Noam Chomsky on The New World Order (1998)

well since david brought up or will i might mention that in his defense that he didn't only write about foot control in totalitarian societies it's perfectly true that that was the you know well thrust main thrust of his work and it's certainly what he's known for but he did write an interesting essay called literary censorship in england and it was about foot control and free societies big thing one does the example because he was there and the point that he made is that it really wasn't all that different from the talat area in soviet union it was just done in different ways but he said that the in fact one of the ways he mentioned is a good education you'll be happy to know so if you have a good education i presumably meant you know Oxford and Cambridge in those places you just have it instilled in you that there are certain things it just wouldn't do to say or even to think if the system is working properly and he also talked about private ownership of the press and other factors that as he puts it to end up with and the result that unpopular ideas are an entry called inconvenient facts are silenced with surprising effectiveness well that's not very well known and there's a reason for it it was intended as the introduction to his famous Animal Farm which made him a household word you know satire on the Soviet Union but as if to prove his point it was silenced with surprising effectiveness it didn't appear for unknown reasons his biographers don't go into though they must know and it was discovered about 25 years later long after his death and his unpublished papers so it's true that Orwell is known for his attack on the other guy but he generalized the point and the more important points the ones that have to do with us which are always the most important are those have been as he put it kept dark and silenced with surprising effectiveness still unknown for the most part except the real Orwell aficionados well that message is worth bearing in mind he was writing about England but applies us as well and more importantly because of American power it was American power in fact that established the current world order there are only occasional moments in human affairs when you can sensibly when there are changes that are dramatic and significant enough so that makes sense to talk about a world order one of them probably the most dramatic and the most easily x surely was in 1945 at the end of the most devastating single catastrophe in human history which left much of the industrial world either seriously damaged or in ruins except for the United States which was unscathed and in fact had benefited enormous Lee from the war industrial production more than tripled that ended the depression which had not been affected very much by the New Deal and it set the stage for the next phase of history the United States at that time had about half the world's total wealth and unparalleled military power and security of a level that had no precedent and perfectly naturally dominant forces in the state corporate system planned to use that power to organize in the world and accord with their own perceived self-interest that's what's technically called the national interest in academic writing and the media and so on inside these truisms which is what kind of a curiosity about the intellectual culture is that these truisms which is what they are are commonly described as a Marxist view which is odd since first person ever who I know of who are them clearly was Adam Smith and perhaps the person who most lucidly articulated them was Winston Churchill and you know it shouldn't strain the intelligence of a eight year old to figure out that that's the way the world works anyway it does if you have a good education that's an inconvenient fact but in fact well how do you organize the world the there were conflicting visions you know us elites had their picture of how to ought to be organized but it was certainly not uniform any means and opposing forces had to be dealt with somehow want to borrow some cold war rhetoric they had to be contained or possibly rolled back if that could be done and that was done with varying degrees of success the basic conflicts of course persist and they persist for quite simple reasons they're about fundamental values about justice and freedom and human rights and these values are constantly an arena of conflict between the more powerful between centers of power and most of the rest that's a good deal of history in the last half century is no exception to that well at the onset of the current era the end of the Second World War there were very the framers of the New World Order they had to face these challenges everywhere first they had to face them at home I mean domestically in the United States what had to be contained or rolled back was the fact that a large majority the population had rather strong commitments to more or less social democratic ideals sometimes a lot more far-reaching than that positions that the business world quite rightly regarded as a threat to its traditional domination of US society as they put it in their own internal publications it was the hazard facing industrialists in the rising political power of the masses which had to be contained and suppressed and that was that was then you that's a constant theme that runs through came up again in the wake of the turmoil of the 1960's which led to concerns among elites in this case liberal elites about what they called the crisis of democracy the fact that large parts of the population that are usually apathetic and passive and obedient were trying to enter the political arena to press their own demands it's a crisis of democracy which had to be overcome they incidentally expressed particular concern about what they called the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young the ones who make sure that you don't have that the wrong thoughts don't come to mind and the period since the early 1970s has been one of a doctrinal assault against the effort the rather successful in many ways Liberatore elements of the 1960's that's the modern theory but going back to the early period the early the mid 1940s these were major problems and it's interesting to look at how they were dealt with but can't go into it now well there were similar problems right throughout the industrial world there they were enhanced by the fact that the anti-fascist resistance had quite considerable prestige and appeal at the end of the war and often it had a sort of radical Democratic thrust to it also traditional conservative the traditional conservative order had been discredited because of its association with fascism well the first first task of the United States and Britain after the war was to restore that traditional order and its and that was a major it was done all over the world and one or another form sometimes blood aliy sometimes in other ways mostly in ugly ways that should be chapter one of post Second World War history well as in the United States that project continues it's taken new forms in the last couple of decades under under the guise of what's sometimes called neoliberalism or economic rationalism or the free market and other terms that are permeated with a good deal of fraud and hypocrisy I'll come back to that in the third world there were similar problems in the 40s and there they were compounded by pressures to dismantle the Imperial systems and the legacy that they had left a legacy of subordination and dependency and throughout the third world rather similar policies were imposed but you can really see them in their starkest clarity in latin america and the reason is because they're the United States really reigned supreme I mean there were essentially no challenges so you can see the policies formulated you read them in internal documents sometimes public ones and executed with pretty dramatic clarity the when I say there were no challenges that's not quite true there was one major challenge and that was the domestic population in Latin America there there was a threat and it was recognized right away the State Department records from the mid 40s early and mid 40s talk about the concern they're concerned with what they called the philosophy of new nationalism that was sweeping all over Latin America I'm now quoting it was embracing policies designed to bring about broader distribution of wealth and to raise the standard of living of the masses on the principle that the first beneficiaries of a country's resources should be the people of that country the name for that evil doctrine is radical nationalism or economic nationalism that's what's called an official state papers and of course it's unacceptable the first beneficiaries of a country's resources should be US investors their counterparts elsewhere and the local associates that's taken for granted we have to protect our resources as the chair of the State Department's policy planning staff put it George Kennan famous humanist our resources happen to be somewhere else but they're ours and we have to protect them and make sure that we're the first beneficiaries there was a conflict over this and in February 1945 at a hemispheric conference a u.s. power naturally prevailed and the United States imposed what was called the economic charter of the Americas which called for an end economic nationalism in all its forms so none of this nonsense well there followed a cruel and bloody half-century still going on and these were central themes throughout and they remain so now they're very much alive today although here too they take the form of they've changed somewhat in style and form now they're in the framework of a certain kind of globalization in a very special form which is crafted primarily to serve the interests of those with power perfectly naturally transnational corporations financial institutions that state a leets and so on well the most critical part of the third world then and now as well was the Middle East and there's a simple reason for that it was the locus of the world's major energy supplies and remained so State Department didn't mince words about it it was called the greatest material prize in world history the strategically most important part of the world uh stupendous source of strategic power and so on that's the Middle East and it was clear who had to be the first beneficiaries of those resources they had to be under effective US control had to be accessible on terms that are acceptable to us power US leadership and the main concern was the huge profits that they generate they had the flow primarily to the United States secondarily to its junior partner as the British Foreign Office ruefully described itself in the mid-nineteen for 1945 internal documents recently released the profits have to be recycled by local managers who are supposed to be the plinth dependent on the global rulers the British and their day and the Sun had a nice name for them and internal documents they call them the Arab facade behind which the British would exercise actual rule they're still around there's still the Arab facade so that's the structure basic structure of the system naturally it engenders continual conflict the people of the region don't understand why they shouldn't be the beneficiaries of the resources of that region kind of backward that way they and that causes problems in internal documents the problems which have been going on since the Second World War and effective long before they're called the problem of radical nationalism economic nationalism and so on for the general public for people like us they're different terms used for them they're called international terrorism of really big intellectual the crisis The Clash of Civilizations or some other fancy term but it's good old-fashioned radical nationalism the strange idea that the first beneficiaries of a country's resources should be the people of that country and that there should be effort to construct policies designed to bring about a broader distribution of wealth and to raise the standard of living of the masses and State Department terminology well that goes on and it's likely that it'll become worse at least if the consensus of geologists is anywhere near accurate that is that the current oil glut and extremely low crisis I mean at the pump in the United States they're lower than they've been since the Second World War in real terms it's generally assumed that that's a temporary phenomenon and that there is a an oil shortage coming probably not too far the reason for that belief is that the rate of discovery has declined which went up from about 1850 until the mid 1960s kept kept going up it's been declining since the mid 60s despite much more elaborate technology and deep drilling and so on keeps going down and the available oil which is some rough estimate of it is being used up very fast in fact close to half of the known exploitable capacity has been used since the oil crisis of the early 70s and it's accelerating so that you know but about furthermore about half of the known exploitable capacities in the Middle East which means that that region of the world will become you know it'll be looming larger and larger in the effort to control the whole world and those are you know not certain but reasonable prospects unless there's something radically new discovered that looks as if that's what's coming there's a general prediction that about half of total known capacity will have been used up by within a gate or maybe two decades anyway not very distant future and after that as far as anybody knows there'll be a decline and a shift to middle east sources as the major center there's a lot of hype about the Caspian Sea and so on but that's apparently mostly fake according to oil company sources they claim it's being hyped by the United States government for political reasons as part of their ante their their effort to develop an alliance with Europe against Iran which they so far haven't been able to do so they're kind of talking about Caspian Sea but the estimates are that that's maybe on the order of North Sea oil not very large a couple of years use at most the and most of it isn't in that region it's in kazahstan all right well anyhow those are prospects that are expected which means the Middle East will be be a major center of conflict and turmoil very probably there are new alignments taking shape there which if you want to you should keep your eyes on them it's not yet and part of it's already there part of its taking shape but kind of an alignment between which is this one's very visible turkey Israel and the Palestinian administration which is supposed to keep the Palestinians under control they're supposed to play the role basically that the black leadership of the ban Thurston's played and under the apartheid regime it's why agreement was about and so those three are sort of on one side the turkey israel relation is now very visible and frightening people on the other side you can see a kind of and this must be wearing people in the State Department no end and the planning centers there's the beginnings of interactions rapprochement between Saudi Arabia Iran Egypt Syria in part frightened by the turkey israel relationship that's being established under US power with the junior partner following loyally behind as always and it's this is recipe for a lot of trouble in the future well there's a lot to say about all these matters but and plenty of aspects of the post-war post-world War two world and global system that haven't even mentioned but let's drop that on if you're interested glad to talk about it later and turn to something different namely the institutional framework that was designed for world order in the in the mid 40s that's 50 years ago asked how it's fared and where it stands today that institutional framework had three basic pillars there was an international political order there was a Human Rights order and an economic order the political order is articulated in the United Nations Charter the say a little about each the first the political order that's essentially the UN Charter the Charter has some simple long document but it has it's based on a very simple principle namely it bars the threat or use of force in international affairs threat or use of force and there only two exceptions to that which are clearly specified and more or less they're relevant to the real world one is if the Security Council of the United Nations unanimously authorizes the use of force or the threat of force after having determined that peaceful means have failed the second exception is famous article 51 which permits self-defense against armed attack until the Security Council acts armed attacks pretty narrowly define concept an international law that means a sudden overwhelming attack so for example if Cuba were to land troops and Washington the way the United States is supposed to respond is to inform the Security Council and ask them to do something about it and until the Security Council acts the United States is permitted to use force and self-defense the Cuban invasion that example may be hypothetical I'm not sure the Cubans kept a couple of months ago the Cuban threat was officially downgraded by the Pentagon that elicited a lot of anger on Capitol Hill and there was rejected by the White House at the same time the European Union was bringing charges against the United States and the World Trade Organization US embargo against Cuba for violating international law as has already been determined by every relevant international body and the u.s. refused to accept World Trade Organization jurisdiction claiming a national security exception meaning that the Cuban threat is still live so you better make sure you got your gas masks and your desks to hide under and so on well anyway that's the sole exception these are the sole exceptions there's of course no enforcement mechanism apart from the great powers and decisively that means the United States but the problem is that the great powers as far as I know universally reject the principles of the Charter and the small powers would too if they were big enough to get away with it they reject them in practice and also in the case of the United States explicitly in doctrine as well very clearly so in fact the doctrine has been stated repeatedly maybe stated most clearly by Dean Acheson leading statesmen at the time it was a senior adviser to the Kennedy administration he was justifying the plainly illegal blockade of Cuba in 1962 before a meeting of the American Society of international law and he pointed at he stated that quote a situation in which our country's power position and prestige are involved cannot be treated as a legal issue okay so if US power position and prestige are involved forget about international law the Charter or anything else that's pretty plain and accurate there's no need and no time to go through the practice of the past half-century one recent example is the bombing of the pharmaceutical plant in Sudan it's quite trivial in historical context though of course a war crime and didn't arouse much concern here but I suppose that if there was a terrorist attack that had destroyed half of US pharmaceutical supplies I might have maybe made it to the back pages of the newspapers anyhow that's a minor example of the utin case the use of force and radical violation of international law without leaving a plea to of any cover but it's quite standard you read it in the front pages every time there's any talk about say bombing Iraq obviously that's not done with Security Council support the u.s. of course knows it can't get the Security Council to agree to that so therefore it's just blatant violation of the central principles of international law even the threat this is independent of what you may happen to think about the regime or anything else we're talking about here about the international political order what's kind of interesting about the past 15 years or so the since Reagan is that it's all become very open and public so that's the one real innovation of the recent period so the United States during the Reagan administration claimed officially that article 51 self-defense against armed attack that that includes quoting self defense against future attack that was that was that was a justification for the bombing of Libya or it permits the United States quoting to defend its interests that was the justification for the invasion of Panama and the even gotten were ludicrous in the Clinton years but the basic point is we'll do what we feel like and now that's open and unchallenged accepted by the electril community except maybe they question it on pragmatic grounds us at the end of the UN Charter that's the end official end it's always it's never been effective but it's by now officially dead about the practice should don't don't go into it but the this has been amply demonstrated in action and shocking ways and again always with the acquiescence and the just of the support of the intellectual classes the educated classes those who've got a good education and though which things are inconvenient facts so there are no such facts as say the American invasion of South Vietnam in the early 1960s or the US war against the church and other miscreants and Central America in the 1980s and on and on those didn't happen in official history or of course they happened in real history in a free society in a free institution of higher learning these would be central components of the curriculum and in fact it's a kind of a reasonable measure of the freedom of the university to ask exactly how much attention is given to these central events of modern history and the doctrine that lies behind them leave that as an exercise for those who might be interested you know what the answer is going to be well let's turn to the second pillar of world order the human rights regime that's of course the universal declaration of human rights in a couple of days and December 10th that will be the 50th anniversary of its signing unanimous signing and we'll probably be regaled with condemnations of the horrendous human rights violations of somebody else particularly official enemies and those charges will probably be accurate or reasonably accurate but partially you can be pretty confident that the inconvenient fact don't be mentioned a vastly more important topic will be ignored namely human rights violations and the often terrible atrocities which can be charged in whole or in part to our account easy to think of examples many of them ongoing well these are whatever their scale happens to be huge but even if their scale was slight they would be far more important than enemy atrocities or other atrocities for quite elementary moral reasons moral truisms namely these are the exempt cases that we can act to mitigate or to terminate so on the most elementary principles those are the most important the comparative treatment of enemy atrocities in our own is very instructive and again I'll put it aside there's plenty in print about it unfortunately I don't know of any analysis of Stalinist propaganda but I assume it was sort of a mirror image of ours it would be interesting to discover that in fact the interesting to discover if it sinks to the depths of moral cowardice of our treatment of Western treatment American treatment of the atrocities chargeable home that's another good topic for somebody to look at if you want you can get a certain insight into the real understanding of human rights by looking at a doctrine that's well known the international lawyers not much beyond it's called the whole formula it's attributed the US Secretary of State Cordell Hull of the Roosevelt administration this formula defines what it calls the international minimum standard of civilization well that standard doesn't involve genocide or torture and other such marginal issues rather it is in quoting the right to adequate effective and prompt compensation for expropriated property where full compensation is to be at fair market value as determined by the former owners that's the International standard of civilization and it's a formula that applies in rather intricate ways for example it's the basis for the US economic embargo and terrorist war against Cuba for forty years that's been carried out because of Cuba's failure to meet this minimum standard of civilization that as it failed to offer what Washington unilaterally decided was fair compensation for nationalized property so the formula applies there on the other hand it doesn't apply for some odd reason to US investors in the US government who stole the Cuban properties at the turn of the century when Cuba was under US military occupation and consented to this robbery by force but that expropriation was okay doesn't fall under this principle the principle also doesn't hold for the US government and private powers who stole Spanish and British possessions in Cuba and the Philippines at the same time after the bloody conquest of the Philippines killed a couple hundred thousand people the United States throughout the Spanish concession for the for example for the Spanish on Manila railway company on the grounds that in quoting it had been inspired by Spanish imperialistic motives unlike the u.s. possessions that Cuba nationalized so it's a rather subtle doctrine it also doesn't apply to the founding of the United States that was based on expropriation of British properties British possessions and also the possessions of British supporters who were about as numerous as the rebels in the Civil War that was part of the global war going on at the time it's called here the American Revolution actually a civil war with two sides supported by different great powers and more or less equally balanced at home New York State alone gained close to four million dollars which was a huge sum in those days by taking the property of loyalists but that's okay that doesn't fall into the formula well goes on have to have a kind of subtle mind and good education to comprehend all of this and to understand what counts as an international minimum standard of civilization and against that kind of background you can understand more accurately the significance of the Universal Declaration in the real world I think one final comment on that and then I'll go on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the central thesis of it is universality of course that means all of the rights enumerated are of equal status and you're pretty sure here talk in the next couple of days about you know the relativists various bad guys please Asian values and things like that again the charges will be mostly accurate again partial you're unlikely to read editorials about the fact that the United States is a leader of the relativist camp quite officially one whole category of rights enumerated in the Universal Declaration is simply dismissed namely the socio-economic provisions according to the US government they have no status ginger Patrick Kirkpatrick Reagan's ambassador to the UN she described them as a letter to Santa Claus the US ambassador Morris Abram the ambassador the UN Commission on Human Rights described them as preposterous dangerous incitement actually he was talking about the Declaration of the right to development that the UN was considering which closely paraphrases the Universal Declaration in which the u.s. proceeded to veto thereby vetoing central parts of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights well maybe I'll be surprised and there'll be an editorial about this but I'm not holding my breath again there's a lot more to say if you read those provisions you'll see why they have no status so let's put that aside and turn to the international economic order which is actually all over the front pages today the reason that it's all over the front Hey is that the crisis the last 20 or 25 years has finally become begun to hit rich people so now it's a crisis up until now it didn't exist but now you can read it in the headlines and by now what's been happening is reasonably well known for exactly that reason nothing new just different victims our potential victims the international economics order was also established in the mid 40s 1944 the Bretton Woods system it's the Bretton Woods system designed by the United States and England was essentially I mean theoretically not but effectively then it had two basic principles one principle was that it called for freeing up trade so liberalizing trade they wanted to get back to something like the period before World War one which were only just about approaching in terms of scale of international economic transactions relative to the economy and so on scale it's not all that novel so they want to end drink between the two wars it declined a lot so they wanted to liberalize trade its principle one the second principle was to regulate capital flow and keep exchange rates fixed that's actually still you can still find that in the IMF rules the reason for the second principle was in part a belief which is probably probably correct least reasonable that capital flight short-term speculative capital flows particularly an exchange rate fluctuations which go along with them they're going to undermine trade trade an investment and in fact recent experience tends to be consistent with that assumption the more important reason however was again a kind of truism which wasn't controversial and it isn't controversial now and that is that free flow of capital undermines democracy and undermines the welfare state they were far too popular to ignore in the new twentieth century actually and if you go back to an earlier period say during the period of British domination of the world before World War one nowhere near as strong as US domination but substantial during that period as I just mentioned the level of globalization in gross terms was not very different from today actually higher in some respects capital flow was roughly at today's levels relative to the economy but in those days economic policy state economic policy could be designed without very much concern for the rabble because they didn't have a voice it was just you know voting was restricted and in the industrial societies kind of very weak imitation of democracy therefore national economic policies could be set and exchange rates could be fixed and so on even though there was rapid capital flow and in fact a major part of current economic policy is to try to get things back to those happy days when you could sort of disregard the population and just leave decisions in the hands of the right people you know financial capital and so on that's a large part of the history the last twenty or so years now the truism about free capital flow undermining democracy in the welfare state that was emphasized quite explicitly by the negotiators the US and British negotiators at Bretton Woods and the reasoning is straight forward capital controls that is restrictions on free movement of capital across borders they enable governments to carry out fiscal policies like monetary and tax policies that are from the point of view of investors irrational as they only help people not profits so they sustain employment or sustained incomes and social programs and so on and such policies can be introduced without fear of capital flight if it's constrained on the other end if there is free flow of capital you get what some international economists have called a virtual Senate of financial capital it can impose its own social policies simply by the threat of capital flight now sending the capital out of the country which leads to higher interest rates and economic slowdown budget cuts for health and education and so on and recession or maybe collapse basically the IMF principles if prescriptions if you look at them well as I say all of this was articulated very clearly at the time by the US British negotiators and it's not particularly controversial then or now if you have free flight a free flow of capital you're going to get a virtual cent a Senate and democracy and you know the welfare the social contract will be undermined very it's important to keep these really pretty elementary observations in mind when you look at the current period well the Bretton Woods system as originally established was pretty much in place in for about 20 20 25 years or so that's what's often called the Golden Age of post-war state capitalism had by historical standards high good economic performance so high growth high rates of growth both of the economy and of production expansion of the social contract and so on its was dismantled the system was dismantled from the early 1970s one major move was when Nixon simply unilaterally abrogated some of the basic principles the other major financial centers joined in by the 1980s capital controls were mostly gone in the rich countries completely gone the smaller economies held up held on to them South Korea for example which is a significant economy kept them through the 80s it was compelled to drop them in the early 90s that's widely regarded as a major factor in the recent collapse along with radical failures in the private sector throughout East and Southeast Asia the big topic I should say I won't go into it but I ought to say that serious analysts at least to consider the East Asia East and Southeast Asia quite different but the East Asian economic miracle is considered quite real so chief economist of the World Bank Joseph Stiglitz highly regarded economists he's in the after the crisis he's emphasized that the East Asian economic miracle as he calls it was his words and amazing achievement historically without precedent he also points out that it was based on quite significant departures from official doctrines and that it ought to be sustainable unless it's destroyed by financial markets he only quote him he points out that in the East Asian countries South Korea and Taiwan government as in Japan a government took major responsibility for promotion of economic growth abandoning what he calls the religion that markets know best in intervening to enhance technology transfer relative equality education health along he doesn't say this but along with industrial policy coordination and strict capital controls he also mentions that the rich countries hadn't followed somewhat similar paths as the World Bank has also acknowledged but nowhere near accurately and in fact that's the basis for economic development historically and in every case that we know well what happened after the Bretton Woods system collapsed in early 70s essentially the Golden Age ended since then it's been a period of much poor economic performance again you can argue about causal effects but the facts are not controversial there's been a slowdown specially in the industrial world I mean let's keep to the industrial world the Western industrial world at you know a little variation from place to place but essentially there's been a slowdown of growth both of the economy and the productivity that's noticeable also trade if you look more closely it's a lot of claims about an explosion of trade and there's a few instances where it's correct but overall it's not trade seems to be going up relative to the general economy but that's because the economy has been going down faster than the rate of birth of trade has been going down so the ratios higher the it's one major effect for economic performance secondly particularly in the United States and England but to some extent in the general industrial world incomes have stagnated or declined for the great majority of population in the United States working conditions have gotten a lot worse Social Services as you know have deteriorated infrastructures collapsed there's huge debt the welfare state is kind of in tatters sort of what would be expected from the decisions of the virtual Senate in the United States and in England inequality has which was declining from during the Golden Age it's rapidly increased it's known back to roughly what it was in the 1920s that all of these effects leave a kind of superfluous population very you know don't contribute much to profit formation in third world dependencies you carry out things like what's called social cleansing in Colombia like you kill them or something like that but this is a civilized societies that we treat them differently we throw them in jail and the rate of incarceration has been going up very rapidly right along with these policies it's sort of made easier by race class correlations and so on but the basic phenomenon is not much to do with them so throw them in jail around 1989 - with crime rates incidental a u.s. crime rates are sort of toward the high end of the rich countries but not off the spectrum there was one exception namely killing with guns but that has to do with a gun culture and the gun was not crime rates the and as you'd expect in around 1980 the United States was within the spectrum sort of toward the high end in incarceration of the population that tripled during the 1980s it's still going up very fast it's now five to ten times as high as any other industrial society and it's long been a world record among any societies that have meaningful statistics the and it's not insubstantial so for example the numbers in prison numbers of working-age people in prison would if he counted them that would add about two percent to the unemployment rate which is no small amount there's also a big prison industry developing and you know it's becoming a major private boondoggle even for big military industry and so on a lot of money involved well that's these are other changes another change is that particularly in the 1990s profits went through the roof the business press has been just ecstatic through the 90s actually this is up until the middle of this year things changed around August but up until then the business press was absolutely ecstatic you know stupendous dazzlingly couldn't find words for it a major change around 1970 early 70s was an astronomical increase in capital flows that came from the deregulation and mostly short-term very short-term like around 80 percent of it is a week or less you know I mean it comes back to where it started within a week often days or hours the amounts are now huge nobody really knows but it's estimated about a trillion and a half dollars a day or something of that sort it's virtually unrelated to the real economy probably harmful to it back in 1970 when the total was far smaller about 90% of foreign exchanges were estimated to be concerned with the real economy meaning like investment and trade 10% speculative by now general guesses are around maybe 5% related to the real economy the rest speculative and very short-term with the effects you'd expect if there's well not those of you that's well-known in the economics literature that there's basically no theory for financial markets there govern standard terminology is by panics manias and crashes there's a lot of irrational herd behavior as what's called technical trading or noise trading you know not related to economic fundamentals but just like you know guesses as to how to make money in three seconds and so on it leads them there has been much more volatility of markets since the early 1970s a lot of panics manias and crashes unpredictable and never predicted and bigger and bigger every time they come around nobody knows what's going on and they the honest people admit it recently the the Bank for International Settlements which is I guess ranks as the most conservative institution around it's the central bank of central bankers they recently came out with their latest report in which they said look we don't know what's going on and they urged humility in the face of the turmoil in the world as I said it's now becoming a crisis because rich people are getting worried instead of the usual victims the IMF did a study of banking crises from 1980 to 1995 at 15 year period and they found that about a fifth of the country that's almost every country in the world around 180 countries 1/5 of them had serious banking crises and another and another 60% had significant problems often recurrent problems a lot of them bailouts and you know again very volatile and irrational markets and rapid fluttering fluctuations of exchange rates and response to the speculative flows all of that means everything's out of hand and now as I say it's worrying rich people the another feature of this period since around the 1970 has been an attack on free markets that's not what you read but that's what's been happening the words of me just the head of economic current had a head of economic research of the World Trade Organization did a technical monograph on this a couple years ago he described this period as one of what he called sustained assault on free markets led by the Reagan administration he estimated the Reaganite protectionist measures which were extreme at about three times those of other industrial countries in their effects these are often not tariffs they're what are called non-tariff barriers just various other devices which essentially block trade and are intended to do that during the Reagan years which was accepted the Reagan period is called conservative but what that's supposed to mean it was an extreme radical statist administration the ratio of state expenditures to gross national products shot up the debt shot up and protectionism also increased it approximately doubled during the Reagan years broke post-war records public subsidies increasing enormous Lee they were bailouts transfer transfers to the public sector in effect it was there was reasons for it the reason was go back to around 1980 you'll notice there was a lot of concern about the industrial decline about the decline of the American economy and there were calls for what was called reindustrialization of America and in order to carry out the reindustrialization of America the Reagan administration turned to the classic device government spending in particular Pentagon spending which since the Second World War has been the absolute foundation of the economy every dynamic sector of the economy sort of virtually everyone flows off it some extreme examples like a current example is the Internet but computers electronics you pick it that largely initiated and subsidized through by the public then handed over to private capital and the Pentagon has been a favorite device for doing this one reason why the Pentagon budget stays high independently of any conflict and why it's strongly supported in fact increased by people like Gingrich and lot and others parade as conservatives can in other words all this market discipline is fine for poor people but not for rich folk they have to keep the cycle of dependency going well in 1980 it was a big problem and they had to reindustrialize America they turned to the Pentagon as and there was a huge increase in the Pentagon budget it was pretty explicit what it was about and so for example the Pentagon picked up developed a program manufacturing technology program manTech it was called which was going to overcome the failures of American management American management had failed to keep up with modern management techniques that had been pioneered largely by the Japanese leaning production and all this kind of stuff so they had to get be given a shot in the arm the Pentagon devised this program to design what they called the factory of the future with automation and flexible production lean production and all this kind of stuff and that purpose was straightforward it was in their words to boost the market share an industrial leadership of American industry which had fallen way behind because of management incompetence the same is true of the National Laboratories so the do-e labs the Department of Energy labs their explicit goal is to their words the move federally developed technologies into private industry and academia academia is just one of the funnels by which public funds go into private pockets my job to it I shouldn't complain too much mit is a large part of this but that's the purpose of the end of the government labs and the reindustrialization worked the its the idea was to overcome management failures to save central components of the economy the whole industrial system from mainly Japanese competition and also to put them in a position to dominate the emerging technologies and markets of the future again as I say the internet is and information technology generally are good examples the internet for example was designed for about 30 years mostly in the public sector first by the Pentagon and the National Science Foundation was finally commercialized over the opposition of about two-thirds of the population all right but that was just a few years ago in 1995 in fact to the extent that there had been some private involvement but if you check it back it's usually federally funded initiative came out of the information processing technology office of the Pentagon for the most part the since the sixties but that's only one example well all that's continuing under Clinton including radical interference with free trade when it's convenient and that runs across the spectrum of choices so the Clinton administration has in one way or another barred everything from you know things ranging from Mexican tomatoes openly because US consumers preferred them to Florida grown ones they said so that's at one end the other end Japanese super computers which were blocked by prohibitive tariffs pretty recently for the open purpose of protecting US manufacturers like Cray enterprise which is main had been the main US manufacturer of supercomputers called private enterprise but only because the profits are private the markets are government under buy America programs and things like that much of the technology and the funding has been public but the privates are in the profits are indeed in private and when they couldn't manage just slammed high tariffs on so that goes on and that's an old story that's the history good part of the history of industrial development from 94 Britain as well before us I go to the United States goes back to the early 1820s well in the recent years mid-90s there's been a lot of euphoria in the United States again up till about August of this year it's a switch point but up till then there's been a great deal of euphoria about you know what's called a fairytale economy so you could read in front-page headlines in the New York Times about saying that Americans were smug and prosperous and the happy glow of the American boom and fat and happy America is enjoying one of the greatest booms in American history and on and on if you read through these euphoric accounts they always give one example that's the stock market and it's true the stock market has been an absolute fairy tale especially for the top 1% of American households who won't close to half the stock and other assets and top 10% who own most of the rest what happens when you go down to the next 10% you know the next decile from 80 to 90 percent of income well it turns out that their net worth has declined in the 1990s meaning their debts increased faster than their assets and as you go down below the next 10% down to the bottom and the story just gets worse and worse 80% approximately if families are working a lot more hours on the worst conditions just to keep from losing more ground the they haven't yet recovered the level of the of 1989 according to the latest statistics little on early 1970s when the great economic boom began to take off all of this is without precedent in American history this is a recovery from recession and it's the first recovery in which most of the population was basically left out trying to get back to where they were before the boom as for growth no economic growth and so on this greatest boom in American history is in fact one of the worst the worst in the post-war period it's the slowest it's below economic growth is below even the quite anemic 70s in the 80s way below the 50s in the 60s it's it's great it's a fairy tale for some people undoubtedly and those happen to be the ones who are writing the articles about it and the ones they meet and elegant restaurants and right parties and so on and so forth so yeah for them it's a fairy tale economy you do get fake there's studies of consumer you know of consumer optimism that sort of thing they've been running pretty high but you look a little more closely and you'll discover that the main reason is that people as the researchers point out have lowered their expectations so now if you can get by that's enough you know then you're happy you don't expect your children to do much better maybe worse that's a change it's a new change in American history well that's the fairy tale economy and the reasons for the fairy tale are also pre frankly explained and we should listen to the explanations so maybe the most powerful and most respected person in the United States is the Fed chair Alan Greenspan and he's explained he's very proud of the economy that he presided over and he explained how it works to Congress and his congressional testimony he attributed the fairy tale to what he called greater worker insecurity meaning workers are intimidated you know they're afraid to ask for wage for raises and wages because they can just be fired or their jobs can be transferred to Mexico or something like that the Clinton administration agreed economic report of the president attributed the economy with fairy tale economy again they're very proud of it to what they called significant wage restraint yeah that's the same thing a greater worker insecurity workers are too in to ask for a share in the good times the it's reported in the business press Businessweek had a study a couple months ago showing that about 90% of working people are insecure and that's good for the health of the economy any of you who study economics know that there's a phenomenon called health of the economy which has actually nothing to do with health of the population I mean even in the technical sense and the health of the economy is improved if people are scared and wages are down and you don't have to waste money on irrational things like what's good for the general population keeps inflation low enough to please financial institutions and concentrates wealth where it ought to be top a few percent well there are a lot of reasons for that threat of job transfers is one that's one of the main purposes of the so-called trade agreements and there's many others I will skip further discussion about this because I'm going on too long for a while it looked as if this whole story was gonna work there were it looked as if this fairy tale for the top few would work out and that it would be possible to maintain the fraud about the markets knowing best and so on and so forth while calling on plenty of massive state intervention to ensure that the rich don't have to face market discipline where that was all moving along rather nicely until about last summer when again the threat started to reach the people who matter since then it's been there's been a remarkable change in economic orthodoxy it does change very quickly very fast if you look over the years sois flipping up and back it's a very flexible science it turns out now the orthodoxy has changed there are calls for capital controls from pretty surprising places like the Bank for International Settlements business press World Bank in one former and others debates about it even inside the IMF the last bastion there's concern about it now and also some of the most passionate academic advocates of free trade one of them well-known Columbia University professor Jagdish Bhagwati has been writing angry articles all over the place is one of the most prominent free trade advocates in the profession enough in foreign affairs and so on condemning what he calls the wall street treasury complex which is destroying the International economy by imposing policies that free financial markets I'm quoting him through the IMF and so on that's that's change and I think the change can be dated at least and may be attributed least plausibly attributed to the change and the victims up until now it's been mostly poor people the majority of the population in countries like the United States the third world has been completely devastated by this but sectors have been left out the people who count and now they're worried they're worried that the whole system will lead to a kind of global meltdown well how to there's a reason why they're calling for humility they don't know how to tame the destructive forces would have been unleashed there have been some proposals they look reasonable they've been advanced by leading economists for 20 years or so they're now sort of coming out of it you know they're now sort of moving into the public discussion they might work they might not they've been kept off the agenda of the powerful because they liked the way things were going they liked those outcomes no maybe not well is this so-called globalized economy really out of control that's the call for humility is a good idea but still given what we know it's pretty hard to believe as I mentioned in gross terms it's not all that new and there are novelties but by gross measures it's kind of like pre-world War one and most of the interactions most of the interchanges are within the major industrial societies with sometimes called the Triad you know Europe your European Union you know North America and Japan well those are all countries where you can Institute with the public in fact could act to institute economic policy changes these are countries where you can have public policy decisions there aren't going to be any military coos for example it's not like a third world country it's that means and even within the framework of existing institutions there are plenty of things you can think of that could well be enacted to restore sort of you know what's called golden age type structures and there's no reason to stop there I mean the institutions are not self legitimizing and never have been in history there's still not I left didn't they have to be challenged justified if they can't be justified which I think they can they can be changed that's all subject to popular will with very few constraints in the rich industrial countries of course it's completely natural for all the doctrinal institutions to try to make you feel hopeless to you know the divert public attention away from the crucial issues and try to bring about a mood of sort of hopelessness and despair and you know turn people individual survival strategies and so on and if you were working for a PR agency nobody would have to tell you that that's what you have to do is obvious that that's what you have to do it's been going on for centuries it's understandable and as always understanding can liberate people it can liberate them to design and follow a very different paths and these could go quite far they could go to the dismantling of oppressive legitimate institution new democratic more democratic institutional arrangements you can right through the economy sort of obvious where to look there are plenty of others and in fact it may we ought to be thinking about somehow trying to make it possible should be within our reach to address in some serious way the needless suffering and injustice that are that really define contemporary society and to demonstrate that the human species is not some kind of lethal mutation which is destined to destroy itself and good deal more in what amounts to the flick of an eye from an evolutionary point of view that's actually not an unlikely prospect if things continue on the in the present the prevailing conditions of social life okay I'll stop there [Applause] okay could we have some lights and we all have not that light I'm gonna have two mics down the front sir okay very good so come down and put your questions keep keep your questions short and bear in mind please that your questions and comments bear in mind that we have interpreters here so keep them clear and just about see the mics somebody over there yeah go ahead yeah working no okay in your opinion what is the year 2000 computer crisis and what effect will this have on the world order as you've described it I'm the big specialist on this and you know I'm sure there are people here who can give them more competent answers than I can but there's no doubt that it's pretty serious so for example the u.s. security officials are very concerned about it for one reason because they're afraid that the air defense systems will collapse and the Soviet Union and China where they haven't even started to address these questions yet and the way what are called air defense systems work they can shoot off missiles you know with very little you know kind of a hair-trigger in fact the US has actually offered China and Russia new air defense systems to try to make sure that they don't you know by accident happen to destroy the world all right that's one problem but there are plenty of others I mean the I mean I imagine that the you know the big banks and so on of probably they made sure their interests are cared for but a lot of other problems around that nobody really knows as far as I can tell nobody basically knows it could be the main advice people are getting is stay in your homes for the first week or two of the year 2000 don't take any trips you know store up on food beforehand and see how things kind of even out I don't know I mean and I've never haven't read anything that seems to know is that one working I don't think he'll oh yeah yeah I wanted you to comment briefly on the you talked a lot about the institutional economic order and I was interested in your feelings on the currently ongoing high level discussions on the multilateral agreement on investment in the obvious lack of public discourse mm-hmm okay I've written a lot about that if you're interested so it's in print I actually did a review that the multilateral agreement on investments which you get which is always for the moment did the it was this is a well sort of the nature of it was captured rather nicely in a Businessweek headline last February called it the the explosive trade deal you've never heard of both parts of which were true it's an explosive deal not really a trade deal it's an explosive investor rights agreement which gives investors extraordinary rights like nothing you know the most extreme that have ever been imagined with no obligations I mean all the huge treaty 150 pages all the obligations are on what they call States which means people you know the state is is sometimes the state's dictatorship sometimes marginally you're more or less democratic but the obligations are all on people and they're in public institutions and the rights are all for private power unaccountable private power and the rights are pretty extraordinary I mean corporations had been given the rights of persons which is outlandish early in this century something would scandalize classical liberals they should say but that has already happened although it could be and I think should be rescinded because it's outlandish but this treaty like parts of NAFTA actually gives them the rights of states which is something novel and you know time to go into it anyhow it's been going on it was initially originally they tried to they thought they'd put it through the World Trade Organization but that didn't work because there was a lot of objection from third world countries India and Malaysia so it shifted over to the OECD the rich countries you know twenty nine richest countries that's more controlled and it went on for about three years and negotiations with virtually no public comment I did a almost complete review in the United States and England and Australia and until the one act until early this year that's after close to three years there was a like statistical error you know occasional or mention here and there it's not that it was unknown it was perfectly well known so the business press the business world knew all about it their lobbying groups were involved in it from the beginning the you know it must have known but it was kept it's one of those inconvenient facts that was kept dark to borrow war wealth phrase the one partial exception was Canada in Canada in early 1997 it sort of broke through because of popular activism right and that led to a lot of pressure and a lot of publicity you know Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and so on in the rest of the industrial world it's sort of an to break through mostly from public activism early this year and the the signing date was supposed to be last April but they backed off in near panic the OECD there were some quite comical articles about it the London Financial Times which is you know the premier business daily in the world had an article called hordes of vigilantes and it was about the hordes of vigilantes who the OECD and the corporations and the you know the rich countries and the transnational and the international financial institutions this gorgeou vigilantes which a lot of activists just overwhelmed them and frightened them and they had to back off from trying to do it and they quoted people who warned that it may not be as easy as it has been in the past to arrange international agreement in secret and then have them rubber stamped by Parliament's that's the way it's been working until now but now we may be in trouble because all those vigilantes are around the trade unionists environmentalists you know grassroots activists and so on it's other crisis of democracy and in fact a pretty stunning victory for the vigilantes if you look at the forces that were arrayed against each other well they tried to put it off until October and last October but it collapsed I mean by that time a couple of major countries it pulled out France pulled out Australia pulled out the United States kind of mixed and for the moment at least it's on the Shelf which means they're gonna sneak it in some other way the major effort of the United States has been to try to push it through the IMF rules by revising the IMF articles to include conditionalities that include a lot of the multilateral agreement the my m-f is properly secret you know so it never gets reported and in fact operates in secret so that's a better forum but people are interested or to keep their eyes on do you think the recent failure in Paris could be at all attributed to look to the what you talked about going on in the stock market in August yeah partly I mean partly just the power centers are scared but partly and I think we shouldn't under look underestimate this this horde of vigilantes really made a difference the same happened last fall with a year ago that is with fast track up until as the Clinton administration argued correctly fast track had been standard legislation instantly this fast-track issue doesn't really have anything to do with free trade I mean even if you put aside the fact that the so-called trade agreements aren't free trade by any in any meaningful sense the fast-track issue has to do with democracy so even most passionate advocate of free trade would be in favor of would be against fast-tracked if they also believed in democracy I mean fast track is just an arrangement which allows exactly what I quoted it allows deals to be made behind closed doors and rubber-stamp by Parliament's that's fast-track this has got nothing to do with free trade but in fact it had always been accepted I think for about twenty years a brief gap but last fall when the Clinton administration tried to push it through with like a hundred percent media support as far as I know enormous corporate backing they had to back off mainly by constituent pressure so you know people were banging on the doors of their congressional representatives and they backed off even if they were in favor of it never came up well those are all indications of how much can be done even by extremely disorganized groups with no unity and you know very little interaction and you know scattered all over the place just imagine what could be done by really organized popular movements that's one of the reasons why the end of the doctrinal system has to you know the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young the trilateral commission they got to work overtime to do their job make sure that people don't have these bad thoughts and worry about inconvenient facts but these are victories that should be recognized I mean they're kind of defensive victories they didn't you know they prevented something but they're a signal that you can go on to more substantial ones what do you think of direct democracy well it depends what you mean by it well I mean if you mean by it for example that say as contrasted with representative democracy that depends I mean any complicated society is gonna have to have some kind of representation I think think that's undoubted the question is how it works I you you you were my rock syndicated you're dissatisfied with the way power is acquired and wielded in this country they may not as mine do with thee you ended by suggesting that perhaps it's time for some new ideas but that doesn't mean do it I mean none of them one of them is that everybody votes more or less more less irrelevant and it's irrelevant because that's one of the ways in which the doctrinal system diverts your attention from what really matters what really matters is the fact that the major institutions in the society are under totalitarian control after all what's a corporation you know a corporation is just a tyrannical system one of the most tyrannical systems that humans have ever devised they've been given extraordinary rights by the courts not by legislation early in this century they're like the multilateral agreement would give them actually the rights of states they're basically unaccountable to the public when they've been given the rights of persons that means for example they have the right to propagandize so like they've been given the rights of free speech which is insane you know these are collectivist institutions they've been given the right to advertise in fact that your expense so you get the tax free so you get you pay for the privilege of having your minds destroyed and they're they you know they own the information system and they control the information system that what are the media you know huge corporations parts of bigger corporations that sets the framework of discussion discussion it the major decisions that affect what happens in the economy and social life are made behind closed doors very little public accountability they have the right freedom from search and seizure you know Fourth Amendment rights means you can't know anything about what they're doing you know all right and and they have enormous power furthermore you know I mean let's describe this free trade it's ridiculous I mean these about maybe nobody these are secret institutions so all figures have to be taken with a big grain of salt because nobody really knows but the guesses are that by international economists that maybe 40 percent or so of US trade is actually internal to corporations meaning it's not trade at all you know it's just moving something across a border it's no more trade than moving from Indiana to Illinois or something like that happens across a border you know to get cheaper labor to avoid environmental restrictions and so on well you know 40% is not a small number and that's a vast underestimate because there are also complicated strategic alliances among alleged competitors so IBM and Toshiba and Siemens and so on are working together you know they're working together on design on marketing and so on and in fact in fact it's gotten to the point where some international economists call it a new system what they call alliance capitalism you know big networks of tyrannical institutions basically running the world I mean in comparison with this the difference between you know everybody voting and everybody not voting is pretty trivial these are the major questions so you think the public opinion polls are a sham no they're not at all sham in fact they're extremely interesting and you should pay attention to them the the United States is very public of painful czar different from votes incidentally totally different in fact public opinions and the results of votes often turn out to be radically different and some of the reasons are given by the fate of referendum so for example take where I live Massachusetts for years you know every year there was a referendum on the progressive income tax for the state now that would benefit you know overwhelming benefit for the general population you take a look at the public opinion polls at the beginning very strong support for it and then it slowly declines by Election Day it's a minority why did decline well huge propaganda campaign warning people that if you do this all the business is going to flee out of Massachusetts you won't have a job your children will starve and so on yeah that's just what the guys are willing the information system want you to believe so public a pin you should look at public opinion polls for the same reason that they are taken well why do we have so many public opinion polls in the United States and they're mostly business or initiated the propaganda institutions like the PR industry they want to keep their finger on the public pulse they've got to know how to design the propaganda so they want to know what people are thinking so in fact if you want to find out you can find out too and you can find out how these opinions are changed sometimes sometimes they're very resilient strikingly resilient so say take the Vietnam War there was huge propaganda justifying the war I mean among articulate people there was virtually no opposition to it contrary to what you're told there was pragmatic opposition you know it's not working or something like that but you know there's that kind of opposition and Hitler's General Staff after Stalingrad the principled opposition was almost non-existent this has been studied incidentally literally almost non-existent on the other hand if you look at public opinion polls they're quite different so public opinion studies were taken regularly by the Gallup poll is one of the questions every you know regular questions and the Gallup polls from around 1970 to the early 90s last one I saw was what do you think of the war in Vietnam given an open set of choices you know like 10 options where you usually get low numbers but it was a steady 70 percent roughly you know plus or minus a little that chose fundamentally wrong and immoral not a mistake there's nobody in educated opinion articulate opinion whoever said that I mean everybody who answered the question that way was making it up for themselves well you know that's it's striking indication of the divergence between public opinion and policy actually another one is the multilateral agreement on investments which is just mentioned as soon as it became public you know the whole thing collapsed because for exactly the reason that the negotiator said looks like an end to an we can make deals behind closed doors and have them rubber stamped by Parliament there's Ravel getting involved in things those are some of the major reasons for for the kind of thing that Orwell was talking about it for you know what controlled and free societies in fact the more you you know the less force as people win more freedom as we people have you know meaning that the power to coerce by violence has declined the importance of propaganda has increased and that's well understood I mean you can you know you read it in manuals of the public relations industry and the productions of academic intellectuals you know the founders of modern political science public intellectuals and so on you have to control the public mind because we can't control people in any other way well under those conditions public opinion polls are important and interesting public intellectuals and so on you have to control the public mind because we can't control people in any other way well under those conditions public opinion polls are important and interesting but voting is something different because people are giving highly structured choices structured by an information system which is dedicated to maintaining the power of those who owned and run it and that power is enormous I'm in the corporate control of the media's like a small part of it corporate control of the economy and social life is a far stronger part the virtual Senate that I mentioned is another part I mean unless we think about those institutions worrying I mean you know concern about things like proportional representation or you know voting by computer and so on may be of some interest but it's like 10:30 effect Noam you mentioned how geologists have their findings are having an impact on the long term geo strategic impact or interests in the Middle East I was wondering if you could comment on on a different type of scientists in act on the same resource in particular that of climate scientists who are now estimating that over the next hundred years we can safely use maybe 40 years of current usage of fossil fuels without having some serious impacts both on on the ecology but also on a number of human social structures and what that will what potential that has for altering the geostrategic balance and also for being an issue around which people can confront these sources of power that you talk about you and so just to be clear I'm not suggesting that policymakers or advisors are paying much attention to any of this the reason is that they think an extremely short term in a short term framework and furthermore a lot of them are account professional economists so if you look at the OECD you know the rich countries they don't apparently don't even have a major study group on this I and the ones that they have are mostly staffed by professional economists who just like the head of the World Bank said they have a religion and the religion says it can't happen no it can't happen because markets are perfect you know so as soon as the price starts to go up some miracle will happen and people will find an alternative fuel well maybe you know maybe maybe not nobody knows but if you believe in the religion you know have to worry about it like most religions there's an answer you know you got it in graduate school but as far as I know there is no serious planning going on about this and the professional articles about it say they can't discover anything serious planning it should be a serious issue and what u.s. planners are surely concerned about are the visible steps towards realignments in the Middle East region that they're concerned about and they certainly are concerned about controlling it and they are concerned about China in the United States about trying to there's a conflict between the United States and Europe over Iran right now I mean the Europeans mostly want to reintegrated into the world system the United States for its own reasons wants to keep it out and punished all right and that's apparently a good bit of the background for all this talk about where the pipeline ought to go and you know how much oil there is around the Caspian Sea and so on so that kind of short-term stuff yeah people are thinking about but not there's no reason to believe that they're thinking about the long term questions I think we ought to be thinking about them but doesn't mean planners or on the climatologist yeah you're right I mean there's just a overwhelming consensus that there are big problems coming nobody knows what they are you know like one of the consequences the critics there's like about six scientists in the world or something who are pick up about half the newsprint who are regularly trotted out to say which is true that the models aren't very good and there are a lot of things you don't understand and so on so there's a lot of uncertainties but of course a point about uncertainty is that you know the guesses could be off in either direction that's one of the elementary properties of uncertainty so the predictions could be overstating which is the only thing you ever hear or they could be understating which you don't hear you know and again for reasons of short-term gain and profit in fact until the ozone layer started breaking up in the North you didn't hear anything about that either you know as long as it was just people down down there yeah and then they had they had alternatives but it's really hit the Wall Street Journal and so on when people who count we're starting to get affected and right now people who count or not are doing pretty well with oil stocks the big mergers that are coming along like Exxon and Mobil those guys are probably thinking about it you know but that doesn't but that doesn't mean that planners are on the climate issues the ecological issues are there that's sort of what I had in mind in my last statement it could well turn out that humans will simply quickly be any a lethal mutation that could happen and in fact as to the consequences of global warning you can find predictions all over the place I mean some of them are that you know the level rise meters and meters which may happen but another fairly widely held view is that the Europe will move into an ice age because the Gulf Stream will be redirected farther south which would make Europe something like you know ain't Greenland or something like that and the effects of that on the global global society are you know just incalculable another prediction is reasonably widely held is that the Midwest US will become a dust bowl which would have a terrific effect on global food supplies for bad reasons because so much of it has been concentrated there so you know there are all kinds of serious dangers people ought to be worrying about these things I wanted to ask you about the possibility of a solution that as you mentioned in Latin America the basic other force was the masses and that's also true about the whole world considering that now what the situation is that basically the workers union in their United States have been demolished for all practical purposes and that's kind of happening in Europe to them today and what's happening in the third world there is no OPEC anymore and there are low nations don't exist basically most of the progressive forces have been attacked and we can how do you see that because from where you are I'm sure you have a better idea that now I have at least now we're all guessing but my guesses are a little different that do you see that the movements the little movements here and there somehow will come together and create a mass movement that can connect internationally because that's basically what we need and being a left person and some of the left ways of doing things have been discredited by still I'm discredited by who by their powers to get my parents did they ever create no no they tell you they're discredited but that's because they want you to feel help okay first just to back up a little I mean I think you ought to be cautious about describing an OPEC as a progressive force it wasn't even independent yeah but you know just take a look at US and Britain and their reaction to the rising oil price they didn't mind in fact the US and Britain kind of suppressed I mean Britain that's kind of like the little puppy dog they do what they're told but the United States in fact you know you can read professional literature which says refer to the US Treasury and then has a footnote saying that's shorthand for the US UK Treasury but they they were not so much opposed to the oil price rise and the reason is they sort of benefited from it these are the their main competitors the other industrial countries Minh in fact you know the US was actually running a positive trade balance with Saudi Arabia after the price went up because they figured out ways of getting the Arab facade to recycle the profits that's why there was such a huge armaments floated to the oil-producing countries mostly comes back here and also don't forget that the end construction projects and all sorts of things that's where Bechtel got you know rich from from and don't forget that when the oil price goes up at the pump the profits go up too and the profits are mostly us British companies so they're perfectly happy to have the price go up another effect of the early seventies price rise was that it enabled the oil majors to bring online production fields they knew about but we're not using because they weren't profitable enough when the price went up high enough you could start using North Sea oil which is what saved the Thatcher government from totally destroying England and you could bring along Alaska oil which are you know wasting resources they're not big but they're around for 20 years or so and that was there because of the price rise so the oil companies were not unhappy about it and in fact it was a meeting and I think around February 1974 so were Kissinger and you know the White House called in rich countries other and kind of told them you know laid down the line on this not to make a fuss about the oil price rise and if in fact the US and Britain led the way out of the you know short term global recession then because they weren't being harmed by it and if they had been harmed that our Arab facade would not have stayed in business very long you can be sure that they would have you know they did their job or else they're out the so I I mean you know there are big problems with energy but not that I don't I wouldn't quite say that the American unions have been destroyed they certainly have been damaged they were damaged seriously by the trade agreements they were damaged even more by just criminal acts authorized by the government so the Reagan administration effectively told corporations that they were not going to that they were not going to enforce the laws against illegal firing of union organizers and so on this is pretty open actually it was reviewed in the business press brief frankly they simply said and the Clinton administration is continuing with that so the number of firing firings of workers for attempting to organize started shooting way up it's all it legal but doesn't matter if nobody's enforcing the law if you have a criminal state you know crime pays you know very well and one of the effects of that and threat to transfer and so on that's certainly weakened the labor movement along with other you know bigger developments but it's leveled off and there's a recovery and it's it's not a big change in terms of numbers but it's quite a change in terms of consciousness so you know talks like say this you can give to labor audiences years ago you can now easily you know and in fact they're not militant enough these stalks because they want to see more you know there's these things oscillate in fact for the first time I mean the International you're right about stressing the importance of international solidarity that's very important and there's not much of it but just take a look at American labor you know up until quite recently US labor internationally it was like an adjunct to the CIA you know they were working hard to undermine unions and undermine democratic regimes and so on that's no big secret that's changed the people in the international office now are people who are very much attuned to problem say of Latin American labor and in fact there are some beginnings you know they're not huge but there's some beginnings of cross-border solidarity and anti-sweatshop agitation you know pushing you know this very limited wording and NAFTA which was put into silence public opinion about labor rights but that's being pushed sometimes constructively by American unions sometimes by Mexican workers and things and those are good signs a Europe is a big problem in Europe interaction among the labor unions is apparently I don't know a lot about this but from what I understand is very slight you know different languages and so on and so forth and that's got to become a more significant factor especially with the European Union but that doesn't seem to be in any ways a lost cause and all the talk you read about discrediting the Left that's ridiculous I mean these these views that they say are discredited or ones they've been screaming and denouncing for all their lives you know all through history nothing discredited about them like mild social democratic policies that work quite well you know within limits because they leave private power essentially unassailed but it's the collapse of these policies that's been devastating policies weren't dis great the and they're by no means the limit they're the beginning I think there's and things like what we're talking about before says a popular really quite spontaneous popular reaction to things like the MA I that's rather striking that's done with no organization and by now you know their structures forming they can interact and they can grow so it doesn't seem to me a terribly depressing prospect you can worry about the pace maybe it's not adequate probably isn't but you know the right kinds of things are happening yeah well you know there are things you can be amiss you know I mean optimism and pessimism are kind of like personal you know that belongs to that's what you worried when you're sitting alone somewhere that's what you think about otherwise you just stay optimistic that's the only way anything will ever happen dr. Tomsky just to let you know ahead of time this is a critical comment it sounds as if your work draws a lot on CWM ales marks and Emanuel Wallace teens thinking and I'm wondering what's new and exciting about Chomsky in theory so for us students are the social sciences in the room what can we take away from this lecture yeah well certainly not I mean especially first well there's no theory in fact I don't know of any theories in the social sciences I mean I don't think the term theory should be applied to fields as intellectually thin as the social sciences so there's no theory oh there's just some common sense observations I started off with you remember by saying that views of this kind are commonly described as Marxist which is kind of ironic because the clearest articulation is people like Adam Smith and Winston Churchill and so on which is true the and I think that most of this is kind of common sense so there's no theory what's the oh the theory is very different from understanding most of our lives we live our lives often pretty successfully without any theories about other people and we don't have any theories about other people but you know we get along and manage our interactions and so on there's very few areas of human life where there's anything you might call a theory so some areas like even in biology you know it would be but when you get very far beyond big molecules I mean starts to become pretty descriptive sure right there there's an in this in the world of human affairs I don't think there's much in the way of theory I think the message you go to take is use your use your sense look at history you know think of obvious things you know break through the propaganda images remember that the institutions are trying to indoctrinate you keep that in mind compensate for it and if you do these things I think you can get as good a sense of the world as anybody has thank you you mentioned the ongoing artificial threat of Cuba to the United States and I wonder if you could address radio program called Marty that we beam as a propaganda and maybe on a larger level the whole apparatus of the International propaganda broadcasting in the US mm-hmm well the u.s. like other countries has a state propaganda system US Information Agency and others and it's not particularly huge I mean this is you know by comparative standards I don't think it's considering the size and scale of the United States it's not relatively a huge program I mean I don't think states ought to have the right to carry out propaganda but even more important I don't think private entities or to have the right to carry out propaganda I mean maybe the individual the individuals in them can but not as entities private entities like the New York Times or or General Electric or Jorge Moscone osa who recently died yes he's a person he should have rights people should have rights I think independent of what their views are but whether organic entities should have rights that's another question as I mentioned when organic entities were given the rights of persons early in this century that scandalized conservatives and what are called classical liberals for perfectly obvious reasons classical liberal doctrine would school conservatism held that rights in here and human beings persons that means people of flesh and blood you know not collectivist entities legal fictions you know there were constituted and created and given the rights of persons by courts I think those are things that we ought to question why should they have the rights to freedom from search and seizure for example so that you don't know what they're doing I mean I think an individual should have it like I don't think that cops should have the right to go into your living room and find out what you're up to but what about a an organic entity should that have those right I mean should Nazi Germany if it have those rights for example their Bolshevik Russia I don't think so so why General Electric I was very disappointed on you expose first part in who's his world power you did the measure you mentioned the cutter but you read you emphasize few seconds ago about history I mentioned you didn't mention at all about Yugoslavia I left Yugoslavia 40 years ago I didn't extend west that time while they're happy Broz Tito you go south with Yalta with the Karen etc I'm Serbian by native cities related States I came in United States in College Park I've won my political freedom in New York but I lost my Jewish wife from New York my personal freedom we have daughter here who got graduated diploma last summer intercultural relations she cannot understand Jewish mother always right or wrong father serbian so we polarized our family of three members into half question my question is if organization of European states 37 countries signed about quarter century ago unknown violation of borders of any states and former secretary Baker said in June I do believe 21st June in Belgrade was not for forty years over there then border of Yugoslavia unviolated yet now my adopted country sided with former colonies country France Great Britain Portugal Spain breaking one country two pieces same people same language two different alphabets what about your victim poor people on third part of expose for economic point of view for second part about your human rights we are always with course with with kangaroo tails them on Saturn my Serbian people there how you can mush you how you can explain but you're there how can I explain well first of all every case has to be explained on its own you're quite right I didn't mention you Slavia but you know i didn't mention a 99% of the world like it for example I didn't mention Southern Africa where at the very same time as all the as the Bosnian war was going on ever even more people being killed in Angola and in fact if you go back to the Reagan years under the rubric of what was called constructive engagement US and British backed South African forces killed maybe a million and a half people and caused say sixty billion dollars of damage I didn't mention that either there was a lot of things I didn't mention you know but Yugoslavia yeah we could look at it and we sort of you know I kind of know what happened the country was first of all was under a dictatorship since the 40s and that dictatorship had many negative aspects like dictatorships do was pretty brutal on the other hand it did dampen lots of internal hostilities kept him down you know the dictatorship collapsed part of the reason why it collapsed in fact was IMF rules so during the 1980s it's not just the IMF I mean during the 1980s he was likely did go through a kind of structural adjustment program which had the usual effects that it's had in the third world one of the effects that it had was kind of breaking apart the social fabric that happened alongside the breakdown of the dictatorship when Slovenia and Croatia pulled out and we don't really know all the details but as far as is known it looks as though there was significant German pressure within the European Union to let him break away and facilitate their break away which led as everyone predicted to conflict between Serbia and Croatia then came you know the Bosnian atrocities and ended up with the u.s. moving in I after most of the dirty work was done an imposing part in effect partition that's you know that's more or less what happened now the struggle was moved on the Kosovo which is a very complicated issue but just to mention one aspect of it when I said or that the Western powers in Western opinion don't even you know give minimal commits have no minimal commitment to the basic principles of international order I mentioned Iraq but I could have just as well mentioned Kosovo NATO which just means the United States has no authority to threaten or use force this is independent of what you think about what's going on there you can think whatever you like but there is no authorization for the threat of use of force by the United States or anyone else there's can the so I mean you're right when you say that the whole international order broke down in Yugoslavia but it did everywhere else to I mean didn't it break down when the United States invaded South Vietnam and then the rest of Indochina and ended up killing four or five main field paradox but unifying 16 different countries dozen different languages in Europe and breaking one small country to pieces you would better get from broken glass you don't drink anymore I'm sorry I don't see what the paradox is this is just one of the innumerable problems of international affairs every one of which has to be looked at on its own although you find many of the same factors behind a lot of two more okay boss there's two more questions one on each side dr. Chomsky my thinking is more from the point of view of India but you can answer in a more general sense I'd like you to comment from the point of view of the so called third world countries in the face of the globalization for example if you take democracy democracy seems to be closely linked with freedom of choice but safe to take a silly example if you take say 20 cities in India and you expose them to a Pepsi or coke for say one month and then take a perfectly democratic referendum you would find that all of them would support I mean that Pepsi should come into India so it seems so vulnerable to the onslaught of the multinational corporations of globalization bro in fact wait a moment when India was pressured an Indian elites agreed remember and nene leakes agreed and with the Western pressure to what's called liberalized I think the first thing that the first sector of Indian the Indian economy that was targeted was advertising so the first thing that happened is big mostly New York public relations firms and London public relations firms went in there and just like you described you know carried out huge pressure to try to modify tastes but that shouldn't really surprise you I mean the West has been subjected to that for hundreds of years it's a I mean that's why we have a huge public relations industry it's an enormous industry which is designed to turn people I mean you know they're not very secret about what they're up to they want to turn everybody into an atomized consumer who recognizes that life is essentially worthless you can't control your productive life you can't control your work life the only thing you can't talk to anybody else because you have to be isolated and atomized and you get your gratification by consuming more commodities that you don't want I mean that's what the television is about that's what radio is about that's what nine-tenths of the newspapers are about and it's been going on quite consciously and you know my Khan for a hundred years okay now it's hitting India you know my concern is what about the solutions the solution is I think to oh that you strike at the heart of private power I mean as long as as private power has this as as long as you have this extraordinary concentration of decision-making power in essentially unaccountable private organic institutions you're gonna have problems just like you have problems if you have a Bolshevik state I mean India is very striking I was there you know before and after and it was pretty striking I mean the last time I was there was first time I was there it was all you know Indian food and the other thing last time I was air was a December in January 1996 I think I was there for about a week traveling around the country getting talks it happened you know it happened to hit a huge snowstorm so I the flight took around 48 hours and I had turned out I had to give the first talk at the Delhi School of Economics right like two hours after I land you know after not having slept for a couple of days so I asked for some food you know something to eat you know what they brought Kentucky Fried Chicken I mean mind-boggling introduction to the new [Laughter] India can defend itself I mean for example the Indian media which are not you know great exemplars of democracy you know they're privately owned rich people and so on but they defended themselves against public takeover I mean Murdoch and others want to take them over and they just resisted India has somewhat resisted the international patent regime it's kind of it that's an interesting story the United States claims to be in favor of free trade but really isn't nobody is nobody powerful is at least except for somebody else but one of if you if you look at the World Trade Organization one of the founding doctrines of it is radically protectionist that's what's called intellectual property rights they extended intellectual property rights like patents for drugs you know to an absolutely unprecedented extent and also extended them from processes to products products were never patented before just processes that's not only an attack on free trade it's also an attack against innovation it means that some smart guy in India can't figure out a smarter way to produce some drug the purpose of this is a major assault on free trade and on innovation and growth in order to ensure the profits of things like merck pharmaceutical well you know india resisted so the way you know a better night so fill me in if I don't have the details right but the India there was so much public opposition that the Indian Parliament couldn't ratify it I think the government went over their heads if I recall correctly and ratified in Islington yeah and by now it's kind of interesting but the pharmaceutical India had very cheap relatively cheap drugs because they had their own pharmaceutical industry I was like as compared with Pakistan which had international companies the Indian prices were much lower and of course the purpose of all of this stuff is to make the prices go up at first the Indian pharmaceutical firms objected but I noticed that now they're not objecting which suggests maybe you know the answer but suggests to me that there probably linking up with the Western pharmaceutical firms so they can just exploit the Indians more efficiently all of them together I guess I mean I don't know that for a fact but yeah these are but the point of all of this is that India can raise is so for example India maintain some kind of capital controls in fact it's kind of striking if you look at Asia there's an Asian crisis but there are few islands which haven't been much affected India's one China's and other Taiwan as another they all have some degree of capital controls and it's been noted in the professional literature so India was able to resist that kind of liberalisation and you know when you talk about India it's kind of misleading because there are sectors in India the wealthy sectors the professionals and so on who like the globalization but look there were sectors in India who loved the Raj you know they enriched themselves they were the counterpart to the Arab facade you know you go to any third world country you want you know the poorest one in central Africa you'll find a sector of very wealthy people very privileged very wealthy people who are kind of linked up mostly with Western power like the people who ran India for the British and the British didn't run it they ran it through an Indian civil service and in fact Indian troops and about 90 percent of the British Army was the Indian troops well you know those guys do fine and they now are in favor of this kind liberalisation the population may suffer but that's a different story thank you I read this interview with you and I think someone I think it was Marty parrots said that you were outside the pail of intellectual responsibility I was wondering what was the context of that and also how do you respond the same way everybody else I mean as he defines intellectual responsibility that's absolutely right for example I don't have a slavish Stalinist like loyalty to his holy state you know okay that puts me out of the pail of responsibility right off okay and then also I met this guy who said that your last name is Tom ski because your dad's felt it with a head is that true that's what the guys at Ellis Island Immigration decided yeah I mean actually as you know and from there Eastern European immigrants they didn't have last names so if my father was say if you like but it was so and so son of so-and-so and somewhere along the line probably at Ellis Island they got this name which my father did pronounce with a foot and in fact I went through early years of schooling that way until I finally realized that you know I'm being put with the h's or the something and so I just changed the pronunciation just for convenience yeah all right thank you yeah

Channel: Manufacturing Intellect

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Length: 121min 39sec (7299 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 03 2017