Excerpt: "In this recent conversation with Dan Falcone, a Washington
DC-based high school history teacher, Chomsky builds on our last interview,
discussing everything from Scott Walker to the Monroe Doctrine, from
Citizens United to for-profit colleges."
Noam Chomsky. (photo: Mirco Andrea Carlesso)
Creating the Horror Chambers
By Noam Chomsky, Jacobin
29 July 15
We're pleased to publish another interview with Professor Noam Chomsky. In
this recent conversation with Dan Falcone, a Washington DC-based high school
history teacher, Chomsky builds on our last interview, discussing everything
from Scott Walker to the Monroe Doctrine, from Citizens United to for-profit
colleges. We hope you'll share it widely.
I wanted to stay on the topic of education and ask you about language,
terminology, and definitions in the social sciences. So for example, I've
noticed in my curriculum that there's a tendency to have terms with a real
definition and then a code definition. Terms like foreign aid, independence
movements, partition, and democracy.
Two terms that I know are of particular interest to you are anarchism and
libertarianism. Could you discuss the varying definitions of those two
terms, anarchism and libertarianism? Maybe the American definition versus
the European, and why that's important for education to sort out?
There's hardly a term in social science, political discourse, academic
professions, and the scholarly professions where there's anything remotely
like clear definitions. If you want a clear definition, you have to go to
mathematics or parts of physics.
Definitions are basically parts of theoretical structures. A definition
doesn't mean anything unless it's embedded in some theory of some
explanatory scope. And in these areas, there really are no such theories. So
the terms are in fact used very loosely. They have a strong ideological
component.
Take, say, democracy. The United States, I'm sure in your school, they teach
as the world's leading democracy. It's also a country in which about 70
percent of the population, the lower 70 percent on the income scale, are
completely disenfranchised.
Their opinions have no detectable influence on the decisions of their own
representatives. Which is a good reason to believe, a large reason, why a
huge number of people don't bother voting. They know that it's a waste of
time. So is that a democracy? No, not really.
And you could say the same about almost any other term. Sometimes it's
almost laughable. So for example, in 1947, the US government changed the
name of the War Department. They changed it to the Defense Department - any
person with a brain functioning knew that we're not going to be involved in
defense anymore. We're going to be involved in aggression. They didn't have
to read Orwell to know that. And in fact, religiously, every time you read
about the war budget, it's called the defense budget. And defense now means
war, very much as in Orwell. And pretty much across the board.
Anarchism is used for a very wide range of actions, tendencies, beliefs, and
so on. There's no settled definition of it. Those who use the term should be
indicating clearly, as clearly as you can, what element in this range you're
talking about. I've tried to do that. Others do it. You know,
anarcho-syndicalism, communitarian anarchism, anarchy in the sense of let's
get rid of everything, the old kind of primitive anarchism, many different
types. And you're not going to find a definition.
Libertarianism has a special meaning predominantly in the United States. In
the United States, it means dedication to extreme forms of tyranny. They
don't call it that, but it's basically corporate tyranny, meaning tyranny by
unaccountable private concentrations of power, the worst kind of tyranny you
can imagine.
It picks up from the libertarian tradition one element, namely opposition to
state power. But it leaves open all other forms of - and in fact favors -
other forms of coercion and domination. So it's radically opposed to the
libertarian tradition, which was opposed to the master servant relation.
Giving orders, taking orders - that's a core of traditional anarchism, going
back to classical liberalism. So it's a special, pretty much uniquely
American development and related to the unusual character of the United
States in many respects.
America is to quite an unusual extent a business-run society. That's why we
have a very violent labor history. Much more so than comparable countries,
and attacks on labor here were far more extreme. There are accurate
libertarian elements in the United States, like protection of freedom of
speech, which is probably of a standard higher than other countries. But
libertarianism is designed in the United States to satisfy the needs of
private power.
Actually, it's an interesting case in connection with the media. The United
States is one of the few countries that basically doesn't have public media.
I mean, theoretically, there's NPR, but it's a highly marginal thing and is
corporate funded anyway. So there's nothing like the BBC here. Most
countries have something or other. And that was a battleground, especially
when radio and television came along.
The Founding Fathers actually were in favor of different conceptions of
freedom of speech. There's a narrow conception which interprets it as being
a negative right, meaning you should be free of external interference.
There's a broader conception which regards it as a positive right: you
should have a right to impart and access information, hence the positive
interpretation. The United Nations accepts the positive interpretation, and
theoretically, the US does too.
If you look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I think Article 19
says that every person must have the right to express themselves without
constraint and to impart and receive information over the widest possible
range. That's the positive right.
That was a battleground in the 1930s and 1940s. Particularly right after the
Second World War, there were high level commissions taking both sides. And
the position that won out is what was called corporate libertarianism,
meaning corporations have the right to do anything they want without any
interference.
But people don't have any rights. Like you and I don't have the right to
receive information. Technically, we can impart information if we can buy a
newspaper, but the idea that you should be a public voice that people, to
the extent that this society's democratic and participatory, was eliminated
in the United States. And that's called libertarianism. Meaning
mega-corporations can do what they like without interference.
In the ever-growing field of Republican presidential candidates is Wisconsin
Gov. Scott Walker. He's advocating local control of schools in an effort to
undermine public education. With his announcement to run for president, I'm
reminded of the recall in Wisconsin a few years ago and its relation to the
Citizens United case. Can you discuss the ramifications of the Citizens
United case and the impact on teachers and education, and the overall
meaning of that decision on the society?
The Citizens United decision should be considered in the context of a series
of decisions, starting with Buckley v. Valeo back in the '70s, that
determined that money is a form of speech. You and I can speak in the same
roughly equal loudness, but you and Bill Gates can't speak in the same
loudness in regards to money. So that was a big deal, that there can't be
any interference with the use of money, for example - funding.
Now there were restrictions in the laws on campaign funding, but they've
been slowly eroded. Citizens United pretty much dispensed with them. There's
still some limitations but not much. So exactly what its impact was is
pretty hard to judge. But it's part of a series of decisions which have led
to a situation in which, if you want to run for president, you have to have
several billion dollars. And there's only certain sources for several
billion dollars. If you want to run for Congress, pretty much the same.
House of Representatives, you have to have a huge campaign funded.
Technically, you could decide, "I'm going to run for president." That's a
meaningless freedom. It doesn't mean anything. And the effect is pretty
striking. The impact of money on politics goes way back - you know, Tom
Ferguson's Golden Rule? It's the best work on this topic; he's a very good
political scientist, and has done work, very good work, on the impact of
campaign funding on both electability, but also more significantly on
political decisions. And he traces it back to the nineteenth century. And
the impact is quite substantial - it goes right through the New Deal and on
to the present.
But now it's in the stratosphere. That's why 70 percent of the public is
totally disenfranchised. They don't contribute to campaign funding, so
they're out. And if you sort of go up the income/wealth scale, you can
detect greater levels of influence, but it's not really significant until
you get to the very top, maybe a fraction of 1 percent or something, where
decisions are basically made.
It's not 100 percent, so you find some deviation. There are times when
public opinion is powerful enough so that it does matter, but these are
overwhelming tendencies. The effect on education, of course, is obvious. It
means that the concentrated power of the business classes will determine
educational as well as other policies. That's why you're getting charter
schools, cutting back of funding for state colleges, the corporatization of
the universities. I mean, it's across the board.
Universities, for example, are increasingly going to a business model in
which what matters is not educational attainment, but the bottom line. So if
you can get temporary, cheap, dispensable labor, like adjuncts and grad
students, that's preferable to tenured faculty. And of course by other
measures, it's not that preferable, but this is a business model.
At the college level, there's a huge growth of these private colleges, most
of which are total scams. They're not private, they get maybe 80-90 percent
of their funding from the federal government through Pell Grants and other
things. And they're very profitable. So during the recession, they stayed
extremely profitable. All their corporate profits went down, but their stock
stayed high.
They have a huge drop-out rate, enormous. Corinthian Colleges, one of the
biggest for-profits, just had a big scandal. They made promises that they'd
recruit deprived populations. So they'll heavily recruit in, say, black
areas, with all kind of inducements to what you can become if you take on a
huge debt and go here. Kids end up with an enormous debt and very few of
them even graduate. It's just a major scam. And meanwhile, the community
colleges, which can serve these communities, they're being cut back.
And that's very natural in a business-run society. After all, business is
interested in profit and power; not a big surprise. And so therefore why
have public education, when you can use it as a way to profit? It's very
much like the health care system. Why is the United States about the only
country without any national health - without any meaningful national health
care? Well, it's the same thing. It's extremely inefficient, very costly,
and very bad for the patient, about twice the per capita costs of comparable
countries, with some of the worst outcomes.
I don't know if you've tried to get health insurance, but it's an
unbelievable process. My wife just did it, and we spent days trying to get
on the computer networks, which don't work, and then you call the office and
then you wait for an hour and finally you get somebody that doesn't know
what you're talking about and if you do it, it fails. And we finally had to
end up after days of this, going to an office, a physical office out in the
suburbs, a small office, where you can actually talk to a human being, and
then figure it out in five minutes.
Alright, that saves money for the government and the insurance companies,
but it costs money to the consumer. And in fact, that's not counted, so
economists, for ideological reasons, don't count costs to users. Like if you
think there's an error on your bank statement, say, and you call the bank,
you don't get somebody to talk to. You get a menu, a recorded menu, and then
comes a whole routine, and then maybe if you're patient, minutes later, you
get somebody to talk to. Saves the bank a lot of money, so it's called very
efficient, but that's because they don't count the cost to you, and the cost
to you is multiplied over the number of consumers - so it's enormous.
If you added those costs, the business would be extremely inefficient. But
for ideological reasons you don't count the cost to people, you just count
the cost to business. And even with that, it's highly inefficient. All of
these - it's not because people want it. People have favored national health
care for decades. But it doesn't matter. What the people want is essentially
irrelevant.
Education is simply part of it. So sure, when Scott Walker talks about going
down to the local level, it's put in the framework of, "I'm for the common
man." What he means is that at the local level, businesses can have a lot
more power than they can at the state level or at the federal level. They
have plenty of power at the higher levels, but if it's a local school board,
the local real-estate people determine what happens. There's as little
resistance as you can possibly get down at the lower levels. It would be
different if it was a democratic country where people were organized, but
they're not. You know, they're atomized.
That's why the right wing is in favor of what they call states' rights. It's
a lot easier to take over a state than the federal government. Pretty easy
to take over the federal government too, but a lot easier when you get to
the state level.
And all of this is veiled in nice, appealing terminology about we've got to
favor the little guy and send freedom back to the people and take it away
from power, but it means exactly the opposite - just like libertarianism.
Do you see a lot of propaganda efforts in terms of undermining teachers,
maybe in regards to pensions or job security, to have "neighbor turning
against neighbor"?
It's unbelievable. In fact, what Walker did, or his advisers, was pretty
clever. They unionized the teachers, firemen, policemen, and people in the
public sector who had benefits. And what they concealed, and what you know,
is the fact that the benefits are paid for by the recipients. So you pay for
the benefits by lowering your wages. That's part of the union contract. You
defer payment and take a slightly lower wage and get a pension. But that's
suppressed.
So the propaganda which was directed at the workers in the private sector
said, "Look at these guys. They're getting all kinds of benefits and
pensions, security, and you're being thrown out of your job." Which is true.
They were being thrown out of their jobs. And of course the unions had
already been beaten down to almost nothing in the private sector. And this
propaganda was able to mobilize working people against people in the public
sector. It was effective propaganda. I mean, a total scam, but effective.
It's pretty interesting to see it work in detail. You get a lot of insight.
So you remember in 2008, when the whole economy was crashing, we could have
gone into a huge depression, mostly because of the banks and their
corruption and so on. But there was one huge insurance company, AIG, the
biggest international insurance company, which was collapsing. If they would
have collapsed, they would have brought down with them Goldman Sachs and a
whole bunch of big investment firms, so the government wouldn't let them
collapse.
So they were bailed out, a huge bailout. And it was really malfeasance, if
not criminality, on their part that led to all of this, but they were bailed
out, and Timothy Geithner had to keep the economy going. Right after that,
right at that time, the executives of AIG got huge bonuses. That really
didn't look good, so there was some publicity about it, bad publicity. But
Larry Summers, the former secretary of treasury, a big economist, said, you
have to honor the contracts. And the contract said that these guys have to
get a bonus.
Right at that same time, the state of Illinois was going bankrupt, it
claimed. And so they had to stop paying pensions to teachers. Well, you
didn't have to honor that contract. So yeah, for the gangsters at AIG who
practically brought the economy down, you got to honor that contract,
because they got to get their multimillion dollar stock options. But for the
teachers who already paid for the pensions, you don't have to honor that
one.
And that's the way the country runs. That's what a business-run society
looks like in case after case. And it's all consistent and perfectly
sensible and understandable.
Shifting to a foreign policy question, I remember recalling being given the
traditional account of the Monroe Doctrine as a young student of history,
and in my formative years, hegemonic terms or imperialistic phraseology in
the classroom wasn't common. It was excluded from my history introduction
all the way through high school.
Anyway, a little while back, Secretary of State John Kerry announced that
"the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over." It might have been just rhetoric,
and recently Vice President Biden announced that a $1 billion aid package
would be delivered to Central America.
That prompted several scholars like Adrienne Pine, an academic from American
University, to express concerns - her area of expertise is Honduras and
Guatemala, and she was arguing that this "aid packaging" would go to corrupt
government officials in those countries and it would do little to enhance
democracy or help people.
Well, this whole story is quite interesting. The meaning of the Monroe
Doctrine, we were taught, was to protect the country from European
imperialism. And that's perfectly defensive. But the actual meaning was
stated very clearly by Secretary of State Lansing, Woodrow Wilson's
secretary of state. It's a wonderful example of an accurate description - he
presented a memorandum to President Wilson in which he said, here's the real
meaning of the Monroe Doctrine.
He said the Monroe Doctrine was established in our interest. The interests
of other countries were an incident, not an end. So it's entirely for our
interest. But Wilson, a great exponent of self-determination, said he
thought this argument was "unanswerable," but it would be impolitic to make
it public. That's the meaning of the Monroe Doctrine. And it is. It's
exactly the way it's been used.
This is supposed to be our hemisphere. Everybody else stay out. We didn't
have the power to implement it in 1823, but it was understood how it would
work. John Quincy Adams, the great grand strategist and the intellectual
author of Manifest Destiny, explained in the accredited - I think he
probably wrote the Monroe Doctrine when he was secretary of state - he
explained it was really directed at Cuba.
Cuba was the first foreign policy objective for the US. We wanted to take
over Cuba. And the Monroe Doctrine was supposed to keep the British out. And
it was discussed, and they understood that they couldn't do it because
Britain was too powerful.
But Adams explained that over time, Britain would become weaker, and the
United States would become more powerful, and over time, he said, "Cuba will
fall into our hands by the laws of political gravitation, the way an apple
falls from the tree." Which is exactly what happened through the nineteenth
century when relations of power shifted, the United States became more
powerful and was able to kick Britain out of one place after another.
In 1898, the United States invaded Cuba. The pretext was to liberate Cuba.
In fact it was to conquer Cuba and prevent it from liberating itself from
Spain, which it in fact was about to do. And then comes the Platt Amendment,
and Guantanamo and all the rest of the story.
That's the Monroe Doctrine. Why is it changing? It's changing because Latin
America has liberated itself. The United States is practically being kicked
out of the hemisphere. That's extremely important. For the last roughly
fifteen years and for the first time in its history, the Latin American
countries have begun to integrate slightly to free themselves from imperial
control to face internal problems, and if you look at the hemispheric
conferences, the United States is increasingly isolated.
At the Santiago conference in 2012, the OAS conference, it never reached any
decisions because they have to be reached by consensus, and the US and
Canada blocked every decision. The major ones were on Cuba. Everybody wanted
it admitted, but the US and Canada refused. And the other was drugs. The
other countries want to end this crazy US drug war which is destroying them,
and the US and Canada refused.
Well, there was another conference coming up in Panama, just a couple months
ago. And Obama recognized, or an adviser recognized, that unless he did
something, the US would simply be kicked out of the hemisphere. So they
moved towards normalization of relations with Cuba. And here, it's presented
as a wonderful benign gesture, bringing Cuba out of its isolation.
Fact is, the United States is totally isolated. In the world, it's
completely isolated. The votes in the UN on the embargo are like 180-2, the
United States and Israel. And in the hemisphere, it was on the verge of
being tossed out. So they make the gestures that are silly - they have to
say those sort of things, or end up being thrown out of the hemisphere.
And we can't intervene at the previous levels - there's plenty of
intervention, but not at the level before. As for giving money to Honduras
and Guatemala, it means giving money to murderers ruling governments that
were installed by US power. The Honduras government was thrown out by
military coup in 2009. This is Obama now. And they were a military
government, ran a kind of a fake election, which almost nobody recognized
except the United States, and it's become a horror chamber.
If you take a look at the immigrants coming across the border, you'll notice
most of them are from Honduras. Why? Because Honduras, thanks to Obama, is a
horror chamber. They're giving money to Honduras, this military regime which
has probably the worst human rights record in the hemisphere. Guatemala has
been a horror story ever since 1954, when the US went in.
So that's the history, but not the sanitized history.
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Noam Chomsky. (photo: Mirco Andrea Carlesso)
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/07/chomsky-interview-citizens-united-democra
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izens-united-democracy-higher-education/
Creating the Horror Chambers
By Noam Chomsky, Jacobin
29 July 15
e're pleased to publish another interview with Professor Noam Chomsky. In
this recent conversation with Dan Falcone, a Washington DC-based high school
history teacher, Chomsky builds on our last interview, discussing everything
from Scott Walker to the Monroe Doctrine, from Citizens United to for-profit
colleges. We hope you'll share it widely.
I wanted to stay on the topic of education and ask you about language,
terminology, and definitions in the social sciences. So for example, I've
noticed in my curriculum that there's a tendency to have terms with a real
definition and then a code definition. Terms like foreign aid, independence
movements, partition, and democracy.
Two terms that I know are of particular interest to you are anarchism and
libertarianism. Could you discuss the varying definitions of those two
terms, anarchism and libertarianism? Maybe the American definition versus
the European, and why that's important for education to sort out?
There's hardly a term in social science, political discourse, academic
professions, and the scholarly professions where there's anything remotely
like clear definitions. If you want a clear definition, you have to go to
mathematics or parts of physics.
Definitions are basically parts of theoretical structures. A definition
doesn't mean anything unless it's embedded in some theory of some
explanatory scope. And in these areas, there really are no such theories. So
the terms are in fact used very loosely. They have a strong ideological
component.
Take, say, democracy. The United States, I'm sure in your school, they teach
as the world's leading democracy. It's also a country in which about 70
percent of the population, the lower 70 percent on the income scale, are
completely disenfranchised.
Their opinions have no detectable influence on the decisions of their own
representatives. Which is a good reason to believe, a large reason, why a
huge number of people don't bother voting. They know that it's a waste of
time. So is that a democracy? No, not really.
And you could say the same about almost any other term. Sometimes it's
almost laughable. So for example, in 1947, the US government changed the
name of the War Department. They changed it to the Defense Department - any
person with a brain functioning knew that we're not going to be involved in
defense anymore. We're going to be involved in aggression. They didn't have
to read Orwell to know that. And in fact, religiously, every time you read
about the war budget, it's called the defense budget. And defense now means
war, very much as in Orwell. And pretty much across the board.
Anarchism is used for a very wide range of actions, tendencies, beliefs, and
so on. There's no settled definition of it. Those who use the term should be
indicating clearly, as clearly as you can, what element in this range you're
talking about. I've tried to do that. Others do it. You know,
anarcho-syndicalism, communitarian anarchism, anarchy in the sense of let's
get rid of everything, the old kind of primitive anarchism, many different
types. And you're not going to find a definition.
Libertarianism has a special meaning predominantly in the United States. In
the United States, it means dedication to extreme forms of tyranny. They
don't call it that, but it's basically corporate tyranny, meaning tyranny by
unaccountable private concentrations of power, the worst kind of tyranny you
can imagine.
It picks up from the libertarian tradition one element, namely opposition to
state power. But it leaves open all other forms of - and in fact favors -
other forms of coercion and domination. So it's radically opposed to the
libertarian tradition, which was opposed to the master servant relation.
Giving orders, taking orders - that's a core of traditional anarchism, going
back to classical liberalism. So it's a special, pretty much uniquely
American development and related to the unusual character of the United
States in many respects.
America is to quite an unusual extent a business-run society. That's why we
have a very violent labor history. Much more so than comparable countries,
and attacks on labor here were far more extreme. There are accurate
libertarian elements in the United States, like protection of freedom of
speech, which is probably of a standard higher than other countries. But
libertarianism is designed in the United States to satisfy the needs of
private power.
Actually, it's an interesting case in connection with the media. The United
States is one of the few countries that basically doesn't have public media.
I mean, theoretically, there's NPR, but it's a highly marginal thing and is
corporate funded anyway. So there's nothing like the BBC here. Most
countries have something or other. And that was a battleground, especially
when radio and television came along.
The Founding Fathers actually were in favor of different conceptions of
freedom of speech. There's a narrow conception which interprets it as being
a negative right, meaning you should be free of external interference.
There's a broader conception which regards it as a positive right: you
should have a right to impart and access information, hence the positive
interpretation. The United Nations accepts the positive interpretation, and
theoretically, the US does too.
If you look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I think Article 19
says that every person must have the right to express themselves without
constraint and to impart and receive information over the widest possible
range. That's the positive right.
That was a battleground in the 1930s and 1940s. Particularly right after the
Second World War, there were high level commissions taking both sides. And
the position that won out is what was called corporate libertarianism,
meaning corporations have the right to do anything they want without any
interference.
But people don't have any rights. Like you and I don't have the right to
receive information. Technically, we can impart information if we can buy a
newspaper, but the idea that you should be a public voice that people, to
the extent that this society's democratic and participatory, was eliminated
in the United States. And that's called libertarianism. Meaning
mega-corporations can do what they like without interference.
In the ever-growing field of Republican presidential candidates is Wisconsin
Gov. Scott Walker. He's advocating local control of schools in an effort to
undermine public education. With his announcement to run for president, I'm
reminded of the recall in Wisconsin a few years ago and its relation to the
Citizens United case. Can you discuss the ramifications of the Citizens
United case and the impact on teachers and education, and the overall
meaning of that decision on the society?
The Citizens United decision should be considered in the context of a series
of decisions, starting with Buckley v. Valeo back in the '70s, that
determined that money is a form of speech. You and I can speak in the same
roughly equal loudness, but you and Bill Gates can't speak in the same
loudness in regards to money. So that was a big deal, that there can't be
any interference with the use of money, for example - funding.
Now there were restrictions in the laws on campaign funding, but they've
been slowly eroded. Citizens United pretty much dispensed with them. There's
still some limitations but not much. So exactly what its impact was is
pretty hard to judge. But it's part of a series of decisions which have led
to a situation in which, if you want to run for president, you have to have
several billion dollars. And there's only certain sources for several
billion dollars. If you want to run for Congress, pretty much the same.
House of Representatives, you have to have a huge campaign funded.
Technically, you could decide, "I'm going to run for president." That's a
meaningless freedom. It doesn't mean anything. And the effect is pretty
striking. The impact of money on politics goes way back - you know, Tom
Ferguson's Golden Rule? It's the best work on this topic; he's a very good
political scientist, and has done work, very good work, on the impact of
campaign funding on both electability, but also more significantly on
political decisions. And he traces it back to the nineteenth century. And
the impact is quite substantial - it goes right through the New Deal and on
to the present.
But now it's in the stratosphere. That's why 70 percent of the public is
totally disenfranchised. They don't contribute to campaign funding, so
they're out. And if you sort of go up the income/wealth scale, you can
detect greater levels of influence, but it's not really significant until
you get to the very top, maybe a fraction of 1 percent or something, where
decisions are basically made.
It's not 100 percent, so you find some deviation. There are times when
public opinion is powerful enough so that it does matter, but these are
overwhelming tendencies. The effect on education, of course, is obvious. It
means that the concentrated power of the business classes will determine
educational as well as other policies. That's why you're getting charter
schools, cutting back of funding for state colleges, the corporatization of
the universities. I mean, it's across the board.
Universities, for example, are increasingly going to a business model in
which what matters is not educational attainment, but the bottom line. So if
you can get temporary, cheap, dispensable labor, like adjuncts and grad
students, that's preferable to tenured faculty. And of course by other
measures, it's not that preferable, but this is a business model.
At the college level, there's a huge growth of these private colleges, most
of which are total scams. They're not private, they get maybe 80-90 percent
of their funding from the federal government through Pell Grants and other
things. And they're very profitable. So during the recession, they stayed
extremely profitable. All their corporate profits went down, but their stock
stayed high.
They have a huge drop-out rate, enormous. Corinthian Colleges, one of the
biggest for-profits, just had a big scandal. They made promises that they'd
recruit deprived populations. So they'll heavily recruit in, say, black
areas, with all kind of inducements to what you can become if you take on a
huge debt and go here. Kids end up with an enormous debt and very few of
them even graduate. It's just a major scam. And meanwhile, the community
colleges, which can serve these communities, they're being cut back.
And that's very natural in a business-run society. After all, business is
interested in profit and power; not a big surprise. And so therefore why
have public education, when you can use it as a way to profit? It's very
much like the health care system. Why is the United States about the only
country without any national health - without any meaningful national health
care? Well, it's the same thing. It's extremely inefficient, very costly,
and very bad for the patient, about twice the per capita costs of comparable
countries, with some of the worst outcomes.
I don't know if you've tried to get health insurance, but it's an
unbelievable process. My wife just did it, and we spent days trying to get
on the computer networks, which don't work, and then you call the office and
then you wait for an hour and finally you get somebody that doesn't know
what you're talking about and if you do it, it fails. And we finally had to
end up after days of this, going to an office, a physical office out in the
suburbs, a small office, where you can actually talk to a human being, and
then figure it out in five minutes.
Alright, that saves money for the government and the insurance companies,
but it costs money to the consumer. And in fact, that's not counted, so
economists, for ideological reasons, don't count costs to users. Like if you
think there's an error on your bank statement, say, and you call the bank,
you don't get somebody to talk to. You get a menu, a recorded menu, and then
comes a whole routine, and then maybe if you're patient, minutes later, you
get somebody to talk to. Saves the bank a lot of money, so it's called very
efficient, but that's because they don't count the cost to you, and the cost
to you is multiplied over the number of consumers - so it's enormous.
If you added those costs, the business would be extremely inefficient. But
for ideological reasons you don't count the cost to people, you just count
the cost to business. And even with that, it's highly inefficient. All of
these - it's not because people want it. People have favored national health
care for decades. But it doesn't matter. What the people want is essentially
irrelevant.
Education is simply part of it. So sure, when Scott Walker talks about going
down to the local level, it's put in the framework of, "I'm for the common
man." What he means is that at the local level, businesses can have a lot
more power than they can at the state level or at the federal level. They
have plenty of power at the higher levels, but if it's a local school board,
the local real-estate people determine what happens. There's as little
resistance as you can possibly get down at the lower levels. It would be
different if it was a democratic country where people were organized, but
they're not. You know, they're atomized.
That's why the right wing is in favor of what they call states' rights. It's
a lot easier to take over a state than the federal government. Pretty easy
to take over the federal government too, but a lot easier when you get to
the state level.
And all of this is veiled in nice, appealing terminology about we've got to
favor the little guy and send freedom back to the people and take it away
from power, but it means exactly the opposite - just like libertarianism.
Do you see a lot of propaganda efforts in terms of undermining teachers,
maybe in regards to pensions or job security, to have "neighbor turning
against neighbor"?
It's unbelievable. In fact, what Walker did, or his advisers, was pretty
clever. They unionized the teachers, firemen, policemen, and people in the
public sector who had benefits. And what they concealed, and what you know,
is the fact that the benefits are paid for by the recipients. So you pay for
the benefits by lowering your wages. That's part of the union contract. You
defer payment and take a slightly lower wage and get a pension. But that's
suppressed.
So the propaganda which was directed at the workers in the private sector
said, "Look at these guys. They're getting all kinds of benefits and
pensions, security, and you're being thrown out of your job." Which is true.
They were being thrown out of their jobs. And of course the unions had
already been beaten down to almost nothing in the private sector. And this
propaganda was able to mobilize working people against people in the public
sector. It was effective propaganda. I mean, a total scam, but effective.
It's pretty interesting to see it work in detail. You get a lot of insight.
So you remember in 2008, when the whole economy was crashing, we could have
gone into a huge depression, mostly because of the banks and their
corruption and so on. But there was one huge insurance company, AIG, the
biggest international insurance company, which was collapsing. If they would
have collapsed, they would have brought down with them Goldman Sachs and a
whole bunch of big investment firms, so the government wouldn't let them
collapse.
So they were bailed out, a huge bailout. And it was really malfeasance, if
not criminality, on their part that led to all of this, but they were bailed
out, and Timothy Geithner had to keep the economy going. Right after that,
right at that time, the executives of AIG got huge bonuses. That really
didn't look good, so there was some publicity about it, bad publicity. But
Larry Summers, the former secretary of treasury, a big economist, said, you
have to honor the contracts. And the contract said that these guys have to
get a bonus.
Right at that same time, the state of Illinois was going bankrupt, it
claimed. And so they had to stop paying pensions to teachers. Well, you
didn't have to honor that contract. So yeah, for the gangsters at AIG who
practically brought the economy down, you got to honor that contract,
because they got to get their multimillion dollar stock options. But for the
teachers who already paid for the pensions, you don't have to honor that
one.
And that's the way the country runs. That's what a business-run society
looks like in case after case. And it's all consistent and perfectly
sensible and understandable.
Shifting to a foreign policy question, I remember recalling being given the
traditional account of the Monroe Doctrine as a young student of history,
and in my formative years, hegemonic terms or imperialistic phraseology in
the classroom wasn't common. It was excluded from my history introduction
all the way through high school.
Anyway, a little while back, Secretary of State John Kerry announced that
"the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over." It might have been just rhetoric,
and recently Vice President Biden announced that a $1 billion aid package
would be delivered to Central America.
That prompted several scholars like Adrienne Pine, an academic from American
University, to express concerns - her area of expertise is Honduras and
Guatemala, and she was arguing that this "aid packaging" would go to corrupt
government officials in those countries and it would do little to enhance
democracy or help people.
Well, this whole story is quite interesting. The meaning of the Monroe
Doctrine, we were taught, was to protect the country from European
imperialism. And that's perfectly defensive. But the actual meaning was
stated very clearly by Secretary of State Lansing, Woodrow Wilson's
secretary of state. It's a wonderful example of an accurate description - he
presented a memorandum to President Wilson in which he said, here's the real
meaning of the Monroe Doctrine.
He said the Monroe Doctrine was established in our interest. The interests
of other countries were an incident, not an end. So it's entirely for our
interest. But Wilson, a great exponent of self-determination, said he
thought this argument was "unanswerable," but it would be impolitic to make
it public. That's the meaning of the Monroe Doctrine. And it is. It's
exactly the way it's been used.
This is supposed to be our hemisphere. Everybody else stay out. We didn't
have the power to implement it in 1823, but it was understood how it would
work. John Quincy Adams, the great grand strategist and the intellectual
author of Manifest Destiny, explained in the accredited - I think he
probably wrote the Monroe Doctrine when he was secretary of state - he
explained it was really directed at Cuba.
Cuba was the first foreign policy objective for the US. We wanted to take
over Cuba. And the Monroe Doctrine was supposed to keep the British out. And
it was discussed, and they understood that they couldn't do it because
Britain was too powerful.
But Adams explained that over time, Britain would become weaker, and the
United States would become more powerful, and over time, he said, "Cuba will
fall into our hands by the laws of political gravitation, the way an apple
falls from the tree." Which is exactly what happened through the nineteenth
century when relations of power shifted, the United States became more
powerful and was able to kick Britain out of one place after another.
In 1898, the United States invaded Cuba. The pretext was to liberate Cuba.
In fact it was to conquer Cuba and prevent it from liberating itself from
Spain, which it in fact was about to do. And then comes the Platt Amendment,
and Guantanamo and all the rest of the story.
That's the Monroe Doctrine. Why is it changing? It's changing because Latin
America has liberated itself. The United States is practically being kicked
out of the hemisphere. That's extremely important. For the last roughly
fifteen years and for the first time in its history, the Latin American
countries have begun to integrate slightly to free themselves from imperial
control to face internal problems, and if you look at the hemispheric
conferences, the United States is increasingly isolated.
At the Santiago conference in 2012, the OAS conference, it never reached any
decisions because they have to be reached by consensus, and the US and
Canada blocked every decision. The major ones were on Cuba. Everybody wanted
it admitted, but the US and Canada refused. And the other was drugs. The
other countries want to end this crazy US drug war which is destroying them,
and the US and Canada refused.
Well, there was another conference coming up in Panama, just a couple months
ago. And Obama recognized, or an adviser recognized, that unless he did
something, the US would simply be kicked out of the hemisphere. So they
moved towards normalization of relations with Cuba. And here, it's presented
as a wonderful benign gesture, bringing Cuba out of its isolation.
Fact is, the United States is totally isolated. In the world, it's
completely isolated. The votes in the UN on the embargo are like 180-2, the
United States and Israel. And in the hemisphere, it was on the verge of
being tossed out. So they make the gestures that are silly - they have to
say those sort of things, or end up being thrown out of the hemisphere.
And we can't intervene at the previous levels - there's plenty of
intervention, but not at the level before. As for giving money to Honduras
and Guatemala, it means giving money to murderers ruling governments that
were installed by US power. The Honduras government was thrown out by
military coup in 2009. This is Obama now. And they were a military
government, ran a kind of a fake election, which almost nobody recognized
except the United States, and it's become a horror chamber.
If you take a look at the immigrants coming across the border, you'll notice
most of them are from Honduras. Why? Because Honduras, thanks to Obama, is a
horror chamber. They're giving money to Honduras, this military regime which
has probably the worst human rights record in the hemisphere. Guatemala has
been a horror story ever since 1954, when the US went in.
So that's the history, but not the sanitized history.
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http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
