Old Wine, New Bottles: Free Trade, Global Markets and Military AdventuresNoam Chomsky
University of Virginia, February 10, 1993
There are a lot of specific topics that I'd like to talk about, for example Haiti, certainly appropriate at the opening of Haiti Solidarity Week. And I hope they'll be time later to turn to some of them. These opening remarks I'd rather direct to some more general themes in which the specific ones, at least as I understand them, can be best understood and interpreted. There is a very general thesis about contemporary history which is widely proclaimed, in the rich industrial societies of the West, at least. That claim is that history is converging to an ideal of liberal democracy and free markets which are a kind of ultimate realization of human freedom and the accompanying thesis, that we have just emerged from a cosmic struggle in which the ideals of liberal democracy and classical markets have been vindicated. Some even call it the end of history. The reality, I think, if we look at it, is a bit different. Democracy and free markets are in my view declining in the West and they're considered by the rich and the powerful, and in fact, always have been, to be a threat, a problem, a danger that has to be avoided and overcome. As for the 70-year-old Cold War, it certainly existed, but it should be understood in rather different terms, and when understood in different terms, can be seen as part of a much broader conflict, one which is euphemistically called the North-South confrontation but if we were honest, we would just call Europe's Conquest of the World, which has been going on for 500 years, Europe now including the European colony that leads the crusade.
What I'd like to do is say a few words about these topics in the current setting which some call the New World Order. First of all, What about democracy? Before discussing whether it's being deepened or disappearing, we have to understand what we mean by the term. And it has different meanings. Like most terms of political discourse, it has basically two meanings. It has its dictionary meaning, its common sense meaning, and then it has the meaning which is used for the purposes of ideological warfare, which is usually the exact opposite. So in the common sense meaning, a society is democratic, and there could be many dimensions, to the extent that the general public has ways of participating in a meaningful fashion in the shaping of public affairs. Insofar as a society allows that option and fosters it, it approaches democracy and there are many ways in which that could happen. In the what we might call the politically correct meaning, the one imposed by the doctrinal managers, a society is democratic insofar as decision-making is vested in the hands of the business classes and the rest of the population is marginalized or eliminated although they may have formal procedures to participate, but they're not supposed to participate in public affairs.
Now actually if you look at the internal discussions, not the kind that's on the front pages, but where, reasonable, intelligent people are talking to one another, that's the picture that you get, that's the more or less official doctrine about democracy, and it goes way back. It goes back to the earliest democratic upsurge, earliest democratic revolutions in modern democratic revolutions, in 17th century England which caused tremendous fear and outrage among those who described themselves as the "men of best quality." They were deeply concerned that the rabble and a Republic has to be contained, and controlled, and has to be taught to be obedient to their masters. And there's a reason. That doctrine goes right up till the present; it's basically the official doctrine right up till the present and the terminology hasn't even changed a lot, when you come to it. There's also a reason, a kind of a rationale and that's also remained constant over the centuries. The rationale is that the rabble, the general public, are stupid and ignorant. As Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, described the general public, they are "ignorant and mentally deficient." In fact, in the 18th century, they used to be called "beasts in men's shape." They can't be allowed to participate in public affairs or it would be a disaster. I mean, it's like allowing a two-year old to run across the street. So when the franchise is extended through popular struggle, or when in other ways the rabble are given a voice, you have to construct social structures and political structures in such a way to ensure that that voice can't be heard. I mean, maybe they can hear each other, but it can't influence the management of public affairs, otherwise it would be a disaster.
Our own country was founded on the same principle. The leading idea of the Founding Fathers, expressed in what John Jay called his favorite maxim, is that the country ought to be governed by those who own it. His exact words: "Those who own the country ought to govern it." Now they can't do all the managing, of course; they have to delegate that. So they delegate it to people who call themselves "men of virtue." They were going to manage the country in the interests of those who own it, who are the proper governors. Well, that's the fundamental principle of American democracy and American society and it's realized to quite remarkable extent. And many efforts have been made to ensure that it continues to be realized. If there's ever a challenge to it, or a threat, there's a good deal of [cure?]. I'll come back to some contemporary examples. Actually, somebody reminded me on the way in, this is after all Thomas Jefferson's university, and he had some thoughts on that topic too. His thought, and in fact the basis on which he founded the university, was that the university should guarantee the men of virtue, those who were going to govern the country, only have correct thoughts. They have to be indoctrinated in political correctness. It would be extremely dangerous to allow them to hear heretical doctrines. In fact part of the reason for founding the University of Virginia was so that bright young people in the South who were going to be the governing class not be infected by heretical doctrines they might hear in places like, say, Harvard. You know, the center of [laughter]. I should say the British had the same idea. I don't want to get too far afield, but as late as the late 19th century, Cambridge University, which had only total contempt for American studies, of course, you don't worry about the stupid colonials -- some dons at Cambridge decided that it might be a good idea to learn something about the colonies even though they're pretty backward and so on and there was a proposal -- somebody gave some money to bring over a professor from Harvard who'd give some lectures. And there was a big debate among the Cambridge dons and it was finally turned down. And it was turned down because they were afraid he was going to sow revolutionary doctrine and rouse the rabble.
Back to Jefferson, that was just an insult about Cambridge. Now let me return to insults about the University of Virginia. The principle on which, if you look back at Jefferson's letters and the internal discussions and so on about the founding of the university, it was, a major purpose was to ensure that heretical ideas were never thought or were never expressed. There were a lot of problems; it wasn't only Harvard. It's also that the men who were going to govern the country, the men of virtue, obviously had to know the history of England. I mean, you couldn't study law in the colonies without knowing the history of England. And the problem was for Jefferson that the most convincing and persuasive history of England was written by David Hume, who was a Tory and had the wrong ideas. And Jefferson was concerned that people would read Hume's history of England and be misled into improper thoughts. So he therefore proposed, there was a solution, there was an edition of Hume by somebody named Baxter which revised it, cut out all the improper thoughts and put in proper thoughts. And according to Jefferson this was done so elegantly that when you read it, you couldn't tell that it had been revised, it sounded like Hume, although all the bad thoughts were taken out and replaced by good thoughts. And Jefferson tried for quite a few years, I think about twenty years if I remember, to try to get some American publisher to publish this baudlerized version, which of course wouldn't indicate that it was changed, and unfortunately there weren't any publishers dishonest enough to go along with this. But they finally had to, after it became really hard to control the reading matter in this fashion, he finally settled on the idea of ensuring that the faculty would be properly selected so none of them would have any heretical thoughts, and therefore they could be counted upon to constrain, limit the reading material in such a way that the men of best quality would not be tempted into political incorrectness.
The reasons are the same, because if you think the wrong thoughts there might be opportunities for the rabble to get out of their place which is not influencing public affairs. Well, I don't want to go through too much history, but let's just come up to the present. This doctrine of democracy is exactly the one that prevails today. And it has several variants. But a sort of a classic modern formulation of it may be most interesting, most penetrating is by Walter Lippmann. If you look at his essays on democratic and political theory, he was of course the dean of American journalists and a leading and very influential intellectual and on the critical dissident side, I should say, critical of war, the Vietnam War and so on. He wrote one of the major exposures of the American press for duplicity [and wrote big] on the New York Times for the way it portrayed the Bolshevik Revolution and grossly falsified what was happening, as he pointed out, in the interests of state power and policy at the time. So he's kind of on a dissident side, and he wrote important essays on democratic theory. If you look them up in the library, you'll find that they're subtitled "Progressive Essays on Democracy." And he spelled out the way a democracy should function. In a democracy, it's in classical terms, he said there is the problem of those whom Lansing called the ignorant and the mentally deficient. Lippmann called them "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders"; that's the general public. There are ignorant and meddlesome outsiders who are, he said, "a bewildered herd", and we, the responsible men -- the men of virtue who run things -- we have to protect ourselves from the trampling and the rage of the bewildered herd. Otherwise they'll be problems. Now it's a democracy, not a what we would nowadays call a totalitarian state, not an absolutist state, and in a democracy a herd, the rabble have a function, what he called a "function". Their function is to be spectators, not participants. Now it's the job of the respectable people, you know, the 10%, the 20%, whatever it is, to analyze, understand, think, make decisions and so on. And it's the job of the rabble, the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, to stay outside, and we've got to make sure they don't meddle in what's none of their business, namely influencing public affairs.
Now since this is democracy, they have a further function. Periodically, the rabble are permitted to, as he put it, "lend their weight" behind one or another member of the respectable men; that's what's called an election [laughter]. You be our leader or you be our leader, and then they're supposed to go home and do something else and not meddle any longer. And any form of participation in public affairs other than that would be unacceptable. The same ideas are expressed, they go right into the academic literature of political science, primarily through the work of Howard Laswell, who was one of the modern founders of the discipline, who held that, as he put it, we should not succumb to what he called "democratic dogmatisms" about the average man, and we should not forget the stupidity of the average man, we should not fall into the error of believing that the average man is capable of making the right decisions about his own -- always "his" of course -- his own needs and concerns. They can't; that's a mistake. And since we can't control them by force, because it's a democracy, we have to control them by opinion. Now he was writing in the 1930s, when people were a little more open and frank, so he could talk propaganda. He said we have to ensure that there's propaganda, effective propaganda, which will keep the rabble in their place. So the leading, one of the leading figures of modern American thought, Reinhold Niebuhr, who has been called the theologian of the Establishment, he was the guru of the Kennedy administration, and George Kennan and people like that; his view, as he put it, we have to, it's the responsibility of, he said, "rationality belongs to cool observers," a very small group of people, the men of virtue, and nobody else has that gift, but we who have the rationality, we have to keep the simple-minded people on course by feeding them what he called "emotionally potent oversimplifications and necessary illusions." If we can do that, then they'll stay out of trouble, and then the men of virtue can run things without interference.
The doctrine comes right to the present, but as I say, there is a spectrum. I've been sampling the soft-liberal side. That's the side that believes that the population have the right to be spectators. They're allowed to see what's happening. There's also a much harsher side. It's the side that's called "conservatism", in another perversion of discourse. The people who're called conservatives these days are statist reactionaries who believe in a powerful interventionist state which interferes massively in the economy and in international affairs and protects itself from the rabble totally. They're not even allowed to know what it's doing. Any honest conservative would turn over in his grave, say Robert Taft or someone, to see the way the word is being used these days. But the so-called conservatives, their position is that the rabble don't even have the right to be spectators. They're not supposed to know what's happening at all. So the Reaganites are a good example. When I say Reagan, I don't mean the individual who was watching movies or something like that [laughter]. I'm thinking about the symbol; though I mean the group of people who were making decisions in the Reagan administration. So the Reaganites, their view was that the public shouldn't know what's happening. That's why they instituted the largest state propaganda agency in American history when it was finally, the Office of Public Diplomacy, in order to try to propagandize the population and bring it into line with policies the population was opposed to. When it was exposed finally, in the late 1980s, and then of course declared illegal, which of course it was, one of the top administration officials explained that what they were doing was carrying out the kind of policies you carry out in "enemy territory." And that was exactly accurate. From the point of view of the so-called conservatives, the general public are the enemy, and they're living in enemy territory and you got to control them, and one of the ways you control them is by keeping them from knowing what's happening.
Now that's the real meaning of the so-called Iran-contra business. The Reagan administration forged new paths, you know they reached thoroughly new dimensions in clandestine terror and violence operations. We've always had clandestine terror, but they broke some new records in it. And clandestine terror, clandestine operations, are quite typically carried out in order to keep the domestic population from knowing what's going on. Remember, clandestine operations aren't a secret from anybody else. Like the Reaganite clandestine terror operations were not a secret from the victims; they knew about it fine. They were not a secret from the dozen or so "terror states" that the Reaganites enlisted in the cause, to take part in it. The fact of the matter is they weren't even secret to the media and the intellectuals, but they were done at a low enough level so you could pretend you didn't know about them. Until finally it broke out and then you had to admit that you knew about them. But the point is that the general public, the enemy territory, had to be kept ignorant, and that's typically why clandestine operations are carried out. Those of you who've undertaken the task -- which I recommend, it's a lot of fun -- of reading through the declassified record, if you just think through as you go along, "what point was there in classifying this?" at every point, and you find there's almost never a security interest. The interest is almost always to prevent the general public from knowing what the government is doing. It's a good criterion to bear in mind when you work through this record. Occasionally there are the kind of things you might claim have a security interest, but not very often. It's usually the domestic public that they're worried about.
Well, that makes sense in terms of the general theory of democracy. I bring this up because I think we are now moving towards the authoritarian end of the spectrum of democratic theory, that is, the end in which the public is not supposed to know what's going on, they're not supposed to even be spectators. And I think much of what is happening now, including the so-called free trade agreements, are in fact to a considerable extent intended to contribute to that end. There's a close relation between free trade and democracy. What's called free trade, which as I'll mention is not free trade, is in part being pressed to undermine democracy. I'll explain what I mean by that as I proceed. Now I mean democracy in the common-sense sense of the word, not the PC sense meaning "marginalize the public." Sometimes the public does get out of hand; that happens periodically. And then you have to intervene in one fashion or another, often by violence; the United States has a rather violent history. It has a very violent labor history, for example much more so than Europe, because the rabble kept getting out of hand, and you had to beat `em back into submission, often by killing. Hundreds of American workers were murdered by security forces at a time when nobody was being killed in Europe. I mean this was [so] unheard of, that the far right European press was appalled at the treatment of American workers right through into the 1930s. They couldn't believe that this would be so violent. Wilson's Red Scare was an extremely repressive period.
Actually this bears on the ideas of people like Walter Lippmann and Niebuhr and Laswell and the rest of them. If you look through all of this record of democratic theory, you'll notice that one question is always unasked, namely, "How come I'm one of the men of virtue?" It turns out that everybody who's writing this stuff is always one of the men of best quality, you know, the men of virtue, responsible men and so on. So Lippmann, for example, might have asked the question, "How come I'm one of the responsible men and Eugene Debs is in jail? Is it because I'm smarter than Eugene Debs or something like that?" Well, no, it's because Eugene Debs was a labor leader who dared to raise improper questions about the nature of the First World War, and you're not allowed to raise improper questions, because if you raise improper questions the rabble might start thinking. So he's in jail and Walter Lippmann is a member of the responsible class. In fact, the answer to the unasked question is transparent and in fact explained by John Jay's dictum that the men who own the country ought to govern it, and you're one of the responsible men if you do your job for them. If you are working for somebody else, let's say the rabble, you're not one of them. But of course, that doctrine had better remain unexpressed and unthought even by the people themselves. So they doubtless honestly think of themselves as really men of virtue, and they'll find out how much men of virtue they are if they try following Eugene Debs's path. Well that's the unspoken thought you have to add to all the theory in order to make it intelligible.
Sometimes the rabble breaks out, as in the period when Wilson had to institute his Red Scare, for example, crushing independent thought, unions, organizing, in effect, setting the country back with the support, enormous support, of the liberal intellectuals, media and so on, until the time it began to hurt business interests -- they were kicking out too many immigrants and they need the workers -- and then they sort of cut it off. And that led to a period of quiesence, and things broke out again in the thirties, and they had some problems. It happened again in the 1960s. In the 1960s there was a lot of ferment, and it showed up all over the place, and it led to great concerns. It led to concern over what was called a "crisis of democracy." In fact a very intriguing insight into the ideas about democracy on the part of elite elements, again liberal elites in this case, the more libertarian end, is the book which I advise you [reading], it's called the "Crisis of Democracy." It's the first, and in fact only, major publication of the Trilateral Commission, which is a commission made up of sort of liberal elites from Europe, the United States and Japan (it's what Trilateral [is]). It's the group around Jimmy Carter, basically; that tendency of opinion. In fact, the entire Carter administration came from there. They have a book that came out in 1975 called "The Crisis of Democracy" which was the result of a big study. And what is the crisis of democracy? Well, the crisis was that in the sixties sectors of the population that are normally marginalized and apathetic began to become active. So young people and women and minorities and others who usually are quiet -- they're spectators like they're supposed to be -- they became more active and organized, and they even tried to enter the political arena and press their demands. Now if you're naive, you would regard that as democracy, but if you're sophisticated, you understand that that's a crisis of democracy which has to be overcome. They were in complete agreement on this; the only question was on how do we overcome the crisis.
The American contributor, who was the chairman of the government department at Harvard, a political scientist named Samuel Huntington, in his contribution looked back nostalgically to the old days before the crisis, the days of Harry Truman, when as he described it, Truman was able to "run the country with the help of a few Wall Street lawyers and financiers." It's a bit of an exaggeration. Incidentally this kind of vulgar Marxist rhetoric is rather common in high levels of discussion [laughter], you know, Red Books, business journals, secret documents, you find this kind of thing. Obviously it wasn't just a few Wall Street lawyers and financiers, but he got the point. And in those days, he said, there was no crisis of democracy, and everything was fine because the rabble were just spectators. But in the sixties they got out of hand and caused this crisis, and it's therefore necessary to institute measures to return them to their proper place, so the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders go home. And in fact there have been major efforts to that end ever since the early seventies; that's an interesting topic in itself, but we [are going] to put it aside. Although in fact the things like say the free trade agreements are very much part of this; I'll try to bring that together.
Well, before getting to that, let me mention what should be obvious. There's also an international variant of the general theory. The general theory domestically is that the men who own the country ought to govern it, and that it should be managed in their interests by a small group, responsible people who keep the rabble from interfering. That's the basic theory of democracy, and in order to make sure that this works, you have to control their thoughts, as Thomas Jefferson classically pointed out, and make sure they don't think the wrong things, or read the wrong things or hear the wrong ideas, and so on. So you need propaganda, you need an indoctrination system, since you can't control them by force in a free society.
The international variant is also clearly articulated, very lucidly in fact, for example by Winston Churchill in 1945 who wrote that "the government of the world must be entrusted to satisfied nations, the rich men dwelling at peace in their habitations." Our power placed us above the rest, and we want no more, we're satisfied with what we have, so therefore we should rule the world. It's those other people out there who want more who are trouble. They're a problem; they're the meddlesome rabble. And they have to be kept in place. Well since this is international society and not domestic society, the use of force is free. You can use it as freely as you like, so you can carry out aggression and massacre and torture and death squads and so on if they get out of place. The last ten years in Central America are a perfect example. In the last ten years the United States fought a bitter war against the church, the Catholic Church, and other miscreants, who were trying to organize the ignorant rabble, to create Bible study groups that became self-help groups or peasant associations or unions, or in various other ways, to try and get the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders to take some part in shaping their own affairs in one of the most miserable horror chambers in the world. And not incidentally, the one we've had most influence in for about a hundred years, which does raise some questions among those who are willing to stray out of orthodoxy. I leave it to you to think of the possible answers to that question. But this was unacceptable. As a result, a huge horror was organized throughout Central America. About 200,000 people were slaughtered outright -- not just killed, you've got to have a demonstration effect -- so mutilated, tortured, raped, cut to pieces. You know, you [may] have to get people to understand that the rabble doesn't raise their head. The countries have in fact been devastated; possibly they may never recover. Accordingly this is described as a great victory for democracy. The official doctrine about this is that what we did in Central America makes us an "inspiration for democracy in our time," quoting from the New Republic. And that's understandable too. When you carry out a huge massacre and slaughter and torture and so on, and you destroy popular organizations, and you leave society strictly in the hands of the oligarchs and the business classes linked to US corporations, that's democracy in the official sense. So it is a victory of democracy, and if you understand your, if you've learned your lessons, you can see that it makes sense to call that a victory for democracy.
Well, it's not the first time, and it won't be the last time. But that's what you have to do internationally to make sure that Churchill's generalization of the thesis holds, that the rich and the satisfied rule the world. So putting these together, we have a domestic version, at home the rich men rule, the owners rule, internationally the club of the rich men rules. There's an internal conflict of course. Much of the population at home is in the same status as the rest of the world. They have to be controlled as well. In short, there's an internal class conflict. Well again, we can go back to some of the classics for some of the best discussions of this. Just as terms like democracy have two meanings, the writings of the classics, like say Adam Smith, have two meanings too. First of all there's the Adam Smith who actually wrote The Wealth of Nations, and then there's the Adam Smith who has come to the present in a distorted version, misinterpreted for purposes of ideological warfare. If you look at the real Adam Smith, you find that he emphasized, in fact insisted upon, the element of class struggle. [inaudible] proper education. You should know that Adam Smith was a great opponent of mercantilism and colonialism which he said was very harmful to England and therefore should be overthrown, and therefore we have free trade and everything was wonderful.
Well that's half of what he said. The other half is, he said that mercantilism and colonialism were harmful to the general public of England. But he said they were very beneficial to the principal architects of that policy, namely the merchants and the financiers, who enrich themselves in this manner. And since they were the architects of policy, they designed policy for their interests, which incidentally happened to harm the general population of England. And that's typical, he said, because they are simply following what we nowadays call capitalist principles, what he described as the Vile Maxim, all for ourselves, nothing for anyone else. And when the principal architects of policy use state power to follow the vile maxim, they will carry out actions which are of great benefit to themselves, but quite possibly very harmful to the general population. Well, that's adding the class conflict that Smith crucially emphasized that's not part of the bowlderized version that's supposed to get to the men of virtue who are going to run the country. But if you bother to read the materials, which again I recommend, that's what you find. He was no fool. What he wrote doesn't look at all like what is attributed to him. Well, taking Smith's version, which I think is accurate, we expect to find that the architects of policy will be those who have domestic power. In his day, the ones he called the merchants and the financiers. That's pre-corporate capitalism. In our day it's basically corporate institutions, multinational corporations, international banks and so on. They are the principal architects of policy. And quite naturally, exactly as Smith proposed, theorized, they will design policy in their interests. The general public may suffer, but that's none of their business, because they're pursuing the vile maxim: all for ourselves, nothing for anyone else. And internationally, that means ensuring that the conquered world, the South, the Third World, stays in their place, and that the rich men at home get what they need.
Now they have the world at their feet, and they have the domestic population serving them, and they have the men of virtue telling us that all of this is right and just, and that it's not [happening]. In a [great] capsule, that's more or less a picture of the way society writes, and it was right on target in this respect. Well I may have a chance to refer to him again, I mean the real Adam Smith, not the one who [stumps] for the canon, not Baxter's version of Hume, but actual Hume. Apologies to the founder of your university for departing from principle on this.
Well, there are various methods for imposing order. If it's say El Salvador, you can send out the death squads. If it's the Soviet Union, a totalitarian state, you send the people to, you know Sakharov goes into exile, Havel goes into jail, and so on. If it's a US-run dependency, you don't use those soft means; you use terror, torture, mutilation; you murder, tear `em to shreds, and so on. Now we don't make those comparisons here, but people in the Third World are not constrained by our doctrinal requirements, so Latin American writers quite commonly point out that bad as things were in Eastern Europe, the Eastern Europeans were lucky compared with Latin Americans. I mean, they only get sent to jail, in the post-Stalin period at least. [Before it was much worse.] But in the post-Stalin period, they usually got sent to jail or exiled, or something like that, whereas their equivalents in Latin America would be murdered. So the Jesuit publication in El Salvador, when the Jesuits were murdered in 1989, pointed out that with regard to Havel, that he had a bad time, but he's lucky he wasn't in Central America, or he never would have made it. He would have ended up with his brains blown out. That's the way we run things there.
So there are various means of controlling people. At home, we usually, sometimes we use those methods but rarely, usually we use softer means, indoctrination, the Jeffersonian technique, indoctrination and thought control to ensure that people don't have to right the wrong thoughts. That makes it a much freer society, and a much easier one to live in. I should say it's a big improvement. One shouldn't understate that; it's a big improvement, not to have to be killed by death squads. And we should be thankful for that. But it's still supposed to keep the same structure in place, the same basic structure in place.
Now how do you do it? Well, the basic technique has got to be thought control, and US business happens to be highly class-conscious, an unusually class-conscious business community. And they've been thinking about this throughout our entire century. In fact, if you look at the history of the public relations industry, a US invention, from the early part of the century, it was designed, as its initiators put it, in order to "control the public mind." And the reason was that the public mind was the greatest threat to corporations. So therefore you have to carry out a vast propaganda campaign to ensure that the rabble stay on course. And the public relations industry spends probably billions of dollars a year to do this. And by now it goes over all sort of things, from straight indoctrination, you know like making sure you read the right books and read the right editorials and so on, to television sitcoms, which give you a certain view of the way life is supposed to be lived and inculcates values, essentially trains you to be a passive observer, a passive consumer with artificial wants, stimulated so you work hard and obediently to get those things you don't really want. You don't have any work problems, in fact, you have no work at all; you just have personal problems. So you're a passive, isolated atom of consumption, and an obedient servant who does what they're told. That's basically the picture that comes across.
When it's necessary, there has been some marginal effort in the cinema and so on to deal with unions. There's an interesting [book?] about this if you're interested in the history. Typically, unions are presented as anti-worker organizations. The typical movie about unions is something like On the Waterfront, where Marlon Brando is the heroic worker who stands up against the corrupt union and defends the workers against the union; that's the hero. The unions are an alien element which tried to break up our harmony and harm the workers, and you gotta protect yourself from them. That's the theme that goes all the way through.
Consciously designed, incidentally. Very interesting business propaganda about this in the late 1930s. Business was terrified when American workers finally got the rights that they'd had in Europe sixty years earlier, namely the right to organize, and they won their first legislative victory, the Wagner Act which gave them the right to organize -- first and last legislative victory. Business was terrified, there was all kinds of frenzied discussion in the business journals. They turned to what were called "scientific methods of management" to try to overcome this threat of democracy and unionization, and started right off in fact. And the main technique was to use public relations methods -- I mean they also continued to use force, workers still got killed -- but the main idea was to use public relations techniques, propaganda, to try to create an image of us vs. them. In fact, it was called the Johnstown Valley formula; it worked so well in breaking steel strikes in the late thirties. The Mohawk Valley formula [started] in Johnstown Valley, Pennsylvania. The idea was to present an image of us vs. them, where us is the sober worker with his lunch-pail, the housewife you know preparing dinner, the hard-working executive toiling sixteen hours a day for the benefit of everybody, the honest editor turning out the truth. That's us; we're all in harmony. And then there's them, you know these aliens, these outsiders who are disrupting our harmony and are anti-American, and this and that and the other thing, and you present these images in the press and in those days the radio, nowadays television, and the pulpit and so on and so forth, and you can kind of mobilize the public, they hoped, and it succeeded very often, into defending us and our harmony, the harmony of the worker and the executive, against them, the outsiders who are trying to disrupt. That's the formula that's produced, and it runs through a whole long period of public propaganda. By that I mean things, everything from comic strips to movies to, these days, television, and so on. Well, that's one of the techniques for controlling the public mind.
Another technique, and this again goes in classical political theory back as far as Montesquieu at least, maybe beyond, it's pointed out that if you really want to run an absolutist state, what we nowadays call a totalitarian state, you have to isolate people from one another. Because if people can get together, they start having bad thoughts. So what you want to do is isolate them. Then they're passive against the system of power and can't do anything. And we've refined that to a very high level in the United States. It's a very isolated population. People are stuck alone in front of the tube to a remarkable extent. And that makes them pretty defenseless. You don't, there are no organizations, that's why there's been such an enormous effort and successful effort to destroy unions, it's proceeded here way beyond anything else, to the extent that in fact the United States was recently censured by the ILO, the International Labor Organization, which is extremely rare, for its anti-union activities which are not tolerated anywhere in the Western world, like hiring strike-breakers to break strikes. But unions have been virtually destroyed. There is no political organizations; there's no political parties, just candidate-producing organizations, nothing like say even something minimal like the Canadian NDP, nothing like that's possible.
And you see the effect. I mean, that's why the United States is sort of off the spectrum on most social issues. The big question now is about health, but that's just typical. We're the only industrial country that doesn't have a health policy. And we can't have one. We cannot have a health program that's efficient, cheap and works for the general public. If you want to know the answer why, you want to see the way propaganda works, I would advise today's New York Times, which I happened to pick up in the airport. There's a big front-page story running over a whole inside page about the brilliant new plans for health being developed, called managed health care. If you look through it, you'll notice some incredibly complex arrangement, which is going to involve tons of paperwork and administration and bureaucracy, and is going to require on the part of the public enormous information. The example that they praise as the magnificent case is one where people have to choose among nineteen private organizations, to see which one gives the best health care. Just try that one out in your spare time. I don't know if any of you've ever had to, most of you are too young to fill out Medicare forms and so on, but the amount of bureaucracy and administration in the US system is vastly beyond than any other country, probably ten times as high as say Canada or England. And the reason is that it's privatized, and therefore highly inefficient, very bureaucratized, and doesn't reach most of the public. So our health costs are out of sight, and it's got to stay this way.
And in this long article, you'll notice one sentence, one sentence, quoting somebody from the Harvard Medical School saying, look -- it would be much better to have a single-payer system like Canada. In fact, everybody. We [tolerate] Canada because it's next door. Everyone has it. That gets one sentence in the article. And then there's another sentence, separately, which says why that can't happen, namely quoting one of the insurance executives saying the problem with the Canadian system is that it offers no role for the insurance companies.[laughter] Therefore we're going to continue with highly inefficient, bureaucratized system, many layers of government bureaucracy, tons of paperwork, inefficiency. When you have insurance companies running it, you've got to have a lot of those [administrators] to make sure they don't run away with the store. After all, they're following the vile maxim, don't forget. So that'll continue, and part of the reason for this departure from, incidentally what wasn't mentioned is that in polls about 70% of the public prefers this unacceptable option, even though no one advocates it. You can't find an editorial or commentary saying look we ought to be like everybody else in the world; that's outlandish. Although no one advocates it, and everyone is isolated, alone in front of the tube, or whatever, still, 70% of the population wants that unacceptable variant.
You can understand why the rabble have to be put in their place. If they're allowed to express their views, you do get into real trouble. There might not be gifts for the insurance industry. And incidentally that's true on issue after issue. If you bother taking a look at public opinion studies, you'll notice that they radically differ from policy, from the array of policy options on issue after issue after issue. The democratic theorists who have pointed out the need to ensure that the public is put in their place, they know what they're talking about. If you don't put the public in their place, you're going to get all kinds of problems. In Europe they didn't, in Canada they didn't entirely succeed in putting the public in their place. They did have active unions, and they were able, with other public organizations and parties, to push through a kind of social contract, which makes them much more humane societies, also much more efficient in many respects. But we can't do that, because here we're more towards the capitalist end of the state-capitalist spectrum, meaning more inhumane, following the vile maxim more efficiently, hence without the kind of social protections that are taken for granted throughout the rest of the industrial world. So isolating people is the technique.
And a third technique, and here we come to what should have been the main topic finally, raising decision-making to a level so remote from the public that they don't even know what's going on. That's the ultimate destruction of democracy, and that's what we're moving to now in my opinion. I think that's exactly what's involved in things like GATT and NAFTA and so on and so forth. They're not changing things (NAFTA is the North American Free Trade Agreement and GATT, you know, the general international agreements on trade [General Agreement on Tarriffs and Trade]). If you actually look at what's being introduced in those agreements, it really doesn't change a lot, it just sort of stabilizes what's going on. But it locks it into place. The point of the agreements is to lock it in place so public opinion can never change it. Let's have a look and see how that works.
NAFTA is an interesting case. And it shows clearly, I think, if you look at it closely, it shows the relation between so-called free trade and democracy. I keep adding so-called free trade, because let me stress that none of these things called free trade agreements have anything much to do with free trade. One of the main US positions, both in NAFTA and in GATT, is to try to increase protection. A major theme of the US stand in both of these agreements is to increase protection for things in which the US has an advantage. Now that's what is called intellectual property. Intellectual property means new technology, the technology of the future. The US still has an advantage in that; we do dominate patents in software and that kind of stuff. So the idea is to try to raise the protectionist barrier around that, to protect intellectual property, to ensure that others can't get in on it. Crucially that means making certain that US corporations, like say the pharmaceutical industry is extremely profitable, and incidentally is a state-subsidized industry, publicly subsidized industry like every functioning part of the economy. The public pays for the research and development and so on and so forth, and [it] gives the profits to someone else, so it's called private enterprise. So these publicly subsidized industries must be protected so that they can monopolize the drugs that are concocted this way, and therefore raise them out of sight so nobody can afford them and make huge profits which they mostly spend on things like packaging and advertising.
Those protections have to be increased, and in fact the same is true in all of biotechnology. So in fact one of the major things that is going on now is that in everything from genetic engineering to pharmaceutical [companies?], people are raiding the Third World. The Third World is the main source of bio-diversity. And over thousands of years, people in the Third World have cultivated and created species. You know, they created seeds that work in a particular environment, and they've discovered plants that heal, and they've done a huge amount of work. Of course they don't get protected for any of those rights. [No], they're the Third World; we rob them. You know, their job is to get robbed. So when a drug company goes and uses the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of thousands of years of peasant agriculture to look for the right kinds of seeds or the right kinds of herbs or whatever, they don't get anything out of it. In fact in addition this is mostly women's knowledge, which makes it even less worthwhile. It's mostly things that women do, agriculture and so on, and the women teach it to their daughters. And they have a huge accumulated store of knowledge, so it's not only worthless because it's the Third World but it's multiply worthless because it's women in the Third World. So they just get robbed.
And then the drug companies and the biotech industries and so on take those things and introduce some slight modifications and then patent them. And then we force the Third World to take them. We force them in very simple ways. We force them into export agriculture. And we can do that because we're very powerful. And export agriculture does require something different than what they've been doing, so they got to use the seeds we sell them, having modified what they've created. But then we patent it, so they can't reuse their seeds. The farmer in the Third World is going to have to pay royalties if he tries to reuse the seeds. Same with drugs. I mean, India, say can produce drugs at, you know, a fraction of what they buy them from the United States. So therefore we have to ensure the protectionist barrier prevents them from doing that, so that Indians die because they can't afford drugs that they could get for a penny, while we ensure the wealth of the US-based corporations, which are publicly subsidized corporations in the first place.
Well, it goes on like this across the board. Notice this has nothing to do with free trade. It's called free trade, but it's just a particular variety of protectionism designed by the principal architects of policy in pursuit of the vile maxim, just as Adam Smith said. It's all written there in the Wealth of Nations, if you read the actual text, instead of the politically correct version given to you. And he's exactly right, and that's the way it translates into the modern period.
The connection with Canada is particularly interesting. The Canadian health, take say health care again, which is a big concern. The Canadian health care system is a real bother to people in the United States. They don't care much about Germany and places like that, because nobody sees that, but it's hard not to see Canada. It's like just a couple miles away. The people are just like us, you know, sort of the same society. So it's hard not to notice that they have a functioning health care system. And therefore since we can't prevent people from seeing it, we better destroy it. And part of the reason for the so-called free trade agreement is to destroy it. So the Canadian health care system is by now being considered an unfair interference with free trade, because it imposes burdens on American manufacturers who have to pay higher costs for health because of our inefficient system. So that interferes with free trade, so they gotta give up their efficient system.
Or take drugs. Part of the, one of the ways in which Canada succeeds in keeping medical costs down is by allowing generic drug production. You know, you produce instead of Bayer Aspirin, you just produce aspirin, which is the same thing, it just doesn't have Bayer written on it. And the same is true across the board. I mean, some of the very expensive drugs, like [Lovastatin?] say, which is an anti-cholesterol drug which costs an immense amount, you can produce it for virtually nothing. It's a monopoly in the United States protected by patents, so it goes through the roof. But they just produce the generic drug, and that of course reduces health costs. You know, it makes drugs available to people and reduces costs. Well, we're now trying to force Canada to accept our highly protectionist measures. One of the major elements of NAFTA, actually it's in already in the Canadian-American variant of this, but we want to extend it in NAFTA, is to ensure that they can't do that. So they have to buy the high-priced drugs produced by mostly US-based corporations, which are subsidized in the first place by the taxpayer, which is why they were able to develop. And for a country like Canada, you know, it'll be costly, but for a country like India, it just devastates. I mean, about 11 million children die every year in the Third World, every year, just because of lack of access to simple drugs, sometimes things like water with salt in it. And you got to make sure that that continues. That's why we pursue protectionist efforts in what is called free trade agreements.
So one reason why I keep adding so-called is that the free trade isn't free trade. It's a mixture of liberalization and protection designed by the principal architects of policy in the service of their interests, which happen to be whatever they are in any particular period. If you read through the details of the GATT negotiations, you find this is exactly what is going on. In fact, the United States is one of the most protectionist countries in the world, constantly being denounced by GATT for violations. For example, all of our embargoes are violations of GATT, every one of them. In fact we were condemned by the World Court for illegal embargo, illegal economic warfare in violation of free trade. We're the only country that achieved that status. The whole Pentagon system, meaning the Pentagon, NASA, the rest of it, all in violation of free trade; it's a protectionist system. It's a system that compels the public to pay the costs of high-technology industry. That's in fact what it was designed for, I mean apart from its international function of beating people over the head, it had a major domestic function, namely to ensure the viability of advanced sectors of industry, electronics and so on. You go back to the business literature of the 1940s, they're very frank about it, it's not a secret except from the population again. Well all of this stuff is a gross violation of any sort of free trade.
Now again there's a spectrum, like the Reaganites were extreme in their protectionist efforts. The Reaganites introduced more protectionist measures than all the preceding post-war administrations combined. They in fact virtually doubled, from 12 to 23%, the percentage of imports subject to one or another kind of duty. They wanted to reconstruct the American steel industry, so what they did was just bar imports, flat out. We don't need any rules, we're strong, we're big guys, we're tough guys, we're the toughest guy on the block. When we say, "You don't send us steel," they don't send us steel. You don't need any law. So we blocked off the steel market. The state intervened to destroy the unions, so you get cheap non-unionized labor. The result is we have what the business press called "a lean, efficient steel industry" which has recaptured its position in the world market. Yeah, that's kind of [?]. The US was falling behind in chips, fine, we set up a government-industry consortium in which the public pays the costs and the industry gets the profits. And we were able to recapture a place in chips. So it shows across the board. There is no functioning sector of the economy in which this isn't true. And the same is true of every other industrial society.
The only people that are supposed to follow these rules are the Third World, and we want them to follow the rules because then we can rob them. If we follow them, they'd be able to rob us, so we're not going to follow them. In fact in the whole history of industrial society, there isn't a single example that I've been ever able to find of any successful industrial society that developed by following these rules. They all developed, from England up to South Korea, by radically violating them, including us. The only countries that have followed them have been devastated, and if you think about it, you'll see why obviously. So there is a spectrum on the degree of protectionism, with the Reaganites being at the more protectionist end, but everyone believes it, everyone believes in state intervention to ensure the viability of the domestic economy.
If there were any people, outside of ideologues, who believed in the viability of capitalism, that was finished by the time of the Great Depression. By the time of the Great Depression, everybody realized realized this system is hopeless. And nobody's even played with it since then. Ever since then, in fact the people who learned it best were just the ones who had to, the corporate managers who flocked to Washington to run the wartime economy, which was a kind of command economy, a sort of totalitarian economy. And it was very efficient. US industrial production more than tripled; they were able to get out of the Great Depression -- the New Deal measures had done virtually nothing. And they learned the lesson: massive state intervention, meaning organizing the public subsidy, and direction, and regulating the disorderly markets and so on and so forth, that can maintain a system of private privilege, but nothing else can. And that's the way we've been ever since, just as every industrial society in somewhat different techniques.
Well, that's why I'm hesitant about calling any of these things free trade, so when I say free trade, I mean in quotes, you know the kind of thing, the kind of protectionism we call free trade. The point of all of these things, however, is in a way different. It's to remove decisions out of public control, and you can see it very clearly by looking at NAFTA. Let's take a look at it. The North American Free Trade Agreement, which is going to unify Canada, the United States and Mexico, there is a good deal of technical disagreement about what the exact impact will be, and there's room for debate, because the fact of the matter is that nobody knows. I mean, when economists make forecasts, it's kind of like what's called chaos, you know, you make a minuscule change in the assumption, you get a huge change in the predictions, and nobody knows anything about the assumptions. So the things that are called predictions are mostly ideological doctrines of one sort or another. The fact of the matter is that nobody really knows what the overall effect will be, but some things are pretty clear. One thing that everyone has agreed on is that it's going to be a bonanza for investors. They're going to make hay, in the United States and Mexico and Canada. Everyone agrees on that, and it's pretty obvious. Their rights are protected. In fact, things like protection of new technology is built into it, in the manner that I described. They can't lose; they're going to win. Furthermore, they can change the rules any time they feel like. They can't lose.
What about the effect on the general, it's also pretty widely agreed, it's hard to doubt this, that the impact on the environment will be negative. In fact, that you can already see. The effect of GATT and NAFTA regulations is to override federal and state and local conditions on things like health and environmental protection. So for example, the US has rules that restrict the pesticide DDT in imported food. Okay, that's in violation of free trade; it's overridden by the free trade agreement. GATT in fact ruled that we have to keep to what are called "international standards." What are international standards? Well, international standards, if you look, are set by a committee that meets in Rome, which consists of corporation executives and corporate lawyers, mostly from agribusiness. They decide what are the appropriate international standards, and if say, you know, Virginia decides to try to protect its population by going beyond them, or the United States does, that's knocked out because it's in violation of free trade. Actually, the US just lost a case with Mexico because Americans had decided they didn't want dolphins killed when tunafish were caught, and therefore insisted that tunafish should have on it a label saying something like you know "Dolphin Safe" or something, meaning using techniques that didn't catch dolphins. Mexico brought a charge against the United States, and they won, because these labels on the can are interference with free trade. So now you can be sure that when you eat tunafish you're getting plenty of dolphin [laughter].
And that's the way it goes on every health and environmental issue. They're all going to be overridden, and that's part of the point. Part of the point is to guarantee that the vile maxim works, that there's no interference with business rights, with profits, with the vile maxim, from anything like public opinion, the rabble, which might have feelings about health or environment and so on. And in fact, it's said, it's said quite openly. You know, here's a quote from the head of, the CEO of United Technologies, which is part of our private enterprise system, it's almost entirely a state- subsidized system, industry....
[tape flips]
...this is 1983 when he was describing the new policies that the Reaganites were going to be carrying out, said, "We need a world business environment that is unfettered by government interference." And he listed things like packaging and labeling requirements, you know for example, labeling on foods that says you know "this is dangerous to your health" or something, or telling you how much medicine you're allowed to take or something. Those are government regulations which interfere, that's government interference, we got to stop it, because we need a world business environment that's unfettered by all of this. And that's one big part of GATT and NAFTA. And that part is almost certain to follow.
As for the general population, it gets more complex. There's a fair argument that most of the work force, probably a large majority of the work force in all three countries will suffer from, if you, it's getting late so I won't go through details, but there's a plausible argument to that effect. However let me turn more to the question of democracy directly. The US has trade legislation, the NAFTA agreement was initialed on August 12th by the three presidents. August 12th, that's right in the middle of the presidential campaign. Now whatever else you think about this, nobody doubts it's going to have a big effect on policy -- a big issue. And here it comes right in the middle of the presidential campaign, a big issue, take a look back or remember back and ask how much discussion there was of it. Well, there were a couple of ritual phrases -- you know, a few odd phrases. The press is almost a 100% in favor of it. No critical voices get in, because it's the business press after all, and they like it. Investors are going to be fine; everybody agrees on that.
What about the public? Well, you know it's like this health business again. Even though the public has never heard any criticisms, they're against it. In fact by about 2--1, the public is against NAFTA, even though they've never heard any criticisms, and they don't even know the reasons, because they can't have heard it. In fact they can't even know the content of the NAFTA agreement because it was a secret. It was an executive secret. So here's a secret agreement. A little information leaked out, enough so that the public's 2--1 opposed to it, it was coming up right in the middle of an electoral campaign. Nothing, you know. It's going to sail right through Congress; they've already put it on a fast track. Unless there's an enormous amount of public uproar, it's just going to sail through, because the principal architects of policy recognize that it is in their interests. Period. That's why you have to ensure that democracy doesn't function.
Now a good deal of care was taken in this case. There is US trade legislation, the Congressional Trade Act of 1974, which requires something called the Labor Advisory Committee, a union based committee, have an analysis and advisory role on any trade related legislation, obviously this. Okay, the Labor Advisory Committee was notified in fact that their report would be due on September 9th, so one month after the agreement was initialed. They were given the text of the agreement on September 8th in this case, to make sure that they wouldn't even have time to convene. Now labor bureaucrats are not a very radical bunch of people. They're very conservative, in fact. But they were infuriated. They wrote a long report, interesting report, and they were infuriated by two things: first the utter contempt for democracy and for law, namely providing them with the text of this secret agreement 24 hours before they had to write a lengthy report -- it's a big, complicated agreement, and an analysis takes time -- to make sure they couldn't say anything about it; then the rest of the report is about content, to the extent that they could make anything of it in 24 hours. And it was a very negative account. They said, look, this thing protects the rights of investors and says nothing about the rights of workers. Well that's there for a purpose. You want to make sure that you can drive work down to high-repression, low- wage areas, so that the vile maxim is maximized, so you get what [everybody?] wants, a business climate favorable to investors. In fact, the purpose of NAFTA, as was pointed out by the head of Eastman Kodak, is primarily as he put it, "to lock in the opening of Mexico's economy." That is, to make sure that Mexican public opinion doesn't rethink any of this and make changes. We want to lock it in and make sure that it's going to stay exactly like this. And the same for the American public and the Canadian public, and the same for GATT.
Well, without proceeding in detail, if you look through these things, here's what you discover. Decision-making on major issues is now vested in international institutions which are so remote from public influence, that the public has no idea what's going on. I mean, in the case of NAFTA, incidentally the Labor Advisory Committee report was never reported in the press, right, I'd be surprised if any of you know about it, here's a case where the government radically violated the law, demonstrated utter contempt for the democratic process, rammed through a secret executive agreement of enormous influence, wouldn't even let the one popular group that is supposed to see it by law, the labor- based group, even look at it, they write the report, and then the press censors it. All right, here we have the ultimate in the destruction of democracy, the ideal that everybody's been dreaming of. Not only is the rabble excluded, they don't influence policy, but they don't know what's in policy, and finally they don't know that they don't know. Virtually nobody knows that they don't know what is going on. Well, you know, now we've reached the ultimate. That's the ultimate possibility in the destruction of democracy.
Now in the United States this issue isn't discussed much. In Europe it's discussed a lot. As I said, Europe is more politicized. They still have things like unions and so on. Part of the fuss about the European Community that you read about is a fuss over what's called in European Community parlance, "the democratic deficit," meaning the vesting of decision-making in executive groups that are beyond the influence of Parliaments, which to some extent reflect public involvement. That's called the democratic deficit, and a lot of people don't like it. You know, I mean they want to have, they care about the things that happen in their own communities and their lives and their children and so on; they want to have something to say about that. They don't want bureaucrats in the international institutions to make those decisions in secret and not tell them about it. However the point of these agreements is to increase the democratic deficit, to establish it, to lock it in place with international treaties that public opinion will not be able to modify, because they're international treaties. That's the idea. And things like the IMF and the World Bank and the GATT and the NAFTA and the EC and so on are efforts to create that network of international institutions which is completely uninfluenced by the rabble -- can't be influenced because for one thing they don't even know what's going on. Who knows what's going on in the GATT negotiations? Who knows what's happening in the G-7 executive meetings? I mean, unless you're a specialist, you can't know. You know, you got to take out a major research project to find out what's going on, but that's the major framework of decision-making to which all of the institutions influenced by the rabble, like parliaments, will be subject. That's the idea.
Furthermore, in the business press, which is usually quite honest about these things, it is described with quite engaging frankness. So if you read say the London Financial Times, a major international business journal, they had a front-page article a little while back about what they called the New Imperial Age, which I thought was terrific incidentally. In the New Imperial Age, they said, there's a de facto world government developing, namely just the institutions I mentioned, you know, GATT, IMF, World Bank and so on, which is making very broad decisions to which everyone is going to have to conform, and thankfully doing it in secret. And representing the interests of the real centers of power, namely transnational corporations and supranational banks. If you look through history, there's nothing surprising about this. Government institutions, governing institutions, have usually, almost always I guess, coalesced around domestic power. Now in the last couple hundred years, domestic power is mostly economic power. In the modern period, it's mostly corporate power. In the very modern period, it's mostly transnational corporate power. So naturally it's developing its own governing institutions, as always, and it's always doing it with the same purpose in mind, to keep the rabble out. There are now new ways of doing this, and that's the new imperial age which is hailed.
Well, I don't want to try your patience too long. I wanted to say some things about the Cold War. Let me just say a word about how that fits into this. One part of this world system, you know, European conquest, is that the Third World is not allowed to raise its head. It's a service area. Now of course in the Third World itself there's this same class struggle that Adam Smith talked about. That is, inside the Third World, there are rich powerful elites, linked to international power. They're very small in the Third World -- they're much bigger in the rich countries -- and they want to keep their own populations down. Okay, so it's an obvious system that you don't have to spell it out [?]. But the Third World in general has to be kept in its service role. They have to provide raw materials and cheap labor and investment opportunities and markets, these days opportunities for export of pollution, and new [interest?] and so on. That's their job.
Well, what's the Third World? Well, it's mostly the part that was conquered by the West -- you know, Latin America, Africa and so on. But bear in mind that the original Third World was Eastern Europe. In fact, even before Columbus, Europe was split along a fault-line which incidentally runs right through Germany and is not too far from where the Cold War was fought. The Eastern part was underdeveloped. It was moving into servitude. It was becoming a typical Third World service area for the slowly-emerging, at that point, very early stages of Western European development. The differentiation actually is notable in the 15th century, and it goes right on. By the early twentieth century, most of Eastern Europe was deep Third World, deep colonized Third World, and getting worse, falling further and further behind.
Well when a country like Grenada, a little speck in the Caribbean, pulls itself out and tries to say organize fishing collectives, the whole force of US power moves in to crush them. It started under Carter with economic and other warfare, and then it was finally consummated in an invasion [which threw it out] -- no more fishing cooperatives. All you have is international banking laundering money. In fact it's the only part of the economy that's functioning, while the rest of it sinks back into desperation. Well Grenada you can knock over in a weekend. A sixth of the world you can't knock off in a weekend. It took seventy years. But in fact that's pretty much what was going on. Now it's much more complex, and they're many more dimensions, there's a lot to talk about. You know, Grenada and a big, huge tyranny with a lot of military force are not the same thing, but the logic is very similar.
And it's very striking, if you look through this whole period, you discover strikingly that Stalin's crimes were never anybody's concerns; nobody cared. You go back to say, remember the first stage of the Cold War, from 1918 up to 1939, broken off by the war, nobody thought that Russia was going to be aggressive in those days. I mean, however awful they were, they weren't going to invade Germany or something. Nobody was that crazy. Nevertheless the same policies were followed, containment, rollback, embargo and so on, because of the Bolshevik threat, namely the threat of independence. We supported Hitler for that reason, we did. We supported Mussolini for that reason enthusiastically, because they were barriers to this threat. As soon as the war intervened, we picked it up right again in 1945, the same position. Now the piece of the Third World that had been cut out was bigger, and included a lot of Eastern and in fact Central Europe.
But Stalin's crimes were of no concern to anyone. If you look back at the internal discussions, now all declassified, you find that Truman for example said he liked Stalin, he was the kind of guy we can deal with, what happens in Russia is none of my concern, he said. You know if he wants to kill 30 million people, that's his business. We can get along with him fine, he said. In fact if he dies, it would be a catastrophe. The only condition is, Truman added, we have to get our way 85% of the time. If that works, everything will be fine. Then he can go on you know murdering people, or anything he likes. And that was the general position. Stalin's crimes were of no account, any more than Saddam Hussein's were, any more than Hitler's were, any more than Noriega's were, to take a very minor thug.
What's important is independence. If they're independent, you got to destroy them, whether they're priests organizing in El Salvador or Saddam Hussein after he committed the first crime in his life, namely disobeying orders on August 2nd, 1990. If he wanted to gas Kurds, that's none of our business; we keep giving him arms. But don't cross us. Don't disobey orders. Play your Third World service role. That's the way the histories work. Okay, the Soviet Union was a big military force. In fact, it had been back in the 18th century. It was never an economic power of any great significance, though it was advancing, which was a worry to everyone because it was a model other Third World countries wanted to follow. By around 1960 it hit the peak of its influence. By the sixties, the economy was declining visibly. If you take a look at social statistics, the kinds of things that measure what's happening in the economy, like infant mortality and life expectancy and so on, it starts to decline around the sixties. The Russians were forced into a huge military spending program by the Kennedy administration, which harmed them even more. But by the seventies, even military spending was levelled off, despite a lot of lies about it. And by the early eighties they collapsed, and they're moving right back into the Third World. They're moving right back where they were. They're picking up standard Third World characteristics: a rich elite, which is incidentally mostly the old Communist party.
If you're a Western banker or businessman, and you want to set up a branch office in Warsaw, Poland, and you want to get somebody to run it, who're you going to look for? Well you know, the guys who know the ropes, who know their way around, who have influence and so on, yeah the old nomenklatura, the guys who always ran the place and now are going to run it for you. So these people are now the new capitalists. They are becoming the Third World elite. The general population is sinking into misery like most of the Third World, and in fact the general pattern is being reconstructed. Now that's a heterogeneous region, you know, like a big place. I'm giving a very broad brush stroke, and different parts are different, but as a generalization that's pretty much what's happening. And in fact in its logic, it's not all that different from Grenada or Nicaragua or El Salvador, or any other place where people raise their heads. They can be nice guys, horrible guys, it doesn't make the slightest difference. It's the independence that's the constant. If they're independent, they got to go, because of the maxims that I mentioned, and the same is true domestically.
Well, with the end of, part of the function of the Third World is to enable the rulers at home to control their own population. So especially as the economy is becoming what's called globalized, you know much more mobility of capital and much easier to have production somewhere else and bring it back here and so on, the internationalization of the economy that everybody talks about, well that is a corollary, a very obvious corollary, of the internationalization of the Third World model. If you can can shift production to high-repression, low-wage areas, that means you don't have production in areas where people have over time succeeded in defending their rights. So take General Motors, the biggest corporation. As you know, they're trying to close down a couple dozen plants in the United States and Canada, but they are the biggest employer in Mexico, because there they can get cheap labor, not because of the invisible hand, but because of the very visible hand of the Mexican security forces, which murder labor leaders and have succeeded in destroying unions and have succeeded in lowering the average wages in Mexico, which were never very high, by 60% over the last decade. That's what's known as an economic miracle [laughter]. That's the way it's described. Wages have dropped to about 60% thanks to state violence, which we support, and that means General Motors can get very cheap labor down there, and that means they can get rid of their plants up here.
Well, Eastern Europe is supposed to play exactly the same role. Again, if you read, say, the Financial Times, there's an upbeat, front-page article on a new plant that General Motors is establishing in East Germany, a high-tech plant, a $700 million plant, greatest high-tech, very good prospects. They're putting it in an area where there's close to 50% unemployment, so they can therefore get workers to whom they pay 40% of the wages of Western workers, and without the benefits of -- I'm now quoting -- "the pampered West European workers." So we don't have to worry anymore about these pampered West European workers, who've gotten things like wages and benefits and health care and so on. We can go into the reopening Third World and get cheap, skilled, healthy labor. It's East Europe, not Brazil, so it's healthy labor, and educated. And also they have white skins and blond hair, so you know it's easier to work with them than the brown guys and stuff. So it has a lot of advantages.
And the Western European corporations are doing the same thing. I mean, the biggest conglomerate in Germany, the biggest one, Daimler-Benz, you know, Mercedes and stuff like that, last year when there was a big strike wave in Germany, the executive director openly announced to the work force that if they went on strike, he was just going to move the plant, not only to the Third World, but also into Russia, where they can now get very cheap labor. All right, that's the Third World role.
Well the effect of that is to internationalize the Third World pattern. You know, a typical Third World country has a tiny segment of very wealthy people, and a huge number of completely superfluous people living in utter misery in quite rich countries. And if they get out of hand there, you can send the security squads. The United States is picking up that aspect. Now we're a rich country, so we don't look like Brazil, but you take a walk down New York, Los Angeles, or any big city, and you can see. There's extreme wealth and indescribable poverty. I mean, places like Boston, the city Hospital has been forced recently to open a malnutrition clinic because they're getting Third World levels of malnutrition. They even have to do triage because social services have been cut back so much they can't deal with the kids. Now the United States is not going to be like Brazil. We're too rich a country, so the proportions will be different, but the structure is emerging. And part of the way of building that structure in is precisely things like very high-level executive decisions, which take policy out of the hands and out of the influence of the rabble. So you got to control their thought; Jefferson was right about that -- the public relations industry and so on. But even more you have the kind of protection that takes things out of their control.
Well in my opinion a lot of the drive behind NAFTA and GATT and so on, quite apart from the economic consequences, is exactly this. It's locking into place executive decisions which are out of the influence of the public. They're locked in place; they're treaties. I mean, even if people get interested, they're not going to be able to do anything about it. That's a good deal of the New World Order. Well you know at the same time -- last comment -- there have been counter-tendencies. This crisis of democracy that erupted in the 1960s has never been crushed. In fact, it's expanded. Among the rabble, they're much more active than they were then. You take almost any issue, whether it's intervention, or sexism or racism, you name it, the environmental issues, the public is just much more concerned and involved and agitated now than they were thirty years ago. These are big issues. They can't be suppressed anymore, the way the used to be. That's true on everything. So the crisis of democracy has gotten worse. It's a big problem, and there's a lot of concern over it. It hasn't taken institutional force yet. You know, everybody's isolated, so they can think in their heads, but they can't do much about it, although you know it's enough effect so that power has to bend to it at least. Well you know, that's a counter-tendency. If that democratic tendency continues and really takes institutional force, it's a counterweight to what's going on among the principal architects. And which of those two tendencies prevails, that's going to determine what the New World Order will be. It'll determine in fact whether there's a world that a decent human being would even want to live in.
[applause]
Apologies for running on so long, but there's some time for discussion at least -- I didn't preempt it all.
Questions and Answers What about Japan?
Japan, yeah. Well Japan is an interesting case. Japan is a very interesting case if you look at it. Japan is the one part of the South, you know the non-Europe part of the world, it's the one part that was never colonized. It's also the one part that developed. I think, that's not an accident, if you think about it. Japan was in fact occupied by the United States in the late forties, and the United States tried to convert it into our kind of place. In the early 1950s, as the occupation ended, the Japanese had to make a decision how they were going to go.
Well, they've told us about it. You know, this is a society where people write books and things like that, and you can read about it, it's interesting. They decided to scrap the western development model. They decided to scrap western economics totally, throw it out the window, and follow a totally different model, one rooted in their own history, and in fact the one that was used by every developed society. They threw out all the textbooks, everything the occupation authorities and scholars and so on had told them, and they went ahead and modeled themselves, as they put it, on the Soviet Union. They said they were going to create a society on the model of the Soviet Union, but it was going to work, because they were going to be efficient, not crooks, gangsters. So they reconstructed a system with big conglomerates -- it's not exactly like the Soviet system -- big conglomerates of industry and banks working together with a government bureaucracy, a very extensive government bureaucracy, MITI, with branches that would control particular industries. So the government bureaucracy worked very closely with particular branches of industry and the banks. They target emerging technologies, they radically violate market conditions, they set prices "wrong," purposely. They break all the rules, but with the interest of economic development. And it works. Very surprising. American economists are extremely surprised. If you look back to the late forties and the early fifties, their prediction was that maybe down the road sometime Japan would be able to produce knick-knacks for Asia. That's literally what they said. Well Japan broke all the rules and therefore was able to develop. Later the countries in their periphery, South Korea, Taiwan, also broke all the rules radically, and therefore they were able to develop.
Well now they have a fairly developed society, but remember they don't have any of the advantages that we do. I mean, the United States is uniquely advantaged. It's a fantastic indictment of capitalism that the United States is as poor a country as it is. I mean, we have just incredible advantages. Back in the 18th century, the US was in absolute terms, not relative, richer than most of the world is today. Visitors from Europe in the 18th century came here, they just marvelled at the fact that people didn't have to work in the United States. Farmers had to work a couple hours a day. You know, they were rich. The United States had, once we exterminated the native population, which is the term the founding fathers used incidentally, we had huge resources available, open land, homogeneous population, and investments coming in when we need it, no enemies, and it's not since the war of 1812 when we invaded Canada have we had an enemy to fight. There's just nothing comparable to that. So of course Japan is nothing like us. It's an overcrowded island without a lot of resources and so on. But nevertheless it's an expanding and developing economy.
What about it? Well, you know, there are potential conflicts developing there. So take say NAFTA. One of the protectionist measures that the US insists upon in NAFTA is what are called local origin requirements, meaning that if a factory, if somebody invests in Mexico and they want to export into the United States, they have to demonstrate I think it's 50 or 60% of the inputs into it are local. Now that's meant to keep Japanese industry out, to make sure Japan doesn't use Mexico as a platform for entry into the United States, as free market principles would require of course, but remember we don't believe in the free market. We just believe in ramming it down the throats of other people and harming them. And the hope is that that'll keep Japan from using this. But there's certainly going to be conflict. And Germany even more so. Germany also didn't follow the rules. They radically violated the rules so they were able to develop, you know, with the Bundesbank having huge policy influence and so on. And they have Europe there, so you know, Europe is like a kind of German colony. And that makes a big economic unit. If they ever get their act together, that's likely to be the one real competitor to the United States.
But when you talk about competitors these days, you have to be very cautious. When you talk about the United States, say, you have to ask, What am I describing? Am I describing the geographical entity, or am I describing US-based corporations? It used to be that those two things were sort of similar. Now they're radically different, and it's not a small difference. So by now about 40% of what is called "trade" is actually transfers internal to particular firms. It's as much trade as if in a Mom & Pop grocery store, you moved the corn flakes from one shelf to another, you know, it's just trade by terminology. And that's not a small amount. It's like maybe 40%. That's centrally managed trade. I mean, that's another reason why the whole free trade business is nonsense. This is centrally managed trade inside particular international corporations which are very hard to identify, as to where they are. I mean, they may have their, you know, head offices in New York, but they're international, and what's Europe and what's United States gets very hard to distinguish. The point is there are common interests, and that's exactly why you're getting a de facto world government in Brussels and Geneva, because that represents the general interests of these international institutions which have really no concern for the geographical entity. So the geographical entity United States is declining. That part is true. You know, you take a look at the geographical entity, it's share in world trade is declining, real wages are declining, have been sharply in the last ten years, a lot of things are much worse than they are ten years ago, people aren't very optimistic and so on.
On the other hand, if you take the United States meaning US- based corporations, they're doing great. In fact there's even a technical term for it; it's called the paradox of `92. The business press in late `92 had articles with headlines like "Paradox of `92: Economy Weak, Profits High." Well, okay, it just depends what you mean by United States. If you mean by United States the rabble, yeah, not very good. If you mean by United States the principal architects of policy in the Adam Smith sense, they're doing great, you know. Except they happen to be producing abroad, their labor can be repressed more easily, they can shift their offices from one place to another depending on currency fluctuations or what the current tax rate is, you don't have to pay taxes, they can launder their drug money in places like Grenada where there's no regulation and where a bank means a room like, you know, a little office with a fax machine, and with modern telecommunications, you can launder all the money through there, that's a bank. There are all kinds of options open in an international age, so you need the international institutions, and the same problem arises when you talk about Japan.
One has to be much more clear than in the past about what we're talking about. But there are potential conflicts; there's no doubt. Nations haven't disappeared.
Could you see Ross Perot [inaudible]
Ross Perot, well that's a very interesting phenomenon. If you take a look back at Ross Perot, he appeared on the scene last spring. As far as the public was concerned, he might as well have dropped from Mars. He didn't have any policies. Later he came out with some policies....
[tape flips]
...What it tells you is that people are so desperate, they'd vote for Mickey Mouse [laughter]. They want anything but what they've got. The last election was very striking in that respect. People say it was, you know, people voted for Clinton. That's absolutely untrue. If you look at the polls, they didn't vote for Clinton. It's just that they disliked Clinton less than they disliked Bush. That's what was called a vote for Clinton. If Mickey Mouse, if Murphy Brown had run, she probably would have won [laughter]. The polls kind of suggested that. And I think that's the Ross Perot phenomenon. It's the kind of thing you get in sort of devastated peasant societies where a millenarian cult develops [laughter]. People say, God I got to have something, I'll [believe in the society?]. Actually I think the Kennedy revival last year sort of on what's called the Left, I hate to [?] the term, was similar. The things around Oliver Stone, you know, and JFK and all the Camelot enthusiasm. It's kind of like a Cargo Cult in the Melanesian Islands [laughter]. Maybe great ships will come back and save us, everything is so rotten. These phenomena are very striking in depoliticized societies.
Actually the United States is very interesting in that respect. Take say for example religious fanaticism. The United States is off the spectrum on that, among industrial societies. I mean if you look at, there's a lot of interesting cross-cultural studies, and typically religious fanaticism declines as industrialization and modernization increase, except for the United States. The United States is at the level of Bangladesh or Iran [laughter]. If you look at the polls, it's mind-boggling. I mean, 75% of the population literally believes in religious miracles. When people are given an open question, "What's the most important thing in your life?" you know, a lot of choices, where usually maybe 10% is a high number, close to half say the most important thing in their life is their relation to God. When you get to things like "satisfying work" or "respect in the community", it's down to like say 2%. You know, the idea that life could be meaningful doesn't even exist. Maybe some[things?] would be better in heaven. Actually it's worse, it's more extreme in the black community than in the white community. It's again understandable. You have to remember say in Harlem, life expectancy for males is about like Bangladesh. This is the richest country in the world, remember, with unparalleled advantages. And I think the Ross Perot phenomenon belongs in that. It's kind of like the millenarian cult.
My question was more to the policies of Ross Perot.
There's nothing to say, what do you want to say? What do you say? I mean, some of the policies make sense, some didn't make sense, you know, I don't think anybody cared about them, as far as I could see. His proposals, I mean like you know, an electronic town meeting, I mean that's just another step in the destruction of democracy. You know, everybody's sitting alone in front of their computer pushing buttons. I mean, that's just another step in isolating people and preventing them from having thoughts. I mean, you have thoughts when you talk to people. I mean, look, anybody in the sciences knows this. If you want to do scientific work, you don't, it's very few people who do scientific work by sitting alone in their office all their lives. You talk to graduate students, you hear what they have to say, you bounce ideas off your colleagues. That's the way you get ideas, that's the way you figure out what you think. That's the way, and in political life or social life, it's exactly the same thing. You try imaging scientific research where some guy is standing up in front of the television screen with everybody, all the physicists around the country in front of their computer, and he makes a proposal, and they push buttons [laughter]. That'll tell you how much democracy [inaudible]
There is something appealing to my grasping straws that probably other people in this room share, and that is that there are developing communications, interactive communications, methods like E-mail, bulletin boards, electronic bulletin boards, fax, ways of bypassing the managed press. How much hope can we take in this alternative communications network?
I think that's a very important thing, and it depends how it's used. You know, like technology itself is usually kind of neutral. You can use it for oppression, you can use it for liberation, almost everything. And this is an example. So the new techniques of electronic communication and data processing and publishing and so on, I mean, they make it possible to break out, it used to be the case that you needed a tremendous amount of capital to run a newspaper. You don't anymore. Like Z Magazine, the magazine I write for regularly, is literally run by two people on a shoestring, and they can run a very good monthly magazine because it's easy now. You have technology to do it. It's very good for the Third World. I have a daughter who lives in Nicaragua, went down there, she works on technical publishing, and you know, it sounds high-tech, computers and stuff. It isn't. It's very cheap, you know, very cheap, very easy, perfect for the Third World. You don't need resources, a fraction of the -- she's still down there -- a fraction of the resources that are needed for ordinary publishing, and you can get around to people. Well, you know, if you had the minimal level of technology that made these things available, it would be an alternative.
On the other hand, it can also be used as a technique of control. I mean, the question is, what kind of organizations are going to take control of it and use it. If you're tuned into the nets, you'll know that it's extremely tough. I mean, you get bombarded with floods of stuff that just wipe out any possibility of understanding. There are a lot of nuggets in there, but there isn't much in the way of structuring and arranging and organizing. That takes some intellectual input and resources. PeaceNet does it to an extent, but even PeaceNet is too undigested. If you want to really figure out what's on PeaceNet, you've got to spend an awful lot of hours on it. And something that's politically meaningful, you know, it's going to be really useful for ordinary people, can't be something where you got to spend ten hours a day. It's got to be, it's got to reach people in some other form. I mean, I think you're exactly right; technology makes a lot of options possible.
Is dissent going to be able to change anything?
Is it going to? Sure, why not. I mean, we don't live under slavery, we don't live under feudalism.
But I mean, when you're up against the mass media that, you know, churns out stuff --
But the point is the mass media are, though they have more sophisticated measures, they try harder, they're less effective. People don't believe them as much as they used to. In fact, it's very, another striking fact is that people's skepticism is constantly increasing. There's a measure done every year by the Harris poll; it's called alienation. What it means is, Do you think any of the institutions work for you, including the media? Do you trust anybody? Do you trust the press? Do you trust the doctors? Do you trust politicians? Distrust, alienation keeps going up. Last year it hit it's historic peak, two-thirds didn't believe anything [laughter]. The point is that, you know, people are getting bombarded with this stuff, but they don't believe it. In that respect we are becoming like totalitarian states. Like if you went to Russia, you know, pre-Gorbachev Russia, and you did a, nobody did any polls of course, but if you had done a poll, "Do you believe what you read in the Pravda?", everybody would have laughed.
I have a question, [to audience in general] has anybody every been polled? You've been polled? --
Well, see, that's not a meaningful question. People say that, but they're really not thinking. I mean, the polls are accurate. You don't have to poll thousands and thousands of people to get an accurate picture of the public. The chances are virtually nobody's polled, but it's accurate. And the reason is because the samples make sense. You know, if you think about it, you know, and there's a good reason why the polls are accurate: the polls are not done for guys like you and me. The polls are done for the business community. Almost all the polling is done for business and the public relations industry, because they want to keep their finger on the public pulse. If you're spending a couple billion dollars a year in organizing propaganda, you want to know what those guys are thinking out there, because you want to know how to distort, and therefore you better get an accurate picture. So a lot of effort and energy goes into making the polls accurate, and by and large they are quite accurate. Over time, if you check, their inaccuracies are about within the range that they say, you know, a few percentage here and there. So, a lot of people on the left say, yeah, you know I was never polled, I don't believe it, but that's not the way it works. But with proper sampling, you can get quite a good estimate of public opinion with a scattered sample, and I think there's every reason to believe public opinion studies.
You know, in fact, strikingly what they show is exactly the opposite of what the masters want. What they show in issue after issue is huge public divergence, like right through the Reagan years. The public kept moving towards kind of New Deal social democracy. When the public was asked what you want, right through the Reagan years, you know, social spending, spending on education, people wanted more taxes if it was going to go to social spending. They didn't want military spending; they didn't want intervention. In fact policies --
What about Panama? 80% of the people were in favor of the invasion of Panama.
Look, they were in favor of it for 24 hours. Actually, there's an interesting, what happened is quite interesting. There was a leak, a very interesting leak, from the Bush administration the day of the ground attack in Iraq. It was a leak of an early Bush administration planning document. It was buried in the press, if you could find it. Very interesting, but it's before Panama, you know, right when they came in, they did a big study of that intervention, and here's what they concluded. They said in the case of confrontation with much weaker enemies, meaning anybody we're going to be willing to fight, we only fight people who don't shoot back, so in the case of confrontation with much weaker enemies, I'm quoting it, "we must not only defeat them, but we must defeat them rapidly and decisively because anything else will undercut political support."
Okay, that means the classical intervention is not even an option anymore. Classical intervention mean, say, what Woodrow Wilson did. You send the Marines to Haiti and the Dominican Republic, they kill thousands of people, they destroy the place, they turn it into a plantation for American corporations, they stay there for twenty years, they leave it a total wreck under the control of the National Guard, that's Haiti but the Dominican Republic is the same. That's classical intervention. That's not an option. Classical intervention was John F. Kennedy sending the US Air Force to bomb South Vietnam, as he did, and to napalm villages, as he did, and so on, with nobody batting an eyelash. That's not an option. The only option there is, is taking a much weaker enemy, demonizing him, so the whole population of the United States is terrified, you know, hiding, and then have a rapid, decisive, miraculous victory which is over in like twenty-four hours.
That's what happened in Panama. Remember that Panama was preceded by three months of intense propaganda about the drug war. September 7th George Bush announced the drug war, which of course was a total hoax except the media completely fell into line. That became the only issue on television. I checked the wires for a while. After our Leader made the announcement, there were more stories on drugs than on Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America combined, for a month. The Hispanic narco- traffickers led by the arch-demon Noriega were going to come and shoot up our kids. You know, we got to do something. Well, you know, this is a very frightened society, a very cowardly, a very frightened society, which is typical of very rich, powerful countries, incidentally, and everybody was cowering in terror. Well, finally George Bush went and rescued us. You know, you're not going to shoot up our kids. He saved us, he did it very fast, it was over in about 24 hours. That kind of intervention they can still carry out, but not a lot more. That's a big improvement over the last thirty years. So yes, it happened, you know, we're not at Utopia, but --
In fact, I'd the same about the Iraqi war. I mean, a lot of people in the sort of peace movement were very depressed about their failure to stop that war, but I think they're misreading it. I mean, this is the first time in history that I know of where there was huge protest against a war before it happened. Remember the big demonstrations in Washington were before the bombing. I mean, the case of Vietnam, you know, it was four years before you could get a protest going. There were hundreds of thousands of American troops rampaging around South Vietnam. You know, maybe a million people had been killed, and so on, before you could get any protest. That's a big change in thirty years. There's a long way to go too.
Clinton seems to have appointed an awful lot of people from the Council of Foreign Relations.
Who had? I didn't get your first word... Clinton, oh, yeah.
[inaudible] ...Council of Foreign Relations. [Why?] is this, and how important is this in the scheme of things?
The Council of Foreign Relations is not like the Trilateral Commission, is not very important. I mean, it's proceedings are usually about as boring as most academic journals, if you want to get a look at it, maybe more, and the reason is obvious when you look at the participants [laughter]. You know, it's a collection of more or less mainstream, establishment types who think in rather dull and conventional and unimaginative ways about foreign affairs, and they stay pretty well within the parameters, and you know, they'll occasionally pull in somebody with a little -- you know, some woman or something -- to kind of make it look as it's more open. But overwhelmingly, it's about what you'd expect when a bunch of unimaginative, mainstream intellectuals get together and talk within the framework that they've been able to think about. Unimaginative, because if anybody with any independence, shows any independence, they're not going to be allowed into this. Why should they be? But they're not important as an influence.
Clinton is a one-worlder.
Everybody is. Look, I mean, these policies with regard to the de facto world government are not shifting between Bush and Clinton one bit. There's no change. Because those are over and above any political parties. I mean, the political parties in the United States are just different factions of the business community, and on some issues they agree, like on these issues. They may differ, there are differences, I don't mean to say they're identical. Like, Clinton had an unusual amount of business support for a Democrat, quite unusual, if you look. The markets were very steady right before his election, meaning business liked him, including the international markets, the strength of the dollar and stuff. And the reason was business recognized him as a conservative business candidate who was going to be a little more rational in addressing their needs than the fanatics of the Reaganite type. Okay, in other words, instead of, I mean, you know, nobody believes in free markets, that's for sure, but there are differences.
So in the last ten years, three countries to a limited extent believed some of their own rhetoric, England, the United States, and Australia. The three English-speaking countries, to a limited extent, played around with sort of free-market, neo-liberal ideals, to a very limited extent, but to some extent. And naturally it was a disaster in all three countries. I mean, all three of them are a disaster, and they're now trying to do something about it. Well, you know, it's a disaster even for the business community. I mean, sure, they got a lot of wealth very quickly, but you got to pay the cost. I mean, you know, for example, say take the Wall Street Journal, which is the exponent, you know, the real exponent, of the neolithic Right, you know. So they thought this party for the rich that the Reaganites threw was great, they loved it, except they don't like the consequences. So for example they had a front-page story the other day about the state education system in California, which is collapsing naturally, as anybody with half a brain knew it was going to. I mean, when the Federal government transfers all of its resources to welfare for the rich and stops all social services, the burden of caring for the population is going to fall on the states. They're not going to be able to bear it, so they toss it down to the localities, and they can't bear it, so it collapses. Sure, so the state education system in California, which used to be very good, is collapsing.
Well, why does the Wall Street Journal care? Well, because business in San Diego, for example, counts on the state education system as a public subsidy to them. The state education system is supposed to be training their managers and their skilled workers and carrying out the applied research that they're going to be able to use for profit, and so on. And this big public subsidy collapsed. Class war is very hard to fine-tune. I mean, you can throw a party to the rich, and you know, give all the money to executives and bail out Continental Illinois Bank and all that stuff, but if you're going to let social services decline, it's even going to hurt rich people. Well, they want that stopped. You know, they want something done so that there's a more rational public subsidy. That's why the people are, about the only issue in the last campaign that I could detect was what was called "industrial policy." Should we have industrial policy or shouldn't we? Well, that's a joke of course, we've always had industrial policy, we just called it the Pentagon. So the question is, should we have an overt industrial policy which we admit is industrial policy, or should we pretend it's defense against the Russians? Well, the Clinton people were more open about this. They said, yeah, look, let's face it, you know, we've got biotechnology, and we've got all sorts of new needs; we have to get the government more involved in forcing the public to pay the costs and provide a market for private profit. We got to get more open about that. The Reaganites were a bit more fanatical, wouldn't do it openly. So a lot of people in the business community preferred Clinton's approach. That's why you have Laura Tyson as the head of the Council of Economic Advisors. So there are differences, but they're differences between a pretty narrow spectrum. There isn't going to be a big change in Clinton on any of these things.
What can we do as private citizens that would be effective?
What can we do? Exactly what has brought about every other change in history. I mean, take the ones in our own lifetime. Let's take, say, the civil rights movement. You know, you go back thirty, forty years, it wasn't pretty, people were getting lynched. There were a couple of lynchings every year in the South. It's not fun. If you walked through a black city, it's like South Africa. Certainly they couldn't vote. It was really horrible. Well how did it change? It changed. I mean, you go to Hattysburgh, Mississippi now, it's totally different. It's just a totally different place. It changed because a lot of people whose names nobody every heard of, SNCC workers mostly, put themselves on the line, started to organize, worked locally, built up enough public support so that it was possible to have freedom rides where they'd get beat up and killed and so on. Finally it built up to a point where people called "leaders" could show up and say, okay, you know, I'm leader. It even finally got to the point where the Kennedy administration, which was strongly against the civil rights movement, contrary to a lot of lies, was forced to kind of pick it up. You know, there was just so much public pressure that even they had to pick it up and say, yeah, I'm your leader. And finally some big changes took place. That's the way everything has happened in history.
I mean, take feminism, an even more recent thing. I mean of course it goes way back, but you know, the modern revival of it. It's really since the late sixtiess. I mean, you go back to the late sixties, these weren't considered live issues. I mean, if Anita Hill had showed up thirty years ago, with her charges against Clarence Thomas, people wouldn't even bother laughing. You know, they would have applauded Thomas. You know, a good macho guy. This time they had to at least pretend they cared. You know, the Senate tried to suppress it, but there was so much public uproar about it, they had to put on a pretense of caring about it. Okay, that's change. And those changes took place the same way, and slavery ended the same way, and feudalism ended the same way. We have the franchise for that reason. There's no other technique anybody's ever heard of, that I know of.
Stop watching Hollywood movies?
Among other things.
I want you to expand more on the [inaudible]... You also spoke also of the isolation activists [inaudible]...
Well, isolation, yeah, but, there is the isolation. [Dave?] is asking about the isolation of the activist community. You know, isolation is something you can overcome. I mean, the isolation today is nothing like what it was thirty, thirty-five years ago. Anybody who's my age can tell you that. It's just radically different. I mean, it would have been, when I started giving talks about these things in the early sixties, it wasn't like this, if you can believe that. I mean, I was giving talks to people's living rooms. Or I'd give a talk in a church, you know, with four people, two of whom wanted to kill me [laughter]. [inaudible] ...the drunk that wandered in because it was cold outside, [laughter] and of course, there was the local [?] who were [?] outside. Literally, that's what was going on. I mean, we couldn't, in Boston, which was a pretty liberal city, we couldn't have public meetings against the war until late 1966, you know, literally, without them being broken up by violence, mostly by students, incidentally, with the liberal press applauding. I mean, there's a big change in thirty years, and the isolation then looked really astonishing, and it changed. We got a crisis of democracy out of it. What's more, it spread. In the 1980s it was bigger than before. If you take a look at the Central America solidarity movement, say, they're a new phenomenon. You know, I don't know anything like that, and it was in mainstream America. You know, it was like churches in Kansas and places like that.
[lecture continues, but tape ends]
Transcribed by Sanjoy Mahajan. [Note: brackets indicate what I couldn't hear very well on the tape but guessed at anyway. A question mark within brackets means the inaudibility might affect the meaning of the sentence or phrase. Apologies for any errors. -- Sanjoy]
|
