mercredi 28 mai 2008

Le Bluetooth au service des parents :

Le célèbre parc de Tivoli au Danemark vient d’ouvrir ses portes pour la belle saison. Et pour la première fois depuis sa création, les parents n’auront plus à s’inquiéter de perdre leurs enfants,. Un nouveau système de surveillance vient d’être installé pour l’occasion. Rien à voir avec le bracelet GPS dont sont équipés certains prisonniers en liberté surveillée au Etats-Unis, même s’il en est proche… le système danois est composé d’un maillage de 63 points d’accès Bluetooth couvrant toute la surface du parc. Les parents peuvent ainsi équiper leurs rejetons de bracelets Bluetooth pour la modique somme de 3 euros. Si un enfant disparaît, il suffit d’envoyer un SMS au bracelet. ce dernier émet alors un signal capté par la borne la plus proche, ce qui équivaut dans le pire des cas à une vingtaine de mètres. Il ne s’agit pas là d’une initiative isolée : la plupart des parcs et fêtes foraines sont en cours d’équipement.

samedi 24 mai 2008

La campagne présidentielle américaine s'élargit avec l'éternel candidat Ralph Nader

La campagne présidentielle américaine a accueilli dimanche un nouveau candidat, le défenseur des consommateurs Ralph Nader, qui se lance à 73 ans dans une 5e tentative au moment où les partis démocrate et républicain sont en train de choisir leurs candidats respectifs.

"Je suis candidat à la présidence", a dit M. Nader sur la chaîne NBC, en se défendant de jouer les trouble-fête.

"J'offre la perspective d'un discours alternatif sur les grands dossiers qui sont totalement ignorés ou combattus par les grands candidats, (le démocrate Barack) Obama, (la démocrate Hillary) Clinton et (le républicain John) McCain", a-t-il précisé.

Ralph Nader, qui aura 74 ans mercredi, avait remporté 2,7% des voix en 2000, ce qui avait conduit des démocrates à l'accuser d'avoir empêché la victoire d'Al Gore face à George W. Bush. Il avait également été candidat en 2004, où il avait remporté 0,3% des voix, et aussi en 1992 et 1996.

Il a estimé dimanche que l'opposition démocrate au président George W. Bush devrait obtenir un "raz-de-marée" en novembre, ou "fermer boutique".

M. Nader a notamment fait valoir que son message en faveur de l'environnement, de la sécurité sur le lieu de travail et contre les intérêts du monde des affaires justifiait une candidature indépendante, accusant le nouveau favori démocrate Barack Obama d'avoir "autocensuré" ses meilleurs instincts, notamment en soutenant la "destruction" de la bande de Gaza par Israël.

La veille, M. Obama avait souligné que "tout le monde a le droit de briguer la présidence pour autant qu'ils remplissent" les conditions requises, et révélé que M. Nader l'avait appelé avant de se lancer.

"A beaucoup d'égards c'est une personnalité héroïque", avait ajouté M. Obama en marge d'une réunion de campagne dans l'Ohio (nord), mais il semble avoir "une assez haute idée de son propre travail", avait-il dit.

M. Nader, à l'origine notamment de la ceinture de sécurité, a reproché de son côté aux candidats du parti démocrate, Barack Obama et Hillary Clinton, de ne pas s'intéresser à ce que les Américains perçoivent comme des problèmes: la guerre en Irak, les scandales boursiers, le conflit israélo-palestinien.

Quant au candidat présumé du parti républicain John McCain, M. Nader, qui appelle à une procédure de destitution contre le président Bush et son vice-président Dick Cheney, l'a accusé d'être "le candidat pour la guerre éternelle".

Plusieurs élus et commentateurs ont minimisé l'impact de la nouvelle candidature Nader.

"Ce qui est plus intéressant, c'est de voir si (le maire de New York) Michael Bloomberg va se lancer", a ainsi souligné le gouverneur démocrate du New Jersey Jon Corzine, un partisan de Mme Clinton. "Ca, ça aurait un impact majeur, et il est impossible de prévoir quel bord en souffrirait le plus".

M. Bloomberg, fondateur milliardaire de l'agence de presse qui porte son nom, s'est fait élire sous l'étiquette républicaine en 2001, mais il est devenu indépendant l'été dernier, et n'a jamais démenti son intérêt présumé pour la Maison Blanche.

Les favoris démocrates actuels, eux, poursuivaient dimanche leur campagne à l'approche des primaires cruciales du 4 mars, Mme Clinton dans le petit Rhode Island (nord-est), M. Obama dans l'Etat sinistré de l'Ohio.

Les deux adversaires doivent se retrouver mardi pour un ultime débat télévisé lourd d'enjeu, alors que le mari de Mme Clinton, l'ex-président Bill Clinton estime indispensable qu'elle l'emporte dans dix jours à la fois en Ohio et au Texas (sud).

"Rendez-vous en Ohio!" avait lancé une Hillary Clinton hors d'elle samedi, reprochant à son adversaire de se livrer à de basses tactiques de campagne en décalage avec son discours rassembleur: "Honte à vous, Barack Obama", avait-elle dit.


The Pentagon Official Web Site:
http://pentagon.afis.osd.mil


Federal Bureau of Investigation: FBI
http://www.fbi.gov


White House Official Web Site:
http://www.whitehouse.gov

mercredi 21 mai 2008

En Allemagne, on a volé un kilomètre et demi de barrière d’autoroute !


La police allemande fait face à un incident nouveau : en effet, un kilomètre 500 de barrière autoroutière a disparu !
Ainsi, 20 tonnes de métal se sont envolées de l’autoroute A6 qui mène jusqu’à Francfort. Ce sont ainsi 500 bandes de quatre mètres qui ont disparu, ce qui a du prendre des heures au gang responsable du méfait.
La police allemande est totalement déconcertée par l’affaire : « nous nous demandons encore comment les voleurs pu s’enfuir avec autant de métal, et surtout sans que qui que ce soit ne le remarque. Il faut un très grand camion pour transporter autant de barrières ! ».
Aucun témoin de la scène ne se serait pour le moment manifesté.

Keeping the Rabble in Line Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian: Introduction

Keeping the Rabble in Line is a sequel as well as a departure from Chronicles of Dissent.
In this latest collection Noam Chomsky focuses on economic and trade issues and the emerging global economic order. While an increasingly spectacle-driven media wine and dine us on a menu of O.J. Simpson, Tonya Harding, or whatever the current diversion is, major shifts in the international scene are occurring. As Chomsky points out, nation-states are becoming increasingly challenged by the power and reach of transnational corporations. The latter may be the defining feature of the coming era. Our response will be crucial. Again and again in these interviews and elsewhere Chomsky suggests the need to organize and become active. Passive consumption of information is not enough.
Rabble will hopefully get people moving in a practical direction, be it direct action protests, getting involved with or establishing a community radio station, producing and distributing a video, starting a bookstore, publishing a newsletter or having discussions in your living room with a few friends.
I think Chomsky's contribution lies in the fact that he constantly stresses not just the need to be informed and act but that we are all capable of doing so. His own commitment, involvement and accessibility is a concrete example. He is a cartographer. He provides a detailed road map to assist in figuring out where things are and in charting out routes.
And in another sense he is a memory bank. So while the punditocracy engineer history
Chomsky is there as a constant corrective to remind us about the concerted U.S. effort to destroy popular organizations in post-war Europe or the monstrous crimes of the Indochina War or the real accomplishments of the Nixons, Kissingers, Clintons and other luminaries who direct the global pillage.
The interviews in this collection were recorded in Chomsky's office at MIT or by phone.
"Crime and Gun Control" was a live radio call-in on KGNU in Boulder. Titles reflect the core theme of the interviews but each discussion covers several topics. Many people from all over ask me to ask him certain questions. It would be impossible to acknowledge everyone's contribution but Carlos Otero in particular has been most helpful with his criticisms, suggestions and encouragement. My thanks to Sandy Adler for her transcriptions. Much appreciation to Noam Chomsky for his time and effort.

David Barsamian August 1, 1994

Keeping the Rabble in Line Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian: The World Bank, GATT and Free Trade

April 20, 1992


DB: In 1944 at the Bretton Woods conference in New Hampshire the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were both created. What function do these two major financial entities play?

Their early role was in helping to carry through the reconstruction of the state capitalist industrial societies that had been wrecked by the Second World War. After that they shifted to what is called "development," which is often a form of controlled underdevelopment in the Third World, which means designing and supporting particular kinds of programs for the Third World. At this point we move into controversy. Their effect, and you can argue about their intention, is overwhelmingly to integrate the South, the old colonial areas, into the global society dominated by concentrated sectors of wealth within the North, the rich society.

DB: You know that old song, "Where Have All The Flowers Gone"? Well, where have all the billions gone? The World Bank has lent tens of billions of dollars. Who lent what to whom exactly? What did it do there?

You can't answer that simply. In the advanced industrial societies [that money] helped carry out a reconstruction from postwar damage. In the Third World [lending has] had mixed effects. It's had effects in changing the nature of agriculture, developing infrastructure, steering projects towards particular areas and away from other areas. It's been part of the long process of trying to undercut import substitution and move toward export oriented agriculture. By and large [World Bank loans have] been a subsidiary to the policies of those who control it. The United States has an overwhelming role in the financial institution because of its wealth and power. And the United States and its immediate allies have designed programs of what they called development throughout the world. The money may have gone into anything from dams to agro-export producers to occasionally some peasant project.

DB: The International Monetary Fund has been vilified in the Third World for the draconian measures that it has imposed on those developing countries.
Take a Latin American country today. There is a huge debt crisis. Remember that the Bretton Woods system basically broke down in the early 1970s. The Bretton Woods system involved regulation of currencies, convertibility of the dollar for gold, all sorts of other rules which essentially made the United States an international banker. By 1970 or so the U.S. could no longer sustain that. It was very advantageous to the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. It allowed enormous overseas investment by American corporations. But by 1970 the U.S. was unable to sustain [the role of international banker]. President Nixon dismantled the system in 1971. That led to an enormous amount of unregulated currency floating around in international channels. The world was awash with unregulated capital, particularly after the rise in the oil prices. Bankers wanted to lend that capital, and they did. They lent it primarily to Third World countries, which means to elite elements. For example, Latin American dictatorships would go on huge borrowing binges. The results were praised in the West as "economic miracles," like the Brazilian "miracle" under the generals which left that country saddled with huge indebtedness. When the 1980s came along, U.S. interest rates went up and started pulling money toward the United States and increasing interest payments on the debt. The Latin American economies started going into free fall. Capital flowed out of them at a rapid rate. They were unable to control their own internal wealthy classes. The capital export from Latin America may not have been at the level of the debt, but it probably wasn't very far below it. There was a flow of hundreds of billions of dollars from south to north, partly debt service, which far outweighs new aid by the late 1980s -- payment of interest on the debt, and so on, and other forms of capital flight. By now, deeply impoverished African countries are even exporting capital to the international lending institutions.
The net effect of this is what some people jokingly call a program in which the poor in the rich countries pay the rich in the poor countries. That's approximately the way it comes out. Then the IMF comes along, run by the wealthy countries, which have certain rules for the weak. They are that if you have a high level of inflation and the currency isn't stable and various other economic indicators aren't satisfied, then you impose extreme forms of austerity: balance the budget, cut back services, control the currency, etc. That's neoliberal free market economics. That's typically disastrous for the general mass of the population. That's why the rich countries themselves will never accept those rules unless they're forced to. For example, there was a time in the late 1970s when Britain was forced to adopt certain IMF rules because of its weakness. But no country rich or powerful enough would ever do it, like the U.S., for example, which has incredible debt but doesn't accept IMF "suggestions". We're too powerful to follow those rules. Third World countries, which are much weaker, especially those which are under the control of Western-oriented elites anyway, who often benefit by it, do follow the rules and there's disaster for the population. That's why you get vilification. The same thing is happening in Eastern Europe now. The whole neoliberal free market story is basically designed for the benefit of the people who are going to win the game. Nobody else follows those rules. The West doesn't follow them either when it's not going to win. For example, the World Bank estimates that right now protectionist measures imposed by the rich countries cost the Third World more than twice as much as total aid going from the North to the South -- and that "aid" is mostly a disguised form of export promotion.

DB: To whom are the World Bank and the IMF accountable?

To the people who put the money in, which means a bunch of rich countries, primarily the United States, which is the dominant element there. It's mainly funded by the wealthy states, and the U.S. has the largest vote, so that's who they're beholden to.

DB: Where does the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, GATT, fit into this economic picture? One commentator has called it the "economic teeth of the new world order."

GATT is the international trading system, also set up in the 1940s. It's in the news now because for the last several years the Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations has been going on with an effort to achieve some new form of freeing up international trade.
Freeing up international trade in itself, in a general sense, is not a bad thing. It's often a good thing. The point is, nobody goes into that game, if they have the power, without ample protection for their own internal needs. So for example every one of the Western powers, including the United States, is entering the GATT negotiations with a certain agenda, a mixture of liberalization and protectionism geared to the particular strengths and weaknesses of that economy. When we speak of "that economy" we mean the people in the dominant positions in it. So the European Community wants high level protection for the aerospace industry and agricultural production. The United States has a mixture of policies. It's calling for liberalization and free trade in many areas. On the other hand, it's also calling for enhanced protection in areas where the U.S. is strong. Take so-called services like banking. The U.S. is calling for a liberalization of services in the Third World, which would have the instantaneous effect of swamping and overwhelming all Third World banks and financial institutions by western ones, since they're so much richer and more powerful. That would eliminate the possibility of any national industrial development programs within the Third World. That's the kind of liberalization that the U.S. is in favor of. It means that Third World economies would be managed by western banks and those who run them and the governments that are tied to them.
On the other hand, the U.S. is calling for more protection in other areas, particularly intellectual property rights, which includes anything from pop music to cinema to software to patents. Right now the U.S. is racing ahead in patenting what may turn out to be parts of genes. The idea is to patent the genes of corn, or for that matter humans, so that future biotechnology, which will involve various kinds of genetic engineering, will be in the hands of mainly U.S. private firms. They will control that field, and they want to make sure it's protected. So they want long patent rights and so on. That means that drugs, software, new technology, new agricultural forms, any form of biotechnology that may involve health will be in the hands of Merck Corporation and others like them who will make tens of billions of dollars in profits. It means that India, which could duplicate a lot of this much cheaper, duplicate Merck drugs at a fraction of the cost, will not be permitted to do it. The U.S. also demands product rather than only process patents, to insure, say, that India's pharmaceutical industry doesn't invent a cheaper way to produce some drug -- a barrier to efficiency and innovation, but a boon for profits. That's understandable on the part of the rich. They want to control the future, naturally, and that means control technology. The biotechnology aspect, the patenting of genes, has been causing an international furor in the scientific world. It can have a huge impact in the future. One shouldn't minimize it.
The U.S. (like others) also insists on a high level of protection for U.S. shipping. Shipping between U.S. ports has to be in U.S. ships. If Alaskan oil comes down to California, it has to be in U.S. ships. The U.S. insists that anything involving U.S. goods be done to a very high percentage in U.S. ships, which benefits the U.S. maritime industry.
Similarly, "defense" expenditures are not considered subsidies under GATT rules. That's enormously important for the U.S., which spends more on its military system than the rest of the world combined, as has always used that as a cover for massive public subsidy to high-tech industry. The point is that there is a mixture of protectionism and liberalization geared to the interests of those who are designing the policies, which are the powerful economic forces within the state in question. That's not a great surprise, after all, but that's what GATT is all about, and that's what the negotiations are about.
If the current GATT programs succeed, it's clear that they're tending towards a world government ruled by a club of rich men who meet in their organizations, like the G-7 meetings, the meetings of the seven richest industrial countries, which have their own institutions, like the IMF and the World Bank, which have a network of arrangements established in GATT and which administer a system of what's sometimes been called "corporate mercantilism." Remember that although this is called "liberalization" and "free trade," there's a tremendous amount of managed trade internal to it. So huge corporations which are often more powerful than many states carry out controlled, managed trade internally. This means trade across borders, too, because they're internationalized. They do planning of investments, of production, of commercial interactions, manipulation of prices, and so on, and they naturally manage it for their own interests. Corporate mercantilism is fine. It's governments that are not allowed to get into the game. The rich western powers don't have any objection at all to managed trade. They just don't want it to be done by governments, because governments have a dangerous feature that corporations don't have: governments may to some extent fall under the influence of popular forces, usually to a limited extent. But to some extent there's always that fear.
There's no such fear in corporations. They are immune from any form of public control or even surveillance. Therefore they are much more acceptable management agents for this mercantilist system being designed globally in the interests of the rich. GATT plays its role in this.

DB: You mentioned the powerful economic forces. Increasingly those forces transcend frontiers. There has been a massive internationalization of capital and finance over the last few years. What are the implications of that?

First of all, there's nothing novel about it. Back in the 1930s there were, for example, notorious interconnections between, say, I.G. Farben in Germany and Du Pont. In fact, big U.S. corporations were essentially producing for the German war machine right up until the war and some even claim afterwards in various devious ways. But there was a big change after the Second World War. There was a big upsurge in the creation of multinational firms, even beyond the traditional multinationals, for example, the energy corporations, which always were highly internationalized. But it extended much beyond.
The Marshall Plan, for example, gave a big shot in the arm to the internationalization of capital. It would designate some project in Belgium where you could build a steel complex. It would then encourage bids from American corporations, which would naturally win the bidding most of the time. Marshall Plan funds were then used, as intended, to underlie the expansion of U.S. investment through the rich areas, primarily in Europe. That led to an explosion of international corporations. U.S. foreign investment exploded in the 1950s and 1960s. Not long after came European international capital.
Britain had always been substantially involved in the internationalization of capital. In recent years Japan has joined the game and done plenty of foreign investing. This has increased through the 1980s.
There are a lot of reasons for this in the recent period. One is the one I mentioned before, the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, which led to an enormous amount of unregulated internationalized wealth. Another was a revolution in telecommunications, which makes it extremely easy to control international operations in which production is done in one place and the financing comes from somewhere else and you shift the dollars around. That means you can have executive offices in a skyscraper in New York and production facilities in Papua, New Guinea and fake banks in the Cayman Islands which may be nothing more than a fax machine set up to evade regulation. You can transfer funds around. You can control and manage importing and exporting within the corporate empire through management decisions. It can be scattered all over the world, with branch offices in Zurich. That's had a lot of effect. Everyone knows that the U.S. share in international trade has been declining in the last ten years. But in fact if you look at the share in international trade of U.S.-based corporations, it has not been declining. It may have been either stable or slightly increasing. Everyone knows the U.S. is supposed to have a big trade deficit. On the other hand, if you take into account the operations of overseas producers that are part of U.S.-based corporations, and imports into the United States that are actually transfers from U.S. corporations operating abroad to the same
U.S. corporations operating internally, if they import parts for their own production, it probably levels out the trade deficit, maybe even gives the U.S. a trade surplus.
The functioning institutions in the world system are increasingly corporate empires. I say "increasingly" because national states, the rich states, at least, retain substantial importance. They are instruments of integrated corporate systems. And also increasing because it's an old phenomenon. It goes back to the origins of capitalism. It is true that it has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years.

DB: To continue with GATT: The Environmental News Network has said that GATT will "open borders for businesses seeking lower labor costs and less rigorous environmental regulation, thus blackmailing U.S workers to accept deteriorating working conditions and lower wages or lose their jobs." Do you think that's a fair assessment?

It's not even controversial. Of course it will have that effect. It's already having that effect. Take the free-trade agreement with Canada. It's actually working both ways.
Canada has just objected to U.S. environmental regulations on use of asbestos, claiming that that's interference with free trade. Canada is an asbestos exporter, and they want the barriers lowered. Perhaps they've already won on that, meaning that U.S. environmental regulations on asbestos will have to decline. Sooner or later the U.S. is probably going to object to the Canadian Health Service as an interference with free trade because it means that Canadian-based corporations are freed from the burden of paying parts of health costs that U.S. corporations have to bear because of the grotesquely incompetent and highly bureaucratized health system. Threats from U.S. insurance companies were enough to cause Ontario to drop plans for a provincial auto insurance program that would have reduced costs, but cut out the highly inefficient private corporations -- an interference with free trade, they claimed, and won. Canada has lost several hundred thousand jobs. There are various estimates, but none are less than a quarter of a million jobs, to the United States, manufacturing and similar type labor, because Canadian corporations would much prefer to produce in the southeastern United States, where the government enforces what are called "right-to-work laws," which means state policy coerces labor to ensure that there will be no unionization. As a result, working conditions are far inferior. Wages are less. Naturally, corporations will move to such places. Even the threat to move serves to discipline labor. In general, the effect of the free-trade agreements will be to move to the lowest common denominator with regard to wages, and environmental protection.

DB: So do you think that under the rubric of free trade that the Canadian health care system would be seen as an unfair advantage that Canadians have?

It hasn't yet happened, but I would expect it. I expect that American corporations sooner or later may decide that it would be a good idea to undermine the Canadian Health Service by an argument of that sort. There are a lot of calculations involved in that. One problem is that production is so internationalized that Canadian corporations are often U.S. corporations.

DB: What did you make of the spectacle of the President of the United States going to Japan with about a score of CEOs of major U.S. corporations and essentially demanding a kind of "international affirmative action," as Jesse Jackson has called it?

First of all, remember that the propaganda phrase was, "I'm going for jobs, jobs, jobs."
How much Bush cares about jobs you can see by looking at U.S. policy towards American workers. So while he's talking about jobs, jobs, jobs, the U.S. government is trying to set up the basis for maquiladora industries in Central America to take away American jobs. The phrase means "profits, profits, profits." That's what he was there for.
It was kind of stupid for the CEOs to come along. It left the United States as an object of ridicule. But whether they were along or not, that's what the trip was for. Everybody should have known that. The trip was to coerce Japan into accepting managed trade, meaning what's called here "fair-trade practices," which means mercantilist arrangements between powerful states to violate free-trade arrangements and ensure that their own powerful economic forces get benefits. There's nothing novel about that. The Reagan administration combined free-trade bombast with a highly protectionist record. Take control over imports. Various kinds of control over imports amount to duties. They practically doubled, from about twelve percent to about twenty-three percent, during the Reagan years, through what are sometimes called "voluntary arrangements," meaning "you do what we say or we'll close off your market." The latest effort to get Japan to buy American auto parts is just another part of the state-managed trade system that the rich always insist upon while of course beating their breasts about free trade when you can use it as a weapon against someone else.

DB: Is Japan powerful enough to resist?

That's an interesting question. No one really has answers to these questions. The domestic and international economies are only very dimly understood by anyone. So anything we say will sound a lot more confident than it ought to be. My own suspicion has always been that the strength of the Japanese economy has been overestimated, that it's much flimsier than is alleged. For objective reasons. Japan is a resource-poor country, highly dependent upon export for survival. In particular it depends very heavily on the U.S. market. It's expanding into Asian markets, but that doesn't compare with the U.S. market.
The U.S. remains the richest country in the world. Also, it's dependent, unlike the United States -- which has plenty of internal resources and enough military power to control other sources of raw materials -- on trade for resources and raw materials as well. Also, the Japanese, when you look at the numbers, look very rich. But if you look at the way people live, they don't look very rich. People are crammed into tiny apartments. They live a highly coerced and submissive existence. If you develop any reasonable quality of life standards, Japan would not rank very high by many measures, although it ranks quite high in others, like health, for example. So it's a mixed story. It think there are serious weaknesses in that economy. I'm not all that surprised by the current recession and financial crisis in Japan. They have such resources and capital. They'll doubtless pull out of this one.

DB: Along with the Arab oil producing states and some portions of Europe, Japan seems to be the only other area where there is excess capital formation for investment.

There is a lot of excess capital, but it's not clear what it's going to look like after this crisis has passed. A lot of it was based on very chancy investments and a huge bubble in real estate which was highly inflated. But it's still true. They have plenty of excess capital. In my opinion, German-based Europe is a more likely prospect for a world economic leader in the long term.

DB: You just said "crisis," which reminds me of something I've been hearing as long as I can remember, and I am certain you have as well, the "current crisis in capitalism." It seems to be an ongoing story. Is this particular crisis any different?

There has been a global stagnation for about twenty years now. The growth rates and the rise in productivity of the 1950s and 1960s are things of the past. It leveled off around the early 1970s. Things like the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system were symptomatic.
Since then there has been a kind of stagnation. It's not level across the globe. For example, for Africa it's been a catastrophe. For Latin America it's been a catastrophe. In fact, for most of the domains of the capitalist world it has been absolutely catastrophic, including internally. Large parts of American and British society have suffered severely, too. On the other hand, other sectors have done quite well. The so-called newly industrializing countries of East Asia, the ones in the Japanese orbit, like South Korea and Taiwan, didn't succumb in the 1980s to the international crisis of capitalism as Latin
America did. Up until then their growth rates had been pretty comparable. But they separated sharply in the 1980s, with the East Asian ones doing much better. Again, nobody really knows the reasons for this, but one factor appears to have been that, unlike Latin America, the East Asian countries don't make any pretense of following free-market rules. Capital flight was a huge problem in Latin America. The wealthy just sent their capital elsewhere, or else it was just payment on debt. East Asian countries didn't do that. South Korea has no capital flight problem because the state is powerful enough not only to control labor, which is the norm, but also to control capital. You can get the death penalty for capital flight. Other forms of state-corporate managed industrial and financial development did protect them from this global crisis of capitalism. Within the rich countries there were various reactions. The United States and Britain are probably the ones that suffered most from it, thanks to Reaganite and Thatcherite measures.
Whether you call this a crisis or not, it's not a well enough defined term so you can answer the question. For a very large part, probably a considerable majority, of the
American work force, real wages have either stagnated or maybe even declined for about a twenty-year period.

DB: The decline of major U.S. industries, such as auto, textiles, electronics, etc., is well documented. It's not even a matter of discussion. The fastest area of growth in jobs in the U.S. is in such areas as janitors, waiters, truck drivers.

Actually, the fastest growing white collar profession is security guard.

DB: What does that tell you?

It means that there is a large superfluous population that has to be controlled and a large number of rich people who have to be protected from them.

DB: Is there any economic strategy or planning to create real jobs with decent wages? For U.S. workers? Why should there be?

DB: It would seem that elites would want to protect their position.

But their position does not rely primarily on U.S. labor. They do want to have a domestic work force for services, but production is a different matter.

DB: But if there's major economic dislocation in this country, unrest would surely result and their position of power and strength would be threatened.

That depends on whether you can keep the public under control. For example, the Washington Post reported on a study about black males in Washington, D.C.

DB: Forty-six percent of all black males between 18 and 35 are incarcerated in the District of Columbia.

I think they say at any particular moment about seventy percent of them are somehow within the control of the justice system, on probation, etc. That's a way of keeping people from bothering us: keep them in jail. If they're not useful for wealth production they have to be controlled somehow. But it's not clear that that's a threat to the elites in the Washington area. Or take New York City, which is an absolute disaster. But you can walk around wealthy sectors of downtown Manhattan that look very glitzy and cheery.


DB: Prison construction in the U.S. is one of the fastest growing industries.

Yes. The U.S. has by far the highest per capita prison population in the world. Even things like the drug epidemic are functional in a way. I'm not claiming that the government starts it for this purpose. Things go on because they have certain functions for elite groups that set policy. One effect of the so-called "drug war," which has very little to do with controlling drugs and a lot to do with controlling people, has been to create a huge explosion in the prison population. Anybody who works with prisons will tell you that a very substantial part of the prison population is people who are in there for possession, not for harming anyone. That's a technique of control. Whether it's an economical technique of control you could argue. Look how much it costs to control people by putting them in prison and having them on drugs and therefore not bothering you or having them shooting and robbing each other in inner cities. How that compares with other techniques of social control would be a hard question to answer. However, to go back to your original question. If you were a wealthy professional or corporate executive living in Westchester County, there are certain things you want. You want a comfortable environment, a golf course, to be able to go to the theater in downtown Manhattan. You want your executive offices to be in good shape. You want fancy restaurants around. You want to be able to leave your limousine somewhere without having it broken into. You want good schools for your children. You want a powerful army to protect your interests. You want a skilled work force insofar as you need it. But much of what happens in this country is of no interest to you. If most of the country goes down the tube, that's no big problem.

DB: I love your comment "'Ultimately' is a notion that does not occur in capitalist planning." Why not?

First of all, there are no capitalist systems. If there were a capitalist system it couldn't survive for more than a couple of weeks. The only capitalist systems are the ones that are imposed on Third World countries for the purpose of weakening them so that they'll collapse and be taken over by the rich. But there are systems that are more or less capitalist. The more capitalist they are, that is, the more competitive, and less planned and integrated, the more they will tend towards short-term gains. That's inherent in the system. To the extent that a system is competitive and unplanned, those participating in it will be devoting their resources, both intellectual and capital, to short-term gain, short-term profit, short-term increase in market share. The reasons for that are pretty straightforward. Let's imagine that there are three car companies: Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler. Let's say they're really competitive. Then suppose that General Motors decided to put its resources into dealing with problems of global pollution or even trying to produce better cars ten years from now that would be better than those of Ford and Chrysler. At the same time its competitors Ford and Chrysler would be putting their resources into increasing profits and market share tomorrow, next month, next year. During that period, General Motors would be out of luck. They wouldn't have the capital and the profits to carry out their plans. That's exactly why in countries like Japan in the 1950s, the ministry that directed and organized the Japanese economy, together with the big corporate conglomerates, explicitly and openly decided to abandon free-market illusions and to carry out national industrial planning aimed at Japanese development in "strategic sectors" with high long-term potential. In newly developing industries, the industries of the future, the startup costs can be quite considerable. Profit doesn't come for some time. In a competitive, more capitalist society, you're out of luck. But in a more managed society you can deal with that. There are many well-known free-market inadequacies that typically lead capitalist entrepreneurs to call upon the state to intervene for their benefit. In Japan this led to a conscious decision to carry out substantial, organized, planned interference with the market mechanism so that the economy could prosper. Questions of pollution are perfect examples. If one company tries to devote resources to effects on the environment, they will simply be undercut by other companies which are not doing it. Therefore they will not be in a position to compete in the market.
These are matters which are inherent in our capitalist systems. There were experiments with laissez faire in Britain in the nineteenth century, when people actually took their own rhetoric seriously. But they pretty quickly called it off. It's too destructive.

DB: So you're saying that this class of managers is impervious to the bridges literally collapsing on the homeless and tunnels bursting under the city of Chicago?

Not because they're bad people, but because if they stopped being impervious to it they wouldn't be managers any more. Suppose that the CEO of some big corporation decideshe's going to be a nice guy and devote his resources from that corporation to the homeless people under the bridges that are falling down or to global pollution.

DB: He's out of a job.

He's out of a job. That's inherent in the system. These are institutional facts. If you want to watch this at its more extreme limits, you should take a look at the World Bank plans on pollution. These recently surfaced. One of my favorite issues of the New York Times must have been February 7, back in the business section. There was a report called something like "Can Capitalism Save the Ozone Layer? "Ozone being a metaphor for saving the environment. The question was whether capitalism could save the environment. That was a story by their financial correspondent Sylvia Nasser. The World Bank had come out with a consensus report for the rich countries on a position to take at the Rio conference in June on the global environment. It was written by Lawrence Summers, the chief liberal economist from Harvard. The idea is that the rich countries should take the position, led by the World Bank, that the problem of pollution is that the poor countries, the Third World, don't follow rational policies. "Rational" means market policies. Many of them are resource and raw material producers, energy producers, and they sometimes try to use their own resources for their own development. That's irrational. That means that they're using resources for themselves, often at below market rates, when there are more efficient producers in the West who would use those resources more efficiently. That's interference with the market. Also, these Third World countries often introduce some measures to protect their own population from total devastation and starvation, and that's an interference with the market. It's an interference with rational market policies. The effect of this Third World irrationality is to increase production in places where it shouldn't be taking place, to increase development in places where it shouldn't be going on, and that causes pollution. So if we could only convince those Third World countries to behave rationally, that is, to give all their resources to us and stop protecting their own populations, that would reduce the pollution problem.
This document was produced with a straight face. It happened that on the same day on the same page of the New York Times there was a little article, unrelated, about a World Bank memo, an internal memo, that had leaked. It had been published by the London Economist, a right-wing British Wall Street Journal, but weekly. It was written by the same Lawrence Summers. The Times had a brief, slightly apologetic summary of it, including an interview with Summers in which he claimed it was intended to be sarcastic.
The World Bank memo added to what I have just said about Third World irrationality. It said that any kind of production is going to involve pollution. So what you have to do is to do it as rationally as possible, meaning with minimal cost. So suppose we have a chemical factory producing carcinogenic gases that are going into the environment. If we put that factory in Los Angeles, we can calculate the number of people who will die of cancer in the next forty years. We can even calculate the value of their lives in terms of income or whatever. Suppose we put that factory in Sao Paulo or some even poorer area.
Many fewer people will die of cancer because they'll die anyway of something else, and besides, their lives aren't worth as much by any rational measure. So it makes sense to move all the polluting industries to places where poor people die, not where rich people die. That's on simple economic grounds.
Combine that with the other document. What it says is that the Third World should stop producing and protecting its own population because that's irrational. We should send our polluting industries to them because that is rational. Summers in this memo points out that you might have counterarguments to this based on human rights and the right of people to a certain quality of life. But he points out that if we allowed those arguments to enter into our calculations, then just about everything the World Bank does would be undermined. That's quite accurate. That's supposed to be a reductio ad absurdum.
Obviously we can't undermine everything the World Bank does, so obviously we can't allow such considerations to enter. We consider only economic rationality, of course geared to the interests of the World Bank. That's what you do with pollution. Try to convince the Third World to stop producing and to stop protecting their own population and to accept our pollution. It's all perfectly explicable on rational economic grounds. Any graduate student in economics can prove it to you.

DB: Apropos of this blindness of the planners: you have a fantasy ...

It's not blindness. I think it's very reasonable on their part.

DB: Within their framework.
Yes.

DB: You tell of a fantasy that involves the Wall Street Journal and the greenhouse effect.

Someone asked me once and I simply said that if I had the talent, which I don't, I would write a short story about the Wall Street Journal. I suppose their offices are on the seventeenth floor of some New York skyscraper. They're sitting there in that office putting out an issue of the Wall Street Journal claiming once again that the greenhouse effect is just a fraud invented by left fanatics. As the issue goes to press the water level would have risen to that point and you could hear them gurgling as they start the printer running. That's about what it's like.

DB: Let's talk about organized labor unions in the United States. Only fifteen or sixteen percent of the total U.S. work force is now unionized, far below, perhaps by half or even more, what it was decades ago. This is the era of givebacks, benefits reductions, skipping, deferring or eliminating raises. Does organized labor really have a positive, progressive role to play?

It should, but it's in a very weakened state. It's been weak for a long time, but it was smashed during the 1980s. It started with Reagan's success in breaking the air-traffic controllers' strike, and it's continuing until today. The UAW just lost a serious strike at Caterpillar. Their strategy has been so overcome by class collaboration -- We nice guys work together with management -- that when the crisis came at Caterpillar they were probably unprepared. They were simply wiped out. At this point Caterpillar probably won't even live up to the terms of the latest agreement. It seems to be continuing to lock them out. These are serious blows to the labor movement, and that means to American democracy, but they're much to the benefit of the small sectors that are enriching themselves. Does labor have a part to play? It depends on whether working people can get their act together and rebuild the labor movement and turn it into a powerful force for both people's rights and democracy as it once was. It's going to have to be rebuilt from the bottom up. Labor's role has declined significantly since the 1940s. They're not unaware of it. Doug Fraser, the former head of the UAW, pointed out almost fifteen years ago that there has been a bitter, one-sided class war led by American capitalists fighting against labor, while labor, meaning labor bureaucrats, have been seduced by class-collaboration slogans. They're not fighting a class war. The effect of a bitter, one-sided class war is very evident.

DB: The New York Times, in talking about the economic woes, says "There is little mystery about what caused the economic problems. The country is suffering a hangover from the mergers, rampant speculation, overbuilding, heavy borrowing and irresponsible government fiscal policy in the 1980s." How well did the Times and its brethren in the media during this period of economic dislocation and decline actually cover the events and give the American people information that they could act upon?

The Times isn't in the business of giving the American people information they can act upon. They hailed the Reagan revolution and its achievements. There were sectors of the population that profited marvelously, including the corporate sectors, of which the Times is a part. They couldn't fail to see that there are social costs. You can't walk around New York City and not see that there are severe social costs, so they probably saw it too. But this was considered as a glorious period of success. There were people who were upset about it. Take a look at, say, Mondale's funding in 1984: a lot of it was from fiscal conservatives who were worried about the long-term effects to their own interests of this kind of mad-dog Keynesianism, wild crazed spending, and government stimulation of the economy through borrowing that was going on through the Reagan years. People could see that that was going to be very problematic for the economy. Take what's just happened in Chicago. The estimates of the costs of fixing those leaks in the underground tunnels might have been at the level of $10,000. They didn't fix them because they wanted to save the $10,000 as part of the cutback in civic services. The net effect will be a loss of maybe over a billion dollars or more. That's a loss to private capital, too.

DB: But compared to the S&L bailout that's peanuts.

Yes, the S&L bailout is much bigger than that. Chicago is just one piece of a growing disaster. Spending on infrastructure has declined radically in the last ten years, and that's going to have its costs. What happened in Chicago is going to happen all over the place.

DB: It can't help but affect even the elites. The area that was flooded ...

And it's hurting them in Chicago. Chicago businesses are suffering. Insurance companies are going to suffer.

DB: They're not going to like that.

No, but there's not a lot that they can do about it except to accept more long-term, integrated state corporate planning. There are other possibilities, like democracy, but nobody's going to talk about that.

DB: Yeah, right. And maybe there will just be more slogans like "belt-tightening" and "austerity" and "biting the bullet" as opposed to genuine economic policy.

There is genuine economic policy, but it's geared to the short term economic interests of the rich. It's very genuine. And there's plenty of state intervention for that purpose. Take the Pentagon budget. That's massive state intervention in the economy for the benefit of the rich. That's what keeps the electronics industry going, for example.

Keeping the Rabble in Line Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian: They Don't Even Know That They Don't Know



December 16, 1992



DB: Tis the season of fantasies and fairy tales, and in that holiday spirit, today's New York Times editorial offers the following history lesson: "America became rich by tapping its natural resources and building large manufacturing plants that imposed rigid work rules." What an inspiring story!

Actually, it's a good year to mention that. This year is sort of historic in this respect. For one thing, it's the centenary of the destruction of the largest union in the United States, the American Steelworkers Union, by Andrew Carnegie, who had just in 1892 established the Carnegie Steel Works, which became the first billion dollar U.S. corporation. His most advanced plant was in Homestead, Pennsylvania, a working-class city with a working-class mayor and a lively cultural scene and a commitment to workers' rights and a union base. He locked the workers out. They took over control of the plant and the town. He sent Pinkerton guards, who were driven away. He then got the National Guard sent in, which took over. It was exactly as the New York Times described. In fact, they described it at the time. He was able not only to destroy the union, but to institute twelve-hour work days, and miserable labor standards. The company history published not too long after described this as the basis for the enormous profits that they made.
Although he was a pacifist, he succeeded in overcoming his pacifist principles to take on a huge contract for steel for naval vessels. The U.S. was then building up a big navy for purposes of international intervention. He also succeeded crucially, and this is important, in destroying utterly the democratic structure of the town and the region. Scholars who went in to investigate Homestead afterwards found that people were afraid to talk to them. They wouldn't even talk in their homes because they were too terrified of blacklisting and other retaliation. When Mother Jones, the eighty-nine-year-old labor organizer, came to Homestead in 1919 to try to help organize the union again, she was carted off by the cops when she tried to make a public statement. As late as the 1930s, when Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, came to Homestead, she had to be under police protection. It wasn't until the mid-1930s, in the course of union organizing and great public activism, that the elements of democracy were restored to Homestead, and they didn't last very long. The attack on the union started right away. Nineteen-ninety-two is a historic year in that respect, too. This is the first time in sixty years that a major corporation has dared to use the ultimate weapon against a major union. Caterpillar broke a UAW strike by hiring scabs, just as Carnegie and Frick had done a century earlier. So the Times has a point to make. If you impose harsh enough working standards, you can create profits. As the Times well knows, it turns out to be much easier than before to move production to high-repression, low-wage areas like Mexico or increasingly, Eastern Europe or Indonesia. There you can really impose iron work rules and extract a lot of profit and meanwhile leave the United States with the inner cities that we see. So all that's accurate. I'm glad to see the Times saying something true. They could have added a little background but you can't ask for everything.

DB: "America became rich by tapping its inner resources." The brave and enterprising European settlers came to these shores and found this vast, empty, fertile land with abundant flora and fauna and developed it, like some natural process.

That's partly true. They first had to exterminate the native population and drive them off the lands. "Exterminate" is the word they used, and it's what they did. After exterminating the population and bringing in huge numbers of slaves to work for them, they developed the resources.

DB: At the Little Rock economic conference and elsewhere there is much talk of economic recovery and restoring competitiveness. Gar Alperovitz takes a dim view that federal policy can reverse basic problems. He writes in today's New York Times that what is being proposed is "not likely to make a dent in our deeper economic problems. We may simply be in for a long, painful era of unresolved economic decay." Would you agree?

I didn't see that piece but I did read this morning's Financial Times from London, and they talk with some pleasure of the fiscal conservatism shown by Clinton and his advisors. There are some real issues here. First of all, as regards Gar Alperovitz's comment, it's accurate, but we have to be careful in the use of terms. When he says America is in for a long period of decline, we have to decide what we mean by "America." If by the United States we mean the geographical area, he is, I'm sure, right.
There has been decline, and there will be further decline, and the country is picking up many of the aspects of a Third World society. That's an automatic consequence of sending productive labor elsewhere. GM, as the press constantly reports, is closing some twenty-four factories in North America. But what you only read about in the small print is that it's opening new factories, including for example a $700 million high-tech factory in former East Germany, an area of huge unemployment where they can pay forty percent of the wages of Western Europe and none of the benefits. Or, as the Financial Times, the leading world business journal, puts it, they don't have to worry about the "pampered West European workers" any longer, they can just get highly exploited Third World workers now that Eastern Europe is being pushed back to its traditional Third World status. It's the same in Mexico, Thailand, etc.
There is a consequence to that. We become a Third World country in some respects. So if by the United States we mean the geographical area, he's right. If by the United States we mean U.S.-based corporations, then he's not right. In fact, the indications are to the contrary. Profits are doing fine, and a small sector is enriching itself. Even production by U.S.-based corporations is doing well, if we view the matter globally, as they do. I think Gar is right in saying that the policies now being discussed will have only a cosmetic effect on the United States as a geographical area. But I think they will probably be beneficial to the United States as a system of U.S.-based finance and industry, which is why the business community tended to give Clinton a good deal of support.
These last couple of days, the conference, and the elections, too, did deal with a significant issue. As usual, the issue had to do with a tactical disagreement within business circles. They are facing an objective problem, there's no doubt about it. The core of it has to do with what's called "industrial policy." We have to put aside a lot of nonsense before we can talk about this. The United States has always had an active state industrial policy, just like every other industrial country. Outside of ideologues, the academy, and the press, no one thinks that capitalism is a viable system, and nobody has thought that for sixty or seventy years, if ever. It has been understood certainly since the
Great Depression and the Second World War, if not long before, that the only way a system of private enterprise can survive is if there is extensive government intervention to regulate disorderly markets and protect private capital from the destructive effects of the market system, to organize a public subsidy for targeting advanced sectors of industry, etc. So every advanced country, whether it's Germany or Japan or by now South
Korea or certainly the United States, France, etc., has always had an active industrial policy. You can trace this back to the first industrializing country, England, and it's always been true of U.S. history, increasingly consciously so, since the Depression and the Second World War. Nobody called it industrial policy. It was always masked within the Pentagon system, which was, internationally, an intervention force, though domestically the Pentagon always was, and was understood to be from the late 1940s, a method by which the government can coordinate the private economy, can provide welfare to it, can subsidize it, can arrange the flow of taxpayer money to research and development, provide a state-guaranteed market for excess production, and target advanced industries for development, etc. Just about every successful and flourishing aspect of the U.S. economy has always relied on this kind of government involvement.
Much of it has been masked by the Pentagon system.
Why are people now talking about industrial policy? The reason is that the mask is dropping. That's an objective problem. It is very difficult now to get people to be willing to lower their consumption, their aspirations in order to divert investment funds to high-technology industry on the pretext that the Russians are coming. There are various efforts to continue this. In fact, the current public relations stunt in Somalia, in my opinion, is an effort which I don't think is going to work to try to reinvigorate this system. But the system is in trouble. Economists and bankers have been pointing out openly for some time that one of the main reasons why the current recovery is so sluggish is that the government has not been able to resort to the traditional pump priming mechanism, the traditional mechanism of economic stimulation, namely increased military spending with all of its multiplier effects. That's just not as readily available.
There's another fact that goes right along side it, which is independent of this. The cutting edge of technology and industry has for some time visibly been shifting in another direction, away from the electronics-based advanced industry of the postwar period and towards biology-based industry and commerce. Biotechnology, genetic engineering, design of seeds and drugs, even animal species, etc. is expected to be a huge growth industry with enormous profits. It's vastly more important than electronics. In comparison, electronics is a sort of frill. This has to do with the means of life and existence, which the government and U.S. corporations hope that U.S. commercial enterprises will dominate and if possible even monopolize. But it's very hard to disguise government involvement in that behind the Pentagon cover. Even if the Russians were still there you couldn't do that. So there are some real problems. That's why you have open discussion now of industrial policy. It was pretty openly proposed and discussed in the Little Rock meetings, and in fact throughout the campaign. There are differences between the two political parties on this. The Clinton people are more up front about these needs. The Reagan-Bush types, who are more fanatically ideological, still to some extent have their heads in the sand about it, although the Reagan administration was highly protectionist and did set up a government corporation to try to get the computer-chip industry back into operation. That succeeded. They were a bit more dogmatic on this issue. I think that's one of the main reasons why Clinton had substantial business support.
Those are real phenomena. They will have to be dealt with. Or take the question of "infrastructure" or "human capital," a kind of vulgar way of saying keep people alive and allow them to have an education. By now the business community is well aware that they've got problems with that. Take, for example, the Wall Street Journal, which has been the most extreme advocate of Reaganite lunacies for the past ten years. They're now publishing articles in which they're bemoaning the consequences -- without, of course, conceding that those are the consequences. They had a big news article a couple of weeks ago on the state of California and the collapse of the educational system, which they are very upset about. It was about San Diego. Businessmen in the San Diego area have relied on the state system, on a public subsidy, to provide them with skilled workers, junior managers, applied research, etc. The system is in collapse. The reason is obvious: the large cutbacks in social spending in the federal budget and the huge federal deficit, all of which the Wall Street Journal supported, simply transferred the burden of keeping people alive and functioning to the states. The states are unable to support that burden. They are in serious trouble. They tried to hand it down to the municipalities, which are also in serious trouble. One of the consequences is that the very fine educational system in the state of California is in serious difficulty, and now businessmen are complaining about it.
They want the government to get back into the business of providing them with what they need: skilled workers and research. That's going to mean a reversal of the fanaticism that the Wall Street Journal and others like it have been applauding for all these years.

DB: At the Little Rock conference I heard Clinton talking about structural problems and rebuilding the infrastructure. One attendee, Ann Markusen, a Rutgers economist and co-author of the book Dismantling the Cold War Economy, talked about the excesses of the Pentagon system and the distortions and damages that it has caused to the U.S. economy. So it seems that there is at least some discussion of these issues that I don't recall ever coming up before.

The reason is that they simply can't fully maintain the Pentagon based system with the propaganda pretexts gone. So you've got to start talking about it.

DB: Talking about it is one thing, but do they really have a clue about what do to? Can they have a clue?

I think they have a clue about what to do. They know perfectly well what they can do. If you listen to smart economists like Bob Solow, who started the thing off, they have some pretty reasonable ideas about what to do. What they want to do is openly done by Japan and Germany and every functioning economy, namely rely on government initiatives to provide the basis for private profit, and do it openly. The U.S. has been doing it indirectly through the Pentagon system, which is in fact kind of inefficient. It won't work anymore anyway, for the most part. So they would like to do it openly. The question is whether that can be done. One problem is that the enormous debt created during the Reagan years, at all levels -- federal, state, corporate, local, even household -- makes it extremely difficult to launch constructive programs. That's why they're faced with this contradiction.

DB: There is no capital available.

Yes. In fact, that was probably part of the purpose of the Reaganite borrow and spend program.

DB: To eliminate capital?

You recall about ten years ago, when David Stockman was kicked out, he had some interviews with William Greider which he pretty much said that the idea was to try to put a cap on social spending simply by debt. There will always be plenty to subsidize the rich, but you won't be able to pay aid to mothers with dependent children, only aid to dependent corporate executives. They may have overdone it. Furthermore, there is another problem, a cultural and ideological problem. They have for years relied on propaganda based on denial of these truths. It's other countries that have government involvement and social services. We're rugged individualists. So IBM doesn't get anything from the government. In fact, they get plenty, but it's through the Pentagon, among many other ways, for example, regressive fiscal measures. Propaganda aside, the population is pretty individualistic and kind of dissident and doesn't take orders very well, by comparative standards, and it's not going to be easy to sell people on subsidizing advanced sectors of the economy. These cultural factors are significant. In Europe there has been a kind of social contract. It's now declining, for exactly the reasons that I mentioned, but it has been largely imposed by the strength of the unions, in my opinion, the organized work force, and the relative weakness of the business community, which is not as dominant in Europe as it has been here for historical reasons. That led to a kind of social contract, if you like, in which the government does see primarily to the needs of private wealth, but it also creates a not insubstantial safety net for the rest of the population. So they have general health care, reasonable services, etc. We haven't had that, in part because we don't have the same organized work force and we have a much more class conscious and dominant business community. In Japan, pretty much the same results were achieved, but the reasons were largely the highly authoritarian culture.
People just do what they're told. So you tell them to cut back consumption, they have a very low standard of living, considering their wealth, work hard, etc. and people just do it. That's not going to be so easy to do here. There are going to be many problems.

DB: You mentioned the GM plant moving to Mexico. There's also Smith Corona in Cortland, New York, the last U.S.-based typewriter company. That, too, is moving to Mexico. There's a whole maquiladora corridor along the border, with incredible levels of lead in the water, high levels of pollution and toxic waste, and workers working for five dollars a day.

Actually, the case that I mentioned was GM moving to Eastern Europe, which is in a way more interesting. It tells you what the Cold War was all about. But you're right about Mexico. One of the major issues before the country right now, right through the whole electoral period, is NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. It's quite interesting to see how that's been handled. You learn a lot about the country and the future from looking closely at that. There is no doubt that NAFTA is going to have a very large scale effect on the life of Americans, and Mexicans, too. You can debate what the effect will be, but nobody doubts that it will be significant. Quite likely the effect will be to accelerate just what you've been describing, the flow of productive labor to Mexico, which is a totalitarian dictatorship, very brutal and repressive. Therefore you can guarantee low wages. During what's been called the "Mexican economic miracle" of the last decade, wages have dropped sixty percent. Union organizers get killed. If the Ford Motor Company wants to toss out its work force and hire slave labor, they just do it.
Nobody stops them. Pollution goes on unregulated. It's a great place for investors. One might think that NAFTA, which includes sending productive labor down to Mexico, might improve their real wages, maybe level the two countries. But that's most unlikely.
One reason is the repression, which prevents organization that could lead to raising wages. Another consequence of NAFTA will be flooding Mexico with capital-intensive agricultural products from the United States, all based ultimately on big public subsidies, which will undercut Mexican agriculture. So they will be flooded with American crops, which will drive millions of people off the land to urban areas or into the maquiladora areas. This means another major factor driving down wages. It's not at all clear that NAFTA will lead to raising wages. It will almost certainly be a big bonanza for investors in the United States and for the wealthy sectors in Mexico which are their counterparts, the ones applauding the agreement, and the professional classes who work for them. It will very likely be quite harmful for American workers. The overall effect on jobs is uncertain, but it's very likely that wages and work conditions will suffer. Hispanic and black workers are the ones who are going to be hurt most.

DB: While those jobs are being lost, U.S. corporate profits are increasing. Is that what you're saying?

Corporations are doing very well. This is one of the best years for corporate profits.

DB: Will NAFTA and GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, essentially formalize on institutional level North-South relations?

That's the idea, in fact. It will also almost certainly degrade environmental standards. For example, corporations will be able to argue that EPA standards are violations of free trade agreements. This is already happening in the Canada-U.S. part of the mislabeled free trade agreement. Its general effect will be to drive life down to the lowest level while keeping profits high. One can debate this, but there's no doubt that the consequences are significant, and it's interesting to see how it's been handled. It didn't even arise in the campaign. The public hasn't the foggiest idea what's going on. In fact, they can't know.
One reason is that NAFTA is a secret. It's an executive agreement which is not publically available. To give you an indication of the extent to which this is true, in 1974 the Congressional Trade Act was passed. One of its provisions was that on any trade-related issue there has to be an analysis and input by the Labor Advisory Committee based in the unions. Obviously they have to have an analysis and report on NAFTA. NAFTA was signed by the President. It's an executive agreement. That was mid-August of this year.
The Labor Advisory Committee was notified. They were informed that their report was due on September 9 of this year. However, they were only given the text about twenty-four hours before the report was due, ensuring that they couldn't even convene and obviously couldn't write a serious report. These are conservative labor leaders, not the kind of guys who criticize the government much. They nevertheless wrote a very acid report. They said, to the extent that we can look at this thing in the few hours given to us, it looks like it's going to be a total disaster for working people, for the environment, for Mexicans, and a great boon for investors. They pointed out that property rights are being protected all over the place but working rights are never mentioned. They also bitterly condemned the utter contempt for democracy that was demonstrated by not even allowing them to look at it. They said parts of it are still being kept secret. GATT is the same. Nobody knows what's going on there unless they're some kind of specialist.

DB: Have you seen details of these treaties?

You can see details in the secondary comment on them, like the Labor Advisory Committee report. Theoretically, by now it's possible to get a text. But the crucial point is that, even if you and I could get a text, what does that mean for American democracy? How many people even know that this is going on? The Labor Advisory Committee report was never reported by the press. People not only don't know what's happening to them, they don't even know that they don't know. GATT is even more far reaching. I just came back from a couple of weeks in Europe, where this is a pretty big issue in the European Community context. One of the big public concerns in the European Community is described as nationalism, but what it really has to do with, I think, is what's called in EC parlance the "democratic deficit," meaning the gap that is developing between executive decisions, which are secret, and democratic, or at least partially democratic institutions, like parliaments, which are less and less able to influence decisions made at the Community level. All of this is a marvelous device for rendering democratic forums meaningless. It means crucial decisions with enormous impact are being raised to a level where the population can't influence them even indirectly through parliaments and furthermore doesn't know about them. And as in this case, doesn't even know that it doesn't know. That leads us towards a goal that has long been sought, namely maintaining democratic forms but ensuring that there's no interference with private power. This is a reflection of the globalization of the economy.
Over history, governmental institutions have, to a considerable extent, tended to reflect the form that's being taken by economic power and its organization. It's not one hundred percent, but there is a strong tendency in that direction. That's what we're now seeing.
The economy is being internationalized, meaning that the geographical industrial countries are being deindustrialized but the corporations are doing fine. This internationalized economy, run largely by transnational corporations and supernational banks are creating their own governmental structures, like GATT and NAFTA and the IMF and the World Bank and the G-7 meetings, etc. The international business press is pretty up front about it. They call it a "de facto world government" which is going to reflect these interests.

DB: It seems that the Clinton-Gore administration is going to be in a major conflict over its support for NAFTA and GATT at the same time, at least on a rhetorical level, talking about its commitment to environmental protection and creating jobs for Americans.

I would be very surprised if there's a big conflict over that. I think your word "rhetorical" is accurate. Their commitment is to U.S.-based corporations, which means transnational corporations. They very much like this special form that NAFTA is taking with special protection for property rights but no protection for workers' rights. And with the methods being developed to undercut environmental protection. That's in their interests. I doubt that there will be a conflict in the administration about this unless there is a lot of public pressure.

DB: There's been almost a domino effect, in terms of Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Canadian businesses are moving to states in the deep South and U.S. businesses moving to Mexico.

And remember that Canadian and U.S. businesses are pretty closely interlinked. Again, we have to be very careful when we use words like "Canada" and "United States" or "Mexico." These always were propaganda terms which covered up a lot. You just have to look at some of the figures. About ten years ago, when the latest U.N. figures were made available, about forty percent of world trade was internal, intrafirm transfers, transfers internal to a particular corporation. That is, it was centrally managed trade. It's not really trade, just interchanges between branches of a big transnational corporation. That's forty percent of world trade. Undoubtedly the figure's higher now.

Take a look at neo-classical economics, the kind of stuff you're supposed to bow before.
It has a theory about this, i.e., ideally there's a free-market sea and within it are little islands which are little individual firms. Of course, everybody understood that a particular business, say a grocery store down the street, internally doesn't work by free trade. Internally it's centrally managed. So you have centrally managed islands in the freemarket sea. The free-market sea was always more of less of a joke. But by now the islands are about the scale of the sea. This is increasingly centrally managed trade by major corporate structures. It's been called "corporate mercantilism" with its own governmental structures developing and the public increasingly marginalized to a pretty remarkable extent.

DB: Talk about the political economy of food, its production and distribution, particularly within the framework of IMF and World Bank policies. These institutions extend loans under very strict conditions to the South. They must promote the market economy, and they need to pay back the loans in hard currency. They have to increase exports, like coffee, so that we can drink cappucino, or beef so that we can eat hamburgers, all at the expense of indigenous agriculture.
Basically the picture's the way you have described. The individual cases are quite interesting. Take the great economic miracle in Latin America, which is now being used as the basis for applying the same medicine in Eastern Europe. In fact, the same people are going. Jeffrey Sachs, a leading Harvard expert, who carried through what's considered the highly successful economic miracle in Bolivia, then went off to Poland and Russia to teach them the same rules. It's interesting to have a close look. Take Bolivia. It was in trouble. It had had brutal dictators, highly repressive, huge debt, the whole business. The
West went in, Sachs was the advisor, with the IMF rules: stabilize the currency, increase agro-export, cut down production for domestic needs, subsistence agriculture, etc. It worked. The figures, the macroeconomic statistics looked quite good. The currency has been stabilized. The debt has been reduced. The GNP is increasing. There are a few little flaws in the ointment: poverty has rapidly increased. Malnutrition has increased. The educational system has collapsed. But most interesting is what has in fact stabilized the economy: agricultural exports -- but not coffee. Coca. Some specialists on Latin American economies estimate that it now accounts for probably about two-thirds of Bolivian exports. The reason is obvious. Take a peasant farmer somewhere, flood his area with U.S.-subsidized agriculture, maybe through a Food for Peace program, so he can't produce or compete. Set up a situation in which the only way he can function is as an agricultural exporter. He's not an idiot. He's going to turn to the most profitable crop, which happens to be coca.
The peasants of course don't get much out of this. They also get the guns and the DEA helicopters. But they get something. At least they can survive. And you get a flood of coca exports. The profits mostly go to the big syndicates, or, for that matter, to New York banks. Nobody knows how many billions of dollars of this pass through New York banks or their offshore affiliates, but it's undoubtedly plenty. Plenty of it goes to U.S. based chemical companies which, as is well known, are exporting chemicals to Latin America far beyond any industrial needs, mainly the chemicals that are used in cocaine production, which is an industrial activity. So there's plenty of profit. It's probably giving a shot in the arm to the U.S. economy as well. And it's contributing nicely to the international drug epidemic, including here. That's the economic miracle in Bolivia. And that's not the only case. But yes, these are the kinds of consequences that will follow from what has properly been called "IMF fundamentalism." It's having a disastrous effect everywhere it's applied, except that it's regarded as successful. From the point of view of the perpetrators, it is quite successful. So Latin America is supposed to be undergoing a dramatic recovery, and in a sense it is. As you sell off public assets, there's lots of money to be made, so much of the capital that fled Latin America is now back. The stock markets are doing nicely.
Take a look at Chile. There's another big economic miracle. The poverty level has increased from about twenty percent during the Allende years up to about forty-four percent now, after the great miracle. Similarly in country after country. But the elite sectors, the professionals, the businessmen, are very happy with it. And they're the ones who make the plans, write the articles, etc. So there's a lot of praise for the economic miracle here, too. It's just a far more exaggerated version of what we see here. Here we see it in a relatively mild way as compared with the Third World, but the structural properties are the same. The wealthy sector is doing fine. The general public is in deep trouble.

DB: Between 1985 and 1992, for example, in the United
States, Americans suffering from hunger rose from twenty to thirty million, this while novelist Tom Wolfe, a great admirer of yours (Not!), described the 1980s as one of the "great golden moments that humanity has ever experienced."
Take a look at last Sunday's New York Times Magazine. There was an article which was properly apolitical, but if you just add the background politics you can explain it. It was about the Boston City Hospital, the hospital for the poor, the general public in Boston, not the fancy Harvard teaching hospital. They didn't say so in the article, but a couple of years ago they had to institute a malnutrition clinic because they were getting Third
World levels of malnutrition and their funds are so slight that they had to institute triage, take the cases that you can save more easily. That's something that has never happened before. Most of the deep starvation and malnutrition in the country had pretty well been eliminated by the Great Society programs in the 1960s. But by the early 1980s it was beginning to creep up again, and now the latest estimates are thirty million or so in deep hunger. It gets much worse over the winter because parents have to make this agonizing decision between heat and food. The effect is the kind of things described in that article: children dying because they're not getting water with some rice in it.

DB: The group Worldwatch says that one of the solutions to the shortage of food is control of population. Do you support efforts to limit population?
First of all, there is no shortage of food. There are problems of distribution, serious problems. However, that aside, I think undoubtedly there should be efforts to control population. There are well-known ways to control population: increase the economic level. Population is very sharply declining in industrial societies. Many of them are barely reproducing their own population. Take Italy, which is a late industrializing country but has been industrializing. The birth rate now doesn't reproduce the population.
That's a standard phenomenon. The reasons are pretty well understood. Economic development is the best method of population reduction.

DB: Coupled with education?

Coupled with education and, of course, the means for birth control. The United States has had a terrible role. It will not help fund international efforts to even provide education about birth control.

DB: The globe is burning while various Neroes are fiddling.

A study reported in the current issue of the British journal Nature indicates with greater precision and certainty than ever before that global warming is increasing. It predicts anywhere from a four to six degree increase in temperature. The resulting change in the earth's climate would have disruptive and possible catastrophic consequences for both human society and natural ecosystems.
This has been pretty well known to scientists for over twenty years. I remember when I first heard it from the head of the Meteorology and Earth Sciences Department at MIT, a very distinguished scientist and incidentally a big skeptic about catastrophism. But by about 1970 he was convinced that there was a very serious problem ahead. There has been much debate about the timing, but the course of developments is not really in doubt.
There are some holdouts, like the editors of the Wall Street Journal, but it's pretty clear.
This new study seems to sharpen up the estimates. It narrows the range that had already been assumed and adds more evidence to it.
Nobody can be certain about these things, of course. There's always going to be a margin of error, and a lot is simply not understood. But to play games with these possibilities is just insane. You have to take seriously a worst-case analysis.

DB: Carl Sagan spoke in Boulder a few months ago and talked about the environmental crises transcending narrow state interests and state abilities to address them, thus openingthe way to global cooperation. This is something you've talked about as well.
The question is: Who's going to do the global cooperation? There's plenty of cooperation going on.

DB: The global enforcer.
There's that, and there's also this de facto world government, reflecting the needs and interests of the global corporations and banks. That's global cooperation. What is lacking, however, is global cooperation arising out of popular democratic structures. That's not only lacking, it's declining, because the democratic structures are declining. So to talk about global cooperation is not helpful. Global cooperation among the transnational corporations is just going to make the problem worse.

DB: There is a burst, a surge of tribalism all over the world: nationalism, religious fanaticism, racism, from L.A. to the Balkans to the Caucasus to India. Why now?

First of all, let's remember that it's always been going on.

DB: I grant you that, but it seems more pronounced.

In parts of the world it's more pronounced. Take Eastern Europe. Up until a couple of years ago it was under the control of a very harsh tyranny. A tyranny like the Soviet system basically immobilizes the civil society, which means that you eliminate what's good, but you also eliminate what's bad. One of the things that was bad in that civil society traditionally was very bitter ethnic hatreds. Europe altogether is a very racist place, even worse than we are. But Eastern Europe was particularly ugly. One of the reasons why I'm here is that a lot of my parents and grandparents fled from that. It was held down by the general repression of civil society, which repressed democratic forces but also ethnic hatreds and hostilities. Now that the tyranny is gone, the civil society is coming back up, including its warts, of which there are plenty. Elsewhere in the world, say in Africa, yes, there are all kinds of atrocities. They were always there. One of the worst atrocities was in the 1980s. South African atrocities, meaning U.S.-backed atrocities, from 1980 to 1988, were responsible for about a million-and-a-half killings, plus about $60 billion of damage, only in the region surrounding South Africa. Nobody here batted an eyelash about that, because the U.S. was backing it. If you go back to the 1970s in Burundi, there was a huge massacre, hundreds of thousands of people killed.
Nobody cared.
In Western Europe, you are getting an increase in localism. This is in part a reflection of the decline in the representative character of the democratic institutions. So as the European Community slowly consolidates towards executive power, reflecting big economic concentrations, people are trying to find other ways to preserve their identity, and that leads to a lot of localism. That's not the whole factor, but it's a lot of it. You should be careful with what's called "racism" in the United States. Take Los Angeles.
There's plenty of racism. But remember that there's an unpronounceable five letter word in the United States, namely "class." And a lot of the conflict is in fact class. There are tremendous disparities between black and white populations in health, infant mortality, etc. But a substantial factor of that is actually a class factor. At every class level, from homeless up to executive, blacks are worse off than whites. Nevertheless, a lot of the disparity between blacks and whites is class-based -- poor whites are not much better off than poor blacks. Race and class are pretty well correlated, so you get confusions. As the population moves towards a kind of a Third World character, people get bitter and desperate. And as the democratic institutions become more and more evacuated of content, people look for other things. They may look for a savior, like a guy from Mars like Ross Perot. Or they may turn to religious fanaticism, or other things.

DB: Or resurrect the Kennedy myth.

That's another case, in my opinion.

DB: Germany is the country everyone loves to hate. It's a very convenient target. It's interesting to see what the German government response has been to the incidents in that country to restrict immigration -- they had the most liberal asylum policies in the world -- limit civil liberties, and ban political parties.

When anything happens in Germany, people get pretty upset. And they're right. There is a history, after all. Nevertheless, we should remember a few things. As you said, Germany had the most liberal policy. Furthermore, they had by far the largest number of refugees.
Europe is an extremely racist place. The localism is way beyond anything that we're used to. To an extent that you rarely find here, people tend to live near where they were raised and hate the person in the next village. There's a lot of talk about German racism, and it's bad enough. For example, kicking out the Gypsies and sending them off to Romania is such a scandal you can't even describe it. The Gypsies were treated just like the Jews in the Holocaust, and nobody's batting an eyelash about that because nobody gives a damn about the Gypsies. But we should remember that there are other things going on, too, which are getting less publicity. Take Spain. It was admitted into the European Community with some conditions, one of which was that it is to be what is pretty openly called a "barrier" to these hordes of North Africans who the Europeans are afraid are going to flock up to Europe. It's a narrow distance. There are plenty of boat people trying to get across from North Africa to Spain, kind of like Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
The boats are sinking in the Mediterranean, or if people happen to make it, they are expelled by the Spanish police and navy. It's very ugly. There are of course reasons why people are going from Africa to Europe and not the other direction. There are five hundred years of reasons for that. But it's happening, and Europe doesn't want it. They want to preserve their wealth and keep the poor people out.
The same problem is happening in Italy. There was a recent electoral victory by the Lombard League, a group that seems to have a kind of neofascist element. It reflects northern Italian interests. Part of their concern is the same thing: North Africans drifting up through Sicily and into Italy and coming up from the south. They don't want them.
They want rich white people. Europe has not been a heterogenous society to anything like the extent that the United States has. Nor has it been as mobile a society as the United States. These matters have been a bit under the cover, but they're harder to keep under the cover.
DB: What are your two new books?

One is called Year 501. As the title indicates, it's an effort to look back over and rethink the major themes of the past five hundred years, the period of the European conquest of the world, and to look at the forms that it's taken, the principles and themes that underlay it and ask what they suggest about year 501, meaning the future. In my opinion it's basically more of the same adapted to current contingencies with elements of the kind we've been discussing. The second book is called Rethinking Camelot. The main focus is on two years, 1963-64, the presidential transition and the planning for the Vietnam War.
That's a fascinating period that we probably know more about than almost anything in American history. There's huge documentation. It's extremely important. It led to one of the largest atrocities of the whole five-hundred-year era, namely the Indochina War, which had enormous consequences. Major decisions were being made at that time. It takes on added interest because of the fact that there was a presidential transition and an assassination which has led to a lot of, in my view, fantasies, but at least beliefs that something crucial happened, that some major change in American history took place at the time of the Kennedy assassination which cast a pall on everything that followed. This has been fostered in large part by Kennedy intellectuals. After the Tet Offensive in 1968, when corporate America basically called off the war, they completely changed their story as to what had happened. If you take a look at the people who had written memoirs,
Kennedy's associates, they came out with new versions totally different from the old ones, in which it turned out that Kennedy was a secret dove and was trying to withdraw.
There was no hint of that in the earlier versions or, for that matter, in the secret record or anywhere else. But they have an obvious stake in trying to recover the image of Camelot and make it look beautiful. Arthur Schlesinger is the most remarkable example. Also, large sectors of the popular movements have been involved in this, to a certain extent even immobilized by these ideas, especially in the last year or two.

Keeping the Rabble in Line Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian: Race



January 14, 1993

DB: The latest news bulletins report that Allied bombers are currently attacking Ankara, Jakarta, Tel Aviv, and even Washington, D.C., because of their defiance of UN resolutions. Would you care to comment?

Not Port-au-Prince?

DB: You just wrote a book called Year 501, and it's beginning the same way that Year 499 began, with the bombing of Iraq, which is very much what you anticipated. Although this bombing is of a very different character. This one is a matter of George Bush and Saddam Hussein playing to their respective audiences and each giving the other appropriate assistance in the action. It's difficult to conceal. I noticed Bob Simon on CBS the other night just after the bombing, reporting from Baghdad, saying, This is the best gift that Bush can give to Saddam Hussein. Conversely, although for a short time only, Saddam Hussein will now again, even more, be able to appeal not only to his own population but to a considerable part of the Arab world and a lot of the Third World as someone who is defying imperialist violence. The bombing was immediately denounced by the Arab League as an act of aggression against an Arab country. The Arab countries wouldn't take part. Certainly at home he's guaranteed a worshipful reception on the part of those who transmit pictures of the world to the public. The same with Bush: worshipful reception at home, easy action, overwhelming force against people who can't shoot back. You can strut around the stage and strike heroic poses. It emphasizes what he wants to go down in history as his one achievement, namely killing a lot of people without getting shot at.

DB: There was Libya in the 1980s and now Iraq in the 1990s, convenient punching bags. But Muammar Qaddafi and Saddam
Hussein also play their part. They're great villains.
They're easy to hate, too.
Qaddafi is sort of a small time thug, but Saddam Hussein is a major one. On the other hand you have to bear in mind that the villainy is totally irrelevant. He was as much a villain before August 2, 1990. His worst crimes by far are during the period when he was a highly admired ally who was being strongly supported by the United States, so strongly that he even almost approached the level of Israel. Israel, I had thought, would be the only country in the world that could bomb an American ship (the Liberty), kill a couple of dozen American sailors and get away with it completely. But I was wrong. Iraq was able to do it, too. Iraq was able to bomb the U.S.S. Stark in the Gulf, killing Americans, and get away with it because they were such close allies. That was in 1987, the period when the U.S. was tilting strongly toward Iraq to try to make sure that they won the Iraq-Iran war. It continued until the one crime for which Saddam Hussein cannot be forgiven: he disobeyed orders on August 2. Immediately after, within a few months, the U.S. was supporting him again. There was no secret about it. In March, right after the fighting stopped, when Saddam Hussein turned to crushing the Shiites in the South and then the Kurds in the North, the U.S. stood by quietly and assisted him. The Kurds finally got some publicity. They're blue-eyed and Aryan. But the Shiites got no publicity. They were much harder hit. That was right under the nose of American forces. Iraqi generals were appealing to the American forces to let them have some arms so they could fight off Saddam Hussein's troops. Stormin' Norman was just sitting there and watching, maybe writing his memoirs at the time. This was reported. It received sober approval in the press: Yes, we don't like Saddam Hussein, but we have to support him in the interests of stability, meaning retaining our power in the region. In fact, at that time, the government was actually kind enough to explain for once exactly what they were doing. It's worth paying attention to the words, passed through the government spokesman at the New York
Times, chief diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman, who described U.S. policy as handed to him, which is that the U.S. is seeking the "best of all worlds": an iron-fisted Iraqi junta which could wield the iron fist in Iraq just the way Saddam Hussein did before the invasion of Kuwait, much to the satisfaction of the U.S. allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia and obviously the boss in Washington. That's what they want. This makes it extremely clear. You can't miss the message. It's explicit and clear and lucid. They want a Saddam Hussein, and since he's now an embarrassment, they want a clone, somebody equivalent to Saddam Hussein who will be able to wield the iron fist again just like he did. So the crimes are irrelevant. Yes, he's a demon, but that's irrelevant. What's relevant is the obedience. That's a pattern that goes way back in history. We supported Mussolini and Hitler for similar reasons.

DB: No noise from the servants' quarters.

Yes.

DB: What do you think of this new concept in statecraft, the "no-fly zone"?

Anyone's going to try to lead with their strength, and the U.S. strength is in high-technology military capacity. The U.S. government recognizes that classical intervention is no longer an option. This is one of the major changes since the 1960s; in fact it's a change in world history. I think they well understand that the population will not tolerate the classical forms of intervention. We should remember what that means. Classical intervention is, for example, when Woodrow Wilson sent the Marines to attack Haiti and the Dominican Republic and conquer them, killing thousands of people, tearing apart the constitutional system and reinstating virtual slavery, turning the countries over to western investors, turning them both into plantations. Neither country has recovered. In the case of Haiti we stayed there for almost twenty years. Or marauding around Nicaragua searching for Sandino. Or another form of classical intervention, actually one that set some new precedents, was Kennedy thirty years ago, when he sent the U.S. Air Force to start bombing villages, authorized napalm and defoliation, and sent U.S. military forces in as combat advisors. All of that's classical intervention. That's finished. Nobody assumes that that's even possible any longer. They can only carry out what an early Bush administration high-level planning document stated: only rapid and decisive intervention against much weaker enemies which will lead to very quick victory without any fighting.
Anything else will undercut political support. There is no longer any political support.
That gets back to no-fly zones. No-fly zones nobody knows about. It's clean. The only people who get killed are other people. There's never any interaction between the military forces. So what was called a "combat" between U.S. and Iraqi jets wasn't a combat. It wouldn't be a combat if I sat here pushing a button and a bomb went off halfway around the world. The Iraqi jets are only "in combat" when U.S. planes are out of their range. So there are cheap wars. We can attack, but we never get shot at. That the public will still tolerate. That's what no-fly zones are about.

DB: What about the role of the UN in these various interventions now, giving its approval?
First of all, the UN doesn't really give its approval. It just stays back. So during the Gulf
War, the UN did not give its approval. The UN was neutralized. There was a series of resolutions. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Security Council passed resolution 660, which is the usual kind of resolution that's introduced after some act of aggression. It called for Iraq to withdraw. It had a second part, which was immediately forgotten, because the U.S. wouldn't tolerate it. The second part was that Iraq and Kuwait should immediately undertake negotiations to settle issues between them. The U.S. wasn't having that. They didn't want negotiations. The second part dropped out of history. But the first part stayed. Iraq should withdraw. The only difference between that and any other UN resolution was that this time it wasn't vetoed. A similar resolution had been introduced just a few months earlier, when the U.S. invaded Panama. Of course that time it was vetoed. The U.S. has vetoed dozens of such resolutions. Same thing when Israel invaded Lebanon.
Then came a series of resolutions leading ultimately to the final one, 678, in which the UN simply washed its hands of the matter. In late November 1990 the UN simply said, Look, it's out of our hands. Any state can do anything they feel like. That's one of the most destructive attacks on the UN that has ever taken place. The UN simply said, We cannot carry out our function. The UN charter is very explicit that no state can use violence unless explicitly authorized by the Security Council. The UN didn't do that, but simply said, We have to wash our hands of the matter. The reason is the U.S. is going to do what it feels like.

DB: So yesterday's bombing was illegal?
It had no authorization at all. Nobody even pretends that it did. Furthermore, whatever the Iraqis were doing with the missiles, whatever games they were playing, right or wrong, you can discuss it at some other level, but as far as the UN resolutions are concerned, it's conceded in the small print that they did not violate any resolution. As tothe other things, impeding access of UN inspectors and moving into Umm Qasr port to pick up their equipment, that's arguably in violation of resolutions in a technical sense, but the UN simply made a comment -- didn't condemn them as they condemn lots of things -- authorizing no actions. The bombing was completely unilateral, a unilateral decision by the United States, which apparently was made even before the UN meeting.
The aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk was already preparing. The only reason they didn't attack a day earlier was because the weather was bad, meaning it would have occurred even before the UN meeting. It was independent of it. The UN never authorized any such action.
Independently of all of this the UN has been neutralized in another respect. For a long time, many decades, from about the late 1960s through the end of the 1980s, the United States was intent on essentially destroying the United Nations, because it simply was not a pliable instrument of U.S. policy. Under Reagan, the U.S. didn't pay its dues. It was way in the lead in vetoing Security Council resolutions in the past quarter-century. It was doing everything it could to undermine and eliminate the organization, especially those parts of it that were concerned with Third World affairs, like UNESCO. However, by about 1989 or 1990, the situation changed. The UN came back into favor. During the
Gulf War there was a long series of awed articles about the "wondrous sea change" in the United Nations. What happened is that it fell back into line. The UN is essentially the five permanent members of the Security Council. They run the Security Council. The General
Assembly you can dismiss. The great power doesn't pay any attention to it. The United
States always had two automatic votes in the Security Council, usually three. Britain is a kind of colony. France will make a couple of noises, but they go along. So they had three votes out of the five. With the collapse of the Soviet Union they had four. Russia became even a more loyal client than Britain, which is hard to imagine. That gives four automatic votes. China is very dependent on U.S. trade. It will at most abstain. That means the U.S. essentially has the Security Council in its pocket.
The disappearance of the Soviet Union is one of a number of factors that had the effect of essentially eliminating Third World voices. As long as the Soviet Union was there, two big gangsters parading around, there was some space for independent forces, there was room for non-alignment. You could play one power against the other, or they'd squabble between themselves. With the Soviet Union gone and only one gangster left, that's finished. Furthermore, it's very important to remember that there was a tremendous crisis of capitalism that swept most of the capitalist world in the 1980s. Especially the former colonial world, which was devastated. The only areas that escaped were those in the region around Japan which didn't submit to the neoliberal orthodoxy and standard economic principles that had a devastating impact on Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia that weren't in the Japanese orbit, like the Philippines.
That also undermines very strongly any form of Third World independence. There are other factors, but the net effect is that the UN is pretty much back in the pocket of the United States, which means that it's getting a much more favorable press at this point. Of course, not when it does things that the U.S. doesn't want. For example, there was a condemnation of Iraq, although it didn't authorize bombing. There was a simultaneous condemnation of Israel for deporting 415 alleged Hamas members from Gaza. They deported mostly the intellectuals, the professional class. At one university virtually the whole staff was kicked out. There was condemnation of that. Of course the U.S. doesn't mind that, so therefore it doesn't matter. So it's the usual story: insofar as the United Nations will be an instrument of U.S. power or can at least be made to look it, it is a useful organization. When it isn't doing what the U.S. wants, then it can disappear.

DB: Does Operation Restore Hope in Somalia represent a new pattern of intervention?

I think it represents another try. I don't think that really should be classified as an intervention. It should be classified as a PR operation for the Pentagon. The U.S. has some interests in Somalia, but I don't think they're major. The U.S. was, of course, deeply involved in Somalia. This has to be finessed by the press at the moment, because it's not a pretty story. From 1978 through 1990 -- it's not ancient history -- the U.S. was the main support for Siad Barre, who was a kind of Saddam Hussein clone, tearing the country apart. He probably killed fifty or sixty thousand people, according to Africa Watch. He destroyed the civil and social structure, in fact, laid the basis for what's happening now.
The U.S. was supporting and may well be still supporting him. We don't know exactly.
We know that the forces, mostly loyal to him, are being supported through Kenya, which is very much under U.S. influence. It's possible that that support continues. Anyhow we certainly did through the end of 1990.
The U.S. was there for a reason: there are military bases there which are part of the system aimed at the Gulf region. The main U.S. intervention forces, overwhelmingly, have always been aimed at the Middle East. This was part of the system of bases surrounding that. However, I doubt that that's much of a concern at this point. They are much more secure bases and more stable areas. What is needed now, desperately needed, is some way to prevent the Pentagon budget from declining. In fact, it's kind of intriguing that it was almost openly stated this time. So Colin Powell, the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs, made a statement about how this was a great public relations job for the military.
The Washington Post had an editorial describing it as a bonanza for the Pentagon. The reporters could scarcely fail to see what was happening. After all, when the Pentagon calls up all the news bureaus and major television networks and says, Look, be at such-and-such a beach at such-and-such an hour with your cameras aiming in this direction because you're going to watch Navy Seals climbing out of the water and it will be real exciting, nobody can fail to see that this is a PR job. There's a level of stupidity that's too much for anyone. So it was a big PR job. And it's needed. The best explanation for the intervention, in my opinion, was given in an article on the day of the intervention in the
London Financial Times which didn't mention Somalia. It was about the U.S. recession and why the recovery is so sluggish. It quoted various economists from investment firms and banks and so on, the guys that don't just design models for mathematical journals but care about the economy. The consensus was that the problem with the recovery from the recession was that the standard methods of government stimulation of the economy weren't available. The pump priming through the Pentagon system, one of the major government devices for management of the economy, simply was not available to the extent that it had been in the past. The economy was therefore very sluggish, for that and other reasons.
That's a big problem. The Pentagon system has been the core of state industrial policy.
It's declining. There have been various efforts through the 1980s to revitalize it. Bush put it pretty honestly in his farewell address when he explained why we intervened in Somalia and not Bosnia. What it comes down to is in Bosnia somebody might shoot at you. In Somalia it's just a bunch of teenaged kids. We figure 30,000 Marines can handle that. So it's just photo ops, basically. One hopes it will help the Somalis more than harm them, but they're more or less incidental. They're just props for photo opportunities for Pentagon public relations, which is a crucial thing. When the press and commentators say the U.S. has no interests there, that's taking a very narrow and misleading view.
Maintaining the Pentagon system is a major interest for the masters of the U.S. economy.

DB: There was a Navy and Marine White Paper in September 1992 called "From the Sea." It discusses that the military focus shifts from global military threats to "regional challenges and opportunities" including "humanitarian assistance and nation building efforts in the Third World."
But that's always been the focus, rhetoric aside. The military budget is mainly for intervention. In fact, even strategic nuclear forces were basically for intervention. It's not that we intended to use nuclear weapons against Grenada. But the point is that you have to think about the way strategy works. The U.S. is a global power. It wasn't like the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union carried out intervention right around its borders, where it had overwhelming conventional forces. The U.S. is a global power. It carries out intervention everywhere: in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, in places where it has no conventional advantage. Accordingly, it always had to have an extremely intimidating posture to make sure that nobody got in the way. That required what was called a "nuclear umbrella": powerful strategic weapons forces to intimidate everybody so that conventional forces could be an instrument of political power. In fact, virtually the entire military system -- its military aspect, not its economic aspect -- was geared for intervention, and that was usually covered as "nation building." In Vietnam, in Central America. We're always humanitarian. So when the Marine Corps documents say we now have a new mission, humanitarian nation building, that's just the old mission. We now have to emphasize it more than before because traditional pretext is gone. There was always an ideological framework in which you could place this, namely the conflict with the Russians. If you had to carry out nation building, humanitarian efforts by attacking and destroying South Vietnam, that was to block Soviet expansion. That part's gone. You can't any longer be blocking Soviet expansion. So we're now just focusing on what was left, the humanitarian nation building. But it's the same as it's always been. It's just the current form of imperialist concern.

DB: What kind of impact will the injection of U.S. armed forces into Somalia have on the civil society? Somalia has been described by one U.S. military official as "Dodge City" and the Marines as "Wyatt Earp." What happens when the marshall leaves town?

First of all, that description has nothing to do with Somalia. One crucial striking aspect of this intervention is that there's no concern for Somalia. No one who knew anything about Somalia was involved in planning it, and there is no interaction with Somalis as far as we know. Since the Marines have gotten in the only people they have been dealing with are the so-called "warlords," and they're the biggest gangsters in the country. They're dealing with them. But Somalia is a country. There are people who know and care about it.
They've described it. They don't have much of a voice here. One of the most knowledgeable is a Somali woman named Rakiya Omaar, who was the Executive Director of Africa Watch. She did most of the human rights work, writing, etc., up until the intervention, which she strongly opposed and was then fired from Africa Watch. She knows Somalia well. Another is her co-director, Alex de Waal, who resigned from Africa
Watch in protest after she was fired. Apart from his human rights work, he is also an academic specialist on the region. He has published a major book with Oxford University
Press on the Sudan famine and has written many articles on this. He knows not only Somalia but the region very well. And there are others. Their picture is typically quite different. In fact, many things are not controversial. Most of Somalia recovered from the U.S.-backed Siad Barre attack. Siad Barre's main atrocities were in the northern part of
Somalia, what formerly had been a British colony. It was recovering. It's pretty well organized. It has its own civil society emerging, a rather traditional one, with traditional elders and lots of new groups, womens' groups, have come up in this crisis. They could use aid, doubtless, but it's kind of recovering.
The area of real crisis was one region in the south, in part because of the forces of
General Mohammed Hersi, known as Morgan, Siad Barre's son-in-law, which are supported from Kenya. They were carrying out some of the worst atrocities. The forces of
General Mohammad Farah Aidid and Ali Mahdi were also rampaging. It led to a serious breakdown in which people just grabbed guns in order to survive. There was a lot of looting. That's when you get these teenaged gangsters. That's a description of a certain region. It was at its worst in the early part of 1992. By September-October it was already being overcome and this part of Somalia was also recovering. If you look at the serious aid groups, not U.S. Care, and not the UN, which are extremely incompetent, as everyone agreed, but the ones who are doing most of the work, like the International Red Cross, Save The Children, the smaller groups that were carrying out development projects, like the American Friends Service Committee, which had been there for many years, or Australian Care, which was a major provider -- they were getting most of aid through.
They were giving figures of about eighty or ninety percent of the aid getting through by early November. The reason was that they were working with the reconstituting Somalian society. In this corner of real violence and starvation, things were already recovering, rather on the pattern of what had already taken place in the north. There were plenty of problems, but it was recovering.
A lot of this had been under the initiative of a UN negotiator, Mohammed Sahnoun, of Algeria, who was extremely successful and highly respected on all sides. He was working with traditional elders, with the newly emerging civic groups, especially women's groups.
They were coming back together under his guidance, or at least initiative. He had good contacts everywhere. He was kicked out by Boutrous Ghali in October because he publicly criticized the incompetence and corruption of the UN effort. They put in an Iraqi replacement who maybe would have achieved something, maybe not. It was over because of the Marine intervention. A U.S. intervention was apparently planned from shortly after the election. The official story is that it was decided upon at the end of November, when
George Bush saw heartrending pictures on television. But in fact U.S. reporters in Baidoa in early November saw Marine officers in civilian clothes walking around and scouting out the area, planning for where they were going to set up their base. This was rational timing. The worst crisis was over. The society was reconstituting. You could be pretty well guaranteed a fair success at getting food in, since it was getting in anyway. Thirty thousand troops would only expedite it in the short term. Not too much fighting, because that was subsiding. Good timing for Bush, too, because it means you get the photo opportunities and then you leave and somebody else faces the problems later on, which are bound to arise.
So it wasn't Dodge City. There was an area which was horrible and was recovering. What this massive intervention will do to that is very hard to predict. It could make it worse, could make it better. It's like hitting a seriously ill patient with a sledge hammer. Maybe it will help. Maybe it won't. But that comment about Dodge City simply reflects what is true: nobody cared. They didn't try to find out what Somalia was, because they didn't care. Somalis are props. What happens to them is incidental. If it works, great, we'll applaud and cheer ourselves and bask in self-acclaim. If it turns into a disaster, we'll treat it the same way we do with other interventions that turn into disasters. After all, there's a long series of them. Take Grenada. That was a humanitarian intervention. We were going to save the people from tragedy and turn it into what Reagan called a "showplace for democracy" or a "showplace for capitalism." In fact, they poured aid in. It had the highest per capita aid in the world the following year, next to Israel, which is in another category.
And it turned into a complete disaster. The society is in total collapse. About the only thing that's functioning there is money laundering for drugs. But nobody hears about it.
The television cameras were told to look somewhere else. So if the Marine intervention turns out to be a success, which is conceivable, then there will be plenty of focus on it and how marvelous we are and have to do it again. If it turns into a disaster it's off the map. Forget about it. So either way you can't lose.

DB: There's another factor at work here I'd like you to comment on: the notion of intervention on humanitarian grounds is a claim that's always made by the powerful against the weak. You don't have Bangladesh sending troops to help quell the situation in South Central L.A.
Not only that, but it is so routine that it's just like saying "hello" when you walk into a room. Take, say, American history. When the U.S. was expelling or exterminating the native population back right from the Revolution on, it was always described as "humanitarian." We're their benefactors. When Andrew Jackson proclaimed his Indian Removal Act, which set off virtual genocide, he described it to Congress with great self-acclaim, describing in a teary voice what a great benefactor he was to the Indians. He said that white people wished that they were getting such benefits from us. After all, the white settlers, when they go out to the West, they don't get huge government grants, they don't have the U.S. military lead the way for them. But when the Cherokees are being sent out there on what was called the "Trail of Tears," on which about half of them died, they were being accompanied by the U.S. Army and even given a couple of cents to get started. It was a tremendous gift. We were so benevolent. In fact, right after the American Revolution, in 1783, there was a commission established to try to determine what to do with the Indians. The question was: How do we kick them out of their land now that we've won? They decided to expel them, remove them from one area to another, rob their lands. It's worth reading what they wrote: They said we shouldn't go overboard in generosity. Our natural generosity should have certain limits, because if generosity goes too far, it becomes harmful to everybody. So we should be generous as always, but not too generous, while we're robbing them of their lands.
This is a refrain which is such a deep element of the national culture that to refer to it in this case is misleading. There's no atrocity that's been carried out that hasn't been described as humanitarian and beneficial to the victims.

DB: Comment on the events in the former Yugoslavia. This constitutes the greatest outburst of violence in Europe in fifty years -- tens of thousands killed, hundreds of thousands of refugees. This isn't remote East Timor we're talking about -- this is Europe. It's a living room war on the news every night.
In a certain sense what's happening is that the British and American right wings are essentially getting what they asked for. Since the 1940s they've been quite bitter about the fact that Western support for a short time turned to Tito and the partisans and against Mikhailovich and his Chetniks and the Croatian anti-Communists, including the Ustasha, who were outright Nazis. The Chetniks were also playing with the Nazis and were mainly trying to overcome the partisans. They won. The partisan victory imposed a communist dictatorship, but it also federated the country. It suppressed ethnic violence, and created the basis of some sort of functioning society in which the parts had their role. That collapsed for a variety of reasons, and now we're essentially back to the 1940s, but without the partisans. Serbia now has inherited the ideology of the Chetniks. Croatia has inherited something of the ideology of the Ustasha, far less ferocious than the Nazi original, but similar in some ways. They are now doing pretty much what they would have done if it hadn't been for the partisan victory.
Of course, the leadership of Serbia and Croatia come from the Communist Party, but that's because every thug in the region was part of the ruling apparatus. (Yeltsin, for example, was a tough CP boss.) It's interesting that the right wing, at least its more honest elements, approve. For example, Nora Beloff, a right wing British commentator on
Yugoslavia, had a letter in the London Economist condemning the people who are denouncing the Serbs in Bosnia. She's saying it's the fault of the Muslims. They are refusing to accommodate the Serbs who are just defending themselves. She's been a supporter of the Chetniks from way back, no reason why she shouldn't continue to support Chetnik violence, which is what this amounts to. Of course there's another factor.
She's a super fanatic Zionist, and the fact that the Muslims are involved already makes them guilty in her eyes.

DB: Some say that just as the Allies should have bombed the rail lines to Auschwitz to prevent the deaths of many people in concentration camps, so we should now bomb Serbian gun positions surrounding Sarajevo that have kept that city under siege. Would you advocate the use of force?
First of all, there's a good deal of debate about the Second World War, and how much of an effect bombing would have had. Putting that aside, it seems to me that a judicious threat of force, not by the Western powers but by some international, multinational group could have, at an earlier stage, suppressed a good deal of the violence and maybe blocked it. Whether that would mean bombing gun positions or not is a question that you can't make a decision about lightly. For one thing, you have to ask not only about the morality of it, but also about the consequences. The consequences could be quite complex. For example, conservative military forces within Russia might move in. They already are there, in fact, to support their Slavic brothers in Serbia, and they might decide to move in en masse. (That's traditional, incidentally. Go back to Tolstoy's novels and you can read about how the Russians saved their Slavic brothers from attacks. That's now being reenacted.) At that point you're getting fingers on nuclear weapons. It's also entirely possible that an attack on the Serbs, who feel that they're the aggrieved party, could inspire them to move more aggressively in Kosovo, the Albanian area, which could very well set off a large-scale war, with Greece and Turkey involved. So it's not so simple.
Or what if Bosnian Serbs, with the backing of both the Serbian and maybe even other Slavic regions, started a guerrilla war? Western military "experts" have suggested it would take maybe a hundred thousand troops just to hold the area. So bombing Serbian gun emplacements sounds simple, but one has to ask about the consequences. That's not so simple.
If it were possible to stop the bombardment of Sarajevo by threatening to and maybe even actually bombing some emplacements, I think you could give an argument for it. But that's a very big if.

DB: Zeljko Raznjatovic, known as Arkan, a fugitive bank robber wanted in Sweden, was elected to the Serb Parliament in December 1992. His Tiger's Militia is accused of killing civilians in Bosnia. He's among ten people listed by the U.S. State Department as a possible war criminal. Arkan dismissed the charges and said, "There are a lot of people in the United States I could list as war criminals."
That's quite correct. By the standards of Nuremberg, there are plenty of people who could be listed as war criminals in the West. It doesn't absolve him in any respect, of course.

DB: Christmas came early in 1992 for at least six former Reagan administration officials implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal. There was a presidential pardon on Christmas Eve. Bush said of the pardonees, "The common denominator of their motivation, whether their actions were right or wrong, was patriotism." That doesn't sound like the position of German defense lawyers at Nuremberg.
No. They couldn't have gotten away with it, but it was quite accurate. Probably Himmler and Goering were acting as patriotic Germans. I frankly didn't take the pardons all that seriously. It was a highly selective prosecution. They didn't go after top people or the important issues. What they were being charged with is minor issues. Lying to Congress is bad, it's a serious violation of law which carries a five-year jail sentence. But as compared with carrying out huge international terrorist operations, it's pretty small potatoes. Nobody was charged with conducting an illegal war against Nicaragua. They were only charged with lying to Congress about it. It indicates the values that lie behind the prosecution. In other words, kill and torture whoever you like, but be sure to tell us.
We want to take part too. If you think about it, that's exactly what happened in Watergate.
The charges against Nixon never included bombing Cambodia. It did come up in the hearings, but the only respect in which it came up was that Nixon had lied to Congress about it. There was no charge ever that he had sent U.S. bombers to devastate Cambodian peasant society, killing tens of thousands of people. That was never even considered a crime. So to pardon people for lying to Congress makes a certain amount of sense if we understand it as meaning, Look, the major crimes are never even being discussed. It's kind of like catching Al Capone on his income tax.

DB: I've never heard you talk about Gandhi. Orwell wrote of him that "...compared to other leading political figures of our times, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind." What are your views on the Mahatma?

I'd hesitate to say without undertaking a much closer analysis of what he did and what he achieved. There were some positive things there. For example, his emphasis on village development and self-help and communal projects. That would have been very healthy for India. Implicit in what he was suggesting was a model of development for India that could well have been a much more successful and humane one than the Stalinist model that was adopted, the development of heavy industry, etc. The talk about nonviolence you really have to think through. Sure, everybody's in favor of nonviolence rather than violence, but under what conditions and when? Is it an absolute principle?

DB: You know what he said to Louis Fischer in 1938 about the Jews in Germany. He said that German Jews ought to commitcollective suicide which would "have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence."

That is a tactical proposal, not a principled one. He's not saying they should have walked cheerfully into the gas chambers because that's what nonviolence dictates. He's saying, If you do it you may be better off. So that's a tactical proposal. It reflects no moral principle. It has to be evaluated on its merits. If you evaluate it on its merits, from that point of view, divorcing it from any principled concern other than how many people's lives can you save by doing this, it's conceivable that it was true. I don't think it's likely, but it's conceivable, not out of the question, that that would have aroused world concern in a way in which the Nazi slaughter surely did not. I think that the argument for it is very slight. On the other hand, there's nothing much that the Jews could have done anyway.

DB: Orwell adds that after the war Gandhi justified his position, saying, "The Jews had been killed anyway and might as well have died significantly."
Again, he's making a tactical, not a principled statement. One has to ask the question what the consequences would have been of the actions he recommended. That's speculation based on little evidence. For him to have directed that recommendation at the time is kind of grotesque. What he should have been emphasizing was: Let's do something to prevent them from being massacred. The right position to take at the time was, Look, they can't do anything. Powerless people who are being led to slaughter can't do anything. Therefore it's up to others to do something for them. To give them advice on how they should be slaughtered is not very uplifting, to put it mildly. You can say the same about other things all the time. Take people being tortured and murdered in Haiti.
You want to tell them, The way you ought to do it is to walk up to the killers and put your neck in front of their knife and maybe people on the outside will notice. Could be. But a little more significant would be to tell the people who are giving the murderers the knives that they should do something different.

DB: India today is torn asunder by various separatist movements, Kashmir is an incredible mess, occupied by the
Indian army, and there are killings, detentions, and massive human rights violations, in the Punjab and elsewhere. I'd like you to comment on a tendency in the Third World to blame the colonial masters for all the problems that are besetting the countries today. They seem to say, "Yes, India has problems but it's the fault of the British," as if India was once a great big happy place.
How to assess blame for historical disasters is a difficult matter. You could ask the same thing about the health of a starving and diseased person. There are a lot of different factors that enter into it. If there was a torturer around who was torturing them, that certainly had a role. But maybe after the torture is over, the person eats the wrong diet and lives a dissolute life and dies from the effects of that. That's what we're talking about here. It's not easy to sort out the proportion of blame. There's no doubt that imperial rule was a complete disaster. Take India. Bengal was one of the richest places in the world when the first British merchant warriors arrived there. They described it as a paradise.
Today this area is Bangladesh and Calcutta, the very symbols of despair and hopelessness. These rich agricultural areas produced unusually fine cotton, the major commodity of that period. They had, by the standards of the day, advanced manufacture.
Dacca, which is the capital of Bangladesh, was compared by Clive, the British conqueror, to London.
About a century later, in debates in the House of Lords, Sir Charles Trevelyan described how Dacca had collapsed from a major manufacturing center and thriving city to a marginal slum under the impact of British rule. In Bengal, and throughout the parts of
India that they controlled, the British undermined and tried to destroy the existing manufacturing system, which was comparable to their own in many respects. As the industrial revolution was urbanizing and modernizing England, India was becoming ruralized, a poor, agrarian country. Adam Smith, over two hundred years ago, deplored the depredations that the British carryied out in Bengal, which, as he puts it, first of all destroyed the agricultural economy, and then turned "dearth into a famine." The British overseers even took agricultural lands and turned them over to poppy production for the opium trade to China. The only thing that the British could sell to China was opium, and Bengal was one of the places where they produced it. There was huge starvation.
Indian manufacturing in other areas was considerable. For example, an Indian firm built one of the flagships for the English fleet during the Napoleonic Wars. Britain imposed harsh tariff regulations, starting in about 1700, to prevent Indian manufacturers from undercutting British textiles. That's the beginning of the industrial revolution, beginning with textile production and extending to other things. They had to undercut and destroy Indian textiles because India had a comparative advantage. They were using better cotton and had, by the standards of the day, a relatively advanced industry. It wasn't until 1846 that Britain suddenly discovered the merits of free trade. By that time their competitors had been destroyed and they were way ahead. They were very well aware of it. The British liberal historians, the big advocates of free trade in that period they say: "Look, what we're doing to India is not pretty, but there's no other way for the mills of Lancaster to survive. We have to destroy the competition."
And it continued. Nehru, in 1944 in a British prison, wrote an interesting book (The Discovery of India) in which he pointed out the correlation between how long the British have influenced and controlled each region, and the level of poverty. The longer the British have been in a region the poorer it is. The worst, of course, was Bengal, where the British arrived first.
In Canada and North America, they just wiped out the population. You don't have to get to current, "politically correct" commentators to describe this. You can go right back to the founding fathers. The first Secretary of Defense, General Henry Knox, who was in charge of Indian removal from 1784 on, said that what we're doing to the native population is worse than what the Conquistadors did in Peru and Mexico. He said future historians will look at these actions, what would be called in modern terminology "genocide," and paint them with "sable colors." They weren't going to look good to history.
John Quincy Adams, the intellectual father of Manifest Destiny, became an opponent of both slavery and the policy toward the Indians long after he left power. He felt that he himself had been involved in a crime of extermination of such enormity that he believed God would punish the country for this monstrous deed. So in North America we just essentially exterminated and expelled the population.
Latin America was more complex, but the initial population was virtually destroyed within a hundred and fifty years. What was left was a mixture. Meanwhile, Africans were brought over as slaves, which had a major effect on devastating Africa even before the colonial period. The conquest of Africa drove it back even further. After the West had robbed the colonies -- as they did, no question about that, and there's also no question that it contributed to their own development -- they changed the relationships to so-called "neo-colonial", domination without direct administration, which was also generally a disaster.
How do you sort the guilt at this point? If Israel is committing crimes against the Palestinians, does that justify the Holocaust? I suppose some unreconstructed Nazi could say, look at what those guys do as soon as you let them go. Just means we didn't do anything. It's all their fault.

DB: To continue with India: talk about the divide-and-rule policy of the British Raj, playing Hindus off against Muslims. You see the results of that today. Which is not to say that it was pretty before, because it wasn't. The Marathi invasions were ugly and brutal. But the fact is that the level of brutality introduced by the Europeans was novel almost everywhere in the world. Naturally, any conqueror is going to play one group against another. In India, for example, I think about ninety percent of the forces that the British used to control India were Indians.

DB: There's that astonishing statistic that at the height of British power in India, they never had more than 150,000 people there.
That was true everywhere. It was true when the American forces conquered the Philippines, killing a couple hundred thousand people. They were helped by Philippine tribes. They exploited conflicts among local groups. There are always plenty who will side with the conquerors. Just take a look at the Nazi conquest of Europe. Take Western Europe; let's forget the Third World. Nice, civilized Western Europe. Places like Belgium and Holland and France. Who was rounding up the Jews? The local people. In fact, in France they turned them over faster than the Nazis could handle them. If the United States was conquered by the Russians, George Bush, Elliott Abrams, and the rest of them would all be working for the invaders and sending people off to concentration camps.
Ronald Reagan would be reading their ads on TV. That's the traditional pattern. Invaders very naturally play upon any kind of rivalries and hostilities that they find to get one group to work for them against others.
You can see it right now with the Kurds. The West is trying to mobilize Iraqi Kurds to destroy Turkish Kurds. Turkish Kurds are by far the largest number, and historically, they were the ones who were the most repressed. It's not covered much in the West because Turkey is an ally, so you don't cover the atrocities they carry out. But right into the Gulf War they were bombing in Kurdish areas. Tens of thousands of people were driven out.
But now the western goal is to use the Iraqi Kurds as a weapon to try to restore what they call "stability" in Iraq, meaning their own kind of system.
Last October there was a very ugly incident in which there was a kind of pincer movement between the Turkish army and Iraqi Kurdish forces to expel and destroy Kurdish guerrillas from Turkey. Independently of what we might think of those guerrillas, there's no doubt that they had substantial popular support in southeastern
Turkey. But the Iraqi Kurdish leaders and some sectors of Kurdish population were going to cooperate because they thought they could gain something by it. You could understand their position. Not necessarily approve of it -- that's another question. These are people who are being crushed and destroyed from every direction. If they grasp at some straw for survival, it's not surprising, even if grasping at that straw means helping to kill their cousins across the border. That's the way conquerors work. They've always worked that way. They worked that way in India.
India wasn't a peaceful place before the British, no, nor was the western hemisphere a pacifist utopia. But that aside, everywhere the Europeans went they raised the level of violence to an extraordinary degree. On that serious military historians have no doubts.
As the most recent historian of the East India Company puts it, "warfare in India was still a sport, in Europe it had become a science."
Europe had been fighting vicious, murderous wars internally and it had developed a culture of violence, as well as the means of violence, which were unsurpassed. The culture of violence was extraordinary. European wars were wars of extermination.
Everywhere the Europeans went, whether it was the Portuguese or the Spanish or the
English or the Dutch, they fought with a level of violence which appalled the natives.
They had never seen anything like it. That was true virtually over the entire world, with very few exceptions. In fact, from Europe's viewpoint, these colonial wars were what we call today small wars. It didn't take very many forces to destroy huge numbers of natives, not so much because the technology was better, but because the Europeans fought differently. If we were to be honest about the history, we would describe European colonialism simply as a barbarian invasion.
The British and Dutch merchants who moved into Asia broke into relatively free trading areas which had been functioning for long, long periods with pretty well established rules. More or less free, fairly pacific. Sort of like free trade areas. The description of what they did is just monstrous. They introduced a level of violence which had never been felt before. They destroyed what was in their way.
The only ones who were able to fend it off for a while were Japan and China. Japan did manage to fend it off almost entirely. That's why Japan is the one area of the Third World that developed. That's striking. The one part of the Third World that wasn't colonized is the one part that's part of the industrial world. That's not by accident. To strengthen the point, you need only look at the parts of Europe that were colonized. Parts of western
Europe were colonized, like Ireland, which is very much like the Third World, for similar reasons. The patterns are striking. China sort of made the rules and had the technology and was powerful, so they were able to fend off Western intervention for a long time. But when its defense finally broke down in the nineteenth century, the country collapsed.
So it's completely correct that the post-colonial period had seen many brutal monsters develop. But when people in the Third World blame the history of imperialism for their plight, they have a very strong case to make. It's interesting to see how this is treated in the West these days. On January 7, 1993 there was an amazing article in the Wall Street Journal by Angelo Codevilla, a so-called scholar at the Hoover Institute at Stanford, criticizing the intervention in Somalia. He says, Look, the problem in the world is that
Western intellectuals hate their culture and therefore they terminated colonialism. Only civilizations of great generosity can undertake tasks as noble as colonialism to try to rescue these barbarians all over the world from their miserable fate. The Europeans did it and of course gave them enormous gifts and benefits. But then these western intellectuals who hate their own cultures forced them to withdraw. The result is what you now see.
You really have to go to the Nazi archives to find anything comparable to that. Apart from the stupendous ignorance that is so colossal that it can only appear among respected intellectuals, the moral level is -- you have to go back to the Nazi archives. But it's an op ed in the Wall Street Journal. It probably won't get much criticism.
There are counterparts in England, the Sunday Telegraph, the Daily Telegraph. It's interesting to read the right-wing British press after Rigoberta Menchu won the Nobel Prize. They were infuriated, especially their Central America correspondent. Their view is, true, there were atrocities in Guatemala. But either they were carried out by the left wing guerrillas or they were an understandable response on the part of the respectable sectors of the society to the violence and atrocities of these Marxist priests. So to give a Nobel Prize to the person who's been torturing the Indians all these years, Rigoberta Menchu ... it's hard for me to reproduce this. You have to read the original. Again, at it's worst, it's straight out of the Stalinist and Nazi archives. It's very typical of British and American culture.

DB: That brings in the whole question of race and racism and how that factored into the relationship between what I'll call the "North" and the "South."
There has always been racism. But it developed as a leading principle of thought and perception very much in the context of colonialism. It's not that it wasn't there before. It obviously was. But it gained entirely new dimensions and new significance in the imperialist context. That's understandable. When you have your boot on someone's neck, you have to have a justification for it. The justification has to be their depravity. If you can find anything to hang their depravity on, like the color of their eyes, it's that. It's very striking to see this in the case of people who are not very different from one another.
Take a look at the British conquest of Ireland, which was the earliest of the western colonial conquests. It was described in the same kind of terms as the conquest of Africa.
The Irish were a different race. They weren't human. They were a depraved race of people who had to be crushed and destroyed.

DB: Some Marxists connect racism as a product of the economic system, of capitalism. Would you accept that?
No. It has to do with conquest. It's oppression. If you're oppressing somebody, maybe you're robbing them, it doesn't have to be torture. If you're robbing somebody, oppressing them, controlling them, dictating their lives, it's a very rare person who can say, Look,
I'm a monster. I'm doing this for my own good. Even Himmler didn't say that. There's a standard technique of belief formation that goes along with oppression, whether it's throwing them in the gas chambers or charging them too much at a corner store or anything between those. There's a standard mode of reaction, and that is to say that it's their depravity. That's why I'm doing it. Maybe I'm even doing them good. If it's their depravity, there's got to be something about them that makes them different from me.
What's different about them will be whatever you can find.

DB: And that's the justification.
Then it becomes racism. You can always find something, like a different color hair or eyes, they're too fat, they're gay. Whatever it might be. You find something that's different enough. Of course you lie about it, so it's easier to find more.

DB: Do you know the scorpion and camel story? There's a scorpion who wants to cross the river. He needs the camel to help him across. He asks the camel, "Hey, come on. Give me a lift." The camel says, "What are you, crazy? I know who you are. You're going to sting me." The scorpion says,
"No, no, no. I'm a reformed scorpion. I'm a good guy. I wouldn't do something like that." So after much persuasion the camel finally relents and says, "OK. Hop on." So the scorpion gets on the camel's back. In the middle of the river, the camel feels a sting in his back and realizes that the scorpion has just stung him. He starts howling and cursing and says, "You promised me you wouldn't do this!
We're both going to die now. We're going to drown. You're insane." The scorpion says, "Well, it's in my nature." This leads to human nature. Is racism something that's acquired or learned, or is it innately endowed?
I don't think either of those is the right answer. There's no doubt that there's a rich human nature. We're not rocks. Anybody sane knows that an awful lot about us is genetically determined, in our behavior, our attitudes. That's not even a question among sane people.
When you go beyond that and ask what it is, you're entering into near-total ignorance. We know there's something about human nature that forces you to grow arms, not wings, and to undergo puberty at roughly a certain age. And by now we know that things like acquisition of language are part of human nature even in its very specific forms, things about the visual system and so on. When you get to cultural patterns, belief systems, etc., the guess of the next guy you meet at the bus stop is as good as the best scientist. People can rant about it if they like, but they basically know virtually nothing.
In this particular area we can make some kind of reasonable speculation. I think most reasonable is the one I've just outlined. It's not so much that racism is in our genes. What is in our genes is the need for improving your own self-image.

DB: For domination.
No. For justifying what you do. I can't believe that everybody doesn't know this from their own lives. If any person thinks about their own life honestly for a minute, they'll think of plenty of things that they did that they shouldn't have done. Maybe they stole something from their brother when they were ten. If you look back honestly and ask yourself, Did I say to myself at the time, I'm a rotten bastard but I'm going to do this because I want it? Or did you say, Look, I'm right to do this for this and that reason? The answer almost invariably is the second. It doesn't matter whether it was a minor or major thing. That's probably in our nature. It's probably in our nature to find a way to recast anything that we do in some way that makes it possible for us to live with it.
If we move into the social sphere, the sphere of human interactions, where there are institutions and systems of oppression and domination, people who are in those positions of authority and domination, who are in control, who are doing things to others, who are harming them, are going to pursue this course of constructing justifications for themselves. They may do it in sophisticated ways or non-sophisticated ways, but they're going to do it. That much is in human nature. One of the consequences of that can turn out to be racism. It can turn out to be other things, too.
Take the sophisticated ones. One of the intellectual gurus of the modern period in the United States is Reinhold Niebuhr, who was called the "theologian of the establishment."
He was revered by the Kennedy liberal types, by people like George Kennan. He was considered a moral teacher of the contemporary generation. It's interesting to look at why he was so revered. I actually went through his writings once. The intellectual level is depressingly low. But there's something in there that made him appealing. It was what he called the "paradox of grace." What it comes down to is, no matter how much you try to do good, you're always going to do harm. Of course, he's an intellectual, so they have to dress it up with big words and big volumes. But that's what it comes down to.
That's very appealing advice for people who are planning to enter into a life of crime. To say, no matter how much I try to do good I'm always going to harm people. That's the paradox of grace. You can't get out of it. A wonderful idea for a Mafia don. Then he can go ahead and do whatever he feels like, and if he harms people, Oh my God, the paradox of grace. That, I think, explains why he was so appealing to American intellectuals in the post-World War II period. They were preparing to enter into a life of major crime, major criminal actions. They were going to be either the managers or else the commissars for a period of global conquest, running the world, which is obviously going to entail enormous crimes. Isn't it nice to have this doctrine before us? Of course we're super benevolent and humane, but the paradox of grace! Again, if you're an intellectual you dress it up and write articles about it.
The mechanisms, however, are quite simple and elementary. I think all of that is, if you like, part of our nature, but in such a transparent way that you don't even call it a theory.
Everybody knows this from their own experience, if they stop to think about it. Like just about everything that's understood about human beings, everybody knows it if they stop to think about it. It's not quantum physics. Mostly what's known is on the surface. Think about yourself and you can see it right there. Forget the big words and the polysyllables and the intellectual apparatus and just think about it. It's easy to see how that transmutes itself into racism.
Take the Serbs and the Croats. All they want to do right now is murder each other.
They're indistinguishable. They use a different alphabet, but they speak the same language. They belong to different branches of the Catholic Church. That's about it. But they're perfectly ready to murder and destroy each other. They can imagine no higher task in life.

DB: What about the so-called "competitive ethic" of competition? Is there any evidence that we are naturally competitive? Proponents of the free market theory and the advocates of market capitalism say that you've got to give people the ability to compete -- it's a natural thing.
There are certainly conditions under which people will compete. There are conditions under which people will cooperate. For example, take a family. Suppose that whoever is providing the money for the family loses his or her job, so they don't have enough food to eat. The father is probably the strongest one in the family. Does he steal all the food and eat it, so all the kids starve? I guess there are people who do that, but then you lock them up. They're pathological. There's a defect there somewhere. No, what you do is share.
Does that mean they're not competitive? No. It means that in that circumstance you share.
Those circumstances can extend quite broadly. For example, they can extend to the whole working class. When you have periods of working class solidarity, people struggling together to create unions and decent working conditions, a republic of labor in which people would control their work and not have to suffer wage slavery. That's the United States, after all. Take a look at the Homestead lockout a century ago, when Andrew

Carnegie established the world's first billion-dollar corporation by destroying the biggest union in the country.
He destroyed it right in Homestead, which was a working-class town with working-class solidarity. That was a period of enormous ethnic hatred and rivalry and racism, at that time directed mostly against the Eastern European immigrants, the Huns and the Slovaks.
But during that conflict they worked together. It's one of the few periods of real ethnic harmony. They worked with Anglo-Saxon Americans and Germans and the rest of them.
There are circumstances in which competition shows up and in which cooperation does.
Again, I doubt that any person can fail to see this in their own life.
Let me tell you a personal story. I'm not particularly violent. But when I was in college, I had to take boxing. The way you did it was to spar with a friend, but we all found, and we were amazed, that pretty soon we wanted to kill each other. After doing this pushing around for a while, you really wanted to hurt that guy, your best friend. You could feel it coming out. It's horrifying to look at, and again I doubt that people have failed to see this in themselves and something about their lives. Does that mean that the desire to hurt people is innate? In certain circumstances, this aspect of our personality will dominate.
There are other circumstances in which other aspects will dominate. You want to create a humane world, you change the circumstances.

DB: How crucial is social conditioning in all of this? Let's say you're a child growing up in Somalia today.
How about a child growing up in Boston, just down the street? Or even here, in
Cambridge. Just last summer a foreign student at MIT was killed, knifed, just a few blocks from here, by a couple of teenagers from the local high school. They were engaged in a sport that works like this: high-school kids are supposed to walk around and find somebody walking the street. One of the kids is picked, and he's supposed to knock the person down with one blow. If he fails to do it, the other kids beat up the kid who failed. So that's the sport. So they were walking along and saw this MIT kid. One of them was chosen and knocked him down with one blow. For unexplained reasons they also knifed him and killed him. They didn't see anything especially wrong with it. They walked off and went to a bar somewhere. Somebody had seen them, and they were later picked up by the police. They hadn't even tried to get away. They didn't see anything wrong with it. They're growing up in Cambridge, not on Brattle Street, but probably in the slums, which are not Somali slums by any means, not even Dorchester slums. But surely kids in the western suburbs wouldn't act like that. Are they different genetically?
No. There's something about the social conditions in which they grew up that makes this an acceptable form of behavior, even a natural form of behavior. Anyone who has grown up in an urban area must be aware of this. I can remember from childhood, there were neighborhoods where if you went in you'd be beaten up. You were not supposed to be there. The people who were doing it, kids, felt justified and righteous about it. They were defending their turf. What else do they have to defend?

DB: Speaking of Brattle Street, just last night I was there.
Panhandlers, people asking for money, people sleeping in the doorways of buildings. This morning at Harvard Square in the T station it was more of the same. The spectre of poverty and despair has increasingly come into the vision or the sightlines of the middle- and upper-class. You just can't avoid it as you could years ago when it was limited to a certain section of town. This has a lot to do with the pauperization, the internal Third Worldization, I think you call it, of the United States.
There are several factors, which we've discussed before. In part it's an immediate corollary to what's called the globalization of the economy. Furthermore, there is a tremendous expansion of unregulated capital in the world seeking stable currencies and low growth. These factors have immediate, obvious consequences, namely extension of the Third World model to industrial countries. The Third World model is a sector of extreme wealth and privilege amidst huge misery and despair among useless, superfluous people. The model is extending to the entire world.
Take a look at the NAFTA discussions. The argument for NAFTA, the North American
Free Trade Agreement, is that it's not going to hurt many American workers, just unskilled workers, defined to mean about seventy percent of the work force. That's one of the things you're seeing.
Look at South Central Los Angeles. That's an area where there were factories, but not any more. They moved to Eastern Europe, Mexico, and Indonesia, where you can get peasant women off the land. That's the part of free trade the elites advocate. They don't advocate the other parts of it. But the parts they can benefit from they advocate. That internationalization of production will have the effect, over the long term, of giving the industrial countries a sort of Third World aspect themselves.
There are other things happening everywhere in the industrial world, but most strikingly in four major English speaking countries -- England, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. I think the reason for that is pretty obvious. These are the countries that in the 1980s took at least minimally seriously some of the rhetoric that they preached. In most of the world, the free market rhetoric is not taken seriously. But England under Thatcher and the United States under the Reaganites and Australia and New Zealand under Labor governments to a limited extent adopted some of the doctrines they preached for the Third World. Naturally, the population suffered for it.

DB: Deregulation?
Deregulation, something a little bit like structural adjustment, which in the Third World means eliminate welfare, eliminate subsidies, stop building roads, give everything to the investors and something will trickle down by some magic, some time after the Messiah comes. The western countries of course would never really play this game completely. It would be too harmful to the rich. But they flirted with it in these English-speaking countries. And they suffered. When you say "they" suffered, you've got to be careful. The population suffered. The rich did fine, just as they do in the Third World. When I say there's a catastrophe of capitalism in the Third World, that doesn't mean for the rich people. They're doing just great.

DB: That's the paradox of 1992.
The New York Times did have a headline in the business pages: "Paradox of 92: Weak Economy, Strong Profits." Big paradox. That's the story of the Third World. It's the story now of Eastern Europe. And it's also the story in Thatcherite England, Reaganite America, and Labor party Australia and New Zealand. Most of the population suffered as the societies moved more towards the Third World pattern than is the case, say, in continental Europe or Japan. In the periphery of Japan what you're getting is a move out of the Third World pattern into an industrial pattern, as in South Korea and Taiwan, who dismiss neoliberal economics as a joke, are able to develop internally.

DB: Thank you.