[Peace-discuss] Chomsky on Democracy Now 101130

[C. G. Estabrook]

Noam Chomsky on the Economy, U.S. Midterm Elections, Climate Change, Haiti, and More
[Noam Chomsky is a Professor Emeritus at MIT, where he taught for over half a 
century. He is author of dozens of books. His most recent is Hopes and Prospects.]

AMY GOODMAN:Noam, you’re continuing your prescription, your advice that you 
would give to President Obama today.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, the economy is a disaster. There is 10 percent official 
unemployment, probably twice that much actual unemployment. Many people 
unemployed for years. This is a huge human tragedy, but it’s also an economic 
tragedy. These are unused resources, which could be producing to make the things 
that this country needs. I mean, the United States is becoming a kind of a third 
world country.
You take a—the other day, I took a train from Boston to New York. That’s, you 
know, the star of the trains of Amtrak, train system. I mean, it took about 
maybe 20 minutes less than the train that my wife and I took 60 years ago from 
Boston to New York. In any European country, any industrial country, it would 
have taken half the time. Plenty of non-industrial countries. Spain is not a 
super-rich country. It’s just introducing a 200-mile-an-hour new railway. And 
this is just one example.
The United States desperately needs many things: decent infrastructure, a decent 
educational system, much more pay and support for teachers, all kinds of things. 
And the policies that are being carried out are designed to enrich primarily 
financial institutions. And remember that many of the major corporations like, 
say, GE and GM are also financial institutions. It’s a large part of their 
activity. It’s very unclear that these financial shenanigans do anything for the 
economy. There are some economists finally, mainstream ones, finally beginning 
to raise this question. They may harm it, in fact. But what they do is enrich 
rich people, and that’s where policies are directed to.
An alternative would be to stimulate the economy. There is no—demand is very 
low. Business—the corporations have money coming out of their ears, their huge 
profits. But they don’t want to spend it, don’t want to invest it. They’d rather 
profit from it. Financial institutions don’t produce anything. They just shift 
money around and make money from various deals. The public is some consumer 
demand, but it’s very slight. We have to remember that there was an $8 trillion 
housing bubble that burst, destroying the assets for most people. They’re 
desperately trying to keep a little to save themselves. The only source of 
demand right now would be government spending. It doesn’t even have to affect 
the deficit, can be carried out by borrowing by the Fed, which sends interest 
right back to the Treasury. If anyone cares about the deficit, which is actually 
a minor issue, I think, that should be the major issue.
There should be massive infrastructure spending. There should be spending on 
things—simple things like weatherization. I mean, we should have a substantial 
program to reduce the very severe threat of global warming. That’s unfortunately 
unlikely with the new Republican legislators and with the effects of the massive 
corporate propaganda to try to convince people that it’s a liberal hoax. The 
latest polls show about maybe a third of Americans think that—believe in 
anthropogenic global warming, you know, human contribution to global warming. I 
mean, that’s almost a death knell for the species. If the U.S. doesn’t do 
anything, nobody else will. We now have chairs going into the—
AMY GOODMAN: Noam, what do you think of the U.N. climate change summit that’s 
taking place in Cancún?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, the Copenhagen summit was a disaster. Nothing happened. This 
one, Cancún, has set its sights much lower, in the hope of at least achieving 
something. But let’s say they achieve all their goals, which is very unlikely. 
It’ll still be a toothpick on a mountain. There are much more serious problems 
behind it.
We’re now facing a situation where the House, relevant House committees—science, 
technology, energy and so on—are being taken over by climate change deniers. In 
fact, one of them recently said, "We don’t have to worry about it, because God 
will take care of it." Well, you know, this is—it’s unbelievable that this is 
happening in the richest, most powerful country in the world. That’s one major 
area where there should be substantial changes and improvements. If not, there’s 
not going to be anything much more to talk about in a generation or two.
Others include just reconstructing the economy here so that people get back to 
work, that they can produce things that the country needs, that they can live 
decent lives. All of that can be done. The resources are there; the policies aren’t.
AMY GOODMAN: Noam, you know, when you look at the new Congress—I’m reading from 
The New Yorker, "Darrell Issa, a Republican representative from California, is 
one of the richest men in Congress. He made his money selling car alarms, which 
is interesting, because he has twice been accused of auto theft. ([Issa has] 
said that he had a 'colorful youth.') Now, with the Republicans about to take 
control of the House, Issa is poised to become [the chairman] of the Oversight 
Committee. The post comes with wide-ranging subpoena powers, and Issa has 
already indicated how he plans to wield them. He is not, he assured a group of 
Pennsylvania Republicans over the summer, interested in digging around for the 
sort of information that might embarrass his fellow-zillionaires: [he said,] 'I 
won't use it to have corporate America live in fear.’ Instead, he wants to go 
where he sees the real malfeasance. He wants to investigate climate scientists. 
At the top of his list are the long-suffering researchers whose e-mails were 
hacked last year from the computer system of Britain’s University of East 
Anglia. Though their work has been the subject of three separate 'Climategate' 
inquiries—all of which found that allegations of data manipulation were 
unfounded—Issa isn’t satisfied. [He said recently,] ’We’re going to want to have 
a do-over.’"
NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah. That’s part of the massive offensive, basically a corporate 
offensive. And they haven’t been quiet about it, like the Chamber of Commerce, 
biggest business lobby, American Petroleum Institute and others have said quite 
publicly that they’re carrying out a massive, what they call "educational 
campaign" to convince the population that global warming isn’t real. And it’s 
having an effect. You can see it even in the way the media present it. So you 
read, say, a New York Times discussion of climate change. They have to be 
objective, present both sides, so one side is 98 percent of qualified 
scientists, and the other side is Issa and Senator Inhofe and a couple of 
climate change skeptics. There, notice, also missing is a third side, namely, a 
very substantial number of leading scientists who say that the consensus is 
nowhere near alarmist enough, that in fact the situation is much worse. Well, 
you know, the United States is now—it has been dragging its feet on this for a 
long time, and it’s now much worse.
I mean, there was just recently—a couple days ago, there was a report of an 
analysis of green technology production. It turns out China is in the lead, 
Germany is next, Spain is high up there. The United States is one of the lowest. 
In fact, investment from the United States in green technology is higher in 
China—I think twice as high in China—than in the United States—than it is in the 
United States and Europe combined. I mean, these are real social pathologies, 
exacerbated by the latest election, but just one aspect of where policy is going 
totally in the wrong direction, where there are significant alternatives, and if 
they’re not pursued, there could be real disaster, and maybe not too far off.
AMY GOODMAN: I’d like to switch gears for a minute, Noam Chomsky, and talk about 
the elections in Haiti that just took place.
NOAM CHOMSKY: "Elections," you should put in quotation marks. If we had 
elections in the United States in which the Democratic and Republican parties 
were barred and their political leaders were exiled to South Africa and not 
allowed to return to the United States, we wouldn’t consider them serious 
elections. But that’s exactly what happened in Haiti. The major political party 
is barred. As we know, the United States and France essentially invaded Haiti in 
2004, kidnapped the president, sent him off to Central Africa. His party is now 
banned. Most analysts assume that, as in the past, if it was allowed to run, it 
would probably win the election. President—or former President Aristide is, by 
all information available, the most popular political figure in Haiti. Not only 
is he not allowed to run, by essentially the U.S., but not allowed to return. 
They’ve been trying to keep him out of the hemisphere. Can’t go back to Haiti, 
but the U.S. has been trying to keep him out of the hemisphere altogether. 
What’s taken place is a kind of a charade. I mean, it’s not nothing. You know, 
Haitians are trying to express themselves. We should respect that. But the major 
choices that they might have are barred by foreign power, U.S. power, and 
France, which is the second of the two historic torturers of Haiti.
AMY GOODMAN: Honduras. Actually, interestingly, in these cables that have come 
out through the WikiLeaks release is a U.S. diplomatic cable from 2008 that says 
exactly what the U.S. government would not say publicly, that the coup against 
Manuel Zelaya was outright illegal. Your response, Noam Chomsky?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah, that’s right. This is an analysis by the embassy in 
Honduras, Tegucigalpa, saying that they’ve done a careful analysis of the legal 
and constitutional backgrounds and conclude—you can read their summary, which is 
a conclusion—that there is no doubt that the coup was illegal and 
unconstitutional. The government of Washington, as you point out, wouldn’t say 
that. And in fact, after some dithering, Obama finally essentially recognized 
the legitimacy of the coup. He supported the election taking place under the 
coup regime, which most of Latin America and Europe refused to recognize at all. 
But the U.S. did it. In fact, the U.S. ambassador publicly accused the Latin 
Americans who wouldn’t go along as being seduced by magic realism, you know, 
García Márquez’s novels or something, just a statement of contempt. They should 
go along with us and support the military coup, which is illegal and 
unconstitutional. And has many effects. One effect was that it preserves for the 
United States a major air base, the Palmerola Air Base, one of the last ones 
remaining in Latin America. We’ve been kicked out of all the others.
AMY GOODMAN: Noam, I have two questions, and we only have two minutes left. One 
is about North Korea. The WikiLeaks documents show Chinese diplomats saying that 
Chinese officials increasingly doubt the usefulness of neighboring North Korea 
and would support reunification. The significance of this?
NOAM CHOMSKY: I’m very skeptical about that statement. There is no indication 
that China would be willing to have U.S. troops on its border, and that’s the 
very likely outcome of a reunified Korea. They’ve been bitterly objecting to 
U.S. naval maneuvers in the Yellow Sea, not far from their coast, what they call 
their economic territorial waters, and expanding U.S. military forces near their 
borders is the last thing they want. They may feel—I don’t know—that North Korea 
simply is unviable, and it will have to collapse, and that’s a terrible problem 
for them from many points of view. That I don’t know. But I’m pretty skeptical 
about that leak.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Noam, your latest book, Hopes and Prospects, what gives 
you hope?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, the "hopes" part of that book is mostly about South America, 
where there really have been significant, dramatic changes in the past decade. 
For the first time in 500 years, the South American countries have been moving 
towards integration, which is a prerequisite for independence, and have begun to 
face some of their really desperate internal problems. A huge disparity between 
islands of extreme wealth and massive poverty—a number of the countries, 
including the leading one, Brazil, have chipped away at that.
AMY GOODMAN: We have ten seconds.
NOAM CHOMSKY: And Bolivia has been quite dramatic with the takeover by the 
indigenous population in a major democratic election. These are important facts.
AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, thanks so much for being with us. Oh, by the way, 
happy birthday, pre-birthday.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Thanks.
AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, Professor Emeritus at MIT, Massachusetts Institute of 
Technology, author of over a hundred books, his latest called Hopes and Prospects.

Source: 
http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2010/11/30/noam_chomsky_on_the_economy_us_midterm_elections_climate_change_haiti_and_more