Noam Chomsky on Trade and NAFTA (1993)

noam chomsky professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this evening in Washington speaking to a group they've asked you to come talk about the implications and consequences of the Clinton administration's foreign policy how's Bill Clinton done first year in foreign policy I think about as expected I actually wrote an article last December about it my view is that he was exactly the way he presented himself candidate of big business new democrat free from the old liberal cliche is about entitlements and rights and so on committed to improving the business climate to engaging the government more in supporting the wealthy the kind of thing he'd done in Arkansas and I think that the both the formulation of the policy which came in late September there was a series of speeches in which the Clinton vision as they were calling it was formulated and then the achievements of the policy which are essentially the November achievements NAFTA the the Asian Pacific Council summit associated domestic programs that reflects his achievement in supporting the concerns and interests of major American corporations it explains why the Wall Street Journal for example is so enthusiastic about him describing him as a continuing with what has been a pattern of Democratic presidents who linked up very closely to interests of big business rather than a small business whereas the Republicans in contrast tend to be the party of the business community generally so somewhat different and I think that's pretty much what we're finding and we will continue to find I think with the health plan and so on on the other hand and other foreign policy issues such as you know I'm say helping restore democracy in Haiti and so on I mean I never expected any possibility that and don't see any if if you mentioned some of those the foreign policy achievements go back and talk a little bit more detail you mentioned NAFTA off to bat now going to that little further about the impact NAFTA is going to have well and after there's a good deal of the issue that was discussed like will there be more jobs or less jobs the nobody has any idea under the economic models that are being used they're so remote from reality that what they say is almost meaningless and that's pointed out a long time ago the Congressional office of Technology Assessment did an analysis of this executive version of NAFTA about a year ago and made that point on others however there are some consequences about which there's pretty general agreement then if you read the text and you see the international forces at work you can understand why it is going to have the effect of deepening the split between the the wealthy and the general population inequality has been growing in the country for about 30 years real wages have been declining growth has been quite slow such wealth has been created is going increasingly through a small sector of the wealthy the country is kind of taking on a sort of a third world look I mean it's not Brazil or Mexico but if you walk through the streets of any major city say Washington or New York or whatever you see what the statistics tell you that there's a large relatively marginalized population developing superfluous for wealth production because increasingly transnational corporations are able to shift production to high repression in low-wage areas elsewhere and wages will go down in fact they're going down internationally because these things all interact so as American we u.s. wages are now the lowest in the industrial world outside of Britain that's a big change over the last ten years in fact a complete reversal and that means that a German factories will invest in Alabama as they're now doing because they get much cheaper and more repressed labor so it brings down German wages the so what is it anticipated from NAFTA I think almost across the board is a lowering of the income of a substantial part of the population probably a majority an increase in wealth for privileged sectors and what that will mean overall in the statistics is not so certain so let me give you one one analysis which is highly regarded and taken actually here in Washington Post is by a UCLA professor of management Edward leemer who's prone asked I believe and he estimated that by the end of the decade if NAFTA goes through in the present form the form that it didn't go through there would be an increase his estimate was of about three thousand dollars a year in income for professionals and ASEC people associated with the higher levels of the business community managerial skilled labor executives and so on about three thousand dollars a year increase in income for them about a seven hundred and fifty dollar a year decline in income for most of the workforce and he figured that would average out to about a two hundred dollar a year decline for the general population and my believe he's Pro NAFTA and most of the economists were prone enough to say something similar so my colleague Paul Krugman of MIT is a international trade specialist who was very Pro NAFTA does agree that for unskilled labor there will be a decline in income unskilled labor happens to be 70 percent of the workforce there was an analysis in New York Times the day after the NAFTA vote they delayed it it's a first analysis of the regional impact of NAFTA predicted regional impact in the New York area and it was exactly the same they said banking corporate law firms pharmaceutical corporations of the publishing industry chemical industry which is highly capital intensive not many workers corporate law firms and they'll all do fine then they said there'll be some losers the losers will be women blacks Hispanics semi skilled labor that's about three-quarters of the workforce and the effect will be to split to increase intensify the move that is very clear to our separating the society into two tiers in the long term it means sort of internationalizing the third world model that's the typical third world country say Mexico you know small sector of very wealthy people usually connected to international investment and finance and transnationals and so on and a very large sector of extremely poor people and that instantly NAFTA is expected to have the same effect in Mexico so the leading Mexican financial journal which is very Pro NAFTA estimated that about 25 percent of Mexican manufacturing industry would be destroyed in the first two years and about fourteen percent of the workforce would be eliminated another effect of NAFTA which everyone expects is that the cheap US agribusiness exports will contribute to the process already going on of driving out large numbers of peasant producers all of this swells the workforce swelling the workforce drives now an income there is no serious opportunity for organizing it's pretty repressive and brutal so that will have the effect of lowering wages there and just this will have the effect of lowering wages here and this if you look at the international system this is a continuing drag you know any country that's providing more where workers have achieved more right say rights to hold job security or pension rights or whatever it's naturally going to be driven down as international capital can seek the point of highest repression and lowest wages so where you move towards an international economy of essentially low growth low wages and very high profits and that's a kind of internationalization of the third world model and this particular version of NAFTA was is very likely to have that consequence no you know it should not be called a free trade agreement because it is not it is a highly protectionist agreement with a complex mixture of liberalisation and protection designed to guarantee investor right investor rights are very delicately protected worker rights community rights and so on undercut in fact one consequence of it is to attack democratic institutions as aims to get it places decision-making power in the hands of unaccountable structures which are transnational if there's a conflict let's say between some local or regional decision on say environmental protection or pesticides or whatever and in a transnational corporation that will ultimately find its way to an adjudication panel which operates in secret which is made up mainly of corporate lawyers and so on and is out of public control all of these systems reduce the role and effectiveness of parliamentary institutions and unions and other popular groups and increase the decision-making power of investors and transnational corporations and big banks and so on and that's what they're intended to do good afternoon and welcome to a special LIVE viewer callin program on this Friday afternoon our guest for about the next 35 minutes now Noam Chomsky professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology we've seen the numbers at the bottom of the screen and we ask if you've called in the past 30 days to await so that others can get in with our calls a little bit more easily first call us from Royal Oak Michigan good afternoon you know you started talking about NAFTA and you got me thinking about my my first objection to it was just the fact that it was like 2,000 pages and you know it's just it's like you don't you don't really understand it and you think they're trying to fool you with something and I was wondering how long did bills used to be like a hundred years ago and do you think that you know it would be possible for them ever to just see all future bills should be less than ten times the length of the US Constitution well you're quite right about the not only the length of this but if you do have a look at it you'll find out it's also unreadable I mean it's it's very hard going and recall that this was it was intended that this would be rammed through in secret if you look at what happened the agreement was signed by the three executives of Canada United States and Mexico in mid-august 1992 I think was August 12th or so in 1992 remember that was right in the middle of a presidential campaign whatever one thinks of attitude towards NAFTA Chavez has a big effect on American life try to look back and find out what anybody said about it nobody was very little discussed in fact probably wouldn't been mentioned at all if Perot hadn't brought it up nobody knew about it nobody knew what was going on according to US trade law there's a 1974 congressional legislation which requires that any trade related instrument any law or whatever involving trade must be submitted to the labor advisory committee group-based and unions as for advice and consultation and analysis that's the one popular input to trade legislation it was not given to them they were in fact informed that their reaction to NAFTA was due on you know I would say September 15th or whatever the date was some date around then and they were actually given the text of this 2,000 page document on readable document 24 hours before the due date that was to ensure that they couldn't even formally convene all of this incidentally was suppressed in the press nobody talked about it the labor advisory committee did write a very detailed and rather interesting analysis and they were very bitter about this and pointed out that even the procedure was a major attack on democracy the intention was that all this would go through Congress was on a fast track they weren't gonna pay any attention to it and nobody would know there was enough popular opposition that developed for all sorts of reasons so that it had to become a public issue but it was not intended to be it was intended to be you can see by just what I described it was intended to be driven home and secret and then just sort of sitting there locking into place particular arrangements and particulars of the powerful and as I mentioned it itself is quite anti-democratic in its essential nature so your reaction to the length of the text and and for the more the complexity the text is quite accurate when we fill out more details we see that that's a large part of it in fact I think it should men eat the major impact of these of these developments including yet may well be to undermine democratic structures and to transfer power to private private power essentially private transnational institutions and recall that a corporation is essentially free from public control and when it becomes transnational even the limited control that comes from national legislation declines you are professor of linguistics what is linguistics and what's the two parts and what's the significance of its study well there's a lot covers a lot of territory but the kind of linguistics that we do is an effort to find out the basic principles of a certain part of human cognitive nature what is it that enables us to to do what you and I are doing what special thing is it about our brains as distinct from other organisms that enables these extremely complex systems of Arctic of the creation and articulation of thought and interaction first of all to develop why do they have the forms they do what are the principles they operate under what aspects of them are universal just rooted in our genes basically which kind of to be most of them and what does this tell us about the nature of the human mind and that's essentially the topic Cherry Hill New Jersey good afternoon gosh I wish would stop dissecting every part of the United States in the world why don't we go to a 25 hour a week work and we could all go out and smell the roses what's so bad about that well actually proposals with that kind were made by not for 25 hours but I think 36 hours or something by the union's years ago and that's a very it's a very interesting question remember the fight for a 40-hour week was a huge battle it took almost well about 70 or 80 years of a very bitter strife and in the night States very violent strife I should say I think about 700 workers were killed by security forces during that period simply to attain the 40-hour week and shortly after that victory was attained that started being lost so the 40-hour week is now a thing of the past the average work week has been increasing through a variety of mechanisms since that victory was won the question of whether there should be a lower workweek is it should be you know it in my opinion at least I mean here our values come in but in my opinion it should be basically a matter of a necrotic decision but of course for it to be a matter of democratic decision that means that corporate power has to be under Democratic control if the decisions are made by private power unaccountable private power they are naturally going to try to drive their workforce down to the lowest possible level and get the maximum out of them and if that comes from having 60 hour weeks they'll drive for that Garden Grove California good afternoon yes I wanted to ask mr. Chomsky if he believes that if there are no changes made and the way we trade and operate internationally whether this wouldn't in the long run reduce the world to global serfdom and then it seems were right back to where communism came in in the first place if people cannot survive they're going to repeal and here we spent 40 or 50 years fighting communism and we seem to be moving in to the direction where we're going to get it back thanks for the call well there's a lot to say about what we call fighting communism for one thing there's no plausible sense of the word in which the Soviet Union was communist or socialist or anything like that it was a totalitarian state which was from its origins radically opposed to any element of the traditional socialist vision but whatever it was this was a big part of the traditional third world which is essentially what Russia and a spirit were with in Europe's third world had been for hundreds of years which went off on a course of independent development which we call communism and they called communism that we don't allow parts of the third world to escape from their service rule it doesn't matter whether they're little ones or big ones and that led to a big conflict they are now back in a third world that's what losing the Cold War means and I don't think it's a I mean the the revolutionary changes that took place in Russia were indeed a reaction to their deeply impoverished third world conditions they had nothing to do with socialism or anything like that but that's what they were you're right our effort to destroy it was not an attempt to to improve economic conditions in fact take a look at the parts of the third world that we do control that takes a Brazil you know huge rich country with enormous resources which we've been had a big strong hand and running since 1945 and take a look at it that's what we've been trying to create in a third world it's a country with a sector and five or ten percent of the population of great wealth the average level of the country is about at the level of Albania or Paraguay then maybe 75 percent of the population lives in utter misery and this is in a country with an enormous advantages no enemies tremendous resources of lotta US aid and in fact US tutelage since 1945 and my suspicion is that's what much of Eastern Europe will come to look like but you're right about the the tendencies that now exist are polar or polarizing tendencies much of the world indeed most of the world is the society is becoming polarized on an international scale with these there's low growth in most places there's increasing wealth but in very small sectors and substantial parts of the population are declining they have to be controlled by force in my opinion it's kind of symbolic that the anti-crime bill passed a couple of days after NAFTA passed I mean after NAFTA it's going to have I think it's fairly clear this polarizing effect meaning more people more social disintegration meaning more crime meaning more force because unless something constructive is done to reconstruct society you just gonna control people by force and will it ultimately lead to rebellion or I think it probably will I mean in South Central Los Angeles is a case I wouldn't call it a rebellion it's a break out of some kind but it's a response to and these are @xa South Central Los Angeles I mean these are regions where there were jobs at one point there was industry when that disappears you get social disintegration which can take all kind of forms I mean abuse and families for example alcoholism random violence I mean take a lot of forms it could possibly take constructive forms and I very much hope it will and those constructive forms all of the efforts to reverse these tendencies which are deeply rooted in the international economy Lagrange Indiana good afternoon yes dr. Chomsky I'm a student at Purdue University and I would just like you to know that you've been an inspiration to me academically my question is how would you like to see President Clinton respond to the growing nuclear threat of North Korea I would like to see serious efforts against proliferation and looking at North Korea alone does not really respond to that issue first of all the question of North Korea and is in a broader context but bear in mind that while Clinton is talking about nuke the threat of nuclear proliferation in North Korea he's also contributing to nuclear proliferation so one of his grand achievements at the asia-pacific summit was to override congressional restrictions on sale of high technology equipment to China now those restrictions were imposed by Congress when Congress was given what they considered conclusive evidence that China was involved in missile proliferation possibly involving North Korea incidentally and possibly also nuclear proliferation and if you look at Clinton's summit decision it was to give them supercomputers which is Pentagon analysts quickly pointed out can be used for missile development and nuclear development and also to allow US exports for nuclear power generation now nuclear power nuclear weapons production are very close and since China has we can believe us intelligent have been engaged in proliferation essentially Nixon was a Clinton was saying that I don't care about proliferation what I care about is profit for US corporations there are other cases too I mean one of the major nuclear powers aside from the really big ones is the State of Israel which is the CIA pointed out decades ago has hundreds of nuclear weapons well you know it's nuclear capacity is as an element in in the world which has a lot of people frightened I don't see any concern about that when you turn to North Korea I think the problem is real and I think it's a problem of how North Korea is to be integrated into a world system in in under conditions in which it is at the moment pretty desperate and pretty unstable and that issue goes beyond nuclear weapons it looks to me as though North Korea is kind of desperately trying to trade some form of potential or maybe actual nuclear weapons development against a form of acceptance into the international system and I think that's the direction that should be pursued the last call was say a student what kind of a teaching load do you still carry regular teaching load at a place like I teach my graduate school so it means well I don't know maybe several hours a week of actual and lecturing and many hours a week of person-to-person interaction with students Plus and you've been teaching for how many years oh geez thirty-eight years I guess all the words named after nearly 40 years what do you still like about the classroom oh it's really exciting I mean the there's nothing more exciting than the intellectual interchange and the interaction with students whether it's in chill I at one time in my life actually taught children not teaching advanced graduate students and it's always an exciting experience or it can be McLean Virginia good afternoon good afternoon dr. Chomsky two questions number one have you written another book since deterring democracy or do you have another one in the works yeah several oh great three or four in fact I'm a little bit on them they're kind of hard to find you know and yeah though well let me see if I can remember them I'll list them for you really fast year 501 rethinking Camelot chronicles with dissent letters from Lexington and prosperous few and the Restless many or what come to mind great great color you said they're they're hard to find well they're usually not on the Shelf per se or you have to special order them in terms of being able to get them I'd you know I don't like to wait around for things to come in I just like to see what's on the shelf and they're not there a little bit on the scare side they're also not reviewed so it's hard to know about them and they're usually published by small presses which don't have the resources to advertise okay one other quick second question in terms of looking at the mass media these days you don't really see much contrary opinion real contrary opinion when you're looking at the major media and it's good to see that at least you get out every once in a while I caught you and Posner and Donahue a while ago and what what do you think in terms of getting more dissent in terms of real contrary opinion into the media do you think that'll be happening or how does that work I wouldn't think it it's not on its own it won't happen I mean the media are basically huge corporations which sell audiences to advertisers and they're gonna reflect the interest of their owners and their buyers by and large however as popular pressures develop you know as popular organization takes place and in it popular involvement in the political system and in social change and so on the medial respond to it I think you're quite right that there's more openings now than there were say 30 years ago at least I experienced that to a limited extent and I think it's just a result of the changes that have taken place in the country I mean it's a more active lively vibrant society than it was thirty years ago and this is reflected in the media to some extent while you're but why are your books are defined they say unpopular things so the what one book of mine happens to be on the US media were the bestseller and can it was literally a best-seller it was based on lectures given over Canadian Broadcasting Corporation I don't think it has a single review in the United States why should American media want to publicize a critical analysis of the American meeting San Francisco good afternoon yes hi professor Chomsky I want to let you know that I was at the premiere of your the documentary about you and premiered here in San Francisco and I thoroughly enjoyed it my question for you is now that the historians are starting to speak about the 80s and the Ronald Reagan presidency I'm not so interested in you know what you feel about Ronald Reagan more what would you feel the continued effects as we head into the next century are going to be and maybe speak to the conditions that brought this about well the Reagan I think you're right in putting Reagan aside I don't think I think he was mostly a symbolic figure probably didn't even know what policy was most of the time but the the policies that developed in the in the Reagan years were in fact continuations of the late Carter years so if you look at the last few years of the Carter Administration Carter introduced called for vast expansion of the military budget and cutback of social programs though he didn't have quite the political clout to push that through but the Reaganites pushed it through and in fact the military programs of the Reagan years are not all that different from the projections of the Carter years same with the cutback of social programs and this goes back to things that happened in the early 70s and when there were big changes that took place in the international system one of them was that Richard Nixon dismantled the Bretton Woods system the system of that developed after the Second World War of international sort of capital regulation in which the US was in effect the World Bank er that said that was one of a number of factors that said in motion a substantially in fact huge growth of speculative capital in the world of accelerated the internationalization of production meaning you know 15 of production abroad and that sort of thing and set a lot of other forces in motion this meant a sharp attack it meant lower growth sharp attack on welfare and living standards and wages wages have been real wages in the United States have been declining since about that time in fact and the Reagan years simply extended and accelerated these differences so the Reagan years were years of substantial polarization maybe 70% of the population it's actual absolute wealth declined in the Reagan years whereas for the top few percent they became greatly enriched and this just is a continuation and indeed acceleration of the kind of processes we've been talking about and unless there's there also going on in the Clinton years and unless we the population does something about them they're going to continue Syracuse good afternoon dr. Chomsky yeah I played Sam long admire your work studied it here at turkeys University I was wondering how you feel NAFTA will affect third world countries particularly countries in Central America spoke earlier on third world economies well of course the Central American countries technically aren't in NAFTA but the and it's a little hard to predict there was a what was called a Caribbean Basin initiative which was going to include the Central American countries and the Caribbean countries and that was that the policies of the central of the Caribbean Basin initiative were what are called liberalization I mean those countries are to open themselves up to market forces now that has a general and NAFTA will probably in the long term contribute to opening up third world countries to market forces now there are a lot of rich countries don't allow themselves to be open to market forces so the United States is highly protectionist it has all sorts of systems for massive state intervention in the economy and it always has every successful developed country relied from England up till you know South Korea and Taiwan relied on including us that relied on radical intervention at a state intervention to protect economic power from market forces and it continues until this day the Pentagon system for example economically speaking is just a funnel of by which the general public subsidizes high-tech industry which is of course a radical violation of market principles however the third world's to be deprived of those mechanisms so that it will in fact be a kind of service area and the effect of these programs there have now been so-called structural adjustment programs there have been over 75 and then I forgotten how many exactly the general effect that they have is to lower Labor's share of national income that's the overriding effect I mean then what happens you know depends on one place to another but they themselves have this polarizing effect and that's the way market forces work we have here a mixture of market forces and state intervention and the state intervention is for the benefit of the wealthy in fact we want to know how it works have a look at Clinton's great triumph in Seattle the this sort of centerpiece which got so much hoopla was a speech that he gave in which he announced his vision for the free market future in the Pacific and he picked a model company which he called a model for what other American corporations should do and in fact gave the speech and in a building of that model company a hanger of the Boeing Corporation that was the model for the free market future Boeing is a publicly subsidized corporation Boeing relies extensively even for its existence on the Pentagon if it wasn't for the Pentagon funnel Boeing would not be the country's major exporter in fact it would be functioning and the same is true of the aeronautical industry altogether the same is true of the other we mentioned Cray supercomputers would you know being given to China why decree supercomputers exist because the public paid the costs of research and development for computers and in fact provide a substantial part of the market through the whole Pentagon system the Pentagon acid and so on these are the kinds of interventions in market processes that benefit a certain sector of the economy the more skilled professional investors top managers and so on as far as Central America is concerned though they're gonna be subjected to market forces in fact we've done this Costa Rica in Central America was the one exception to the Central American model of almost total social disaster remember this is the region of the world where we have had the most influence we take a look at Central America we learn a lot about ourselves that's where we've had an enormous influence because proximity for a long long time there was one exception to the disaster that the harder' chamber that's most of the region namely Costa Rica which for various reasons had developed the kind of Western European sort of Social Democratic character and was a much richer country than the rest well you know during the Reagan years there was a pretty harsh attack on that Costa Rica's there was a lot of pressure on Costa Rica to abandon its social programs to cut back on domestic investment to open itself up the market forces in fact to become very much like the other countries of the region and it largely succeeded in the United States a pretty powerful country especially relative to Central American countries so the fate for Central America and after or no NAFTA in my opinion is unless again unless we do something about it because they're not powerful enough to do it themselves is to become essentially export platforms for American industry which will use extremely cheap and repressed labor for profits here and elimination of jobs here Gainesville Florida good afternoon professor thanks for your recent visit here to the University of Florida I'm a student in philosophy down here I appreciate your talk to especially appreciated the common about the Florida State University mascot I thought that was appropriate my question is this certainly we expect each individual to make up their own mind about issues and not make up their mind based on their political affiliation but what was unique to NAFTA that allowed for individuals like say yourself and Pat Buchanan or say Bob Dole and Bill Clinton normally on other sides of the political aisle to hop into bed together so to speak well NAFTA was an interesting issue I mean it was it was a very overwhelmingly it was a class issue in fact the New York Times even permitted itself the unusual phrase class lines which was rarely a term which rarely appears in the media because it's a little too revealing but they did point out that the attitude toward NAFTA by and large broke down on class lines corporate power was overwhelmingly for business and corporate power was overwhelmingly for it the workforce was overwhelmingly against it the media were overwhelmingly for it but they automatic almost automatically respond the corporate interests that despite the enormous media barrage virtually 100 percent approval the general population remained somewhat against it so the latest polls I saw I think in September October showed about of the portion of the population that had an opinion it was about 55 or 60 percent opposed which is something that had stayed pretty steady as for Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot they were a little bit exceptional he usually they take a corporate to stand on this issue they didn't for whatever reason I think you'd have to look into their particular point of view and motivations but you're right that's a funny Alliance Los Angeles good afternoon hi mmm professor Chomsky I just took a class and used this semester at Chapman University I had a question I was wondering where do you think now how and who do you think she regulates the content of media Janet Reno was just in Congress speaking about how TV violence should be stopped do you think that the companies the media itself could control themselves or do you think there should be a regulating force governmental force behind it well I'm personally very skeptical about any form of regulation of any kind of speech now the media don't even begin to approximate freedom of speech I mean this is the kind of freedom where people who own the place set the rules so that's not real freedom nevertheless the idea of X even in that kind of system heavily skewed towards extreme wealth personally I'd be reluctant I'm very reluctant to see any kind of regulation take place freedom speech is a really important value we've over the centuries we've particularly in the United States won a lot of being one substantial freedom of speech and I think we ought to preserve it however with regard to the media I think there's a much more serious question should the media be democratized I mean if the media are our institutions of private power we can be quite sure that they're going to have have a particular take on things they're going to give a picture of the world which by and large reflects the interests of their owners and their advertisers and other centers of power in the society and that means that the attitudes and points of view and interests of the general public are going to be marginalized and I think the answer to that is not you know regulation its democratization the specific question of violence on the media to argument i I think you have to have a balance between which is not easy to just determine between allowing full freedom of expression and imposing some restrictions on what people are exposed to so for example even the most passionate advocate of freedom of speech does not believe that say I have a right to go into your living room and put up a pornographic poster or something that's an that's you might say my inability to do that's a restriction of freedom of speech but I think everyone agrees with that when you move to a say poster in Times Square saying you know I don't know some obscene thing or this graceful thing the issue becomes more complex because it's not really private space it's just the space where you are and the conflict between the right to private space and the right to freedom of speech begins to be ambiguous when you go to the media becomes even more ambiguous it's in a sense private space I mean that's given the way the society is just kind of you know you're not compelled but you're at least driven to being exposed to it and therefore what's on it is a kind of involvement in your private space but at a more remote step it's at this point that value is becoming difficult than decisions become difficult however my own bias at least would be against and I think the but that the burden proof has to be on anyone who wants to introduce any form of regulation in my opinion Washington DC good afternoon hi professor Chomsky I'm also a fan of yours I've read at least five or six year books and many of your articles over the years I work quote within the system here in Washington DC I had for about ten years and I was wondering your perspective on the election of Bill Clinton over George Bush and whether you think there's any positive difference whatever for either the American people or people internationally of his being elected there is some difference between what Bush represented in what Clinton represented I mean Clinton was essentially a what's called a moderate Democrat that I mean a kind of a right-wing a pro-business Democrat and the new Democrat and that means it was very difficult to distinguish that from moderate Republican but there were some differences if you look at the campaign for one thing the Republicans and the Democrats have rather different constituencies the Republicans are quite openly the party of business they don't pretend to be much else the result is that they don't really appeal to it popular constituency the way the Democrats do they by and large have to appeal to constitute public constituency on the basis of jingoist appeals fear religious fundamentalism and so on you could tell it from the Republican convention and that's a substantial part of the population and that the Democrats on the other hand put themselves forward as the popular as the party of you know the working people and the ethnic minorities and women and so on in fact in practice they're just another another business party but the difference in constituency shows so when these parties are in power although the major decisions that they make keep to the essential agenda of the state corporate Nexus which doesn't change a lot on other issues which are of less significance to a major private power they do different things so on issues of say civil the the Reagan administration and Bush as well carried out a very substantial attack on civil rights and I would and and that harms the interests of the popular constituency of the Democrats in fact the general public and I would expect then I think we already see a slight difference in that respect things like say limited amount of family leave which every just about every industrial country has in fact far more than we Bush beatitude Clinton passed it again that's a sort of throwing crumbs to the constituency these crumbs are not minor incidentally with regard to how what our lives are like but they're very minor with respect to the major interests of maximization of power and wealth so if you read say The Wall Street Journal the main Business Journal you'll find they're very enthusiastic about business and about Clinton and described him as one of the best candidates big business could imagine despite the fact that on say social programs and other things he may not be entirely to their taste there were there was also a difference that you could detect on major economic policy the Clinton administration called much more openly for state intervention to support and protect major economic centers than the Republicans did though both they're all protectionist the Republicans tended to be a bit more ideological about it and not to intervene not to call so openly for third so extremely for intervention to protect business for market forces the Clinton called a bit more for that in fact it's done a bit more so Clinton's national export strategy announced in late September called for an extension of policies that the Reaganites English had pursue which we're in violation of cádiz everyone admitted and Clinton wanted to extend that and I was put rather well by the Secretary of Treasury Lloyd Bentsen I said something like I'm tired of this level playing field business I want the playing field tilted more toward the interest of US business so we always tilt the playing field in the interest of the US business but they wanted to tilt it a bit more Buffalo New York good afternoon hi how you doing good I'm a graduate student and I'm interested in educational history and I think that like the media higher education has played a role in reinforcing corporate interests and I'm wondering do you believe that higher education in the future is going to become more democratic or less democratic depends on what people like you do about it if there is no popular involvement in this private power will have its impact which is significant and that's gonna make it less democratic for the universities and the whole educational system to be more democratic there has to be some counter balancing force to private power and that only counterbalancing force can be public involvement in democratization so to the extent that such forces exist the universities can become more democratic in fact they have become more so in the last 30 years in my opinion we have with just a few seconds left you've written so much already and you mentioned earlier three or four books in progress what do you hope comes from your writings my hope is that it'll stimulate people to try to ask questions about the world and find their answers I mean I have what I think are my answers but I think if people have a broader range of analysis and information available to them they're in a position that come up with better insight and better understanding early so I hope and then of course I'll do something about it because just having the ideas in your mind doesn't change the world Noam Chomsky is professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology thank you very much and we thank you for your calls and your comments have a good afternoon

Channel: Manufacturing Intellect

Views: 26,449

Rating: 4.8823528 out of 5

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Id: 8OsFJVR6f2w

Length: 46min 31sec (2791 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 03 2017