Jerry Monaco's List: Noam Chomsky

• “A Black worker could get a job in an auto plant, as the unions were still functioning, and he could buy a small house and send his kid to college,”
• “Ronald Reagan was an extreme racist—though he denied it—but the whole drug war is designed, from policing to eventual release from prison, to make it impossible for Black men and, increasingly, women to be part of [American] society,” he said. “In fact, if you look at American history, the first slaves came over in 1619, and that’s half a millennium. There have only been three or four decades in which African-Americans have had a limited degree of freedom — not entirely, but at least some.”

• First, the U.S. is unmatched in its global significance and impact.  Second, it is an unusually open society, possibly uniquely so, which means we know more about it.  Finally, it is plainly the most important case for Americans, who are able to influence policy choices in the U.S. -- and indeed for others, insofar as their actions can influence such choices.  The general principles, however, extend to the other major powers, and well beyond.
• What happened when the Russian threat disappeared in 1989?  Answer: everything continued much as before.
• The media chimed in enthusiastically, lauding the magnificent achievement of defeating Panama, unconcerned that the pretexts were ludicrous, that the act itself was a radical violation of international law, and that it was bitterly condemned elsewhere, most harshly in Latin America. 
•   Rather, the excuse now was the growing “technological sophistication” of Third World powers.  Disciplined intellectuals understood that it would have been improper to collapse in ridicule, so they maintained a proper silence.
• “defense industrial base.” The phrase is a euphemism, referring to high-tech industry generally, which relies heavily on extensive state intervention for research and development, often under Pentagon cover, in what economists continue to call the U.S. “free-market economy.” 
• “could not have been laid at the Kremlin’s door.”  Contrary to 50 years of deceit,
• l Salvador, the leading recipient of U.S. military aid
• and with one of the worst human rights records anywhere.
• d the Atlacatl Brigade to
•   The Brigade had just returned from advanced counterinsurgency training at the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and had already left a bloody trail of thousands of the usual victims in the course of the U.S.-run state terror campaign in El Salvador, one part of a broader terror and torture campaign throughout the region. 
• An Economic Charter of the Americas” designed to eliminate economic nationalism “in all its forms.” There was one unspoken condition.  Economic nationalism would be fine for the U.S. whose economy relies heavily on massive state intervention.
• “the philosophy of the New Nationalism [that] embraces policies designed to bring about a broader distribution of wealth and to raise the standard of living of the masses.” As U.S. policy analysts added, “Latin Americans are convinced that the first beneficiaries of the development of a country's resources should be the people of that country.”
• Washington understands that the “first beneficiaries” should be U.S. investors,
• Thus Brazil could produce low-quality steel that U.S. corporations did not want to bother with, but it would be “excessive,” were it to compete with U.S. firms.
• that respond to popular pressures for independent development. 
• In Guatemala, apart from the crime of the new democracy in empowering the peasant majority and infringing on possessions of the United Fruit Company -- already offensive enough -- Washington’s concern was labor unrest and popular mobilization in neighboring U.S.-backed dictatorships.
•   Literally not a day has passed since 1953 when the U.S. has not been torturing the people of Iran.  Guatemala remains one of the world’s worst horror chambers.  To this day, Mayans are fleeing from the effects of near-genocidal government military ca
• Attacks against Human Rights defenders have increased 300% during the last year.
• There is a clear evidence of a very well organized strategy by the private sector and Army. Both have captured the government in order to keep the status quo and to impose the extraction economic model, pushing away dramatically indigenous peoples from their own land, due to the mining industry, African Palm and sugar cane plantations.  In addition the social movement defending their land and rights has been criminalized, many leaders are in jail,
• and many others have been killed.”
• The poor people are the ones they appeal to and they have always wanted to plunder the rich.
• The U.S. somehow finds it difficult to appeal to the poor with its doctrine that the rich should plunder the poor.
• threatening in an independent Cuba was “the Castro idea of taking matters into one's own hands.
• “the distribution of land and other forms of national wealth greatly favors the propertied classes, and the poor and underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, are now demanding opportunities for a decent living.” Again, Washington’s usual dilemma.
• “The extensive influence of 'Castroism' is not a function of Cuban power... Castro’s shadow looms large because social and economic conditions throughout Latin America invite opposition to ruling authority and encourage agitation for radical change,” f
• make Cuba a “showcase” for development, giving the Soviets the upper hand throughout Latin America.
• The simple fact is that Castro represents a successful defiance of the U.S., a negation of our whole hemispheric policy of almost a century and a half
• Ernest May and Philip Zelikow
• The pretense all along was that we were defending ourselves from the Russian threat -- an absurd explanation that generally went unchallenged. 
• , independent nationalism is a “virus” that might “spread contagion.” Kissinger was referring to Salvador Allende’s Chile.  The virus was the idea that there might be a parliamentary path towards some kind of socialist democracy.  The way to deal with such a threat is to destroy the virus and to inoculate those who might be infected, typically by imposing murderous national security states.  That was achieved in the case of Chile, but it is important to recognize that the thinking holds worldwide. 
•   It was feared that independent Vietnamese nationalism might be a virus that would spread contagion to the surrounding regions, including resource-rich Indonesia. 
• Vietnam was virtually destroyed and ringed by military dictatorships
• From the early 1960s, a plague of repression was imposed on the continent that had no precedent in the violent history of the hemisphere, extending to Central America in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, a matter that there should be no need to review.
• It is worth remembering that the U.S., like England before it, has tended to support radical fundamentalist Islam in opposition to secular nationalism, which has usually been perceived as posing more of a threat of independence and contagion.
• Security in the normal sense is not a prominent factor in policy formation.
• what is actually meant by “security”: security for whom?
• One answer is: security for state power.
• - the “Netherlands Invasion Act,”
• the NSA’s surveillance program was exposed by Edward Snowden’s revelations, high officials claimed that it had prevented 54 terrorist acts.
• that there was actually only one case: someone had sent $8,500 to Somalia.  That was the total yield of the huge assault on the Constitution and, of course, on others throughout the world.
• Like NAFTA and other such pacts, these are not free trade agreements.  In fact, they are not even trade agreements, but primarily investor rights agreements.
• Again, secrecy is critically important to protect the primary domestic constituency of the governments involved, the corporate sector.
• There is, in other words, ample evidence that securing state power from the domestic population and securing concentrated private power are driving forces in policy formation.
•   There are interesting cases, some quite current, where these commitments conflict
• accelerating each of those threats -- in the interests of the primary concerns, protection of state power and of the concentrated private power that largely determines state policy.
• It also illustrates the moral calculus of contemporary Anglo-American state capitalism: the fate of our grandchildren counts as nothing when compared with the imperative of higher profits tomorrow.
• There is a huge public relations campaign in the U.S., organized quite openly by Big Energy and the business world, to try to convince the public that global warming is either unreal or not a result of human activity.  And it has had some impact.  The U.S. ranks lower than other countries in public concern about global warming and the results are stratified: among Republicans, the party more fully dedicated to the interests of wealth and corporate power, it ranks far lower than the global norm.
•   The actual media doctrine is “fair and balanced” when the concerns of concentrated private power are involved, but surely not elsewhere.
• as policymakers play roulette with the fate of the species in pursuit of the driving factors in policy formation.

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• The documents unveil a remarkable project to expose to state scrutiny vital information about every person who falls within the grasp of the colossus - in principle, every person linked to the modern electronic society.
• the project is being executed in one of the freest countries in the world, and in radical violation of the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights, which protects citizens from "unreasonable searches and seizures," and guarantees the privacy of their "persons, houses, papers and effects."
• The British government has called on the NSA "to analyse and retain any British citizens' mobile phone and fax numbers, emails and IP addresses, swept up by its dragnet," The Guardian reports, working from documents provided by Snowden.
• the NSA routinely receives or intercepts routers, servers and other computer network devices exported from the United States so that it can implant surveillance tools
• The principle of the presumption of innocence, which dates back to Magna Carta 800 years ago, has long been dismissed to oblivion.
• standard version is that the primary goal of policy is security and defense against enemies.
• : security for whom, and defense against which enemies?
• Policy must assure the security of state authority and concentrations of domestic power, defending them from a frightening enemy: the domestic population, which can become a great danger if not controlled.
• "Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate."
• "you may have to sell [intervention or other military action] in such a way as to create the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union that you are fighting. That is what the United States has been doing ever since the Truman Doctrine" at the outset of the Cold War.

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• We don’t use the term “working class” here because it’s a taboo term. You’re supposed to say “middle class,” because it helps diminish the understanding that there’s a class war going on.
• It’s true that there was a one-sided class war, and that’s because the other side hadn’t chosen to participate, so the union leadership had for years pursued a policy of making a compact with the corporations, in which their workers, say the autoworkers—would get certain benefits like fairly decent wages, health benefits and so on. But it wouldn’t engage the general class structure. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why Canada has a national health program and the United States doesn’t. The same unions on the other side of the border were calling for health care for everybody. Here they were calling for health care for themselves and they got it. Of course, it’s a compact with corporations that the corporations can break anytime they want, and by the 1970s they were planning to break it and we’ve seen what has happened since.
• Knights of Labor, and also a radical populist movement based on farmers. It’s hard to believe, but it was based in Texas, and it was quite radical. They wanted their own banks, their own cooperatives, their own control over sales and commerce
• But the Knights of Labor were crushed by violence, and the Farmers’ Alliance was dismantled in other ways. As a result, one of the major popular democratic forces in American history was essentially dismantled. There are a lot of reasons for it, one of which was that the Civil War has never really ended. One effect of the Civil War was that the political parties that came out of it were sectarian parties, so the slogan was, “You vote where you shoot,” and that remains the case.
• The enormous benefits given to the very wealthy, the privileges for the very wealthy here, are way beyond those of other comparable societies and are part of the ongoing class war.
• CEOs are no more productive or brilliant here than they are in Europe,
• The bottom 70 percent or so are virtually disenfranchised; they have almost no influence on policy, and as you move up the scale you get more influence. At the very top, you basically run the show.
• Nonvoting is very high, roughly 50 percent, even in presidential elections—much higher in others. The attitudes of people who don’t vote are studied. First of all, they mostly identify themselves as Democrats. And if you look at their attitudes, they are mostly Social Democratic. They want jobs, they want benefits, they want the government to be involved in social services and so on, but they don’t vote, partly, I suppose, because of the impediments to voting. It’s not a big secret. Republicans try really hard to prevent people from voting, because the more that people vote, the more trouble they are in. There are other reasons why people don’t vote. I suspect, but don’t know how to prove, that part of the reason people don’t vote is they just know their votes don’t make any difference, so why make the effort? So you end up with a kind of plutocracy in which the public opinion doesn’t matter much. It is not unlike other countries in this respect, but more extreme
• he case of labor is crucial, because it is the base of organization of any popular opposition to the rule of capital, and so it has to be dismantled
• There are major efforts being made to dismantle Social Security, the public schools, the post office—anything that benefits the population has to be dismantled. Efforts against the U.S. Postal Service are particularly surreal. I’m old enough to remember the Great Depression, a time when the country was quite poor but there were still postal deliveries. Today, post offices, Social Security, and public schools all have to be dismantled because they are seen as being based on a principle that is regarded as extremely dangerous.
• If you care about other people, that’s now a very dangerous idea. If you care about other people, you might try to organize to undermine power and authority. That’s not going to happen if you care only about yourself. Maybe you can become rich, but you don’t care whether other people’s kids can go to school, or can afford food to eat, or things like that. In the United States, that’s called “libertarian” for some wild reason. I mean, it’s actually highly authoritarian, but that doctrine is extremely important for power systems as a way of atomizing and undermining the public.
• And that’s what really counts: solidarity, mutual aid, care for one another and so on. And it’s really important for power systems to undermine that ideologically, so huge efforts go into it. Even trying to stimulate consumerism is an effort to undermine it. Having a market society automatically carries with it an undermining of solidarity. For example, in the market system you have a choice: You can buy a Toyota or you can buy a Ford, but you can’t buy a subway because that’s not offered. Market systems don’t offer common goods; they offer private consumption. If you want a subway, you’re going to have to get together with other people and make a collective decision. Otherwise, it’s simply not an option within the market system, and as democracy is increasingly undermined, it’s less and less of an option within the public system. All of these things converge, and they’re all part of general class war.
• The suburbs are out of it, so they can cluck their tongues about how racist everyone is elsewhere, and that kind of pattern was carried out all over the country
• There are a lot of factors that play into it, but by this point it’s going to be pretty hard to organize the working class on the grounds that should really concern them: common solidarity, common welfare.
• A lot. The Charter of the Forest, which was half the Magna Carta, has more or less been forgotten. The forest didn’t just mean the woods. It meant common property, the source of food, fuel. It was a common possession, so it was cared for. The forests were cultivated in common and kept functioning, because they were part of people’s common possessions, their source of livelihood, and even a source of dignity. That slowly collapsed in England under the enclosure movements, the state efforts to shift to private ownership and control. In the United States it happened differently, but the privatization is similar. What you end up with is the widely held belief, now standard doctrine, that’s called “the tragedy of the commons” in Garrett Hardin’s phrase. According to this view, if things are held in common and aren’t privately owned, they’re going to be destroyed. History shows the exact opposite: When things were held in common, they were preserved and maintained. But, according to the capitalist ethic, if things aren’t privately owned, they’re going to be ruined, and that’s “the tragedy of the commons.” So, therefore, you have to put everything under private control and take it away from the public, because the public is just going to destroy it.
• Now, how does that relate to the environmental problem? Very significantly: the commons are the environment. When they’re a common possession—not owned, but everybody holds them together in a community—they’re preserved, sustained and cultivated for the next generation. If they’re privately owned, they’re going to be destroyed for profit; that’s what private owner- ship is, and that’s exactly what’s happening today.
• Take Spain, which is in a huge economic crisis. But one part of Spain is doing okay—that’s the Mondragón collective. It’s a big conglomerate involving banks, industry, housing, all sorts of things. It’s worker owned, not worker managed, so partial industrial democracy, but it exists in a capitalist economy, so it’s doing all kinds of ugly things like exploiting foreign labor and so on. But economically and socially, it’s flourishing as compared with the rest of the society and other societies. It is very large, and that can be done anywhere. It certainly can be done here. In fact, there are tentative explorations of contacts between the Mondragón and the United Steelworkers, one of the more progressive unions, to think about developing comparable structures here, and it’s being done to an extent.
• He said that if you take a look at societies around the world—any of them—power is in the hands of the governed, those who are being ruled. Hume asked, why don’t they use that power and overthrow the masters and take control? He says, the answer has to be that, in all societies, the most brutal, the most free, the governed can be controlled by control of opinion. If you can control their attitudes and beliefs and separate them from one another and so on, then they won’t rise up and overthrow you.
• In the United States, the advertising and public relations industry is huge. Back in the more honest days, they called it propaganda. Now the term doesn’t sound nice, so it’s not used anymore, but it’s basically a huge propaganda system which is designed very extensively for quite specific purposes.
• First of all, it has to undermine markets by trying to create irrational, uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices. That’s what advertising is about, the opposite of what a market is supposed to be, and anybody who turns on a television set can see that for themselves. It has to do with monopolization and product differentiation, all sorts of things, but the point is that you have to drive the population to irrational consumption, which does separate them from one another.
• As I said, consumption is individual, so it’s not done as an act of solidarity—so you don’t have ads on television saying, “Let’s get together and build a mass transportation system.” Who’s going to fund that? The other thing they need to do is undermine democracy the same way, so they run campaigns, political campaigns mostly run by PR agents.
• It’s very clear what they have to do. They have to create uninformed voters who will make irrational decisions, and that’s what the campaigns are about. Billions of dollars go into it, and the idea is to shred democracy, restrict markets to service the rich, and make sure the power gets concentrated, that capital gets concentrated and the people are driven to irrational and self-destructive behavior.

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• "There was a drought of unprecedented scale in Syria which devastated the agricultural community, so people streamed into the cities to survive. There was serious social disruption. Therefore, the tragedy that has unfolded in Syria is partly a consequence of global warming."

    

  Before I have time to engage the professor on this particular hot potato, he has driven on. "Syria took in a million or so refugees from Iraq, and on top of that came the huge immigration into the cities. Then events saw some towns emulate the Arab Spring uprisings to which Assad reacted with extreme brutality. The country then entered into the standard dynamics of military conflict.

• It bans the production, storage, and use of chemical weapons, and the three go together because production and storage is very close to use. It’s a constant threat that amounts to a kind of use. Trying to implement the full convention would make a lot of sense, and might, in fact, conceivably offer a peaceful way out of the chemical weapons issue, just by eliminating all chemical weapons in the region. Well, there’s a reason why Obama didn’t mention that, and why the press doesn’t mention it. That would mean that Israel would have to give up its chemical weapons, and the U.S. is highly protective of Israel’s weapons of mass destruction.”
• In recent years for the first time ever, Latin America has substantially liberated itself from foreign influence. For example, the United States does not have a single military base remaining in Latin America. That’s pretty remarkable, and Latin America is taking an independent stance in world affairs.”
• Chomsky went on to elaborate that such a decline is to be expected, given the history of America’s rise to superpower status: “…The peak of American power was actually in 1945, the end of the Second World War. At the end of the Second World War, other industrial countries had been devastated or destroyed. The War was very beneficial to the American economy. It got us out of the Depression, the U.S. industrial production practically quadrupled; the U.S. ended the War holding literally fifty percent of the entire wealth of the world. Nothing like that has ever been true in the past. The U.S. had overwhelming security. It had controlled the whole hemisphere. It controlled the opposite sides of both oceans, didn’t control the whole world, but had enormous security… By the 1970’s the economic power of the world had diversified considerably. The world was then what’s called tri-polar. There were three major centers of economic power: U.S.-based North America, German-based Europe, and Japan-based East Asia. At that time Japan was the main center, and North East Asia was already the most dynamic economic region in the world. Well, the U.S. share of world wealth was down to twenty five percent, still enormous, but not fifty percent, and the process has continued since.”
• The United States is still a one party system, the Business Party, but there is only one faction. The faction is moderate Republicans, who are now called Democrats. The current Democrats are not very different from what used to be called moderate Republicans; the Party has shifted to the right- not one hundred percent, but substantially.”
• “So, what we now have, I think, should be described as a one party system with one faction, moderate Republicans, and a few fringes.

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