Why were we so concerned about it? According to Kissinger, Chile was a “virus” that would “infect” the region with effects all the way to Italy.
Despite 40 years of CIA subversion, Italy still has a labor movement. Seeing a democratic government succeed in Chile would send the wrong message to Italian voters.
That’s one of the main reasons the US has been so interested in Middle Eastern oil. We didn’t need the oil for ourselves; until 1968, North America led the world in oil production. But we do want to keep our hands on this lever of world power, and make sure that the profits flow primarily to the US and Britain.
The peace process is restricted to US initiatives, which all for a unilateral US-determined settlement with no recognition of Palestinian national rights. That’s the way it works. Those who cannot master these skills must seek another profession.
The well-oiled Republican PR systems of the 1980s regularly accused the Democrats of being the party of the special interests: women, labor, the elderly, the young, farmers — in short, the general population. There was only one sector of the population never listed as a special interest: corporations (and business generally). That makes sense. In PC discourse their (special) interests are the “national interest,” to which all must bow.
To make sense of political discourse, it’s necessary to give a running translation into English, decoding the doublespeak of the media, academic social scientists and the secular priesthood generally. Its function is not obscure: the effect is to make it impossible to find words to talk about matters of human significance in a coherent way. We can then be sure that little will be understood about how our society works and what is happening in the world — a major contribution to “democracy,” in the PC sense of the word.
And it’s directed primarily to the needs of those who implement social policy, who are mostly the wealthy and the powerful.
For example, the US has always had an active state industrial policy, just like every other industrial country. It’s been understood that a system of private enterprise can survive only if there is extensive government intervention. It’s needed to regulate disorderly markets and protect private capital from the destructive effects of the market system, and to organize a public subsidy for targeting advanced sectors of industry, etc.
But nobody called it industrial policy, because for half a century it has been masked within the Pentagon system. Internationally, the Pentagon was an intervention force, but domestically it was a method by which the government could coordinate the private economy, provide welfare to major corporations, subsidize them, arrange the flow of taxpayer money to R&D, provide a state-guaranteed market for excess production, target advanced industries for development, etc. Just about every successful and flourishing aspect of the US economy has relied on this kind of government involvement.
A business or a big corporation is a fascist structure internally. Power is at the top. Orders go from top to bottom. You either follow the order or get out.
The concentration of power in such structures means that everything in the ideological or political domains is sharply constrained. It’s not totally controlled, by any means. But it’s sharply constrained. Those are just facts.
Just as international law isn’t applicable to the US, which has even been condemned by the World Court. States do what they feel like — though of course small states have to obey.
You can find repeated Security Council resolutions that never passed that condemn the US, ones which would have passed if they were about a defenseless country. And the General Assembly passes resolutions all the time, but they have no standing — they’re just recommendations.
It’s perfectly true that Israel wants peace. So did Hitler. Everyone wants peace. The question is, On what terms?
The British succeeded. India deindustrialized, it ruralized. As the industrial revolution spread in England, India was turning into a poor, ruralized and agrarian country.
It wasn’t until 1846, when their competitors had been destroyed and they were way ahead, that Britain suddenly discovered the merits of free trade. Read the British liberal historians, the big advocates of free trade — they were very well aware of it. Right through that period they say: “Look, what we’re doing to India isn’t pretty, but there’s no other way for the mills of Manchester to survive. We have to destroy the competition.”
90% of the forces that the British used to control India were Indians.
That was true everywhere. It was true when the American forces conquered the Philippines. They were being helped by Philippine tribes, exploiting conflicts among local groups. There were plenty who were going to side with the conquerors.
But forget the Third World — just take a look at the Nazi conquest of nice, civilized Western Europe. Who was rounding up the Jews? Local people, often. In France they were rounding them up faster than the Nazis could handle them. The Nazis also used Jews to control Jews.
Class: the unmentionable five-letter word.
The idea is to create a picture among the population that we’re all one happy family. We’re America, we have a national interest, we’re working together. There are us nice workers, the firms in which we work and the government who works for us. We pick them — they’re our servants.
And that’s all there is in the world — no other conflicts, no other categories of people, no further structure to the system beyond that. Certainly nothing like class — unless you happen to be in the ruling class, in which case you’re very well aware of it.
You use the term elite. Samir Amin says it confers too much dignity upon them. He prefers ruling class. Incidentally, a more recent invention is the ruling class.
The US could become a color-free society. It’s possible. I don’t think it’s going to happen, but it’s perfectly possible that it would happen, and it would hardly change the political economy at all — just as women could pass through the “glass ceiling” and that wouldn’t change the political economy at all.
That’s one of the reasons why you commonly find the business sector reasonably willing to support efforts to overcome racism and sexism. It doesn’t matter much for them. You loose a little white-male privilege in the executive suit, but that’s not all important as long as the basic institutions of power and domination survive intact.
There’s no doubt that there’s a rich, complex human nature. We’re not rocks. Anybody sane knows that an awful lot about us is genetically determined, including aspects of our behavior, our attitude. That’s not even a question among sane people.
When you go beyond that and ask what it si, you’re entering into general ignorance.
When you get to cultural patterns, belief systems and the like, the guess of the next guy at the bus stop is about as good as that of the best scientist. Nobody knows anything. People can rant about it if they like, but they basically know almost nothing.
It’s not so much that racism is in our genes; that is in our genes is the need to protecting our self-image. It’s probably in our nature to find a way to recast anything that we do in some way that makes it possible for us to live with it.
It’s the same in the broader social sphere, where there are institutions functioning, and systems of oppression and domination. The people who are in control, who are harming others — those people will construction justifications for themselves. They may do it in sophisticated ways or nonsophisticated ways, but they’re going to do it.
Ultimately the governors, the rulers, can only rule if they control opinion — no matter how many guys they have. This is true of the most despotic societies and the most free. If the general population won’t accept things, the rulers are finished.
That underestimates the resources of violence, but expresses important truths nonetheless. There’s a constant battle between people who refuse to accept domination and injustice and those who are trying to force people to accept them.
People can disrupt, makes suggestions, but the same is true of a slave society. People who aren’t owners and investors have nothing much to say about it. They can choose to rent their labor to the corporation, or to purchase the commodities or services that it produces, or to find a place in the chain of command, bu that’s it. That’s the totality of their control over the corporation.
That’s something of an exaggeration. But corporations are more totalitarian than most institutions we call totalitarian in the political arena.
I don’t see why we should have had any long-term hopes for something different. Commercially-run radio is going to have certain purposes — namely, the ones determined by people who own and control it.
As I mentioned earlier, they don’t want decision-makers and participants; they want a passive, obedient population of consumers and political spectators — a community of people who are so atomized and isolated that they can’t put together their limited resources and become an independent, powerful force that will chip away at concentrated power.
Investors don’t go down to the TV studio and make sure that the local talk-show host or reporter is doing what they want. There are other, subtler, more complex mechanisms that make it fairly certain that the people on the air will do what the owners and investors want. There’s a whole, long, filtering process that makes sure that people only rise through the system to become managers, editors, etc., if they’ve internalized the values of the owners.
People will find some ways of identifying themselves, becoming associated with others, taking part in something. They’re going to do it some way or other. If they don’t have the option to participate in labor unions, or in political organizations that actually function, they’ll find other ways. Religious fundamentalism is a classic example.
If you’re a working person, you just don’t have time — alone — to take on the power company. That’s exactly what organization is about. That’s exactly what unions are for, and political parties that are baed on working people.
In other word, Aristotle felt that if you have extremes of poor and rich, you can’t talk seriously about democracy.
Emptying people’s minds of the ability, or even the desire, to gain access to cultural resources — that’s a tremendous victory for the system.
It’s an old scam. Milton Friedman is smart enough to know that there’s never been anything remotely resembling capitalism, and that if there were, it wouldn’t survive for 3 seconds — mostly because business wouldn’t let it. Corporations insist on powerful governments to protect them from market discipline, and their very existence is an attack on markets.
All this talk about capitalism and freedom has got to be a conscious fraud.
Another of the many areas where freedom and capitalism collide is what’s laughably called free trade. About 40% of US trade is estimated to be internal to individual corporations. If a US auto manufacturer ships a part from Indiana to Illinois, that isn’t called trade; if it ships the same part from Illinois to northern Mexico, it is called trade — it’s considered export when it leaves and an import when it comes back.
But that’s nothing more than exploiting cheap labor, avoiding environmental regulations and playing games about where you pay your taxes.
So talk about “the growth in world trade” is largely a joke. What’s growing is complicated interactions among transnational corporations — centrally managed institutions that really amount to private command economies.
The hypocrisy is pervasive. For example, free-trade boosters also demand IP rights that are highly protectionist. The WTO version of patents (which today’s rich countries would never have accepted while they were gaining their place in the sun) is not only extremely harmful to developing countries economically, but also undermines innovation — in fact, that’s what they’re designed to do. They call it “free trade,” but what it really does is concentrate power.
The most fanatic advocates of private despotism (who actually want to undermine freedom and democracy) naturally use nice words like freedom. What they really mean is that we have to have tyranny and a powerful state to ensure it.
It’s possible to live in the poorest countries and be in a very privileged surroundings all the time. Go to, say, Egypt, take a limousine from the fancy airport to your 5-star hotel by the Nile, go to the right restaurants, and you’ll barely be aware that there are poor people in Cairo.
You might see some out the car windows when you’re driving along, but you don’t notice them particularly. It’s the same in New York — you can somehow ignore the fact that there are homeless people sleeping in the streets and hungry children a couple of blocks away.
The reason is perfectly obvious: When you eliminate the one institutional structure in which people can participate to some extent — namely the government — you’re simply handing over power to unaccountable private tyrannies that are much worse. So you have to make use of the state, all the time recognizing that you ultimately want to eliminate it.
Some of the rural workers in Brazil have an interesting slogan. They say their immediate task is “expanding the floor of the cage.” They understand that they’re trapped inside a cage, but realize that protecting it when it’s under attack from even worse predators on the outside, and extending the limits of what the cage will allow, are both essential preliminaries to dismantling it. If they attack the cage directly when they’re so vulnerable, they’ll get murdered.
For whatever reason, diaspora communities tend to be, by and large, more extremist, chauvinistic and fanatic than people in the home country. That’s true of just about every US immigrant society I can think of.
The US attitude was expressed rather neatly by Madeleine Albright in a remark which, as far as I know, wasn’t reported. She was trying to get the UNSC to accept one of our punitive actions toward Iraq: none of the other countries want to go along with it, since they recognized that it was really just a part of US domestic politics. So she told them that the US will act “multilaterally when we can and unilaterally as we must.” So would anyone else, if they had the power.
Part of what the propaganda system does it deprive terms of meaning. It probably starts at some relatively conscious level and then just gets into your bones.
Terror has a deeper effect than simply killing a lot of people and frightening a lot of others. They called this deeper effect the “domestication of aspirations” — which basically means that people lose hope. They know that if they try to change things, they’re going to get slaughtered, so they just don’t try.