Well, almost. He still supports Israel, I think. He's opposed to the BDS
movement.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, March 26, 2018 10:14 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Noam Chomksy: Bernie Sanders Is the Most Popular
Politician in the Country, but the Mainstream Media Is Ignoring Him
Noam Chomsky is, in my humble opinion, the most thoughtful political mind in
America today.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/25/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Noam Chomksy: Bernie Sanders Is the Most Popular Politician in the
Country, but the Mainstream Media Is Ignoring Him By Lynn Parramore,
Institute for New Economic Thinking
25 March 18
The renowned linguist, cognitive scientist, and historian on where we
stand as an economy, as a country, and as human beings
We recently interviewed Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor Emeritus at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Laureate Professor in
the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. He shared
his thoughts with the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) on
foreign policy, dissent in the internet age, public education,
corporate predation, who's really messing with American elections, climate
change, and more.
Lynn Parramore: You've been looking at politics and international
relations for quite a long time. Over the decades, what are the
continuities in these areas that stand out in your view?
Noam Chomsky: Well the continuities are the message of the Athenians
to
Melos: "the powerful do what they wish and the weak suffer what they must"
[from Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War"]. It's often
disguised in humanitarian terms. The modalities and the context
change. The situations change but the message stays the same.
LP: What do you see as the most significant changes?
NC: There are some steps towards imposing constraints and limits on
state violence. For the most part, they come from inside. So for
example, if you look at the United States and the kinds of actions
that John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson could carry out in Vietnam,
they were possible because of almost complete lack of public attention.
I don't know if you know, but as late as 1966 in Boston we could
barely have an anti-war action because it would be violently broken up
with the support of the press and so on. By then, South Vietnam had
been practically destroyed. The war had expanded to other areas of
Indochina. The Reagan administration, at the very beginning, tried to
duplicate what Kennedy had done in 1961 with regard to Central
America. So they had a white paper more or less modeled on Kennedy's
white paper that said the Communists are taking over. It was the usual
steps, the propaganda, but it collapsed quickly. In the case of the
Kennedy white paper, it took years before it was exposed as mostly
fraudulent, but the Wall Street Journal, of all places, exposed the
Reagan white paper in six months. There were protests by church groups
and popular organizations and they had to kind of back off. What
happened was bad enough but it was nothing like Indochina.
Iraq was the first time in the history of imperialism that there were
massive protests before the war was even officially launched. It's
claimed by people that it failed, but I don't think so. I mean, they
never began to do the kinds of things that they could have done. There
were no B-52 raids on heavily populated areas or chemical warfare of
the kind they did in Indochina. By and large the constraints come from
inside, and they understood that. By the time you got to the first
Bush administration, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they came
out with a national defense policy and strategic policy. What they
basically said is that we're going to have wars against what they
called much weaker enemies and these have to be carried out quickly
and decisively or else there will be embarrassment-a way of saying
that popular reaction is going to set in. And that's the way it's
been. It's not pretty, but it's some kind of constraint.
There are increasingly conditions in international law, like the Rome
Treaty [the 1957 treaty that established the European Economic
Community] and so on, but great powers just ignore them if they can
get away with it, and getting away with it means ignoring the
constraints of other states, which, in the case of, say, the U.S.,
don't amount to much. Or internal constraints from changes inside the
society, which have put in conditions of some significance, I think.
It's almost unimaginable now that the U.S. could carry out the kind of
war it did in Indochina, which is something recognized by elite
opinion. A typical example is Mark Bowden's op-ed in the New York
Times the other day about [Walter] Cronkite and how he changed
everything. Well, what did Cronkite say? He said, it doesn't look as
if we're going to win. That's the criticism of the war. That's the way
it was perceived at the time, and that's the way it's still perceived
by intellectual elites. But if you look at public opinion-which
doesn't really get investigated much so it's not too clear what it
means, but it's interesting-the Chicago Council on Global Affairs was
running polls on all sorts of issues in the 70s and 80s, and when the
Vietnam War ended in 1975, about 70 percent of the population
described the war as fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake.
That stayed pretty steady for several years until they stop asking the
question.
The director of the study, John Rielly, interpreted that as meaning
too many American were being killed. Maybe. There's another possible
interpretation of "fundamentally wrong and immoral," which is that the
U.S. was carrying out a crime against humanity. But it was never
investigated because there's too much cognitive dissonance. Elite
intellectuals can't perceive that possibility.
Everybody had a comment when the war ended, and so the hawks said,
"stab in the back" [i.e. civilian critics undermined the military] and
"if we'd fought harder we would have won." The doves went kind of like
Anthony Lewis of the New York Times, who was maybe the most extreme.
In 1975 when the war ended, he said the war began with blundering
efforts to do good. "Efforts to do good" is virtual tautology, facts
irrelevant; and "blundering" means it failed. He said that by 1969 it
was clear that it was a disaster because the U.S. could not bring
democracy to Vietnam at a cost acceptable to us.
That's
the far left critique of the war in 1975. And Bowden, who is writing
from a critical point of view, basically reiterated that point a couple days
ago:
Cronkite's great contribution was to say, "look, it looks as if we
can't win, and if we can't win." I mean, Russian generals said the
same in Afghanistan. We don't honor them for that.
LP: When you talked about protests in Understanding Power before the
digital age, you mentioned that it was difficult for dissenters and
protesters to connect with each other. How has the internet changed
that? Protesters are obviously under surveillance when they are
online, but they are able to connect with each other more quickly. Has
there been a net gain to those who want to object to wars and
oppression? Or is this illusory?
NC: You may remember, during the Tahrir Square demonstrations in
Cairo, which were being organized through social media, at one point
[Hosni] Mubarak actually closed down the internet. That increased the
mobilization.
People just started talking to each other. It's a different kind of
communication. It means a lot more. So I think, yes, social media do
offer opportunities for quick organization and transmission, but
typically at a pretty superficial level. Face-to-face organizing is
something quite different. The same, incidentally, has been found in
electoral politics.
Andrew Cockburn had an interesting article in Harper's during the
[2016] campaign in which he compared studies on the effect on
potential voters of advertising, you know, TV, and the effect of
knocking on doors and talking to people. It was overwhelming that the
latter was more effective. We're still human beings.
LP: Companies like Google and Facebook increasingly control the
information we can access. They've even been enlisted to vet stories,
to weed out fake news, though there's evidence that they may be
weeding out legitimate dissent. Yet they are often applauded as if
they're doing a service. How is this sort of thing affecting our freedom?
NC: It's service for a bad reason. The younger people just don't read
much, so they want something quick, fast, easy. You go through a
newspaper, it takes time. You have to see what's at the end of the
column, not just what's in the headline. So this kind of instant
gratification culture is drawing people to these quick summaries.
Practically everybody's on Facebook (except me).
The other thing they're doing which is kind of interesting has to do
with microtargeting, which is being used for electoral manipulation.
There are some cases, which have not been discussed as far as I know
outside the business press. During the last German election, there was
a lot of talk of potential Russian interference, you know, it's gonna swing
the election.
Well, it turns out there was foreign interference, but it wasn't Russian.
It
was a combination of the Berlin office of Facebook and a media company
in the U.S., which works for Trump, Le Pen, Netanyahu, other nice
guys. They used Facebook in Berlin to get a demographic analysis of
parts of the population to allow them to microtarget ads to
individuals in favor of AfD, the neo-Nazi party, which may have been a
factor in their unexpectedly high vote in the election. This was
reported in Bloomberg Businessweek. This was a real case of electoral
manipulation but somehow it doesn't make the headlines.
LP: Which brings us to the narrative of Russian influence in the 2016
presidential election. I understand you're not very impressed with
this line.
NC: Well it's very hard to take seriously for a number of reasons. One
reason is the work of Thomas Ferguson and his colleagues ["How Money
Won Trump the White House"]. There really is manipulation of
elections, but it's not coming from the Russians. It's coming from the
people who buy the elections. Take his study of the 2016 election
["Industrial Structure and Party Competition in an Age of Hunger
Games: Donald Trump and the 2016 Presidential Election"]. That's how
you interfere with elections. Or the pretty spectacular study that he
and his colleagues did about a year ago on Congress "How Money Drives
US Congressional Elections," where you just get a straight line [the
correlation between money and major party votes in Congress]. You
rarely see results like that in the social sciences. That's massive
manipulation. Compared with that, what the Russians might be doing is
minuscule. Quite aside from the fact that the U.S. does it all the
time in other countries.
LP: It's clear from leaked emails that the Democratic National
Committee meddled with Bernie Sanders in his quest for the 2016
presidential nomination by favoring Hillary Clinton when it was
supposed to be unbiased towards all candidates. What do you think it
would it take for a real reformist candidate, a true populist, to ever win
the presidency?
NC: What it would actually take is popular organization and activism.
With all its flaws, the U.S. is still a pretty free country. In this
case, Democratic Party managers had to manipulate to keep Sanders from
winning the nomination. His campaign, I think, was really spectacular.
I couldn't have predicted anything like it. It's a break with over a
century of American political history. No corporate support, no
financial wealth, he was unknown, no media support. The media simply
either ignored or denigrated him. And he came pretty close-he probably
could have won the nomination, maybe the election. But suppose he'd
been elected? He couldn't have done a thing. Nobody in Congress, no
governors, no legislatures, none of the big economic powers, which
have an enormous effect on policy. All opposed to him. In order for
him to do anything, he would have to have a substantial, functioning
party apparatus, which would have to grow from the grass roots.
It would have to be locally organized, it would have to operate at
local levels, state levels, Congress, the bureaucracy-you have to
build the whole system from the bottom.
It's kind of intriguing now, I'm sure you've seen the polls where he
turns out to be the most popular political figure. Well, in a
functioning democracy, the person who is the most popular political
figure should appear somewhere. But nothing he does gets reported.
It's taking place, it's having effects, but from the point of view of
the liberal media, it's as if it doesn't exist.
LP: What about recent events in California with Senator Dianne
Feinstein, who got a big surprise by failing to win the state
Democratic Party endorsement for a sixth term? Is this like the
Sanders phenomenon, where people who want basic things like universal
healthcare and worker protections are making their preferences heard
by refusing to support candidates who are unresponsive?
NC: She was voted down, and like the Sanders campaign or [Jeremy]
Corbyn in England, there is a groundswell, and if it could be turned
into something sustained and with a serious base, it could mean a lot.
Traditionally, this has always been built around the labor movement,
and that's why the corporate sector is so dedicated to destroying the
unions. It's coming up in the Janus case, which was heard the other
day, which will probably be voted in favor of Janus, which will be a
lethal blow to public unions. [Mark Janus is the plaintiff in the U.S.
Supreme Court case Janus v. AFSCME involving the issue of whether
government employees represented by a union must pay dues to cover the
cost of collective bargaining and resolving grievances].
The whole U.S. private sector is passionate about destroying the union
movement. This has been going on for a long time, but now they really
think they can strangle it because it's the core of activism for almost
anything.
Take a look at, say, healthcare. In Canada, in the 50s, it was the
unions who were pressing hard for national healthcare, and kind of
interestingly, in the U.S. the same unions were pressing for
healthcare for themselves, auto workers in Detroit. These are two
pretty similar countries, but with this striking difference in outcomes on
healthcare.
A more interesting case is England. There's a pretty good article that
just came out in the latest issue of Jacobin, which runs through the
history of British healthcare and it's quite interesting. It began, in
England under Bevan in the late 40s. They got what was the best
healthcare system in the world-still is, probably, and certainly was
then. It started with mine workers in Wales who developed their own
cooperative health system on a small scale. Aneurin Bevan was a Welsh
mine worker. The cooperative system was picked up by the Labour Party
as a program and the Labour Party actually won the election in 1945
and Bevan pushed it through and they got the National Health Service.
Well, there's two points that are critical for the U.S. It's the unions.
That why you have to destroy the unions. You destroy solidarity. It's
same reason for the attack on public schools, the attack on social security.
These are all based on the idea that somehow you care about others,
the community, and so on, and that's completely unacceptable in a
culture where you want to try to concentrate wealth and power. You
don't want people to have anything to do except to try to gain whatever they
can for themselves.
In that case, they'll be very weak, of course. It's only when you
organize together than you can confront private capital.
Secondly, there was a political party. The American political system
probably wouldn't be accepted by the European Court of Justice as a
legitimate system. There's no way for independent parties to enter the
system. The Labour Party in England started as a very small party. But
because the system allows-as most democratic countries do-small
parties to function, they were able to develop and work within
Parliament and expand and get political figures and the government and
finally ended up being a big party. That's almost impossible in the
U.S. If you look at a ballot in the U.S., it says Democrat,
Republican, Other. Nobody can break in. It's a political monopoly. It's two
things that aren't really political parties.
You can't really be a member of the Democratic Party, you can't
participate in designing its programs. You can be a member of the
Labour Party. These are big differences, so I think two huge problems
in the U.S. are the deficiencies of the political system, which shows
up in the kind of things that Tom Ferguson and his colleagues
study-you know, the enormous power of concentrated wealth in
determining the outcome of elections and then the policies afterwards.
That's one, and the other is the destruction of the labor movement.
LP: Let's talk about the attack on public schools, which Gordon Lafer
has outlined in his book, The One Percent Solution.
NC: Yes, a very interesting book.
LP: He discusses efforts by ALEC and other corporate-backed groups to
dismantle public education, to get legislation passed to replace
teachers with online education, increase class sizes, replace public
schools with privately-funded charters, and so on. You've talked about
the history of mass education. How do you see this corporate agenda for
American schools?
NC: You know, mass public education was, with all its flaws, one of
the real contributions to American democracy. It was way ahead of
other countries all the way through, including the college level with
land grant colleges and so on. Europe just began to match that after
World War II. Here it was happening in the late 19th century. Now
there's a real concerted effort to destroy the whole public education
system. ALEC and Koch Brothers just recently announced a campaign
taking Arizona as the test case because they figure Arizona is
probably an easy one since it has probably the lowest per capita
expenditure for education and a very right-wing legislature. What
they're trying to do-they describe it openly-is to try to essentially
destroy the public education system, turn everything to vouchers and
charter schools. It'll be an interesting battle, and if it works in
Arizona they want to do it elsewhere.
It's a huge corporate offensive. It's very similar to attack on unions.
First the Friedrichs [Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association,
in which the Supreme Court deadlocked on the issue of the right of
public-sector unions to collect fees from workers they represent,
including those who don't join the union, to cover bargaining and
other activities], now the Janus case, and they'll probably succeed.
This right-to-work legislation is just unacceptable in other
countries. In fact, in the NAFTA negotiations, at one point Canada
proposed that part of a revision should be to ban measures that
undermine labor rights like the right-to-work legislation. It's kind
of like using scabs. It's just not heard of. But Reagan introduced it
here-I think the U.S. and South Africa were the only countries that
allowed it. In fact, the U.S. has never even ratified the first
principle of the International Labour Organization, the right of
association. I think the U.S. must be alone, frankly. It's very much a
business-run society.
LP: What are students being trained for now in the corporate vision of
education that is taking over the country? What kind of future will
they have? And what does it do to the idea of a democracy?
NC: Students will be controlled and disciplined. The education doesn't
leave any room for interaction, for creative activity, for teachers to
do things on their own, for students to find a way to do things, I've
talked to teacher's groups. I remember once I was giving a talk and a
6th grade teacher came up to me describing experiences. She said that
after one class a little girl came up and said that she was really
interested in something that came up and wanted to know how she could
do some more on it. And they teacher had to tell her, you can't do it.
You have to study for the MCAS, the Massachusetts version of the
regular exam [Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System].
Everything depends on that. Even the teacher's salary depends on that.
So you can't do anything creative as an individual. You follow the
rules. It's the Marine Corps. You do what you're told. No
associations. It's a perfect system for creating a deeply
authoritarian society.
It's also kind of a two-tiered system. It's a little bit like what Sam
Bowles and Herb Gitnis [co-authors of Schooling in Capitalist America]
discussed when they wrote about early mass education. For the general
worker, turn them into industrial workers, but for the elite, you have
to have creativity: MIT, Harvard. You have to have people to create
the next stage of the economy.
LP: In the last several years, we've had a number of protest
movements, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and the #MeToo movement, which
have often met with hostility or dismissal in the liberal press. Take
#MeToo: the protest against workplace sexual harassment and violence
has shown solidarity along class lines and across countries. For
example, Latina farmworkers and Indian feminists back it. Yet some in
the liberal press compare #MeToo protesters to McCarthyites and warn
of witch hunts, despite the fact that the movement is helping to shift
power away from oppressive management towards workers in challenging
things like forced arbitration clauses that deny workers the right to
take charges to court.
NC: It's a very valid protest and it's an important movement. Charges
do have to be subject to some kind of verification. Just allegation is
not enough. As far as I know, the left-oriented groups like EPI
[Economic Policy Institute] are in favor of ending forced arbitration,
which also affects many other kinds of charges. I think they're
focusing on labor rights.
LP: That's true, but it seems that some may not be recognizing #MeToo
as really part of the labor rights struggle.
NC: That's interesting. Yes.
LP: Let's talk about the broader issue of economic inequality. This
year, wealthy elites polled at the World Economic Forum in Davos
listed inequality as number 7 on their list of global worries. They're
more worried about other things, like data breaches and involuntary
migration. Do you think that they may be comforted by the fact that
they've avoided some scary scenarios, like, for example, a real
populist president in the US, and can therefore relax a bit? Should
they be more worried?
NC: The danger that they perceive is that it might lead to a popular
uprising, so you have to control that. There are the standard excuses
about merit, which is a joke when you look at the details. I mean,
take Bill Gates-a perfectly admirable person, but, as I'm sure he'd be
the first to say, he based his fortune on two things, one, decades of
work in the state sector which created the technology - the creative,
risky work which was done since the 50s. He picked it up and marketed
it. The second is the World Trade Organization, which gives him
monopoly-pricing rights. I mean, that's great but.
LP: Kind of goes against the Horatio Alger myth [the belief that
anybody can get rich just by working hard].
NC: Yes.
LP: Finally, as you look ahead, what do you consider to be the biggest
threats to human beings in the future? What should we be most
concerned about?
NC: Climate change and nuclear war. These are really existential threats.
And what's happening now is just astonishing. If media were
functioning seriously, every day the lead headline would be this
amazing fact-that in the entire world, every country is trying or
committed to doing at least something. One country-one!-the most
powerful country in history-is committed to trying to destroy the
climate. Not just pulling out of the efforts of others, but maximizing the
use of the most destructive means.
There's been nothing like this in history. It's kind of an outrageous
statement, but it happens to be true, that the Republican Party is the
most dangerous organization in human history. Nobody, not even the
Nazis, was dedicated to destroying the possibility of organized human
life. It's just missing from the media. In fact, if you read, say, the
sensible business press, the Financial Times, Businessweek, any of
them, when they talk about fossil fuel production, the articles are
all just about the prospect for profit. Is the U.S. moving to number
one and what are the gains? Not that it's going to wipe out organized
human life. Maybe that's a footnote somewhere. It's pretty astonishing.
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