Interview with Noam Chomsky

The Democratic Deficit

by Jason Francis

OM Times: How would you describe the relationship existing between large corporations and national governments?

Noam Chomsky: As a very broad generalization, you could almost say that governments are agencies of big corporations. Just look at who staffs the executive suites, or the enormous effect of economic decisions on setting parameters for government decisions. On the other hand, there are very interesting cases of conflict between state and corporate interests even when the state is pretty much controlled by the corporations.

In fact, we are in the middle of one such corporate-state conflict right now. The Bush administration is almost an offshoot of the energy corporations. There is a very close relationship. On the other hand, the policies of the Bush administration are opposed by the energy corporations. For a long time Iran has been a dramatic example of conflict between state interests and the interests of the energy corporations, even though the state is very much under the control of the energy corporations.

This goes back to the overthrow of the Iranian parliamentary regime in 1953. At that point the Eisenhower administration was also heavily in the pocket of energy corporations. The US government wanted US energy corporations to take over 40 per cent of the British oil concession in Iran (Britain had the whole concession at the time) but the US corporations didn’t want to do it. For short term interests it was a lot more profitable for them to lift oil from Saudi Arabia than from Iran. For ordinary business interests, they didn’t want to enter into conflict with the Saudis. But the US government forced them to by threatening antitrust suits and other measures, and the corporations had to go along. That same dynamic is happening again now.

I’m sure if you went to the offices of Exxon Mobil and others, they would be quite happy to invest in Iran, which could be very profitable for them, but the government won’t allow them to do it, even though the Bush/Cheney administration is very much in the pocket of the energy corporations. An individual might make different decisions as chair of Exxon Mobil, than as US Secretary of State, because there are somewhat different interests involved.

Typically, the CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of a corporation is interested, to a large extent, in short-term profit and market share, but that same individual as Secretary of State has in view the overall interests of the corporate system in the longer term and that leads to different decisions. So the relationship between large corporations and national governments is very intimate and undoubtedly the state authorities are very heavily influenced by corporate power, but there are interesting cases of conflict.

Cuba is another example: substantial parts of the business world, including oil companies, would be quite interested in ending the US embargo of Cuba, but the government won’t allow it. George Bush comes straight out of a Texas oil background and would not allow Texas oil companies to co-operate with Cuba in developing offshore oil. It would be very profitable for the oil companies. In fact that conflict reached a rather dramatic confrontation in Mexico City about a year or so ago. There was a meeting there of oil executives with Cuban energy administrators, trying to work out plans for US oil corporations, Texas ones mainly, to invest in offshore Cuban oil, which apparently is fairly substantial. The Bush administration discovered the meeting was taking place in a Sheraton Hotel, which is US owned, and ordered the hotel to kick them all out, including Bush’s golfing partners, and they had to do it. Mexico was pretty upset about it. This is intervention in Mexican sovereignty, yet there was nothing they could do about it. That’s a striking case and there are others.

OM TIMES: What has been the overall cost of the relationship existing between governments and corporations?

NC: The cost for the victims of the Third World is incalculable. Take Guatemala, for example. The Eisenhower administration overthrew the democratic government of Guatemala in 1954, in substantial part because of the interests of multinational companies. The costs for Guatemala since 1954 are literally incalculable. Even now, after all these years, it is still the most violent country in the region – tremendous poverty, hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered. How do you measure those costs? Guatemala was on its way to becoming something like Costa Rica in the early 1950s but the Eisenhower administration’s intervention, partially influenced by the corporate structures, led to a disaster.

Let’s consider Chile as another example. There was a large corporate interest in the case of overthrowing President Salvadore Allende’s government. What happened is often called the first 9/11. On 11 September 1973, the US-backed military coup took place. If you translate what happened to a US equivalence – comparing it to 9/11 – it’s as if Al Qaeda had bombed the White House and killed the President, completely overthrown the government, and instituted a vicious dictatorship that killed 50,000-100,000 people, tortured 700,000 and set up an international terrorist center that was overthrowing governments all over the hemisphere. It makes 11 September 2001 pale in comparison, but that’s what happened.

In Indonesia, again with the substantial influence of major corporations eager to get their hands on the resources of Indonesia, the US-backed military coup in 1965 within a few months had killed hundreds of thousands of people and left the country in the hands of a vicious dictator with all sorts of atrocities to follow. You can continue these examples over and over again. The costs have been phenomenal.

OM TIMES: Considering that the relationship between government and business is creating humanitarian disasters and economic disparity, and with the future of the entire planet threatened by global warming, why are politicians and corporate executives willing to engage in suicidal behavior, considering that their own lives and futures depend on the safety and health of the people and world they are jeopardizing?

NC: If you’re a corporate executive or an official in a government that is very much under business influence, your concern is with power, profit, privilege and wealth in the short term future. On the other hand, you may be a person who has grandchildren and you want them to live in a livable world. When you go home, that may be what you’re concerned about, but in the office that’s not your job. Your job, as a CEO of a corporation, for example, is to make sure that the bottom line looks good in the next quarter. There’s very little long term planning in the business system and there are reasons for that. It’s almost an institutional imperative. We don’t have a highly competitive system. It’s an oligarchy in many ways, with some competition.

Take the leading civilian export – civilian aircraft. There are basically two businesses in the world that are major civilian aircraft producers: Boeing and Airbus. They are in constant litigation, which is almost comical to watch, over which one gets more government subsidies. They both survive on massive government subsidies. They are, of course, in competition, but let’s just suppose they were real capitalist enterprises, not state capitalist enterprises. Suppose that Airbus decided to put its resources into producing highly energy efficient aircraft that would be on line 20 years from now. Airbus wouldn’t be around 20 years from now because Boeing would be putting the same resources into selling airplanes next year. Therefore Airbus couldn’t do it. These are things that cannot be developed within market systems. And to the limited extent that we have market systems, it discourages long term planning, just for institutional reasons.

OM TIMES: How has the liberalization of our financial structures, which was enacted in the early 1970s and referred to as neoliberal capitalism, affected democracy?

NC: That was very well understood, even in the 1940s. The post-war economic system, the so-called Bretton Woods system, was worked out in detail by Britain and the United States. One of the principles that they introduced was that governments would have control over capital flow and that currencies would be pretty much regulated within a narrow band. First, they thought that would increase economic growth, which turned out to be true for the longest period worldwide in economic history. But there was another concern – democracy. They understood very well that unless governments had the capacity to control capital movements and currency rates they simply would not be able to carry out popular social democratic programs, no matter how much the population supported them. The reasons are fairly straightforward. They understood and discussed them.

If governments cannot control capital exchange rates, that sets up what international economists sometimes call a “virtual parliament” of investors and lenders who carry out a moment-by-moment referendum on government policies. That means the government faces a dual constituency – the one constituency is its own population, the other constituency is the virtual parliament. If the virtual parliament decides that some government policy is what they call ‘irrational’, meaning it may help the population but harms profit, they can prevent it by capital flight, attacks on currency and other measures that the government is powerless to prevent unless it has the kinds of built-in conditions established by the Bretton Woods system. When those conditions were dismantled in the 1970s we got the predicted results: a major harm to economic development and an attack on democracy.

OM TIMES: How is electoral democracy fairing in the United States?

NC: What’s sometimes called the ‘democratic deficit’, the failure of normal democratic institutions to perform, is huge. Public opinion in the United States is very carefully studied, a lot is known about it. It turns out to be pretty consistent and internally coherent over long periods. A book on this subject [The Foreign Policy Disconnect] by Benjamin Page and Marshall Bouton came out in 2006. Furthermore, it is well known that there’s a huge gap between public opinion and public policy on major domestic and international issues. In fact, on a host of major issues, both political parties are well to the right of the population.

In order to maintain political power under such a situation you have to eliminate content from elections. Party managers who run elections have to turn to the devices that in effect come naturally to them. These are, after all, the same public relations firms that try to sell you toothpaste and lifestyle drugs on television. We know how it works. When you look at a television ad for a lifestyle drug, for example, you see a professional football player or sexy actress who says: “It’s good for A. Ask your doctor if it’s good for you.” They don’t give you information. You’ll get an ad for an automobile but there’s not much information about the automobile. They’ll try to delude you with imagery. That’s a device for undermining markets. Business does not like markets; it wants control. It doesn’t want markets with informed consumers making rational choices.

The same institutions are running electoral campaigns, and they want to sell candidates. That’s the commodity they’re selling. They don’t want to provide information about them any more than General Motors wants to provide information about its cars. They want to delude the voters with imagery and rhetoric. You try to sell George Bush in the last election, for example, not on the basis of his policies (that will never work), but on the basis that he looks like a nice ordinary guy. He mispronounces words just like we ordinary guys do, and I would like to meet him at a barbeque, and so on. You end up with people voting for him who oppose his policies and may not even know that fact. Very few Bush voters knew what his policies were. A majority of Bush voters thought he was in favour of the Kyoto Protocol, because they were.

That’s very much like selling toothpaste or lifestyle drugs on television. Increasingly, that’s the way elections have to work when you have this enormous democratic deficit gap between public opinion and policy. It’s a natural development in a business-run society with high concentrations of capital and a very atomized, disorganized public. We don’t have political parties in a very meaningful sense. Our political parties are candidate-producing machines. They’re not institutions that people participate in except marginally. Policies are not formulated programs by constituencies – maybe marginally, but not much. The public is atomized, separated from one another, subjected to enormous propaganda from the public relations industry and media, so you end up with this democratic deficit.

Religious Fundamentalism

OM Times: What effect is religious fundamentalism having on democracy around the world?

Noam Chomsky: If religious fundamentalism is kept as a personal or community matter, it has no effect on democracy. But if it enters into the political system, the public arena, it has a very significant and, of course, negative effect upon democracy, because its principles are pretty much inconsistent with it. This is developing all over the world. It’s quite dramatic in the United States right now. The United States has always been off the chart in terms of extremist religious beliefs. It’s quite radically different from other industrialized societies. There is no industrial society outside the United States where you can find a significant number of people – about 50 per cent in the United States – who believe that the world was created several thousand years ago exactly as it is now. That’s similarly true for other extremist beliefs.

Religious fundamentalism has occasionally entered into the public arena and political life during periods of religious revivalism, which had an effect on policy in the 1950s, for example. But there has never been anything like the most recent 30 years or so. By the late 1970s political party managers began to realize that if they catered to the religious fundamentalist community, which is very substantial, by offering them small things that didn’t matter much to the policy makers, they could gain electoral votes. Since the 1980 election, every presidential candidate has had to declare themselves deeply religious. The question never really arose much before, but since the 1980 election that has been uniform.

In other parts of the world, Islamic fundamentalism is of most concern to the West. The most extreme Islamic fundamentalist state in the world has been and remains Saudi Arabia – also the closest US ally in the world, in part because of its Islamic fundamentalism. Back in the 1950s and 1960s there was a struggle between secular Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalist extremism. The two main figures in the struggle were President Nasser in Egypt and the King and Royal Family of Saudi Arabia. The US was strongly opposed to secular nationalism in Egypt, Iraq and elsewhere, and favored Islamic fundamentalism.

That conflict was basically settled by Israel’s conquests in 1967, which pretty much destroyed the Nasser center of secular nationalism and one of the pillars of the Third World movement, the Non-Aligned Movement, which the US also despised. In fact, that’s when the US/Israeli relationship became really firm. A kind of ‘love affair’ developed between US intellectuals and Israel, which had not existed before as a real service to US power, supporting Islamic fundamentalism against the dangers of secular nationalism. The same thing happened inside the Israeli occupied territories: Israel supported the fundamentalist groups, which emerged finally as Hamas, as a weapon against the secular nationalist PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization].

This has also happened elsewhere. It is well known that former US President Reagan supported the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists the US could round up around the world to try to bleed the Russians in Afghanistan.

During the same years, the 1980s, the US strongly supported the Zia ul-Haq dictatorship in Pakistan, which radically Islamized the country, established the famous Islamist madrasas with the funding of Saudi Arabia, which significantly moved the country towards Islamic fundamentalism. The Reagan administration also overrode congressional restrictions against aid to Pakistan, based on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, which the Reagan administration pretended they didn’t know about. Now, of course, radical Islamism has taken on its own very threatening and dangerous characteristics.

The same is true of Hindu nationalism. The fundamentalist nationalism is represented mostly by the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party], one of India’s main political parties, which puts forth a dangerous and quite extreme Hindu nationalism. In Gujarat, the recent election was won by Narendra Modi (the main figure in the Hindu Nationalist Movement), who was largely responsible for the massacres there a few years ago in which a couple of thousand Muslims were killed. These are not minor developments, and are not only threatening to democracy, but to any meaningful conception of human rights.

Democratic movements in South America

OM TIMES: What effect are the socialist presidencies of Chavez in Venezuela, Morales in Bolivia, Kirchner in Argentina, Correa in Ecuador and Lula in Brazil having on regional integration, socioeconomic sovereignty and democracy throughout South America?

NC: Let’s begin with democracy because that’s the easiest one to measure. There are regular polls taken throughout Latin America by a highly respected Chilean polling organization, Latinobarometro, which studies in depth the attitudes of the populations in the various countries toward democracy. Much to the discomfiture of the United States, Venezuela ranks way at the top in many measures. It ranks right alongside Uruguay at the top of support for democracy and support for the government. It ranks highest in assessing the role of the government in meeting economic progress and in a series of other measures. These results are so unacceptable in the United States that they’re just not reported but you can find them annually by looking at Latino barometro polls. The last one was taken in November 2007.

As far as Venezuelans are concerned, they have made great progress in democracy and they’re proud of it and support the government. Of course, it’s the opinion of Venezuelans that matter, not [North] Americans. The same is true in Bolivia. In fact the election of Morales was a spectacular victory for democracy. It’s hard to find a comparable example in the world, certainly nothing like that is conceivable here. In Bolivia the large majority of the population, which is an indigenous Indian population, for the first time since the Spanish conquest, seriously entered the political arena, gained political power and elected someone from their own ranks – overcoming enormous odds. Could you imagine that happening in the United States or any Western country?

They didn’t just go to the polls on Election Day. These were mass popular movements, which had been struggling for crucial issues like cultural rights, control of resources, eliminating the neo-liberal policies that were destroying the populations, major issues they had been fighting about for years. When it came to the election they were organized and elected their own candidate. That’s democracy. The election in Bolivia in December 2005 is, far-and-away, the most remarkable democratic change anywhere in the hemisphere. Morales was immediately condemned for being autocratic and endorsing dictatorship and so on. The main reason was that he was calling for the nationalization of Bolivia’s resources. The critics failed to mention that this was with the approval of probably 90 per cent of the population. But that’s so autocratic and antidemocratic by our measures. It’s not following our orders, which is what democracy means to us.

Nestor Kirchner was a somewhat different story. Argentina had been the poster child of the International Monetary Fund [IMF], a great economic miracle they had created, except that it all collapsed in a total catastrophe and Argentina’s economy was ruined. Kirchner got Argentina out of it by radically violating the orders of the IMF and moving on, as he put it, “to rid ourselves of the IMF forever”. The IMF is essentially a branch of the US Treasury Department. Argentina restructured and paid off its debts with the assistance of aid from Venezuela. It recovered very rapidly, much to the surprise of the conventional economists who predicted disaster from these measures. Other countries in the region are going the same way. Brazil in its own way paid off the debt and rid itself of the IMF. Bolivia is moving in that direction, Venezuela and others. In fact, the IMF is in serious trouble now because the countries on which it relies for its funding, mainly by debt collection, are refusing to follow its orders and are paying off their debts or restructuring them.

All of these efforts are moves toward integration. The United States is now in a position where it is supporting South American governments of the kind it would have overthrown by military coups not many years ago. So Lula in Brazil is the ‘fair-haired boy’. His policies aren’t all that different from [former Brazilian President] Goulart’s back in the early 1960s. He was overthrown by a military coup planned by the Kennedy administration, which took place a few weeks after Kennedy’s assassination, by establishing a kind of neo-Nazi national security state of vicious murderers – a plague [which has] spread over the hemisphere.

Now the United States is supporting Lula as its hope and in order to maintain a fiction that there’s a split between the ‘good left’, Lula, and the ‘bad left’, Chavez and Morales. There’s some truth to that; they are different. But in order to maintain that fiction it’s necessary to suppress quite a lot of information. For example, it’s necessary to suppress the fact that when Lula was re-elected his first major act was to travel to Caracas, Venezuela, to support Chavez’s electoral campaign and to dedicate a major bridge over the Orinoco River, a joint Brazilian-Venezuelan Project, and initiate another one. It’s also necessary to suppress the fact that shortly after that – in Cochabamba, Bolivia, which was the center of the Bolivian democratic revolution – the leaders of the South American states gathered. They apparently papered over their differences and issued a declaration calling for integration of Latin America in the style of the European Union. They recognized there was a long way to go to reach that but it’s the beginning of moves in that direction. You don’t find this in the press but it’s very important. The Bank of the South was just initiated, joining the major countries – Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina and others – which would concentrate on development problems in South America. That could turn out to be an independent funding institution independent from the World Bank.

There are two important, related steps being taken in South America, for the first time since the Spanish conquests. One is that countries are moving toward integration. They had been very separate from one another, each related to the imperial powers in its own way but separated from one another. That’s beginning to be overcome. That’s a prerequisite for independence. If they’re not unified they can’t resist an outside imperial power.

Also, they’re beginning for the first time to come to terms with extraordinarily important internal divisions in each country. South America has some of the worst inequality in the world. Traditionally it has been ruled by a small Europeanized, mostly white elite with very wealthy ties to the West: they send their capital to the West, they have their second homes in the West and their children go to the West to study. They’re pretty much disconnected from their own societies. On the one hand, you have the rich, dominant, mostly white elite, and on the other, you have a huge mass of deeply impoverished people. That gulf is beginning to be overcome.

What happened in Bolivia is a striking example. Even in Venezuela there’s an element of that. One of the reasons for the elite’s bitter hatred of Chavez is that he’s not white; he’s of mixed race. Racial issues are important there and they’re beginning to be overcome. There are plenty of pitfalls. You can’t predict the course it will take, but the developments are very positive ones.

Latin America is diversifying its economic relations. It had been totally dependent on US-European investment, trade and so on but that’s changing. There are now South-South relations developing – India, South Africa and Brazil. The raw material exporters in Latin America – Peru, Brazil, Chile and Venezuela – are beginning to diversify their exports to Asia. China is now beginning also to move in investments. All of this is giving Latin America many more options than they’ve had in the past.

The integration, the steps toward overcoming the radical internal divisions, and the diversification of relations with the world are all very significant developments. Sometimes it is called socialism, whatever that’s supposed to mean. But it is true that there are moves toward benefiting the general population. In Venezuela, for example, contrary to claims here [in the US], poverty has been significantly reduced. There are efforts – sometimes successes, sometimes failures, often corrupt, but efforts at least – to try to develop a popular control that undermines the traditional elite control. At the same time, there are also autocratic tendencies that are dangerous in the long run, maybe, but certainly complex arrangements. Overall, steps are being taken that are quite positive and you can see that by the hostile reaction here. It’s a good measure of it.

Steps are being taken in some countries toward shifting wealth and power toward the authority hated in the United States. In earlier days that would have led to military coups or economic strangulation but the United States is no longer capable of that. The last effort at a military coup was in 2002 when the United States supported a coup that briefly overthrew the government in Venezuela, kidnapped the President and disbanded parliament and the Supreme Court. This overthrow of democracy was supported by the United States and very publicly welcomed. In fact, they called it a step toward democracy. It was quickly overthrown by popular uprising and the United States had to turn to other ways to try to overthrow the government – propaganda, subversion and so on. But military coups are no longer as easy as they were in the Kennedy and Johnson years.

OM TIMES: What can we do in the US to move toward true democracy?

NC: We should take successful moves toward democracy tomorrow. It’s ridiculous to claim that in the richest, freest and most powerful country in the world we are incapable of doing what poor Bolivian peasants succeeded in doing. Of course, we can do it. But it takes commitment, energy, dedication, overcoming illusions, dismissing propaganda, developing real popular movements and demanding accountability from leadership. Develop your own programs and push them through the political system and get them implemented. If they can do it in a place like Bolivia and we say we can’t do it here, if someone were watching this from Mars they would be cracking up laughing. Of course, we can do it here but it doesn’t happen by itself.

Information: www.chomsky.info, www.hegemonyorsurvival.net, www.americanempireproject.com

Noam Chomsky is professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, where he teaches linguistics and philosophy. He has received wide recognition for having revolutionized modern linguistics and has been awarded, among other honors, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science. Also internationally acclaimed as a scholar on such subjects as politics and foreign policy, he has written many bestselling political books, including Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (2003), Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (2007) and Interventions (2007). Noam Chomsky was interviewed for Share International by Jason Francis and kindly shared with permission.