Noam Chomsky: Cum merge lumea/ How the World Works

how the world works a collection of interviews and speeches of noam chomsky examining some of the most important and difficult questions of u.s and world history just hit the shelves a few days ago the book published by kurta veke which enjoyed immense success overseas totaling more than a half a million copies sold we'll most certainly reignite old debates and spark new ones on many questions relevant today it will most definitely question and transform the immensely idealized image of u.s democracy and an image cultivated by the mainstream media in romania in the whole of the eastern bloc to discuss some of this some of these questions and give you a taste of what the book has to offer i have here with me a very special guest professor noam chomsky it is a great honor and pleasure to have you here with me and i'm most grateful to you for taking your time to talk to me and to your already numerous romanian readers about some of the ideas discussed in your book very pleased to be with you professor chomsky translating this book um i have to tell you for from from the onset was very often an instructive experience though at times it felt like reading an almost exhaustive inventory of the things found in pandora's box um and one of the most unsettling things you discuss at length in the book is the way usa used its dominant position in the world after the second war in order to consolidate its economic and political power um no matter the costs democracy was good only as long as as it served american interests human rights were upheld only when it benefited u.s interests and so on my question for you would be what has changed in the last decades and why do you think this strategy remained unquestioned by the european allies of america for such a long time at least until the iraq war first of all we should recognize that what you describe is simply the way great powers operate nothing i mean they're of course differences from one to another but basically uh they're going to pursue their own interests very peripheral if any concern for human rights democracy a lot of rhetoric and the interests that they pursue are not those of the population but those of sectors internal to the society that have power and domination uh societies are not egalitarian policies aren't made by the public the public has some degree of influence depending on the country but anyone you look at there's centers of concentrated power we can easily identify them and they pursue their interests things have changed in recent years in many ways there was a big change in 40 years ago when the neoliberal wave began this was a program began to be developed in the night um because history goes way back but it began to take force in the 1970s the carter years where you saw the bear beginning then it took off in force with reagan and thatcher around 1980. the prime concern it talks about free markets and so on but we can put the rhetoric aside uh government grew under reagan for example but the idea is to shift the idea was encapsulated very clearly in one of reagan and reagan's inaugural address when he was elected that government is the problem not the solution well you think for a few minutes a few seconds what does that mean it means we have to take decisions away from government and put them somewhere else where is the somewhere else private power so we have to take decisions away from the government which is at least partially responsive to the population and put them in the hands of private power which is totally totally unaccountable to the population and concerned only with maximizing profit and wealth for itself that's where decisions have to go okay not hard to and in fact actions were taken right away to implement these measures in both the united states and britain which pioneered it then it spread all over the world so the first thing that thatcher and reagan did almost on taking office was to move to destroy the labor movement uh in the case of thatcher by trying to destroy the mine workers the most militant part of the in the case of reagan by bringing in uh strike breakers to break strikes that's at the time was illegal in the entire world outside of south africa apartheid south africa of course put aside that the soviet bloc different story but uh the uh but reagan did it and when he got away with it corporate sector picked up the idea figure we can do it too uh since then and both in britain and the united states uh major especially the u.s a major attack on the labor movement barely exists the other thing is uh predictably uh uh opening the doors to massive concentration of wealth and power and private hands so by now for example uh take the united states about 0.1 percent not 1 0.1 percent of the population holds about 20 percent of the wealth it's about twice was what it was when reagan came in i mean well for the majority large majority the population things have pretty much stagnated so about 70 of the workforce can barely get by from one week to another well that's the natural consequence of these decisions and then of course in the last few years under trump there have been other dramatic changes could go into that um i think we have enough time to to to discuss this matter a little bit but i would be now most interested to understand uh what um in how way do you think the fact that for example china is more and more emerging as a very um as a world power as a very powerful country both military and economically how will this impact the weak states in the western world um is um is this gonna lead to um reconsideration of this weakening of the states um and i'm referring to america and the the powerful states in europe of course well china has grown enormously it now has a substantial economy in terms of per capita wealth it's way below the western world in terms of general uh social and economic progress you can get a sense by looking at the human development index of the united nations which ranks countries by various measures in terms of development including the economy including other things but china is about 90th way down the it's nowhere near the western world europe actually europe has the largest economy in the world and larger than the united states china's in term the gross economy is large but the per capita economy slate furthermore if you look at other measures which aren't used like ownership of the world's wealth who owns the world's wealth well there's some good studies of this we have one baya very smart political scientist now in hong kong sean stars what he shows is that about half the world's wealth half is owned by us-based multinational corporations they're first or second in just about every category manufacturing finance retail that china's way behind so china takes a apple computer the world's biggest uh enterprise just passed through trillion dollars broke a record uh it's it's uh apple devices like the one i happen to be using is assembled in china but it's assembled under the control of the taiwanese corporation foxconn which gets a lot of the profit but the main profit goes right back to the apple headquarters china gets something but a very small percentage of the profit gained by putting together the apple devices and that's true for across the board now china is improving so it's advancing in in some areas it's actually first in the world like a solar panels solar is not just scale but even the uh advanced technology the wind turbines 5g you know the new internet standard higher internet standard the united states is concerned about that and is trying to prevent china from developing it's a very cruel program but not claiming dubious security reasons the united states under trump is very specifically trying to prevent china's development in a sane world it would be cooperating with china in development so if china can develop advanced internet capacity we all benefit from it if china develops better electric uh vehicles is fine for everybody if china develops a coronavirus vaccine it's wonderful for the world the idea of trying to prevent this in order to stay on top is cruel and savage so do you think i'm trump go ahead do you think we're gonna we're gonna witness such um fierce uh economic uh wars in in the future um as as a way of the usa to stifle china's development if we want to destroy human society one way to do it is to enter into economic wars if we want to preserve human society and even in a better form a much better form the right answer is internationalism and cooperation it's not that the chinese government is a nice government that's very important yes other governments too but that's no reason to try to stop the kind of social and economic development which would benefit not only the people of china but everyone um you talk a lot um in in this book and in many many of your talks about the very important role of intellectuals uh who you say have a duty to expose the abuses of government um and and i would like to talk about that but first i would like us to to talk about another role of the intellectuals um namely that of providing a kind of ideological infrastructure that justifies abuses of the government against its own citizens or against other countries um and since you have extensively discussed in in in your book in this in this volume uh the overt and covert war u.s wage uh in in the last in the last few decades um on latin america um i would like to refer to intellectuals such as lawrence harrison or samuel huntington who developed lawrence harrison or samuel hampton i know you had over time you had many debates with them and i would like to to ask you how do you find this idea which is still very present in many ways among my fellow countrymen and to some extent in the whole of the eastern bloc that uh underdevelopment is a state of mind um an idea that somehow justified um basically justified the us interventionist monolith skill in latin america well the if you look at the record of u.s intervention in latin america it's horrendous so for example just take mainstream scholarship not my opinion take a look at say the standard scholarly history of the school cold war cambridge uh history of the cold war multivolume history very sober conservative you know they have an article on the us and latin america of course written by a highly respected caller coatsworth columbia university dean respected scholar he points out that since in the post-stalling era since roughly the last 60 60 years or so the u.s the massive torture repression violence in u.s dominated latin america far exceeds what happened in eastern europe and what happened in eastern europe was not very pretty i don't have to tell you about it but uh actually the worst was in romania where as is true chauchesku was a darling of the united states he was supported by the united states till literally the last minute and george w bush was supporting that h.w bush first wish was supporting him until the day he was overthrown by the public but in latin america even including celcesko and the rest of them the record is much worse but and if you look at u.s commentators who know like the chief of insurgency for kennedy and johnson charles mitchell it was his name he was the head of condor insurgency in latin america he says that kennedy's decision in 1962 to change the mission of the latin american military which the u.s of course controls to change it from hemispheric defense to internal security was internal security means war against your own population so that decision in 1962 changed the us attitude from tolerance for the rapacity and terror of the latin american military into direct participation in crimes of the kind that we remember from him from heinrich himmler that's the head of in curtains or counter insurgency not some radical uh for johnson and kennedy and if you look at the record that's in fact the case it's a horrifying record and there are it's very interesting to look at the question of democracy promotion it's also discussed in the book the democracy promotion is a prime part of u.s government rhetoric other countries too everyone has their own force this is the u.s force it's carefully studied the best studies are by a well-known scholar thomas carruthers who is a great advocate of democracy promotion he's a reaganite he was in reagan's state department in charge of democracy promotion so he's not discussing it from the left he's a careful scholar he's honest he studies it in latin america and he says the way he puts it is interesting he says all american leaders are schizophrenic they call for democracy promotion but what they do undermines it consistently it's a strange thing you can't understand it they have some psychological problem so they all say it's a wonderful thing they all do everything he can to undermine it and then he says well the reason basically is i'm almost quoting the us government is wants democracy but it does not want it to do anything that is inconsistent with u.s interests and demands so in other words democracy is fine as long as you follow our orders okay that's the standard position now the united states is not breaking any new ground on this if you look back at the british record french record it's all the same so france was carrying out a civilizing mission when the french general in algeria gave orders to exterminate the population his words were carrying out our civilizing mission that the british were just so magnificent that nobody could understand how wonderful they were when they were destroying india and forcing it to grow opium so they could hammer their way into china into the chinese market but they're so angelic that nobody could even understand them in fact this is just uniform i mean you see it in a kind of a vulgar form in totalitarian states like the old soviet union there it's right on the surface you just laugh at it in the western countries it's a little more subtle so you have to spend a few minutes to take it apart but it's not very different well it's it's a very it's a very bleak and discouraging uh image you paint reality i mean um for many people who live in romania for many people who uh were who were my age when communist communism ended um this this way you you um uh characterize america would be unthinkable uh so um they um the generation of my parents and um i would say a large majority of the people in romania and in other in other countries from the eastern bloc still see the united states of america as a great light uh uh spreading out uh democracy and um they still see the still see russia uh as the empire of evil so um for many this book and many other books of you who have in part been translated into romanian uh um are like a shock and um it's very hard to believe for somebody who had this image this idealized image of america how come um all these things can be true and um i i always have difficulty in convincing these people that um the american democracy is but an empty shell and nothing more the most democratic countries free and democratic countries there's no correlation you can be free and democratic internally and violent and murderers outside so uh it's it's always a mixed story just like american history okay how did americans take the united states became a independent in the 1780s 250 years ago the one of the main reasons for the american revolution was that the british who had been in control had issued a royal proclamation 1763 in which they said that the colonists and who were part of england and britain at the time were not allowed to move past the mountain range the appalachian mountain range right at the end edge of pennsylvania roughly they were not allowed to move into the indian territories where the indian nations ruled and britain was protecting the rights of the indian nations against the colonists colonists were having that they wanted to expand to the west uh george washington father of the nation was a great land speculator he wanted to pick up lands in the indian countries make money from carried out may even during the revolutionary war he was carrying out major attacks against the iroquois the name among the iroquois they called washington the town destroyer that was the name he was given then comes the rest of the 19th century virtual extermination the population was virtually eliminated they were treaties they were broken they were exterminated expelled and now mostly in reservations very poor reservations these were the population of the country that's one part of the story another part of the story was the most vicious system of slavery that ever existed in human history there had always been one or another form of slavery but there was nothing comparing with the american self absolutely nothing an entirely new form of slavery and it never ended 400 years since the first slaves were brought still there it's kind of like a caste structure like india with the dollars they're marked for life you know they can make change in the wording and the laws but it stays and it stays the same white supremacy is a deep rooted property in the united states donald trump understands that very well and that's why it's the fannin in every speech he gives appealing to white supremacy trying to stimulate him you take a look at fbi statistics on terror in the united states there isn't much but there's some you go back 10 years let's say about um 10 percent of the terror was white supremacist after four years of trump it's practically a hundred percent these messages have impact and he knows what he's doing it's not stupid he has to appeal his policies are to enrich the wealthy and the powerful can't win votes that way so you have to try to cultivate other issues like racism white nationalism uh guns and you know whatever you can pick up and he's a master at that we've we see people like that you see one right near you orban and hungary yeah it's a phenomenon all over the world yeah and i would i would like us nevertheless the democratic achievements are substantial i'm i'm free to say what i want uh the fbi isn't going to come in and arrest me there is for people who are have a little bit of privilege which is most of the population they're quite secure from state depression not if you're black and living in islam um i i agree with you and you touched a lot of interesting things and we have we i hope we'll have the time to to discuss some of them uh in length but i would like to go back to something you said because i think one can one can um agree that to some extent there is a correlation between the way a country treats other countries and the way it treats its own citizens and i think you yourself um give an argument for this idea when you speak about the this phenomenon you call a third worldization of america and i think that even now uh during these uh trump years we see how the american public has become the enemy um i i would argue that after a certain point um your own citizens become the internal enemy and even if uh there is an internal democracy it is constantly uh chipped away it is constantly um uh eroded by this violence exercised against other countries it can happen but i think you're you shouldn't take the trump phenomenon is off the spectrum he is by no means a normal politician there's been nothing like him in american history nothing he's a true monster interested in nothing but himself and wealth empowered not to do anything anything at all to maintain it doesn't care one bit about the population now that's new it wasn't true of george w bush it wasn't true of the first bush it wasn't true of reagan nixon none of them in fact just take this election uh nixon not a nice person basically won the election in 1960. kennedy won the election by trickery and faked votes and so on nixon didn't challenge it he knew that if he challenged it he might have won but he said he just didn't want to tear the country apart cared more about the country than winning an election uh take al gore in 2000 the election was stolen and go through the details but he said he's not going to challenge it again the same reasons so that's a far-right republican the liberal democrat had the same view take trump he's already announced that he's not going to accept the election if he doesn't win he doesn't care he doesn't care about the country he don't care about anything he's uh you know he's people call him a fascist but that gives it much too much credit fascism was a serious ideology that's way above his pay grade he's what he's like is a kind of a tin pot dictator in a small meal colony where the government gets overthrown every couple of years by the military approximately what he's turning the country into but this is way off the spectrum it's not the normal case if he wins another four years it could become more permanent well what's what's really disconcerting for me and for the people i i talked with about this uh about what's happening in america right now um and i i agree with everything you said about trump with your characterization of trump but i i think what is very disconcerting is the fact that the american institutions at least some of them the the republican party coward to trump the fact that he he was able to change prosecutors and he was able to uh what's happening right now with the postal service for example um he's trying to steal the election by uh uh naming a apostle master who was boycotting who is uh destroying dismantling the post uh the postal service this is disconcerting um i mean a a usual run run of the mill tag wouldn't be able to do all these things that's what i said it's a tin pot dictator you go to some you know equatorial grenade or someplace like that yeah you'll find the dictators do exactly that kind of thing the prosecutors are quite interesting i mean congress the republican congress republicans are not what they used to be the republicans used to be a bona fide political party you can i mean i've voted republican in my in the past you know you might like them and dislike them but they're a political party no they're not they're way off the spectrum in international comparisons they are ranked alongside the uh fringe parties in europe with neo-nazi origins that's the kind of party they are they're completely in trump's pocket they're afraid they're terrified of him of his base they have no integrity one or two people romney a couple others are willing to speak up now and then the others just support him completely now what he did with the executive branch is quite interesting and very typical of small-time dictators congress in the days when the republicans used to be a serious party under republican leadership established inspectors general every branch of the executive has an inspector general who supervises it keeps his eye on it makes sure there's no corruption other forms of malfeasance and so on that's their job uh they were instituted by republicans charles grassley senior republican senator they started looking into the swamp that trump has created in washington extraordinary corruption they started looking into it he fired them did the senate respond it's a republican majority grassley himself responded he's the senior republican none of them supported him they said okay trump wants to do it he does it just a couple of weeks ago he wanted to appoint as the senior pentagon official in the executive a man named tata who's a ultra right-wing uh guy who's they made all sorts of racist horrifying comments could never pass even approval by the republican senate so trump just avoided the approval process which is constitutionally demanded and hired and fired and hired in fact he's done that throughout the whole administration you look at the offices topic office in the executive branch very few of them have been ratified by the senate constitution requires that but trump got around it by just making them temporary appointments so again this is like i'd expect it from orban for example this is ten-pot dictatorship and the republican party or i should say the former republican party is letting him get away with it and the party faithful the voters accept it too they trust him they believe him so a majority of republicans major considerable majority i think it's about three-quarters think that he's doing a fine job with the pandemic the united states totally off the spectrum it has four percent of the world's population 25 of the cases and just about every other country is doing far better europe is opening up but china's almost completely opened up the east asian countries are functioning the united states is a wreck i haven't been out of my house for four months yes to to be honest it's astounding it's astounding that after after the chaos he created by not recognizing the the threat from from early on by not imposing um by not asking the people to wear a mask by not making it mandatory um it's for me it's it's mind-blowing to see that he still hovers above 42 uh when it in the polls i mean when it when when it comes to approval rates he is above 40 percent and in the pose biden is leading by by seven eight percent not not more than that and in the in the swing states the margins are way smaller so i think that um if if you look at how the things are right now uh with a little bit of improvement trump can still win the elections uh and and what as as i i told you before what what what's uh hard to understand for me is how such an an old party the grand old party how these institutions how nobody can stop trump it's quite amazing the uh for one thing remember that he's strongly supported by the corporate sector they're pouring money into his campaign so the fossil fuel industries for example are pouring funds into the trump campaign they want to make sure that they still have a few years left to destroy human civilization which is what they're doing and they know that if biden comes in he doesn't have a terribly strong policy but he'll cut back their efforts so it's not the true trump blacks gain support from very central institutions the i mean it is a democratic society which has to recognize that over the past 100 years you can predict who's going to win an election for congress or president with very high probability just by looking at campaign spending that variable alone makes an enormous difference and campaign spending comes from the rich and the powerful so the one of the miracles of the sanders campaign was that he broke with this pattern for the first time in over a century which is quite an achievement he had no support from private capital from private wealth media were strongly opposed to him and he got practically won the nomination it came very close to the the uh that's an amazing achievement and it shows that there are things that can be done despite the radical imbalance of power now right it's a very strong in fact quite openly there's nothing secret about this you can read about it in the mainstream press the republican party today is working out ways in which they can win the election even if they lose the popular vote and even if they lose the electoral vote the techniques the number of techniques being developed they have to do with things in the constitution that aren't very precise you have to bear in mind that democratic societies don't just rest on laws they rest on good faith and trust trust that somebody like nixon will say i care more about the country than winning an election britain for example the constitution is about ten words long the 350 years of parliamentary democracy rely on trust and good faith and in fact when boris johnson suspended parliament so that he could ram through his brexit proposal it was a huge uproar first attack on the constitutional order in 350 years was in fact shot down by the supreme court but when what trump is doing is just saying let's forget all the no good faith no trust we'll just use any trick we can and there are some tricks what they're planning is you have to look at the details the vote is on november 3rd but the electors vote in december i think it's december 4th the governors of the states in theory can the electors as to what to do no it's never happened you know because you assume good faith but it's theoretically possible and a lot of the republicans are governed or furthermore what they can claim is there's something that's called a blue shift the early voting tends to be higher republican the later voting shifts to democrats that's the big shift so the mail votes are coming later you have to be looked at checked and so on and one of the reasons the joy is trying to wreck the post office is to make sure that they're contested and they don't come in but if they do come in and they're counted they may shift the election to the democrats but the republicans are planning to contest it on the ground that it's illegitimate for that reason if there's a conflict between what the governors say and what the elections say it goes to the house of representatives now the hazard is mostly democrats but the constitution requires that each state gets one vote so wyoming with 500 000 people gets the same vote as california with 45 million people republican small states haven't been republican and that's a way in which by simply trickery canary they might maintain their control of the executive branch it's and that and it's perfectly open it's not secret they're talking about how they can do this this is in what used to be a functioning democracy well um i guess i have to hope that this is not going to happen i mean i have to hope that biden is going to win by such a huge margin that trump won't be able to say anything and that even if he claims the elections were rigged uh the uh gop won't won't get behind him and i think this is a very important point if the gop doesn't get behind trump if they're losing if they're losing the senate if they if they if they lose votes they might not get behind trump and this might be the end of trump could be but remember that the republicans are a minority party and it's a fading minority there is mainly a white male uh party white male religious christian evangelical and rural but and that part of the population's declining so they know they have no future they can't win free elections and if they lose this election they may be finished if they hold on what one the senate used to be called the greatest deliberative body in the world under mitch mcconnell and trump the senate has stopped functioning uh the way the legislative system works bills are created in the house of representatives sent to the senate to debate and discuss and to rule and then a joint committees make a decision mcconnell just refuses to look at them none of the house bills get looked at the senate does only two things tax cuts for the rich and appointing young justices to fill the entire judicial system in the hope that they can just stuff the the judiciary with so many far-right people that nothing will ever get implemented no matter what the population wants if they lose the election they lose the chance to do that and they may be finished as this kind of political party so there's a lot at stake for them that's why you see the hysteria at the republican convention uh just listen to the rhetoric you know if we don't uh win the country is going to be turned over to radical leftist socialists who want to kill all the whites and turn the country into china or something like that a big theme of the election is that biden is under the control of the chinese i mean in any sane country this would wouldn't even be you wouldn't even laugh until ludicrous but that's the governing party in the united states i mean one of the chief officials like peter navarro and trump himself say china unleashed the virus against us navarro says consciously in order to harm us i mean yeah it's absurd you don't get that even in the wild conspiracy theories but that's the mainstream republican party yeah it's absurd and it's outrageous and uh now that you you've talked a lot about uh tax cuts and uh wealth inequality um i would like i would like us to to talk a little bit about about these these matters and the fact that this massive wealth inequality in america but all over the world um it's actually destroying democracy as we uh as we uh see and uh is destroying democracy because it's weakening the social cohesion because it's reviving uh xenophobia and we see it in in poland for example in europe uh it's it's um reviving nationalism religious intolerance and so on and um in in one of your interviews um you discuss an idea and you you quote um i quote you now um this aristotelian idea you speak about the dangerous radical aristotle and um i would like to ask you because i was always puzzled by that how come this simple self-evident idea that you can't have democracy when there are huge wealth disparities in a society um how come this idea seems so strange and so hard to accept for so many who still advocate for free market capitalism everybody has to do it on on their own and so on and what kind of democracy is it that the one we live in and are democracy and globalized capitalism even compatible well first of all let's forget to talk about free market we had a free market in the united states the main corporations would be dead they take the i mean about maybe almost half the economy is financial institutions there they exist on the basis of government support it's not just i mean of course they crash the economy regularly and they get bailed out but that's only the visible part i mean because it's understood in the financial community all over the world that governments are not going to let the big banks fail the phrase that's used is too big to fail what does that mean that means they're a safe investment they can take risky pro high profit uh efforts and if they collapsed the publicly bail amount they get access to very cheap credit because the credit agencies know they're going to be bailed out by the government now you add all that together that probably amounts to almost all their profit actually the imf did a study of the six major american banks and concluded that their profit depends almost entirely on the hidden government subsidies both the actual bailouts and this the the understanding that they're going to be billed at which gives them inflated credit ratings access to chief currency ability to take risky investments so that's a free market that's almost half the economy uh same with the rest when in the 1980s peak of neoliberalism american manufacturing was declining because of incompetence of american managers most of them come from business schools they used to come from engineering so you go back over the history of general motors the people in charge came out of the engineering department they were interested in making cars in more recent years they come out of harvard business school they don't know what a car is they know how to make money on the stock market when these guys got into management positions uh the companies began to decline they couldn't compete with superior japanese and german competitors so what did the free market reagan do banned the conf and the competitors they called them voluntary export restraints voluntary means do what we say or you blast your head off so under the voluntary export constraints japan reduced its exports gave the american manufacturers a little bit of time to recoup with government aid i mean this happens all the time a free mark let's take the world trade organization it's called free market it's an investor rights agreement the uh what's called intellectual property rights give exorbitant patents of a kind which have never existed in history to to allow monopoly pricing rights to be multinationals what's that going to do with the free market i mean the whole thing is a gag so it's not free market it's just policies or pixie when reagan came in there actually were laws against a use of tax havens sending your money like take apple computers you know the biggest corporation in the world they've paid frankly no taxes the reason is they're an irish company they have an office in dublin which is probably the size of the room that i'm sitting in maybe there's a secretary there once in a while but since they're an irish company they pay irish taxes which are very low to try to attack corporations so they don't pay taxes the amount of money in off in tax havens is estimated maybe 20 or 30 trillion dollars a year robbing the public just robs the public before reagan that was illegal and the treasury department enforced the law reagan opened it up we have to have a free market corporations have to be free to rob the public so okay maybe 20 30 trillion dollars of robbery of the public before reagan stock buybacks you know just a corporation buying its own stock to inflate it was illegal reagan said no free market they have to be able to do it the result is instead of building up the productive capacity the corporation knew by stock back to enrich shareholders and management we see that right now corporations are racing to the government to ask for huge subsidies because they're suffering from the pandemic the the amounts that they're asking for roughly on the order of the stock buybacks since the crash then used that money to develop the corporations in the productive capacity pay the workers educate people and so on they used it just enriched to enrich the honors and management now they want the public to pay for it that's called the free market okay so but why it's turning out this way because those are policy decisions for example it was a policy decision to let ceos head of a corporation to pick their own the panel that determines their salaries let's then pick them corporations are government licensed to remember they're not on the free market they're given a license to operate and given many benefits in order to be licensed for example limited corporation if you're a shareholder in a corporation you don't have liability for the crimes the corporation commits the big advantage for limited that's the basis for the corporate law and in return for that they have duties and responsibilities determined by the government meaning technically by the public so one of them is has to do with how the ceo salary is determined breaking change the rules so the ceos could pick the wrong panel what do you think happens you know ceo's payment goes for the roof not just salary most of its uh stock stock options and things of course now it's it's gone so far so high you can't even see it anymore it's a large part of the inequality and that brings up management salaries to compete with it so sure you carry out these policies you get inequality and then you screen fee more free market which is nothing to do so the definition of the free market is actually um socialism for the very rich and the austerity for the poor because this is what this is what we experienced like 10 years ago during the financial crisis and i think this is as you as you just said this is what's happening right now i mean once again the corporations are bailed out the huge uh banks are are saved um and um the costs for all this are paid by the by the regular people um and um it's like seeing this seeing like living in a time loop we witness this over and over and over again um how can we stop it how can how can we stop it is it maybe the the fact that that this globalized capitalism is is destroying the environment is this enough to mobilize the people against it is this enough to um in other words is this ecological crisis going to save us somehow because we we are being we are getting more aware of what's happening or is it the beginning of the end it's one or the other and the end is not far off uh is it enough i mean there's some like uh take again the united states which is the most important and is the global criminal the leading global criminal on global warming other countries are doing at least something some quite a lot under trump the united states is purposely racing to disaster it's maximizing the use of just in the last few days trump opened up the last huge wildlife reserve to more drilling and ended regulations to limit methane release from fossil fuel companies all of which is lethal for the environment and he doesn't care he just wants to make profit tomorrow but if the if his if society doesn't exist in 50 years it's not his problem so trump is racing to disaster now take a look at there are two conventions going on democrat republican take a close look see how often global warming has been mentioned okay republicans of course never because they say it's not a problem how about the democratic convention did you hear a speech about it do you hear anybody mention it no it's it doesn't matter that we're racing towards disaster and it's not far off i mean just the last couple of weeks we've learned that the ice sheet in greenland major ice sheet has reached the point of irreversible melting the amount of water stored there would raise the sea [Music] probably levels meters or something way beyond anything that human life could survive okay there's still time to deal with it it's known how to deal with it maybe a couple of decades after that we're finished if you're right and i'm afraid um i can i can't see a way out of this i can't see any major country in the western hemisphere mobilizing really mobilizing against global warming not even germany reached i mean we had an agreement we had this paris agreement but um even those those small standards that all countries agreed upon were not achieved by most of the countries and this is this is a worrying sign that there's nothing we can do actually i mean well there is i mean some of them like say denmark are coming pretty close to renew to zero emissions germany's doing at least something still relying on coal wants to get rid of that but it's doing something in fact most of the world is doing something and it's known what has to be done actually take china it's a mixed story on the one hand they're still building coal plants which is destructive on the other hand they're way ahead of the rest of the world in solar power wind turbines and electrification and astonishingly that's what the united states is trying to prevent but not just we destroy everything we try to prevent anyone else from doing anything there's still time even in the united states by no means hopeless take the democratic party of the sanders campaign which is a remarkable phenomenon as i said decided to cooperate with biden to try to influence the program it was a very wise decision they have it's not just entering the campaign it's the constant popular activism the banging on doors you know the protests sitting in our congressional offices all of this just kept up well turns out that the platform of the democrats on global warming is nowhere near enough but it's way better than any that's ever been had now the then comes an internal conflict in the party the dnc is called the democratic national committee that's the clinton clintonite new democrats basically moderate republicans now they are donor oriented so they've managed to chip away at the platform a pretty dramatic way both biden and kamala harris vice presidential nominee both of them called for ending subsidies to fuel companies which is essential the dnc cut it out of the program because they're worried about the donors who might not like it so there's an internal battle going on but at least there's a battle and the public does have a role it has managed some effective consequences it can do more that's where the hope lies same in every other country the uh the global strike last october extinction rebellion mostly young people it's kind of uh indescribably i don't know words to find the fact that it's young people who are trying to save the world our generation is saying let's let it all get destroyed it's uh irony isn't the right word i don't know of a word it's shocking yeah it takes a 16 year old kid rid of thunder to talk to the davos crowd and say you got to do something um professor chomsky it's it's really wonderful talking to you but i know we're we have already surpassed an hour so um i have just one more question for you um somehow in line with with your with your last remarks because i was all i was always astounded of especially of your optimism and um it was very hard for me to accept that bernie sanders didn't get the nomination and i think it was very hard for many people who hoped especially after the the three the first three elections uh went his way um it was very hard to accept everything and what i want to ask you is how how do you still have the strength of being so of being optimistic after everything you you you saw after everything you witnessed and do we have a moral obligation of being optimistic of believing we can change our societies our worlds uh for the better there's several very good reasons to be optimistic the one reason actually is history despite all we're seeing the over a long stretch it's a much better world than it was things that were perfectly acceptable uh 30 or 40 years ago are completely unspeakable today you can't even mention i mean take the united states in many ways the most free country in the world back when not even when i was a child in the 1960s the united states still had anti-miscegenation laws which were so extreme that the nazis refused to accept them anti-sodomy laws into this century federal laws required segregation in housing that was funded by the federal government that cut out blacks from the big housing boom in the 50s and the 60s okay the women's rights radically different there's lots of changes over the world could go on so that's one reason the other reason is what you call the moral obligation we actually have two choices one is to say it's pointless i quit i'll help making the worst come about the others to say accurately there are opportunities no matter how small or how large i'll grasp them maybe we'll make it a better world there's no choice between those two professor chomsky i hope we will both get to live in a better world i thank you very much for your time i wish you all the best and i hope you'll have the chance to meet again thank you very much it's wonderful to talk to you you

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Keywords: noam chomsky, cum merge lumea, eseistica, carte, carti, curtea veche, curtea veche publishing, editura curtea veche, editura curtea veche publishing, paul gabriel sandu, lansare de carte, lansare carte, lansare noam chomsky, lansare chomsky, lansare carte online, lansare de carte online, lansare online, how the world works, trump, american elections 2020, noam chomsky interview, noam chomsky global warming, noam chomsky book, noam chomsky coronavirus, noam chomsky china

Id: YvcCyRGOIYw

Length: 66min 51sec (4011 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 03 2020