The Return of Predatory Capitalism 3 страница

They did this for two reasons. Part of it was just service to the big power, the big guys, who are supposed to protect them. But partly because they shared the U.S. geopolitical analysis, which was very straightforward, that there could be a demonstration effect of successful independent development in Indochina. They were worried about the same thing from China in those days. And that it could spread. It could, as they liked to put it, “infect the region.” There could be an infection

that could spread over the whole region. The way you get rid of an infection is you destroy the virus and you immunize those whom it might reach. And they did. They helped the U.S. destroy the virus.

The U.S. had basically won the Vietnam War by the early 1970s, as was clear to the business community. Nobody else seems to be able to understand it yet. In the region they simply supported the installation of extremely brutal, murderous regimes.

The most important was Indonesia, where there was a major event in 1965. The CIA pointed out in its report, which has since come out, that the slaughter that took place ranks right up with the Nazis and Stalin. They were very proud of it, of course, and said it was one of the most important events of the century. And it was. Indonesia was the rich area that they were afraid might be infected by the spread of independent nationalism. When the generals took over in the mid 1960s, General Suharto, in what the Times called admiringly a “staggering mass slaughter,” destroyed the one political party in the country, the PKI, the party of the poor. Everyone agrees on this. The U.S. records, incidentally, have also come out through the 1950s at least, although they’ve been very secretive about them. They’ve been very selective about what they release. It’s a little unusual. It’s also been noticed by scholars. But there’s enough there to know that what they were afraid of was that the PKI, the major political party, would win an election if there was ever an election. So therefore democracy had to be destroyed.

In the late 1950s, the U.S. carried out huge subversive operations designed to strip away the resource rich outer islands in a military uprising. That didn’t work. The only alternative left was this “boiling bloodbath,” as it was called in the press, which very much satisfied the U.S. There was total euphoria across the board. The same thing happened pretty much in Thailand and the Philippines and so on. So the region was inoculated. The virus was destroyed. Australia played a part

in it. Since then they have been incorporated into what’s called in the U.S. the “defense system,” the military system. So that’s their relationship to the U.S. But they have a separate relationship to Asia. That’s the relationship of increasing subordination to Japanese and overseas Chinese capital that’s quite visible. For example, of the three largest exporters, two are Japanese multinationals, which is the standard Third World pattern developing.

DBDarwin, in his Voyage of The Beagle in 1839, wrote, “wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.” How did the aborigines, the indigenous population of Australia fare? Did you have any contact with them while you were there?

Some. In Tasmania they were simply totally exterminated. In Australia they were driven inland, which means desert. In the U.S., it’s taken several hundred years. It’s just two hundred years for Australia, they’re a young country compared with us—they’re beginning to recognize aboriginal rights, the land rights issue, etc. There is an independent aboriginal movement. Up till now there’s been extreme racism, maybe worse than the American record. But it’s changing, and now there are aboriginal rights groups. I was able to meet some of them. I was invited by the Timorese, and they’re in contact with them. So there has been some legal recognition of aboriginal land rights and some limited rights to resources, but it will happen to the extent that the popular forces press it, as usual.

DBThere’s been a noticeable shift in the emphasis of your public talks and your writing over the last decade. There’s much more focus now on trade and economic issues. When did that occur? How did that come about?

It came about from the 1970s, when the issues shifted. Some major events took place in the early 1970s, very significant. One of them was the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, which we’ve talked about. That’s one force that set in motion very substantial changes that gave a big acceleration to the growth of multinationals. Transnational corporations now have an enormous role in the world economy. These are just incredible private tyrannies. They make totalitarian states look mild by comparison.

The other huge change was the extraordinary growth in financial capital. First of all, it’s exploded in scale. It’s absolutely astronomical. There are close to a trillion dollars moving every day just in trading. Also the total composition of capital in international exchange has radically shifted. So in 1970, before the destruction of the Bretton Woods system, which meant regulated exchanges, about ninety percent of the capital in international exchanges was real economy related, related to investment and trade. Ten percent was speculative. By 1990 the figures were reversed. By 1994, the last report I saw was 95% speculative and it’s probably gone up since. That has an extraordinary effect.

Its effects were noticed by James Tobin, the American Nobel Prize-winning economist, in his presidential address to the American Economic Association in 1978, so that’s in the early stages. He pointed out that this rise of financial capital speculating against currencies is going to drive the world towards very low-growth, low-wage, and, though he didn’t mention it, also high-profit economy. What financial capital wants is basically stable money. It doesn’t want growth. This is why you see headlines in the papers saying, Federal Reserve Fears Growth, Fears Employment, we’ve got to cut down the growth rate and the employment rate. You have to make sure that Goldman, Sachs gets enough money on their bondholdings. He suggested at the time a tax on

speculative capital, just to slow down the rate of capital exchanges. Of course that was never done. It’s coming up in the U.N. It will be smashed, but it’s still being discussed, simply to try to shift the balance towards productive investment instead of speculative and destructive interchanges.

Incidentally, it’s had an enormous effect on the news business. The big wire services, like Reuters and AP, which is connected with Dow Jones, and Knight-Ridder, do give news, but that’s a secondary function. The main thing that they do is interact instantaneously with financial markets. So if Clinton is giving a speech, the AP, Reuters, and Knight-Ridder reporters will be there, of course. If he says a phrase indicating maybe we’re going to stimulate the economy, they race off with their mobile phones in their hands and call the central computer and say, Clinton said X. Then the guy who is manning the computer twenty-four hours a day types off to thousands of terminals around the world that Clinton said X, and maybe $700 million moves around in financial markets. The three wire services compete to make sure they get there first. I was told by a reporter who works for Reuters that every day they get a record of how they rank as compared with AP and Knight-Ridder, and it’s in the microseconds. You’ve got to get there half a second before because there are huge amounts of money at stake. All this is destructive for the economy. It tends towards low growth, low wages, high profits. That’s essentially what the wire services are about these days. Yes, there’s news on the side, but that’s slow stuff for us guys.

The telecommunications revolution, which expedited all of this, is, incidentally, another state component of the international economy that didn’t develop through private capital, but through the public paying to destroy themselves, which is what it amounts to. This has been going on since the early 1970s, but it really hit big in the 1980s, primarily in the Anglo-American societies. So under the Reaganites and Thatcher, and

with a spillover effect in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada (it’s all one culture area). You get this development we talked about last time of the effects on families and children. That’s just one effect.

DBWhere does the collapse of the Mexican economy factor into this?

I just got a phone call a couple of days ago from a journalist in Mexico telling me that I’m a big figure there now because they had an interview with me in one of the Mexican journals (La Jornada, November 7, 1994) a couple of months ago in which I said this is all built on sand and is going to collapse. It was pretty obvious. It’s what’s called a Ponzi scheme. You borrow money. You use what you’ve borrowed to borrow more money, and finally the whole thing collapses because there’s nothing behind it. Economists who know anything about Mexico didn’t miss it. It’s the ideological fanatics who didn’t notice it, or claim not to.

The free market reform, so-called, “privatization,” which everyone says is such a wonderful thing, means giving away public assets for a fraction of their worth to rich cronies of the president. Every president of Mexico, including Salinas, whom we’re supposed to love, comes out a billionaire, for some reason, as do all of his friends and associates. The number of billionaires in the Forbes list of billionaires went up from one to twenty-four from 1989 to 1993 during the huge economic miracle.

Meanwhile the number of people below the poverty level increased at roughly the same rate. Wages have fallen about fifty percent. Part of the point of NAFTA was to undermine the Mexican economy by opening them up to much cheaper imports from the U.S. The U.S. has an advanced state-subsidized economy, so therefore you can produce things very cheaply. The idea was to wipe out middle-level Mexican business, keep the multinationals. There are Mexican-based

multinationals. Keep the monopolies. Keep the billionaires. Lower wages. That’s good for U.S. corporations. Then they can move over and get workers at a fraction of the wage. It’s a very repressive state. You don’t have to worry about unions and regulations. There has been a lot of capital flowing into Mexico, but it’s well known that it was mostly speculative.

As far as the rich Mexicans are concerned, they just export their capital. They’re not going to keep it there. So probably rich Mexicans lost very little from this devaluation. For one thing, they all knew it was coming because it’s so totally corrupt that it was all known on the inside. If anyone looks, they’ll find that Mexican capital probably went overseas very fast shortly before the devaluation.

So it’s the American investors who are in trouble, big Wall Street firms. One Mexico specialist, Christopher Whalen, very conservative, who advises business, called the current Clinton plan a scheme to bail out Treasury Secretary Rubin and his friends. The Europeans know this. Just this morning the main European countries announced that they were going to back off from this. They don’t see any particular point in bailing out rich Wall Street firms. But it’s another one of those techniques by which you get the American taxpayer to pay off rich Americans.

This is essentially what happened to the debt crisis back in the early 1980s. Mexico had a huge debt. The debt was to U.S. banks, but they don’t want to pay the cost. So it was basically socialized. When the debt is moved over to international funding institutions, as it’s been, that means to the taxpayer. They don’t get their money from nowhere. They get it from taxes. It’s exactly what existing capitalism is about. Profit is privatized but costs are socialized. If Mexico wants to develop, it’s going to have to do it the way every other country did, by not closing itself from international markets, but by focusing on domestic development,

meaning building up its own resources, protecting them, maintaining them. It’s got plenty. Not giving them away to outsiders. And they’re going in exactly the opposite direction.

Part of this bailout is that Mexico is essentially mortgaging its one major resource, the oil reserves. The U.S. has been trying to get hold of those for forty years, and now we’ve got them. PEMEX, the big Mexican oil company, is probably completely broke. It looks good on statistics, but if any serious accountant took a look at it, they’d probably find that it doesn’t have any capital. Because relative to other big oil companies it has been doing very little capital investment. That has a very simple meaning: you’re not getting ready to produce for the future. But they do have the oil, and U.S. energy corporations would be delighted to take it over. Mexico is going down the tubes. That’s what’s called an economic miracle. It’s not the only one. It’s true of the hemisphere.

DBIt was really interesting to watch how this played out in the mainstream press. You’ve often talked about the needs of foreign countries to satisfy Wall Street investors. Rarely have I seen it so blatant as in this case. Mexico’s finance minister goes to New York, makes a case and the Times wrote, New York Investors Not Pleased With Him. He goes back to Mexico and gets fired. Then the new guy goes to New York, as did other finance ministers from Argentina and elsewhere, and the line was, New York Investors Take a Liking to Him.

This one was so blatant you couldn’t conceal it. It was all over the front pages. In fact, it was kind of interesting in Congress. The current Congress is not really a straight big business institution the way the Democratic Party usually is. It’s got a mixture of very reactionary nationalist fanaticism. A large part of it is based on phony business, like yuppie-style business and some of it on the middle level, more

nationalistic business. And they don’t like it. They’re not in favor of bailing out the big Wall Street firms. So you’ve had opposition from Congress and from people like Pat Buchanan and so on.

What’s happened here is very interesting. If people weren’t suffering, if you were looking at it from Mars, it would be interesting to watch. Big business for years has been trying to undermine and roll back the whole social contract, the welfare system, and so on. But there are elections. You can’t approach the population and say, Look, vote for me, I want to kill you. That doesn’t work. So what they’ve had to do is to try to organize people, as have other demagogues, on other issues, what they like to call “cultural issues.” So what they’ve organized is Christian fundamentalists and jingoist fanatics and a whole range of extremists, plus plenty of people who live off the government but pretend that they’re entrepreneurial, like the high tech culture, all publicly subsidized, but they pretend all sorts of entrepreneurial values. They’re all big libertarians as long as the government’s paying them off enough. Gingrich is the perfect example. So that collection of people is the only one they can mobilize. It’s not hard in the U.S. It’s a depoliticized society. There’s no civil society. It’s been destroyed. There is very deep fundamentalist fanaticism, widespread fear, a very frightened society, people hiding in terror. The jingoism is extraordinary. There’s no other country that I know of outside the Soviet Union where you could have a concept like “anti-Americanism.” Almost any country would laugh if you talked about that. But in the Soviet Union or the U.S. it’s considered a totally normal thing. This is all a result of lots of corporate propaganda and other such things.

But the result is that they’ve now got a tiger by the tail. It’s a little bit the way probably Hitler’s backers in the industrial-financial world felt by the late 1930s. The only way they were able to organize people was in terms of fear and hatred and jingoism and subordination to power.

Pretty soon they had these maniacs running around taking political control of the state. The state is a powerful institution. We’re getting something like that in the U.S. There is an anti-big business mood among the troops that big business has mobilized. The reason is they couldn’t mobilize them on any other grounds. You couldn’t mobilize them on the real project, namely kill yourselves. That won’t work. So they had to do it around other projects, and there aren’t a lot around. So you get something like—I don’t want to draw the analogy too tightly, because things are different—it has something of the feel of Hitler Germany and Khomeini Iran, in which similar sorts of things took place. The business sectors in Iran, the merchants, the bazaaris, the guys who wanted to get rid of the Shah, they did organize Islamic fundamentalists. And they weren’t happy with the results. Something similar is happening here.

DBIs that the major internal problem that you see for the rollback crusade?

I don’t know how big a problem it is. The point is that the concentration of private capital is by now so extraordinary and so transnational in scale that there isn’t much that can be done in political systems to affect it. The London Economist had a great phrase that captures it. They were describing the elections in Poland, where the Poles, not understanding how wonderful their economy is, voted back the old communists into power. About half the population of Poland said they were way better off when they were under communism. We know it’s an economic miracle. They don’t understand it. The Economist assured its readers that it didn’t really matter, because, as they put it, “policy is insulated from politics.” So in other words, these guys can play their games, but there’s enough private tyranny to ensure what the

World Bank calls “technocratic insulation.” You keep doing the same things no matter what these guys say at the ballot box.

Probably that’s true. If you look at the programs that are being pushed through now in the U.S., they’re very carefully crafted to protect the rich. The New York budget that came out yesterday was a very good example. It’s worth taking a close look at. They say they’re lowering taxes, but it’s a total lie. For example, if you lower state support of mass transportation, that has one immediate consequence, namely costs of riding public transportation go up. And that’s a tax, a very carefully crafted tax, not on guys who ride around in limousines but on working people. So in fact they will cut income taxes. In that sense, taxes are being cut. But the tax system is getting less progressive. They’ll cut taxes. But meanwhile they’ll increase taxes for the poor, the people who have to ride the subway. Elderly people who are at home and can’t get out and need shopping services, that’s going to be cut, which means the costs are transferred to the poor. They’re not yet going after Medicare, because rich people get Medicare. But they went after Medicaid, which goes to poor people. Cut mental health services. The rich will get them anyway. If you look at the budget carefully, it’s a very carefully honed class warfare designed to crush the poor even more. I don’t mean welfare mothers. I mean working people. I’m talking about eighty percent of the population. Smash the poor more. Enrich the rich. Inequality at the level of Guatemala isn’t good enough. They want to make it more extreme. That’s the so-called populism, the fight for the middle classes. Those are the policies that are getting rammed through.

DBA couple of months ago Labor Secretary Robert Reich said, If you’re going to talk about welfare, let’s talk about “corporate welfare.” How far did that idea go?

He gave a talk which was well reported in the foreign financial press. The London Financial Times had a big report on it. It was mentioned around here. It was shot down instantly by the White House. They told him right away to shut up. The Wall Street Journal had a nice article about it a couple of weeks later, a good article, in which they reported about the enormous subsidies being given to corporations under the new Gingrich program, which they said was going to make boardrooms delighted. In the course of the article they said, Well, Robert Reich did make this speech about ending corporate welfare as we know it, but he was instantly shot out of the water by the White House. It was made very clear that no such plans were on the agenda. Quite the opposite. We’re working for you guys, don’t worry about it. But it’s a term that’s in the public eye at the moment, although as yet very little mentioned in the U.S., and instantly silenced by the Clinton White House.

DBRobert Siegel is the co-host of National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. In an exchange he had with Jerry Markatos, a colleague of mine, in North Carolina, Siegel says that “attacking welfare for the rich is a staple of mainstream Democratic rhetoric. Chomsky’s observation about this is not exactly cutting edge stuff.”

Of course, I’ve been talking about it for years, as have others out of the mainstream. He may believe what he said. He probably doesn’t know anything about the facts. These guys are just supposed to read the words that somebody puts in front of their face. The fact is that “attacking welfare for the rich” was shot down instantly. It’s not a Democratic staple. In fact, the Democrats made it extremely clear and explicit that they weren’t going to let this go anywhere. Reich was called on the carpet for it. Siegel may simply not be aware of the facts, which is very likely. And incidentally, the point that Markatos raised had

nothing to do with what is sometimes called “corporate welfare,” but rather something different and far more important: the Pentagon-based system of public subsidy for high technology industry. Apparently Siegel missed the point completely, again, not too surprising since these topics are not likely to be discussed in his circles.

DBBut Siegel doesn’t leave it at that. Markatos asked him, Why don’t you have Chomsky on NPR once in a while? He said he wasn’t particularly interested in hearing from you and that you “evidently enjoy a small, avid, and largely academic audience who seem to be persuaded that the tangible world of politics is all the result of delusion, false consciousness, and media manipulation.”

He knows as much about that as he does about the staples of Democratic political discourse. Actually, I did have a discussion with him once, which was kind of interesting. A book of mine called Necessary Illusions, which was on the media mainly, was based on invited lectures given over Canadian national public radio. It was then published and was in fact a bestseller in Toronto. I never saw a review here, as far as I recall. But there was a fair amount of public pressure on NPR. On All Things Considered they have an authors interview segment. So under various kinds of pressure they finally agreed to let me have one of those five-minute interviews. It was with Siegel.

I didn’t listen. But it was announced at 5:00 that it was going to be on the next half-hour segment. People listened. It got to 5:25 and it hadn’t been on. Then there were five minutes of music. At that point people started calling the stations, saying, What happened? They didn’t know what happened, so they started calling Washington. The producer of the program said it had played. She said it was on her list and it played. People asked her to check. It turned out it hadn’t played. She

called me. I didn’t pay any attention one way or the other. She was kind of apologetic. Somewhere between 5:05, when it was announced, and 5:25, when it was supposed to go on, it had been canceled by somebody high up. She said that the reason was that they thought Robert Siegel’s questions weren’t pointed enough. If true, the fact that anyone even checked at that point shows how terrified the NPR liberals are that some doctrinally unacceptable thought be expressed. She asked me would I do it again. So I said sure. It’s a pain in the neck going down to the station. But I went down again. He tried to ask pointed questions. You can draw your own conclusions. That they did run. That’s our one interchange.

As to the audience, there’s some truth to it. It’s true that there are some countries, the U.S. is one, the others are mostly Eastern Europe and other totalitarian systems, where I have had almost no access to the major media over the years. That’s not true elsewhere. First of all, there are plenty of audiences in the U.S. I don’t have any problem talking with the people I’d like to talk to. In fact, I can’t do a fraction of it. They’re students, popular groups, churches, etc. But the thread of truth beneath what he says is that in the U.S., as in Russia, the major media may have been very sure to exclude not just me, but anybody with a dissident voice.

You showed me the Markatos-Siegel exchange (Current, January 16, 1995) right after I came back from Australia. There I gave a talk at the National Press Club, which was nationally televised (twice), at the Parliament Building, I was not talking about the U.S. They wanted me to talk about Australia’s foreign policy. So I talked about Australian foreign policy to journalists, parliamentarians, officials, and a national audience. I was not very polite, but very critical, because I think the foreign policy is disgraceful. I was on their world services program beamed to Asia. I was interviewed on that for about half an hour on the

Timor Gap Treaty, a very important matter. All over the press and the papers. The same is true elsewhere. I have articles and interviews in major journals up and down the hemisphere, and many invitations from leading journals that I unfortunately have no time to accept; I’d like to. I just had an article in Israel’s most important daily journal, an invited critique of their foreign policy. They don’t want me to talk about the U.S. They wanted a critique of the so-called peace process. The same is true in Europe. So as far as Robert Siegel is concerned, there are two possibilities. Either he understands something about me that, outside the Soviet Union, no one else knows. That’s one possibility. There’s another possibility, that he resembles the commissars in a different way. People can make their own decision.

DBLet’s turn to one of our favorite topics, which is of course sports. There is a major labor action going on that a lot of people know about, and that’s the baseball strike. Have you been following that?

No, I’m afraid not.

DBThere’s an interesting component to this which I think you should know about. The owners are demanding that their workers, the players, put a cap on their earnings. But no similar cap is being asked to be put on the owners’ ability to make profits.

That sounds like the norm. I’ll bet you without looking at it that most of the population is blaming the players. I suspect, it’s just the way media and corporate propaganda usually works.

DBThat just played out here in Massachusetts. Governor Weld wants to give money to the owner of the New England Patriots to

spruce up the stadium and build luxury boxes and improve road infrastructure and the like. There was a poll in yesterday’s Boston Globe that most of the people want it. They think it’s a good idea. That’s not welfare.

No, because it goes to rich people. This is part, again, it’s a matter of people paying for their own subordination. Maybe it’s fun to watch baseball games. In fact, I like it, too. But the fact of the matter is that the way this stuff functions in the society is to marginalize the people. It’s kind of like gladiatorial contests in Rome. The idea is to try to get the great beast to pay attention to something else and not what we powerful and privileged people are doing to them. That’s what all the hoopla is basically about, I would guess.

DBDecatur, Illinois, is the site of three major labor actions. The corporations involved are Staley, a British-owned company; Bridgestone, which is the number one tire and rubber maker in the world and is Japanese-owned; and Caterpillar, the number one producer in the world of earth-moving equipment. At Staley there’s a lockout. At Bridgestone and Caterpillar the workers are on strike. The New York Times is calling this a “testing field in labor relations” and also saying that “in Decatur more than anyplace else labor is trying to halt its slide toward irrelevance.

There is a whole long story here. The U.S. has an extremely violent labor history, unusual in the industrial world. Workers here didn’t get the rights they had in Europe until the mid-1930s. They had had those rights half a century before in Europe, even in reactionary countries. In fact, the right-wing British press, let’s say, the London Times, couldn’t believe the way U.S. workers were treated. Then finally the U.S. workers