Noam Chomsky: Hope Theirs and ours

our guests this evening really is an intellectual Rockstar and many of you are here because you know that according to Paul Robinson writing in the New York Review of Books and I quote judged in terms of the power range novelty and influence of his thought know'm Shaam ski is arguably the most important intellectual alive today the London Times named him one of the thousand makers of the 20th century professor Chomsky has written prolifically taught courses and lectured widely throughout the world his groundbreaking research into the nature of human language and communication has had an impact on everything from the way children are taught foreign languages to what it means when we say we are human dr. Chomsky has also earned a place in history as an activist social critic unrelenting and compelling voice in the debate over American and global politics among his recent books are new horizons in the study of language and mind on nature and language hopes and prospects and Gazza in crisis he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Science and a recipient of the Kyoto Prize in basic sciences the Helmholtz medal the Dorothy Eldridge peacemaker award the Ben Franklin medal in computer and cognitive science and countless other prestigious awards so before I bring him to the podium let me just review the format for this evening dr. Chomsky will give his talk and immediately following his talk we will take a minute pause stretch and reflect while University of Maryland professor of history dr. David Cecelia joins dr. Chomsky on stage to help moderate the question and answer portion of the evening there will be microphones in the aisles down here in the orchestra section and I believe there will be some my upstairs if you have a question please calmly form a line behind the microphone closest to you and professor Cecilia will call on you for your question please do not ask a question without a microphone and please be considerate of the people behind you in the line and make your question succinctly can get as many questions as possible before the event ends so now I just want to say that Professor Chomsky has said we shouldn't be looking for heroes we should be looking for good ideas and it's really my distinct pleasure to welcome to our campus community one of the preeminent makers of ideas of our time dr. Noah Chomsky to clarify the title a little while adopting imagery of the Occupy movements the imagery that's become familiar current in the last few months them is the one percent and us is the 99 percent of course this is only imagery it's not to be taken literally the leading factor in the astonishing inequality to which the Occupy movement has finally drawn attention actually lies in a fraction of one percent of the population maybe a tenth of one percent it's mostly hedge fund managers CEOs of financial corporations and the light now this is a product of radical changes in the economy since the 1970s it initiated a process in which an out-of-control financial sector is eating out the modern market economy from the inside just as the larvae of the spider wasp eats out the host and which it has been laid actually those words are not mine I couldn't get away with it I'm quoting Martin wolf of the Financial Times probably the most respected economic correspondent in the world suitably conservative a related and parallel process has been the deindustrialization of America that's a sharp reversal of centuries of history it's been a bonanza for the 1% and pretty much of a disaster for the rest the process is called failure by design in a by the Economic Policy Institute they're the major monitors of the state of working America and not of course a failure for the designers as they make clear the designers have been making out like bandits rather a failure for the rest including future generations on whom huge burden is being imposed that one that may be impossible to meet and again by design it's not a law of nature law of economics anything else planned process the Occupy imagery it refers to aspirations and commitments so take for example Martin Luther King his anniversary was commemorate celebrated a couple of weeks ago a king was a leading figure of the 1% that's independent of whatever his personal assets might have been when he was assassinated and we should recall that he was assassinated while he was supporting a strike of public sector workers a group that's now targeted for destruction in the current phase of the class war the vicious class war that's intensified in the last 30 years or so he was hoping at the time to carry his dream forward by leading a march of the poor to Washington the March actually took place starting from the motel where he was assassinated in Memphis passing through regions where the civil rights struggle had been waged and finally reaching Washington where the marchers were dismissed with scorn by Congress and driven out of the city and by the police who for good measure were ordered to destroy their encampment and resurrection city in the middle of the night revealing the attempt of northern liberalism for king when once he went beyond condemning racist Alabama sheriff's to confronting the more fundamental problems of American society in the north as well the terrible plight of the poor and aggression abroad at the time that was the atrocious u.s. war in Indochina Martin Luther King's actual dream and not the one we hear orations about on Martin Luther King Day the actual one was left in tatters and unfulfilled legacy matters worth contemplating as king is solemnly commemorated one vivid illustration of the difference between the crises of the 1% and the 99% is the fate of the Congressional legislation that was passed to deal with the catastrophic financial crisis that was created by the 1% and their associates in the political and professional worlds the government reaction was reviewed by the Special Inspector General of the bush-obama bailout programs at Neil Barofsky he pointed out that the legislation that authorized the bail a bailout was two-sided it was the financial institutions that were responsible for the collapse they were to be saved by the taxpayer and the victims of their misdeeds were to be very partially compensated by measures to give some protection to home values and to secure owner home ownership well only one part of the bargain was kept it didn't take a genius to predict which part the financial institutions were rewarded lavishly for causing the crisis the tarp bailouts were the least of it meanwhile the rest of the program flounder quote offski foreclosures continued to mount with 8 million to 13 million filings forecast over the program's lifetime while the biggest banks are 20% larger than they were before the crisis and control the larger part of the our economy than ever furthermore he went on they reasonably assumed that the government will rescue them again if necessary indeed the credit rating agencies incorporate future government bailouts into their assessments of the largest banks exaggerating market distortions that provide them with an unfair advantage over smaller institutions which continue to struggle and of course over the 99% in short he concludes Obama's programs were a giveaway to Wall Street executives and a blow in the solar plexus to their defenseless victims and very likely a stepping stone towards the next and probably worse financial crisis as business lobbying chips away systematically at the dodd-frank regulation bill well these crises have been a regular occurrence since the Reagan years though there weren't any before before that the New Deal regulatory apparatus remained in place now that was also the greatest growth period in American economic history often called Golden Age by economists it was also a period of egalitarian growth the lowest fifth of the population that as well as the top fifth it was also the period in which the modern high tech economy was founded very largely in the dynamic state sector of the economy and not something you read about when you see the encomiums to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and the others who made use of the contribution of the public to commercialize the work that had been done well at that time the banks were were banks they were they did pretty much what a bank is supposed to do in a state capitalist society no they took unused top capital like say your bank accounts and they transferred them to what was supposed to be some constructive use like somebody wants to buy a home or send their kids to college or start a business or whatever it may be now that was the golden age when deregulation began and the post-war system so-called Britain would system was dismantled that was a system of regulated capital and regulated currencies when that was dismantled in the 1970s it led to an extraordinary increase in global capital flow a banks weren't banks anymore though they became financial casinos increasingly opaque instruments all kinds of incentives to underestimate risk because as profs me pointed out the nanny state is counted on to step in when things go sour credit bridge rating agencies as he wrote already take that for granted well it wasn't very hard to predict what was going to happen there are a few Internet economists who actually did very few one of them was David Felix he repeatedly warned quoting him that the increasing frequency of financial crises during the period of financial liberalisation could terminate in an uncontrollable one return to the Great Depression quite close to that now he was joined by a few others among them Johnny well and last teller well-known British and American economist they published in the 90s an important book that called global finance at risk they discussed the institutional roots of the underestimation of risk and they proposed means to deal with it at root the problems result from very well-known in efficiencies of of markets inherent inefficiencies of markets which you learn about it for a semester of economics one of these is that transactions in a market system don't take into account the effects of on others who are not parties to the transaction so for example if you sell me a car and we're paying attention we'll work it out so that we both make out pretty well all right but we simply don't take into account the effect of that purchase on somebody else that guy over there and the effects can be the effects are real there's more pollution there's more congest traffic congestion there are more accidents and when you multiply these over the population they they become substantial in fact these externalities as they're called under you don't pay attention to them they're footnote now they can be huge that's particularly true in the case of financial institutions so their vocation is to take risks and if they're well managed they are supposed to ensure that the potential losses to themselves that will be covered for themselves under capitalist rules market rules it's not there it's not their business to consider the risk to others that's even apart from the nanny state rushing in when things get in trouble which of course expands the underestimation of risks but even apart from that just inherent in a market system is that risk is underpriced because what's called systemic risk that is the risk to the system at large is not priced into decisions so if Goldman Sachs makes a risky transaction investment of some kind or loan or whatever it presumably if we'll manage covers the risk to itself even putting aside the fact that the nanny state is there to help it out if when things go wrong but it doesn't take into account the risk that if it's say loan goes bad the whole system will collapse which is pretty close to what happened it insured itself with AIG AIG tanked if the government hadn't bailed out AIG the biggest insurance company that Goldman Sachs would have he would be bankrupt and other consequences like it would have happened as would happen in a capitalist society without in any state but the risk is always there an exaggerated and underestimated just by virtue of the nature of markets well that naturally leads to repeated crises but all such annoying thoughts were put to the side during the period of what's called neoliberal globalization that kind of settled into dogma from the Reagan Sacher years also dismissed were occasional warnings to beware of what Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz fifteen years ago called the religion that markets know best they don't there are inherent assistance risks that are just part of them can be very severe and often are that's the least of it but too devout believers who came to dominate the profession and such heresies is regulating financial markets must be dismissed in fact dismissed with ridicule and in fact they consistently were the extremism of the religion was revealed quite graphically just a couple of days ago the Fed Federal Reserve regularly releases transcripts after five years and it released transcripts of internal discussions in 2006 those are very interesting reading that was just when the housing bubble was reaching its incredible peak unnoticed because markets know best so the fact that well in the last few years housing prices have been shooting way out of sight a breaking a trend line of a century without any basis in any economic fundamentals that had to be right because markets know best that's what the religion dictates economist Dean Baker who's one of the very few who foresaw the catastrophe he could do the arithmetic is apparently a rare talent he comments that there is no one in the eighth Fed meetings reported who suggests that the economy faces any serious turbulence ahead there is not even discussion that a mild recession could be in sight there was a concern in the meetings the concern was inflation of which there wasn't even a remote sign but that's what worries financial institutions shortly after the Fed meetings the huge bubble burst destroyed trillions of dollars of paper wealth on which much of the public relied having been deluded into believing that it was safe for the more deprived parts of the population like african-americans it virtually eliminated net worth that's astonishing when you look at the figures well during these if you read the transcript see the president of the New York Fed the one who's primarily in charge of monitoring Wall Street he captured the general mood among the elite of the profession economics profession when he hailed Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan who at the time was revered as a saint Alan on the eve of the worst crash since the Great Depression that Timothy Geithner so it is who went on to become was appointed Obama's chief economic manager he told Greenspan I'd like the record to show that I think you're pretty terrific and thinking in terms of probabilities I think the risk that we decide in the future that you're even better than we think is higher than the alternative so you're up in the pantheon Greenspan himself had not only boasted over the achievements of what economists called the Great Moderation over which he was presiding but he even explained how the magical tricks were performed was quite frank about it during the Clinton years he informed Congress that one of the ways in which he was achieving these fabulous results was to instill growing worker insecurity and that's a good thing he says because it reduces efforts by working people to try to gain compensation and benefits to mitigate the harsh effects of the Great Moderation and that's obviously healthy for the economy now the religion decrees that those gains should go to the 1% of course for the benefit of all by some kind of miracle that never takes place after the great crash 2007 such fundamental market efficiencies which as I say your thought about in the first term of economics they finally did reach the attention of leading economists some of the leading financial economists wrote that there is growing recognition that our financial system is running a doomsday cycle whenever it fails we rely on lacks money and fiscal policies to bail it out the response teaches the financial sector Laura to take large Gamble's to to get paid handsomely and don't worry about the costs they will be paid by taxpayers through bailouts and lost jobs and the financial system is resurrected to gamble again notice that that's recognizing a kind of a superficial cause of the problem now the deeper cause inherent and market inefficiencies in this case at least Winston went on mentioned though others mentioned it so the system is a Doom loop those are the words of the official of the Bank of England who's responsible for financial stability and in fact so it remains getting worse well as I mentioned the failure by design traces back to the 1970s when there was a substantial redirection of the US economy towards financialization and offshoring of production the industrialization both of these were impelled in part by the falling rate of profit in domestic manufacturing but also by diversification of the global economy that by 1970 the global economy was becoming what's called tri-polar they have to recall that after the Second World War the peak of us power the US was the one economic center had half the world's wealth other industrial countries had been severely harmed or devastated by the war u.s. gained enormous Lee from the war industrial production correctly quadrupled and that was the peak of power of the famous American decline that's talked about these days actually started right away declined very quickly decline is kind of interesting if you think about it the first step in American decline that has a name it's called the loss of China it happened in 1949 and then there's huge debate uh who's responsible for the loss of China a major issue in American domestic policy since that time it's interesting that the phrase itself is never questioned you can only lose something that you own and it's just taken for granted of course we own the world how can anyone question that so if some part of the world moves towards independence we've lost it and then the problem is you know who's responsible for the laws so in fact part of the post-war planning very explicit wasn't the US should control the entire Far East as well as most of the rest so that's the beginning of American decline keeps going I won't run through it but by nineteen seventy five seventy it had reached the point that instead of having a controlling said half the world's will it had declined to 25% which is still colossal but not 50% and the United States by then was it's about what it is now incidentally the United States was one of three major economic centres there was a major center and North America us-based North America in another one in German based Europe roughly comparable and a third in East Asia which was already becoming the most dynamic industrial system in the world then it was Japan based as soon as was that was to be joined by the industrial powerhouses and Japan's former colonies Taiwan and South Korea soon later joined by China which is becoming its assembly plant now that's actually an important fact to bear in mind when you hear about China's rapid growth which is indeed spectacular but it's the growth is largely as an assembly plant for the industrial countries on its periphery and for multinational corporations say like Apple where they make your iPods and Foxconn that's where the high technology comes from the parts and components the fancy software and so on China itself mostly assembles them that means incidentally that the trade deficit with China that you hear about all the time is severely miscalculated which has been pointed out in fact if you calculate the trade deficit by what's called value-added how much value is actually added in each step of the manufacturing process then the trade deficit with China it reduces by about 25 percent and it goes up by same figure approximately with the peripheral industrial countries and of course US manufacturers make a gain from it as well not the population now there's a recent study by the sloan foundation that goes into this and gives some illustrations one illustration is an iPod they say if you have if there's an iPod assembled and exported from China it costs they estimated a hundred and fifty dollars to produce and China adds $4 to that the rest is coming from the outside well under these conditions namely in a decline in the rate of profit Manufacturing diversification of the economy opportunities for production abroad and so on under those conditions of financial manipulations and overseas operations became much more profitable for the designers of the economy who designed a failure as the EPI points out now what that did is it set off a vicious cycle of greater concentration of wealth increasingly in the financial sector which just exploded that led concentration of wealth leads almost automatically the concentration of political power that in turn leads to legislation which carries the cycle forward most of things like fiscal measures you know changing tax burdens and so on deregulation the rules of corporate governance that give more power to the chief executive and a lot more meanwhile what remained of functioning democracy rapidly declining was shredded further as the cost of Elections skyrocketed that drives the political parties deeper even deeper than before they're always there but even deeper than before into corporate pockets where the money is the Republicans did it so enthusiastically that they scarcely even resemble a traditional political party anymore the which is part of the reason for the year of lunacy of the Republican debates and talk about that if you abandon any pretense of being a political party you have to mobilize voters somehow and you can't do it on the base of your policies now you can't go to the voting public and say hey our only policy is to enrich the super-rich and impoverish you so you have to organize other constituencies the groups they're always there you know but they had never they weren't really mobilized as a political force in earlier years that includes religious I would use the word extremist meaning by comparative by world standards but they're not extremists by US standards that country's kind of off the spectrum and religious extremism and has been for a long time in fact since the colonists but they weren't organized as a political force very much and now they are that's a big voting constituency nativists who are consumed with hate and fear they're always there but now they're organized a small businessmen who feel that the world's turning against them they don't like the big corporations not like the government they're like anybody they can be organized and other sectors like that I kind of hate to say it but those of you who know something about modern history will recognize that this is somewhat similar to the constituencies that big industrialists mobilized in Germany in the late bime our republic which became the Knutson which was the Nazi Party and they thought they could control them what turned out they couldn't it's a lot of dissimilarities but some unpleasant similarities to anyhow when you mobilize those constituencies and that's who you have to talk to then the debates and the so-called debates you know the Catechism so on it's gonna be like what you see on television it's kind of amazing the world there's nothing like it and any parliamentary system but it's almost inevitable the once a political party abandons any pretence of being a political party and just as completely in service to a tiny sector a fraction of the 1% well that's the vicious cycle the Democrats who actually the Democrats today are what used to be called moderate Republicans moderate Republicans it's sometimes said that they're gone they're not gone they're centrist Democrats or even center-left Democrats now they're not far behind although that's part of the vicious cycle well actually a lot of what's going on is in accord with a maxim of Adam Smith's that should actually be known better back in wealth of nations 1776 he wrote that of course he's interested in England he wrote that in England the principal architects of government policy are the people who own the economy in his day the merchants and manufacturers of England they set policy and they design it so as to ensure that their own interests are very well attended to however Grievous the effect on others including the people of England but in particular that those overseas like those in India who were suffering what he called the savage injustice of the Europeans and British in that cases you know well that's that's a pretty good principle of politics it held well and 1770s it slightly different today it's not merchants and manufacturers its financial institutions and multinational corporations but the general maxim holds pretty well you can make it more complex and sophisticated but as a kind of a simple first approximation it's not bad and very dramatic today well it's also worth remembering that the founders of classical economics Smith and David Ricardo they were they couldn't predict what's what's been happening today and in fact they did they warned about what would be recognized would be a nightmare of what's now called neoliberal globalization what the 99% have been enduring here and much harsher and long familiar in the poorer countries so for example Adam Smith discussed what would happen if in England the merchants and manufacturers decided to basically abandon England to invest abroad and import from abroad he pointed out that they may might do very well and under those circumstances but it would be very harsh for England however he argued that this is not going to happen because of a phenomenon that's sometimes called home bias that the merchants and manufacturers would prefer to do business at home to invest at home and to get their commodity for products from home and then he said because of this as if by an invisible hand England will be saved from the ravages of what we called neoliberal globalization that phrase invisible hand is a pretty hard one to miss it's the only occurrence the one occurrence of the phrase in his classic wealth of nations so if you look it up the index that's the passage it'll take to you two it's basically a critique of neoliberal globalization and a description of what's happening now he was not alone his was the next great political economist David Ricardo classic Kazakh economist he recognized the same thing any point Hibbs he recognized that his famous law of comparative advantage that would collapse if his England Portugal model of the British investors and merchants did everything in Portugal they do fine but England would collapse and he said it wouldn't happen he hoped it wouldn't happen he was a little more sentimental about it than Adam Smith Athene hoped it wouldn't happen he hoped that because of home bias I'll quote him most men of property would be satisfied with a low rate of profits in their own country rather than seek a more advantageous employment for their wealth in foreign nations the feelings that I hope I wish should be sorry to see weakened he said well that's what happened dramatically in the best generation that leads to the process of eating out the market of economy like the larvae of a wasp quote Martin wolf again and destruction of the manufacturing base of the economy at home with all that that entails and it's quite serious well the 1% can survive on Finance and profits from production I survive very well at least temporarily production under absolutely hideous conditions at monstrosity is like Foxconn Taiwanese owned corporation where they produce your iPods and other Apple products and others but the 99% that can't survive on this and there are other effects longer-term effects that one of them is loss of the technological edge that's another debt we're imposing on future generations there's a take one rather striking illustration there is a rapidly growing market for solar panels growing very fast it's now been largely taken over by China the US Secretary of Energy physicists even true he warned recently to Congress that the United States is falling behind an advanced manufacturing and he took as exhibit a solar panel manufacturing he toured one of the main Chinese factories and he reported it's a high-tech automated Factory it's not succeeding because of cheap labor rather because of sensible planning the government making creating opportunities for the infrastructure for suppliers and so on the kind of synergies developed also for Apple the products as was discussed recently in the New York Times so he said it started the factory started with very low tech manufacturing but there's a general phenomenon which is well known to industrial engineers manufacturing capacity provides the basis and the stimulus for a design innovation and rising to higher levels of sophistication and in production and design and invention a lot of it comes from the factory floor just trying things out seeing what's works getting new ideas and so on and in fact it's gotten to the point two points out where the Chinese have now developed a type of solar cell with world record efficiencies so China's forging ahead in this essential market and it might in others too as the 99% here languish again by design now I mentioned that China to this day is still primarily an assembly plant but it's going to move up the technology ladder in ways like this and we're helping it out and helping others out to gain a technological edge which will lose that industrial countries to Germany's doing quite well for example well a good illustration of the design is President Obama's economic team when he came into office it was in the midst of this terrible collapse so he had the first thing I do is appoint an economic team that was very interesting to see how he appointed he avoided everyone who had criticized the the decisions and the procedures that were leading to the crisis included Nobel laureates they were out period the ones who came in were the ones who designed the crisis Robert Rubens boys basically and that was noticed the business press noticed so Bloomberg News one of the main business journals they actually did a review of akadama x' economic team one by one talked about their records and their conclusion was that most of these guys shouldn't be on an economic team they should be getting subpoenas well that's correct there was in fact one exception that representing the liberal left called for some kind of regulation that was Paul Volcker just to place him in the spectrum he was reagan's treasury secretary but by the last couple of years that puts him somewhere on the left yeah anyway he didn't last very long he was thrown out he was replaced Obama replaced him by Jeffrey Immelt he is the CEO of General Electric that's the nation's largest corporation and the business world was quite pleased they were glad to get rid of Volcker radical leftist and they trusted ml so London Financial Times pointed out that mr. Immelt support meant was applauded by the US Chamber of Commerce made big business lobby which has been among the president's harsher critics and funded notice funded many Republicans who ran against Democrats in November's elections this is right after the 210th election so the last barrier to unimpeded business rule is out of the way we can all be happy in the 1% well you take a look at GE the this appointment incidentally was heralded as to create jobs okaythat's jeffrey melts mission more than half of GES workforce is abroad more than half of its revenues come from overseas operations also vary substantially from not from production but from the financial manipulations it is now doing some hiring but at much lower salaries the workforce has been so beaten down by class war by unemployment designed unemployment that they don't object they're glad to have any work at all this practice the genie is now illustrating of two-tier contracts you know old contracts for the unionized workforce that you can't get rid of yet trying to get rid of them but much lower pay and much worse benefits for all new workers that two-tiered contract system it goes back to the Reagan years it's a core part of the bitter and a very self-conscious class war of the past generation well the amount appointment that I said was proclaimed by the White House to be for job growth but it had very little to do with that more accurately it's what's called follow the money more than a century ago the great political financier Mark Hanna I said that three things are important in politics and money and money and I forgotten the third one that's far more true today than it was a century ago especially after the changes of radical changes of the past 30 years well the consequent and perfectly predictable decline of and in fact intended a decline of democracy is evident every day on the front pages so right now for example in Washington the great issue of the day is the deficit for the general public of the great issue of the day's jobs and on strictly economic grounds the public is right there very few serious economists have questioned this so in fact the reasons are explained in the most prestigious places including the business press I'll quote again Martin wolf Lee London Financial Times correspondent was maybe the most respected economic course not in the world he writes that the US fiscal position is not an urgent issue the u.s. is now able to borrow on easy terms the astonishing feature of the federal fiscal position is that revenues are forecast to be a mere fourteen point four percent of gross domestic product in 2011 far below their post-war average of close to eight percent individual income tax is forecast to be barely six percent of GDP in 2011 this non American cannot understand what the fuss is about in 1988 at the end of Ronald Reagan's term receipts were three times that high over 18 percent of GDP a tax revenue has to rise substan actually if the deficit is too close and of course that means rise substantially on the sectors of the population where it's been sharply reduced the rich especially the super-rich and the corporate sector well it is astonishing but it's not hard to understand it's the demand of the financial institutions and the super-rich and in a rapidly declining democracy that's what counts those are the voices that are heard and as an instrument of class war the policies that the public strongly opposes that make perfectly good sense actually much the same is true these days in continental Europe there are two leading economists a financial press even the International Monetary Fund that point out that the policies of the European Central Bank which are much more reactionary than the Fed their policies imposing austerity during recession are almost certain to undermine growth and even to undermine debt repayment which is exactly what's been happening now the IMF International Monetary Fund recently did a survey of several hundred cases of applying austerity during recession and they showed that in the uniformly it undermines growth and even undermines debt repayment which is not too surprising what's needed is economic stimulus and Europe has plenty of resources for that so on economic grounds doesn't make any sense but on grounds of class warfare it's kind of sensible it's a way to undermine hated social programs to weaken labor and to entrench corporate control even more than before so the programs that the public strenuously opposes are quite rational it's more failure by design well even if you keep to the secondary issue of the death the radical decline of democracy I'm speaking of here stares us in the face so the public hasn't used on how to deal with the deficit large majorities raise taxes on the rich even if not anywhere near the level of a great growth period but raising them and safeguard the benefit systems of Medicare Social Security not even Tea Party adherents insist on that the financial institutions demand the opposite so therefore it's the opposite that's on the agenda for Republicans it's part of the catechism that you have to solemnly in tone lockstep rather in the style of the old communist party just got a repeat and the Democrats again are not all that far behind a couple of steps behind well there is something that's undiscussables now that is a very obvious well known way to eliminate the deficit totally and in fact to create a surplus and that is to reform the scandalous health care system and not by some utopian means and just to make it like other industrial countries you know that's kind of not outer space so the u.s. health system which is unique in a number of ways one is that it's privatized and unregulated that's extremely inefficient layer after layer of bureaucracy tons of administrative costs profit-making advertising all sorts of things which take funds away from the treatment of people and of course all kind of measures and after all these are profit-making institutions they're there to make profit not to cure people so they try to do it and they try to do it by all sorts of ways to defer the treatment if they can get away with it that's kind of what I'm adding and it's about twice the per capita costs even more of comparable countries that does not translate into health benefits in fact the u.s. comes out sort of at the low end of industrial societies and health outcomes but that's a huge cost and in fact if it if we did Institute a health care system like other countries the deficit would be wiped out and in fact there'd be a surplus but that's not part of the debate over the deficit it's not discussed in the media the financial institutions don't want it and the story there actually is a far more ominous component of the failure by design now that's not just for the 99% but for the but for their children and the grandchildren and those are the 1% - and that's environmental catastrophe there have been a number of major emissions reports in the last couple of weeks one from the International Energy Association which is a pretty conservative body it was founded by Henry Kissinger now they came out with their regular report indicating that emissions you know greenhouse emissions were far beyond what had been anticipated and their chief economist warned that we may have about five years before the window closes as you put it will reach the point in global warming which is irreversible assumed to be irreversible from then on it just explodes and these are we're called nonlinear processes you know I can exclude three fast so we got five years other emissions are getting worse than ever right before that a couple of weeks before that the US Energy monitors Department produced its estimates which similar said its 419 it's for 2010 the last figures said it was the greatest rise ever and it was worse than the worst-case scenario of the IPCC you know the International monitors the scientists group that monitors emissions they have a spectrum of the more optimistic less more pessimistic estimates and this was worse than the worst of them I should say that where I am at MIT that didn't come as any surprise there is a climate change study group at MIT and they've been saying for years that they weren't unpublishing the fact that their own models suggest that the IPCC consensus is in an even its worst case is far too optimistic well that's what the latest emissions report shows that Congress reacted to this they reacted by enacting legislation to ensure that there can be no inquiry into whether the crazy weather of the past year which is very unusual it might have something to do with global warming and they explained you can't inquire into that because you inquire into it you might open the door to conceding that the global warming is taking place or that it could be a problem and can't do that so therefore we can't inquire into it that it's kind of similar to the National Rifle Association which for decades has prevented any legislation would which would lead to an inquiry and no action just an inquiry into that whether there's a relation between guns and homicides it's clear what they're gonna find out but you can't inquire into it it's too dangerous well meanwhile Congress Republican Congress is is busy its dismantling environmental measures that are on the books the ones introduced by Richard Nixon it was in many ways the last liberal President Eisenhower would look like some kind of flaming radical today so all the more evidence about how they both the doctrinal and policy spectrum has shifted to the right but on climate there are international polls taken by the Pew foundation and turns out that across the world a large majority of the population is very much concerned about the environmental catastrophe even in the United States there's considerable concern all of the United States is much lower than other countries they're much less concerned less the belief that it's real which is why every Republican candidate can say and Ian must say it's not doesn't exist or it's not a problem and get away with it in the United States this figure has been going down for the last couple of years concerned for climate you know the problems of climate that's certainly correlated with a massive corporate propaganda campaign which was openly announced and nothing secret about it you can read in the New York Times that after the success of the insurance companies in meaning back health reform and turning the Obama program into a kind of a gift to them what you need it was after their success the Chamber of Commerce of our control ium Institute and others announced that they're going to use the same methods to try to undermine the concern over global warming and it's big a in a big campaign it's apparently had a substantial effect and that's all a direct consequence of the shift of power towards unaccountable private tyrannies and the religion and it is a religion that there must be no public interference in their pursuit of short-term profit and power well it's easy and convenient to make fun of the Republican congressman who explained that there can't be any environmental problems because God promised Noah that would never be another flood that's easy we can laugh about it it's less easy less convenient and far more significant to pay attention to the secular religious extremism that's all around us right in our circles our own and lightning circles kind that I mentioned and this indeed goes well beyond what I've already mentioned at an encrypting involves crises that are far graver than the failure by design in the rich countries from which the 99% are suffering among these many crises and there are plenty of there's one that ought to be of prime concern for us and that is just on moral ground the ones the crises affecting the victims of our crimes well these are ranged and widely to talk about but I'll just end by bringing up one quite striking case which happens to teach us a good deal about ourselves if we choose to learn from it as you know anniversaries of important events are often commemorated sometimes quite solemnly like Pearl Harbor day but there are some that are forgotten and they have lessons too so I'll mention one we are now reaching the fiftieth anniversary of the date when President John F Kennedy launched a direct US invasion of South Vietnam just 50 years ago he shifted u.s. policy from support of a brutal client regime that had killed tens of thousands of people and he listed in resistance that couldn't subdue he's shifted policy from support for them to a direct us attack that included bombing by US aircraft the use of napalm a program of chemical warfare programs that ultimately drove millions of people villagers into urban slums or what amounted to concentration camps in which this story was they would be protected from the indigenous guerillas who in fact the administration knew they were willingly supporting well quote official sources from fifty years ago President Kennedy authorized use of US forces in a sharply increased effort to avoid a further deterioration of the situation in South Vietnam including increased airlift to the government of Vietnam that's the u.s. client regime which until virtually the end declared itself to be the government of all Vietnam the this increased airlift included helicopters light aviation transport air aircraft equipment and US personnel for aerial reconnaissance instruction in an execution of air ground support special intelligence aircraft personnel and chemical defoliants to kill Vietcong food crops and to foliate selected border and jungle areas spraying equipment was installed on the 834 helicopters and is ready to be used against food crops the this is 1961 1966 T to the defoliants included Agent Orange that's laden with dioxin which was known to be but that manufacturers at least was known to be one of the most lethal carcinogens that's anyone knows about and it exact 'add pretty terrifying toll on the invading armies and of course far worse horrors for the civilian population still does find aborted hideously malformed fetuses and Saigon hospitals several generations down the line but notice that all of this is attack on South Vietnam the short term effects were reported by the most highly respected Indochina specialists military historian Bernard fall there was no dove incidentally but he was one of the few who cared about the people of the tormented countries so in early 1965 he estimated that about 66,000 had been killed between 1957 and 1961 under the u.s. imposed terror state and another 90,000 between 1961 when policy was shifted in April 1965 during the early stages of the kennedy johnson aggression virtually all of them South Vietnamese and mostly victims of the u.s. client regime or as he put it the crushing weight of American Armour napalm jet bombers and finally vomiting gases well the decisions of 50 years ago were largely kept from the American people the pieces dribbled out and so are the shocking consequences that persist the first study of the continuing impact of chemical warfare on South Vietnamese construction of food crops and so on first study of that just appeared by Fred Wilcox a couple of months ago I doubt very much that'll even be reviewed well despite the silence information did trickle through the give idli some sense of what was happening but efforts at justification were pretty slim because nobody really cared hardly more than President Kennedy's impassioned address to the General Assembly UN General Assembly where he warned that we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primary uncovered means for extending its sphere of influence and if the conspiracy achieves its ends in Laos and Vietnam the gates will be opened wide conspiracies in the Kremlin there weren't any Russians anywhere near sight but they were the sort of the monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that was doing all these things about the same time he warned that as he put it the complacent the self-indulgent the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history and only the strong can possibly survive now that was his lament after the failure of the invasion of Cuba Bay of Pigs invasion a warning that got to do something about it oh well hardly necessary to spell out the actual basis for these grim pronouncements since so few people were even paying attention to what was actually being done and the invasion itself passed with hardly more than a yawn well that was 1961 years later by 1967 opposition of the crimes did reach a substantial scale but by that time hundreds of thousands of US troops and tens of thousands of virtual mercenaries were rampaging through the country the heavily populated areas were subjected to saturation bombing and by then the invasion had spread to the rest of Indochina and the consequences had become so horrendous that Burnette fall again forecast that Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity is threatened with extinction as the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size and he was again referring to South Vietnam which was always the main target up to that point the war went on for another eight horrendous years and mainstream was opinion was divided between those who described the war as a noble cause that could have been one with more dedication and at the opposite extreme the critics the to whom it was a mistake that proved too costly kind of like the German General Staff after Stalingrad that's the Liberals by 1977 the President Carter aroused almost no notice when he explained that weäôve it Nam no debt and because the destruction was mutual practically no comment well still to come after Falls burnt Falls grim warning was the bombing of the remote peasant society of northern Laos bombing with such intensity that the victims lived in caves for years to try to survive the bombing that almost nothing to do with the Vietnam War had mostly to do with the fact there were a lot of bombers around them nothing much to do shortly after that came the bombing of rural Cambodia at the incredible level of all allied air operations in the entire Pacific Theater during World War two including two atom bombs that's rural Cambodia all of this was under Henry Kissinger's orders anything that flies on anything that moves now that's a call for genocide of a kind that's very hard to find in New York I've already known disregarded these were what are called secret Wars in the meaning reporting of what was available even what was available was very scanty and the facts are still barely known to the general public or even educated elites people can recite by heart every real or alleged crime of official enemies these are all matters that reflect that merit reflection not about you know the Republican base but about ourselves and our communities and those we live in and they also married action and there is finally some action the Occupy movements are first large-scale popular response to the growing crisis of the past generation maybe they can go beyond what they've done I hope so they have achieved a great deal and if they can overcome the inevitable repression already underway and if they can find ways to expand into the general community and to deepen the insight that they're trying to provide that could prove to be a development of historical significance and whether that will happen is essentially up to us to determine just as it's up to us to determine whether say Martin Luther King's a dream is to remain as in tattered ruins or can in fact be realized so we got started a little late so that many of you could join us and we're delighted to have you we'll set up here I believe we already have a couple of microphones set up so we have some time for some dialogue with Professor Chomsky and we also have some handheld microphones up in the balcony so if you could please line up here and I hope we can get some questions from some undergraduates as well tonight that would be terrific okay so the gentlemen over on this side dr. dr. Chomsky absolutely love your work I just wanted you to comment and give some of your criticisms over the State of the Union speech the other night if you had any criticisms I never listen to stay too they're kind of predictable which means they carrying essentially no information even in the technical sense of information you can predict what they're going to say yes it's mostly boilerplate that's in this case it's a bill it's a campaign speech for the next election now there were a couple of things in it which were I've read read read about them later they there are a couple of things which are reasonable if they're carried through there are some things mature they're quite threatening oh just to pick one of those Obama made it clear that they're gonna go ahead with the XL pipeline that's delayed and go through and the fracking operations and these are kind of like a death sentence for the species I mean you can argue about the other things but these are pretty very serious the you know the advanced technology and it's been developed for getting a gas from natural gas other hydrocarbons products from the shale tar sand the Derrick's the predictions are nobody knows the predictions are right but the predictions are that they will lead to of their it's kind of hell they'll lead to energy independence for the United States and maybe first century so the United States will be kind of the Saudi Arabia of the world of course at the end of that century there won't be any world to care about but that's not not part of the calculation I think it's kind of amazing to see these discussions I mean what the facts are you can debate but take again the Financial Times it's probably the most responsible and serious journal in the world very good Journal now they had a full page devoted to a euphoric account of how fracking techniques and the pipeline could lead to a century of energy independence and global hegemony for the United States because of the vast resources that would be opened up and not some comment a couple of sentences on the local environmental effects which are very severe that destroys Water Resources and all sorts of things so a couple of words about that but literally not one word relating it to the emissions reports that had just appeared at that time the ones I mentioned and you just put these things together and you can see that the species is kind of like lemmings happily walking over the cliff you know it's pretty much what he said it's gonna lead to living other proposals you know if it kind of varies some of them make some sense some don't there's not much details you know really of what they mean and it you don't know whether he's gonna really pursue them so for example takes a health care reform when Obama came into office with a mandate a very strong mandate also controlling a both congressional body and part of the mandate was for serious health reform a majority of the population was in favor of some kind of national health care you know extending maybe extending Medicare to the whole population or what's called single-payer Canadian style and not because Canada has the best health system in the world but because this is a very insular country and people have know that Canada's there somewhere and they don't know that Australia say has it much better health system but so people want a Canadian style health system which would in fact sharply cut the deficit and so on that was a mandate they gave it away without a struggle he it was reduced to a public option at least an option for this Obama gave that away without trying even though he was supported by maybe close to two-thirds of the population he quickly made a deal with the big pharmaceutical companies to continue a legislation that I think is unique to the United States well in the United States Congress is perfect the government is prevented by law the executive is prevented by law from negotiating drug prices so of course drug prices are you know two or three times as high as anywhere else after this one part of the medical system which is treated is handled like every other industrial country that's the Veterans Affairs program there the governor's allowed to negotiate drug prices there's guaranteed health care there's preventive care and the the costs are a fraction of the general system of public system and the outcomes are quite good and this remembers a vulnerable part of the population these are people who are not kind of like a random section of the population a lot of them had war injuries and traumas and so on and so forth well they're they're allowed to do it but for the rest of the population not allowed to at that time there was about eighty-five percent of the public was in favor of getting rid of that provision and it saw it went step by step it actually ended up with by about August this must been August 2010 the insurance industry industry were euphoric about their victory that's great we got a huge victory the Obama system is going to give us a huge number of new people signing up and will make a ton of money on it of course they turned against it because nothing is ever good enough damn I'd like to get everything you don't have anything so after having celebrated the victory they finally turned against it and said no we want even more no of course but that was an example of how he handled the mandate the same with other things like take the of the bailout legislation that I mentioned there were two parts to it in the legislation save the banks who were responsible pam-pam offered their crimes and do something for the victims only half was done it wasn't because of lack of public support so we don't know even the kind of positive parts of it that may not mean anything in fact whether they will mean anything it depends on whether there's massive public pressure to force them to mean something there's always pressure coming from concentrated capital the business classes are always fighting a very self-conscious class war highly class conscious business community and if it's a one-sided class where will they win and so it depends whether there's another side and the class work but I think that's the fate of whatever's decent in the State of the Union speech oh good evening my name is David de Xiang I'm a former Marine veteran who survived the hideous war of atrocity against the Vietnamese people's after my return I was trained as a community organizer by Saul Alinsky as was very active in Veterans Affairs including being a core member of the group of volunteers that built the Vietnam Memorial in Washington also known as the wall I invite everyone here to go there and as you reflect during the spirit of Tet healing and reconciliation to try and imagine how vast a symbol Memorial would be in Vietnam and how much we owe the Vietnamese and the indo-chinese my question I couldn't here in the afterword of fields failed States you note the opportunities for education organizing abound and warned that failed to grasp them as like a nominee will have ominous repercussions for our country our world and future generations I strongly believe that the media is mightier than war and then I ask how do we the people defend our Constitution occupy the foreign policy establishment the national media to ensure sustained Democratic empowerment and access to unimpeachably ground intelligence to redress these foreign policy grievances suffer Fidelis how do we how do we Occupy Wall Street but the foreign policy establishment it's very free country by comparative standards that is a very free country but you got a lot of opportunity they range from demonstrations to electoral politics to resistance to organizing organizing public pressure you know it's way to do it in fact you don't to go berry for the educational establishment the intellectual establishment is up to their neck in this and we live right in the middle of it of course that can be influenced you know in classrooms writing and organization and all sorts of things I don't I mean I hear the question often and I don't really understand it we can do almost anything we want it's you know it's not like say Egypt where you're going to get murdered by the security forces it's a hearing there's some regression sometimes but by international standards by comparative standards so slight that it hardly counts certainly for privileged people not for say Martin Luther King not for people with our own color or you know poor people and so on yeah they could get it in the neck but for people like us see the the opportunities are just overwhelming there's nothing to stop all kinds of action from education and organizing to the political action to demonstrations do all kinds of resistance are possible with whole range of things one of the kind of things that have succeeded in the past after all we have a history of success in getting policy changes the New Deal legislation for example they didn't come out of nowhere but that came out of very large-scale popular activism which reached the point where the business world and the government agreed to allow progressive legislation to pass the business world quickly tried to undermine it but they had to accept it because the next thing it takes a sit-down strikes at by the time sit-down strikes were taking place the business world could easily see that the next step is just taking over the factory running it and kicking them out well you don't allow that so some legislation patent portent legislation passed and under other massive popular organization of pressure the other things happened and it's happened again I mean in the 1960s for example of the anymore movement which I mentioned it got from essentially nowhere to a mass popular movement so strong that by 1968 if he read the Pentagon Papers and one of the most interesting sections is the final section that ends in mid-1968 and the last the first few months of 1968 you take a look at that section there the president wanted to send a couple hundred thousand more troops to South Vietnam and the military and Joint Chiefs were opposed because they said that they would need the troops for civil disorder controlled the United States the population was just going to get out of control the young people women minorities others and just gonna need the troops to control the population here they didn't send the troops well you know when the government gets that worried you've had in fact but they did other horrible things could have been worse but it was bad enough like I mentioned but it had to be kind of clandestine actually the same thing happened in the Iraq war on a current of you is that the protests the protest against the Iraq war were historically totally unique but I think it's a first war in history where there was massive protest before the war was officially launched I can't think of a case where that ever happen and it's claimed that there wasn't any effect but I don't think that's true it should have gone on unfortunately it reduced and that allowed more leeway for aggression but the Iraq war King was nothing like the war against South Vietnam and the policies that Kennedy and Johnson routinely carried out that without even thinking about it we're never tried to erect there was no chemical warfare there was no saturation bombing by b-52s there was no what are called the population control measures we drive the population of the concentration camps that none of these measures were even tried and I think the reason they weren't tried is part of a lot of reasons but one of them was just the public it was understood that the public was not going to re from this time so--okay had a kind of a retarding effect there are other kinds of popular organization that have had major effect I've looked at countries a much more civilized place now than it in the 1960s in many respects it takes a woman's rights I'm in 1960s women literally still were not allowed to serve on juries they hadn't gotten to vote long before but in the 60s they still women could not there were some states where they could but in many states they couldn't serve on jury and they take a place same way on university 1960 almost a hundred percent white male no now it's kind of like this that's changed all over the country well that's a big change in the nature of the society and the culture it didn't happen by magic it wasn't a gift from above it came from extensive organizing activities and corresponding actions which finally broke down a lot of barriers and freed things up that's the way changes take place it's not a big secret there's no magic and all those methods are still available thank you so let's see if we can go up to the balcony do we have a microphone with a questioner up there yeah I was wondering if you'd read gar alperovitz book America beyond capitalism and if if you have what you thought of his ideas in the book could you repeat the title and author of the book please I'm Hamid either I was wondering if he had read gar alperovitz America beyond capitalism okay and what he thought of our that's very important book and the work that he's doing that's described there is extremely important that's one of the things that can be done it's very feasible the book reviews work that alperovitz mainly has been involved in for some years in trying to develop worker owned enterprises mostly in Ohio it took off in Ohio for very interesting reasons and because it was 1977 the as part of this change in the socio-economic policy that I was discussing Oh the US Steel Corporation decided to close down its operations in Youngstown Ohio the Youngstown is a steel town it was built by and around thee you know the steel industry the working people the community were extensively involved in steel production and all that everything that flows off of it manufacturing plant spawns all sorts of other things so it was a steel town US Steel decided to sell it off kill the town instead of just giving up the workers in the community would have called the stakeholders offered to buy the plant and run it themselves that could have been done with enough public support it could have happened these were not public issues at the time that way it didn't go to court the court think the Union took the case to court to try to get the right to do it they lost in the court no but they could have won and it could have been carried forward well so it was a kind of a defeat but like a lot of defeats it wasn't the end of the story it was the basis for moving on to something else and what it spawned was a lot of much smaller scale efforts to establish worker owned enterprises a lot of it's called the Cleveland mob well a lot of them around Cleveland and other parts of Ohio which are not huge enterprises but there's a lot of them how parrots miss book reviews all of this you can look at it for details and these are notice worker-owned that's short of worker managed that would be another step towards liberation but it's real and it's a way of reacting to the kind of collapse of the productive system for the 99% we're just taking it over actually if you take a look at standard texts and business economics you know nothing radical standard texts and business economics now point out that there's a no economic principle or any other principle that says that corporations should be controlled by shareholders the shareholders incidentally it doesn't mean somebody who you know this pension fund has $2 of theirs in the as a share that shareholders are very narrowly concentrated shareholdings like top 1% of the population most of it and that means big banks interlocking directorates and so on there's no economic principle that says they're the ones who should determine investment policy like just shipping production to Foxconn there's no law of economics incident that should happen it could just as well be done by stakeholders by the workforce of the community perfectly consistent with anything that anyone claims about economic theory well you know there's no reason for say the Occupy movement to be less imaginative and ambitious than standard business texts so yes stakeholders could take over parts of the economy that are being dismantled that run them effectively and direct them to different purposes these are very feasible tasks so for example one of the things that Obama's praised for by the kind of less liberal economists Paul Krugman and others is for having essentially nationalized the auto industry and reconstructed it that's pretty much what happened well what's the auto industry was nationalized he just said what would happen there were alternatives one alternative was to reconstruct it and hand it back to the essentially the original owners not the same names but same class same banks and so on but that's what was done another possibility would have been and the auto industry over to the workforce and the communities the stakeholders and redirected towards things that the country really needs not only badly need high-speed rail for example it's a you know it's a kind of a shameful situation when you compare it with other countries in much poorer looking and it would be a tremendous economic benefit to the it's the human benefit in all kinds of respect means I could have got here in two hours instead of wasting time at the airport for example literally two hours I happen to be in France a couple of months ago giving talks the last one I gave was all southern France I had to get from having you on southern friends to the airport to go Airport and of course is praying that goes directly to the airport it took two hours it's the same distance as Washington the boss makes better what eight hours or something but oh this is these are human costs their economic cost the things the country badly needs the skilled workforce at the in the auto industry could easily be it could be reconverted to producing things like this and other things and people need that could be done under the ownership and management of the workforce and the communities well that was an alternative that getting back to air of it this is the kind of thing we talked about that particular case but it's the kind of case that's coming up all the time and these are very feasible things they're not far out in Utopia now they could have a big effect on the society and how Perewitz is one of the very few people is really doing very good work on this book it's certainly worth reading thinking about what it describes whether Rob what options it suggests but this comes up all the time I should say like in Boston I didn't warn others that a year ago those in a suburb across important manufacturing town there was a there was a reasonably successful high-technology small manufacturing plant that was producing equipment high-tech equipment for aircraft and they apparently were doing ok but they weren't making up profit for the managers in the multinational corporation who owned them so the corporation wanted to just dismantle it out of the union you know I didn't like oval workers wanted to buy the operation and just run it themselves well they the corporation wouldn't agree I suspect that they wouldn't agree mostly on the class grounds it's kind of not a good idea to let people own and manage their own workplaces and get the wrong idea anyhow whatever the reason it didn't work but if say the Occupy movement had been around and if it had been active and energetic enough that I had reached out sufficiently that's the kind of thing it could have participated in and supported then maybe gotten it over the edge well that'd be important in maintaining say manufacturing in Massachusetts and that kind of thing goes on all the time these are options that are all over the place so and garbetts by the way he's also had a long distinguished career starting with his book atomic diplomacy about fifty years ago as here at the university so our dilemma is that we could go on all night with professor Chomsky but we need to get back home safely so let me take one more question and we'll wrap it up from this this side thank you fair enough kind of thank you for your so if we can do both and get a question from the other side upstairs from a woman do we have anyone to fit the bill yes we do so hi I'm Lindsey and I am an adjunct professor what's known as a Beltway adjunct I teach eight classes a semester and I have no health insurance and no retirement benefits I'm communication scholar and I've studied your work for the last 15 years and I want to know beyond the critique which was a marvelous critique by the way thank you what are the discursive strategies that we can use to combat this kind of ideologically driven discourse that dominates the politics that we deal with in the classroom and beyond every day I mean I know I have friends colleagues and family members who are staunchly you know staunch supporters of Republican worldview and it's hard to have dialogues meaningful dialogues with them because in late modernity facts no longer matter which is hard because there's some legitimacy in late modernity for challenging the notions of truth that historically grounded us in the Enlightenment but what I'm wondering is with that being the case how do we begin to talk about truth in a meaningful way what kind of linguistic strategies do we use to drive change that's what I'm wondering I only heard about half of it okay so I'm sorry I destroyed version what discursive strategies can we use at a time when facts seem to this anger little foundation yeah well before answering let me just make a comment expanding on the statement I made before about one of the great victories of the past generation namely establishing a much higher level of women's rights it's a huge progress but notice how far we've we are from having reached any proper point just but every talk I give the same question comes up how about allowing a question from a woman why does that question even arise you know like you know we don't ask the question how about allowing the question from somebody with blonde hair let's say why is the discrimination so deeply embedded and in fact internalized that you still have to raise the question know that and it's it's a uniform I can't remember to talk what this didn't come up so that's something to think about that's still a battle to be won internally and in the society as far as the discursive strategies are concerned I don't think there are any answers other than other ones we all know but the ones that have succeeded not 100% of course every successes there are some sensors oh sorry one discursive strategies keep your hand away there are things we can all do I mean we're all practically everybody here I'm sure it's for a pretty privileged sector of the population you have lots of opportunities you can you can speak you can write you can organize you can you can reach out to other people if you keep doing it it can have an impact it takes a something like the women's movement I mean a lot of you're old enough to remember how that happened I mean it habit began with very small consciousness-raising groups the groups of women getting together and talking to each other and coming to comprehend that a lot of its internal to comprehend that you don't have to accept oppression that there is oppression first of all like if you asked my grandmother is she oppressed she wouldn't know what you were talking about of course she was hopelessly oppressed but just wasn't that's life you know it's like asking do you breathe so just getting to understand that you don't have to accept the oppression you can be a free independent person and then came efforts to expand and there was bitter resistance you know it wasn't easy by any means that in fact there still is there's a backlash and so on and so forth but you just keep struggling for it now the civil rights movement it didn't get anywhere near Martin Luther King's dream but it did have effects big change from saying Alabama in 1960 know things that are bad but not like that and it's a head the same way it started with you know goes back decades of course but it really took off when a couple of young black students sat in at a lunch in outer 60 or 51 years ago they were arrested and beaten and so on pretty soon snick form Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee the students got some support in a Spelman College in Atlanta where a lot of the the snick activists came from there were two faculty members who supported them a Howard gen and starting Lind both expelled but they did get some support and they Freedom Riders Freedom buses started there was a little participation from the north it was very brutal that people were killed beaten you know not fun I mean I remember demonstrations as late as 1965 in the South where there's just brutal police violence and repression the federal marshals there kind of watching him not doing anything but but they did it did get some games it hit a limit it hit a limit as soon as it reached the North it's kind of striking Martin Luther King in 1966 expanded the movement to Chicago then they were just dumped thought miserably it was a mark losing effort to mobilize the poor mobilize people around slums moved on to the war in Vietnam huge antagonism he ended up the way I described just kind of written out of history by northern liberals but it did have success and the successes are real and we know how they were won same with thee with everything else on the Vietnam War protests didn't reach a substantial level but remember what it was like four years I mean I when I started giving talks about the Vietnam War in the early sixties it was in somebody's living room or in a church with four people no and in fact if we tried to do it to college say you they might thing you'd have to bring together half a dozen topics main men of them Vietnam and I hope that somebody would show up as late as October 65 that's after what Burnett fall was describing what I quoted in Boston which is a liberal City you could not have a public demonstration against the war literally would be violently broken up often by students that's a fact in March 1966 yeah this time the hundreds of thousands of troops were rampaging in South Vietnam a huge destruction country virtually destroyed in Boston again a liberal city since we couldn't have public demonstrations because they'd be broken up we tried to have one in a church downtown church or aankhen Street Church now the church was attacked you know Tomatoes cans the face actually there was a police contingent I walked outside that stood next to the police captain I asked him you know can't you do something to stop the defacing of the church and said I can't do anything about a minute later a tomato hit him in the face and about thirty seconds the place was but that was going on in March 1966 a year later there were big demonstration and it's there were no special kind of tricky strategies just what we all know how to do if people don't want to think about facts that try to bring out the importance of understanding facts which after all everyone knows in fact if you look at public attitudes that even tea party attitudes they're kind of social-democratic literally so for example among Tea Party advocates and of course the rest of the population a considerable journey are in favor of more spending for health and more spending for education they're against welfare but more spending to help save women with dependent children that's the result of very effective propaganda Ronald Reagan one of his great successes was to demonize the concept of welfare so welfare means for Reagan you know Reaganite rhetoric a rich black woman and driving to a welfare office in a chauffeured Cadillac to take your hard-earned money and spend it on the drugs there's nothing well nobody's in favor of that but are you in favor of what welfare actually does yeah that ought to be supported and I just don't think it's true that people don't want to hear about facts and the sames true health the deficit the things I mentioned you know not 100% but there's a fairly simple about I think it's 2/3 of the population thinks that corporations should be deprived of personal rights that's a pretty significant move now that would undo a century of court decisions not just citizens united goes back a century and that's against the will of about two-thirds of the population well all these things offer plenty of opportunities for discussion interchange of Education organizing activism the opportunities are all there it's mostly the will to undertake them that's lacking and it's not easy I mean that there's costs associated with it so you know undoubtedly even for privileged people but you know not the costs that people like us can't bear not that kind of cost so professor Chomsky has given us a lot to think about across a really astonishing range of topics in the best tradition of intellectual exchange and and of the deans lecture series before we thank him I want to thank the organizers of this event I want to thank all of you for coming out tonight coming out this evening I'm sorry we couldn't get two more questions so please join me in thanking professor Laura you

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Length: 109min 58sec (6598 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 14 2013

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[u/peppermintfresh]

I love all this content. Thanks