Friday, December 31, 2010
Naomi Klein: Shock Doctrine
Naomi Klein: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (27Sep2007)
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Empire: Hollywood & War Machine
YT:AlJazeeraEnglish: Empire: Hollywood & The War Machine (22Dec2010)
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Bloomberg: Michael Lewis
Bloomberg: Author Lewis Says Wall Street Is 'Making America Worse' (16Mar2010)
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Monday, December 20, 2010
#Arizona: Disease Evolution HIV
Michael Worobey: Arizona: Disease Evolution - The Example of HIV (Spring2006)
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Thursday, December 16, 2010
UCTV: Why Darwin Matters
Michael Shermer: Evolution, Intelligent Design & the Battle 4 Science & Religion (2Apr2009)
The Institute for Advanced Study
Peter Goddard: There Are No Excuses in Paradise – IAS: Past, Present and Future 【30Jan2008】
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
PI: Newton Believed in Alchemy?
William R. Newman: Why Did Isaac Newton Believe in Alchemy? (6Oct2010)
Monday, December 13, 2010
Science & Religion aren't friends
By Jerry A. Coyne
Religion in America is on the defensive.
Atheist books such as The God Delusion and The End of Faith have, by exposing the dangers of faith and the lack of evidence for the God of Abraham, become best-sellers. Science nibbles at religion from the other end, relentlessly consuming divine explanations and replacing them with material ones. Evolution took a huge bite a while back, and recent work on the brain has shown no evidence for souls, spirits, or any part of our personality or behavior distinct from the lump of jelly in our head. We now know that the universe did not require a creator. Science is even studying the origin of morality. So religious claims retreat into the ever-shrinking gaps not yet filled by science. And, although to be an atheist in America is still to be an outcast, America's fastest-growing brand of belief is non-belief.
But faith will not go gentle. For each book by a "New Atheist," there are many others attacking the "movement" and demonizing atheists as arrogant, theologically ignorant, and strident. The biggest area of religious push-back involves science. Rather than being enemies, or even competitors, the argument goes, science and religion are completely compatible friends, each devoted to finding its own species of truth while yearning for a mutually improving dialogue.
As a scientist and a former believer, I see this as bunk. Science and faith are fundamentally incompatible, and for precisely the same reason that irrationality and rationality are incompatible. They are different forms of inquiry, with only one, science, equipped to find real truth. And while they may have a dialogue, it's not a constructive one. Science helps religion only by disproving its claims, while religion has nothing to add to science.
Irreconcilable
"But surely," you might argue, "science and religion must be compatible. After all, some scientists are religious." One is Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health and an evangelical Christian. But the existence of religious scientists, or religious people who accept science, doesn't prove that the two areas are compatible. It shows only that people can hold two conflicting notions in their heads at the same time. If that meant compatibility, we could make a good case, based on the commonness of marital infidelity, that monogamy and adultery are perfectly compatible. No, the incompatibility between science and faith is more fundamental: Their ways of understanding the universe are irreconcilable.
Science operates by using evidence and reason. Doubt is prized, authority rejected. No finding is deemed "true" — a notion that's always provisional — unless it's repeated and verified by others. We scientists are always asking ourselves, "How can I find out whether I'm wrong?" I can think of dozens of potential observations, for instance — one is a billion-year-old ape fossil — that would convince me that evolution didn't happen.
Physicist Richard Feynman observed that the methods of science help us distinguish real truth from what we only want to be true: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."
Science can, of course, be wrong. Continental drift, for example, was laughed off for years. But in the end the method is justified by its success. Without science, we'd all live short, miserable and disease-ridden lives, without the amenities of medicine or technology. As Stephen Hawking proclaimed, science wins because it works.
Does religion work? It brings some of us solace, impels some to do good (and others to fly planes into buildings), and buttresses the same moral truths embraced by atheists, but does it help us better understand our world or our universe? Hardly. Note that almost all religions make specific claims about the world involving matters such as the existence of miracles, answered prayers wonder-working saints and divine cures, virgin births, annunciations and resurrections. These factual claims, whose truth is a bedrock of belief, bring religion within the realm of scientific study. But rather than relying on reason and evidence to support them, faith relies on revelation, dogma and authority. Hebrews 11:1 states, with complete accuracy, "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." Indeed, a doubting-Thomas demand for evidence is often considered rude.
And this leads to the biggest problem with religious "truth": There's no way of knowing whether it's true. I've never met a Christian, for instance, who has been able to tell me what observations about the universe would make him abandon his beliefs in God and Jesus. (I would have thought that the Holocaust could do it, but apparently not.) There is no horror, no amount of evil in the world, that a true believer can't rationalize as consistent with a loving God. It's the ultimate way of fooling yourself. But how can you be sure you're right if you can't tell whether you're wrong?
The religious approach to understanding inevitably results in different faiths holding incompatible "truths" about the world. Many Christians believe that if you don't accept Jesus as savior, you'll burn in hell for eternity. Muslims hold the exact opposite: Those who see Jesus as God's son are the ones who will roast. Jews see Jesus as a prophet, but not the messiah. Which belief, if any, is right? Because there's no way to decide, religions have duked it out for centuries, spawning humanity's miserable history of religious warfare and persecution.
In contrast, scientists don't kill each other over matters such as continental drift. We have better ways to settle our differences. There is no Catholic science, no Hindu science, no Muslim science — just science, a multicultural search for truth. The difference between science and faith, then, can be summed up simply: In religion faith is a virtue; in science it's a vice.
But don't just take my word for the incompatibility of science and faith — it's amply demonstrated by the high rate of atheism among scientists. While only 6% of Americans are atheists or agnostics, the figure for American scientists is 64%, according to Rice professor Elaine Howard Ecklund's book, Science vs. Religion. Further proof: Among countries of the world, there is a strong negative relationship between their religiosity and their acceptance of evolution. Countries like Denmark and Sweden, with low belief in God, have high acceptance of evolution, while religious countries are evolution-intolerant. Out of 34 countries surveyed in a study published in Science magazine, the U.S., among the most religious, is at the bottom in accepting Darwinism: We're No. 33, with only Turkey below us. Finally, in a 2006 Time poll a staggering 64% of Americans declared that if science disproved one of their religious beliefs, they'd reject that science in favor of their faith.
'Venerable superstition'
In the end, science is no more compatible with religion than with other superstitions, such as leprechauns. Yet we don't talk about reconciling science with leprechauns. We worry about religion simply because it's the most venerable superstition — and the most politically and financially powerful.
Why does this matter? Because pretending that faith and science are equally valid ways of finding truth not only weakens our concept of truth, it also gives religion an undeserved authority that does the world no good. For it is faith's certainty that it has a grasp on truth, combined with its inability to actually find it, that produces things such as the oppression of women and gays, opposition to stem cell research and euthanasia, attacks on science, denial of contraception for birth control and AIDS prevention, sexual repression, and of course all those wars, suicide bombings and religious persecutions.
And any progress — not just scientific progress — is easier when we're not yoked to religious dogma. Of course, using reason and evidence won't magically make us all agree, but how much clearer our spectacles would be without the fog of superstition!
Jerry A. Coyne is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at The University of Chicago. His latest book is Why Evolution is True, and his website is www.whyevolutionistrue.com.
Neil deGrasse: SciCafe 2010
Neil deGrasse Tyson: SciCafe: Life the Universe and Everything (2Jun2010)
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Friday, December 3, 2010
The Poetry of Science 2010
YT:richarddawkinsdotnet: The Poetry of Science: Richard Dawkins & Neil deGrasse Tyson (28Sep2010)
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Assange & Ellsberg Conversation
WikiLeaks: Julian Assange and Daniel Ellsberg in conversation (25Oct2010)
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Julian Assange: BBC Interview
LiveLeak.com: Interview from Newsnight with Julian Assange (27Jul2010)
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Next For Climate Change Policy
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay. We're still in Washington, and we're talking about the Tuesday night election results. And we're now joined by Daphne Wysham. She works on environmental issues at the Institute for Policy Studies. So thanks for joining us.
DAPHNE WYSHAM, ISTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES: Thank you for having me.
JAY: So the Republicans have taken over the House, and the mood of the country is weird. What's this all mean for climate change issues and environmental issues? You have a situation where a lot of Americans over the last two, three years, and apparently in exit polls in this election, don't even believe there is climate change, never mind feel a sense of urgency about it.
WYSHAM: Yeah. I mean, I think if you were to sum up the outcome of the elections is that we have, essentially, a revved up Republican/Tea Party and a Democratic agenda that doesn't really represent real change when it comes to climate change, and yet that's what's being fought against. And in some cases when—you know, the Tea Party elements, the climate denialists, the people that are punishing those members of Congress who supported cap-and-trade are winning; the ones that are punishing those who voted in favor of cap-and-trade are actually succeeding.
JAY: Now, you were no fan of cap-and-trade anyway. Is it part of the problem is, one, the kind of policies that were presented, people didn't think they were so effective, and the number two, there didn't seem to be any sense of urgency about all of this coming from the administration?
WYSHAM: Well, I mean, yeah, absolutely. We were critical of cap-and-trade for not representing the kind of real, lasting change that we needed to make to sufficiently address the climate crisis, and we're not alone. I mean, some of the leading climate scientists in the world hold the same opinion, such as NASA's James Hansen, that cap-and-trade with offsets was not the way to go. Now we're fighting a rearguard battle in states like California that have managed to pass cap-and-trade legislation, where oil company money, out-of-state oil company money, is essentially fueling a proposition, Proposition 23, that was to put on hold AB 32, the California cap-and-trade with offsets bill. In fact—.
JAY: So this is one of the bright spots of tonight's election?
WYSHAM: Well, bright, bright, and yet—.
JAY: 'Cause 23 went down.
WYSHAM: Start reading the fine print. Yes, Prop 23 has apparently gone down. That's what we're hearing. However, now California's—the regulatory body that's actually going to be implementing the cap-and-trade legislation has said, essentially, we're going to give a free pass to polluters for the next three years. They'll have—. I mean, it's essentially a reiteration of what happened under Waxman and Markey, where we're giving away all these free offsets, free emissions permits, in the interest of making this as cheap and economically viable as possible for California, and at a time of crisis, which is understandable. However, if the end result is not an overall reductions in greenhouse gas emissions but simply shipping them off to another part of the country or another part of the world, what actually have we achieved other than perhaps raising the price of energy for certain members of—you know, people that are buying electricity from the grid, raising the price of goods that are produced in California, potentially losing some jobs there. Of course, there are some positive sides to AB 32, including the fact that there are incentives for renewable energy. But we could go at this problem differently. And I think, you know, unfortunately what we're doing is sort of reiterating the same tired mantra of cap-and-trade, cap-and-trade, even though it's not working at the international level, it hasn't generated any enthusiasm at the national level, and it's not resulting in real emissions reductions.
JAY: Now, President Obama, when he ran, linked these two issues, which was the solution to the economic crisis was going to be this big expansion and expenditure in infrastructure, in a new green economy.
WYSHAM: Right.
JAY: We have heard next to nothing about it. And one of the great opportunities would have been the retooling of the auto industry in Detroit—instead of just throwing money at it, turning that into a center of green production. So if you don't get it from the leadership of the Democratic Party, where is there going to come any sense of urgency? Because there's certainly, in terms of American public opinion right now—. And, I mean, the two words not heard—I should say three words not heard in the election campaign. One was war. Never heard. And the other two are climate change. Like, nobody talked about it.
WYSHAM: I know. And it is frightening, and it's one of the reasons why it's really important to be looking at where is the money coming from in these elections. And, you know, what we know is staggering. And also what we don't know is equally staggering. We know that the US Chamber of Commerce has been a funnel for a lot of oil, gas, and coal money, specifically to be fighting any sort of clean energy initiatives at the state, local, and national level. We know that the Tea Party has been funded largely by the billionaire Koch brothers, who got their money from the oil refining business. And we also know that European polluters have thrown a lot of money into the US election process in support of climate denialists. So we know that Fox News has contributed to the US Chamber of Commerce with this dirty energy agenda. So what we're getting is both a media message and a campaign agenda that perpetuates this confusion, this climate denial, this sense that climate change, maybe it's happening, but it's probably due to natural causes, as I think Sarah Palin is on that sort of line of thinking. But certainly it has nothing to do with fossil fuels, even though, across the board, every climate scientist says CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere causes the Earth to warm, and when you burn fossil fuels, you get CO2.
JAY: So what do you do about it? I know we've tried to get scientists to debate people who are critical of the human-made climate change thesis. It's very hard to get a scientist involved. They say it's not worth debating, and they say, well, it gives them credibility.
WYSHAM: Right.
JAY: And it seems that almost by default the anti-climate change science position is winning because no one's willing to go out there and fight it face-to-face. I mean, is this not also part of the problem?
WYSHAM: Well, I mean, I think it's sort of a sad commentary when we expect our scientists to have to get that engaged in the political process, when, you know, essentially they are sort of trained to remain objective and to try to not take sides one way or another, to just be on the side of scientific truth. And yet, you know, they're constantly being sort of spun through this political machine. And, you know, my feeling is that the Obama administration should be the bully pulpit for this issue. Obama has essentially deferred to Congress. Congress offered up a very watered-down version of what he campaigned on, which was 100 percent auction, which is essentially like—you know, plus some way of redistributing that money back to the American people. Instead what we got was all sorts of free giveaways to polluters and not enough redistributed to the people. Had he really pushed this agenda much more strongly, either through, you know, a vast increase in the amount of government support for the kind of clean-energy industries that we really need to see in this country, as well as in the auto industry and elsewhere, but public transportation, we could have moved further. I believe we could have moved further in the last two years than we did. Instead what we're now doing is defending, you know, at best a pretty weak climate law in California. And we may actually see, as a result of EPA authority being offered up as one of the bargaining chips by various members of the House and Senate and the Democratic Party, we may actually see EPA authority being just continually hammered on over the next two years. We'll see, probably, Lisa Jackson being brought forward and asked to testify and defend this, what—you know, even a conservative Supreme Court has decided the EPA does have the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
JAY: In fact, I think they said [inaudible] authority. They even said you should.
WYSHAM: Exactly.
JAY: They actually directed them to do it.
WYSHAM: And yet what we will probably see over the next two years is just more delay, delay, delay.
JAY: So the issue really, fundamentally, is none of the politicians that are controlling both parties are willing to fight fossil fuel industry. So what should people do?
WYSHAM: Well, the good news is that the grassroots struggles are succeeding. And they're coming from unexpected quarters, whether it's environmental justice movements basically saying, we do not want an incinerator to qualify as a renewable energy option, which is something that was actually being put forward under the Waxman-Markey bill; or native people on Indian land saying no more coal mining, and actually succeeding in some cases in terms of shutting down some of these coal mines; you've got the anti-fracking initiatives that are underway in the northeast, people that are taking on this horrendous process of natural gas extraction that involves pumping all sorts of toxic chemicals into the groundwater. Right and left, people are rising up and really, you know, tackling this issue as a human right, the right to clean water, taking on corporations in their communities. Those kinds of efforts, as well as the Sierra Club has taken on coal-fired power plants across the country, and they've won just about every battle in terms of these new coal-fired power plants that were intended to go online. So my sense is that that's where we need to be putting our energy over the next two years, continue, because the Chamber of Commerce can't possibly keep track of every single local and state initiative. Environmental justice struggles have the—you know, they have the human face, the face of the people that are directly affected by these issues. That mobilizes people. And in the meantime, I think Obama could do a lot more with actual government investment in the clean-energy jobs, and siphon some of that military budget away from—.
JAY: I should have said that's the other unspoken words in this campaign, the military budget.
WYSHAM: Yeah, we don't talk about the military budget. We talk about climate security and military security. And even the Department of Defense is saying, look, the threat from climate change is far greater than the threat from terrorism. And yet where is all of our money going?
JAY: Thanks very much for joining us.
WYSHAM: Thank you.
JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
DAPHNE WYSHAM, ISTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES: Thank you for having me.
JAY: So the Republicans have taken over the House, and the mood of the country is weird. What's this all mean for climate change issues and environmental issues? You have a situation where a lot of Americans over the last two, three years, and apparently in exit polls in this election, don't even believe there is climate change, never mind feel a sense of urgency about it.
WYSHAM: Yeah. I mean, I think if you were to sum up the outcome of the elections is that we have, essentially, a revved up Republican/Tea Party and a Democratic agenda that doesn't really represent real change when it comes to climate change, and yet that's what's being fought against. And in some cases when—you know, the Tea Party elements, the climate denialists, the people that are punishing those members of Congress who supported cap-and-trade are winning; the ones that are punishing those who voted in favor of cap-and-trade are actually succeeding.
JAY: Now, you were no fan of cap-and-trade anyway. Is it part of the problem is, one, the kind of policies that were presented, people didn't think they were so effective, and the number two, there didn't seem to be any sense of urgency about all of this coming from the administration?
WYSHAM: Well, I mean, yeah, absolutely. We were critical of cap-and-trade for not representing the kind of real, lasting change that we needed to make to sufficiently address the climate crisis, and we're not alone. I mean, some of the leading climate scientists in the world hold the same opinion, such as NASA's James Hansen, that cap-and-trade with offsets was not the way to go. Now we're fighting a rearguard battle in states like California that have managed to pass cap-and-trade legislation, where oil company money, out-of-state oil company money, is essentially fueling a proposition, Proposition 23, that was to put on hold AB 32, the California cap-and-trade with offsets bill. In fact—.
JAY: So this is one of the bright spots of tonight's election?
WYSHAM: Well, bright, bright, and yet—.
JAY: 'Cause 23 went down.
WYSHAM: Start reading the fine print. Yes, Prop 23 has apparently gone down. That's what we're hearing. However, now California's—the regulatory body that's actually going to be implementing the cap-and-trade legislation has said, essentially, we're going to give a free pass to polluters for the next three years. They'll have—. I mean, it's essentially a reiteration of what happened under Waxman and Markey, where we're giving away all these free offsets, free emissions permits, in the interest of making this as cheap and economically viable as possible for California, and at a time of crisis, which is understandable. However, if the end result is not an overall reductions in greenhouse gas emissions but simply shipping them off to another part of the country or another part of the world, what actually have we achieved other than perhaps raising the price of energy for certain members of—you know, people that are buying electricity from the grid, raising the price of goods that are produced in California, potentially losing some jobs there. Of course, there are some positive sides to AB 32, including the fact that there are incentives for renewable energy. But we could go at this problem differently. And I think, you know, unfortunately what we're doing is sort of reiterating the same tired mantra of cap-and-trade, cap-and-trade, even though it's not working at the international level, it hasn't generated any enthusiasm at the national level, and it's not resulting in real emissions reductions.
JAY: Now, President Obama, when he ran, linked these two issues, which was the solution to the economic crisis was going to be this big expansion and expenditure in infrastructure, in a new green economy.
WYSHAM: Right.
JAY: We have heard next to nothing about it. And one of the great opportunities would have been the retooling of the auto industry in Detroit—instead of just throwing money at it, turning that into a center of green production. So if you don't get it from the leadership of the Democratic Party, where is there going to come any sense of urgency? Because there's certainly, in terms of American public opinion right now—. And, I mean, the two words not heard—I should say three words not heard in the election campaign. One was war. Never heard. And the other two are climate change. Like, nobody talked about it.
WYSHAM: I know. And it is frightening, and it's one of the reasons why it's really important to be looking at where is the money coming from in these elections. And, you know, what we know is staggering. And also what we don't know is equally staggering. We know that the US Chamber of Commerce has been a funnel for a lot of oil, gas, and coal money, specifically to be fighting any sort of clean energy initiatives at the state, local, and national level. We know that the Tea Party has been funded largely by the billionaire Koch brothers, who got their money from the oil refining business. And we also know that European polluters have thrown a lot of money into the US election process in support of climate denialists. So we know that Fox News has contributed to the US Chamber of Commerce with this dirty energy agenda. So what we're getting is both a media message and a campaign agenda that perpetuates this confusion, this climate denial, this sense that climate change, maybe it's happening, but it's probably due to natural causes, as I think Sarah Palin is on that sort of line of thinking. But certainly it has nothing to do with fossil fuels, even though, across the board, every climate scientist says CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere causes the Earth to warm, and when you burn fossil fuels, you get CO2.
JAY: So what do you do about it? I know we've tried to get scientists to debate people who are critical of the human-made climate change thesis. It's very hard to get a scientist involved. They say it's not worth debating, and they say, well, it gives them credibility.
WYSHAM: Right.
JAY: And it seems that almost by default the anti-climate change science position is winning because no one's willing to go out there and fight it face-to-face. I mean, is this not also part of the problem?
WYSHAM: Well, I mean, I think it's sort of a sad commentary when we expect our scientists to have to get that engaged in the political process, when, you know, essentially they are sort of trained to remain objective and to try to not take sides one way or another, to just be on the side of scientific truth. And yet, you know, they're constantly being sort of spun through this political machine. And, you know, my feeling is that the Obama administration should be the bully pulpit for this issue. Obama has essentially deferred to Congress. Congress offered up a very watered-down version of what he campaigned on, which was 100 percent auction, which is essentially like—you know, plus some way of redistributing that money back to the American people. Instead what we got was all sorts of free giveaways to polluters and not enough redistributed to the people. Had he really pushed this agenda much more strongly, either through, you know, a vast increase in the amount of government support for the kind of clean-energy industries that we really need to see in this country, as well as in the auto industry and elsewhere, but public transportation, we could have moved further. I believe we could have moved further in the last two years than we did. Instead what we're now doing is defending, you know, at best a pretty weak climate law in California. And we may actually see, as a result of EPA authority being offered up as one of the bargaining chips by various members of the House and Senate and the Democratic Party, we may actually see EPA authority being just continually hammered on over the next two years. We'll see, probably, Lisa Jackson being brought forward and asked to testify and defend this, what—you know, even a conservative Supreme Court has decided the EPA does have the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
JAY: In fact, I think they said [inaudible] authority. They even said you should.
WYSHAM: Exactly.
JAY: They actually directed them to do it.
WYSHAM: And yet what we will probably see over the next two years is just more delay, delay, delay.
JAY: So the issue really, fundamentally, is none of the politicians that are controlling both parties are willing to fight fossil fuel industry. So what should people do?
WYSHAM: Well, the good news is that the grassroots struggles are succeeding. And they're coming from unexpected quarters, whether it's environmental justice movements basically saying, we do not want an incinerator to qualify as a renewable energy option, which is something that was actually being put forward under the Waxman-Markey bill; or native people on Indian land saying no more coal mining, and actually succeeding in some cases in terms of shutting down some of these coal mines; you've got the anti-fracking initiatives that are underway in the northeast, people that are taking on this horrendous process of natural gas extraction that involves pumping all sorts of toxic chemicals into the groundwater. Right and left, people are rising up and really, you know, tackling this issue as a human right, the right to clean water, taking on corporations in their communities. Those kinds of efforts, as well as the Sierra Club has taken on coal-fired power plants across the country, and they've won just about every battle in terms of these new coal-fired power plants that were intended to go online. So my sense is that that's where we need to be putting our energy over the next two years, continue, because the Chamber of Commerce can't possibly keep track of every single local and state initiative. Environmental justice struggles have the—you know, they have the human face, the face of the people that are directly affected by these issues. That mobilizes people. And in the meantime, I think Obama could do a lot more with actual government investment in the clean-energy jobs, and siphon some of that military budget away from—.
JAY: I should have said that's the other unspoken words in this campaign, the military budget.
WYSHAM: Yeah, we don't talk about the military budget. We talk about climate security and military security. And even the Department of Defense is saying, look, the threat from climate change is far greater than the threat from terrorism. And yet where is all of our money going?
JAY: Thanks very much for joining us.
WYSHAM: Thank you.
JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
Inside Story: China-Vatican dispute
YT:AlJazeeraEnglish: Inside Story: China-Vatican dispute (22Nov2010)
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
War on Terror - Muslim Eyes
YT:AlJazeeraEnglish: Empire: 'War on terror' through Muslim eyes (28Jan2010)
Wilkerson on 9/11
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Washington. Nine years ago the 9/11 events took place, helped lead to the war in Afghanistan, war in Iraq. And millions of people around the world don't believe they know the real story. Now helping us to analyze this is Lawrence Wilkerson. He was Colin Powell's chief of staff, now teaches at a couple of universities here in Washington. Thanks for joining us, Larry.
LAWRENCE WILKERSON, FMR. CHIEF OF STAFF TO COLIN POWELL: Good to be here.
JAY: So do you think we know the real story of 9/11? Did the 9/11 Commission get to the truth?
WILKERSON: I don't think so. I don't think commissions like this, by their very nature, get to the truth, not even, say, 60 percent of the truth. The Warren Commission investigating President Kennedy's assassination, for example, was in my view a whitewash. I can't say that about the 9/11 Commission yet, 'cause the research is not all done. But the political power that looms over such commissions prohibits their—except by serendipity, and that rarely exists—getting to the complete truth.
JAY: We'll have to talk about the Warren Commission in a separate segment, and I think we should, because I think it's important that there are precedents for what an administration is capable of doing. A lot of the speculation around the 9/11 events was that the Bush administration either deliberately ignored intelligence that something was coming. We know Condoleezza Rice sits down and reads a memo saying Osama bin Laden plans to attack inside the United States, and seems to have done next to nothing after reading the memo. But what do you think are the big unanswered questions?
WILKERSON: I think there are some huge unanswered questions with regard to the culpability, the negligence of the administration—and I use those terms very carefully. I would use those terms to a certain extent about Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941, when Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese, but I have to temper them with FDR, because FDR took decisive action. He reprimanded the—he set up the various commissions. He reprimanded the general and the admiral who were in charge in Honolulu. You can argue about whether he got the right people or not, but he was seen as taking decisive action. Same thing with JFK, John Kennedy, after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He fired the most powerful man, probably, in the intelligence business, Allen Dulles, and others responsible for that operation. George W. Bush did nothing. He did not fire a single, solitary soul that I'm aware of. He kept everyone there. And more people died as a result of 9/11 than as a result of Pearl Harbor. I think it was 3,000 or so and 2,400 or so. Not that that's any measure, but in terms of disaster, 9/11, certainly for the American psyche, if not for its institutional fabric, was as bad as Pearl Harbor, and yet President Bush took no action.
JAY: Now, some of the people who have raised some of the bigger questions about 9/11 point to Pearl Harbor, meaning there's a document a lot of people are aware of called Project for a New American Century, which a lot of the neocons are authors of, and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.
WILKERSON: Richard Armitage even signed that document.
JAY: And I believe Cheney is either on the document or around it. And in the document, it's the vision for a new American foreign policy, which essentially is the projection of post-Soviet empire: we're now the empire, so let's project our power and make—.
WILKERSON: And one of our principal missions is protecting Israel.
JAY: And they say, at one point in the document, to accomplish this new world we'll probably need another Pearl Harbor. So a lot of people have talked about 9/11 as being their other Pearl Harbor. And the question people raise is: do they know something's coming and let it happen? First of all, do you think it's even possible that they could form such an intent?
WILKERSON: I don't think anyone could have pinpointed Pearl Harbor and said with 90 percent and even firmness in their own belief that the Japanese would attack there. I don't think anyone could have done that about 9/11, either. They could have said airplanes may be used. They could have said it's going to be a target in the United States, as I believe George Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence did say. They could say that traffic has increased enormously amongst the most likely group to do this, and we think it's aimed at us, as, again, Tenet said, I think. They could say any number of things. But until they come up with a target, a location, a name, even, Timothy McVeigh is going to hit the federal building in Oklahoma City or whatever, it's very difficult to get the United States government seized of a specificity that will allow it to act.
JAY: But there's things that suggest that they didn't want to know, at the very least. For example, the demotion of Richard Clarke from a cabinet-level position, Richard Clarke being the antiterrorism czar under Clinton, gets demoted after Bush comes to power. But this is after he's given a memo to Condoleezza Rice saying al-Qaeda is your critical threat you need to face. They're inaugurated at the beginning of January. Clarke sends this memo. It more or less gets buried. There's other evidence that other people try to support that same position at the National Security Council or meetings of the main security agencies and are literally not invited back to the meetings because they're apparently told they tell the administration, well, yes, al-Qaeda, something's coming, you need to deal with it. You have the FBI office in Minneapolis find someone taking flight lessons to take off and not wanting to know how to land, etc., and the FBI closes down the investigation. There's a whole culture throughout the security apparatus that we're not interested in any of this.
WILKERSON: All this looks so clean now in retrospect because all the background noise is gone, and believe me, after 40 years in government, I know the background noise is pretty constant and pretty high. I would say a number of things, though. One, I would say the demotion of Dick Clarke is more or less a president's prerogative, but it does show that he's showing everyone his priorities. For example, he didn't just demote Dick Clarke; he demoted John Negroponte, too, because Bill Clinton had moved Madeleine Albright up to—when she was ambassador, to the status of cabinet level for her ambassadorship to the UN. Bush was saying, I am demoting the UN in my priorities by moving Mr. Negroponte down to just a regular ambassador. He did the same thing with Dick Clarke. It was not necessarily saying, I'm disregarding you; it was saying, I'm not prioritizing you as high as the previous administration did. And we can look back on that and say that was a mistake, and it clearly was.
JAY: How do you come to power not being on the inside of the intelligence briefings? Like, not really inside. I suppose once you're a candidate for president they start briefing you to some extent, but I'm not sure who does those briefings. But you get into power. Within days, a cabinet-level guy tells you—.
WILKERSON: Look what you had going on. What you had going on, which most Americans do not realize, is you had this move already by decision makers within the government to what we call "see the raw intelligence". They don't trust the CIA, they don't trust the DIA, they don't trust any of that bureaucracy, because they've been burned so many times by that bureaucracy. That's another issue, the incompetence of our intelligence bureaucracy, now consisting of 17 different entities spending $60 billion plus a year. They don't trust it, and so they wanted to see the raw intelligence. This predates Bush and Cheney, but it comes to a screaming head, an apotheosis, with Cheney. He becomes his own intelligence interpreter. He reads the raw intelligence every day in his office. So Cheney is becoming quickly the intelligence interpreter for the president of the United States. And Cheney—I can't prove this, but Cheney seems to have deemphasized almost instantly al-Qaeda and threats that al-Qaeda might present to the United States.
JAY: Based on what?
WILKERSON: Based on his reading of the raw intelligence.
JAY: When his own CIA guy, Tenet, saying Clark's right, that apparently Tenet's running around, another guy with his hair on fire. Neither of us would know about that, but—.
WILKERSON: These decision makers are setting themselves up in competition with the intelligence agencies and saying, we don't trust you to read this raw intelligence, so give us the raw intelligence. When I was on the policy planning staff at State, I was given access to a special compartmented facility—/skIf/, we call it—where I could go in and read the raw intelligence. I refused to do it, because I know from being a military man what the raw intelligence is. It's bull. If you don't have an expert there to put it all together, to discard the chaff, to pick out the wheat, to correlate it and organize it and connect the dots, it's ridiculous. That's how they've built up the stories of al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, the stories of WMD and so forth and so on in Iraq. They built it up by selectively taking these little bits of intelligence out of the raw data and making them look as if they were professional intelligence.
JAY: Why do you do this? Why do you, within days of coming into power, discount what the head of CIA is saying, your counterterrorism czar is saying?
WILKERSON: Because you have other priorities.
JAY: 'Cause you have an agenda.
WILKERSON: You have other priorities and you have an agenda, yeah, if you want to put it that way, yes. Their priorities were—.
JAY: Iraq.
WILKERSON: No. Their priorities initially were to abrogate the ABM Treaty [Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty] and to build ballistic missile defense. That's their foreign priority. Their domestic priorities were sort of education, which Bush got right into big-time, and Bush had that portfolio. Cheney had the national security portfolio. Lowering taxes—and both the president and the vice president had that one, but that was because the president screwed part of it up. The vice president took it over so he'd make sure he got his capital gains cuts and so forth built into the package. But they had these priorities, and that's what they were after. They were not after al-Qaeda. They were not even after what I would call traditional national security threats. They were after what they thought—ballistic missiles fired by rogue nations, for example—were the real threats to this country.
JAY: Do you think it's possible they conformed the intent that something may be coming, maybe Clarke's onto something, maybe the CIA knows something, and maybe we don't want to do anything about it?
WILKERSON: If I thought that they had deliberately done that with malice of forethought, I don't—you know, I'm not sure I'd still be living in this country. I do not think that anyone in this group of characters—and they are a rogue's gallery in many respects. David Addington, Scooter Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith, they are a rogue's gallery. But I do not think that they did anything that they did without believing, at least part of the time, that it was in the national interests of their country. They were dead wrong, often.
JAY: Condoleezza Rice tells the 9/11 Commission that after reading a memo that says Osama bin Laden plans to attack inside the United States—.
WILKERSON: But where?
JAY: Hold on. She claims that she then speaks to the FBI and gets them to task 56 FBI offices to be on the alert for terrorist activity in the United States. The 9/11 Commission lawyers and investigators get in touch with the 56 FBI offices, and it turns out, if my memory serves me correctly, two actually had something mentioned to them, 54 had said they had never been put on alert. How do you read a memo like that and not at the very least alert the FAA and the FBI that we have a memo that there's credible intelligence that something might be coming?
WILKERSON: Let's examine the bureaucracy here now. Dr. Rice, as national security advisor, does not talk to FBI agents; she talks to the director of the Bureau. That's the only person she talks to (if he's not available, perhaps the deputy or one of the deputies). So Dr. Rice told the director of the FBI bureau, and the FBI director told someone else, who told someone else, who told someone else, or failed to tell someone else. So we just don't understand the gargantuan spider-like nature of the US bureaucracy now. We have so many people working in government that it is astonishing that we get anything done. As David Rothkopf has said very truthfully in his book Running the World, it is amazing how dysfunctional the United States government is. I can testify to that in spades. I'm not trying to excuse them; I'm just saying that Dr. Rice doesn't talk to individual FBI agents.
JAY: We understand that, but it was very unclear, because the head of the FBI, in front of the 9/11 Commission, was very ambiguous whether Rice had actually ever given him these instructions, 'cause he was confronted with this.
WILKERSON: In the same way my boss, Secretary Powell, was somewhat ambiguous and others were ambiguous. I helped build Condi Rice's testimony to the 9/11 Commission with her principal writer, John Bellinger, her lawyer at the time. And I will tell you that there were two occasions in my four years at the State Department that I felt so disgusted that I almost resigned, and I feel, when I think about them today, still disgusted with myself for not resigning. One of them was when I helped Powell prepare himself to testify before the 9/11 Commission and thus got insight into what the administration was doing with the information. And the other was when we presented, at the UN Security Council in February 2003, the Powell presentation that said Saddam Hussein had failed to disarm and still had WMD.
JAY: Rice says about that memo in front of the 9/11 Commission that this was about some historical events, when clearly, if you—once the memo got released, 'cause I think at the time of the actual—her testimony, the memo itself hadn't gone public yet. It did later. When you read the memo, it's clearly about a predicted, possible threat. It's not a historical document. It's a straightforward lie.
WILKERSON: Well, I can't sit here and tell you that I didn't see information in the presentations that both my boss and the national security advisor, Dr. Rice, gave to the 9/11 Commission that, since I had foreknowledge of that information, and background information, too, wasn't close to a lie. I wouldn't say that we actually told an outright lie, but I would say we massaged the information considerably, so that it looked like the Bush administration was far more attentive to al-Qaeda and its threat pre-9/11 than it really was.
JAY: There's a great reluctance, certainly, in the American media and the American political class to suggest motives that there may have been an actual intent not to stop something that might be coming. But if you go back to the Johnson-Nixon relationship during the negotiations with the North Vietnamese, Johnson we now have on tape—'cause they've been released by the Johnson archives—Johnson accuses Nixon of treason.
~~~
LYNDON JOHNSON, US PRESIDENT: Some of our folks, including some of the old China lobby, are going to the Vietnamese Embassy and saying, please notify the president that if you'll hold out till November 2, they could get a better deal. Now, I'm reading their hand, Everett. I don't want to get this in the campaign.
EVERETT DIRKSEN, US SENATOR (R-IL): That's right.
JOHNSON: And they oughtn't to be doing this. This is treason.
~~~
JAY: We know Richard Nixon, unless Johnson's lying, and there's no reason [inaudible]
WILKERSON: Which I would not—you know, after—I just finished reading Gordon Goldstein's book on McGeorge Bundy, Lessons in Disaster. And Lyndon Johnson was a great man in many respects, but telling the truth all the time was not one of them.
JAY: But he's talking to Dirksen, who's a Republican, and Dirksen's—he says to Dirksen, this is traitorous activity, and Dirksen says, yes, I know. Dirksen doesn't deny Nixon's doing this stuff, and he's Nixon's majority, I believe, head of the Senate at the time, majority leader in the Senate. So we know this kind of intent can be formed. And I guess what I'm getting at, are we not left with enough profound questions about all of this—and we started this interview by you saying the 9/11 Commission didn't really get to it, that should there not still be an independent inquiry about what really happened, given how much 9/11 helped shape the events and what came afterwards?
WILKERSON: You know, theoretically I could say yes, but practically I have to say, what good would it do? Because ultimately the people who will have to implement the recommendations, whether they be punitive in nature or whether they be ameliorative in nature, of that commission or whatever, are the same people who are in the government now, and they're not going to do it, or they're going to do it in a perfunctory way.
JAY: Doesn't it—don't Americans need to understand, in order to understand their political elite and what they do and what they're capable of?
WILKERSON: That's a different matter, and it's one reason I teach. I try to teach my young people that they don't know their leadership. They don't know their democratic republic anymore, if indeed it is a democratic republic anymore. I try to teach them that the people in the White House are not the best people in the world. They're not on some pedestal. Often our presidents are middle intellect, if that, and that what we're dealing with is increasingly a leadership that is disconnected from the American people and makes increasingly bad decisions, and that they need to be aware of that, and that the only way to change that is to get more and more good, high-intellect, highly capable people, young, interested in government and into government. So I'm agreeing with you that we have a lot of people in the Congress and a lot of people in the White House who have almost no bona fides for being there.
JAY: In my point of view it remains a very important question in two ways. Number one, people who at the very best may have been negligent—and at a level of criminal negligence is one possible interpretation.
WILKERSON: It's difficult for me to find criminality in this, just as it is with Donald Rumsfeld. I mean, Donald Rumsfeld made some egregious mistakes. One of the biggest ones was promulgating a policy throughout the ranks that essentially amounted, at the private level, to carte blanche to torture. But I don't believe Donald Rumsfeld understood, at the very pinnacle he was sitting at, what he was doing as he sent that instruction out through the ranks. I mean, his postscript on that December 2002 (I think it was) memo, where he wrote, I stand for, you know, eight hours a day; what's wrong with him standing? Infamous comment, but very revealing, I think. The man simply didn't know what he was about. He didn't know what he was talking about.
JAY: But go back to the testimony. You said you helped to shape Rice's testimony for the 9/11 Commission.
WILKERSON: M'hm, so that hers and Powell's would not be contradictory, in essence.
JAY: The statements, for example, of the—tasking the FBI offices, which turns out apparently not to be true, the ability to read this memo and say it's a historical take on something when clearly that wasn't the case, the—.
WILKERSON: Dr. Rice has made some egregious statements since, too, with regard to her culpability in this. And I must say that unlike President Bush, who stayed quiet, which I applaud, and Dick Cheney, who's been vocal until his recent bout looking for a new heart, Dr. Rice has only occasionally spoken out, but when she has, I've bit my tongue, bit my cheek, winced. She has a categorical way of denying any responsibility for some of the things that she clearly had responsibility vis-à-vis, and I find that very disturbing in a person who's been national security advisor of the United States. In this book I was just telling you about, for example, McGeorge Bundy is having an epiphany, finally, and admitting about the mistakes he made in '64 and '65 when he was advising LBJ to go, go, go for Vietnam, increase the troops and so forth, when he knew, and he admits in this book, and he quotes, he knew there was no military purpose for it. It was a preposterous purpose to demonstrate American commitment. Even if we lose, he says, we will have demonstrated our commitment [inaudible] 58,000 names on that black wall over there that I go visit every November.
JAY: And another example of what's possible, if not directly from the president, those around him, because the Gulf of Tonkin incident we now know was more or less a fabricated false flag operation.
WILKERSON: Yeah. And great insight here, I think, and it comes from others, like Andrew Preston's book War Council and elsewhere, but Johnson's political instincts tell him that he can make hay with the Tonkin Gulf incident with the Congress, which is where he came from. He knows the Congress, especially the Senate. And so even advice to the contrary to the president at this time—don't exploit the Tonkin Gulf incident—is disregarded by Johnson, because he sees it as a wonderful political opportunity.
JAY: We know Gulf of Tonkin was a false flag operation to help instigate or draw Johnson into the war.
WILKERSON: I wouldn't characterize it that way. I would characterize it as an incident that happened, the reporting was bad (subsequent reporting, by the way, cleared it up), and as the bad reporting came in, there were people, including the president, who said, A-ha, I know how to use that.
JAY: Knowingly.
WILKERSON: Yeah. It recently happened in Iran. Remember just a few years ago when we had the incident right south of the Persian Gulf, where the Iranians were supposed to have done something, and a Navy skipper reported that they were doing it, and so forth? It turned out to be nothing, but by the time it got to Washington, it was exploited by everybody and sundry. You know, oh, the Iranians are attacking, the Iranians are attacking. I'm sure this Navy skipper down there, when he found out the truth, was going, oh my God, what have I done? You've got to be careful what you report from a battlefield.
JAY: So let's go back to this issue of an independent inquiry, why it would still be useful. If, first of all, millions of Americans have these type of questions in their minds—and some go much further, as we know. There's people that are even talking about the possibility of—.
WILKERSON: There are always conspiracy theories.
JAY: And sometimes there are conspiracies.
WILKERSON: Yes, sometimes even paranoids are right.
JAY: Yeah. All the engineering questions in the buildings, I mean, I personally don't know what to make of any of this. I'm not an engineer.
WILKERSON: I don't, either.
JAY: But what is a fact is there are millions of Americans that have these type of questions, which is interesting as a thing in itself that they do. There's many, many more that have the questions about whether this was somehow an issue of intent rather than negligence in terms of not stopping things. Gordon Thomas, who wrote the book, I think it's called Israel's Secret Army, which is the history of the Mossad, he's reported that Mossad had infiltrated an al-Qaeda cell in the United States that was involved in the 9/11 conspiracy. He says that Mossad tried to tell the CIA and FBI what they knew, and all they got back was, what the hell were you doing operating in our country? So they went and told—I believe it was France and Egypt, and asked them to tell the CIA. Nobody wanted to hear it.
WILKERSON: I certainly don't know if that's true, but it really rings true with regard to our bureaucracy.
JAY: Example after example after example, which is either incredible negligence, the result of a horrible bureaucracy, or a deliberate attempt to create a culture, which starts with the demotion of Richard Clarke and other types of such events that make it right into the FBI, but they don't even want to hear what Minneapolis bureau has found, this—a culture of we want to shut down this conversation about terrorism.
WILKERSON: A president and a vice president have to be very careful about what they say, especially if they're in a large, formal National Security Council meeting, or even a small meeting with extra people attending, because what they say is taken as gospel. And if they are interpreted as having these priorities and not these priorities, then these priorities will wither. If people—.
JAY: And they know that.
WILKERSON: Well, I can't say that—
JAY: The people in power know that.
WILKERSON: —about George W. Bush. I certainly can say that about Dick Cheney.
JAY: But Dick Cheney, as you've said many times, we were dealing with the presidency of Dick Cheney more than George Bush in those first few years.
WILKERSON: It's 2006, I think, before George Bush gets his feet on the ground. That's a long time. But I just said we don't make intellectual giants presidents anymore. Cheney certainly should have known that if he deemphasized this, he was going to, you know, put it out of the ken of most of the agencies and departments, because you can only focus on so many things.
JAY: Do not Americans need to know whether or not this was negligence, or something more than negligence, simply myopia, like we have this agenda and not this? Or is there more to it? Is there any way to—isn't this of such historical importance? And also, in terms of the responsibilities of the Obama administration, a new administration comes into power, so many issues of accountability of the previous administration, and nothing—and not only that, George Bush not much longer gets appointed to go become the savior of Haiti with Bill Clinton. He becomes canonized now.
WILKERSON: There is a major inhibition to investigating the previous administration, and it's very human, and it's very bureaucratic, but it exists and it is powerful, and that is simply that if I do it to them, they'll do it to me, and it doesn't get done. Now, there are other reasons, too. I mean, President Obama has expressed some of these reasons: I want to move on; I don't want to spend the energy and money and what I do have in capital on something that's in the past; what's in the past is in the past; let's move on; let's look at the present and future. That's very American, by the way. That's the reason we're lousy strategists. We're great tacticians, but we're lousy strategists. We don't do strategy at all. We go from day to day, and our democracy muddles through those days. And because we've had so much power since 1945 [inaudible] Now that our power is dwindling and other power is rising, we're going to have to learn to be smart or we're going to disappear.
JAY: When you are working on this, Rice's testimony for 9/11 Commission, did it occur to you that you she was hiding something?
WILKERSON: No. What occurred to me was that we were covering our asses, that we were trying, desperately in some instances, to show that we were in fact not culpable, not negligent pre-9/11. I don't think there was any deliberate culpability or negligence. I think they just had a different set of priorities, and it just turned out, as it did for FDR in '41 (lesser extent, maybe), that their priorities in one case weren't right.
JAY: Well, certainly—.
WILKERSON: And I think FDR had his eye on World War II from probably at least 1936, maybe '35, on. Certainly he had it on it in '39 when he started creating the Civilian Conservation Corps, when he started building, essentially, an army.
JAY: But we know with the document Project for a New American Century, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and the whole group had their eye on a new world order and an Iraq War.
WILKERSON: I'm not so sure that's accurate.
JAY: And whether it's deliberate—. Well, it's in the document.
WILKERSON: They had their—no. They had their eye on regime change. And it could be done by clandestine force, as well as by overt force. And the Clinton administration, I think, bought the clandestine force angle, didn't buy the overt force angle, but never really actualized the covert [inaudible]
JAY: But the idea that within days of 9/11 the Bush administration was already talking about Iraq.
WILKERSON: It gave them the opportunity. It gave them the opportunity to do what they were going to do anyway a lot faster.
JAY: So in the final analysis what do you think? Does there need to be an independent inquiry to find out about all of [inaudible]
WILKERSON: Well, I'm like the president in this instance, for different reasons. I hate to waste such treasure and energy and time on something that's not going to be acted on or not acted on in any way that's going to be helpful. If we're just looking for catharsis—.
JAY: Well, it could be acted on by Americans who can say, we're not going to vote for this whole gang anymore.
WILKERSON: Oh, au contraire, we don't have that choice anymore. We get two idiots to vote for every year, whose campaigns say all manner of things, but whose actual actions are not—I'll quote Ralph Nader here—virtually are not any different from Tom and Jerry. I mean, the two of them are going to do the same thing, because basically what we have today is a corporatocracy: we have the presidents and the Congress in the hands of big food, big pharmacy, big oil, finance, insurance, and real estate. Look at Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. They're quintessential representatives of those communities. And that's who runs this country now. The president doesn't run this country, the secretary of defense and the secretary of state don't run these people, and God help us, the American people don't run this country. Big money runs this country.
JAY: Thanks for joining us.
WILKERSON: Surely.
JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
LAWRENCE WILKERSON, FMR. CHIEF OF STAFF TO COLIN POWELL: Good to be here.
JAY: So do you think we know the real story of 9/11? Did the 9/11 Commission get to the truth?
WILKERSON: I don't think so. I don't think commissions like this, by their very nature, get to the truth, not even, say, 60 percent of the truth. The Warren Commission investigating President Kennedy's assassination, for example, was in my view a whitewash. I can't say that about the 9/11 Commission yet, 'cause the research is not all done. But the political power that looms over such commissions prohibits their—except by serendipity, and that rarely exists—getting to the complete truth.
JAY: We'll have to talk about the Warren Commission in a separate segment, and I think we should, because I think it's important that there are precedents for what an administration is capable of doing. A lot of the speculation around the 9/11 events was that the Bush administration either deliberately ignored intelligence that something was coming. We know Condoleezza Rice sits down and reads a memo saying Osama bin Laden plans to attack inside the United States, and seems to have done next to nothing after reading the memo. But what do you think are the big unanswered questions?
WILKERSON: I think there are some huge unanswered questions with regard to the culpability, the negligence of the administration—and I use those terms very carefully. I would use those terms to a certain extent about Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941, when Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese, but I have to temper them with FDR, because FDR took decisive action. He reprimanded the—he set up the various commissions. He reprimanded the general and the admiral who were in charge in Honolulu. You can argue about whether he got the right people or not, but he was seen as taking decisive action. Same thing with JFK, John Kennedy, after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He fired the most powerful man, probably, in the intelligence business, Allen Dulles, and others responsible for that operation. George W. Bush did nothing. He did not fire a single, solitary soul that I'm aware of. He kept everyone there. And more people died as a result of 9/11 than as a result of Pearl Harbor. I think it was 3,000 or so and 2,400 or so. Not that that's any measure, but in terms of disaster, 9/11, certainly for the American psyche, if not for its institutional fabric, was as bad as Pearl Harbor, and yet President Bush took no action.
JAY: Now, some of the people who have raised some of the bigger questions about 9/11 point to Pearl Harbor, meaning there's a document a lot of people are aware of called Project for a New American Century, which a lot of the neocons are authors of, and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.
WILKERSON: Richard Armitage even signed that document.
JAY: And I believe Cheney is either on the document or around it. And in the document, it's the vision for a new American foreign policy, which essentially is the projection of post-Soviet empire: we're now the empire, so let's project our power and make—.
WILKERSON: And one of our principal missions is protecting Israel.
JAY: And they say, at one point in the document, to accomplish this new world we'll probably need another Pearl Harbor. So a lot of people have talked about 9/11 as being their other Pearl Harbor. And the question people raise is: do they know something's coming and let it happen? First of all, do you think it's even possible that they could form such an intent?
WILKERSON: I don't think anyone could have pinpointed Pearl Harbor and said with 90 percent and even firmness in their own belief that the Japanese would attack there. I don't think anyone could have done that about 9/11, either. They could have said airplanes may be used. They could have said it's going to be a target in the United States, as I believe George Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence did say. They could say that traffic has increased enormously amongst the most likely group to do this, and we think it's aimed at us, as, again, Tenet said, I think. They could say any number of things. But until they come up with a target, a location, a name, even, Timothy McVeigh is going to hit the federal building in Oklahoma City or whatever, it's very difficult to get the United States government seized of a specificity that will allow it to act.
JAY: But there's things that suggest that they didn't want to know, at the very least. For example, the demotion of Richard Clarke from a cabinet-level position, Richard Clarke being the antiterrorism czar under Clinton, gets demoted after Bush comes to power. But this is after he's given a memo to Condoleezza Rice saying al-Qaeda is your critical threat you need to face. They're inaugurated at the beginning of January. Clarke sends this memo. It more or less gets buried. There's other evidence that other people try to support that same position at the National Security Council or meetings of the main security agencies and are literally not invited back to the meetings because they're apparently told they tell the administration, well, yes, al-Qaeda, something's coming, you need to deal with it. You have the FBI office in Minneapolis find someone taking flight lessons to take off and not wanting to know how to land, etc., and the FBI closes down the investigation. There's a whole culture throughout the security apparatus that we're not interested in any of this.
WILKERSON: All this looks so clean now in retrospect because all the background noise is gone, and believe me, after 40 years in government, I know the background noise is pretty constant and pretty high. I would say a number of things, though. One, I would say the demotion of Dick Clarke is more or less a president's prerogative, but it does show that he's showing everyone his priorities. For example, he didn't just demote Dick Clarke; he demoted John Negroponte, too, because Bill Clinton had moved Madeleine Albright up to—when she was ambassador, to the status of cabinet level for her ambassadorship to the UN. Bush was saying, I am demoting the UN in my priorities by moving Mr. Negroponte down to just a regular ambassador. He did the same thing with Dick Clarke. It was not necessarily saying, I'm disregarding you; it was saying, I'm not prioritizing you as high as the previous administration did. And we can look back on that and say that was a mistake, and it clearly was.
JAY: How do you come to power not being on the inside of the intelligence briefings? Like, not really inside. I suppose once you're a candidate for president they start briefing you to some extent, but I'm not sure who does those briefings. But you get into power. Within days, a cabinet-level guy tells you—.
WILKERSON: Look what you had going on. What you had going on, which most Americans do not realize, is you had this move already by decision makers within the government to what we call "see the raw intelligence". They don't trust the CIA, they don't trust the DIA, they don't trust any of that bureaucracy, because they've been burned so many times by that bureaucracy. That's another issue, the incompetence of our intelligence bureaucracy, now consisting of 17 different entities spending $60 billion plus a year. They don't trust it, and so they wanted to see the raw intelligence. This predates Bush and Cheney, but it comes to a screaming head, an apotheosis, with Cheney. He becomes his own intelligence interpreter. He reads the raw intelligence every day in his office. So Cheney is becoming quickly the intelligence interpreter for the president of the United States. And Cheney—I can't prove this, but Cheney seems to have deemphasized almost instantly al-Qaeda and threats that al-Qaeda might present to the United States.
JAY: Based on what?
WILKERSON: Based on his reading of the raw intelligence.
JAY: When his own CIA guy, Tenet, saying Clark's right, that apparently Tenet's running around, another guy with his hair on fire. Neither of us would know about that, but—.
WILKERSON: These decision makers are setting themselves up in competition with the intelligence agencies and saying, we don't trust you to read this raw intelligence, so give us the raw intelligence. When I was on the policy planning staff at State, I was given access to a special compartmented facility—/skIf/, we call it—where I could go in and read the raw intelligence. I refused to do it, because I know from being a military man what the raw intelligence is. It's bull. If you don't have an expert there to put it all together, to discard the chaff, to pick out the wheat, to correlate it and organize it and connect the dots, it's ridiculous. That's how they've built up the stories of al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, the stories of WMD and so forth and so on in Iraq. They built it up by selectively taking these little bits of intelligence out of the raw data and making them look as if they were professional intelligence.
JAY: Why do you do this? Why do you, within days of coming into power, discount what the head of CIA is saying, your counterterrorism czar is saying?
WILKERSON: Because you have other priorities.
JAY: 'Cause you have an agenda.
WILKERSON: You have other priorities and you have an agenda, yeah, if you want to put it that way, yes. Their priorities were—.
JAY: Iraq.
WILKERSON: No. Their priorities initially were to abrogate the ABM Treaty [Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty] and to build ballistic missile defense. That's their foreign priority. Their domestic priorities were sort of education, which Bush got right into big-time, and Bush had that portfolio. Cheney had the national security portfolio. Lowering taxes—and both the president and the vice president had that one, but that was because the president screwed part of it up. The vice president took it over so he'd make sure he got his capital gains cuts and so forth built into the package. But they had these priorities, and that's what they were after. They were not after al-Qaeda. They were not even after what I would call traditional national security threats. They were after what they thought—ballistic missiles fired by rogue nations, for example—were the real threats to this country.
JAY: Do you think it's possible they conformed the intent that something may be coming, maybe Clarke's onto something, maybe the CIA knows something, and maybe we don't want to do anything about it?
WILKERSON: If I thought that they had deliberately done that with malice of forethought, I don't—you know, I'm not sure I'd still be living in this country. I do not think that anyone in this group of characters—and they are a rogue's gallery in many respects. David Addington, Scooter Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith, they are a rogue's gallery. But I do not think that they did anything that they did without believing, at least part of the time, that it was in the national interests of their country. They were dead wrong, often.
JAY: Condoleezza Rice tells the 9/11 Commission that after reading a memo that says Osama bin Laden plans to attack inside the United States—.
WILKERSON: But where?
JAY: Hold on. She claims that she then speaks to the FBI and gets them to task 56 FBI offices to be on the alert for terrorist activity in the United States. The 9/11 Commission lawyers and investigators get in touch with the 56 FBI offices, and it turns out, if my memory serves me correctly, two actually had something mentioned to them, 54 had said they had never been put on alert. How do you read a memo like that and not at the very least alert the FAA and the FBI that we have a memo that there's credible intelligence that something might be coming?
WILKERSON: Let's examine the bureaucracy here now. Dr. Rice, as national security advisor, does not talk to FBI agents; she talks to the director of the Bureau. That's the only person she talks to (if he's not available, perhaps the deputy or one of the deputies). So Dr. Rice told the director of the FBI bureau, and the FBI director told someone else, who told someone else, who told someone else, or failed to tell someone else. So we just don't understand the gargantuan spider-like nature of the US bureaucracy now. We have so many people working in government that it is astonishing that we get anything done. As David Rothkopf has said very truthfully in his book Running the World, it is amazing how dysfunctional the United States government is. I can testify to that in spades. I'm not trying to excuse them; I'm just saying that Dr. Rice doesn't talk to individual FBI agents.
JAY: We understand that, but it was very unclear, because the head of the FBI, in front of the 9/11 Commission, was very ambiguous whether Rice had actually ever given him these instructions, 'cause he was confronted with this.
WILKERSON: In the same way my boss, Secretary Powell, was somewhat ambiguous and others were ambiguous. I helped build Condi Rice's testimony to the 9/11 Commission with her principal writer, John Bellinger, her lawyer at the time. And I will tell you that there were two occasions in my four years at the State Department that I felt so disgusted that I almost resigned, and I feel, when I think about them today, still disgusted with myself for not resigning. One of them was when I helped Powell prepare himself to testify before the 9/11 Commission and thus got insight into what the administration was doing with the information. And the other was when we presented, at the UN Security Council in February 2003, the Powell presentation that said Saddam Hussein had failed to disarm and still had WMD.
JAY: Rice says about that memo in front of the 9/11 Commission that this was about some historical events, when clearly, if you—once the memo got released, 'cause I think at the time of the actual—her testimony, the memo itself hadn't gone public yet. It did later. When you read the memo, it's clearly about a predicted, possible threat. It's not a historical document. It's a straightforward lie.
WILKERSON: Well, I can't sit here and tell you that I didn't see information in the presentations that both my boss and the national security advisor, Dr. Rice, gave to the 9/11 Commission that, since I had foreknowledge of that information, and background information, too, wasn't close to a lie. I wouldn't say that we actually told an outright lie, but I would say we massaged the information considerably, so that it looked like the Bush administration was far more attentive to al-Qaeda and its threat pre-9/11 than it really was.
JAY: There's a great reluctance, certainly, in the American media and the American political class to suggest motives that there may have been an actual intent not to stop something that might be coming. But if you go back to the Johnson-Nixon relationship during the negotiations with the North Vietnamese, Johnson we now have on tape—'cause they've been released by the Johnson archives—Johnson accuses Nixon of treason.
~~~
LYNDON JOHNSON, US PRESIDENT: Some of our folks, including some of the old China lobby, are going to the Vietnamese Embassy and saying, please notify the president that if you'll hold out till November 2, they could get a better deal. Now, I'm reading their hand, Everett. I don't want to get this in the campaign.
EVERETT DIRKSEN, US SENATOR (R-IL): That's right.
JOHNSON: And they oughtn't to be doing this. This is treason.
~~~
JAY: We know Richard Nixon, unless Johnson's lying, and there's no reason [inaudible]
WILKERSON: Which I would not—you know, after—I just finished reading Gordon Goldstein's book on McGeorge Bundy, Lessons in Disaster. And Lyndon Johnson was a great man in many respects, but telling the truth all the time was not one of them.
JAY: But he's talking to Dirksen, who's a Republican, and Dirksen's—he says to Dirksen, this is traitorous activity, and Dirksen says, yes, I know. Dirksen doesn't deny Nixon's doing this stuff, and he's Nixon's majority, I believe, head of the Senate at the time, majority leader in the Senate. So we know this kind of intent can be formed. And I guess what I'm getting at, are we not left with enough profound questions about all of this—and we started this interview by you saying the 9/11 Commission didn't really get to it, that should there not still be an independent inquiry about what really happened, given how much 9/11 helped shape the events and what came afterwards?
WILKERSON: You know, theoretically I could say yes, but practically I have to say, what good would it do? Because ultimately the people who will have to implement the recommendations, whether they be punitive in nature or whether they be ameliorative in nature, of that commission or whatever, are the same people who are in the government now, and they're not going to do it, or they're going to do it in a perfunctory way.
JAY: Doesn't it—don't Americans need to understand, in order to understand their political elite and what they do and what they're capable of?
WILKERSON: That's a different matter, and it's one reason I teach. I try to teach my young people that they don't know their leadership. They don't know their democratic republic anymore, if indeed it is a democratic republic anymore. I try to teach them that the people in the White House are not the best people in the world. They're not on some pedestal. Often our presidents are middle intellect, if that, and that what we're dealing with is increasingly a leadership that is disconnected from the American people and makes increasingly bad decisions, and that they need to be aware of that, and that the only way to change that is to get more and more good, high-intellect, highly capable people, young, interested in government and into government. So I'm agreeing with you that we have a lot of people in the Congress and a lot of people in the White House who have almost no bona fides for being there.
JAY: In my point of view it remains a very important question in two ways. Number one, people who at the very best may have been negligent—and at a level of criminal negligence is one possible interpretation.
WILKERSON: It's difficult for me to find criminality in this, just as it is with Donald Rumsfeld. I mean, Donald Rumsfeld made some egregious mistakes. One of the biggest ones was promulgating a policy throughout the ranks that essentially amounted, at the private level, to carte blanche to torture. But I don't believe Donald Rumsfeld understood, at the very pinnacle he was sitting at, what he was doing as he sent that instruction out through the ranks. I mean, his postscript on that December 2002 (I think it was) memo, where he wrote, I stand for, you know, eight hours a day; what's wrong with him standing? Infamous comment, but very revealing, I think. The man simply didn't know what he was about. He didn't know what he was talking about.
JAY: But go back to the testimony. You said you helped to shape Rice's testimony for the 9/11 Commission.
WILKERSON: M'hm, so that hers and Powell's would not be contradictory, in essence.
JAY: The statements, for example, of the—tasking the FBI offices, which turns out apparently not to be true, the ability to read this memo and say it's a historical take on something when clearly that wasn't the case, the—.
WILKERSON: Dr. Rice has made some egregious statements since, too, with regard to her culpability in this. And I must say that unlike President Bush, who stayed quiet, which I applaud, and Dick Cheney, who's been vocal until his recent bout looking for a new heart, Dr. Rice has only occasionally spoken out, but when she has, I've bit my tongue, bit my cheek, winced. She has a categorical way of denying any responsibility for some of the things that she clearly had responsibility vis-à-vis, and I find that very disturbing in a person who's been national security advisor of the United States. In this book I was just telling you about, for example, McGeorge Bundy is having an epiphany, finally, and admitting about the mistakes he made in '64 and '65 when he was advising LBJ to go, go, go for Vietnam, increase the troops and so forth, when he knew, and he admits in this book, and he quotes, he knew there was no military purpose for it. It was a preposterous purpose to demonstrate American commitment. Even if we lose, he says, we will have demonstrated our commitment [inaudible] 58,000 names on that black wall over there that I go visit every November.
JAY: And another example of what's possible, if not directly from the president, those around him, because the Gulf of Tonkin incident we now know was more or less a fabricated false flag operation.
WILKERSON: Yeah. And great insight here, I think, and it comes from others, like Andrew Preston's book War Council and elsewhere, but Johnson's political instincts tell him that he can make hay with the Tonkin Gulf incident with the Congress, which is where he came from. He knows the Congress, especially the Senate. And so even advice to the contrary to the president at this time—don't exploit the Tonkin Gulf incident—is disregarded by Johnson, because he sees it as a wonderful political opportunity.
JAY: We know Gulf of Tonkin was a false flag operation to help instigate or draw Johnson into the war.
WILKERSON: I wouldn't characterize it that way. I would characterize it as an incident that happened, the reporting was bad (subsequent reporting, by the way, cleared it up), and as the bad reporting came in, there were people, including the president, who said, A-ha, I know how to use that.
JAY: Knowingly.
WILKERSON: Yeah. It recently happened in Iran. Remember just a few years ago when we had the incident right south of the Persian Gulf, where the Iranians were supposed to have done something, and a Navy skipper reported that they were doing it, and so forth? It turned out to be nothing, but by the time it got to Washington, it was exploited by everybody and sundry. You know, oh, the Iranians are attacking, the Iranians are attacking. I'm sure this Navy skipper down there, when he found out the truth, was going, oh my God, what have I done? You've got to be careful what you report from a battlefield.
JAY: So let's go back to this issue of an independent inquiry, why it would still be useful. If, first of all, millions of Americans have these type of questions in their minds—and some go much further, as we know. There's people that are even talking about the possibility of—.
WILKERSON: There are always conspiracy theories.
JAY: And sometimes there are conspiracies.
WILKERSON: Yes, sometimes even paranoids are right.
JAY: Yeah. All the engineering questions in the buildings, I mean, I personally don't know what to make of any of this. I'm not an engineer.
WILKERSON: I don't, either.
JAY: But what is a fact is there are millions of Americans that have these type of questions, which is interesting as a thing in itself that they do. There's many, many more that have the questions about whether this was somehow an issue of intent rather than negligence in terms of not stopping things. Gordon Thomas, who wrote the book, I think it's called Israel's Secret Army, which is the history of the Mossad, he's reported that Mossad had infiltrated an al-Qaeda cell in the United States that was involved in the 9/11 conspiracy. He says that Mossad tried to tell the CIA and FBI what they knew, and all they got back was, what the hell were you doing operating in our country? So they went and told—I believe it was France and Egypt, and asked them to tell the CIA. Nobody wanted to hear it.
WILKERSON: I certainly don't know if that's true, but it really rings true with regard to our bureaucracy.
JAY: Example after example after example, which is either incredible negligence, the result of a horrible bureaucracy, or a deliberate attempt to create a culture, which starts with the demotion of Richard Clarke and other types of such events that make it right into the FBI, but they don't even want to hear what Minneapolis bureau has found, this—a culture of we want to shut down this conversation about terrorism.
WILKERSON: A president and a vice president have to be very careful about what they say, especially if they're in a large, formal National Security Council meeting, or even a small meeting with extra people attending, because what they say is taken as gospel. And if they are interpreted as having these priorities and not these priorities, then these priorities will wither. If people—.
JAY: And they know that.
WILKERSON: Well, I can't say that—
JAY: The people in power know that.
WILKERSON: —about George W. Bush. I certainly can say that about Dick Cheney.
JAY: But Dick Cheney, as you've said many times, we were dealing with the presidency of Dick Cheney more than George Bush in those first few years.
WILKERSON: It's 2006, I think, before George Bush gets his feet on the ground. That's a long time. But I just said we don't make intellectual giants presidents anymore. Cheney certainly should have known that if he deemphasized this, he was going to, you know, put it out of the ken of most of the agencies and departments, because you can only focus on so many things.
JAY: Do not Americans need to know whether or not this was negligence, or something more than negligence, simply myopia, like we have this agenda and not this? Or is there more to it? Is there any way to—isn't this of such historical importance? And also, in terms of the responsibilities of the Obama administration, a new administration comes into power, so many issues of accountability of the previous administration, and nothing—and not only that, George Bush not much longer gets appointed to go become the savior of Haiti with Bill Clinton. He becomes canonized now.
WILKERSON: There is a major inhibition to investigating the previous administration, and it's very human, and it's very bureaucratic, but it exists and it is powerful, and that is simply that if I do it to them, they'll do it to me, and it doesn't get done. Now, there are other reasons, too. I mean, President Obama has expressed some of these reasons: I want to move on; I don't want to spend the energy and money and what I do have in capital on something that's in the past; what's in the past is in the past; let's move on; let's look at the present and future. That's very American, by the way. That's the reason we're lousy strategists. We're great tacticians, but we're lousy strategists. We don't do strategy at all. We go from day to day, and our democracy muddles through those days. And because we've had so much power since 1945 [inaudible] Now that our power is dwindling and other power is rising, we're going to have to learn to be smart or we're going to disappear.
JAY: When you are working on this, Rice's testimony for 9/11 Commission, did it occur to you that you she was hiding something?
WILKERSON: No. What occurred to me was that we were covering our asses, that we were trying, desperately in some instances, to show that we were in fact not culpable, not negligent pre-9/11. I don't think there was any deliberate culpability or negligence. I think they just had a different set of priorities, and it just turned out, as it did for FDR in '41 (lesser extent, maybe), that their priorities in one case weren't right.
JAY: Well, certainly—.
WILKERSON: And I think FDR had his eye on World War II from probably at least 1936, maybe '35, on. Certainly he had it on it in '39 when he started creating the Civilian Conservation Corps, when he started building, essentially, an army.
JAY: But we know with the document Project for a New American Century, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and the whole group had their eye on a new world order and an Iraq War.
WILKERSON: I'm not so sure that's accurate.
JAY: And whether it's deliberate—. Well, it's in the document.
WILKERSON: They had their—no. They had their eye on regime change. And it could be done by clandestine force, as well as by overt force. And the Clinton administration, I think, bought the clandestine force angle, didn't buy the overt force angle, but never really actualized the covert [inaudible]
JAY: But the idea that within days of 9/11 the Bush administration was already talking about Iraq.
WILKERSON: It gave them the opportunity. It gave them the opportunity to do what they were going to do anyway a lot faster.
JAY: So in the final analysis what do you think? Does there need to be an independent inquiry to find out about all of [inaudible]
WILKERSON: Well, I'm like the president in this instance, for different reasons. I hate to waste such treasure and energy and time on something that's not going to be acted on or not acted on in any way that's going to be helpful. If we're just looking for catharsis—.
JAY: Well, it could be acted on by Americans who can say, we're not going to vote for this whole gang anymore.
WILKERSON: Oh, au contraire, we don't have that choice anymore. We get two idiots to vote for every year, whose campaigns say all manner of things, but whose actual actions are not—I'll quote Ralph Nader here—virtually are not any different from Tom and Jerry. I mean, the two of them are going to do the same thing, because basically what we have today is a corporatocracy: we have the presidents and the Congress in the hands of big food, big pharmacy, big oil, finance, insurance, and real estate. Look at Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. They're quintessential representatives of those communities. And that's who runs this country now. The president doesn't run this country, the secretary of defense and the secretary of state don't run these people, and God help us, the American people don't run this country. Big money runs this country.
JAY: Thanks for joining us.
WILKERSON: Surely.
JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Chomsky on Post-Midterm America
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Now joining us is a man who needs no introduction, so I'm not going to do one. Thanks for joining us, Mr. Chomsky.
NOAM CHOMSKY, PROF. LINGUISTICS, MIT: Glad to be here again.
JAY: So we are told by many people, and across the political spectrum, that the problem is we just can't get along. On the front pages of the newspapers today, the story is, will the Democrats work with the Republicans? And they're polling about whether more Republicans want their representatives to fight or not fight. And we're told by people like Jon Stewart that the problem is that we need a more rational center, a more rational discussion; the problem is the people on the left extreme and the right extreme, and there's always been this division between what's called liberalism and conservatism, and that's the basic division of American society, and the problem is the liberals and the conservatives just need to have a more fruitful discourse, they need to get together and figure out a sane center, this all at the time of perhaps the gravest crisis in terms of global economy, certainly since the 1930s. And who knows? It might turn out to be even more profound than that. What's your take on this whole positioning of what the problem is?
CHOMSKY: I think there's very little truth to it. What's happened over the past roughly 35 years is that both parties have drifted to the right. I don't think the terms liberal and conservative mean much. In fact, if you take a look at the—there's quite serious inquiry into the actual attitudes of people who call themselves conservatives. So the group of people who say, I'm in favor of small government, cutting back taxes; put aside the social issues, they're different; well, it turns out most of them have more or less social democratic attitudes. You know, they think there should be more money spent on health, more on education, more on assistance to the poor, but not welfare. Reagan succeeded in blackening the term welfare with his tales about, you know, black women in limousines that are coming to the welfare offices and so on. So no welfare, but assistance to the poor. No foreign aid, but then when people are asked how much should we be giving, they typically say considerably more than we actually are. And what you basically have among the so-called conservatives in the population is what we call liberal attitudes on issue after issue. Take, say, the health-care reform that Obama passed, which is the real fighting issue. Well, a majority of the population's opposed to the health-care reform. If you take a look at the reasons, a substantial number are opposed because it didn't go far enough, and on particular matters that Obama gave away, like, say, a public option. There's pretty strong support for allowing the pharmaceutical corporations to get away with murder, because the government's not allowed to negotiate prices with them—overwhelming opposition.
JAY: But certainly in the last election, just a few days ago, what got articulated as a position people voted for, at least as—if you look at through the media lens, is, you know, low to no taxes, people should fend for themselves, you know, this whole idea of the nanny state is under attack. A more extreme version of what the right might [inaudible]
CHOMSKY: That's certainly true among the spokespersons for the right. But, again, if you take a look at the polling of people who take those views, and you ask them, should we cut down on, say, Medicare, should we cut down on assistance for education, should we cut down on infrastructure development, they say no.
JAY: Well, the way you position it is you're talking about out in society amongst ordinary people that have conservative values. But this is something that doesn't get discussed. And maybe is this, you know, [inaudible] kind of the point? I mean—.
CHOMSKY: I mean, it's there. For example—.
JAY: No, what I'm getting at is this, is that there's a quote of George Will which I keep quoting over and over again, practically every story I do now. In the fall of 2008, heading into the '08 elections, George Will is on Stephanopoulos's show, and there's a back-and-forth with Donna Brazile. And finally Will blurts out, he says, let's not get sentimental about democracy. We don't get to choose whether or not the elite will govern; we get to choose which elite will govern. And is part of the issue here that this liberal-conservative dynamic is a dynamic within the elite, and it doesn't get talked that way about what goes on in the rest of the society?
CHOMSKY: It's a dynamic among the articulate, those who have access to—who have public access to express themselves, like Will. But the attitudes of the population are quite different. In fact, if you look over the years—and there have been quite extensive studies—the general will of the population is quite different from policy on major issues. I can refer you to some studies if you like, but there are quite careful studies of it. In fact, on many major issues—. Say me. I'm supposed to be radical left. I find myself more or less in agreement with the majority of the population—more or less; you know, not exactly. But that's totally different from policy. So, for example, take, say, foreign-policy issues, which have been studied carefully. There's a book by Benjamin Page and Marshall Bouton called The Foreign Policy Disconnect, in which they study, over many decades, attitudes of the public on foreign policies compared with policy, and there is a sharp disconnect. So, say, on international issues, a considerable majority think that the United Nations ought to take the lead, not the United States, in international crises. Actually, a majority think that the US ought to give up the veto at the Security Council.
JAY: It was clear before the Iraq War the majority of public opinion said let the UN finish its inspection.
CHOMSKY: Yeah, but that's standard. I mean, you get—when the United States is at war and there's a lot of propaganda about how our lives are at stake and so on, well, then things change. For example, if you go back about three—take, say, the main foreign policy issue, Iran. It's considered, you know, the threat to world order. Now, there's—the last couple of years there's been a ton of propaganda about it, but if you go back right before the propaganda, say, January 2007, when there were extensive studies of Iranian and American public opinion, turns out they were pretty similar. They both agreed that—large majorities, that Iran should have the right to enrich uranium, as a signer of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, but not develop nuclear weapons; they both favored negotiation over threat of force; and so on down the line. In fact, a huge, you know, a large majority thought the United States ought to move towards abandoning nuclear weapons.
JAY: If you get back to the policy debate on domestic questions, it's being positioned as stimulus versus austerity: less government, no taxes; over here, slightly tax, slight tax reform with some stimulus—although the liberal section of the leadership is also buying into the necessity of sooner than later get to fight the debt, in other words get to austerity.
CHOMSKY: Sooner. That's why Obama has a deficit commission.
JAY: So what should people be demanding? Or what's the vision ordinary people should have? And, you know, in the last election, the small government, lower taxes, you could get—people could get their head around.
CHOMSKY: Except that they don't believe it, because when you ask them what should be cut, point by point, they say not this, not that, I want more spending for that. So it's a slogan, you know, get the government off our backs. And remember, we have a business-run propaganda system. I mean, it shouldn't be a secret. And business, of course, would like to have smaller government, would like to get the government off our back, because that means they get on our back. See, there's a corollary to get the government on our back; namely, give the concentrated private power even more power than it has now. So people call themselves libertarians and say, you know, we don't want to be run by others. They're saying, we want to be run by private tyrannies. They should be free to do what they like. That's the part that's not expressed. But if you think it through, that's what's going to happen. Take the specific issues. People say, yeah, we don't want taxes, which is, incidentally, quite interesting. We'll come back to it in a second. But when people are asked, do you want more taxes? No. Horrible. Here, April 15, you know, it's—that's considered a day of mourning. Some alien force is coming to steal your money. Well, that's quite interesting. That's the result of decades of intense propaganda to try to get people to hate the government so that the corporate sector can run things without interference. And, of course, the corporate sector wants a big government. They don't want to cut the government. They just want a nanny state for themselves. But the propaganda has been very extensive, and it tells you something. I mean, if there was a democratic culture, functioning democratic culture, then people would celebrate April 15. They would say April 15 is the day when we collaborate to implement the policies that we chose. But they don't say that.
JAY: Is part of the problem that an important section of the left, and certainly the leadership of the Democratic Party, don't want to deal with the fact that this form of big government is very alienated from people and that this big government is totally entwined with this corporate sector, but they try to—?
CHOMSKY: I would drop the term left, 'cause, I mean, what is called the left in the media is what used to be called moderate Republicans. The so-called new Democrats are barely—they're essentially what moderate Republicans were 30, 40 years ago. The Republicans are just brashly and openly the party of private power, private tyranny. They—I mean, they talk about we're the common man and elites, but so does everyone. But if you look at the policies, that's what it is. Take, say, Obama. I mean, the core of his funding in the 2000 election was actually financial institutions. And when groups of investors get together to control the state—what we call an election—they expect to be paid back. And they were.
JAY: You can see who got appointed as Obama's financial team.
CHOMSKY: Right away, you know, instantly. There were other people who could have been appointed.
JAY: So what's the vision for ordinary people now? What should they be the demanding? What should they articulate?
CHOMSKY: They should be demanding a functioning democratic society in which decisions are actually made by the public in their own organizations, their own meetings. I mean, you know, let's take, say, the primaries. So, say, New Hampshire has the first primary, technically. Well, if you had a democratic society, a functioning one, not just a formal one, what would happen would be that a town in New Hampshire would get together, town meeting, whatever organizations they have, and say these—hash out the kind of policies they want the government to follow, come to some more or less agreement, say, well we'd like to do so and so, then if a candidate wants to come, they should say, okay, you can come, and we'll tell you what we want you to do, and if you can really commit yourself to this honestly, maybe we'll vote for you. That's not what happens. What happens is the candidate comes in with a huge PR apparatus and makes a speech to the town and says, here's how wonderful I am and here's what I'm going to do, and people probably [inaudible] they don't believe him properly, and then gone. That's the opposite of democracy.
JAY: Now, what would the economy look like? What's the demands on the economy?
CHOMSKY: Well, you know, I think the term stimulus has been turned into a dirty word, like taxes. But if there was real discussion about this, public discussion about it, I think most of the population would probably agree with leading economists, Nobel laureates, who say what we need is a big stimulus. Deficit reduction down the road, maybe. But we didn't have a stimulus. I mean, if you take a look at the Obama stimulus, I mean, contrary to tons of lies about it, there's good objective evidence that it did save maybe a couple of million jobs. However, it was a very small stimulus, and it was wiped out by cutbacks in government spending at other levels. So the stimulus was actually more or less the same as the cutback in state and local spending. So that means there was stimulus.
JAY: Is part of this a missing critique on the limits of stimulus, that there's a point where even if there's—even a direct government jobs program, for that matter, but the underlying problem of stagnant wages and chronic now-high unemployment—.
CHOMSKY: That goes back 35 years.
JAY: So does there not need to be some addressing of that? 'Cause stimulus alone is not likely to address that.
CHOMSKY: No, stimulus is for an immediate problem.
JAY: So what's the longer-term vision?
CHOMSKY: There's a—right now there's a problem of low demand. Corporations have money coming out of their ears. They've just huge profits just stored up. They're not creating demand.
JAY: Yeah. In fact, they're going offshore with the money now, mostly.
CHOMSKY: Part of it, and that's part of the problem, which goes way back, not for now. The population can't—people just lost roughly $6 trillion. That's not small. That's what the housing bubble was, and maybe a couple of trillion more in their mutual funds and so on. So roughly $8 trillion of wealth have been lost for the population. So consumer demand is—it's there, but limited. Now, in that kind of situation, the only way you can get the economy moving again is by government creating demand.
JAY: But then what?
CHOMSKY: If the economy gets moving again, it'll grow, and then with the growth of the economy, you can return and overcome whatever deficit there is. That's pretty much the way it's been done in the past.
JAY: But in terms of this democratization of the society, doesn't there need to be something on the economic front that reflects that? And if you go back to the same kind of economy we had pre-crash—.
CHOMSKY: But now we're going—see, let's go back to that. Take—you mentioned stagnating wages. That's a 35-year problem. I mean, there was a big growth period without historical precedent in the '50s and the '60s into the early '70s. In the mid '70s there was major change in economic policy. You know, it didn't happen in an instant, but it happened over time, and it was escalated by Reagan, again by Clinton, even more so by Bush. But the—it's bipartisan, started in the late Carter years. Two things, which are related. One of them was a shift towards financialization of the economy. So the share of profits by financial institutions started to increase. By now it's (you know, there's—it's estimates) roughly a third of corporate profits. You know, they don't contribute—financial institutions do something for the economy, but nothing on that scale. That's basically harmful to the economy. But it increased enormously. Now they're the solid core of economic power, say, a third of corporate profits or something like that. Associated with that was a hollowing out of productive industry. So it's a continuation of a process that [inaudible]
JAY: So what do you do? What should people be demanding in terms of structural change on the economic side?
CHOMSKY: Well, let's just look at the consequences of this. The consequences are for about—for roughly 35, 30 years, a little more, wages for the majority, real wages, have pretty much stagnated, working hours have increased. People have been getting by by having two adults working, or women in the workforce at lower wages, and by debt, and by asset inflation, like, say, the housing bubble. Well, that's just not viable. And meanwhile these same people see that there's plenty of wealth around, but it's going into very few pockets. I mean, the top maybe 1 percent or even one-tenth of 1 percent of the population have been making out like bandits. And so we now have this incredible inequality, maybe back to the '20s, or maybe even a record. And this is part of people's consciousness. I'm working harder. Things are getting worse. I'm working more hours. Benefits which were never very good have declined. Meanwhile, other people are getting very rich. Something's wrong. Give me an answer. They were right to ask for an answer. They're not going to get it from the Democrats, the people who are called the left, because they are the ones who have been denying and implementing policies. They're not going to say, yeah, that's true; that's what happens when we participated in the huge growth of the financial sector, which is of dubious significance for the economy, may be harmful, largely; we did that, and we assisted the policy of hollowing out production, which is a policy of setting working people in competition with each other throughout the world. So what we call our trade policies—a bad term for it. Certainly not free-trade policies. What are called free-trade policies are essentially a program setting working people against each other throughout the world, but protecting the privileged people. So, for example, we don't allow foreign doctors and lawyers and economists and others to practice here. There's all kind of barriers to it.
JAY: So in terms of some basic structural change—.
CHOMSKY: But the—my point is that the Democrats are not going to say this. Obviously, the Republicans won't say it. The press won't say it. So what comes along is George Will, the Tea Party, Rush Limbaugh, and others who say, look, I have an answer. If you listen to them—and I do listen to them; I'm interested—the answer that you get has a kind of internal coherence. I mean, it's off the wall as far as reality is concerned, but it has an internal logic, and at least it's an answer, so you can see why people believe it. And they end up with completely contradictory attitudes, like let's cut taxes and get the government off our back, but let's increase spending on all the things I care about. Get the government off our back—nobody says get the corporations on your back. You know. Well, we should have a reasonable discourse about this, but that would require—you know, there's only one way that's going to come about, namely, by reconstituting a functioning democratic society (to the extent that there was one), which means popular organizations in which people participate. That's how you get ideas. Even if you're working, say, on this floor of MIT in the sciences, you don't sit by yourself. You talk to others. You cooperate. You work together. You figure out your own thoughts. You sharpen them [on] other people's views. I mean, that's what the labor unions used to be. When—that's one of the reasons why business hates labor unions so much and has been trying to destroy them for 60 years. They're dangerous. They have a democratizing effect. They bring people together and allow them to work together, not just to raise their wages, but also to work out what—you know, exactly what you're asking, what should social and public policy be. And, of course, they're not the only such organization. We have others, and some still survive, churches, for example.
JAY: But to have this expression effective, if you can have this kind of democratization of the politics, at least the beginning of that process, and people start to talk about these kinds of issues, what kind of economy do we want, and what would that policy look like—.
CHOMSKY: Well, I think what kind of economy we want should go way beyond this. I'm just talking about a very superficial level.
JAY: Well, I'm talking about let's go way beyond it. What structural changes should people be imagining? 'Cause if the thing—.
CHOMSKY: Let's be concrete.
JAY: Yeah, because the thing the Tea Party gave is—whatever you make of it, it seemed to be a vision one could fight for. What's a vision, an alternative vision, do you think, that will be more in the interests of people?
CHOMSKY: Democracy, and that has very concrete aspects. So instead of being abstract about it, let's take a real case. The government, the Obama administration, essentially took over the auto industry. I mean, they basically owned it. They didn't call it that. Well, there are things that could have been gone. What was done was to continue the policy of shutting plants, shipping work overseas, and so on, under the same—pretty much the—you know, a few different faces, but essentially the same attitude. There's an alternative. There are things the country badly needs—for example, high-speed transit. When you go abroad and you come back to the United States, in many ways it looks like a third-world country. I could give details, but one typical example is the lack of efficient mass high-speed public transportation. Well, the same GM plants that are being shut down have a skilled workforce in which they could develop that technology and provide it to the country. It would be extremely important for the economy. In the longer term it would be a step towards addressing the extremely serious global warming problem. But instead of doing that, what's happening, what—the policies are that the plants are being shut down, trimmed, the workforce cut back. Meanwhile, the transportation secretary is traveling around Europe using federal stimulus money to get contracts from Spain and France and other places to provide high-speed transit for the United States. I mean, it's surreal.
JAY: So, in other words, a public option for the auto industry.
CHOMSKY: That would mean worker takeover of the factories, which—'cause management isn't going to agree and bankers aren't going to agree. But it would mean that the workforce ought—and the community, what are called the stakeholders, ought to essentially take over the productive system. Then they could do this.
JAY: Well, certainly the government with GM and Chrysler could have had any makeup of the board they wanted.
CHOMSKY: Yeah, they could have had stakeholders.
JAY: What about on the finance sector, then? Why not the same thing, a public option for the finance sector?
CHOMSKY: Well, see, the finance sector really has to be pared down significantly. There are some interesting studies going on about this among economists. And take a look at the last issue of Dædalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. There are several lengthy discussions in it by very well-known economists, including Nobel laureates, who raise the interesting question, "What does the financial system do for us?" and they discuss ways. And what you can find out—they haven't really been investigated, but their judgment basically is, well, awful lot of it is harmful. I mean, there is a service that the financial institutions can perform, like directing investment to—directing funds, stored funds, you know, what you leave in the bank, to usable, to productive investment. But a huge amount of it is not doing that. It's devoted to cutting off a couple of nanoseconds from the financial transfers, which then get reversed a few nanoseconds later. It contributes nothing to the economy, but it absorbs huge funds, and it also draws some of the highest talent, which is also a cost. Well, with the financial institutions a real question is: to what extent do we need them? I mean, some extent. Paul Volcker, you may remember, awhile back said the only useful innovation in the financial sector for the last couple of decades is the ATM machine. He was exaggerating and making a point, but there is a point. So the financialization of the economy—and, incidentally, there's the global economy—that is a major issue that has to be reversed. It—ever since it happened, roughly the '70s.
JAY: I mean, is there any way to do that without the same logic that President Obama gave for the health-care system? Wouldn't it not be [the] same for the finance? You can't really do without some kind of public instrument.
CHOMSKY: With—yeah, and that could have easily been done, just as it could've been technically—.
JAY: Same thing, 'cause they were completely dependent upon public money.
CHOMSKY: Yes. So instead of just saying, okay, we'll bail you out and then pay you off, they could have said, okay, we own you now, and we'll reconstruct you in a socially useful way. That would require the kind of mass popular organization that, for example, led to the New Deal. You know, the New Deal didn't come out of nowhere. In fact, Roosevelt said, force me to do it.
JAY: So the critique of that is that then puts too much concentration of power within a federal government.
CHOMSKY: No, but—see, if we had a democratic society, functioning one, the federal government would be the population, so we put power in the hands of the population and their representatives. That's called democracy.
JAY: So the short of it is, to democratize the economics you've got to democratize the politics and vice versa.
CHOMSKY: And democratize the public. You have to reconstruct functioning significant public organizations of the kind that unions were in the past—and to a limited extent still are. And there are plenty of others. That's—I mean, we can say, okay, we're not going to have a democracy. Fine. Then let's just give it all to Goldman Sachs and—.
JAY: Blackwater.
CHOMSKY: You know, so we'll let them do it. That's, I think, what George Will was saying. Okay. So let's say it. You know. But if we're going to pretend to be a democracy, let's become one. Let's move towards a kind of society where April 15 is a day of celebration, 'cause we're implementing our plans.
JAY: April 15 being pay your taxes day.
CHOMSKY: Pay your taxes means, okay, we're cooperating to implement the programs that we've decided on. And the same thing could happen in, you know, a town where a GM plant is located and being closed down and the stakeholders, workforce, and the community say, no, we're going to take it over and produce what the country needs. Alright, that would require some federal stimulus, just like for GM to proceed as in the past required a big federal stimulus. But it can be done in different ways. We don't have go to Spain to get high-speed transport. We don't have to go to China to get solar panels. These are social decisions made by people in power, primarily these days bankers and other financial institutions, and there's no reason for the public to tolerate that. Now, as long as we're going to have that, you're going to get these contradictory attitudes like cut down on the government, cut down on taxes, but increase everything that I want, which is basically what you have now.
JAY: Thanks very much for joining us. And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
NOAM CHOMSKY, PROF. LINGUISTICS, MIT: Glad to be here again.
JAY: So we are told by many people, and across the political spectrum, that the problem is we just can't get along. On the front pages of the newspapers today, the story is, will the Democrats work with the Republicans? And they're polling about whether more Republicans want their representatives to fight or not fight. And we're told by people like Jon Stewart that the problem is that we need a more rational center, a more rational discussion; the problem is the people on the left extreme and the right extreme, and there's always been this division between what's called liberalism and conservatism, and that's the basic division of American society, and the problem is the liberals and the conservatives just need to have a more fruitful discourse, they need to get together and figure out a sane center, this all at the time of perhaps the gravest crisis in terms of global economy, certainly since the 1930s. And who knows? It might turn out to be even more profound than that. What's your take on this whole positioning of what the problem is?
CHOMSKY: I think there's very little truth to it. What's happened over the past roughly 35 years is that both parties have drifted to the right. I don't think the terms liberal and conservative mean much. In fact, if you take a look at the—there's quite serious inquiry into the actual attitudes of people who call themselves conservatives. So the group of people who say, I'm in favor of small government, cutting back taxes; put aside the social issues, they're different; well, it turns out most of them have more or less social democratic attitudes. You know, they think there should be more money spent on health, more on education, more on assistance to the poor, but not welfare. Reagan succeeded in blackening the term welfare with his tales about, you know, black women in limousines that are coming to the welfare offices and so on. So no welfare, but assistance to the poor. No foreign aid, but then when people are asked how much should we be giving, they typically say considerably more than we actually are. And what you basically have among the so-called conservatives in the population is what we call liberal attitudes on issue after issue. Take, say, the health-care reform that Obama passed, which is the real fighting issue. Well, a majority of the population's opposed to the health-care reform. If you take a look at the reasons, a substantial number are opposed because it didn't go far enough, and on particular matters that Obama gave away, like, say, a public option. There's pretty strong support for allowing the pharmaceutical corporations to get away with murder, because the government's not allowed to negotiate prices with them—overwhelming opposition.
JAY: But certainly in the last election, just a few days ago, what got articulated as a position people voted for, at least as—if you look at through the media lens, is, you know, low to no taxes, people should fend for themselves, you know, this whole idea of the nanny state is under attack. A more extreme version of what the right might [inaudible]
CHOMSKY: That's certainly true among the spokespersons for the right. But, again, if you take a look at the polling of people who take those views, and you ask them, should we cut down on, say, Medicare, should we cut down on assistance for education, should we cut down on infrastructure development, they say no.
JAY: Well, the way you position it is you're talking about out in society amongst ordinary people that have conservative values. But this is something that doesn't get discussed. And maybe is this, you know, [inaudible] kind of the point? I mean—.
CHOMSKY: I mean, it's there. For example—.
JAY: No, what I'm getting at is this, is that there's a quote of George Will which I keep quoting over and over again, practically every story I do now. In the fall of 2008, heading into the '08 elections, George Will is on Stephanopoulos's show, and there's a back-and-forth with Donna Brazile. And finally Will blurts out, he says, let's not get sentimental about democracy. We don't get to choose whether or not the elite will govern; we get to choose which elite will govern. And is part of the issue here that this liberal-conservative dynamic is a dynamic within the elite, and it doesn't get talked that way about what goes on in the rest of the society?
CHOMSKY: It's a dynamic among the articulate, those who have access to—who have public access to express themselves, like Will. But the attitudes of the population are quite different. In fact, if you look over the years—and there have been quite extensive studies—the general will of the population is quite different from policy on major issues. I can refer you to some studies if you like, but there are quite careful studies of it. In fact, on many major issues—. Say me. I'm supposed to be radical left. I find myself more or less in agreement with the majority of the population—more or less; you know, not exactly. But that's totally different from policy. So, for example, take, say, foreign-policy issues, which have been studied carefully. There's a book by Benjamin Page and Marshall Bouton called The Foreign Policy Disconnect, in which they study, over many decades, attitudes of the public on foreign policies compared with policy, and there is a sharp disconnect. So, say, on international issues, a considerable majority think that the United Nations ought to take the lead, not the United States, in international crises. Actually, a majority think that the US ought to give up the veto at the Security Council.
JAY: It was clear before the Iraq War the majority of public opinion said let the UN finish its inspection.
CHOMSKY: Yeah, but that's standard. I mean, you get—when the United States is at war and there's a lot of propaganda about how our lives are at stake and so on, well, then things change. For example, if you go back about three—take, say, the main foreign policy issue, Iran. It's considered, you know, the threat to world order. Now, there's—the last couple of years there's been a ton of propaganda about it, but if you go back right before the propaganda, say, January 2007, when there were extensive studies of Iranian and American public opinion, turns out they were pretty similar. They both agreed that—large majorities, that Iran should have the right to enrich uranium, as a signer of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, but not develop nuclear weapons; they both favored negotiation over threat of force; and so on down the line. In fact, a huge, you know, a large majority thought the United States ought to move towards abandoning nuclear weapons.
JAY: If you get back to the policy debate on domestic questions, it's being positioned as stimulus versus austerity: less government, no taxes; over here, slightly tax, slight tax reform with some stimulus—although the liberal section of the leadership is also buying into the necessity of sooner than later get to fight the debt, in other words get to austerity.
CHOMSKY: Sooner. That's why Obama has a deficit commission.
JAY: So what should people be demanding? Or what's the vision ordinary people should have? And, you know, in the last election, the small government, lower taxes, you could get—people could get their head around.
CHOMSKY: Except that they don't believe it, because when you ask them what should be cut, point by point, they say not this, not that, I want more spending for that. So it's a slogan, you know, get the government off our backs. And remember, we have a business-run propaganda system. I mean, it shouldn't be a secret. And business, of course, would like to have smaller government, would like to get the government off our back, because that means they get on our back. See, there's a corollary to get the government on our back; namely, give the concentrated private power even more power than it has now. So people call themselves libertarians and say, you know, we don't want to be run by others. They're saying, we want to be run by private tyrannies. They should be free to do what they like. That's the part that's not expressed. But if you think it through, that's what's going to happen. Take the specific issues. People say, yeah, we don't want taxes, which is, incidentally, quite interesting. We'll come back to it in a second. But when people are asked, do you want more taxes? No. Horrible. Here, April 15, you know, it's—that's considered a day of mourning. Some alien force is coming to steal your money. Well, that's quite interesting. That's the result of decades of intense propaganda to try to get people to hate the government so that the corporate sector can run things without interference. And, of course, the corporate sector wants a big government. They don't want to cut the government. They just want a nanny state for themselves. But the propaganda has been very extensive, and it tells you something. I mean, if there was a democratic culture, functioning democratic culture, then people would celebrate April 15. They would say April 15 is the day when we collaborate to implement the policies that we chose. But they don't say that.
JAY: Is part of the problem that an important section of the left, and certainly the leadership of the Democratic Party, don't want to deal with the fact that this form of big government is very alienated from people and that this big government is totally entwined with this corporate sector, but they try to—?
CHOMSKY: I would drop the term left, 'cause, I mean, what is called the left in the media is what used to be called moderate Republicans. The so-called new Democrats are barely—they're essentially what moderate Republicans were 30, 40 years ago. The Republicans are just brashly and openly the party of private power, private tyranny. They—I mean, they talk about we're the common man and elites, but so does everyone. But if you look at the policies, that's what it is. Take, say, Obama. I mean, the core of his funding in the 2000 election was actually financial institutions. And when groups of investors get together to control the state—what we call an election—they expect to be paid back. And they were.
JAY: You can see who got appointed as Obama's financial team.
CHOMSKY: Right away, you know, instantly. There were other people who could have been appointed.
JAY: So what's the vision for ordinary people now? What should they be the demanding? What should they articulate?
CHOMSKY: They should be demanding a functioning democratic society in which decisions are actually made by the public in their own organizations, their own meetings. I mean, you know, let's take, say, the primaries. So, say, New Hampshire has the first primary, technically. Well, if you had a democratic society, a functioning one, not just a formal one, what would happen would be that a town in New Hampshire would get together, town meeting, whatever organizations they have, and say these—hash out the kind of policies they want the government to follow, come to some more or less agreement, say, well we'd like to do so and so, then if a candidate wants to come, they should say, okay, you can come, and we'll tell you what we want you to do, and if you can really commit yourself to this honestly, maybe we'll vote for you. That's not what happens. What happens is the candidate comes in with a huge PR apparatus and makes a speech to the town and says, here's how wonderful I am and here's what I'm going to do, and people probably [inaudible] they don't believe him properly, and then gone. That's the opposite of democracy.
JAY: Now, what would the economy look like? What's the demands on the economy?
CHOMSKY: Well, you know, I think the term stimulus has been turned into a dirty word, like taxes. But if there was real discussion about this, public discussion about it, I think most of the population would probably agree with leading economists, Nobel laureates, who say what we need is a big stimulus. Deficit reduction down the road, maybe. But we didn't have a stimulus. I mean, if you take a look at the Obama stimulus, I mean, contrary to tons of lies about it, there's good objective evidence that it did save maybe a couple of million jobs. However, it was a very small stimulus, and it was wiped out by cutbacks in government spending at other levels. So the stimulus was actually more or less the same as the cutback in state and local spending. So that means there was stimulus.
JAY: Is part of this a missing critique on the limits of stimulus, that there's a point where even if there's—even a direct government jobs program, for that matter, but the underlying problem of stagnant wages and chronic now-high unemployment—.
CHOMSKY: That goes back 35 years.
JAY: So does there not need to be some addressing of that? 'Cause stimulus alone is not likely to address that.
CHOMSKY: No, stimulus is for an immediate problem.
JAY: So what's the longer-term vision?
CHOMSKY: There's a—right now there's a problem of low demand. Corporations have money coming out of their ears. They've just huge profits just stored up. They're not creating demand.
JAY: Yeah. In fact, they're going offshore with the money now, mostly.
CHOMSKY: Part of it, and that's part of the problem, which goes way back, not for now. The population can't—people just lost roughly $6 trillion. That's not small. That's what the housing bubble was, and maybe a couple of trillion more in their mutual funds and so on. So roughly $8 trillion of wealth have been lost for the population. So consumer demand is—it's there, but limited. Now, in that kind of situation, the only way you can get the economy moving again is by government creating demand.
JAY: But then what?
CHOMSKY: If the economy gets moving again, it'll grow, and then with the growth of the economy, you can return and overcome whatever deficit there is. That's pretty much the way it's been done in the past.
JAY: But in terms of this democratization of the society, doesn't there need to be something on the economic front that reflects that? And if you go back to the same kind of economy we had pre-crash—.
CHOMSKY: But now we're going—see, let's go back to that. Take—you mentioned stagnating wages. That's a 35-year problem. I mean, there was a big growth period without historical precedent in the '50s and the '60s into the early '70s. In the mid '70s there was major change in economic policy. You know, it didn't happen in an instant, but it happened over time, and it was escalated by Reagan, again by Clinton, even more so by Bush. But the—it's bipartisan, started in the late Carter years. Two things, which are related. One of them was a shift towards financialization of the economy. So the share of profits by financial institutions started to increase. By now it's (you know, there's—it's estimates) roughly a third of corporate profits. You know, they don't contribute—financial institutions do something for the economy, but nothing on that scale. That's basically harmful to the economy. But it increased enormously. Now they're the solid core of economic power, say, a third of corporate profits or something like that. Associated with that was a hollowing out of productive industry. So it's a continuation of a process that [inaudible]
JAY: So what do you do? What should people be demanding in terms of structural change on the economic side?
CHOMSKY: Well, let's just look at the consequences of this. The consequences are for about—for roughly 35, 30 years, a little more, wages for the majority, real wages, have pretty much stagnated, working hours have increased. People have been getting by by having two adults working, or women in the workforce at lower wages, and by debt, and by asset inflation, like, say, the housing bubble. Well, that's just not viable. And meanwhile these same people see that there's plenty of wealth around, but it's going into very few pockets. I mean, the top maybe 1 percent or even one-tenth of 1 percent of the population have been making out like bandits. And so we now have this incredible inequality, maybe back to the '20s, or maybe even a record. And this is part of people's consciousness. I'm working harder. Things are getting worse. I'm working more hours. Benefits which were never very good have declined. Meanwhile, other people are getting very rich. Something's wrong. Give me an answer. They were right to ask for an answer. They're not going to get it from the Democrats, the people who are called the left, because they are the ones who have been denying and implementing policies. They're not going to say, yeah, that's true; that's what happens when we participated in the huge growth of the financial sector, which is of dubious significance for the economy, may be harmful, largely; we did that, and we assisted the policy of hollowing out production, which is a policy of setting working people in competition with each other throughout the world. So what we call our trade policies—a bad term for it. Certainly not free-trade policies. What are called free-trade policies are essentially a program setting working people against each other throughout the world, but protecting the privileged people. So, for example, we don't allow foreign doctors and lawyers and economists and others to practice here. There's all kind of barriers to it.
JAY: So in terms of some basic structural change—.
CHOMSKY: But the—my point is that the Democrats are not going to say this. Obviously, the Republicans won't say it. The press won't say it. So what comes along is George Will, the Tea Party, Rush Limbaugh, and others who say, look, I have an answer. If you listen to them—and I do listen to them; I'm interested—the answer that you get has a kind of internal coherence. I mean, it's off the wall as far as reality is concerned, but it has an internal logic, and at least it's an answer, so you can see why people believe it. And they end up with completely contradictory attitudes, like let's cut taxes and get the government off our back, but let's increase spending on all the things I care about. Get the government off our back—nobody says get the corporations on your back. You know. Well, we should have a reasonable discourse about this, but that would require—you know, there's only one way that's going to come about, namely, by reconstituting a functioning democratic society (to the extent that there was one), which means popular organizations in which people participate. That's how you get ideas. Even if you're working, say, on this floor of MIT in the sciences, you don't sit by yourself. You talk to others. You cooperate. You work together. You figure out your own thoughts. You sharpen them [on] other people's views. I mean, that's what the labor unions used to be. When—that's one of the reasons why business hates labor unions so much and has been trying to destroy them for 60 years. They're dangerous. They have a democratizing effect. They bring people together and allow them to work together, not just to raise their wages, but also to work out what—you know, exactly what you're asking, what should social and public policy be. And, of course, they're not the only such organization. We have others, and some still survive, churches, for example.
JAY: But to have this expression effective, if you can have this kind of democratization of the politics, at least the beginning of that process, and people start to talk about these kinds of issues, what kind of economy do we want, and what would that policy look like—.
CHOMSKY: Well, I think what kind of economy we want should go way beyond this. I'm just talking about a very superficial level.
JAY: Well, I'm talking about let's go way beyond it. What structural changes should people be imagining? 'Cause if the thing—.
CHOMSKY: Let's be concrete.
JAY: Yeah, because the thing the Tea Party gave is—whatever you make of it, it seemed to be a vision one could fight for. What's a vision, an alternative vision, do you think, that will be more in the interests of people?
CHOMSKY: Democracy, and that has very concrete aspects. So instead of being abstract about it, let's take a real case. The government, the Obama administration, essentially took over the auto industry. I mean, they basically owned it. They didn't call it that. Well, there are things that could have been gone. What was done was to continue the policy of shutting plants, shipping work overseas, and so on, under the same—pretty much the—you know, a few different faces, but essentially the same attitude. There's an alternative. There are things the country badly needs—for example, high-speed transit. When you go abroad and you come back to the United States, in many ways it looks like a third-world country. I could give details, but one typical example is the lack of efficient mass high-speed public transportation. Well, the same GM plants that are being shut down have a skilled workforce in which they could develop that technology and provide it to the country. It would be extremely important for the economy. In the longer term it would be a step towards addressing the extremely serious global warming problem. But instead of doing that, what's happening, what—the policies are that the plants are being shut down, trimmed, the workforce cut back. Meanwhile, the transportation secretary is traveling around Europe using federal stimulus money to get contracts from Spain and France and other places to provide high-speed transit for the United States. I mean, it's surreal.
JAY: So, in other words, a public option for the auto industry.
CHOMSKY: That would mean worker takeover of the factories, which—'cause management isn't going to agree and bankers aren't going to agree. But it would mean that the workforce ought—and the community, what are called the stakeholders, ought to essentially take over the productive system. Then they could do this.
JAY: Well, certainly the government with GM and Chrysler could have had any makeup of the board they wanted.
CHOMSKY: Yeah, they could have had stakeholders.
JAY: What about on the finance sector, then? Why not the same thing, a public option for the finance sector?
CHOMSKY: Well, see, the finance sector really has to be pared down significantly. There are some interesting studies going on about this among economists. And take a look at the last issue of Dædalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. There are several lengthy discussions in it by very well-known economists, including Nobel laureates, who raise the interesting question, "What does the financial system do for us?" and they discuss ways. And what you can find out—they haven't really been investigated, but their judgment basically is, well, awful lot of it is harmful. I mean, there is a service that the financial institutions can perform, like directing investment to—directing funds, stored funds, you know, what you leave in the bank, to usable, to productive investment. But a huge amount of it is not doing that. It's devoted to cutting off a couple of nanoseconds from the financial transfers, which then get reversed a few nanoseconds later. It contributes nothing to the economy, but it absorbs huge funds, and it also draws some of the highest talent, which is also a cost. Well, with the financial institutions a real question is: to what extent do we need them? I mean, some extent. Paul Volcker, you may remember, awhile back said the only useful innovation in the financial sector for the last couple of decades is the ATM machine. He was exaggerating and making a point, but there is a point. So the financialization of the economy—and, incidentally, there's the global economy—that is a major issue that has to be reversed. It—ever since it happened, roughly the '70s.
JAY: I mean, is there any way to do that without the same logic that President Obama gave for the health-care system? Wouldn't it not be [the] same for the finance? You can't really do without some kind of public instrument.
CHOMSKY: With—yeah, and that could have easily been done, just as it could've been technically—.
JAY: Same thing, 'cause they were completely dependent upon public money.
CHOMSKY: Yes. So instead of just saying, okay, we'll bail you out and then pay you off, they could have said, okay, we own you now, and we'll reconstruct you in a socially useful way. That would require the kind of mass popular organization that, for example, led to the New Deal. You know, the New Deal didn't come out of nowhere. In fact, Roosevelt said, force me to do it.
JAY: So the critique of that is that then puts too much concentration of power within a federal government.
CHOMSKY: No, but—see, if we had a democratic society, functioning one, the federal government would be the population, so we put power in the hands of the population and their representatives. That's called democracy.
JAY: So the short of it is, to democratize the economics you've got to democratize the politics and vice versa.
CHOMSKY: And democratize the public. You have to reconstruct functioning significant public organizations of the kind that unions were in the past—and to a limited extent still are. And there are plenty of others. That's—I mean, we can say, okay, we're not going to have a democracy. Fine. Then let's just give it all to Goldman Sachs and—.
JAY: Blackwater.
CHOMSKY: You know, so we'll let them do it. That's, I think, what George Will was saying. Okay. So let's say it. You know. But if we're going to pretend to be a democracy, let's become one. Let's move towards a kind of society where April 15 is a day of celebration, 'cause we're implementing our plans.
JAY: April 15 being pay your taxes day.
CHOMSKY: Pay your taxes means, okay, we're cooperating to implement the programs that we've decided on. And the same thing could happen in, you know, a town where a GM plant is located and being closed down and the stakeholders, workforce, and the community say, no, we're going to take it over and produce what the country needs. Alright, that would require some federal stimulus, just like for GM to proceed as in the past required a big federal stimulus. But it can be done in different ways. We don't have go to Spain to get high-speed transport. We don't have to go to China to get solar panels. These are social decisions made by people in power, primarily these days bankers and other financial institutions, and there's no reason for the public to tolerate that. Now, as long as we're going to have that, you're going to get these contradictory attitudes like cut down on the government, cut down on taxes, but increase everything that I want, which is basically what you have now.
JAY: Thanks very much for joining us. And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)