I'm so wanting to come back with a new transcript, but for the moment, here's a great video.
"Palestine and the region in the Obama era: the emerging framework"
with Gilbert Achcar and Tariq Ali. (November 2009)
also at:
http://blip.tv/file/2799996
http://www.vimeo.com/7350655
Transcribed by Scott Senn
"Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours"part3
12 June 2009
Harlem, NY
Also at:
http://video.yahoo.com/watch/5295017/13964512
http://video.yahoo.com/watch/5295224/13964982
(01:04:20)
Well, there's a far more severe crisis, even for the rich and powerful. It happens to be discussed in the same issue of the New York Review that I mentioned, [an] article by Bill McKibben [("Can Obama Change the Climage?", 11 June 2009)]. He's been warning for years about the dire impact of global warming. His current article – worth reading – relies on the British Stern Report, which is sort of the gold standard now. On this basis, he concludes, not unrealistically, that "2009 may well turn out to be the decisive year in the human relationship with our home planet." The reason is that there's a conference in December in Copenhagen which is supposed to set up a new global accord on global warming; and he says it'll tell us "whether or not our political systems are up to the unprecedented challenge that climate change represents." He thinks that "the signals are mixed". To me, that seems kind of optimistic unless there's really a massive public campaign to overcome the insistence of the managers of the state-corporate sector on privileging short term gain for the few over the hope that their grandchildren might have a decent future.
Well, the picture could be a lot more grim even than the Stern Report predicts, and that's grim enough. A couple days ago, a group of MIT scientists released the results of what they describe as "[t]he most comprehensive modeling yet carried out on the likelihood of how much hotter the earth's climate will get in this century" which "shows that without rapid and massive action, the problem will be about twice as severe as previously estimated [a couple of] years ago - and [it] could be even worse than that", because their model does not fully incorporate positive feedbacks that can occur: for example, the increased temperature that is causing a melting of permafrost in the arctic regions which is going to release huge amounts of methane (that's worse than CO2). The leader of the project says, "There's no way the world can or should take these risks." He says, "The least-cost option to lower the risk is to start now and steadily transform the global energy system over the coming decades to low or zero greenhouse gas-emitting technologies" [("Climate Change Odds Much Worse than Thought", 19 May 2009)]. And there's very little sign of that.
Well, furthermore, while new technologies are essential, the problems go well beyond on that. And, in fact, they go beyond the current technical debates about just how to work out cap-and-trade devices, being discussed in Congress. We have to face something much more far-reaching: we have to face up to the need to reverse the huge state-corporate social engineering projects of the post Second World War period which very consciously promoted an energy-wasting and environmentally destructive fossil fuel economy. It didn't happen by accident. That's the whole massive project of suburbanization, then destruction and later gentrification of inner cities. The state-corporate program began with a conspiracy by General Motors, Firestone Rubber, Standard Oil of California to buy up and destroy efficient, electric transportation systems in Los Angeles and dozens of other cities. They were actually convicted of criminal conspiracy and given a tap on the wrist: I think, a $5,000 fine. The federal government then took over; it relocated infrastructure and capital stock to support suburban areas and also created a huge interstate highway system under the usual pretext of "defense". Railroads were displaced by government-financed motor and air transport. The public played almost no role, apart from choosing within the narrowly structured framework of options that are designed by state-corporate managers. They are supported by vast campaigns to "fabricate consumers" with "created wants" (borrowing [Thorstein] Veblen's terms). One result is the atomization of the society and the entrapment of isolated individuals with huge debts. These efforts grew out of the recognition (that I mentioned) a century ago that democratic achievements have to be curtailed by shaping attitudes and beliefs – as the business press put it, directing people to "superficial things of life" like "fashionable consumption". All of that's necessary to insure that the "opulent minority" are protected from "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders" (namely, the population).
[I'll] just add a personal note on that: I came down here this afternoon by the Acela – you know, the "jewel in the crown" of the new high-speed railroad technology. The first time I came from Boston to New York was sixty years ago, and there was improvement since then: it was five minutes faster today than it was sixty years ago.
While state-corporate power was vigorously promoting privatization of life and maximal waste of energy, it was also undermining the efficient choices that the market doesn't and can't provide. That's another highly destructive, build-in market-inefficiency. So to put it simply, if I want to get home from work, you know, in the evening, the market does allow me a choice between (say) a Ford and a Toyota, but it doesn't allow me a choice between a car and a subway, which would be much more inefficient, and maybe everybody wants it, but the market doesn't allow that choice. That's a social decision, and in a democratic society, it would be the decision of an organized public. But that's just what the elite attack on democracy seeks to undermine.
Now these consequences are right before our eyes in ways that are sometimes surreal. A couple of weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal had an article reporting that the US Transportation [Department] chief is in Spain. He's meeting with high-speed rail suppliers: "Europe's engineering and rail companies are lining up for some potentially lucrative US contracts for high-speed rail projects. At stake is $13 billion in stimulus funds that the Obama administration is allocating to upgrade existing rail lines and build new ones that could one day rival Europe's..." [("Europe Listens for U.S. Train Whistle", 29 May 2009)]. So think what's happening: Spain and other European countries are hoping to get US taxpayer funding for high-speed rail and related infrastructure. And, at the very same time, Washington is busy dismantling leading sectors of US industry, ruining the lives of workers and communities, who could easily do it themselves. It's pretty hard to conjure up a more damning indictment of the economic system that's been constructed by state-corporate managers. Surely the auto industry could be reconstructed to produce what the country needs, using its highly skilled workforce. But that's not even on the agenda; it's not even being discussed. Rather, we'll go to Spain and we'll give them taxpayer money for them to do it, while we destroy the capacity to do it here.
It's been done before: So, during World War II, it was kind of a semi-command economy – government-organized economy. That's what happened: industry was reconstructed for the purposes of war, dramatically. It not only ended the Depression but it initiated the most spectacular period of growth in economic history. In four years, US industrial production just about quadrupled, as the economy was retooled for war. And that laid the basis for the golden age that followed. Well, warnings about the purposeful destruction of US productive capacity have been familiar for decades, maybe most prominently by the late Seymour Melman, whom many of us knew well. Melman was also one of those who pointed the way to a sensible way to reverse the process. The state-corporate leadership, of course, has other commitments. But there's no reason for passivity on the part of the public, the so-called stakeholders (workers and community). I mean, with enough popular support, they could just take over the plants and carry out the task of reconstruction themselves. It's not a very exotic proposal. One of the standard texts on corporations in economics literature points out that "[n]owhere...is it written in stone that the short-term interests of corporate shareholders in the United States deserve a higher priority than...all other corporate stakeholders" (workers and community) [(W. Keller & L. Pauly, "Globalization at Bay", Current History, November 1997)]. That's a state-corporate decision; it has nothing to do with economic theory.
It's also important to remind ourselves that the notion of workers' control is as American as apple pie. It's kind of been suppressed; but it's there. In the early days of the Industrial Revolution in New England, working people just took it for granted that those who work in the mills should own them. And they also regarded wage labor as different from slavery only in that it was temporary (also Abraham Lincoln's view). There have been immense efforts to drive these thoughts out of people's heads, to win what the business world calls "the everlasting battle for the minds of men". On the surface, they may appear to have succeeded; but I don't think you have to dig too deeply to find out that they're latent and they can be revived. And there have been some important concrete efforts. One of them was undertaken thirty years ago in Youngstown, Ohio, where US Steel was going to shut down a major facility that was at the heart of this steel town. And there were substantial protests by the workforce and by the community. Then there was an effort, led by Staughton Lynd, to bring to the courts the principle that stakeholders should have the highest priority. Well, the effort failed that time; but, with enough popular support, it could succeed. And right now is a propitious time to revive such efforts, although it would be necessary – and we have to do this – to overcome the effects of this concentrated campaign to drive our own history and culture out of our minds.
There was a very dramatic illustration of the success of this campaign just a few months ago: In February, President Obama decided to show his solidarity with working people. He went to Illinois to give a talk at a factory. The factory he chose was the Caterpillar corporation. Now that was over the strong objections of church groups, peace groups, human rights groups, who were protesting Caterpillar's role in providing what amount to weapons of mass destruction in the Israeli-Occupied Territories. Apparently forgotten, however, was something else: In the 1980s, after Reagan had dismantled the air traffic controllers' union, the Caterpillar managers decided to rescind their labor contract with the United Auto Workers and to destroy the union by bringing in scabs to break a strike. That was the first time that had happened in generations. Now that practice is illegal in other industrial countries, apart from South Africa at the time (not now; now the United States is in splendid isolation, as far as I'm aware). Well, at that time, Obama was a civil rights lawyer in Chicago, and he certainly read the Chicago Tribune which ran quite a good, very careful study of these events [("Caterpillar Strikers Face the Bitter Truth", 9 September 1992)]. They reported that the union was "stunned" to find that unemployed workers crossed the picket line with no remorse, while Caterpillar workers found little "moral support" in their community. This is one of the many communities where the union had "lifted the standard of living for entire communities".
Wiping out these memories is another victory in the relentless campaign to destroy workers' rights and democracy, which is constantly waged by the highly class-conscious business classes. Now the union leadership had refused to understand. It was only in 1978 that UAW president Doug Fraser recognized what was happening and criticized the "leaders of the business community" – I'm quoting him – for waging "a one-sided class war in this country – a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society," and for having "broken and discarded the fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a period of growth and progress." That was 1979. And, in fact, placing one's faith in a compact with owners and managers is a suicide pact. The UAW is discovering that right now, as the state-corporate leadership proceeds to eliminate the hard-fought gains of working people while dismantling the productive core of the economy and sending the Transportation Secretary to Spain to get them to do what American workers could do, at taxpayer expense of course.
Well, that's only a fragment of what's underway, and it highlights the importance of short- and long-term strategies to build – in part, resurrect – the foundations of a functioning democratic society. One short-term goal is to revive a strong independent labor movement. In its heyday, it was a critical base for advancing democracy and human and civil rights. It's a primary reason why it's been subjected to such unremitting attack in policy and propaganda. An immediate goal right now is to pressure Congress to permit organizing rights: the Employee Free Choice Act legislation. That was promised but now seems to be languishing. And a longer-term goal is to win the educational and cultural battle that's been waged with such bitterness in the one-sided class war that the UAW president perceived far too late. That means tearing apart an enormous edifice of delusions about markets, free trade, and democracy that's been assiduously constructed over many years and to overcome the marginalization and atomization of the public.
Now, of all the crises that afflict us, I think – my own feeling is that this growing democratic deficit may be the most severe. Unless it's reversed, Arundhati Roy's forecast might prove accurate, and not in the distant future. The conversion of democracy to a performance in which the public are only spectators might well lead to – inexorably to what she calls "the endgame for the human race". Thanks.
Transcribed by Scott Senn
"Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours" part2
Also at:
http://video.yahoo.com/watch/5295017/13964512
http://video.yahoo.com/watch/5295224/13964982
(00:40:50)
After World War II, Americans were told that their taxes were going to support defense against monsters about to overcome us; that's why it was under a Pentagon cover. So, for example, in the mid-'60s, when LBJ warned that there are only 150 million of us and that there are 3 billion of them, and if might makes right, they're going to "sweep over" us and "take what we have", so we have to stop them in Vietnam [("Remarks to American and Korean Servicemen at Camp Stanley", 1 Nov 1966, )]. And if that sounds familiar, it's because it is. For those who are concerned to understand the realities of the whole Cold War system of controlling the public, there's a very obvious moment to inspect carefully: that's just twenty years ago, at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall and what followed later. Now the celebration of the 20th anniversary (this November) – it's already begun with ample coverage, and it's surely going to increase as the date approaches. But the very revealing policy-implications of what followed have been ignored, as in the past, and probably this coming November, except on Democracy Now ! What happened after the Berlin Wall fell? Well, the Bush I administration reacted immediately: it issued a new National Security Strategy and a budget proposal which laid out what our new course will be after the collapse of what the Kennedy called the "monolithic and ruthless conspiracy" to conquer the world, Reagan's "evil empire". It was gone. And now that it was gone, the whole framework of propaganda collapsed. So what was the response of the planners in the Bush administration? Very straightforward: in brief, everything will go on exactly as before, but with new pretexts. So we still need [the] same huge military system, but for a new reason: literally because of the "technological sophistication of Third World" powers [(National Security Strategy of the United States, March 1990)]. (Nobody laughed!) We have to maintain what they called "the Defense Industrial Base"; it's a standard euphemism for high-tech industry: the system whereby the public pays the costs and takes the risks and, you know, high-tech industry gets the profits. We also, they said, have to maintain intervention forces, directed mostly at the Middle East. And then comes this interesting phrase: ...directed at the Middle East, where the "threats to [our] interests" that required military intervention "could not be laid at the Kremlin's door". In other words: "Sorry, folks, we've been lying to you for fifty years; but now the clouds have lifted, so you can see, if you choose to." And few chose to.
Actually, the fate of NATO is very instructive and highly pertinent right now. Prior to Gorbachev, NATO's announced purposed was to deter a Russian invasion of Europe. That was often a little hard to take seriously, for example, in 1945. In May 1945, Winston Churchill ordered war plans to be drawn up for what they called Operation Unthinkable; it was aimed at (quote) "the elimination of Russia". The plans, which were declassified ten years ago, (I'll quote it) called for "a surprise attack" by "hundreds of thousands of British and American troops, [joined] by 100,000 rearmed German soldiers", while "the RAF" – the British air force – "would attack Soviet cities from bases in Northern Europe" [(Richard Aldrich, The Hidden Hand)]. And pretty soon nuclear weapons were added to the mix. All of this was declassified ten years ago.
The official stand also wasn't very easy to take about ten years later, when Khrushchev took over in Russia. And he very soon proposed a very sharp mutual reduction in offensive military weaponry. He understood very well that the much weaker Soviet economy couldn't possibly sustain an arms race with the Untied States and still hope to develop. Well, when the US dismissed the offer, as it did, he carried out the reduction unilaterally. And Kennedy did react to that: he reacted with a very sharp increase in military spending, which the Russian military later tried to match. That's tanking the economy, as Khrushchev had anticipated. Actually, that was the crucial moment in the Soviet collapse; the economy stagnated since then.
Well, whatever one thinks of the defensive pretext for NATO, it at least had some credibility. But what happens when the Soviet Union is gone and the pretext disappears? Well, it got more extreme. Gorbachev made an astonishing concession: he permitted a unified Germany to join a hostile military alliance run by the global superpower. (That is astonishing, in the light of history. Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia twice in the century.) Now there was a quid pro quo. This is Bush #1 and James Baker. It had been thought up until a couple of months ago that Bush and Baker promised not to expand NATO to the eastern European, former Soviet satellites. But there was the first careful study of the original documents – just came out by Mark Kramer, a Cold War historian [("The Myth of a No-NATO-Enlargement Pledge to Russia", )]. He believes that he's refuting charges of US duplicity; but in fact what he shows is that it's much more cynical than what had been assumed. It turns out that Bush and Baker promised Gorbachev that NATO wouldn't even fully extend to East Germany. I'll quote them: they told Gorbachev, "... no NATO forces would ever be deployed on the territory of the former [German] GDR [or East Germany]." "... NATO's jurisdiction or forces would not move eastward." They also assured Gorbachev that "...NATO would be transforming itself into a more political organization...." Well, there's no need to comment on that promise; but what follows tells a lot more about the Cold War and its aftermath. Right after that, Clinton came into office, and one of the first things he did was to begin the expansion of NATO to the east, in violation – radical violation of the commitment. The process accelerated, with Bush's general aggressive militarism. These are a severe security threat to Russia. It naturally reacted by developing more offensive military capacity. All of this is a serious threat to human survival.
Obama's National Security Advisor James Jones – he has a still more expansive conception: he calls for expanding NATO further to the east and the south, becoming in effect a US-run global intervention force, as it is today in Afghanistan. The Secretary General of NATO, Dutch officer, de Hoop Scheffer – he informed a NATO meeting that "NATO troops have to guard pipelines that transport oil and gas that is directed for the West", and more generally NATO has to protect sea routes used by tankers and other "crucial infrastructure" of the global energy system. All of that just opens up a new phase of Western imperial domination. Actually, the polite term for it is "bringing stability and peace". That's what's happening now.
In "AfPak" – Afghanistan-Pakistan – as the region is now called, Obama is building enormous new embassies and other facilities, on the model of the "city within a city" in Baghdad. These are like no embassies anywhere in the world. And they are signs of an intention to be there for a long time. Right now in Iraq, something interesting is happening. Obama's pressing the Iraqi government not to permit the referendum that's required by the Status of Forces Agreement. That's an agreement that was forced down the throats of the Bush administration, which had to formally renounce its primary war aims in the face of massive Iraqi resistance. Washington's current objection to the referendum was explained two days ago by New York Times correspondent Alissa Rubin [("Iraq Moves Ahead With Vote on U.S. Security Pact", 9 June 2009)]: Obama fears that the Iraqi population might reject the provision that delays US troop withdrawal to 2012; they might insist on immediate departure of US forces. [An] Iraqi analysis in London.- head of the Iraqi Foundation for Democracy and Development in London (it's quite pro-Western) – He explained: "This is an election year for Iraq; no one wants to appear that he is appeasing the Americans. Anti-Americanism is popular now in Iraq", as indeed it's been throughout – facts that are familiar to anyone who's read the Western-run polls, including Pentagon-run polls. Well, the current US-efforts to prevent the legally required referendum are extremely revealing; sometimes they're called "democracy promotion". Well, while Obama is signaling pretty clearly his intention to establish a firm and large-scale presence in the region, he's also, as you know, sharply escalating the AfPak war, following Petraeus' strategy to drive the Taliban into Pakistan, with potentially awful results for this extremely dangerous and unstable state, which is facing insurrections throughout its territory. These are the most extreme in the tribal areas, which cross the AfPak border. It's an artificial line imposed by the British, called the "Durand Line"; and the same people live on both sides of it: Pashtun tribes; and they've never accepted it; and in fact, the Afghanistan government never accepted it either, as long as it was independent. Well, that's where most of the fighting is going on. One of the leading specialists on the region – Selig Harrison – he recently wrote [("Pakistan's Ethnic Fault Line", Washington Post, 11 May 2009)] that the outcome of Washington's current policies (Obama's policies) might well be what he calls an "Islamic Pashtunistan" (Pashtun-based, separate, kind of quasi-state). The Pakistani ambassador had warned that if the Pashtun and Taliban nationalism merge, "we've had it, and we're on the verge of that." The prospects become still more ominous with the escalation of drone attacks that embitter the population with their huge civilian toll, and more recently (just a couple of days ago in fact) with the unprecedented authority that has just been granted to General Stanley McCrystal. He's taking charge. He's a kind of a wild-eyed Special Forces assassin. He's been put in charge of heading the operations. Petraeus' own counterinsurgency advisor in Iraq, General David Kilcullen – [correction:] Colonel, I think – He describes the Obama-Petraeus-McCrystal policy as a fundamental "strategic error" which may lead to "the collapse of Pakistan"; he says, it's a calamity that would "dwarf" all other current issues, given the country's size, strategic location, and nuclear stockpile [("Death From Above, Outrage Down Below", New York Times, 16 May 2009; "A Conversation With David Kilcullen", Washington Post, 22 March 2009)].
It's also not too encouraging that Pakistan and India are now rapidly expanding their nuclear arsenals. Pakistan's nuclear arsenals were developed with Reagan's crucial aid. And India's nuclear weapons programs just got a major shot in the arm with the recent US-India nuclear agreement; it's also a sharp blow to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. [The] two countries have twice come close to nuclear war over Kashmir, and they're also engaged in kind of a proxy war in Afghanistan. These developments pose a very serious threat to world peace, even to human survival. Well, [there's] a lot to say about this crisis, but no time here.
Coming back home: whether the deceit here about the monstrous enemy was sincere or not (in Johnson's case, it might well have been sincere), suppose that (say) fifty years ago Americans had been given a choice of directing their tax money to development of information technology so that their grandchildren could have iPods and the internet, or else putting the same funds into developing a livable and sustainable socio-economic order. Well, they might very well have made the latter choice; but they had no choice. That's standard. There's a striking gap between public opinion and public policy on a host of major issues, domestic and foreign. And, at least in my judgment, public opinion is often a lot more sane. It also tends to be fairly consistent over time, which is pretty astonishing, because public concerns and aspirations, if they're even mentioned, are marginalized and ridiculed. That's one very significant feature of the yawning democratic deficit, as we call it in other countries. That's the failure of formal democratic institutions to function properly, and that's no trivial matter. Arundhati Roy has a book, soon to come out, in which she asks whether the evolution of formal democracy in India and the United States (in fact, not only there) (in her words) "might turn out to be the end game of the human race" [(Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy)]. And that's not an idle question.
It should be recalled that the American republic was founded on the principle that there should be a democracy deficit. James Madison, the main framer of the Constitutional order – His view was that power should be in the hands of "the wealth of the nation", the more responsible set of men who have sympathy for property owners and their rights [(Rufus King's Notes of the Constitutional Convention of 1787; Records of the Federal Convention of 1787)]. And Madison sought to construct a system of government that would (in his words) "protect the minority of the opulent from the majority" [(Records of the Federal Convention of 1787)]. That's why the Constitutional system that he framed did not have coequal branches: the executive was supposed to be an administrator, and the legislature was supposed to be dominant, but not the House of Representatives, rather the Senate, where power was vested and protected from the public in many ways; that's where "the wealth of the nation" would be concentrated. This is not overlooked by historians. Gordon Wood, for example, summarizes the thoughts of the Founders, saying that "[t]he Constitution was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period", delivering power to a "better sort of people" and excluding "those who are not rich, well-born, or prominent from exercising political power" [(Creation of the American Republic)]. Well, all through American history there's been a constant struggle over this constrained version of democracy, and popular struggles have won a great many rights. Nevertheless, concentrated power and privilege clings to the Madisonian conception. It changes form as circumstances change.
By World War II, there was a significant change: Business leaders and elite intellectuals recognized that the public had won enough rights so that they can't be controlled by force; so it would be necessary to do something else: namely, to turn to control of attitudes and opinions. These were the days when the huge public relations industry emerged, in the freest countries in the world: Britain and the United States, where the problem was most severe. The public relations industry was devoted to what Walter Lippmann approvingly called a "new art" in "the practice of democracy": "the manufacture of consent" [(Public Opinion)]; it's called "the engineering of consent", in the phrase of his contemporary Edward Bernays, one of the founders of the PR industry. Both Lippmann and Bernays had taken part in Woodrow Wilson's state propaganda agency; "Committee on Public Information" was its Orwellian term. It was created kind of to try to drive a pacifist population to jingoist fanaticism and hatred of all things German. And it succeeded, brilliantly in fact. And it was hoped that the same techniques could insure that what are called "the intelligent minorities" would rule and that the general public, who Lippmann called "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders", would serve their function as spectators, not participants. These are all very highly respected progressive essays on democracy by a man who was the leading public intellectual of the 20th century and was a Wilson/Roosevelt/Kennedy progressive, as Bernays was. And they capture the thinking of progressive opinion. So President Wilson – he held an elite of gentlemen with "elevated ideals" must be empowered to preserve "stability and righteousness": essentially the prospective of the Founding Fathers. In more recent years, the gentlemen are transmuted into the technocratic elite and the "action intellectuals" of Camelot, Straussian neocons, other configurations. But, throughout, one or another variant of the doctrine prevails. (The quote from Samuel Huntington that you heard is an example.)
And, on a more hopeful note, popular struggle continues to clip its wings, quite impressively in the wake of 1960s activism, which had quite a substantial effect on civilizing the society and raised the prospects for further progress to a much higher plane. It's one of the reasons why it's called the "time of troubles" and bitterly denounced: too much of a civilizing effect.
Well, what the West sees as "the crisis" – namely, the financial crisis – that'll presumably be patched up somehow or other, but leaving the institutions that created it pretty much in place. A couple of days ago, the Treasury Department, as you read, permitted early TARP repayments, which actually reduce capacity. I mean, it was touted as "giving money back to the public"; in fact, as was pointed out right away, it reduces the capacity of the banks to lend, although it does allow them to pour money into the pockets of the few who matter. And the mood on Wall Street was captured by two Bank of New York employees who "predicted that their lives – and pay – would improve even if the broader economy did not" [("10 Large Banks Allowed to Exit U.S. Aid Program", New York Times, 9 June 2009)]. That's paraphrasing Adam Smith's observation that the architects of policy protect their own interests, no matter how grievous the effect on others. And they are the architects of policy: Obama made sure to staff his economic advisors from that sector, which has been pointed out too: the former chief economist of the IMF Samuel Johnson pointed out [("The Quiet Coup", The Atlantic, May 2009)] that the Obama administration is just in the pocket of Wall Street. As he put it, "Throughout the crisis, the government has taken extreme care not to upset the interests of the financial institutions, or to question the basic outlines of the system that got us here", and " elite business interests" who "played a central role in creating the crisis...with the implicit backing of the government" – they are still there, and " they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the [set] of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive." He says, "The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them" – which is no surprise, considering who constitutes and who backs the government.
(continued)
Transcribed by Scott Senn
This is a very informative and important lecture.
Scott Senn transcribed the entire talk. I appreciate his hard work.
"Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours"
Also at:
http://video.yahoo.com/watch/5295017/13964512
http://video.yahoo.com/watch/5295224/13964982
(16:04) Thanks. It was really exciting to watch Amy [Goodman] a couple of days ago when she was interviewing Judy [Brown Chomsky] . It's quite an amazing achievement. I won't go into the whole story, but she took a lot of courage and effort to win a completely unprecedented case. I don't think there's ever been a case of a settlement like that, where the evidence – which she had in fact gathered in Nigeria – was so strong that the corporation [Shell Dutch Oil] not only settled but even allowed the settlement to be public, indicating their concern that they might be exposed in trial.
Well, let me say a couple of words about the title ["Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours"] which as always is shorthand. There's too much nuance and variety to make any sharp distinction between "us" and "them". And of course neither I nor anyone else can presume to speak for us. But I'll pretend it's possible. There's also a problem about the word "crisis". Which one do we have in mind? There are numerous very severe crises. Many of them will be under discussion here in a couple of weeks at the United Nations in their Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis. And these crises are interwoven in very complex ways which preclude any sharp separation. But again I'll pretend otherwise for simplicity.
Well, one way to enter this morass was helpfully provided by a current issue of the New York Review, dated yesterday. The front cover headline reads "How to Deal with the Crisis" [("The Crisis and How to Deal with It", 11 June 2009)]. It features a symposium of specialists. And it's worth reading, but with attention to the definite article: "THE crisis". For the West, the phrase "THE crisis" has a clear enough meaning: it's the financial crisis that hit the rich countries, and therefore is of "supreme importance". But in fact, even for the rich and privileged, that's by no means the only crisis or even the most severe of those they face. And others see the world quite differently: for example, the newspaper New Nation in Bangladesh. There, we read: "It's very telling that trillions have already been spent to patch up leading world financial institutions, while out of the comparatively small sum of $12 billion pledged in Rome earlier this year, to offset the food crisis, only $1 billion has been delivered. The hope that at least extreme poverty can be eradicated by the end of 2015, as stipulated in the UN's Millennium Development Goals, seems as unrealistic as ever, not due to lack of resources but to a lack of true concern for the world's poor." They're talking about approximately a billion people facing starvation, severe malnutrition, even thirty/forty million of them in the richest country in the world. That's a real crisis, and it's getting much worse. In this morning's Financial Times, the British business press, it's reported that the World Food Program just announced that they're cutting food aid and rations and also closing operations. The reason is that the donor countries have been cutting back the funding because of the fiscal crunch, and they're slashing contributions. So [there's] a very close connection between the horrendous food crisis and poverty crisis and the significant – but less significant – fiscal crisis. They're ending up closing down operations in Rwanda, Uganda, Ethiopia, many others. They have a twenty to twenty-five percent cut in budget, while food prices are rising and the financial crisis – the general economic crisis – is bringing unemployment and cutting back remittances. That's a major crisis.
We might, incidentally, remember that when the British landed in what's now Bangladesh, they were stunned by its wealth and splendor. And it didn't take long for it to be on its way to become the very symbol of misery, not by an act of God. Well, the fate of Bangladesh should remind us that the terrible food crisis is not just a result of Western lack of concern; in large part, it results from very definite and clear concerns of the global managers: namely, for their own welfare. It's always well to keep in mind an astute observation by Adam Smith about policy formation in England. He recognized [(Wealth of Nations, Book 4, chap 8)] that what he called "the principle architects" of policy – in his day, the "merchants and manufacturers" – make sure that their own interests are "most peculiarly attended to", however grievous the impact on others, including the people of England but far more so those who were subjected to what he called "the savage injustice of the Europeans", particularly in conquered India (his own prime concern). We can easily think of analogues today. His observation in fact is one of the few solid and enduring principles of international and domestic affairs; [it is] well to keep in mind. And the food crisis is a case in point.
It erupted first and most dramatically in Haiti in early 2008. Like Bangladesh, Haiti is a symbol of utter misery. And, like Bangladesh, when the European explorers arrived, they were stunned because it was so remarkably rich in resources. Later it became the source of much of France's wealth. I'm not going to run through the sorted history; it's worth knowing. But the current food crisis traces back directly to Woodrow Wilson's invasion of Haiti, which was murderous and brutal and destructive. Among Wilson's many crimes was to dissolve the Haitian parliament at gunpoint, because it refused to pass what was called "progressive" legislation, which would allow US businesses to take over Haitian lands. Wilson's marines then ran a "free election" in which the legislation was passed by 99.9% of the vote; now that's of the five percent of the population permitted to vote. All of this comes down to us as what's called "Wilsonian idealism". Later, USAID instituted programs in Haiti under the slogan of turning Haiti into "the Taiwan of the Caribbean", by adhering to the sacred principle of "comparative advantage": that is, they should import from the United States, while working people – mostly women – slaved under miserable conditions in US-owned assembly plants. Haiti's first free election in 1990 threatened these economically "rational" programs. The poor majority made the mistake of entering the political arena and electing their own candidate: Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a populist priest. And Washington instantly adopted standard operating procedures, moving at once to undermine the regime. A couple months later came the military coup, instituting a horrible reign of terror, which was backed by Bush I and even more so by Clinton. By 1994, Clinton decided that the population was sufficiently intimidated, and he sent US forces to restore the elected president (that's now called a "humanitarian intervention"), but on very strict conditions: namely, that the president accept a very harsh neo-liberal regime – in particular, no protection for the economy. Haitian rice farmers are quite efficient, but they can't compete with US agribusiness that relies on a huge government subsidy, thanks to Ronald Reagan's "free market" enthusiasms. Well, there's nothing at all surprising about what followed next. In 1995, USAID wrote a report pointing out (I'm quoting it) that the "export-driven trade and investment policy" that Washington mandated will "relentlessly squeeze the domestic rice farmer." In fact, the neo-liberal policies rammed down Haiti's throat destroyed, dismantled what was left of economic sovereignty, drove the country into chaos. That was accelerated by Bush #2's banning of international aid on totally cynical grounds. In February 2004, the two traditional torturers of Haiti, France and the United States, combined to back a military coup and send President Aristide off to Africa. The US denies him permission to return to the entire region. Haiti had by then lost the capacity to feed itself, making it highly vulnerable to food-price fluctuation. That was the immediate cause of the 2008 food crisis which led to riots and enormous protests, but not getting food.
The story is familiar, in fact quite similar in much of the world. So, going back to the Bangladesh newspaper, it's true enough that the food crisis results from Western lack of concern (a pittance, by our standards, would overcome its worst immediate effects); but more fundamentally, it results from the dedication to Adam Smith's principles of business-run state policy. These are all matters that we too easily evade; they happen daily, along with the fact that bailing out banks is not uppermost in the minds of the billion people now facing starvation, not forgetting the tens of millions enduring hunger in the richest country in the world.
Well, also sidelined is an easy way to make a significant dent in the financial and the food crises. It's suggested by the publication a couple of days ago of the authoritative annual report on military spending by SIPRI, the Swedish Peace Research Institute . The scale of military spending is phenomenal, regularly increasing, this last year as well. The US is responsible for almost as much as the rest of the world combined, seven times as much as its nearest rival China. No need to waste time commenting.
This distribution of concerns reflects another crisis here, kind of a cultural crisis: that is, the tendency to focus on short-term parochial gains. That's a core element of our socio-economic institutions and the ideological support system on which they rest. One example, now prominent, is the array of perverse incentives that are devised for corporate managers to enrich themselves: for example, what's called the "too big to fail" insurance policies that are provided by the unwitting public, and deeper ones that are just inherent in market inefficiencies. One such inefficiency, now recognized to be one of the roots of the financial crisis, is the under-pricing of systemic risk: the risk that affects the whole system. And that's general. Like, if you and I make a transaction – say, you sell me a car, we may make a good deal for ourselves, but we don't price into that transaction the cost to others. And there's a cost: pollution, congestion, raising the price of gas, all sorts of other things, killing people in Nigeria because we're getting the gas from them. That doesn't count; we don't count that in. That's an inherent market inefficiency, one of the reason why markets can't work. And when you turn to the financial institutions, it can get quite serious. So it means that if (say) Goldman Sachs – if they're managed properly – if they make a risky loan, they calculate the potential cost to themselves if the loan goes bad; but they simply don't calculate the impact on the whole financial system. And we now see how severe that can be, not that it's anything new. In fact, this inherent deficiency of markets – this inefficiency of markets is perfectly well known. Ten years ago, at the height of the euphoria about "efficient markets", two prominent economists John Eatwell and Lance Taylor – they wrote an important book called Global Finance at Risk in which they spelled out the consequences of these market inefficiencies (which we now see), and they outlined the means to deal with them. These proposals were exactly contrary to the deregulatory rage that was then being carried forward by the Clinton administration under the leadership of those who Obama has now called upon to put band-aids on the disaster that they helped create.
Well, in substantial measure, the food crisis plaguing much of the South and the financial crisis of the North have common roots: namely, the shift towards neo-liberalism since the 1970s. That brought to an end the post Second World War Bretton Woods system that was instituted by the United States and Britain right after World War II. It had two architects: John Maynard Keynes of Britain and Harry Dexter White in the United States. And they anticipated that its core principles – which included capital controls and regulated currencies – They anticipated that these principles would lead to relatively balanced economic growth and would also free governments to institute the social-democratic programs – welfare-state programs – that had enormous public support around the world. And to a large extent, they were vindicated on both counts. In fact, many economists call the years that followed – until the 1970s – the "golden age" of capitalism. That golden age led not only to unprecedented and relatively egalitarian growth, but also the introduction of welfare-state measures. Keynes and White were perfectly well aware that free capital movement and speculation inhibit these options. Professional economics literature points out – what should be obvious – that the free flow of capital creates what they sometimes call a "virtual Senate" of lenders and investors who carry out a "moment-by-moment referendum" on government policies, and if they find that they're "irrational" – meaning they help people instead of profits – then they vote against them, by capital flight, by tax on the country, and so on. So the "democratic" governments have a "dual constituency": their own population and the virtual Senate, who typically prevail. And for the poor, that means regular disaster. In fact, one of the reasons for the radical difference between Latin America and East Asian in the last half century is that Latin America didn't control capital flight. In fact, in general, the rich in Latin America don't have responsibilities. Capital flight approximated the crushing debt. In contrast, during South Korea's remarkable growth period, capital flight was not only banned, but could bring the death penalty, one of many factors that led to the surprising divergence. Latin America has much richer resources; you'd expect it to be far more advanced than East Asian. But it had the disadvantage of being under imperialist wings.
From the 1970s, the "golden age" faded. When neo-liberal rules were observed – insofar as they've been observed, economic performance deteriorated and social-democratic programs have been substantially weakened. We see that right here. The United States partially accepted these rules. And for the past 30 years real wages for the majority of the population have stagnated; up till then, they essentially tracked growth. Work hours have increased – now well beyond Europe. Benefits, which have always lagged, have declined. Social indicators – kind of general measure of the health of a society – they also tracked growth, until the mid-1970s when they began to decline, reaching the 1960-level by the end of the millennium. Well, there has been economic growth; but it's finding its way into very few pockets, increasingly into the financial industries, which have grown enormously, while productive industry has significantly declined. And we're seeing it right now. And with the decline of productive industry of course that means decline in living standards – in fact, even opportunities to survive – for much of the work force. The economy has also been punctuated by bubbles, or financial crises, and public bailouts. So the huge bailout of Citigroup right now is nothing new; something quite similar happened in the early '80s to its predecessor Citibank, thanks to the US taxpayer.
These results were described, all through this period, and explained by a few really outstanding international economists (David Felix is one). But the mythology about "efficient markets" and "rational choice" prevailed. And that's not at all surprising. These myths were highly beneficial to very narrow sectors of privilege and power – what Adam Smith called "the principle architects" of policy. That's another very severe institutional and cultural crisis which persists.
Actually, the phrase "golden age of capitalism" is a little misleading. It might more accurately be called "state capitalism". It's worth bearing in mind that the dynamic state sector was and remains a primary factor in development and innovation, through a variety of measures: research and development, procurement – government procurement, public subsidy, regular bailouts, and other means. It's particularly true in the United States. It was done here under a Pentagon cover, as long as the cutting edge of high-tech industry –advanced economy – was electronics-based. For that, the Pentagon served as a good cover. (In recent years, if you look at government spending, it's shifting more towards the health-oriented institutions of the government. That's a reflection of the fact that the cutting edge of the economy is becoming more biology-based.) That includes computers, the internet, satellites, most of the rest of the IT revolution that finally exploded in the late '90s in a tech-bubble, but also much else: civilian aircraft, advanced machine tools, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and a lot more. The crucial role of the state in economic development should be kept in mind, when we read these days dire warnings about government intervention in the financial system, after private management has once again driven it to ruins, this time an unusually severe crisis and one that harms the rich not just the poor, so it merits special concern. It's also worth recalling that large-scale state intervention in the economy is nothing new. On the contrary, it's always been a central factor in economic development. (It's a matter I wish I had time – There's no time to review it here, but the history, which I'll skip, is quite instructive.) These state-guided modes of economic development require considerable deceit in a society where the public can't be controlled by force. So people can't be told that the advanced economy relies heavily on the principle that the population pays the costs and takes the risks and that the profit is eventually privatized. And the eventual can be a long time, sometimes decades, as in the case of computers and the internet, for example.
(continued)
Transcribed by Scott Senn
"Assessing the Role of US Foreign Policy, Israeli Security, & Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories"
7 April 2009 Madison, WI
Chomsky (continued): Now the Russians understand that as well as the Americans. And in fact if they don't understand it, they can read it in American strategic analysis journals, where they can read the detailed explanation of why the "missile defense" system is a potential threat to the Soviet deterrent. Okay, if there's a threat to the Soviet deterrent, what they're going to do is build up offensive military capacity to get around it, which is exactly what they're doing of course. That increases the threat of nuclear war – of maybe, by accident, if you have systems on high alert – . They've come really close to accidents very frequently – maybe stopped by human intervention in the last two minutes or something. So we're consciously increasing the threat of nuclear war. And there are many other cases. I mean, let's take a major case: We just had the NATO summit, okay? Think about NATO for a minute. If somebody wanted some other topics to work on, take NATO. Why does NATO exist? Okay, now, during the Cold War there was a kind of rationale. I mean, you could believe or not; but it had a rationale that wasn't total imbecility: It was supposed to be there to protect ourselves from a Russian attack. Was there a possibility of a Russian attack, you know? Probably not. But at least there's some kind of a credible rationale. Well, you know, after the Soviet Union disappeared, what's the rationale? I mean, there isn't any! And take a look at what happened. I mean, as the Soviet Union collapsed, Gorbachev, the Russian premier, made an astonishing concession to the United States, he allowed – he agreed to allow a unified Germany to be of course militarized and also to join a hostile military alliance. Now that's astonishing. Just look at the history of the past century: I mean, Germany alone practically destroyed Russia several times in the century. Now he's saying a militarized Germany – a main power in Europe – can join a hostile military alliance led by the United States. Amazing concession! But he insisted on a quid pro quo and got it. He insisted that the Bush administration (this is Bush I) agree that – the words they used – that NATO would not expand "one inch" to the east. Okay, that gives Russia a kind of a buffer zone. And that was agreed upon; it was a pledge by the United States. Gorbachev also proposed a nuclear weapons free zone from the Arctic down to the Mediterranean, which would, again, reduce the threat of accidental conflict or some other kind of conflict. The US never responded to that, as far as I know; and it never happened. All right, then Clinton came in. One of Clinton's first acts was to violate that pledge and expand NATO to the east. You know, the Clinton administration – people like Strobe Talbott who was in charge of eastern Europe – say, well, we had to do that to get the eastern European states to join the European Union. But that's just not true. There's no connection between joining the European Union and being a member of NATO. I mean, there's a lot of states – Austria, Finland, Sweden – are part of the European Union but they're not part of NATO. So, okay, you want the eastern European states in the European Union? It makes some sense; it's got nothing to do with NATO. Expanding NATO to the east is just a seriously aggressive act, which significantly threatens Russia, so of course they reacted, by expanding offensive military capacity. Then Bush came along with his aggressive militarism, and it expanded even further. And now it's expanded still further by Obama, by insisting on putting systems in eastern Europe which can only be understood – you know, it's not even a worse case analysis [but] the only rational interpretation of them – is as a threat to the Soviet deterrent which is going to increase tensions. Well, you know, that's not the only example. But there's case after case where actions are being taken which increase the threat of nuclear war. (And that's terminal; you know, nothing much is going to survive a nuclear war.) Many other examples. That's one case, and the other case is environmental destruction, which is creeping along; you know, it's not like imminent and total the way a nuclear war is; but it's going to be severe. Nobody knows the exact details; but everybody knows that the longer you wait, the worse it's going to be. And it could be very severe. Again, [there's] a lot of uncertainties; but all the uncertainties look bad, and most of them look pretty bad. So that's two good reasons why the species is not likely to survive.
Part 6
Chomsky (continued): As for the Samson option, that's actually real. I mean, I said before that if the United States essentially tells Israel, "you've got to withdraw", they'll almost certainly do it. But they do have an option. It was called – It goes back to the 1950s. [If] you look at the Israeli records back to the 1950s, when they were a weak state, not a powerful state, they did say – the top leadership, you know, the Defense Ministry and others (this is the Labor government) – that if anybody crosses us, "we will go crazy". That was the phrase that was used: "we'll be a crazy state; we'll do something so wild that they'll be forced to do what we want." Well, they couldn't really do that back in the 1950s. But once they have nuclear weapons options, they can. And in fact if you read US military journals, you find analyses saying that the Israeli nuclear weapons are a threat to us. You know – not that they're going to attack us, but they'll do something that will cause such, you know, blow-up in the world that we'll get in real trouble. Okay, that's the "Samson option". It goes back to the biblical story of Samson who, you remember, killed a lot of Philistines, and then they caught him and blinded him. And he was in a Philistine temple. He'd gotten his strength back; his hair grew. (You've all learned this stuff.) And he stood between two pillars, and he pulled down the pillars, and the ceiling fell, and he killed more Philistines in his death than in his lifetime. He was basically the first suicide-bomber, who killed lots of Philistines. He's a hero, you know. But that's the Samson option: "we'll bring the temple down, even if we kill ourselves." And it's real, you know. And it's a danger. The more we strengthen Israel's military capacity, the greater the threat to us. I mean, the former head of the Strategic Command, General Lee Butler, after he left it – . (That's, you know, the part of the military that controls strategic weapons, including nuclear weapons.) He was very straight about it; he said, the greatest threat in the region is that Israel has this extraordinary destructive capacity, which first of all impels others to try to match it, but also is an enormous danger in itself. [http://www.basicint.org/pubs/Research/1998nuclearfutures(2).pdf] So we may be shooting ourselves in the head by letting a crazy state develop. And the craziness of the state is not because the people are insane. Once you pick a policy of choosing expansion over security, that's what you end up getting stuck with.
Questioner #6: I was wondering if you could address the Palestinian refugee problem and the question of the right of return in terms of a two-state solution.
Chomsky: Well, there are some problems that are solvable, and there are others that unfortunately – much as we regret it – aren't solvable. It'd be nice if it were otherwise. A two-state settlement can be achieved. But the rights of Palestinian refugees are not going to be achieved except symbolically. It's a horrible story; but if you think about it, it's basically a fact. The refugees in Lebanon or in Jordan – some of them – under a political settlement – some of them could return. Very few are going to return to their homes. I mean, that's about as likely as, you know, Native Americans coming and resettling in Madison. I mean, you could give an argument for it that it would be just. But it's not going to happen in the real world. And the Palestinian refugees – very few are going to return to their homes which have been destroyed, taken over, and so on. I mean, some proportion of them might go back to a Palestinian state, which is of course not their home and is very poor and so on – at best. But most of them are just going to have to be absorbed somewhere. And the right solution, I think, would be for the United States to bring them to the United States. I mean, we have a large degree of responsibility for their plight; we have the wealth and resources to take care of refugees. So, yeah, we ought to do it. I mean, just as in the late – .
Questioner #7: You think Israel and the US will go after Iran?
Chomsky [hoarsely]: I think I better end at this point, because I can't talk.
Transcribed by Scott Senn
"Assessing the Role of US Foreign Policy, Israeli Security, & Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories"
Questioner #3: Hi. In the early 1980's when Zbigniew Brzezinski left his post as National Security Advisor for Jimmy Carter, he went back to Columbia University and taught as one of his first students Barack Obama – taught Sovietology – one of eight students chosen for that. In 1981 Barack Obama visited Pakistan and was, by the last year's president, after Musharraf resigned in 2008, the man who just became president [[?…inaudible…]] to (quote) "watch over" Barack Obama. This was at a time when State Department was discouraging all Americans from going to Pakistan; in fact, you had to have government approval to do so. And then in 1983, he left the university and worked for Business International, a CIA front company. And this is in Bill Blum's "Anti-Empire" project; this is where this information comes from, and from the New York Times in terms of the specific corporation that he worked for. And then fast forward to, you know, the presidential campaign: all of a sudden for the first time in the post-war – . Well, during the entire Cold War every president came from a high-military-spending state – per capita income, above average military spending. Every president elected during the Cold War. And then Clinton has his CIA connections. And Barack Obama are the only two exceptions. We had Illinois and New York – two very low military-spending per capita states – vying for the presidency. What was the difference? Barack Obama carried fourteen of the fifteen highest per capita military spending states in the primaries and became the next president. So is this change we can believe in, or is this just more of the military-industrial complex we've had all along?
Chomsky: Well, I don't put much faith in any of that, frankly. I'm not sure of the data. But let's say they're right. I really don't think it tells us much. If you want to know something about Obama's likely policies, don't look at military spending; take a look at his financing. That's a very good predicter of policies; in fact, there's good studies of this. His financing is primarily from the financial institutions, which preferred him to McCain quite a lot – by a large margin. And that's the kind of policies that he's implementing domestically – those that are favored by the financial institutions that were his largest funders. As far as military spending is concerned, you know, it stays pretty constant; you know, it goes up and down a little; but it stays pretty constant through presidencies. In Obama's case, it's being modified slightly: there's less spending for high-tech military equipment (like the F-22 Fighter) and more for intervention forces. Okay, that reflects the new perceived tasks of the Pentagon. They're not expecting to fight a war against Russia; they're expecting to invade other countries. But I think that's almost independent of where the president comes from. Incidentally, the so-called military-industrial complex – That's a little misleading – the phrase – you know, Eisenhower's phrase. I mean, the "military-industrial complex" in fact is the core of American high-tech industry. Thing like (say) computers and the internet and so on come out of the military-industrial complex. In fact, a large part of Pentagon funding is just devoted to creating the next phrase of the electronics-based economy. So, sure, every president is in favor of that: in favor of having the public pay the costs and take the risks of funding future profits.
Questioner #4: Dr. Chomsky, you dispelled several myths indoctrinated into the American culture tonight about the Middle East. A couple weeks ago, you shared at M.I.T. some myths about the economy. Because these are so hard to detect until you've been exposed to the other side, could you briefly list some more of these myths indoctrinated into our culture, so that we may broader our horizons?
Chomsky: Pick the topic, and you'll find myths. And, what's worse, the same is true of every country I know of. So which topic?
Questioner #4: Whatever you feel is important.
Chomsky: Let's take the main domestic concern of Americans. For decades, the major domestic concern of Americans – either top or very close to the top – hsas been the health system. Okay. And it's obvious why: it's a total catastrophe. It has about twice the per capita costs of other industrial countries and has about the worst outcomes. And, you know, like fifty million people don't have insurance or many more have much too limited insurance. Now those are things that really hurt people. You know, they're not abstract. Drug prices are like two or three times as high as in comparable countries. That hurts people, and they care about it. And furthermore people have consistent ideas, consistent beliefs over a long period. And on this issue, they have very consistent beliefs. For decades, a large part of the population has been in favor of some kind of national health care system. It's called here "single-payer" or, you know, it's called "Canadian style". The reason it's called "Canadian style" is because people know that Canada exists. And it's not called, you know, "Australian style" (which is a better system) because who knows what they have in Australia? But there's been overwhelming support for it. And it would almost certainly be much cheaper than the system we have now. In fact, if you take the socialized part of the system – Medicare – its administrative costs are a fraction of the privatized system. I mean, there's constant talk about, you know, the "problems" that Medicare is facing down the road: "we got to do something to stop it." Yeah, it's true, but the problems are because it has to work through the privatized system, which makes it highly inefficient, costly, bureaucratized, a lot of intervention, and so on.
Part 4
Chomsky (continued): Well, the public has wanted something that makes sense. But it's not on the political agenda. Very few people know that that's what everybody wants and know the reasons for it, because it's not discussed. Okay, that's a pretty impressive achievement: to have suppressed for decades – . Like, everything I said you could find the data in papers, but you've got to research it. But here's a situation where there's a major domestic concern; there's a lot of public support. If it was even discussed publicly, the support would grow much higher. You know, when things are not discussed and debated, people may have an opinion, but their feeling is: "Well, I must be crazy!"; you know, "Nobody else believes this." If it was part of an ongoing, lively debate and discussion (as would happen in a functioning democratic society), yeah, then people would see the reasons for it, and it would reinforce, and you'd have public pressure. Well, up until 2004, these ideas were never on the political agenda. So [if] you go back to the 2004 election (Kerry/Bush election), take a look at the debates and the coverage. The last debate, right before the election, was on domestic issues. [If] you go back and look at the New York Times or the Washington Post the next day, they point out correctly that Kerry never suggested any government involvement in the health care system because it's "politically impossible" and "lacks political support". Okay, the only support it had was the large majority of the population, but it "lacked political support" and was "politically impossible", which means the insurance companies didn't like it, the financial institutions didn't like it, pharmaceutical corporations didn't like it, and so on. In fact, shortly after that, Congress passed legislation which made it illegal for the government to use its purchasing power to negotiate drug prices. I think the United States must be the only country in the industrial world where anything like that is true. So, like, the Pentagon can negotiate prices, you know, to get paper clips, let's say. But Medicare can't negotiate to get lower drug prices. Well, you know, [the] Medicare program created which is a gift to the insurance companies – incidentally, the Democrats voted for it. This year, 2008, something changed: For the first time, the Democrats began putting forward programs which are towards what the population has wanted for decades. (They don't really get there; but at least they're in that direction.) First, Edwards; then, Obama and Clinton. Well, what happened between 2004 and 2008? Public opinion didn't change; it's been pretty much the same for decades. What changed is that the manufacturing industry starting coming out in favor of a national health care system, because they are being smashed by the cost of the privatized system in the United States. Like, General Motors says it cost them over $1,000 more to produce a car in Detroit than across the Canadian border, because they have a rational health care system – more rational – not perfect, but better. Well, you know, when a sector of concentrated capital becomes interested in something, it starts to become "politically possible" and have "political support". You know, these are things that people ought to be discussing and think about. What does that tell you about functioning democracy, if something can become sort of "politically possible" (even if [it's] not what the public wants), but only if a major sector of concentrated capital is in favor of it? I mean, these ought to be topics that are, you know, the main issues for people who want to create a functioning democratic society. And that's the major domestic concern. Now if you take a look at Obama's program today, it's being criticized because it's going to be expensive and we can't afford it. Well, yeah, the way he's planning, it's going to be expensive, because it's maintaining the privatized system. And in fact [the] privatized health care system is complaining bitterly right now, because if there's an option of the coverage system, as is written into the program, they won't be able to compete on a level playing field. That's a way of saying, "We're so inefficient and costly that we can't compete with a national health care system; so it's unfair." And Obama's proposals – such as they are – are now being tinkered with to help the costly and inefficient privatized system compete on a level playing field. Well, why should the population allow any of this to happen? Okay, there's a topic – a very different one – on which popular organizing can take place and should have been for decades, and in fact would have been, if democracy was functioning. If democracy means that, you know, wealthy elites run the country, then of course democracy doesn't function. And this takes us to a broader question: The general population is pretty much aware of this. If you take a look at polls, for a long period, something like 80% of the population says that the government is "run by a few big interests looking out for themselves", not by "the people". That's pretty serious. You know, is it impossible to organize people who think we live in a tyranny, that feel so hopeless they can't do anything about it? Well, it shouldn't be that hard. You know, again, much greater achievements have been made. Okay, those are other issues. And you can continue on and on. Everywhere you look, there's delusion, deceit, control of attitudes and opinions – very systematic. A lot of the business world in fact is devoted to those things, as well as media and so on. They all have to be countered by popular movements. And when they have been in the past, you've got steps towards a more decent society. There's no shortage of such tasks. Take a look almost anywhere, and you'll find them.
Questioner #5: You said before that you think there's a possibility that the human species won't survive the 21st century. I was wondering if you could explain why you think that's true, also if you could discuss Israel's Samson Plan.
Chomsky: I got everything but the last word. ....Oh, the "Samson complex". Well, actually that worries me. There's two good reasons why the species may not survive very long. (So, again, you got some Martian looking at what's gone on here: they wouldn't put high odds on the survival of the species.) One of those is nuclear weapons. I mean, there could be a nuclear war almost any time. I mean, in fact it's kind of like a miracle that we survived since Nagasaki without a nuclear war. We've come awfully close many times – I won't run through the record – but much too many for any rational person to expect. And it continues. So take (say) Obama the other day: Obama made a nice speech about reducing nuclear weapons. Okay, that's good. In the same speech, he said we're going to go ahead with the so-called missile defense programs in Czechoslovakia and Poland. All right, that increases the threat of nuclear war, for obvious reasons. Everyone on all sides is aware that so-called missile defense is a first-strike weapon. It's the only thing it could conceivable do if it were ever [[?...inaudible...]] is to stop a deterrent strike; [it could] never stop a first strike. So it could conceivably stop a deterrent if it ever worked, which it doesn't.
(to part 5&6)
Transcribed by Scott Senn
"Assessing the Role of US Foreign Policy, Israeli Security, & Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories" Q&A
7 April 2009 Madison, WI
(starting at 04:28)
Questioner 1: Thank you so much for your analysis. I think it is exactly what I saw when I was in the West Bank in 2006. And yet I find what you say rather discouraging. So what gives you hope that we actually will be able to turn this around? And what do you think we need to do?
Chomsky: Well, it's really very easy. It's one of the easier things to do. The reason is that the population of the United States is already on our side. I mean, a large majority of the population supports the international consensus. There's high-level support for it, like in the bipartisan commission that I mentioned. All that's necessary is to organize the already-existing support into an activist movement – and there have been plenty of them in the past and they have succeeded – which will cause a change in the rejectionist commitment of the Obama administration, which has no fundamental, you know, interest in sustaining the illegal criminal occupation and can just withdraw support for it, like stop funding the daily criminal activities in the West Bank and in Gaza. In Gaza it's pretty serious; I didn't go into a lot of it. But the siege – . I mean, you know about the destruction in Gaza; but there's a lot more going on which never gets reported. So, for example, in the year 2000, British Gas – a British petroleum company – discovered an apparently pretty substantial natural gas field off in the territorial waters of Gaza. Well, of course Israel wants to get its hands on it. And what's been happening since then, according to local activists (this includes the people who are involved in the Free Gaza Committee, the ones sending ships in to try to break the blockade), Israel has been driving fisherman out of the Gazan territorial waters, closer and closer to shore. Now there's no official statement to that effect, and they don't warn them; they just start shooting at them with the gunboats. And then they get closer and closer to shore. Now you can't fish near the shore in Gaza because the destruction of the power and sewage systems have made the pollution so intense that you just can't fish anywhere near shore. So it's wiping out the Gazan fishing industry, and also laying Israel's claim to take over Gazan energy resources which apparently could be pretty substantial – you know, could play a significant role in developing the country. Israel right now – if you read the petroleum journals (you know, the industry journals) – is sending delegations to make a deal with British Gas to have the gas that's discovered off the waters sent to Israel. Well, you know, those are things we don't have to tolerate, any more than we have to tolerate anything else that's going on. And I don't think it's a hard problem to deal with. I mean, there are much harder problems: say, global warming, or, you know, ending the US occupation of Afghanistan and the bombing of Pakistan. Those are really harder problems because there you're running into fundamental state interests.
Part 2
Chomsky (continued): Here, what's necessary is to carry out enough of an educational program so that people are not deluded by the constant flood of lies and distortion. I mean, when people hear every day unremitting claims that "of course Israel had a right to invade Gaza in self-defense", it's not very hard to explain to people that there's absolutely no basis for that. You know, it takes like two minutes. And if enough people are convinced, they can also be organized to do something about it. So among many tasks that have been carried out over the years, this doesn't really seem to be like a very hard one. It requires organization, and activism, and educational efforts.
Questioner #2: Some of what tonight you say reminds me of what happened to the people and presumably the culture of Diego Garcia. But the question I have for you is: There are progressive Palestinians and progressive Israelis who are now pushing for a one-state solution, which would clearly, it seems to me, put the government of Israel in the light of an apartheid regime, because it will not be able to maintain, you know, what it's trying to do without doing something closer to what happened in South Africa under apartheid. Is that a usable strategy – one-state solution – for activists?
Chomsky: Well, first of all, a one-state solution is sort of meaningless. I mean, what would make sense to look forward to is a binational state. I mean, you got two separate communities with different cultures, different languages. It could be a multi-national state. And that's a reasonable objective; I mean, I've believed in it all my life. But you have to make a distinction between proposing something and advocating it. Like, we can propose that everybody ought to live in peace; you know, beat your swords into plowshares; let's all love each other. Nice proposal. But it isn't advocacy. It becomes advocacy when you spell out a path from here to there. Now there is a way to advocate a binational state – in fact, one and only one way, as far as I'm aware of. And that's to begin with a two-state settlement. It has to be approached in stages. Now there was a time when it could have been implemented directly. That was – . First of all, before 1948, it could have been. But since 1948, it could have been implemented in the period from about 1967 up to '75. And in fact, something like it was even advocated by Israeli military intelligence, but the government turned it down. During that point, it could be literally advocated; Israel was in a position to implement it. And there was discussion of it at the time; I wrote about it a lot in fact. But it was absolute anathema – you know, bitterly condemned. And the reason was: it was feasible. Now it's tolerated, in fact encouraged. So you can read proposals about it in the New York Times and, you know, the New York Review of Books. Why is it tolerated now, but anathema then? Because now it's completely unfeasible. So therefore it serves only to undermine what might be the first stage towards achieving it. So therefore it's popular. You know, I'm not suggesting that those who propose it are trying to undermine a settlement. Of course they're not trying to; but they're doing it. And that's why what they're doing is tolerated. You should think that through: why was it anathema when it was feasible, but tolerated now that it's totally unfeasible? It has no support anywhere. It's not at all like South Africa. If you look back at – . The South African illustration is actually a good model; but you have to pay attention to what happened. First of all, Israel under the current US-Israeli policies – you know, "convergence plus" – Israel's not going to become an apartheid state. It's going to be demographically, ethnically pure. It's going to include Jews and kick out Palestinians, including those who are in Israel. So the apartheid issue will never arise. Furthermore, in the case of South Africa, it did make sense to, you know, have boycotts and divestment and so on to end apartheid, first of all, because South Africa could not get rid of its black population. It's not like Israel; it delighted to get rid of the Palestinian population. South Africa couldn't; it's their entire workforce; you know, it's eighty/eighty-five percent of the population. In fact, that's why South Africa developed the Bantustans: they wanted them to viable, because they needed them. And therefore they became an apartheid state. But even in that case, the protests against apartheid took decades before they developed. I mean, the major programs with, you know, boycott, divestment, and so on were actually in the 1980's. That was after decades of educational effort. It was at a time when there was nobody speaking in favor of apartheid; I mean, literally, it was gone. Congress was passing anti-apartheid legislation. The US corporations were opposed to it; they wanted to end it because it was bad for business. And at that point, you could have boycott/divestment programs, which were in fact effective and important in kind of intensifying and dramatizing these efforts. And they had an effect. The situation in this case is totally different. I mean, the South African model is just irrelevant. I mean, you can talk about a one-state settlement. But it's on a par with calling for everyone to live in peace. That would be nice too, you know. But what's the path to get there? Well, there is a path. It would start with a two-state settlement, which practically the whole world, including the US population, favors. That would cut back the level of violence. It would set up the circumstances in which possibly – and in fact, I think, likely – relations between the two states would grow – commercial relations, cultural relations, commerce, you know, cross-border, and so on. And maybe it would, as circumstances permit, lead to proposals for closer integration, which would make a lot of sense. But if there's another form of advocacy of a binational state, I haven't heard of it. That's the only form I've ever heard of. And I think the appeal which many good activists are entering into for a one-state settlement is simply a diversionary force which is undermining the possibilities for peace, and even undermining the possibilities for an eventual integration into a single state.
(to part 3&4)
Transcribed by Scott Senn
"Assessing the Role of US Foreign Policy, Israeli Security, & Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories"part8
You know, suppose you're sitting on Mars, and you're watching this. The US is telling Iran to give up arms and terror?! I mean, does Iran have 800 military bases around the world? You know? Does Iran produce half of the world's armaments? I mean, is Iran the country that blocks Security Council Resolutions to regulate arms trade? Is Iran the country that has to abandon aggression? The US in fact has invaded and occupies two countries right next door to Iran. Does Iran occupy Canada and Mexico? When was the last time Iran committed aggression? You know? But this passes without comment. It tells us a lot about ourselves – ourselves, you know, people like us. We sit there and watch this and don't collapse in ridicule. In fact, it's applauded: "Obama is so much more forth-coming than Bush! Isn't that wonderful!" Well, that's the kind of thing that happens constantly.
What are the prospects actually for the Palestinians at this point? There's basically two. One is that the United States will join the world; it'll accept the international consensus. If it agrees to a two-state settlement, stops supporting Israel's violation of international law in the Occupied Territories, Israel will go along. They basically have no choice. Once they decided to abandon security in favor of expansion, they have to do what the US says. So they would withdraw. It's sometimes claimed that they couldn't, because it would lead to a civil war. That's not true, however. I mean it's partly true: like, if the Israeli army tried to eliminate the settlers by force, it would probably lead to a civil war, because of the religious, nationalist elements in the officer corps and so on. But there's absolutely no need for the Israeli army to withdraw any settlers. It would be sufficient for the government of Israel to announce that on such and such a day the army returns to Israel, and then provide, you know, trucks and buses, and the settlers who have been subsidized to live illegally in the Occupied Territories would climb quietly into the buses and go quietly back into Israel where they would be subsidized there. Maybe a few would remain: you know, a couple of religious Jews from Brooklyn maybe would decide to hang onto to pieces of rock Okay, they can do that. [If] they want to live under Palestinian authority, [it's] their choice; they don't have to be removed. In fact, the disengagement from Gaza [2005] could have been handled exactly the same way. There was what was called a "national trauma": you know, they sent in the army, and they had to take the settlers out screaming; big pictures on the front pages of little boys pleading, "Don't take us away from our homes!"; cries of "Never again!", you know, "Auschwitz!" and so on. This was all staged, totally staged. I mean, it was staged so transparently that commentators from the Israeli press were just ridiculing it, because it was totally unnecessary. They didn't have to remove a single settler. All they had to do was announce that on August 1st the IDF – the army – will leave Gaza, and the settlers would have left, you know, period. But then you wouldn't have had a "national trauma", and you wouldn't have had a justification for increasing settlement in the West Bank (which was the whole point of the disengagement), and you wouldn't have the cries of "Never again!" and so on. And what made this even more ridiculous was that it was a repetition of a staged "national trauma" in 1982. In 1982, after Israel and the United States finally accepted Sadat's 1971 offer, Israel had to evacuate settlements of northeastern Sinai. So there was a staged trauma, in which miraculously not a single settler was injured. In fact, the Israeli press – maybe Rita [Giacaman] will remember – had headlines saying, "National Trauma 1982", and making fun of it. Okay, it was just a repeat in 2005. And if they want to leave the West Bank, it'll be the same thing. So no civil war, no national trauma. Just pull out, and the settlers will follow you, if you help them by sending lorries, okay, they'll get into the lorries.
That's one possibility. The other possibility is "convergence" or " convergence plus": that is, the US and Israel pursue the policies that they are now developing right in front of our eyes – they're not secret; they go every day – just carrying forward. Sometimes it's claimed that that'll lead to an apartheid state. That's just not true. Israel will take what it wants. The Palestinians – those who remain – will be left somewhere in isolated cantons. In fact, the Israeli tourist bureau may even subsidize them, because it's "picturesque": if Israelis and American tourists drive past on the superhighways they're building, it'll be nice for the Israeli tourist guide to point to a Palestinian leading a goat up on the hills as kind of a Biblical scene; you know, it kind of looks nice. So they may even subsidize them. And the rest will rot, like Dayan said, you know: "live like dogs; if you want to leave, leave." No apartheid, no civil rights struggle, you know, nothing. Just take what you want, and let the others rot. That's the alternative.
And it gets worse. There was an ultra-right position in Israel advanced by Avigdor Lieberman who's now the Foreign Minister. When he announced this, this was described as "neo-Nazi". The idea was to take parts of Israel that had that heavy Palestinian population – there's one particular area (Wadi Ara) which is in Galilee right up near the Green Line – take that area, force the population into Jordan or into a Palestinian state in fact, force them into a derisory third-world barely-existing Palestinian state, and then take over the parts of the West Bank that we want, which would solve the "demographic problem" (the problem of "too many non-Jews in a Jewish state"). Well, of course the population is strongly opposed to it. You can read articles in the Washington Post by the Israeli correspondent describing it. You know, they don't want to lose their citizenship in the country where they live, a rich first-world country, and be kind of tossed into a barely surviving third-world country. But they don't matter. You know, we do what we want. It doesn't matter what the people want. Now when Lieberman proposed that, it was literally denounced as "neo-Nazi". Now it's mainstream. It was accepted by Kadima. Tzipi Livni, who's the official dove, thought it was a good idea. Kissinger thought it was a great idea; he said the only people who oppose this are those who want anarchy and so on. The New York Times thinks it's a great idea. The New York Times correspondent in Israel Ethan Bronner ["In Israeli Vote, With Two Parties Nearly Tied, the Winner Is Gridlock", 12 Feb 2009] wrote a couple of weeks ago that Lieberman's proposal appeals to the left: the left "likes" it because he's calling for "yielding areas that are now part of Israel" in a land swap. "Yielding areas." He didn't bother to tell us how they're "yielding areas". They're going to "yield areas" where the population wants to stay where they are and have the limited rights they now have in a rich country.
Part 9
But Israel is going to humanely "yield" them, over the bitter opposition of the population. Well, you know, right now that's mainstream policy. And if they move towards some ridiculous form of "two-state" settlement, that'll probably be included.
Well, you know, none of this is graven in stone. I mean, Americans don't have to accept.the deluge of lies and deceit and support for terror and violence that's constant. They don't have to watch silently as our government implements a very rare event in history: namely, the systematic murder of a nation at our hands. And it is at our hands.
(continuing to Q&A)
Transcribed by Scott Senn
"Assessing the Role of US Foreign Policy, Israeli Security, & Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories"part7
In fact, the US-style of what's called neo-colonialism – you know, developed paramilitary or military forces, colaborationist forces, to control the population and make sure they don't do outrageous things like express sympathy when some other part of the population is being slaughtered – that's very "encouraging" and we're good at it. It's second nature. Now General Dayton's forces are the soft side of population control. There are also much tougher and more brutal forces in the West Bank: they're called General Intelligence and Preventive Security. And those guys are really tough, not like Dayton. They're trained by the CIA. There's no supervision for CIA training. So they can really train, you know, mass killers. General Dayton is technically under State Department supervision, and that means Congress occasionally has a look at and maybe some soft-hearted Congressman will say something about human rights conditionalities. But the CIA-trained forces can just be, you know, unconstrained in brutality, and torture, and terror. So that's the tough part of the "encouraging" developments, which finally give Israel a "legitimate partner for peace" for the first time.
Well, let's go back to the "reconceptualization", the core of the Obama policies. Israel-Palestine is now side-lined, with the exception of supporting the "encouraging" development of paramilitary forces to control the population and keep them quiet; and we now have to move towards a "coalition" of Israel [and] the Arab "moderates" who are now willing to cooperate with Israel against Iran. Well, what's US policy towards Iran? Obama and Kerry agree that the US must maintain the threat of force against Iran. So that's what it means to say, "All options are open." Threat of force is first of all in violation of international law: Take a look at the UN Charter; it says, "the threat or use of force" is barred, is criminal. But the US has no particular interest in international law. It's also against the will of a large majority of the American population. A large majority of the population thinks we ought to enter into normal relations with Iran: no threat of force. But the population is as irrelevant as international and domestic law are.
So they [Obama and Kerry] agree on that. And they agree on a lot more. The Obama administration is willing to negiotiate with Iran, but on a condition: namely, the condition that US demands – namely, the ending of uranium enrichment – are conceded in advance. So if Iran agrees to our conditions, we'll then negotiate with them, but not before. That was put most clearly by Vice President Biden who spelled out the administration's position. He said that the US is willing to negotiate if Iran first puts a stop to its "illicit weapons programs." Well, what are Iran's "illicit weapons programs"? There was a National Intelligence Estimate [http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/20071203_release.pdf] a year ago – a little over a year ago [November 2007] – which concluded, with "moderate-to-high confidence", that Iran had no weapons programs and hadn't had any for years. But that doesn't matter: the Obama administration, when it came into office said, "We reject the Intelligence Estimate." They conceded that they had no evidence, but we don't like it, so we reject it. So therefore they have "illicit weapons programs". And until they stop the programs, which they may or may not have (and US intelligence says they didn't have them), we can't agree to negotiations.
We also read constantly that the "international community" has demanded that Iran stop uranium enrichment. First of all, everyone agrees that uranium enrichment is a right of Iran: they signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty; they have the right of uranium enrichment, unlike Israel, say, which didn't sign it, doesn't have that right, but has a couple hundred nuclear weapons. So who's the "international community"? Well, the "international community" consists of Washington, US allies who agree with Washington, and nobody else. It omits most of the world. The Non-Aligned States (most of the world's states) forcefully support Iran's right to develop – to enrich uranium for nuclear power. So they're not part of the "internatinal community". A large majority of Americans agree with them: about seventy-five percent agree, yes, Iran has the right to enrich uranium. So they're not part of the "international community". The "international community" is reduced to Washington and whoever goes along with them. Okay, so in that sense, it's true the international community demands that Iran stop its enrichment of uranium. Just to add a little bit to the irony, the programs that Iran is carrying out were strongly supported by the United States, by Kissenger, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, as long as the Shah was in power. The US had installed a brutal tyrant, overthrew Iranian democracy. They [the Iranians] somehow remember that, but we're not supposed to. And during that period, the US insisted strongly and helped Iran develop uranium enrichment programs. In fact, a lot of it was done at M.I.T., where I was. [There was] a big fuss about it when the Shah sent thousands of nuclear engineers to be trained at M.I.T. to develop nuclear enrichment programs. Well, that was then, you know; then, the country was ruled by the tyrant we imposed. Now, not; so now they "don't need" nuclear energy.
There is no attention at all paid to the most important proposal, which a large majority of Americans agree to: that is, to establish a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the region, which is the right idea. That would include Iran, Israel, and any American forces deployed there, with a verification system. Okay, that would mitigate, if not eliminate, any potential threat that Iran poses. But that's off the agenda, because it would mean that Israel has to get rid of its illegal and huge collection of nuclear weapons and of course the US forces wouldn't be able to have nuclear weapons there. The US has also blocked nuclear-weapons-free zones in other parts of the world because it wants to deploy nuclear-armed forces there: in the South Pacific, Europe, and elsewhere. But this one is off the agenda, though a large majority – about seventy-five percent – of Americans favor it. Well, Obama did give a speech, which you read about, to Iran, you know, reaching out in friendship on the Iranian new year Nowruz. A lot of publicity for that. What did he actually say? He said, "Yes, we're delighted to deal with you." (A big, radical change from the Bush administration.) "But first you have to show that you're responsible members of the civilized world: You have to give up arms and terror. Okay?"
(to part 8)
Transcribed by Scott Senn
"Assessing the Role of US Foreign Policy, Israeli Security, & Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories"part-6
7 April 2009
Madison, WI
An illustration of what the US did was that the European Union proposed – I'm quoting now – to provide some health aid – needed aid for health care. Well, the US blocked it. And it had a reason; the reason was that "US officials" – I'm reading the New York Times [Weisman, "Europe Plan to Aid Palestinians Stalls Over U.S. Salary Sanctions", 15 June 2006] – "US officials expressed concern that some of the money might end up paying nurses, doctors, teachers and others previously on the government payroll, thereby helping to finance Hamas," which won the election. That was said with no shame; you know, just sort of: "Yeah, normal. We don't like the outcome of elections: we punish the population. It's natural." It's also natural that this goes on side by side with "soaring rhetoric" about our "idealism", our "commitment to democracy promotion", and so on and so forth. No contradiction – which in a sense is natural too, because it's so consistent. Well, Israeli attacks picked up severely in the following months: by June Israel had fired 7,700 rockets at northern Gaza; that's since its formal withdrawal in September.
Now on June 25th, an event occurred which sharply escalated the US-Israeli attack. On June 25th, Hamas kidnapped an Israeli soldier on the border: Gilad Shalhevet. That led to a huge outcry in the United States and in fact in Europe too: you know, "What a crime!": kidnapping – [correction:] capturing – (you can't "kidnap" a solider) – capturing a soldier from an attacking army. Okay, maybe that's wrong; but there are worse crimes, like one committed one day before the capture of Gilad Shalhevet: namely, the Israeli army invaded Gaza, kidnapped this time two civilians – a doctor and his brother – in Gaza City, spirited them across the border (violation of international law), and they sort of disappeared somewhere into the Israeli prison system where nobody knows what goes on; but there are certainly hundreds – at least – of people under what's called "administrative detention", just kept there without charge. These two brothers, the Muamar brothers, have disappeared. Now that was one day before the capture of Gilad Shalhevet. And kidnapping civilians is a far worse crime than capturing a soldier in an attacking army. But the two events are treated quite differently: The capture of Shalhevet is a major international event. To this day, Israel offers it, puts it forth – with the support of the United States and indeed Europe – as a reason for refusing a political settlement. What about the kidnapping of the Muamar brothers? Well, it was reported: about a couple dozen words in the Washington Post. But it disappeared, which in a way is justified, because this is standard, regular Israeli practice. In the preceding decades, they have repeatedly kidnapped civilians in Lebanon, on the high seas (an act which is much worse than Somoli piracy), killing them sometimes, bringing many of them to Israel, where they are then kept in prisons, sometimes secret prison torture chambers, sometimes for decades, and held as hostages. Well, since that's regular practice, why care if they did it once again on June 24th? But of course if Hamas captures a soldier of an attacking army, well, you know, "the world is coming to an end!" That's again a typical illustration of Western racism. If somebody else does something to us, it's a horror story; if we do much worse to them consistently for decades, you know, it's a yawn.
Let's go back to January 2006. (I should say, after the capture of Shalhevet, the attack on Gaza escalated very sharply: huge attack, large-scale destruction, destroyed the power systems, the water systems, the sewage systems, and so on. But that was considered okay too after this "outrage", which still today is put forth as the main reason for refusing a ceasefire and a setttlement.)
Well, in order to overturn the election, the United States and Israel went farther: they armed a military force, a paramilitary force, led by Fatah strongman Mohammed Dahlan (you know, a tough thug), whose task was to carry out a military coup in Gaza to overthrow the elected government. Well, that failed. Hamas preempted it. And that led to new attacks and a strengthened seige. But also the US and Israel didn't stop there. A US general was sent, General Keith Dayton, to train a paramilitary force, with the help of Jordan, which would be the Fatah paramilitary force. And here we get back to Kerry. He gives a reason to explain why Israel now has a "legitimate" Palestinian "partner": the reason is the Dayton-run paramilitary force, which he says is really good. In fact, he says it's the most important development to show Palestinian legitimacy. And our goal – our primary goal – , he said, is to strengthen General Dayton's efforts to train Palestinian security forces to "keep order" in the West Bank and to "fight terror". And then he says, "Recent developments have been extremely encouraging: During the invasion of Gaza, Palestinian Security Forces were largely successful in maintaining calm in the West Bank amidst widespread expectations of civil unrest. …More has to be done, but we can help" extending this force.
Well, to translate that into English: During the Israeli invasion of Gaza, it was expected that there would be protests in the West Bank. You know, it's the same country after all. But thanks to the US-trained paramilitary forces, they were able to keep the population under control, and there was no expression of sympathy for the people being slaughtered in Gaza. And that's, as Kerry says, "extremely encouraging" and we have to do more. Well, the US has a lot of experience in this, in fact unique experience. It goes back a century, since the US established the Philippine Constabulary to try to control the Philippines. After invading it and killing a couple hundred thousand people, there was a lot of unrest. But the US did succeed, in complicated and sophisticated measures, to create a Philippine paramilitary force, which still pretty much runs the country; that's one of the reasons why the country is kind of a basket case, and it's a century later. And it's happened over and over: the national guards in the Caribbean and Central America, the paramilitary forces in Columbia, which were responsible for, you know, huge atrocities in the last couple of decades. And in fact the military forces themselves, which, for example in Columbia, just cooperate with the paramilitaries; [they are] part of them essentially. And other armies too. So we got a century of experience in how to control populations with collaborationist paramilitary and military forces. So we should be able to achieve it in the West Bank too. And that's, for Kerry, most "encouraging". It includes his own experience in Vietnam, where the Saigon army was such a force; its task was to control the population and prevent them from achieving any form of self-determination. And so, yes, we're pretty good at that.
(to part7)
Transcribed by Scott Senn
"Assessing the Role of US Foreign Policy, Israeli Security, & Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories" part 5
7 April 2009 Madison, WI
Well, let's go back to Kerry, and his expression of his views in his explanation, outlining of the positions of the Obama administration. He talks about the invasion of Gaza – different than Obama, who omitted it. But his position is the standard one, in fact universal position. He said that – . (Incidentally the invasion was of course in violation of international law, but also in violation of US law. US law very explicitly bars the use of US weapons for anything but strictly defensive purposes. And [we] can't even pretend that in this case, but that's kind of overlooked. We don't care about US law any more than about international law.) But he justified the invasion in the universally accepted terms: He said that (I'll quote him) "if terrorists in Quincy, Massachusetts, were launching rocket attacks into Boston…we'd have to put a stop to it, just as the Israelis were forced to respond" in Gaza. And, again, that's Obama's statement about "what I would do if my daughters were being attacked by missiles". And that's pretty near universal. You have to look pretty far to – There is debate about whether the Israeli attack was "disproportionate", but there's no debate about the fact that it was "necessary, justified, in self-defense".
