[THS] !!!!!! Noam Chomsky: The Center Cannot Hold

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Capitalism the only game in town? Here's what capitalism really is.

Masters Of War

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

You’ve thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain’t worth the blood
That runs in your veins

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I’m young
You might say I’m unlearned
But there’s one thing I know
Though I’m younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
’Til I’m sure that you’re dead

	- Bob Dylan

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25618.htm

A Great Global Shift of Power?

"The Center Cannot Hold: Rekindling the Radical Imagination"

By Noam Chomsky

There are poignant studies of the indignation and the rage of those who have been
cast aside as the state-corporate programs of financialization and deindustrialization
have closed plants and destroyed families and communities.

Posted June 03, 2010  - -
[video at URL above - from Democracy Now]


TRANSCRIPT

      NOAM CHOMSKY: One month ago, Joseph Andrew Stack crashed his small plane
into an office building in Austin, Texas, hitting an IRS office, committing suicide. He
left a manifesto explaining his actions. It was mostly ridiculed, but I think it deserves
a lot better than that.

      Stack’s manifesto traces the life history that led him to this final desperate act.
The story begins when he was a teenage student living on a pittance in Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania, right near the heart of what was once a great industrial area. His
neighbor—I’m mostly quoting now—his neighbor was a woman in her eighties,
surviving on cat food, the widowed wife of a retired steel worker. Her husband had
worked all his life in the steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big
business and the union that, for the thirty years of his service, he would have a
pension and medical care to look forward to in his retirement. Instead he was one of
the thousands who got nothing, because the incompetent mill management and
corrupt union, not to mention the government, raided the pension funds and stole
their retirement. All she had was Social Security to live on. And Stack could have
added that are concerted and continuing efforts by the super-rich and their political
allies to take even that away on spurious grounds.

      Stack decided then that he couldn’t trust big business and would strike out on
his own, only to discover that he couldn’t trust a government that cared nothing
about people like him, but only about the rich and privileged. And he couldn’t trust a
legal system, which—in his words, in which "there are two 'interpretations' for every
law, one for the very rich and one for the rest of us," a government that leaves us
with "the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and
insurance companies [that] are murdering tens of thousands of people a year," with
care rationed by wealth, not need, all in a social order in which "a handful of thugs
and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities...and when it’s time for their gravy
train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the
force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if
not hours." And much more, which I won’t repeat.

      Stack tells us that his desperate final act was an effort to join those who are
willing to die for their freedom, in the hope of awakening others from their torpor. It
wouldn’t surprise me if he had in mind the woman eating cat food, who taught him
about the real world when he was a teenager, and her husband’s premature death.
Her husband didn’t literally commit suicide after having been discarded to the trash
heap, but it’s far from an isolated case, which we can add to the colossal toll of the
institutional crimes of state capitalism.

      There are poignant studies of the indignation and the rage of those who have
been cast aside as the state-corporate programs of financialization and
deindustrialization have closed plants and destroyed families and communities. These
studies reveal the sense of acute betrayal on the part of working people who believed
they had a fulfilled their duty to society in what they regard as a moral compact with
business and government, only to discover that they had only been instruments for
profit and power, truisms from which they had been carefully shielded by doctrinal
institutions.

      There are striking similarities in the world’s second-largest economy. This has
been investigated in a very penetrating study by Ching Kwan Lee into Chinese labor.
Lee draws the close comparison between working-class outrage and desperation in
the decaying industrial sectors of the United States and the fury among workers in
what she calls China’s rustbelt, the state socialist industrial center in the Northeast
now abandoned by the state in favor of state capitalist development of the Southeast
sunbelt, as she calls it. In both regions, Lee finds massive labor protests, but different
in character. In the rustbelt, workers express the same sense of betrayal as their
counterparts here, but in their case betrayal of the Maoist principles of solidarity and
dedication to development of the society that they had thought had been a moral
compact, only to discover that, whatever it was, it’s now bitter fraud. In the sunbelt,
workers who lack that cultural tradition still rely on their home villages for support
and family life. They denounce the failure of authorities to live up even to the minimal
legal requirements of barely livable workplace conditions and payment of the pittance
called salaries.

      According to official statistics, there were 58,000 “mass incidents” of protest in
2003 in just one province of the rustbelt, with three million people participating.
Some 30 to 40 million workers who were dropped from work units—quoting
Lee—“are plagued by a profound sense of insecurity,” arousing “rage and
desperation” around the country. And she expects that there’s worse to come, as a
looming crisis of landlessness in the countryside undermines the base for survival of
the sunbelt workers, who don’t even have a semblance of independent unions, while
in the rustbelt, there’s nothing like civil society support that exists, to some extent,
here. Both Lee and the studies of the US rustbelt make it clear that we should not
underestimate the depth of moral indignation that lies behind the bitterness about
what is perceived to be the treachery of government and business power acting
exactly as we should expect them to, unfortunately.

      Something similar can be found in rural India. There, food consumption has
sharply declined for the great majority since the neoliberal reforms were partially
implemented, all of this amidst accolades for India’s fabulous growth, and indeed it is
fabulous growth for some, though not for the rural areas, where peasant suicides are
increasing at about the same rate as the number of billionaires, not far away. And in
fact not so attractive for the workers, American workers, who are transferred to India
to reduce labor costs by IBM, which now has three-quarters of its work force abroad.
BusinessWeek calls IBM the “quintessential American company,” which is quite
appropriate: it became the global giant in computing thanks to the unwitting
munificence of the US taxpayer, who also substantially funded the whole IT
revolution on which IBM relies, along with most of the rest of the high-tech economy,
mostly on the pretext that the Russians are coming. Now IBM is paying them back.

      There’s much excited talk these days about a great global shift of power, with
speculation about whether, or when, China might displace the US as the dominant
global power, along with India, which, if it happened, would mean that the global
system would be returning to something like what it was before the European
conquests. And indeed their recent GDP growth has been spectacular. But there’s a
lot more to say about it. So if you take a look at the UN human development index,
basic measure of the health of the society, it turns out that India retains its place
near the bottom. It’s now 134th, slightly above Cambodia, below Laos and Tajikistan.
Actually, it’s dropped since the reforms began. China ranks ninety-second, a bit
above Jordan, below the Dominican Republic and Iran. By comparison, Cuba, been
under harsh US attack for fifty years, is ranked fifty-second. It’s the highest in Central
America and the Caribbean, barely below the richest societies in South America. India
and China also suffer from extremely high inequality, so well over a billion of their
inhabitants fall far lower in the scale. Furthermore, an accurate accounting would go
beyond conventional measures to include serious costs that China and India can’t
ignore for long: ecological, resource depletion, many others.

      These common speculations about a global shift of power, which you can read all
over the front pages, disregard a crucial factor that’s familiar to all of us: nations
divorced from the internal distribution of power are not the real actors in international
affairs. That truism was brought to public attention by that incorrigible radical Adam
Smith, who recognized that the principal architects of power in England were the
owners of the society—in his day, the merchants and manufacturers—and they made
sure that policy would attend scrupulously to their interests, however grievous the
impact on the people of England and, of course, much worse, the victims of what he
called “the savage injustice of the Europeans” abroad. British crimes in India were
the main concern of an old-fashioned conservative with moral values.

      To his modern worshippers, Smith’s truisms are ridiculed as, quote, “elaborate
theories of how world history was being manipulated by shadowy
corporatist/imperialist networks.” I’m quoting New York Times thinker David Brooks.
It’s one of the many illustrations of the intellectual and moral decline of what’s called
“conservatism” from the understanding of its heroes.

      Actually, in the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that I’m identified as
the villain who adopts Adam Smith’s heresy, as in fact I do.

      Well, bearing Smith’s radical truism in mind, we can see that there is indeed a
global shift of power, though not the one that occupies center stage. It’s a shift from
the global work force to transnational capital, and it’s been sharply escalating during
the neoliberal years. The cost is substantial, including the Joe Stacks of the US,
starving peasants in India, and millions of protesting workers in China, where the
labor share in income is declining even more rapidly than in most of the world.

      Martin Hart-Landsberg has done quite important work on this, and he reviews
how China is playing a leading role in the real global shift of power, not the one you
read about in the newspapers. It’s become kind of an assembly plant for a regional
production system. Japan, Taiwan, other Asian economies export parts and
components to China and provide China with most of the advanced technology that’s
used. There’s been a lot of concern about the growing US trade deficit with China,
but less noticed is the fact that the trade deficit with Japan and the rest of Asia has
sharply declined as this new regional production system takes place. US
manufacturers are following the same course, providing parts and components for
China to assemble and export, mostly back to the US. For the financial institutions,
the retail giants like, say, Wal-Mart, ownership and management of manufacturing
industries, and sectors closely related to this nexus of power, all of this is heavenly.
Not for Joe Stack and many others like him.

      To understand the public mood, it’s worthwhile to recall that the conventional
use of GDP, gross domestic product, to measure economic growth is highly
misleading. It’s a highly ideological measure. There have been efforts to devise more
realistic measures. One of them is called the General Progress Indicator. It subtracts
from GDP expenditures that harm the public, and it adds that value of authentic
benefits. Well, in the US, the General Progress Indicator has stagnated since the
1970s, although GDP has increased, the growth going into very few pockets. That
result correlates with others—for example, the studies of social indicators, the
standard measure of health of a society. Social indicators tracked economic growth
until the mid-’70s. Then they began to decline, and they reached the level of 1960 by
the year 2000. That’s the latest figures available. The United States is one of the very
few countries that has no government inquiry into social indicators. The correlation
with financialization of the economy and neoliberal socio-economic measures is pretty
hard to miss, and it’s not unique to the United States, by any means.

      Now, it’s true that there’s nothing essentially new in the process of
deindustrialization. Owners and managers naturally seek the lowest labor costs.
Occasionally there are efforts to do otherwise. Henry Ford is the famous example, but
his efforts were struck down by the courts long ago. So, in fact, it’s a legal obligation
for corporate owners and managers to maximize profit. One means of doing this is
shifting production. In earlier years, the shift was mostly internal, especially to the
Southern states. There, labor could be more harshly repressed. And major
corporations, like the first billion-dollar corporation, the US Steel Corporation of the
sainted philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, could also profit from the new slave labor
force that was created by the criminalization of black life in the South after the end of
Reconstruction in 1877. That’s a core part of the American industrial revolution,
which continued until the Second World War. That’s actually being reproduced in
part right now, during the recent neoliberal period. The drug war is used as a
pretext to drive the superfluous population, mostly black, back to the prisons, also
providing a new supply of prison labor in state and private prisons, much of it in
violation of international labor conventions. In fact, for many African Americans, since
they were exported to the colonies, life has scarcely escaped the bonds of slavery, or
sometimes worse.

AMY GOODMAN: MIT professor, author, activist, Noam Chomsky. This is Democracy
Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. We’ll come back to his speech
given at the Left Forum just a few weeks ago in New York City at Pace University in a
minute.

AMY GOODMAN: Today it’s Noam Chomsky for the hour, as we return to a major
address he gave on the weekend of the seventh anniversary of the US invasion of
Iraq. It was a gathering of more than a thousand people at the Left Forum at Pace
University in New York. Again, MIT professor, author, activist, Noam Chomsky.

      NOAM CHOMSKY: In the ultra-respectable Bulletin of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences, we can read—I’m quoting—that “The prison system in America
has grown into a leviathan unmatched in human history,” making the US “the home
to the largest custodial infrastructure for the mass depredation of liberty to be found
on the planet,” mostly black, increasingly Hispanic. It’s a product of the past thirty
years, the neoliberal years, as is the fact that the United States—quoting
again—“leads the world not only in incarceration rates but in executive
compensation.” I’m quoting a Harvard Business School professor who points out that
this correlation—this is “increasingly recognized to be linked," as is the fact that the
United States is lagging far behind much of the world, particularly China, but also
Europe, in developing green technologies.

      Well, it’s easy to ridicule the ways in which Joe Stack and others like him
articulate their concerns, which are very genuine and real. But it’s far more
appropriate to understand what lies behind their perceptions and actions, and
particularly, to ask ourselves why the radical imagination is failing to offer them a
constructive path, while the center is very visibly not holding. And those who have
real grievances are indeed being mobilized, but mobilized in ways that pose no slight
danger, to themselves and to the rest of us and to the world.

      Joe Stack’s manifesto ends with two evocative sentences, which I’ll read. “The
communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his
greed.” Stack minces no words about the capitalist creed. We can only speculate
about what he meant by the communist creed that he counterposed to it. I think it’s
not unlikely that he saw it as an ideal with a genuine moral force. If that’s so, it
wouldn’t be very surprising. Some of you may be old enough to recall a poll taken in
1976, on the year of the bicentennial, in which people were given a list of statements
and asked which ones they thought were in the Constitution. Well, at that time, no
one had a clue what was in the Constitution, so the answer “in the Constitution”
presumably meant: “so obviously correct that it must be in the Constitution.” One
statement that received a solid majority was Joe Stack’s “communist creed.”

      Well, I qualified that comment with the phrase “at that time.” Today, a segment
of the population memorizes and worships the Constitution, at least the words, if not
the meaning. There was a Tea Party convention a week ago which produced a
catechism for candidates. One requirement is that they must agree to scrap the tax
code and replace it with one no longer than 4,543 words long. That’s to match the
length of the Constitution, unamended. Only some amendments share this holy
status, one of them the Second, under the recent interpretation by the reactionaries
of the Supreme Court. Now, the First Amendment is suspect, because of what it
might be taken to imply about separation of Church and state. According to the
current version of conservatism, the US is to be a Christian state, kind of like the
Islamic Republic of Iran or the Jewish State of Israel. In that connection, incidentally,
Golda Meir is listed in the catechism as required learning for children, but no
Hispanics. Well, along with normal racism, that reflects the very curious amalgam of
extreme anti-Semitism and support for Israel among right-wing religious sectors. And
such matters should not be lightly dismissed when we try to look ahead.

      Encouraging, this anti-tax extremism that you see in the Tea Party movement is
not as immediately suicidal as Joe Stack’s desperate action, but it’s suicidal
nonetheless, and for reasons that I don’t have to elaborate. What’s happening right
now in California is a dramatic illustration. Right there, maybe one of the richest parts
of the world, the world’s greatest public education system is being systematically
dismantled. And the governor, Governor Schwarzenegger, says he’ll have to eliminate
state health and welfare programs unless the federal government forks over some $7
billion. And other governors are joining in. At the same time, a very powerful states’
rights movement is taking shape, demanding that the federal government not
intrude into our affairs. That’s a nice illustration of what Orwell called
“doublethink”—the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in mind while believing both
of them, which is practically a motto for the times. California’s plight results in large
part from anti-tax fanaticism. And that extends over much of the country.

      Well, encouraging anti-tax sentiment has long been a staple of the business
propaganda that dominates the doctrinal system. So people must be indoctrinated to
hate and fear the government, for very good reasons: of the existing power systems,
the government is the only one that, in principle, and sometimes in fact, is
answerable to the public and can impose some constraints on the depredations of
private power; the corollary to “getting government off our back” is groaning
beneath the even greater weight of unaccountable private tyranny. So-called
libertarians don’t seem to see that that’s what they’re calling for. But business anti-
government propaganda has to be nuanced: business of course favors a very
powerful state which serves Adam Smith’s principal architects, the owners of the
society today, not merchants and manufacturers, but multinationals and financial
institutions. Now, constructing this internally contradictory propaganda message is no
easy task. So people have to be trained to hate and fear the deficit, which is a
necessary means to stimulate the economy after its destruction at the hands of the
dominant financial institutions and their cohorts in Washington. But at the same time,
the population must favor the deficits. Almost half of them are attributable to the
military budget, which is breaking records under Obama, and the rest of the deficit is
predicted—what’s predicted to overwhelm the budget is the cruel and hopelessly
inefficient privatized healthcare system, which is a gift to insurance companies and
Big Pharma.

      Well, that’s a tricky propaganda task, but it’s been—we can see it all the time. It’s
been carried with pretty impressive success. One illustration is the public attitude
towards April 15th, when tax returns are due. Well, let’s put aside the thought of a
much more free and just society and just have a look at this one. In a functioning
democracy of the kind that formally exists, April 15th would be a day of celebration:
we’re coming together to implement programs that we’ve chosen. Now, here, it’s a
day of mourning: some alien force is descending upon us to steal our hard-earned
money. Well, that’s one graphic indication of the success of the intense efforts of the
highly class-conscious business community to win what its own publications call “the
everlasting battle for the minds of men.”

      Another stunning illustration of the success of propaganda, which has
considerable import for the future, is the cult of the great killer and torturer Ronald
Reagan, one of the grand criminals of the modern era, who also—he also had an
unerring instinct for favoring the most brutal terrorists and murderers around the
world, from Zia-ul-Haq and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in what’s now called AfPak to the
most dedicated killers in Central America to the South African racists who killed an
estimated 1.5 million people in the Reagan years and had to be supported because
they were under attack by Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, one of “more
notorious terrorist groups” in the world, the Reaganites determined in 1988. And on
and on, with remarkable consistency. Now, his grisly record was quickly expunged in
favor of mythic constructions that would have impressed Kim Il-sung. Among other
feats, he was anointed as the apostle of free markets, while raising protectionist
barriers more than probably all other postwar presidents combined and implementing
massive government intervention in the economy. He was a great exponent of law
and order, while he informed the business world that labor laws would not be
enforced, so that illegal firing of union organizers tripled under his supervision. His
hatred of working people was exceeded perhaps only by his contempt for the rich
black women driving their limousines to collect their welfare checks.

      Well, there should be no need to continue with the record, but the outcome tells
us quite a lot about the intellectual and moral culture in which we live. For President
Obama, this monstrous creature was a “transformative figure.” If you go over to
Stanford University’s prestigious Hoover Institute, he’s a colossus—I’m
quoting—whose “spirit seems to stride the country, watching us like a warm and
friendly ghost.” Well, painfully to record, many of the Joe Stacks, whose lives he was
ruining, join in the adulation and hasten to shelter under the umbrella of the power
and the violence that he symbolized.

      Now, all of this evokes memories of other days, when the center did not hold,
and they’re worth thinking about. One example that should not be forgotten is the
Weimar Republic. That was the peak of Western civilization in the sciences and the
arts, also regarded as a model of democracy. Through the 1920s, the traditional
liberal and conservative parties that had always governed the Reich entered into
inexorable decline. That was well before the process was intensified by the Great
Depression. The coalition that elected General Hindenburg in 1925 was not very
different from the mass base that swept Hitler into office eight years later, compelling
Hindenburg, who was an aristocrat, to select as chancellor the “little corporal,” as he
called him, that he detested. As late as 1928, the Nazis had less than three percent of
the vote. Two years later, the most respectable Berlin press was lamenting the
sight—I’m quoting—of the many millions in this “highly civilized country” who had
“given their vote to the commonest, hollowest and crudest charlatanism.” The center
was collapsing. The public was coming to despise the incessant wrangling of Weimar
politics, the service of the traditional parties to powerful interests and their failure to
deal with popular grievances. They were being drawn to the forces that were
upholding the grandeur of the nation and defending it against perceived threats in a
revitalized, armed, unified state, which is going to march to a glorious future, led by
the charismatic figure who, in his words, was carrying out “the will of eternal
Providence, the Creator of the universe.” By May 1933, the Nazis had largely
destroyed not only the traditional ruling parties, but even the large working-class
parties, the Social Democrats and the Communists, which were quite strong, along
with their very powerful associations. The Nazis declared May Day 1933 to be a
workers’ holiday. That was something the left parties had never been able to achieve.
In fact, many working people took part in the enormous patriotic demonstrations,
more than a million people in what was called Red Berlin that were joining farmers,
artisans, shopkeepers, paramilitary forces, Christian organizations, athletic and riflery
clubs, and the rest of the coalition that was taking shape as the center collapsed. By
the onset of the war, perhaps 90 percent of Germans were marching with the
brownshirts.

      Well, the world is too complex for history to repeat, but there are nevertheless
lessons to keep in mind, and even memories. I’m just old enough to remember those
chilling and ominous days of Germany’s descent from decency to Nazi barbarism,
quoting the distinguished scholar of German history Fritz Stern, who tells us that he
has the future of the United States in mind when he reviews what he calls “a historic
process in which resentment against a disenchanted secular world found deliverance
in the ecstatic escape of unreason." If that sounds familiar, it is. This is one possible
outcome of collapse of the center when the radical imagination, which in fact was
quite powerful at that time, nonetheless fell short.

      Well, the popular mood today here is complex in ways that are both hopeful and
troubling. One illustration is the attitudes toward social spending on the part of
people who identify themselves in polls as “anti-government.” There’s a recent
scholarly study which is kind of illuminating. It finds that, by large majorities, they
support—I’m quoting it—they support “maintaining or expanding spending on Social
Security, child care, and aid to poor people” and other social welfare measures,
though support falls off significantly when it comes to "aid to blacks and welfare
recipients.” Half of these anti-government extremists believe “that spending is too
little [on] assistance to the poor.” In the population as a whole, majorities, in most
cases substantial majorities, feel the government is spending too little to improve and
protect the nation’s health, and on Social Security, drug addiction, and child care
programs and so on, though again there’s an exception on aid for welfare and
black—welfare recipients and blacks. That’s probably a tribute to Reaganite thuggery,
I suppose.

      Well, these results give some indication of what might be achieved by
commitments that are even far short of the radical imagination, and also of some of
the impediments that are going to have to be overcome for these and much more
far-reaching purposes.

AMY GOODMAN: MIT professor, author, activist, Noam Chomsky. This is Democracy
Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. We’ll come back to his speech
given at the Left Forum just a few weeks ago in New York City at Pace University in a
minute.


AMY GOODMAN: Today it’s Noam Chomsky for the hour, as we return to a major
address he gave on the weekend of the seventh anniversary of the US invasion of
Iraq. It was a gathering of more than a thousand people at the Left Forum at Pace
University in New York. Again, MIT professor, author, activist, Noam Chomsky.

      NOAM CHOMSKY: The Massachusetts election last January, which undermined
majority rule in the Senate, that gives some further insight into what can happen
when the center does not hold and those who believe in even limited measures of
reform fail to reach the population. In the election—the elections, as you know, were
to fill the seat of the Senate’s so-called “liberal lion,” Ted Kennedy. In that election,
Scott Brown ran as the forty-first vote against healthcare, which Kennedy had fought
for throughout his political life. A majority, it turned out, opposed Obama’s proposals,
but primarily because they gave away too much to the insurance industry. And much
the same is true nationally, if you look at the polls on which the headlines are based.

      One interesting feature was the voting pattern among union members. That’s
Obama’s natural constituency, you’d think. Most of them didn’t bother to vote. But of
those who did, a majority chose Brown. And union leaders and activists explained
why. They said workers are angered at Obama’s record generally, but particularly
incensed over his stand on healthcare. One of them reported, “He didn’t insist on a
public option nor a strong employer mandate to provide insurance. It was hard not to
notice that the only issue on which he took a firm stand was taxing benefits” for the
healthcare that had been won by union struggles, retracting his campaign pledge.

      There was a massive infusion of funds from financial executives in the final days
of the campaign. Now, that’s one part of a broader phenomenon, which reveals
dramatically why Joe Stack and others have every reason to be disgusted at the farce
that they were taught to honor as democracy.

      Obama’s primary constituency all along was financial institutions. Their power has
increased enormously. Their share of corporate profits rose from a few percent in the
1970s to almost a third today. They preferred Obama to McCain, and they largely
bought the election for him. And they expected to be rewarded. And they were. I
don’t have to go through the details. But a few months ago, responding to the rising
anger of the Joe Stacks, Obama began to criticize the “greedy bankers” who had
been rescued by the public and even proposed some measures to constrain their
excesses. Punishment for this deviation was swift. The major banks immediately
announced very prominently—front page of the New York Times—that they would
shift funding to Republicans if Obama persisted with his offensive rhetoric.

      And Obama heard the message. Within days, he informed the business press
that bankers are fine “guys,” in his words, singling out the chairs of the two biggest
banks, two biggest crooks, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. They got specific
praise. And he assured the business world that—quoting him—“I, like most of the
American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth,” such as the huge
bonuses and profits that are infuriating the public. “That’s part of the free market
system,” Obama continued—not inaccurately, as “free markets” are interpreted in
state capitalist doctrine. His retreat, however, was not in time to curb the flow of cash
that gained the forty-first seat.

      Well, in fairness, we should concede that the greedy bankers had a point. Their
task is to maximize profit and market share. In fact, as I mentioned, that’s their legal
obligation. If they don’t do it, they’ll be replaced by somebody who will. These are
institutional facts, as are the inherent market inefficiencies that require them to
ignore what’s called systemic risk. They know full well that that’s likely to tank the
economy, but such externalities, as they’re called, are not their business. It’s also
unfair to accuse them of “irrational exuberance”—that’s Alan Greenspan’s phrase in
his extremely brief departure from orthodoxy during the tech boom of the '90s. Their
exuberance was not at all irrational: it was quite rational, in the knowledge that when
it all collapses, they can flee to the shelter of the nanny state, clutching their copies
of Hayek and Friedman and Ayn Rand. The same is true of the Chamber of
Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute and the rest of the business leaders,
who are running a massive propaganda campaign now to convince the public to
dismiss concerns about anthropogenic global warming—and with great success.
There's been a sharp decline in people who take it seriously. Those who believe in
this liberal hoax, as it’s called, have declined to about a third of the population. The
executives who are dedicating themselves to this task know perfectly well that the
hoax is very real and the prospects very grim. But they are fulfilling their institutional
role. If they don’t do it, somebody else will replace them who will. The fate of the
species is another externality that they must ignore, insofar as market systems
prevail. So you can’t criticize them.

      Returning—let’s go back to the very instructive Massachusetts election. It turns
out that the major factor in Brown’s victory was voting patterns. In the affluent
suburbs, voting was high and enthusiastic. In the urban areas, which are heavily
Democratic, voting was low and apathetic. So the headlines were right to report that
voters were sending Obama a message. The message was very clear. From the rich,
the message was we want even more than what you’re doing for us. And from the
rest, the message was Joe Stack’s: in his words, the politicians are not in “the least
bit interested in me or anything I have to say,” though they’re very much interested
in the voices of the masters. Well, there was no doubt some impact of the populist
image that was crafted by the PR machine—you know, “I’m Scott Brown, this is my
truck,” you know, “regular guy,” all that stuff. But that appears to have been a
secondary role. The popular anger is very real, and it’s entirely understandable, with
the banks thriving, thanks not only to the bailouts but to all sorts of other benefits
that they’re getting from the nanny state, while the population remains in deep
recession. Even official unemployment is at ten percent—actual, much higher—and in
manufacturing industry, official unemployment is at the level of the Great Depression,
one out of six unemployed, and very few prospects for recovering the kinds of jobs
that are lost as the economy is being reshaped, in the manner that—with the global
shift of power that I described.

      Well, national polls reveal much the same phenomenon. The latest one I’ve seen
was just a couple of days ago, Wall Street Journal. It shows what they call a 21
percent enthusiasm gap between the parties, with 67 percent of Republicans saying
they’re very interested in the coming November elections, as compared with 46
percent of Democrats. There’s also a major shift from the norm, in that there’s a ten-
point margin by which registered voters say they believe that Republicans are better
at dealing with the economy. That’s a combination of a solid Republican, mostly quite
affluent sector and disillusioned Democrats, who see what’s happening, the Joe
Stacks. Half of Americans would like to see every member of Congress defeated in
the election, including their own representative. Very remarkable picture of—it’s a
remarkable picture of how the center is not holding. And it evokes memories, which
we shouldn’t forget, some of which I mentioned. Now, the public conception of
democracy is almost as negative as the aspirations of the business world. Of course,
they hate democracy, naturally. But they’re now lobbying very fiercely. One of their
highest objectives is to ensure that even shareholders should have no say in choice of
managers, let alone what are called stakeholders, workers and the community. That’s
out of the question. But to quote the Wall Street Journal, some liberals are seeking to
find “`a fair position’ that straddles the divide between companies and shareholders.”
That’s a very interesting phrase, the divide between companies and the people who
own the companies, the shareholders. But they’re right. They’re recognizing the
decision of the courts a century ago that the corporation should be identified with the
management; the shareholders are irrelevant, just like the rest of the public.

      Well, it’s true that there was a federal stimulus, and even though it was much
too small, did have an effect. It’s estimated it saved about two million jobs, according
to the Congressional Budget Office. But the perception of the Joe Stacks that it was a
bust has a basis. Over a third of government spending is by states, and the decline in
state spending approximated the federal stimulus. So the aggregate fiscal
expenditure stimulus was flat. There was no stimulus. That’s according to a study,
recent study, by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the standard source of
economic information.

      Well, the center is clearly not holding, and those who are harmed are once again
shooting themselves in the foot. The immediate consequence in Massachusetts was
to provide another vote to block the appointment of a pro-union voice at the National
Labor Relations Board, which has been virtually defunct since Reagan’s successful
war against working people. Well, that’s what can be expected in the absence of
constructive alternatives.

      Well, are there constructive alternatives? Take a look at the industrial heartland,
in Ohio, where General Motors, among others, continues to close plants. There’s one
of the few journalists in the United States who pays any attention to labor issues,
Louis Uchitelle of the New York Times. He reported recently from the scene of one
recently closed plant. He writes that President Obama “never sought to reopen the
factory even after the federal government became controlling shareholder in GM
during the auto bailout," so they could do what they wanted. What Obama has done
instead is to "try to ease some of the pain by sending an ambassador as a salve for
the community’s wounds, offer[ing] hope"—remember that—"and aid.” The aid is
suggestions which can’t be implemented. Meanwhile, there’s another ambassador,
who he doesn’t mention, the Secretary of Transportation Roy LaHood, and that other
ambassador is in Spain. He’s offering federal stimulus money to Spanish firms to
produce the high-speed rail facilities that the US badly needs and that could surely
be produced by the highly skilled work force that’s reduced to penury in Ohio, while
Obama shuts down the factories. That’s Joe Stack’s experience in Harrisburg again.

      In 1999, LaHood, who was then a Republican congressman, introduced a bill
that would have provided federal funding for transportation infrastructure. It would
have authorized the Treasury to provide $72 billion a year in interest-free loans to
state and local governments for capital investments. That includes investments in
transportation, in transportation infrastructure. And interestingly, his bill called for,
not borrowing the money, but using US notes. That’s much as Abraham Lincoln did
to finance the Civil War and as FDR did during the Great Depression. Well, that was
1999. Today LaHood is using federal stimulus money to obtain contracts in Spain for
the same purpose. It’s another sign of how the center has been disappearing in
recent years, the past thirty years.

      Well, the radical imagination should suggest an answer. The factory in question,
and many others, could be taken over by the workforce with the support of—that
would, of course, require the support of the communities that are left desolate, and
in fact the rest of us. And they could be converted to production of high-speed rail
facilities and other badly needed goods. Now, I said "radical imagination," but the
idea is not particularly radical. In the nineteenth century, it was intuitively obvious to
New England workers—quoting them, quoting their papers—that “those who work in
the mills should own them,” and the idea that wage labor differed from slavery only
in that it was temporary was so common that it was even a slogan of Lincoln’s
Republican Party. Well, during the recent years of financialization and
deindustrialization, there have been repeated efforts to implement worker and
community takeover of closing plants. A few have succeeded, but not most. The
ideas have immediate moral appeal to the affected workforce and the communities,
and they should be quite feasible with sufficient public support. And they would be
very far-reaching in their implications.

      Well, for the radical imagination to be rekindled and to lead the way out of this
desert, what is needed is people who will work to sweep away the mists of carefully
contrived illusion, reveal the stark reality, and also to be directly engaged in popular
struggles that they sometimes help galvanize. So what is needed, in short, is the late
Howard Zinn. Terrible loss. Well, there won’t be another Howard Zinn, but we can
take to heart his praise for “the countless small actions of unknown people” that lie at
the roots of the great moments of history, the countless Joe Stacks who are
destroying themselves, and maybe the world, when they could be leading the way to
a better future.

AMY GOODMAN: MIT professor, author, activist, Noam Chomsky, world-renowned
linguist and political dissident, speaking at Pace University in New York on March
21st, addressing more than a thousand people at the Left Forum.