[Fresh Ink] Chomsky on the Election, Economy, War, and Peace

[Richard Menec]

November 25, 2008

The Election, Economy, War, and Peace

By Noam Chomsky


The Election

The word that immediately rolled off of every tongue after the presidential 
election was "historic." And rightly so. A Black family in the White House 
is truly a momentous event.

There were some surprises. One was that the election was not over after the 
Democratic convention. By usual indicators, the opposition party should have 
had a landslide victory during a severe economic crisis, after eight years 
of disastrous policies on all fronts including the worst record on job 
growth of any post-war president and a rare decline in median wealth, an 
incumbent so unpopular that his own party had to disavow him, and a dramatic 
collapse in US standing in world opinion. The Democrats did win, barely. If 
the financial crisis had been slightly delayed, they might not have.

A good question is why the margin of victory for the opposition party was so 
small, given the circumstances. One possibility is that neither party 
reflected public opinion at a time when 80% think the country is going in 
the wrong direction and that the government is run by "a few big interests 
looking out for themselves," not for the people, and a stunning 94% object 
that government does not attend to public opinion. As many studies show, 
both parties are well to the right of the population on many major issues, 
domestic and international.

It could be argued that no party speaking for the public would be viable in 
a society that is business-run to an unusual extent. Evidence for that is 
substantial. At a very general level, evidence is provided by the predictive 
success of political economist Thomas Ferguson's "investment theory" of 
politics, which holds that policies tend to reflect the wishes of the 
powerful blocs that invest every four years to control the state. More 
specific illustrations are numerous. To mention just one, for 60 years the 
US has failed to ratify the core principle of international labor law, which 
guarantees freedom of association. Legal analysts call it "the untouchable 
treaty in American politics," and observe that there has never even been any 
debate about the matter. And many have noted Washington's dismissal of 
conventions of the International Labor Organization as contrasted with the 
intense dedication to enforcement of monopoly pricing rights for 
corporations ("intellectual property rights"). There is much to explore 
here, but this is not the place.

The two candidates in the Democratic primary were a woman and an 
African-American. That too was historic. It would have been unimaginable 
forty years ago. The fact that the country has become civilized enough to 
accept this outcome is a considerable tribute to the activism of the 1960s 
and its aftermath.

In some ways the election followed familiar patterns.  The McCain campaign 
was honest enough to announce clearly that the election wouldn't be about 
issues. Sarah Palin's hairdresser received twice the salary of McCain's 
foreign policy adviser, the Financial Times reported, probably an accurate 
reflection of significance for the campaign. Obama's message of "hope" and 
"change" offered a blank slate on which supporters could write their wishes. 
One could search websites for position papers, but correlation of these to 
policies is hardly spectacular, and in any event, what enters into voters' 
choices is what the campaign places front and center, as party managers know 
well.

The Obama campaign greatly impressed the public relations industry, which 
named Obama "Advertising Age's marketer of the year for 2008," easily 
beating out Apple. The industry's prime task is to ensure that uninformed 
consumers make irrational choices, thus undermining market theories.  And it 
recognizes the benefits of undermining democracy the same way.

The Center for Responsive Politics reports that once again elections were 
bought: "The best-funded candidates won nine out of 10 contests, and all but 
a few members of Congress will be returning to Washington." Before the 
conventions, the viable candidates with most funding from financial 
institutions were Obama and McCain, with 36% each. Preliminary results 
indicate that by the end, Obama's campaign contributions, by industry, were 
concentrated among Law Firms (including lobbyists) and financial 
institutions. The investment theory of politics suggests some conclusions 
about the guiding policies of the new administration.

The power of financial institutions reflects the increasing shift of the 
economy from production to finance since the liberalization of finance in 
the 1970s, a root cause of the current economic malaise: the financial 
crisis, recession in the real economy, and the miserable performance of the 
economy for the large majority, whose real wages stagnated for 30 years, 
while benefits declined. The steward of this impressive record, Alan 
Greenspan, attributed his success to "growing worker insecurity," which led 
to "atypical restraint on compensation increases" - and corresponding 
increases into the pockets of those who matter. His failure even to perceive 
the dramatic housing bubble, following the collapse of the earlier tech 
bubble that he oversaw, was the immediate cause of the current financial 
crisis, as he ruefully conceded.

Reactions to the election from across the spectrum commonly adopted the 
"soaring rhetoric" that was the hallmark of the Obama campaign. Veteran 
correspondent John Hughes wrote that "America has just shown the world an 
extraordinary example of democracy at work," while to British 
historian-journalist Tristram Hunt, the election showed that America is a 
land "where miracles happen," such as "the glorious epic of Barack Obama" 
(leftist French journalist Jean Daniel). "In no other country in the world 
is such an election possible," said Catherine Durandin of the Institute for 
International and Strategic Relations in Paris. Many others were no less 
rapturous.

The rhetoric has some justification if we keep to the West, but elsewhere 
matters are different. Consider the world's largest democracy, India. The 
chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, which is larger than all but a few 
countries of the world and is notorious for horrifying treatment of women, 
is not only a woman, but a Dalit ("untouchable"), at the lowest rung of 
India's disgraceful caste system.

Turning to the Western hemisphere, consider its two poorest countries: Haiti 
and Bolivia. In Haiti's first democratic election in 1990, grass-roots 
movements organized in the slums and hills, and though without resources, 
elected their own candidate, the populist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The 
results astonished observers who expected an easy victory for the candidate 
of the elite and the US, a former World Bank official.

True, the victory for democracy was soon overturned by a military coup, 
followed by years of terror and suffering to the present, with crucial 
participation of the two traditional torturers of Haiti, France and the US 
(contrary to self-serving illusions). But the victory itself was a far more 
"extraordinary example of democracy at work" than the miracle of 2008.

The same is true of the 2005 election in Bolivia. The indigenous majority, 
the most oppressed population in the hemisphere (those who survived), 
elected a candidate from their own ranks, a poor peasant, Evo Morales. The 
electoral victory was not based on soaring rhetoric about hope and change, 
or body language and fluttering of eyelashes, but on crucial issues, very 
well known to the voters: control over resources, cultural rights, and so 
on. Furthermore, the election went far beyond pushing a lever or even 
efforts to get out the vote. It was a stage in long and intense popular 
struggles in the face of severe repression, which had won major victories, 
such as defeating the efforts to deprive poor people of water through 
privatization.

These popular movements did not simply take instructions from party leaders. 
Rather, they formulated the policies that their candidates were chosen to 
implement. That is quite different from the Western model of democracy, as 
we see clearly in the reactions to Obama's victory.

In the liberal Boston Globe, the headline of the lead story observed that 
Obama's "grass-roots strategy leaves few debts to interest groups": labor 
unions, women, minorities, or other "traditional Democratic constituencies." 
That is only partially right, because massive funding by concentrated 
sectors of capital is ignored. But leaving that detail aside, the report is 
correct in saying that Obama's hands are not tied, because his only debt is 
to "a grass-roots army of millions" - who took instructions, but contributed 
essentially nothing to formulating his program.

At the other end of the doctrinal spectrum, a headline in the Wall Street 
Journal reads "Grass-Roots Army Is Still at the Ready" - namely, ready to 
follow instructions to "push his agenda," whatever it may be.

Obama's organizers regard the network they constructed "as a mass movement 
with unprecedented potential to influence voters," the Los Angeles Times 
reported. The movement, organized around the "Obama brand" can pressure 
Congress to "hew to the Obama agenda." But they are not to develop ideas and 
programs and call on their representatives to implement them. These would be 
among the "old ways of doing politics" from which the new "idealists" are 
"breaking free."

It is instructive to compare this picture to the workings of a functioning 
democracy such as Bolivia. The popular movements of the third world do not 
conform to the favored Western doctrine that the "function" of the "ignorant 
and meddlesome outsiders" - the population -- is to be "spectators of 
action" but not "participants" (Walter Lippmann, articulating a standard 
progressive view).

Perhaps there might even be some substance to fashionable slogans about 
"clash of civilizations."

In earlier periods of American history, the public refused to keep to its 
assigned "function." Popular activism has repeatedly been the force that led 
to substantial gains for freedom and justice. The authentic hope of the 
Obama campaign is that the "grass roots army" organized to take instructions 
from the leader might "break free" and return to "old ways of doing 
politics," by direct participation in action.


Latin America

In Bolivia, as in Haiti, efforts to promote democracy, social justice, and 
cultural rights, and to bring about desperately needed structural and 
institutional changes are, naturally, bitterly opposed by the traditional 
rulers, the Europeanized mostly white elite in the Eastern provinces, the 
site of most of the natural resources currently desired by the West. Also 
naturally, their quasi-secessionist movement is supported by Washington, 
which once again scarcely conceals its distaste for democracy when it does 
not conform to strategic and economic interests. The generalization is a 
staple of serious scholarship, but does not make its way to commentary about 
the revered "freedom agenda."

To punish Bolivians for showing "the world an extraordinary example of 
democracy at work," the Bush administration cancelled trade preferences, 
threatening tens of thousands of jobs, on the pretext that Bolivia was not 
cooperating with US counter-narcotic efforts. In the real world, the UN 
estimates that Bolivia's coca crop increased 5 percent in 2007, as compared 
with a 26 percent increase in Colombia, the terror state that is 
Washington's closest regional ally and the recipient of enormous military 
aid. AP reports that "Cocaine seizures by Bolivian police working with DEA 
agents had also increased dramatically during the Morales administration."

"Drug wars" have regularly been used as a pretext for repression, violence, 
and state crimes, at home as well.

After Morales's victory in a recall referendum in August 2008, with a sharp 
increase in support over his 2005 success, rightist opposition turned 
violent, leading to assassination of many peasants supporting the 
government. After the massacre, a summit meeting of UNASUR, the newly-formed 
Union of South American Republics, was convened in Santiago Chile. The 
summit issued a strong statement of support for the elected Morales 
government, read by Chilean President Michelle Bachelet. The statement 
declared "their full and firm support for the constitutional government of 
President Evo Morales, whose mandate was ratified by a big majority" --  
referring to his overwhelming victory in the referendum a month earlier. 
Morales thanked UNASUR for its support, observing that "For the first time 
in South America's history, the countries of our region are deciding how to 
resolve our problems, without the presence of the United States."

A matter of no slight significance, not reported in the US.

Full:
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/19749

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