Noam Chomsky on the State-Corporate Complex: A Threat to Freedom and Survival

Hello, good afternoon, I have two cleaning matters to start. If I can, firstly I ask that you turn off the pagers and ringers on your electronic devices and secondly I ask that no photographs be taken during the event this afternoon, thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Louise Cowan and, as Director of Heart House, it is my great honor to welcome you to today's event with esteemed professor of linguistics, prolific author, political theorist and public intellectual, Dr. Nome Chomsky, who will speak before the

state

corporate

complex

about a

threat

to

freedom

and

survival

before giving the floor to Linda McQu, who will introduce Our Guest.

I'd like to tell you a little about Har House and the Heart House debate committee, the student group organizing today's event together with Science for Peace and the Near East. Foundation and share with you in particular why we are so pleased to have the opportunity to host Professor Chomsky. The Heart House vision

state

ment describes Heart House as a living laboratory of social, artistic, cultural and recreational experiences where all voices, rhythms and traditions converge as the vibrant home for the education of mind, body and spirit conceived by its founded ERS heart house encourages and supports activities that provide spaces to awaken the capacity for self-knowledge and self-expression Har house has always remained the proud champion of education that extends beyond The conference room and our vision statement express our commitment to offer rich and diverse programming to provide students with entry points to find their voice, spark their curiosity, challenge deeply held ideas, and negotiate emerging identities.

Events like today's conference contribute to our purpose and the fabric of Campus Life by providing spaces for critical discourse and dissenting opinions and for members of the campus and community community to participate in vital conversations, thus helping us all give meaning to the world around us. The heart house debate committee, made up of students from across the university, focused its activities. in creating opportunities for debate and dialogue on the important issues of the day, are one of several student groups at Har House that give voice to our vision through diverse programming conceived and executed by students for students and the community in general during the last few years.

For years, the debate committee has organized events on topics such as the limits of free speech, the criminalization of the HIV state, gender testing in sports, Canada's role in Afghanistan, fighting dictators, Sharia law in Ontario, as well as debates among political leaders at the provincial, local and federal levels, given this rich tradition, the committee is particularly pleased to host Professor Chsky and, in doing so, provide an opportunity for students and members of community at large to engage in his powerful critique of the current model of global capitalism, so without further delay, I am pleased to invite Linda McQu to formally introduce Professor Chomsky.

Linda mcqu has earned a national reputation for taking on the establishment that the National Post called mcqu. Canada's Michael Moore's career highlights include winning a national newspaper award for a series of global and mail-order articles that sparked public attention. the public inquiry into the activities of political lobbyist Patty Star, which ultimately led to the star's imprisonment, and two McLean cover stories investigating the questionable dealings of Conrad Black Mcqu has also addressed prevailing orthodoxies in a series of books on politics and economics, including seven Canadian national bestsellers. His latest book, The Trouble with Billionaires, written with tax professor Neil Brooks, shows how the rise of a new exceptionally wealthy elite has far-reaching negative consequences for society.

Please join me in giving a warm welcome to Linda McCraig, thank you, thank you Louise, for those words. Kind words that I greatly appreciate and thank you for that warm welcome. I just want to say how excited and delighted I am to be here introducing someone who for so long has been an icon and a legendary hero to me. How is Nom introduced? Chomsky, my goodness, just some highlights or some kind of descriptions of him. The New York Times has described him as possibly the most important intellectual alive today, perhaps the most widely read foreign policy voice on the planet.

Look, these are superlative types of comments. He has been cited more frequently than any other living scholar. In fact, he is the eighth most cited source of all time, including Plato and Aristotle. Galileo Dayart. Oh, and here's one I've been told to include. He has an honorary doctorate from the U of Te and just one, I would quickly add that he has been a source of inspiration to many people like me, who aspire in some way to challenge the establishment and challenge the powers that dominate our society. and yet, you know, despite this enormous impact that he's had, you know, being the eighth most cited person in the history of the world, it's fascinating to note that he remains outside the mainstream, I mean, we're the ones who We see a large crowd. here today and many more who have been rejected and yet interestingly you know it's not really a media circus, we don't really have thousands of media falling on us like we would if it was presumably Aristotle or Dayart or Someone like that was here and that's because, to some extent, I think the media treats Chomsky with suspicion and even hostility—in fact, he was telling me over lunch that the only American outlet that features him regularly is Fox News, I think.

It's probably more due to a kind of curiosity than any serious interest in his views. Professor Chomsky started, of course, in the field of linguistics. As a young professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he revolutionized the field of linguistics that he has described. Often, as the father of modern linguistics, he and he have received enormous public recognition for the groundbreaking work he has done in linguistics and continues to do so as a leading thinker in this field, perhaps the leading thinker, but what is fascinating is when changed his focus. Linguistics where he was treated like an international superstar when he brought that approach to political analysis and that same formidable intellect that led to all those advances in thought and Linguistics when he applied that to political analysis the reception was very different, in fact, uh. the reception was often very hostile.

He began to do this very prominently in the early days of the Vietnam War and challenged the American role in ways that people simply weren't prepared for, at least the elite weren't prepared for and so on. the hostility that came towards him is perhaps not surprising Ur Rising uh when you think about what Chomsky did, what Chomsky did and what Chomsky continues to do is challenge and expose the power to expose what it is about, expose it in all its truth naked and expose. its goals and all the myths surrounding it, so, for example, he questioned the widely held and accepted notion that what the United States was doing in Vietnam or what it has done and in so many other countries was somehow benign and that it was about bringing good or helping other people or making the world safe for terrorists or anything that somehow the United States in its exercise of power was different from what other imperial powers had been in the past.

In fact, Chsky has relentlessly exposed that both the United States and increasingly Canada as we join American activities abroad, let's say he was in fact promoting specific interests in the way that all powers do. imperial and that those interests are largely

corporate

interests now in exposing these kinds of things. Of course, he also exposes the role of the intellectual and this has been one of his most important works: intellectuals, academics and the media. He exposes his inability to challenge power, to specifically challenge the power of his own governments. In other words, they can be incredibly insightful and they can be incredibly tough when pursuing the enemy, they can see the hypocrisy and the nakedness of power of, say, the Soviets or the bureaucrats in Iran, but they are often intellectuals.

The elite here are often blind. when, when we look at the actions of our own side, our main commentators, in fact, you know, tend to be enormously soft on those in power here and, in fact, they tend to be defenders of power. In fact, Chomsky often compares them. I'll suddenly make it clear that you know that could have been said by someone from Pravda and, by the way, when you hear it at first, it baffles you when you read his stuff, it's so relentless, so meticulous that it's very carefully, you go in and out realizing which is absolutely right.

And when you do that, of course, you'll never feel the same about Peter Mansbridge again. And in doing this, of course, Chomsky focuses on the abdication of responsibility on the part of intellectuals who on our side know when they see atrocities committed on our side and wars abroad, they know that they speak well, they may have left bad things that shouldn't have happened, there was a little collateral damage, but in fact, what Chomsky clearly shows is that this is part of a systematic and ruthless exercise of power that promotes very specific interests, corporate power interests, and which is done with absolutely reckless and reckless consideration or indifference to people around the world, and in this way, by doing this, you know, our intellectuals and not grasping what our elite are doing is in a set that provides them a kind of cover.

I was reminded of this a couple of years ago, I remember when after the war in Iraq and it was finally clearly recognized that the war in Iraq had not been about weapons of mass destruction. I think Dick Cheney eventually even acknowledged it, uh, not now, that's kind of a Crucial Reveal, right? And I remember watching Wolf Blitzer on CNN and he was like scratching his head and saying my God, how could we have gotten this so wrong? WR and I was thinking, you know. I remember before the invasion of Iraq. I remember 10 million people in the streets around the world protesting against that invasion.

Somehow they didn't understand it. They were wrong, in fact, I remember them carrying signs, uh, you know, how did their oil get, how did our oil get under their sand, you know, and I mean, they understood that the invasion, uh, there probably wouldn't be What would happen if Iraq was instead of sitting on a There was a ton of oil on top of, say, a ton of carrots or something, but somehow Wolf Blitzer and the media people didn't get it, they didn't get it because they didn't have the same skepticism that ordinary people have. They didn't ask the hard questions even though they were in a position to ask those hard questions, so they let the empowered slide, well, Chomsky never lets the empowered slide, uh, and in that sense he's the real. public intellectual now, of course, all of this is particularly important, takes on the role of the intellectual when we talk about the university because here at the University we think of this as a place of critical inquiry if something is going to challenge the prevailing norms and the prevailing ideas will be here at University College and in fact, if you read the UFT statement of purpose, you'll see some incredibly strong statements about how you know and this is on the UFT governing council website, we affirm that uh, the concept Unique to the university, the most crucial of all human rights is the right to

freedom

of expression, academic freedom, freedom of research, we assert that these rights are meaningless unless they involve the right to ask deeply disturbing questions and provocative challenges to society's most cherished beliefs.

In general and in the university itself, it is this human right to radical critical teaching and research that the university has above all the duty to care about because there is no one else, no other institution, no other position in our modern liberal democracy let him be the custodian. of this precious and vulnerable right of the liberated human Spirit. Wow, I mean, that's powerful, it almost makes you cry. A powerful state statement of the University as an important body to hold those in power and those accountable and to maintain a critical attitude. Be careful what is happening, in fact, in reality, the university I must often say is not up to this, of course, many of you are familiar with the situation of the Monk's School of Global Affairs, the donation of $35 million awarded by Peter Monk.

CEO of baric gold to establish a school of Global Affairs um and this of course begs the question: will that school encourage the type of research of, say, mining companiesoperating in the third world what a school of global affairs should logically say? Looking at the monk's agreement with the UFT, there is reason to be concerned about this, in fact, the monk has more influence than one would like, um, than most of his or a large part of his donation, 15 million, will only be delivered. on the way, uh, and only after you are satisfied with the direction of the school, you also specified that it is also specified in the agreement that the monk school will be in this beautiful Heritage building and only senior teachers and their guests will be allowed to enter . through the front door that everyone else, the junior teachers, the public, the students will come in through the back door anyway, maybe you know there is a protest this afternoon, in fact, right after this event there is a protest, uh , going before the Government Council to uh, come to the front. of the Governing Council to urge them to reconsider this whole situation with the monks and Professor Chomsky has indicated that he plans to attend, in fact, he has invited me to go with him and you know that if any of you wanted to come we could also have a party and I just want to point out that we will enter through the front door.

Now I dropped Professor Chsky off last night at his hotel after his speech at UFT Scarboro and I was shocked by the fact that I stopped and a taxi driver started honking at me and I thought, "Oh, boy, you know, I parked in the wrong place or something like that," and the guy was very insistent and it turned out that he was I was so excited that there was no Chomsky whom I had seen in his native Greece years ago and who always, you know, remained a big fan, and this reminded me why Chomsky is, in fact, the most important intellectual alive today. you know he exposes those in power and the way they exercise and abuse power and the elites who cooperate and cover up for them and he does all this in the public interest in the interest of the common person and I know more than any individual. today I think it can truly be said that Nome Chomsky speaks truth to power I give you Nome Chomsky thank you very much thank you uh well I'm going to talk mostly about the United States uh partly because I know it better but also partly because of its unique significance in global system, which has been true dramatically since World War II, the character and extent of this singularity is often not understood and would be worth talking about in itself, but I won.

We won't go into that, however, we constantly see that even in relatively small ways, for example when a housing bubble burst in the United States a couple of years ago, starting a global economic crisis in which most of the world is still submerged. The worst results were simply avoided by rather desperate measures in another area - when France and Britain wanted to bomb Libya a couple of weeks ago, they had to turn to a more reluctant Washington to do the heavy lifting and provide most of the means. of violence we have an enormous comparative advantage in that area, furthermore, although the United States, American society and its political economy are unusual in some ways, it is not that different from other places, and in fact, developments within the United States Over the years, states have often foreshadowed what will happen very soon in other industrial societies of the state capitalist world.

Well, that world, in fact, the whole world is always changing, of course, but there are significant continuities and they are worth keeping in mind. Note that one continuum is that those who control the economic life of a country also tend to have overwhelming influence over state policy. This should be a truism taught in elementary school. It was succinctly formed by Adam Smith in words I have quoted. before, but they are important enough to repeat, speaking of Britain of course, he wrote that the main architects of politics are the owners of society in his time, the merchants and manufacturers, the masters of humanity, like himself called them, and they guarantee that state policy serves their interests, however, the serious effect on others, including the national population, but mainly on the victims of what he called his savage injustice abroad and India was his prime example in the early days of the destruction of India.

Well, today the masters of humanity are. uh, multinational corporations and financial institutions, but the lesson still applies and helps explain why the state corporate

complex

is in fact a

threat

to freedom and indeed even

survival

. Well, at this point there are important elaborations of Smith's truism applied to the modern world. The most sophisticated and sophisticated version I know is from political economist Thomas Ferguson, what he calls his theory of investment in politics, which in summary and simplified essentially sees American elections as occasions in which coalitions of private investors come together to invest to control the state it becomes.

It turns out to be a thesis of fairly high predictive success over more than a century, as it shows that what it effectively means is that choices are largely bought and that the buyer expects to be rewarded and that happens all the time. It was illustrated very clearly. In the last US presidential election in 2008, President Obama's victory was largely due to a huge influx of capital from financial institutions, especially towards the end of the campaign, they preferred him over his opponent McCain. and they expected to be rewarded and of course they were. The country at the time was mired in a deep recession, so Obama's first act was to select an economic team that was made up almost entirely of those who had caused the severe economic crisis he inherited, systematically avoiding critics of their practices, including quite prestigious ones.

The Nobel Prize winners, in fact, the business press wrote quite ironically about this. Bloomberg News did a review of Obama's economic team, looked at each of them, looked at their records and said they concluded that these people should not be on the economic team to fix. to improve the economy they should receive subpoenas, which was quite correct, of course they didn't, it is not surprising that the team chose measures that rewarded the main culprits, who are now richer and more powerful than before and a poise to open the path to the next and probably a more severe financial crisis now recently there was an interesting article about this by uh the special inspector of the barovsky bailout programs wrote a bitter condemnation of the way it was executed uh points out that the legislative act that authorized the bailout was a negotiate uh the financial institutions that were responsible for the crisis would be saved by the taxpayer and the victims of their misdeeds, in fact, real crimes the victims would be somewhat compensated with measures to protect home values ​​and preserve the home ownership, is primarily a housing crisis.

Only the first part of the deal was fulfilled, the financial institutions were handsomely rewarded for causing the crisis and were pardoned for blatant crimes, but the rest of the program failed, as Rovski points out, I am quoting him, foreclosures continued to rise with 8 It is predicted up to 13 million filings over the life of the program, while the largest banks are 20% larger than before the crisis and control a larger share of the economy than ever, they reasonably assume that the government will bail them out again if necessary. necessary, including credit rating agencies. Credit rating agencies factor future government market bailouts into their assessments of the largest bank, which means exaggerating market distortions that give them an unfair advantage over smaller institutions that continue to struggle.

In short, as he says, Obama's programs were a gift. to Wall Street executives and a blow to the solar plexus to their helpless victims in other words, the government listened to those who have a voice in the political system and acts accordingly, all completely in accordance with Smith's truism, well, There should be no surprises. here are careful studies of Senate voting over a long period and they show that the Senate actually responds to a sector of the population that represents the top third in terms of income; in fact, a more detailed analysis would show that, in contrast, it is a very small fraction of that top third.

There is no correlation between the votes of the Senate and the opinions of the middle third. For the lower third there is a correlation, it is negative. The votes of the Senate go against the preferences of the bottom third and on important issues of foreign and domestic policy there is a quite marked disconnection. between public opinion and public policy over a long period Well, one could argue that these results are really not far from the intentions of the founders of society, which is why James Madison, who was the main architect of the constitutional order, explained to the Constitutional Convention that power should remain in the hands of the Senate, the Senate was not directly elected by voters until about a century ago, in those days the executive was more or less an administrator, not an emperor, and the chamber It was the third part of the system, which is The people closest to the public had much more limited authority and that is the way it was, in fact, established, as M.

Madison explained to the Constitutional Convention, the Senate represents the wealth of the nation, the most capable group of men, the men who respect the owners and their correct rights and understand that the government must protect the minority of the opulent against the majority, that is quite accurate, something else that should be taught in grade school, we should keep in mind, however, in Madison's defense, that his mentality was pre-capitalist, so he assumed that a senator would be, as he himself said, an enlightened statesman and a benevolent philosopher; the Senate would be an elected body of citizens whose wisdom could best discern the true interests of their country and whose patriotism and love of justice would be least likely to influence them. sacrificing it to temporary or partial considerations would simply, thereby refining and broadening the opinions of the public, protecting the public against the antics of democratic majorities is rather like the noble Roman knight of the fantasies of the age, actually Adam Smith Before him I had sharper vision.

Mind you, well, it didn't take Madison long to change his way of thinking about this when he saw the first results of the democratic experiment. In fact, he thought better of it in 1792, just a couple of years later, by then he was deploring what he called audacity. the depravity of the times as the stockbrokers become the Petorian gang of the government both its tool and its tyrant bribed by its largesse and outdoing it with outcry and combinations, which is not a bad description of the current political system and its social and economic core. Well, today, in the richest country in human history, 20% of the population qualifies for food stamps.

Real unemployment today is at the level of the Great Depression for a large part of the population. Manufacturing workers, for example, and in fact, their actual circumstances are much worse. In the Great Depression, which I am old enough to remember, most of my family were unemployed working class and the country was, of course, much poorer than it is today, but it was a hopeful period in many ways, there was a feeling that people were doing something about it and that times would get better and in fact they did thanks to the CIO being very active in organizing other things and then immense government stimulus first during the war and then continuing through the postwar decades .

Well that's not true today, the jobs that are being lost are unlikely to return at least under the current programs of the Masters of Humanity, not Graven and Stone, but those are their programs while the population suffers, uh Goldman Sachs, who is one of the main architects of the current crisis, uh, they are now richer than ever and they just quietly announced $17.5 billion in additional compensation for last year; CEO Lloyd received a blank fine of 12.6 million, while his base salary is tripled and exactly as Barski said, they are prepared to play the same game. Again, why can't they rely on the government's insurance policy that allows them to safely engage in risky transactions, make huge profits, and fail to take into account what in the jargon of economics are called externalities, the effect of a transaction? in others?

Fundamentally in your case, what is called systemic risk, that is, the probability that the entire system will collapse as a result of your risky and therefore profitable transactions, and when it collapses as expected, it is not a big problem, They can turn to the powerful. Nanny claims they raise U by holding his copies of Hayek and Milton in her hands.Friedman and Ein Rand and so on and they can demand the bailout to which they are entitled because they are too big to fail, as stated and as one. The commenter added that Riley is also too old to go to jail for pretty serious crimes.

He is a pretty impressive scam, of course, it is a radical violation of capitalist principles, but the masters of humanity believe in those principles only for others, not for themselves, and that position has a long history. Another issue that is important to understand if we are to grasp the nature of the world we actually live in lies in the background of a very revealing interaction that is taking place right now between two countries that are quite different in terms of U uh Independence and the economic development in the United States and Egypt the uprisings for democracy in the Arab world, particularly in Egypt, are events of true historical importance and greatly frighten Western power, for very simple reasons, the West will certainly do everything it can to prevent a true democracy in the Arab world to see why you only have to take a look at the studies on Arab public opinion, which are certainly known to planners, if not to the Western public, at least to those who stick to the media. . that for example in Egypt around 90% of the population thinks that the United States is the main threat they face, maybe 10% think that Iran is a threat, in reality around 80% think that the region would be safer if Iran had nuclear weapons, uh, and those numbers seem high in Egypt, but they're pretty true throughout the Arab world, so it's obvious that the West is not going to do everything it can to prevent those views from entering politics, which which means to prevent uh, any form of authentic democracy, uh, uh, these are extremely important events and it's important to watch how they're developing, so by the way, all of these have a long history, for example, the Egyptian movement that You probably saw it was led by the U. by a group of young techies who called themselves the April 6th movement, why April 6th, well that's a reference to a major labor action that was prepared and planned on April 6, 2008 at one of Egypt's main industrial facilities, the Mahala.textile uh facility there was supposed to be a big strike many support activities I was crushed by the military dictatorship of the U that we were supporting uh forgotten here you know who cares but not forgotten there and the same thing happens in the other countries the things that have been the ones that have suddenly exploded do not come from nowhere uh that is also true for the first one that is not even reported uh the wave current uh uprisings actually started in the last uh uh African Colony one of the two countries in the The Arab world was invaded, occupied and colonized by an external power that is Western Sahara, technically a dependency that is supposed to go to decolonization , was invaded in 1975 by Morocco, a brutal invasion as the majority of the Moroccan population there illegally, of course, and There have been repeated protests, there was another in November and E last November, an effort to establish a tense city.

Moroccan forces quickly crushed it, as it is a liability, the issue reached the Security Council, but France made sure there was. There is no need to investigate what happened, he has to protect his Moroccan client, eh, that was the first in the other occupied country, since until now they don't know anything, the lid has been tightly closed, that is Palestine, uh, there is a lot to say about it, but I think most of you are. familiar with it or should be at least, not least, because of the very brave and important work done here by the late Jim Graph, well, whatever happens, it's not clear, this is all still a work in progress, but at despite internal barriers. and external limitations, these popular movements have achieved substantial success and have quite an exciting prospect.

One of the most dramatic recent moments was on February 20, when Kamala Abas sent a message from T Square in Cairo to the workers of Wisconsin saying that we are with you. as you were with us, abas is a leader of the years of struggle of the Egyptian workers for elementary rights that lie in the background of today's Arab Spring, as I said, brutally crushed by the Western dictator, he is also a figure prominent in the current uprising. and Aasa's message of solidarity to Wisconsin workers evoked the traditional aspirations of the labor movement. Solidarity between the workers of the world and the populations in general.

Well, right now the trajectories in Cairo and Madison are intersecting, but in Cairo they are going in opposite directions. towards the obtaining of elementary rights denied by the dictatorships in Madison towards the defense of rights that have been won in long and hard struggles and are now under severe attack and each of these is a kind of microcosm of trends that are underway in the global society following varied courses and there will surely be far-reaching consequences for what is happening in the decaying industrial heartland of the richest and most powerful country in human history and in what President Eisenhower called the most strategically important area in the world, that is, the Middle East. a stupendous source of strategic power and probably the richest economic prize in the world in the field of foreign investment; those are the words of the State Department in the 1940s.

I was surprised that the United States intended to keep it for itself and its allies in the development of New York. World Order of the day that they were organizing and implementing and in fact they are still doing well, it is normal for the victors to send history to the trash and it is normal for the victims to take it seriously and if we want to understand the world, we must follow their example today In fact, it is not the first time that Egypt and the United States have faced similar problems and moved in opposite directions, which was also true in the early 19th century in ways that are quite crucial for both societies and widespread. around the world are crucial to understanding the creation of the divide between the rich first world and the poor third world and much less Sharp in those days, well, at that time, in the early 19th century, Egypt and the United States were in good position to undertake rapid economic development.

Both had rich agriculture that included cotton, which is a kind of fuel of the early Industrial Revolution, although unlike Egypt, the United States had to develop cotton production and a labor force through conquest, extermination, and slavery. with consequences that reverberate to the present. There was a fundamental difference between Egypt and the United States and that is that the United States had gained its independence and was therefore free to ignore the prescriptions of economic theory, which were practically the same as today at the time they were dictated by the United States. The greatest economist of the time Adam Smith In terms similar to those preached to what today are called developing societies, Smith urged the American colonies to maintain what was later called their comparative advantage, which is to produce primary products for the Export and import superior British products. manufacturers and certainly not try to monopolize crucial products which meant particularly cotton in those days, kind of like oil today.

Any other path, he warned, I will quote, rather than hastening the further increase in the value of your annual output and obstructing rather than promoting your country's progress toward true wealth and greatness roughly what is studied today in courses of economy and the advice given to the world by the IMF and the World Bank, having gained their independence, the American colonies were free to ignore the According to the laws of a sound economy, they were free to follow their own course of independent development guided by the State from England, with high tariffs to protect industry from superior British exports, first textiles, then steel and others, and a wide variety of other modes of state intervention to accelerate economic development. and the independent republic also tried and came very close to trying to get a cotton monopoly, for good reason, the purpose was to bring all other nations to our feet, as the Jacksonian presidents put it at the time they were annexing Texas. and half of Mexico were particularly worried about England.

England was the big enemy in those days, it was the deterrent and they thought that if they monopolized cotton they could make England go under their feet, that is quite important, for example, it is one of the reasons why Canada was not conquered. British dissuaded it several times maybe it is being conquered in other ways but that is another question but it was not conquered militarily nor could they conquer Cuba as much as they wanted because the British fleet was in the finally they conquered it later in the 1898 century under the pretext of free it but they actually conquered it uh, but the idea was that if they could monopolize control of cotton they could overcome this, a deterrent that hindered expansion, it's actually kind of It's interesting that that's essentially the policy that was attributed to it to Saddam Hussein in 1990, ridiculous at the time, but if you look back at the propaganda at the time of the invasion, the pretext was, well, he's trying to monopolize the oil and you know, bring us all. at his feet, it is totally outlandish, but the crime attributed to Saddam Hussein is in fact one of the main ones that led to the economic development of the USA.

It happened and has had a great effect, one of the reasons why it is out of history, except it's in history, well that was America, what about Egypt? Egypt could not follow a comparable course because it was prohibited by British power, it was not independent, so the British Lord Palmerston declared his words that no idea of ​​justice towards Egypt should stand in the way of such great and paramount interests of Britain as preserving its economic and political honey and expressed what it called its hatred for the ignorant barbarian Muhammad Ali, the developmentalist leader who was trying to steer Egypt towards an independent course and, um, the British fleet. and financial resources were deployed to end Egypt's quest for independence and economic development.

After World War II, the United States displaced Britain as global hemiman and adopted the same position. The United States made it clear that Washington would not provide aid to Egypt and the entire world urgently needed help at that time. We would not provide aid to Egypt unless it complied with the standard rules of the week I cited, which, of course, the United States continued to violate by imposing high tariffs on even Egyptian cotton and causing a debilitating shortage of debt dollars in reality. is the usual interpretation of market principles. It's OK for you. It's okay to discipline the week and control it, but not me, please.

I want the nanny state to make sure I'm okay. That applies at home. Goldman Sachs and their colleagues and their representatives in government understand very well that these are really important issues in modern history. They are the basis of the first distinction of the third world that is widespread everywhere and of what is happening internally. Wealthy societies, as well as these fairly simple principles predict that elections are increasingly becoming a farce run by the public relations industry that attempts to mobilize populations to vote while ensuring that issues are marginalized by the reason I mentioned. different opinions on the issues that the masters of humanity, so it is better to keep them aside.

I have to say that although I'm talking about the United States, it's not true everywhere, so if you're going to say the poorest country in South America, Bolivia, they actually have democratic elections that are quite remarkable, especially in the last 10 years. , so in the last 10 years the most repressed, bitterly repressed segment of the population, the indigenous population, in fact, has entered the political arena, pressed their demands, participated in the elections, won the elections, elected someone from their own ranks, a poor peasant, you don't know someone from Skull and Bones, in Jaale, and they won the elections on real issues, serious issues like control of resources, cultural rights, how to handle justice problems in a complex multi-ethnic society and then in another election a couple of years later they did even better, that is democracy, you have to look hard to find something like that in the industrial world, what is happening in our societies is something very different to the public relations industry, which essentially organizes elections, is applying certain principles, that is, the same principles, is applying certain principles to undermine democracy, which are the same as the principles thatThey are applied to undermine markets.

The last thing companies want is for markets in the sense of economic theory to take a Of course, in economics, they tell you that a market is based on informed consumers making rational decisions. Anyone who has seen a television commercial knows that is not true. In fact, the industry, if there was one, if we had a market system, an announcement from, say, General Motors would be a brief statement of product features for next year. That's not what you see, you know, you see a movie actress, a football hero or someone you know standing driving a car, you know, on top of a mountain or something, but the point is to create and the point and that's true of all advertising, the goal is to undermine markets, creating uninformed consumers who will make irrational decisions and the business world spends enormous efforts on that and the same is true when the same industry the industry is dedicated to undermining democracy wants to build elections in which uninformed voters will make irrational decisions it is quite reasonable and it is so obvious that you can hardly miss it and it is another of those things that should be taught in primary schools, Haring style talking about something so obvious to a university audience well, all this is second nature to the masters of the humanity, so for example, after his 2008 victory, as you may already know, Obama immediately won an advertising industry award for best marketing campaign of 2008. uh, he beat Apple computers and if you look at the press of business buses where people talk more openly uh The executives were elated uh they said uh they've been marketing candidates like toothpaste since Reagan, but 2008 was the biggest achievement, they said it was It's so cool it will change the style and the meeting rooms corporate boards.

The 2012 election is now expected to cost $2 billion. They will have to be primarily corporate financing, so it is not at all surprising that Obama is selecting business leaders for top jobs. Angry and frustrated, but unless Western populations can say they rise to the level of the Egyptians, they will continue to be victims in the United States. Republicans long ago gave up any pretense of being a traditional political party. They are so deep in the pockets of corporate America. you and the super rich need a telescope to find them, uh, Democrats who, by the way, are now mostly what used to be called moderate Republicans, so the Democrats aren't too far off from Obama's pick of a team economic team that I mentioned is a Actually, I didn't phrase it very precisely, there was one exception on his economic team, namely Paul Fulker, he was Secretary of the Treasury under Ronald Reagan, but the spectrum has shifted so far to the right that Folker was the last liberal who asked for some kind. of Regulation, by the way, he was not ousted, replaced by Jeffrey Amelt, he is the CEO of General Electric, which is the largest corporation in the country and his special responsibility, if you look back at the rhetoric, was to create jobs, actually , a more precise comment again from Tom Ferguson. is that what we really have here is the disappearance from the stage of the most well-known and visible critic of the excesses of the financial sector and his replacement by the acting CEO of a company that is heavily dependent on government aid of all kinds, including diplomatic assistance, to invest more in China and move jobs there, this is not about jobs, this is about political money that the White House knows it will need to raise. billion dollars for his re-election campaign, that is the context in which this and other recent Obama appointments must be judged and, as expected, the business world was very pleased: the Financial Times of London reported that the appointment of Mr.

Amelt was applauded by the United States House. of Commerce, a major business lobby that they said has been among the president's harshest critics and bankrolled many Republicans who ran against Democrats in last November's election, but perhaps that will be over and the last barrier to government business could be eliminated. Well, if you look at GE General Electric, more than half of its workforce is overseas, more than half of its revenue comes from overseas operations, and most of its revenue does not come from production, although it He considers it a manufacturing company, but a financial operations company for which, by the way, he received a hefty bailout when Wall Street crashed, although the appointment was proclaimed to be for job growth, it actually has little to do with that. and, more accurately, it is what is called following the money.

More than a century ago, the great political financier Mark Hannah said that Two things are important in politics, money, and the second I forgot, another thing for grade school, that is much more true today, especially with the changes radical developments of the last 30 years and are important for understanding these developments over the last 30 years or so. They followed one of the most important changes in the world order in the modern period, namely the dismantling of the post-world war economic system, the so-called British timber system, which had been designed by the victors of the Second World War, the United States.

United States and Great Britain, basic designers. they were John Mayard KES for Britain and New Deal economist Harry Dexter White for the United States. A central component of this system was the regulation of currencies. In fact, it was part of the basis of the enormous economic growth of the following two decades. the highest in history, well, which was dismantled about 40 years ago, that was a factor that led to the enormous explosion of financial speculation and the great growth of financial institutions at that time, they were small components of the economy and they mostly did what banks do.

The supposed thing to do in state capitalist systems is to direct unused funds, like say your bank account, into some kind of productive investment. That was then in 2007, right before the big crisis, they made about 40% of corporate profits in the US, their profits come. mainly from complex financial manipulations, actions that have little or no social or economic utility and are harmful to the economy and also to the people in many ways, these practices would be drastically reduced if capitalist principles prevailed. limited by crises and you know how to lose your money, but fortunately there is no fear of that, at least for the rich.

Another factor in the financialization of the economy was that the rate of profit in production was decreasing, so it was easier to make money through financial manipulations. Of course, always with the protection of the nanny state. A closely related development was the offshoring of production, which is within a global trade system that is very carefully designed so that workers compete with each other around the world along with a very high level of protection. for unprecedented wealth and rights for investors that's the usual interpretation of market discipline again, you know, it's fine for you, but not for me, please, these U developments set in motion a vicious cycle of concentration of wealth and with it concentration of political power again in agreement.

With Smith's dictum over the past 30 years, state corporate policy has been very precisely designed to accelerate this cycle, so inequality, as you probably know, has skyrocketed to the highest levels in US history. . % is such a small group that it is not included in the US Census, which vastly underestimates inequality, which is why it has been studied by the Economist. Meanwhile, for the majority of the population, real incomes have stagnated. people cope with heavier workloads much more than in Europe or even Japan debt and asset inflation like the last housing bubble the minuscule category of winners and it is extremely small, that is mainly hedge fund managers and the like , and they use their political power to improve the process, so tax cuts, for example, are carefully crafted to benefit the super-rich, if we look back to around 1980, to Reagan, when taxes were in The United States was somewhat redistributive, according to the analysis, the surface of internal income, as in most countries, that is what they are supposed to be since then, with a couple of points, that effect decreases and if they are introduced other factors, such as tax havens and others. evasion options uh, they redistribute upwards, uh, that was carefully designed, so let's say, the Bush tax cuts 10 years ago, which are a huge burden on the economy, uh, they were very carefully designed, uh, They started the first year with a tax rebate to the people, a small rebate.

So you get a couple hundred dollars in the mail and you think it's a great tax refund, but they were designed so that over the years the benefits would go to the rich and by the tenth year, when they were due to expire, more than uh, about uh uh, more than half of the tax benefits went to the top 1% of people that count, but then it's kind of invisible if it happens that way, there's a name for this, it's called The Sunset Technique, you make sure that by the time the sun sets things are happening the right way, you fool people at the beginning uh and uh only those who are inside the game can see what you're planning uh in the future uh there's uh uh uh uh uh uh these are uh uh perfectly uh normal uh kind of policies for the people who call themselves conservatives who now want them to be permanent, look at the front pages of the newspapers, they want these cuts to be permanent, but for jobs it's the same that here, the reason we have to give a lot of money to the top 1% of the population or a fraction of what they spend on what they want is for jobs.

In fact, there has been an interesting change in the English language in this regard. There is a word that has become obscene so since there may be children in the audience I can't say it but I will spell it P R fi TS you can't say it actually has a pronunciation it's called jobs so uh Yes U and that's kind of B now It's like a routine uh, uh, and that's the same thing here, uh, well, all of this is, in fact, this kind of thing that was the Bush tax cuts, but the same things are happening right at this moment, uh , as you know. the outgoing session of Congress, that means you know the session after the November elections before the next Congress takes office.

Obama was highly praised for his accomplishments during the outgoing session, you know, display of bipartisanship as a statesman, etc., praised by his own supporters in In fact, well, there were some accomplishments, the main accomplishment was a tax cut for the super rich, uh, and I mean super rich, like I'm pretty good, but I'm under the limit for that one, it was a tax cut for the super rich, of course. It increased the deficit, which is supposed to be the most important thing we care about. Accomplishing that required some pretty impressive footwork, but it was done at the same time there was a tax increase for federal workers, but it wasn't called that because you're not supposed to talk about tax increases, it was called a freeze.

I think for 5 minutes, a freeze for maybe 5 seconds, a freeze for public sector workers is identical to a tax increase for them, so this is a tax increase for the public sector. workers disguised as freezing uh there was also a decrease in the payroll tax for Social Security Social Security is paid by the workers it does not pay anything to the deficit contrary to what you read uh the workers pay for it and there was a decrease in that payment that sounds good people need the money uh but again it was a trojan horse take a look at the way it was designed it was the sunset technique again the freeze was carefully designed to end just before the presidential election now politics The numbers understand perfectly well that with an election coming up, no one is going to say: let's raise the payroll tax so that essentially makes it permanent, which is a way to defund Social Security.

Social Security is actually in pretty good shape despite what everyone shouts, but if you can defund it, it won't be in good shape and there is a standard privatization technique, namely, defund what you want to privatize, like when Thatcher wanted to privatize the railways, the first thing to do is defund them,then they don't work and people get angry and want to change, you say, "Okay, privatize them and then they'll get worse," and in that case the government had to step in and bail you out, but that's the standard technique of privatization, defunding, making sure that things don't work.

People get angry. give it to private equity, well that's the U's social security scam, if they manage to defund it, they've been trying for decades, it's too popular to do much about it and by the way, minuscule administrative costs, you know nothing like the extravagant privatized healthcare system. uh so it's a little difficult to get rid of, but if you can definitely finance it, it could work, that's the point of this decision in the outgoing session and that's a big deal. uh, Social Security, first of all, if it can be privatized, is a huge Bonanza for investors - there's a lot of money in the social security system that is held in a trust fund or invested in government bonds and comes back to the workers, but if that could get into the hands of the financial institutions, they could make a lot of money using those funds to enrich themselves and, as usual, when the system collapses, go back to the taxpayer to bail them out, so it's a great technique Plus, social security really has flaws like it's almost useless for rich people, I mean.

They may get it, but they won't realize it's a stick in a mountain. So who cares? But for a large part of the population it is their means of survival. That's particularly true right now, people had a huge amount of their fake wealth that they believed in housing was a whole fake bubble, but they believed in it, it's what was used to borrow for education, for whatever. whatever is gone, 8 trillion dollars is gone, those people are going to survive on Social Security, uh. but that has no importance for the rich, of course, there is a deeper point in which Social Security is based on the principle that Kamal Abas spoke about, namely solidarity, social solidarity, Social Security is based on the idea that one is supposed to care.

What happens to people in need? For example, if there's a disabled widow across town and you don't have food to eat, you're supposed to worry, that's what Social Security is and you're supposed to look, that's a bad idea. after yourself you don't care about other people Social Security is dangerous, in some ways it undermines preferred doctrines and can even lead to actions that could change the way the world works, so we don't want there to, in fact, be a large scale attack. In public education it is based on the same principles if it can be privatized and the same techniques are used, defund it so that it does not work, complain that privatizing does not work, it gets worse, but then you have undermined social solidarity. and it's okay for the rich to get what they want anyway.

This is all part of a pretty impressive class war campaign that has many aspects, many of them not immediately visible, but they are there, for example. the government sets rules in corporations about how corporations are run, what is called corporate governance of corporations and the rules that have been established during this exciting period of class warfare, the rules are that the CEOs can elect the boards managers who set their salaries and can and that you I know techniques such as stock options that hide short-term gains and you can imagine how that works when you choose your own board.

There have been efforts to try to make this more transparent, but they were rejected by Congress is the same thing that happens with deregulation. During the period in which the New Deal regulations were maintained there was no financial crisis. The system worked without problems. Since Reagan there have been periodic financial crises, each one worse than the last, but the rich and powerful manage. funny and for the reasons I mentioned, the public pays the rich well, that's all this is a kind of new stage of state capitalism. Loyalty to companies is becoming less necessary when the goal of management is short-term profits, which, of course. it comes mainly from financial manipulations, so who cares about the company if it fails?

I am rich. Internal unemployment is not a problem, so there is no need for a national workforce when Mexico, China, Vietnam and other sources of cheap and brutally exploited labor. They can be used as assembly plants and they are assembly plants in China as well. Major industries increasingly have their workforce overseas, such as General Electric, while U have to say that word, I'm afraid I'm sorry, well, the profits come. Home, uh, back into the pockets of some few, so let's take IBM, it's a pretty interesting example. The business press recently had a big article about them and correctly said that IBM may seem to many people to be the quintessential American company, but more than 70% of its workforce. was outside the United States in late 2008 and the following year, as it continued to reduce its employment in the United States, the company announced a program to offer employees the opportunity to move their jobs to emerging markets - in other words, it has the opportunity to move to India.

Let's say where you can live with a much lower standard of living, good opportunity, eh, but that increases what is called the efficiency of the company and provides wealth to the Masters now if the employees do not take advantage of this opportunity that is offered to them so kindly. They have options, they can join the people lining up for food stamps, but IBM is a benevolent company, the article notes that they are offering to cover some of the relocation costs, so they are very nice guys, the report in the press business. He did not explain why IBM should be considered the quintessential American company, but in fact there are good reasons, one being that IBM depended on the taxpayer for its wealth.

That's how he learned to do it. I will forget about previous things like helping. discovered Nazi Germany, but only in the recent period did he learn to move from punched cards to modern computers, did he learn that in Pentagon-funded laboratories like MIT, where I work, for example, when finally, in the early '60s , the company was able to produce its They had fast computers, but they were too expensive for companies, so a state stepped in to buy them now, in general, state acquisition is an important taxpayer subsidy device. Well, many years later, in fact, decades later, IBM was finally able to make profits in the market and was also able to create tremendously successful companies like Microsoft and others that also benefited greatly from public subsidies, so in fact, It is true that it is the quintessential American company and management is following sound economic principles in moving employment overseas. the country is not their business, it is worth noting that this is really new, not long ago the long-term future of the company was an important consideration for management, less and less so under modern forms of state capitalism and Interestingly, these questions were foreseen by the great founders of modern economics, Adam Smith, for example, recognized and discussed what would happen to Great Britain if the master adhered to the rules of sound economics, what is now called neoliberalism, warned that if British manufacturers, traders and investors went abroad. they might benefit, but England would suffer.

However, he felt that this would not happen because these people would be the Masters would be guided by a local bias, so that, as if by an invisible hand, England would be saved from the ravages of economic rationality now that step. It is quite difficult to miss is the only appearance of the famous phrase invisible hand in The Wealth of Nations, that is, in a critique of what we call neoliberalism, the other leading founder of modern economics, David Ricardo, drew similar conclusions , he hoped that domestic bias would lead What I am quoting now would lead men of property to be satisfied with the low rate of profits in their own country rather than seeking unemployment more advantageous to their wealth in foreign nations and said that these are Feelings I'd be sorry to see. well weakened there are predictions aside the U uh in the instincts of the classical economists were quite solid well I mentioned it by a well known uh Market inefficiency effect of market inefficiency of ruling out externalities which is the effect of a transaction on others uh In the case of financial institutions, the externality that is ruled out is a systemic risk, the risk that the entire system collapses as a result of some failed transaction.

You don't take that into account when a transaction is done well, in that case the taxpayer can come to the rescue and ensure that that way you can be sure that those who benefit from risky transactions will be saved, but that is not always the case. a choice and the consequences can be serious, in fact perhaps incredibly serious, so no one will come to the rescue if the environment is destroyed and that it must be destroyed is close to an institutional imperative under contemporary state capitalism, just think about it good. Business leaders are currently carrying out massive propaganda campaigns to convince the population that anthropogenic global warming, as they know it, is due to human interference.

It's a liberal hoax and they are succeeding, like in the US probably a third of the population already believes this. Well, the CEOs running these campaigns understand what we all understand. They understand that the threat is very real. serious that will destroy everything they own, they ruin the lives of their grandchildren, they know all that but they don't know it as CEOs of a corporation in that institutional role, they have no choice, they can retire, of course, but if they stay there, They have to maximize short term profits and market share, in fact that is a legal requirement under Anglo-American law.

If they don't, they will leave and someone else will come in who does, so it is institutional property, not individual, and it sets off a vicious cycle that could be lethal, and to see how imminent the danger is, just take a look at the new United States Congress, which was propelled to power. Thanks to large-scale corporate funding and propaganda, almost everyone is a climate change denier and they have already been acting on those assumptions that they have been cutting back on. The limited spending there is to address environmental problems, uh, and if the United States doesn't do it. doing something meaningful with the rest of the world is also no worse than the fact that some of them are true believers, so, for example, the head of the U, the new head of one of these committees on the environment, explained that global warming can't be a problem because God promised Noah there wouldn't be another flood takes care of that, well, you know, if that were happening, you know, like in Andora or some remote little country, you know, maybe we'd laugh , but it's not ridiculous when it's happening. in the richest and most powerful country in the world and before laughing we should keep in mind that the current economic crisis is largely due to fanatical faith in dogmas such as the efficient market hypothesis and, in general, to what the Nobel Prize winner Laurat Joseph Stiglets 15 years ago called the religion the markets know best.

Religion made it unnecessary for economists and the Federal Reserve to realize that there was an $8 trillion housing bubble that had no basis in economic fundamentals; It was very far from historical trends. and that devastated the economy when it exploded there is no need to look at it because we have the religious markets that you know best so forget all this well and let religion be resurrected despite what happened uh well, all this and much more can continue as long as the population In general it is passive, apathetic, dedicated to consumerism or perhaps hatred towards the vulnerable, as long as that is true, the powerful can do what they want and those who survive will be left contemplating the ruins.

Thank you, thank you now. I will be my name is MRS. Sey and I will be moderating the Q&A session that's about to follow, so what we'll do is answer questions from the floor in the Great Hall and also from the two additional rooms. If you have questions, we have two volunteers uh I would like you to line up to my left or my right well, left and right and the volunteers will have the microphones and give them to you, you have half a minute to ask your questions. Please keep your questions to half a minute because there are a lot of people and we would like to reach as many people as possible so that they recognize you and then you can ask your question and Professor TRky will answer it here.

I can't, let's start there. Good afternoon Professor, my name is Aisha MTZ and my question is actually regarding the ambiguity surrounding the reportsay about them, well, if it's okay, you know, to be in I'm for it, but a lot of the work that is being done, at least in my opinion, seems quite superficial, but draw your own conclusions. Well thank you very much. It's a pleasure seing you again. Thank you for what you have done. brought us this afternoon, you know, I had the pleasure of introducing Noom chsky at a heart house meeting against the Vietnam War in 1966.

It's, it's, it's really nice to see him still moving forward. This amounts to the possibility of this meeting and many of the volunteers and the central organization and I want to point out another aspect of the story: Hard House is represented here by Louise Cowan, the war by Linda Mcqu, did you know? she was a college debater on the Heart House debate committee and by samrai, who uh uh put all of this together, who uh presided over much of it here this afternoon, all of which would have been banned before 1970 because, according to the legacy, it was a all male institution and uh I don't think we planned it this way, but it's a happy coincidence that three women uh uh are the face of Heart House this afternoon, um and I also want to thank everyone else who helped us.

Out uh Bevo in uh Massachusetts uh planning Norm's trip and uh there are a lot of volunteers and the two organizations uh Science for Peace of which I am a representative and the Near East Educational and Cultural Foundation of which I am also a member uh and our material is outside, uh, I urge you to take a look at it not only because we were good hosts, which I hope we were, but because, as Professor Chomsky reminds us, the challenges and opportunities of the present that our masters in corporations and government refuse to face or to tell the truth about um, we must take their place, we must find the truth and act accordingly and I invite you all to join us in this.