October 17, 1994
Published in Lumpen Times
Part I: 21st Century: Democracy or Absolutism
Part II: Q & A
There's a familiar story about the new era that we're entering and the promise that it holds. In brief, to borrow some of the appropriate imagery, the good guys won the shoot-out and they're firmly in the saddle riding off into the sunset. There's some rough terrain ahead but nothing that they can't handle as they lead the way to a bright future, which is going to be based on the ideals that they have always cherished like human rights, democracy, and free markets. A future which in which what we say goes, as George Bush defined the New World Order to great acclaim, great acclaim in the west that is, but the vast majority of the population of the world had a somewhat different reaction, but that was unreported except at the usual margins.
Well, I'm going to skip representative quotes to illustrate the picture. You've all seen enough of it. Actually the quotes are kind of interesting but time is short and I have a very authoritarian manager tonight. So I'll skip that and we'll also skip the typical vulgarities and the blithe disregard for historical and contemporary reality that goes along with it. Now I don't want to suggest that everybody is just telling fairy tales and lies. There are some who tell the truth and sometimes they do it in interesting ways. With regards to take, say, democracy, the United States as you all know is deeply committed to a campaign to bring democracy to the benighted people of Latin America over the hemisphere in the 1980s and there was actually some interesting commentary on that, scholarly commentary, including some of the best of which is a book and several articles by a man who actually has an insiders perspective. His name is Thomas Carruthers who was in the Reagan State Department in the 1980s involved in the Democracy Enhancement Programs as they were called and has written very interestingly about them. He regards these programs as sincere but a failure, although a very systematic failure as he points out, and he's honest enough to point out the systematic character of the failure is this: Where US influence was the least there you found the most progress towards democracy. So, in the southern cone of the hemisphere there was progress toward democracy. People overthrew vicious, brutal, neo-nazi dictatorships that had been established by or with the support of the United Sates and maintained by the U.S. but they were overthrown. The Reagan Administration resisted bitterly the attempt to overthrow its favored dictators but when that proved hopeless and the move toward democracy was irreversible they then took credit for it. That was -- there was a success of democracy. When you got closer to home as Carruthers pointed and our influence was greater, the progress toward democracy was least and, in fact, as he put it where the U.S. had influence it sought only limited, top down forms of democracy that did not risk upsetting the traditional structures of power with which the United States had long been allied. It maintained the basic order of quite undemocratic societies avoiding populist-based change that might upset the established economic and political order and open a leftist direction.
That's how we enhance democracy where we have some influence. So there was a kind of failure, more or less the same sort of failure of the Soviet Union to achieve freedom and democracy in Eastern Europe despite its deeply committed effort. You can get a better picture of the nature of the failure, and the kinds of democracies we try to impose, by actually looking at particular cases. There isn't a lot of time so I'll just take some easy ones. Take in the area most under our control, Central America, traditionally. There's one country that was uniquely favored in the 1980s, namely Honduras. It's the only country in the region that wasn't under direct, physical attack by the United States or by its proxy forces and was also uniquely favored in that it actually received quite a lot of assistance as it became a base for U.S. attack against the rest of the region. So it was in a particularly good position for the Democracy Enhancement Programs and indeed there was what was called a decade of democracy in Honduras. As the Cold War came to an end and the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 Honduras had elections, its third elections. There were two candidates so it was a real election. One represented large land owners. The other represented wealthy industrialists. There were no differences in their programs that anybody could detect including them. There was no campaign, just insults and entertainment and so on. Neither of them challenged the Military who are the effective rulers under U.S. control. There's a regular level of human rights abuses by the security forces and it escalated before the election just to keep peoples minds focused properly. But it never reached the level of, say, El Salvador and Guatemala where it was just like mass murder and genocide. The starvation and misery were rampant throughout the country. They had increased extensively during the decade of democracy from quite a low level in the first place thanks to those neo-liberal programs, agri-export programs, that were pushed by U.S. aid and U.S. advisers and unprecedented U.S. aid which led to an unprecedented human disaster as everyone can see it's on all sides. While starvation and misery were increasing so were other things like capital flight, increasing very fast, profits for foreign investors and the debt burden. That was the decade of democracy. So, therefore, the elections that were held in November 1989 were an inspiring example of the democratic process that today is spreading throughout the Americas as George Bush declared, no less inspiring than the elections in El Salvador in 1982 and 1984 when the opposition leaders were safely murdered and civil society was demolished by US run terrorists called security forces so therefore the press could speak of the encouraging progress toward democracy. Or, for example, the election in Panama in 1984 that was won by general Noriega with considerable violence and obvious fraud and was hailed by the Reagan administration even before the fraudulent numbers were invented. The Reagan Administration recognized Noriega¹s candidate and sent George Schmaltz down there to laud Noriega for another inspiring achievement at democracy. Remember he was our man at that time. That was before he stopped following orders and became a bad guy who had to be destroyed. Honduras was another case. The next most privileged country in Central America after Honduras was Nicaragua. Nicaragua was under attack from a terrorist superpower but it was unique -- I'm putting Costa Rica aside -- it was the only country of the region in which the security forces were not dedicated to attacking the domestic population. Rather they were defending the population from a terrorist attack organized from abroad. So it too was uniquely privileged in a way and it had an election in 1984, highly regarded outside the United States and by the professional Association of Latin American Scholars in the United States, but out of history because it couldn't be controlled by the United States and therefore it didn't take place. Also out of history is the fact that there was another election scheduled for 1990. You're not allowed to say that because the official story is that the 1990 election was held only because of US pressure. Therefore the fact that it was always scheduled is also out of history. But indeed there was a 1990 election which is allowed into history in part. If you look at it tells you a lot about the United States and about the elite culture and about the conception that is held. It fills out even more of the story that Carruthers describes rather coolly. As the Berlin Wall fell and Honduras went through this inspiring example of democracy there was an announcement from the White House to the Nicaraguans that they had a choice. They could vote for the US candidate or they would be subjected to continuing terror and embargo. They had a free choice. We believe in freedom. So they had that choice and they were told that in very clear terms. It's not that the Democrats disagreed. The Congress was run by the Democrats. Congress immediately passed in volition of the plea of the Central American Presidents military aid to the terrorist forces attacking Nicaragua. Here that was called humanitarian aid but the world court had already ruled on that fact and had declared that it is not humanitarian aid, that it cannot be considered humanitarian aid, that it's military aid. But, again, that's the wrong fact so therefore that one is out of history too. Accordingly a mere hundred percent of commentary described it as humanitarian aid. The United Nations once again in vain condemned the US dispatch of military aid to the terrorist forces. It wasn't a hundred percent. The United States and Israel voted against it and that one is out of history. In fact it wasn't reported. In Nicaragua they understood. Outside of places where people have a good education like here it was well understood what was going on. So they had a choice. They voted the right way. They voted for the US candidate. The reaction here was extremely interesting. In fact in Latin America, south of the border, where the press is mostly pretty conservative to reactionary, they applauded the victory. They nevertheless called it a victory for George Bush. Here they called it a victory for freedom. Not just that. There was complete euphoria. Headlines on the New York Times were "Victory for U.S. Fair Play. Americans United in Joy" kind of like North Korea or Albania or something like that. Way at the critical end you had people like Anthony Lewis. He was just exultant about what he called "this romantic age." "We live in a romantic age," he said, where the Jeffersonian ideal of government by consent of the governed is spreading everywhere. Incidentally the methods by which the great victory for Jeffersonian Democracy was achieved were not concealed.
In fact they were described with some clarity. Here's Time Magazine rejoicing over what it called "the latest of the happy series of democratic surprises" as democracy burst forth in Nicaragua. Then they described the victory for US fair play as follows. The method was to wreck the economy and prosecute a long and deadly proxy war until the exhausted natives overthrow the unwanted government themselves with a cost to us that is minimal leaving the victim with wrecked bridges, sabotaged power stations and ruined farms providing Washington's candidate with a winning issue ending the impoverishment of the people of Nicaragua. So that's Jeffersonian Democracy in our romantic age and a victory for US fair play. All of that reveals with quite extraordinary clarity that democracy is not just disliked in the elite culture but it is hated with utter contempt. It's hard to exaggerate the contempt but it's made very clear by these examples. Let me finish running through these with Honduras, again the uniquely privileged country. In November 1993, last year, they had another election. It was the fourth one since 1980 so the decade of democracy is really established. They voted against the neo-liberal structural adjustment programs and what¹s called the economic miracle that they're bringing. They voted strongly against it. But, no problem, as was widely recognized that gesture was completely empty. The rich and the powerful will permit nothing else so the programs go on anyways. To borrow a phrase from the London Economist a policy is insulated from politics. In other words policy goes on in one way and those guys can play around with votes in another way if they feel like it. They happened to be talking about Poland and they were telling foreign investors, "don't worry about the fact that they're voting against the programs you guys like. Policy is insulated from politics now that we've brought democracy to Poland." Well democracy was brought to Honduras too so however the population votes the neo-liberal policies that have brought misery and destruction and the economic miracle as this is called technically will go on. Well, I don't think it was ever reported here, at least I didn't see any report, and my local consultant from Chicago didn't send me any reports from Chicago. It was reported south of the border. Mexico's leading newspaper Excelsior pointed out that "the voters have no real options for improving their living standards which worsen every day." Remember they're familiar with economic miracles from their own country. Continuing, "Three quarters of those who went to the polls live in misery and are disenchanted with formal democracy. The purchasing power of Hondurans is lower than in the 1970's. The rule of the generals is more firmly established." There are other beneficiaries of the economic miracle as well. The Honduran College of Economists pointed out "A group of privileged exporters and local investors make the financial capital and multinational corporations have multiplied their capital in a country where growing economic polarization is generating ever more evident contrasts between the rich who do not hide the ostentation of their moral misery, and the ever more miserable poor." So that's the decade of democracy now we've had four elections. They also point out that at least one out of every two dollars that goes to Honduras comes right back to pay the interest on the foreign debt which is rowing. Even though twenty percent of the debt was forgiven it's increased by ten percent since 1990 alone. It now represents about forty percent of exports. Well that is the most favored country we run, to which we've brought democracy.
Just a couple of weeks ago there was an election in Guatemala. That's on we've been taking care of for a long, long time so you can really see our values at work. It was going to be a showcase for democracy when we invaded it and overthrew the democratic government in 1954. They had an election a couple of weeks ago. The person who won the election was Rios Mott who is someone that would have gotten along quite well with Himmler and Goebels. He's the biggest killer in the recent history of Guatemala. He killed tens of thousands of people before he was overthrown in another military coup. He was a man who was totally dedicated to democracy as President Reagan said in a speech when Rios Mott was busy slaughtering people in the highlands. He just won the election. Less than twenty percent of the population bothered to vote. Mostly rich white people. Rios Mott got a third of the votes, about seven percent of the electorate, but that puts him in power so we have another victory for democracy. We've just seen the same thing in Haiti if we open our eyes.
Meanwhile the US has been fostering other values besides democracy in the regions which it really controls. One value that it has been sponsoring is torture. As has been shown repeatedly US foreign aid is very closely correlated with torture. The leading specialist on human rights in Latin America, Lars Schmaltz, did a study on this published around 1980 in which he pointed out that the correlation is quite close. US foreign aid that flows into Latin America flows to the most egregious violators of fundamental human rights, to countries that torture their citizens. That's also true on a world scale as shown in other studies, including by my colleague Edward Herman. That was in 1980, running through the Carter years. Nobody's bothered to do a study in the last ten or fifteen years because it's too trivial. The correlation just went through the roof.
To take a current case the biggest human rights violator in the hemisphere now is Columbia. Its record is absolutely atrocious. It's also the leading recipient of US aid. About fifty percent of US military aid to the hemisphere goes to Columbia, to the security forces that are carrying out the atrocities. So the correlation is maintained.
Another value we've been sponsoring in Latin America is starvation, misery, death from disease and radical inequality. It's the region that has the highest inequality in the world. The World Bank in fact recently warned that the inequality is so great that there is a crisis coming. You can read about that in the business press but what you don't read about is the causes. It's not in their genes. This is the result to a large extent of social policy and in fact you can trace it. We're a free society so you can et documentary records. In 1945, when the United States was organizing the world it was able to take over Latin America kicking out its traditional rivals Britain and France, there was a meeting which was going to establish what was called an economic charter for the hemisphere. It was designed for economic growth in the hemisphere. There were two positions. As the State Department put it throughout Latin America there was what was called the philosophy of new nationalism, sometimes called economic nationalism. It was based on the principle that development ought to be egalitarian and to the benefit of the general population. As they put it "the prime beneficiaries of a country's resources should be its own population and development should be concerned with their interests and should be egalitarian." Now the US was strongly opposed to this. It's position was that economic nationalism in any form must be blocked, that the prime beneficiaries of a country's resources are not the people of that country rather it's foreign investors meaning US investors and there was to be none of this economic nationalism. In fact the US insisted that the development of Latin America countries be complimentary to the United States. So, we'll do what we're good at and they'll do what their good at and what they're good at is giving us resources and cheap labor and maybe doing some simple operations that we don't want to waste our time on. That's the way it works. The US was powerful enough to establish those principles and the result that you get is what you see today. Well, those are other values that we've sponsored in the areas of our control in addition to democracy.
The following is a series of questions addressed to professor Noam Chomsky following a lecture he delivered at the University of Illinois at Chicago on October 17, 1994.
Q: Given that corporations seem to be needing us less and less and that the jobs that they offer are pretty lame anyway and tend to be very uninteresting, sucking the life out of people, it seems to me that there is an opportunity for people to actually do less boring things and do more of what's the real work in society in supporting each other and educating children and things like that. Have you thought about how the economic system has to change in order for that to really happen?
Noam: First of all a lot of that is already happening so we don't have to look very far for models. Take the UNESCO study that I mentioned which is talking about the differences between the Anglo/American model and the Continental European/Japanese model. These are not very different kinds of societies. They're all corporate run but they happen to have somewhat different social policies for various historical reasons. Things like, for example, in Germany where there's a kind of Social Contract that we don't have, one of the biggest unions won a thirty-five hour week. In Sweden parents get substantial parental leave because taking care of children is supposed to be something that has some value in the society unlike here where the leadership elements hate families. They may talk about family values but they want families destroyed because families are not rational from the point of view of profit making. Another example is the Netherlands. Poverty among the elderly has gone down to flat zero. Among the children I think it's four percent or something, basically nothing. Even within the range of societies almost exactly like ours there's plenty of other social policies. After all why should absolutist organizations exist. Why should a corporation, a fascist organization of enormous power, have the right to tell you what kind of work you're going to do? Why is that any better than having a king tell you what kind of work you're going to do? We fought against that sort of thing and we can fight against it again. As you say there's plenty of challenging, gratifying, interesting work to do. There's plenty of people who want to do it. There's a lot of junky work to do, too. In a reasonable society that just ought to be distributed equally among everybody. The kind of work nobody wants to do. If you can't get robots to do it, okay. Distribute it equally. There is a lot of interesting work to do but people aren't being allowed to do it. It's not only poor people who aren't being allowed to do it. Contrary to all this idiocy about IQ, if you take, say, PhDs in Physics and Math at MIT, who rank pretty high by those standards, they're not being allowed to do what they want to do. In fact a lot of them are going on to do work that is at best useless and probably destructive and they might make a ton of money speculating on Wall Street. That's anti-social work and that's the kind of work that is privileged in this society.
Actually, if you bother looking at these ridiculous books that are coming along, see what they ranked as high achievement occupations. It's things like accountant or public relations specialist--anti-social activities. It's as if we had a society which were rewarding pathological murderers. Any form of social arrangement which is in egalitarian is going to give rewards to certain characteristics. If you gave rewards to pathological murderers, fine. They'd be the guys on top. We happen to give rewards to people who have some combination of ruthlessness and avarice and self-seeking and lack of concern for others and so on. That's called success and people who have that strange contribution of traits are considered to be meritorious. So we have a meritocracy. If you actually look through the occupations it's got nothing to do with intellectual interest, with intelligence, certainly not with constructive activities. A lot of it is plainly anti-social. If you go to people as high as you like with whatever measure you choose, be it IQ or whatever nonsense that is. For example MIT physicists and mathematicians are driven into these anti-social activities just as in the past they were driven into things like making weapons to destroy the world. There's no reason for those choices to be made. They are not principles of gravitation. They're social decisions. They can be made differently and they could and would be made differently in a democratic, free society. So let's make a free society in which decisions are made differently.
Q:We need a brief reference to Haiti. I'm having some trouble seeing how the present policy fits into the picture you've described. I wish you'd amplify that if you can.
Noam: Basically what's happened in my opinion is the following. The US. has been supporting Haitian military dictators for almost 200 years. For the last twenty or thirty years the US. has been trying to turn Haiti into a kind of an export platform with super cheap labor and big profits and so on. In 1990 something happened that really surprised the hell out of them. There was this free election which everyone figured was going to be won by a World Bank candidate that the U.S. was backing. Meanwhile something had been going on in the slums and peasant communities which, as usual, no one was paying any attention to. Namely a lively and vibrant civil society was forming. Big grass roots organizations, people getting involved in things and so on. The CIA doesn't pay attention to things like that. Certainly journalists don't. So all of a sudden they come out of the woodwork and win the election. Catastrophe. The only question in any body's mind who knew anything about American History in December 1990 is "how are they going to get rid of this guy?" Well the US instantly began to undermine the Aristide Government. Aid and investment was cut off except for the business community to form counter-Aristide forces. The National Endowment for Democracy went in there to try to set up counter-institutions, by an odd accident exactly the ones that survived the coup.
The Aristide regime was very successful, which made it even more dangerous. It was getting support from international lending institutions, cutting down on bureaucracy, putting the country in order. Really bad stuff. In September a coup came along, and Aristide was overthrown. Theoretically there was an embargo and sanctions but that was a pure fraud. The US. announced instantly that it was not paying any attention to the sanctions, meaning nobody else had to pay attention to them either. The Bush administration established what they called an exemption, meaning US.-owned firms were exempt from the embargo. The New York Times did a little work on that: they called it "fine-tuning the embargo." We didn't want Haitian people to suffer. And they only suffer when American-owned firms stop working. Meanwhile, U.S. trade with Haiti stays not very much below the norm. Under Clinton it went up by 50 percent. They put an illegal blockade around the country to drive the population back, which is totally illegal. But the trade barely decreased, though somehow the free press seemed to miss that. Nobody thought to do what I did, which was to give a call to the Commerce Department and ask for the trade figures. It takes like two minutes, and then you find out what happened. Somehow that's beyond the resources of the press so they never found out.
The generals were virtually told, "Murder the leaders of the popular organizations, intimidate everyone, destroy people. We'll give you a certain amount of time to do it, and when we tell you the job is done you can go somewhere else and be very nicely treated. Don't worry, you'll then be rich for the rest of your lives." This is exactly what happened. When the time came they were told, "OK, time's up. You did your job."
Incidentally, the day before the US. intervention, there was a big story that came across the AP wire, which means every newsroom in the country had the story the next day. The story was that there had been a Justice Department investigation which determined that the oil companies had been supplying oil to the military junta in violation of the embargo, which we pretty much knew, but they were doing it with the official authorization of the U.S. government at the highest level, which not everyone knew. In fact, the Secretary of the Treasury under Bush essentially said, "Yeah, it's illegal but don't worry about it." And this went on under Clinton too. So, out of curiosity, I did a NEXUS search, and that story did appear in the press the next day, in Platt's OilGram, which is essentially a newsletter for the oil industry. Within a few days it appeared in local papers, like in Dayton, Ohio. But of course that's because local editors aren't sophisticated enough to know what not to say. Now, a couple weeks later, it still hasn't appeared in the national press, except for a couple lines buried in the Wall Street Journal. This was the biggest story of the week. What it said is there were never any sanctions. Never. It gives the whole thing away. So now what happens? Well, American troops move in, telling the generals "go away", and Aristide is now going to be allowed back for a few months. Remember Clinton's speech where he says Aristide has shown what a great democrat he is? He's going to step down when the constitution says he has to step down. But the constitution doesn't say he has to step down in December 1995, Bill Clinton says he has to step down. The Haitian constitution says he's supposed to be in office for five years. The constitution doesn't deal with what happens in three of those five years are spent in forced exile. Only people who hate democracy as much as we do would say that counts. But if you believe in democracy, well that means that the people who voted for him (the overwhelming majority of the population) have a right to a five-year president. I don't think anyone in the United States has noticed this, though it's been pointed out in Canada. I haven't been able to find a word suggesting this in the U.S., reflecting the profundity of that contempt for democracy. So he's in for a year at most, his hands are tied, and there's an economic plan that's rammed down his throat by the World Bank. This was brought out by one of the few reporters in this country, Allan Nairn, who published it in the Multi-National Monito. It's an interesting plan, kind of the standard structural adjustment package. It's been referred to as the package Aristide is offering, and what it says, in a lot of nice words, is at the core that the renovated government must focus its energies and efforts on civil society, particularly export industries and foreign investors. That's Haitian civil society: investors in New York City. So those investors will come in and rebuild what we wanted Haiti to be, so it will have super-cheap labor and American agri-business driving out subsistence farming. So Aristide will be permitted to administer this program, to make sure he discredits himself. We're back to 1990, before the election, with one difference: the popular movements have been decimated.
People in Haiti are happy, and if I were there I'd be happy too; at least the military and torturers aren't murdering them. It's like the choice is between water torture and electric torture -- I guess water torture is better, or so people say. But the hope for Haitian democracy, at least for the moment, is finished. They can go back to being an export platform again. Meanwhile there will be rousing speeches here about our love for democracy. Maybe in fifty years they'll even discover the business about the oil.
There is an interesting historical footnote, if you're interested. The oil company that was authorized by the Treasury Department under Bush and Clinton happened to be Texaco. Both Shell and Exxon shipped oil there from their foreign subsidiaries, but Texaco was doing it directly from the U.S. They asked if it was OK to set up a blind trust, and were told that was illegal, but again not to worry about it. Now people my age, those that have a historical memory, might remember when the Roosevelt Administration was trying to undermine the Spanish Republic sixty years ago. This was during the Spanish Revolution, where the Republic was being attacked by Franco's fascist forces. Franco was being supported by Mussolini. In the U.S., the administration was strongly against the Republic because it was the danger of a popular revolution. One of the ways they did it was by of the Neutrality Act, where we weren't supposed to interfere with the Republic. Except the Neutrality Act was only 50% [abroad?] . The fascists were getting guns from Germany, but they didn't have any oil. But Texaco, which was run at that time by an outright Nazi, which wasn't so unusual in those days, had contracts with the Republic. They terminated those contracts, and contacted ships at sea to deliver the oil to the fascists instead, illegally of course. The press, somehow, was never able to discover that, except for the small left-wing press. But the big papers never had the resources to discover that. And this is what we're seeing in Haiti today.
Q:Could you comment on the current policies of GATT, the whole notion of intellectual property rights, and the effect of these policies on food production in the Third World?
Noam: That's a really important topic and in fact it was one I had hoped to talk about but didn't have time for. GATT is called a free trade agreement, just as NAFTA was, but that's nonsense. These things are not about free trade and they're certainly not agreements. In fact most of the people in the world are opposed to them. What you mentioned is an extreme case of that. Intellectual property rights have to do with protectionism. The U.S., and in fact the rich countries generally, have led the insistence that the GATT agreement, like NAFTA, include strong intellectual property rights. That's protectionism. That means increasing the power of patents. Patents are protectionist devices. They are designed to insure that the technology of the future is in the hands of transnational corporations, most of which, incidentally, you guys pay for. Remember they don't believe in a free market. They want to be publicly subsidized in research and development and controlled markets and so on. The strength of intellectual property rights means longer patents.
Take India for instance. India has a big pharmaceutical industry. They can produce drugs at a fraction of the cost of what Merck wants to sell them for. In fact drug prices are way lower in India than in Pakistan next door because India happened to develop its own pharmaceutical industry. The American corporations don't like that. They want more children to die in India. It's not whether they care whether children die. They want more profit, which means more children die in India. They want to make sure India doesn't produce drugs at less than the cost of American drugs. Now this is done in two ways under GATT. One way is to increase the length of patents. The other is to change their character from process patents to product patents. That's very crucial. In the past patents were process patents. Like if Merck, thanks to your taxes, designed a way to produce a certain drug, and then say some smart guy in India figured out a cheaper way to produce that drug, that was allowed. We don't want that. We want to cut down technological innovation, cut back economic process, economic progress, and economic efficiency and increase profit. So now they are product patents. If Merck figures out a certain way to produce a drug they can hold that for twenty years because it's a product, and they can hold the process for another twenty years. They get forty years of holding on to that drug. By that time everybody's forgotten about it. There's some history about this. The developed countries like us never accepted anything like that. Even weak patents on technological development weren't accepted by the rich countries until just a few years ago. There was one time that I know of that product patents were actually tried, namely in France in the early part of the century that had such patents. That destroyed the French chemical industry. It moved to Switzerland. So Switzerland has a big chemical industry and not France. It's not a big secret. This is straight history and the people who are planning GATT understand it. They want to make sure that they destroy the Indian or Argentinean pharmaceutical industries the same way that France's dumb choices destroyed the French chemical industry. The New York Times a couple of weeks ago had a tiny ten line item stating that India (with a gun pointed at its head) agreed finally to liberalize their pharmaceutical industry, meaning sell it to western corporations. So drug prices will shoot sky high in India and children will die but there will be more profits. Now this has nothing to do with free trade. This is a high level of protectionism. In fact it is specifically designed even to be contrary to the narrow definitions of efficiency that they teach at the University of Chicago Economics Department. So it's going to cut down on technological innovations, efficiency and so on, but it will happen to increase profits by accident. Well, that's intellectual property rights. I gave one example but there are plenty of others like it. If you look over the whole GATT Agreement this is sort of a complicated array of protectionist and liberalizing devices very carefully geared to the interests of transnationals.
As far as agriculture is concerned, the way of measuring the efficiency of agricultural production, which like most of these measures are just tax-based ideology that don't have anything to do with science, is to look at certain inputs and outputs and you do some calculations to figure out what the efficiency is. Some things are left out. If you do the calculations their way the cost of environmental pollution doesn't count. That's called an externality, which means they worry about it in some other department. There's another one you don't count.
It usually turns out to be the case that heavily subsidized western agri-business tend to produce corn more efficiently than, say, Mexican peasants. If you do a narrow measure of the highly ideological type that they teach you about in economics departments it will turn out to be more efficient for the world if American agri-business produces corn with big petroleum inputs than if Mexican peasants do it, but there's a few things left out of that calculation. One thing that's left out is that ten to fifteen million Mexican peasants will be driven off the land. They're going to be driven into cities where they're going to starve. There's a lot of costs associated with that. Put aside the human cost which nobody cares about. Just take the straight economic costs like taking care of them somehow. Well, that's somebody else's department. We don't count that one in.
Put all this stuff together and you get particular choices. This is a game of class warfare masked in big words so it sounds like science and mathematical formulas. If you ask common sense questions you see all kinds of things are left out. If you're sending corn to Mexico you've got to put it in trucks. What about transit costs? The purpose of these agreements is to ensure that agricultural production is monopolized by transnationals and that the third world gets nothing. If you read the Indian press you may have noticed that Indian customs officials stopped some alleged German scientists at the border who were leaving India with some funny stuff in their bags, namely a couple hundred thousand bugs. They didn't know what the hell they're doing with these things but we know. That's the gene pool that western pharmaceutical companies are trying to steal from the south. Those are their resources but we get them for free. For thousands of years people in the south have been developing crops. They don't own them. They don't get any rights from that. We just go in and steal them. So they have the rich gene pool and the thousands of years of experience in creating hybrids and figuring out what herb works. Then western corporations go in and take it for nothing, just check if they've got a piece of paper anywhere that says they own it, stamped by the authorities. Therefore we steal it from them and it appears in some biology lab. We minimally modify it and sell it to them. We patent it. It's a scam designed to rob the poor and enrich the rich, like most social policy. That shouldn't surprise you. After all, who made social policy? This was a truism of Adam Smith. The people who make social policy make it in their interest. They wouldn't be in a position to make social policy if they weren't rich and privileged. People suffer.
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