Noam Chomsky doesn’t hold back… with Fatima Bhutto

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to this live stream event from HowToAcademy. Our guest tonight, Noam Chomsky, is the most influential linguist and cognitive scientist of our age, and a political thinker and activist of global renown. His interlocutor is the author and commentator Fatima Bhutto, whose books include The Runaways, The Shadow of the Crescent Moon, and New Kings of the World. They'll be in conversation for around 45 minutes, following which we'll have plenty of time for your questions, so do submit them as we go along in the Q&A box. That's plenty from me. Please join me in welcoming Fatima Bhutto and Noam Chomsky. Thank you to the HowToAcademy for organising this evening or morning, depending on where you are. Everyone who's joining us from around the world, welcome. Thank you for spending your time with us. And Professor Chomsky, it is an honour to be in conversation with you. I'll just get into it, because I have to cede the mic at some point to the audience. And I want to start with, obviously, the pandemic, and the fact that pandemics come, or at least they tend to coincide with large-scale societal failure, or at least that's an idea that goes back as far as the Bible. But even before the pandemic, we had plenty of global horror, namely a brutal and unrelenting inequality. In the United States, 1% of the population owns 40% of the wealth. 15% of the world's wealth is concentrated in the European Union and the United States. And just thinking of the pandemic alone, while so many people were struggling to survive, to live, to make ends meet, one new billionaire was created every 17 hours. At the same time, more or less, the number of people living in extreme poverty rose by 100 million. Death from hunger tops even the alarming coronavirus death rate. And so I want to ask you to start by speaking to us about how this kind of rampant inequality has brought us to where we are today, and how it has impacted the global handling of the pandemic. I don't want to romanticize earlier years. There were plenty of flaws during the period that economists call regimented capitalism or embedded liberalism. Basically, the New Deal program, the social democratic programs initiated pretty much by the US New Deal in the 1930s. Remember, in the 1930s, we were just, the world was facing very serious problems, not like today, but very serious. And there were several ways out. The continental Europe moved towards fascism. The United States moved towards social democracy. In the post-war period, that was picked up by Europe, developed a range of social democratic programs that lasted pretty much through into the 1970s. There was plenty of resistance by the business world, but was never able to overcome the enormous support for this basic framework of programs. So take, say, Dwight Eisenhower, the last authentic conservative in US politics. For him, the New Deal was untouchable. Straight out, any political figure who doesn't accept the New Deal programs just doesn't belong in our system. Anyone who challenges in any way the right of working people to organize unions simply is not part of our political system. That's the 1950s. That's a time when the Republicans in the United States were still an authentic political party. In parliamentary politics, it's known best. By the 1970s, for various reasons, the counterattack by the business world was succeeding. They were pushing back against the mildly social democratic programs of the earlier era. By the late 1970s—I'm now talking about the United States, but similar things elsewhere—by the late 1970s, with President Carter, who was very anti-labor, a Democrat, the dikes started breaking. 1978, the head of the United Auto Workers, Doug Fraser, pulled out of a labor management conference that Carter was running with a bitter statement. I can't follow my paraphrase, but basically he said that business has launched a one-sided class war against the poor, the working class, and much of the middle class, and they want to essentially destroy the programs that supported the general population, and he's not going to be part of it. It was a rather belated recognition. Business is always fighting a class war in the United States with a highly conscious business class that's intense and goes far back. The United States has a very violent labor history as compared to Europe, for example. But by 1978, Fraser recognized that too late. Then came Reagan and Thatcher, and the one-sided class war was just open, not even—no effort to conceal it. Reagan and Thatcher's first moves, sensible moves, were to eliminate the possibility of defense by attacking labor movements, seriously undermining the labor movement with, in fact, what were generally regarded then as completely illegal tactics, like scab permanent replacement workers. Reagan opened the door on all sorts of other options for the rich to gorge. There was an economic policy. It was pretty explicit. The economic guru of the administration, Milton Friedman, had—his doctrine became open and prominent. It was very explicit. Corporations have no responsibility other than self-enrichment, which, of course, means enrichment of the management and the CEO. Reagan's program announced in his inaugural lecture is government is the problem, not the solution. Put this together, it doesn't take a genius to predict the future. If decisions are no longer in the hands of government, which is at least partially responsible and responsive to the population, and shifted to private hands, unaccountable private concentrations of power, and their total responsibility is self-enrichment, does it take a genius to figure out what's going to happen? No. In fact, it happened in the United States to a significant extent in various ways in England and continental Europe. The worst victims are the Global South, of course, really vicious structural adjustment programs with extensive conditionalities that led to lost decades, a huge rise in poverty. In the United States, we actually have some measures of it carefully studied. The Bren Corporation, very respectable corporation, came out a couple months ago with an effort to analyze what they call the transfer of wealth, what we should call robbery, the transfer of wealth from the lower 90% of the population, working class, middle class, from them to the very top. If you look closely, it's really mostly a fraction of 1%. Their estimate over the 40 years of the neoliberal assault is close to $50 trillion, which is a significant underestimate. They don't take into account the other devices that the one-sided class war opened up, like tax havens, shell companies. If you look at the neoliberalism mantra definition, it says we're committed to market, total nonsense. We're not committed to market. What came out of it is what some economists call a bailout economy. Deregulate, first of all, allow the financial sector to grow enormously. Deregulate it. What do you expect? Regular crashes. Each one worse than the last. Didn't happen during the regimented capitalism period. Banks were controlled. It's not just banks, but those are the striking ones as the financial system, which is mostly predatory, grew enormously. You have a bailout economy started under Reagan, but worse over time. When there's a crash, the friendly taxpayers called in to compensate the perpetrators to see how it really works. If you want to know about class war under Obama, the less extreme case, always the more interesting. When Obama came, he came in in the wake of the housing crash and subsequent financial crisis. Congress had passed legislation to bail out the economy. There were two parts to it. One part was bail out the perpetrators, the banks who had made the predatory loans, huge insurance companies like AIG, which subsidized it, all knowing what they were doing. But then they could read the statistics about the housing prices going out of sight. But they were making money, so it was fine. So the first part is bail them out. Second part, which is also in the legislation, is provide some help for the victims. People who lost their homes, foreclosures, out in the streets, no job. Well, anyone who understands class war will be able to predict quickly what happened. One part of it was implemented. The other part was ignored. That so outraged the inspector general of the treasure department that he wrote a very angry book about it. That's the way it worked. It's the same thing with the huge bailout during the pandemic. It goes to the rich. They are fighting a vicious class war. And if it's one-sided, after they've undermined the defense, plenty of responsibility along the way, then you have these outcomes. And to see how extreme it is, really interesting to look at small details. But take a look at Congress right now. What's being debated is a reconciliation bill. One element of it, the Republican Organization, I hate to call them a party these days, abandoned parliamentary politics, but the Republican Organization is 100% rock solid against anything that might help the general population. They've established what they call red lines, things you can't go beyond. One of them is you cannot raise taxes on the very rich. You cannot touch the one legislative achievement under Trump. The tax bill, which was a giveaway to the super rich in the corporate sector at the expense of everyone else, can, of course, punch a huge hole in the deficit. But when Republicans make a deficit, it's not a problem. It's only when the deficit has components which benefit the rest of the population, then it's a huge problem. That can't be touched. Furthermore, you cannot fund the Internal Revenue Service. One of the elements has been very significantly defunded, which means you can't look for tax cheats. That was not true in the pre-Reagan period. They did look, but that was one of the things that was taken away. The tax cheats aren't the poor. They aren't the working class. Their income goes straight to the IRS. It's for the very rich. They have batteries of lawyers who can figure out tricky ways to evade tax. But the IRS is not allowed to look into it, not just to deal with it, not even to look into it. And this extends to one of the main Margaret Thatcher famously said, there's no society. Either she was lying or she was stupid. She knows perfectly well that there is a rich society, complex rich society for the wealthy and the corporate sector, all kinds of organizations. In the United States, the Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable, American Legislative Exchange Council, which ALEC corporate funded, which passes, which rams laws through state legislatures, which is pretty easy to buy, business friendly. And it's very interesting. And the same in England, of course. A rich society for the rich and the powerful, nothing for the rest. They're cast out and survive somehow, the ravages of the market, not the rich, they're carefully protected. This is one-sided class war. So what does ALEC do? Well, a lot of things, but the small ones are the revealing ones. There's a huge amount of wage theft in the United States, billions of dollars a year. Businesses just refusing to pay wages, refuse to pay overtime, extra wages, all sorts of things. Well, it's all illegal, but it doesn't matter when there's a criminal state because it doesn't look into it. So one of ALEC's main efforts at the state level is to get state legislatures to pass laws making it illegal to punish wage theft, but furthermore, make it illegal to investigate it. Can't leave a single stone unturned in vicious class war. Well, the neoliberal period has a formal definition, you can find it on the OED, but it has an actual definition, and the actual definition is one-sided class war. Well, you have that going on for 40 years, it has an impact. Part of the impact is the anger, resentment, contempt for democratic institutions, beginnings of collapse of the social order. I want to, I mean, there's so much to ask you, but I want to move to another side of the criminal state. Just in the 21st century alone, America has launched two wars against Muslim countries, against Iraq and Afghanistan, to say nothing about the drone bombing and military action against Pakistan, Syria, Libya, and others. And it's pretty clear that a huge reason that they went into those wars was to feed their enormous military-industrial complex. And it's also quite clear that those wars were not in American interests in the long term, they were actually against American long-term interests. But the military-industrial system has gone out of control, it's almost cannibalizing itself to the point that, you know, two trillion dollars or whatever it was, wasn't enough to save America from having to beat a hasty retreat from Afghanistan this summer. The Taliban took Kabul in all of six days. What can the U.S. do about its rogue military-industrial complex now? I mean, is it even possible to scale it back, to reel it back? Well, when Eisenhower used the term military-industrial complex, that's where it comes from, I think the original phrase that he used was military-industrial congressional complex. Congressional was taken out of the refined speech. What he didn't say, although I'm sure he knew, is that that's the high-tech advanced economy. It's not the military-industrial complex, it's the advanced economy, most of which was developed at public expense in the 1950s. Personally, I happen to be right at the heart of it. I was a junior faculty member at MIT, main research university in the world. Lots of government money pouring in, mostly through the Pentagon. The reason for that is, if you want to extract money from Congress, the easiest way to do it is say it's a defense, then Congress passes it. But it was really consciously developing the high-tech economy, what you and I are now using, computers, internet, satellites, microelectronics, and so on. It was all being developed for the purpose of creating an advanced economy. The funnel was the Pentagon, because that funnel was open. Congress funds it no matter what. In fact, this was such an open scandal that by 1969, there was an amendment called the Mansfield Amendment. Senator Mansfield thought this was out of hand, and the amendment said that the Pentagon funding has to be for some military purpose. It was understood that virtually none of it was. Of course, everything was for a military purpose, from anthropology to zoology, the military will try to use it. But the funding was to build the advanced economy. Fundamentally, it's not much of an exaggeration to say that the economy is a public subsidy, private profit economy. Taxpayer funding leads to research, development, risky, creative parts of the work. There's some corporate involvement, but usually secondary. And later, when something's marketable, hand it over to private power for profit and marketing and adaptation to the market. Same's true with drugs, incidentally. Take the Moderna vaccine. The basic work was mostly done in government labs or research universities. Actually, like MIT, where I spent almost all my life, you could see it right around you. The only people who didn't seem to see it were the economics department. Just take a look at the buildings surrounding the camp. During the 50s and 60s, it was electronics firms feeding off the research that includes IBM, Raytheon, and so on. Some of them are military-oriented, some of them just its economy, feeding off the research ideas, creativity in the public institutions. Take a walk around the campus now. What do you see? Pfizer, Novartis. What's happened is the economy has been shifting towards a biology-based economy. So therefore, you want to rip off the public, what you do is surround research universities with the corporations that can take part in the research that's going on and the creativity that's being done in the public sector and benefit from it. It's an exaggeration, but not much of one. The basic character of the economy.