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Illustration: A great, timely one from www.whatnowtoons.com
With all that has been going one, it's time to catch up. Actually, we are very happy to see Wisconsin finally learning something about Democracy from Cairo. Now the Democratic members of the house have left the state so a vote can not be taken by the Republican owned rulers. Finally, some decency while teachers and firemen occupy the legislator in protest against union busting. Our powers that be really want to undo every vestige of FDR which, at the same time, saved capitalism from socialism.
Some other notes: A member of Veterans for Peace and a former CIA briefer for Bush I was manhandled and bloodied while Hillary was speaking about the right to "peaceful protest".
We support rulers in Bahrain, Algeria, and Yemen, but how dare they repress protestors in Iran and Lybia?
- As Mideast "Rolling Revolution" Grows, U.S. Denounces Iranian Crackdown — But Stays Silent on Key Ally Bahrain
- Yemeni Forces Use Tasers, Batons, Knives and Rifles to Quash Anti-Government Protests
- Egypt-Based Political Analyst: "The First Lesson from Tunisia is that Revolution is Possible"
- Egyptian Uprising Fueled by Striking Workers Across Nation
- "A Celebration, Not a Protest": Massive Crowd Packs Cairo’s Tahrir Square to Mark One Week Since Mubarak’s Ouster
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JUAN GONZALEZ: Inspired by events in Tunisia and Egypt, a rolling rebellion continues to unfold across North [Africa] and the Middle East, often amid violent repression by state security forces. During an overnight raid in the Persian Gulf nation of Bahrain, heavily armed riot police surrounded thousands of demonstrators who were sleeping in the central square in the nation’s capital. Without warning, police fired tear gas and concussion grenades into the crowd of pro-democracy activists that included women and children. The Associated Press reports four people were killed and hundreds beaten or suffocated by tear gas. Bahrain’s main Shia opposition group called the storming of the central square by police "real terrorism."
Early this morning, Democracy Now! reached Bahraini human rights activist Nabeel Rajab. He spoke to us from outside a hospital where the wounded were being treated. It is very hard to get through to people in Bahrain right now. Rajab’s cell phone connection was poor, so listen closely.
NABEEL RAJAB: The past two days, people were protesting in Pearl Square, tens of thousands of people, children, men and women, calling for reform and democracy and respect for human rights. Unfortunately, today, morning, at 3:00, 3:30 in the morning, the riot police and special forces attacked the protesters. And many of the protesters, as you know, are children and old men and women and young people. So, among those people, we have many, many injuries. At least two dead confirmed so far, but we expect to see more.
And I see many injuries coming. The people are protesting outside the main hospital, which is Salmaniya Hospital, and were attacked 15 minutes ago. And I see a lot of doctors going out of the main Bahrain hospital to treat people in the street, as there are no places to get them in. And many, many of them are inside, so there is not enough space for them. So doctors are treating the people in the street. And I could see the trolley beds of the hospital taken out to the street to carry as many people as possible.
A lot of people—now, this woman is shouting here beside me. She’s saying, "We need blood! We need blood!" because a lot of people have lost blood. And [inaudible] front of hospital, tens of thousands of people are standing. They want to make sure that their children are not dead. A lot of injured people are still in the scene in the Pearl [inaudible] but cannot be carried because the government, they stopped all the ambulance to go inside. They stopped all the people to go inside to carry the injured people. So, a lot of people don’t know about their kids, don’t know about their people, if they’re alive or dead. So people here around me are crying, they are shouting, they say, "We want to see our children!" They want to go inside the hospital. Doctors are banning them. They say, "You can’t go. A thousand of people inside the hospital." People in the street are bleeding in the street, and some doctors are treating them.
Governments and international governments and all international organizations should voice—we need to hear their voice at this moment—countries like United States, countries like England and Europe. I know how my country is rich. I know why I’m victim of being a rich country, that the United States and other European countries don’t want to make them angry, because as their interests, economic interests, and oil is low. But yes, but there are human beings here. They want to live like your people in the United States. They want to see democracy. They want to see human rights. They want to see that. So, if Barack Obama could come out and speak about other countries like Egypt and Iran, so he could speak about Bahrain. Especially we have more dead people here than they had in Iran, that he should come out and speak and say to the Bahrain government, they should stop this. Barack Obama and the United States are a very influential country here. They are the big brother here. They are the people who could voice. They are the people who could speak. But so far, unfortunately, we have not seen any positive statement made by the United States government.AMY GOODMAN: That’s Bahraini human rights activist Nabeel Rajab speaking to us from Democracy Now! just after Bahrain security forces attacked a gathering of sleeping protesters last night, killing at least four people, injuring hundreds, among them an NBC reporter.
Meanwhile, in Libya, after hundreds protested across the country Wednesday, thousands more filled the streets today again in what’s being called a "Day of Rage." Human rights observers say snipers on rooftops have killed as many as 13 protesters and wounded dozens more. The protests fall on the second anniversary of protests in Benghazi, where security forces killed several people.
JUAN GONZALEZ: In Yemen, two people were killed Wednesday when police opened fire on protesters in the southern city of Aden. At least four people were wounded in the capital Sana’a when student protesters clashed with supporters of U.S.-backed President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
In Iran, violence broke out Wednesday at the funeral of a student killed during an opposition protest earlier this week.
And in Iraq, state forces killed three people Wednesday after a large crowd rallied in the city of Kut over a lack of government services. Hundreds of protesters have gathered in the southern city of Basra today demanding the ouster of the local governor.
AMY GOODMAN: To discuss these events, we’re joined by Marwan Bishara, senior political analyst at Al Jazeera and host and editor of the TV show Empire, and MIT Professor Noam Chomsky, author of, well, more than a hundred books, including, most recently, Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians, also Hopes and Prospects, both published by Haymarket Books.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Wonderful to have you both in our studio this week on this 15th anniversary week of Democracy Now!
Just a correction, it was an ABC News reporter, Miguel Marquez, not NBC, who was among those—you know?
JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes, I know Miguel.
AMY GOODMAN: You know him?
JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: He was in Manama, in Bahrain, part of this rolling rebellion in the Middle East.
Noam, talk about the significance. I feel like we talked a revolution ago. We were speaking just as the rebellion was unfolding in Egypt, and that was just, what, 18 days ago.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Eighteen days ago, yeah. Well, it’s a startling event. I mean, I don’t think one can predict where it’s going, but it’s obviously creating at least the basis for major changes in the region. And for the moment, the regimes are more or less holding. So, in Tunisia and Egypt, it’s essentially the same regime without changes. But the public protests are so vibrant and energetic that it’s hard to believe they’re going to be able to hold.
Bahrain, which was just talked about, is a particularly sensitive place. As you mentioned, it hosts the U.S. Fifth Fleet, the major fleet in the region. But also, it’s a majority Shiite country with a Sunni leadership. And right across on the mainland, the population in Saudi Arabia is also mainly Shiite, and Saudi Arabia has been concerned about them for years. It’s a repressed population. They’re concerned about possible influences from the Shiite regions nearby—Iran, southern Iraq—and also that happens to be where most of Saudi Arabian oil is. So it’s a very sensitive area.
AMY GOODMAN: You’ve been studying the Middle East, also traveling there for decades. Marwan Bishara, you live there. I think you don’t live in any one place, but for Al Jazeera, you travel the world. Talk about the significance of this.
MARWAN BISHARA: Well, I think we are living—I’m not sure if it’s a 1989 moment or something else, but certainly the Arab world has been quite delayed from those transformations that took place in Eastern Europe or, for that matter, in Latin America. And I think perhaps the Arab moment has come. It’s clear that the genie is out of the bottle. Now, some people, some cynics, would like to see it as a temporary uprising and everything will go back as it were. I don’t think so. I think change is coming to the Middle East, to the Arab world, in general. And in a sense, we know that the way back is not the way forward.
But what is the way forward exactly? As Professor Chomsky said, we’re not exactly sure. But certainly, it is a work in progress. And I’m not as skeptical as many that, although Ben Ali has gone in Tunisia and although Mubarak has gone in Egypt, that the Mubarak regime and the Ben Ali regime is going to stay. I think it’s a work in progress, and I think, sooner rather than later, we will see also the regimes being swept away after their symbols, their faces, have already been—have already left the scenes.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I’d like to ask you particularly about Saudi Arabia, the bastion of conservatism and authoritarianism in the region. Now Saudi Arabia is faced with Bahrain—explosion in Bahrain to its east, Yemen to its south, Egypt to its west, and basically all the countries around Saudi Arabia now are on fire. And the impact on the monarchy, and of course on U.S. interests in the area—what do you think will be the impact within Saudi Arabia itself?
MARWAN BISHARA: I think the impact is going to differ from one country to another, but there’s a certain commonality to all of it. See, there is this thing that’s been absent in the mind of many, not only in Washington, but also in the U.S. media. There is something called an Arab. There is an Arab nation. You can fly—you can take a seven-hour flight from Morocco to Iraq, passing through an Arab region that speaks the same language, that has the same heritage. But it has been invisible to American media and to American decision makers. We’ve seen the Arab world. We’ve seen Saudi Arabia, we’ve seen Bahrain, through the lenses of military strategy, oil, prisms of Israel, and certainly terrorism and jihad. But what we’ve seen over the last six weeks has been completely absence. And hence, it caught everyone by surprise. Everyone was caught in the headlights—What is going on? Who are these people?—not realizing that in places like Bahrain, places like Yemen, certainly Egypt, Tunisia and so on and so forth, a pent-up tension has been building up for years. This is not a new thing that’s gone on on Facebook. So, in Saudi Arabia, like in the rest of the Arab world, we’re going to see what has been building up for years. In Bahrain, they used to call it, for the last 30 years, attempts to topple the government, attempts to topple the regime. In fact, they were community organizers. They’re not exactly like Chicago; the risks are far higher in the Arab world. But these are community organizers in Egypt and Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain and other places, trying to live—or trying to root for decent living, but always being called terrorists or always been oppressed under the pretext of terrorism.
AMY GOODMAN: Marwan Bishara, you just came back from Washington, D.C., where you were meeting with think tanks. What is your sense of the Washington consensus understanding versus what you are experiencing in the Middle East?
MARWAN BISHARA: You know, sometimes I forget exactly what are the concepts that are allowed on television or not, but let me just put it this way: they were caught with their pants down, completely. I mean, people in Washington, until today, have not realized exactly what is going on. They’re still trying to play catch-up with what’s going on in the Arab world.
So, for example, I was in one of those brainstorming sessions that tried to talk about what’s next for Palestine and Israel. And what amazes me is that everything that they speak about has an Israel reference to it, because that’s where the correspondents for their main networks are, that’s where their people are, and that’s how they’ve seen the region—Egypt, Palestine and so on—from Israel’s prisms. So, every point of reference is, what did Netanyahu say, or what does Israel think, what would the Israeli lobby consider. Would now, for example, President Obama do this and that, and will the Israeli lobby allow him? What does that mean for our strategic interests in the Middle East? Not understanding that there is a complete sweep that requires not only a change of mindset and, if you allow me here, a change of decision makers, perhaps, or a change of aides in Washington. There’s a complete class of bureaucrats in Washington that are not only not in touch with what’s going on in America, they certainly are not in touch with what’s going on in the Arab world.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Noam Chomsky, I’d like you to follow up on that. The Times had an interesting article today, apparently an Obama administration leak, that the administration had—the President, for more than a year, had requested this study that predicted the possible outbreak of popular movements throughout the region—Samantha Power was involved in preparing this report—as if to say, "Well, we were on top of the situation, even though we weren’t. We knew that this was coming." And your sense of to what degree Washington is able to respond or even is really aware of what’s going on in the region?
NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s hard to believe that they’re not aware of it. I mean, you can read it in the newspapers. There have been demonstrations and protests going on for years. A big protest in 2005, you know, they keep being repressed, then there are more. In fact, the current wave of protests actually began last November in Western Sahara, which is under Moroccan rule after a brutal invasion and occupation. The Moroccan forces came in, carried out—destroyed tent cities, a lot of killed and wounded and so on. And then it spread. You have to be pretty—all the—
AMY GOODMAN: Western Sahara is hardly known about, the rebellion there and the occupation there.
NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s hardly known about, but that’s—I mean, it’s a major atrocity. It’s kind of like East Timor—in fact, pretty much the same, even the same time. But it’s blowing up. And also, they must read the studies of Arab public opinion. I mean, you can’t imagine an intelligence service that doesn’t read the regular studies by Western polling agencies of Arab public opinion. And if you look at them, you can see why democracy is such a frightening concept. The latest major study last August released by the Brookings Institute, so not very obscure, showed that almost nobody in the Arab world regards Iran as a threat—10 percent. What they regard as a threat is the United States and Israel, like 80 and 90 percent. In fact, a majority even favor Iran having nuclear weapons, to balance U.S.-Israeli power, which is the real threat in the Arab world. You take a look at when they list people who are respected, Erdogan in Turkey is way up on top. Obama isn’t even listed. You know, you get down to Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, no Obama. Now, these are the opinions of people in the Arab world. What you said about the bureaucrats and the aides is absolutely correct. I mean, after all, there have been 60 years in which explicit policy, you know, in writing, has been—internal records—has been to disregard the Arab population, as long as they can be kept under control.
JUAN GONZALEZ: So, is, perhaps, the reticence of the administration in the case of Egypt, let’s say, or right now in Bahrain, more geared to the fact that they know that public opinion and they understand that real democracy in the region would mean another Latin America, another region totally out of U.S. ability to dominate?
NOAM CHOMSKY: I don’t talk to anybody in Washington, so I can only guess, but it is simply inconceivable that at least the intelligence services don’t go as far as reading polls that I can read.
AMY GOODMAN: Before Marwan goes, we can’t not talk about the Palestine Papers, because Al Jazeera has released them, and you’re the senior political analyst for Al Jazeera. The Palestine Papers, the leaked documents obtained by Al Jazeera that show how Palestinian leaders offered sweeping concessions to Israel on a number of key issues but received little in return. The U.N. Special Coordinator for Middle East Peace, Robert Serry, has said the papers highlight the Israeli government’s rejection of serious negotiations in its attempt to retain control over the West Bank.
ROBERT SERRY: What you have seen is, in my view, an earnest, genuine Palestinian attempt to actually show readiness for a two-state solution, and maybe we haven’t seen that same readiness on the other side, given also the fact that all of what happened hasn’t led to an agreement.AMY GOODMAN: That’s Robert Serry. Marwan Bishara, I want to have you explain the significance of this—it’s hardly talked about in the United States; we all know about the WikiLeaks documents, but not the Palestine Papers—and again, get Professor Chomsky to respond.
MARWAN BISHARA: Well, look, it’s very simple. There’s been this notion for the last 20 years that, from Arafat onwards, that the Palestinians were not serious partners for peace, that the Palestinians were not forthcoming, that they’re not willing to compromise, that they were set in their ways. What we found out from the Palestine Papers, 1,600 documents detailing session after sessions with the Americans, with the Israelis and so on and so forth, that the Palestinian delegation was not only making incredible compromises that I’m not sure that they will pass through the public opinion in Palestine, but they were making acrobatic attempts just to please their Israeli partners and their American partners. They were almost playing in the American role of trying to bridge between America and Israel and between Palestine and Israel themselves. And yet, they’ve been met with rejection after rejection after rejection, not only from the so-called hawkish bits of the Israeli politics, but actually from the so-called moderate parts of the Israeli policy or the Israeli delegation. So we would see sessions after session, for example, with then-Foreign Minister Livni, where the Palestinians are offering one possibility after another, and the Israelis coming back and saying something so condescending, such as, "Oh, this is very interesting, but I don’t think this will work. Why don’t you come up with something different?" And it just goes on and on for years.
Now, as Professor Chomsky was saying, the problem with much of that, Amy, is that there is information out there, but it does not come together in some understanding of some sort. So we know for 20 years the Palestinians have made historic compromises on the question of the territory, on the question of borders, even on the question of Jerusalem, a question of right of return of refugees, but they have always been met with rejection from the Israeli side and complicity from the American side.
AMY GOODMAN: And Al Jazeera’s role here? And the significance, before you go, of Al Jazeera in this entire uprising? I mean, Saeb Erekat first was really fiercely going after Al Jazeera, and then, before you know it, he, the longtime Palestinian negotiator, had resigned. You, yourself, Marwan, are Palestinian.
MARWAN BISHARA: Well, you know, there was an article out a couple of days ago—I think it was in the Washington Post—by Robert Malley, who was a former aide at the Clinton administration. He said, "Well, today we showed, you know, that Al Jazeera is the Arab leader." And what does that really mean? What it means is that Al Jazeera is a transparent, open forum for Arabs to come and speak, and they have been for the last decade and a half, almost as long as you’ve been on air, Amy, except that they’ve given Arabs from various parts of the Arab world the capacity to come on air and speak. And I think the way we’ve covered places like Palestine—for example, we were the only ones, Amy, in Gaza during the Israeli bombardment and war and invasion of Gaza, last one in 2008.
AMY GOODMAN: And that was Ayman—right?—who now is in Cairo, is the Cairo bureau chief.
MARWAN BISHARA: Yes, Ayman Mohyeldin, that’s correct. And, of course, in Cairo, we’ve been there in a very substantial way. I think we had like eight roving reporters in Egypt alone when things broke out. So, we are there, we listen to the people, and we report the story as is. Of course, before, we’ve been accused, because we report those things that Noam spoke about, the sentiments of people—there is a pent-up tension in that area. The fact that Washington sees people as terrorists, as jihadists, as radicals, as extremists, and the most autocratic and the worst of kleptocracies in the world as moderate, as allies, as friends of the United States, is an insult to the American people. But that’s how Washington has been viewing these things.
AMY GOODMAN: We are going to break and then come back. Marwan Bishara, I want to thank you very much for being with us, senior political analyst at Al Jazeera English and host and editor of Empire. You can see Al Jazeera English on the web. In fact, we did a very interesting forum that you moderated, Marwan, at Columbia Journalism School, with Carl Bernstein and Clay Shirky and others, about WikiLeaks, about a number of issues, about what’s happening. It was happening all—about an hour after Mubarak had resigned. You can go, unfortunately, I’ll say, online, until this is all over the United States. In Toledo, Ohio, and Burlington, Vermont, you can see Al Jazeera English, actually, on Free Speech TV and on Link TV, satellite networks who are giving over some of their time to the programming. We’ll see what happens. Al Jazeera English is waging a huge campaign in the United States, full-page articles in the New York Times ads, saying to people to call for their networks, to cable stations, to bring Al Jazeera just as one of the panoply of networks that people can see. Marwan, thanks so much, Marwan Bishara.
This is Democracy Now! We’ll continue with Noam Chomsky for the hour. Stay with us.
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Rush Transcript
This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, More...AMY GOODMAN: This month is the 15th anniversary of Democracy Now! on the air, and it’s a real privilege to have MIT professor, analyst, world-renowned political dissident, linguist, Noam Chomsky with us. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan Gonzalez, and we’ve been together for this whole 15 years, Juan. It’s really been quite an amazing journey.
As we talk about this revolution that’s rolling across the Middle East, we put out to our listeners and viewers on Facebook last night that, Noam, you were going to be in. And so, people were sending in their comments and questions. We asked, on Facebook and Twitter, to send us questions. Here is one of the questions.
RYAN ADSERIAS: Hello, Professor Chomsky. My name is Ryan Adserias, and I’m a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and also the child of a long line of working-class union folks. I don’t know if you’ve been noticing, but we’ve been holding a lot of protests and rallies here in our capital to protest Governor Scott Walker’s attempt to break collective bargaining rights that Wisconsin workers worked hard for over 50 years ago and have enjoyed ever since. We closed all the schools around here for tomorrow—today and tomorrow, actually. The teaching assistants here at the university are staging teach-outs. The undergraduates are walking out of class to show solidarity. And all of this is because our governor and governors all around the country are proposing legislation that’s going to end collective bargaining and really break the unions. I’ve also been noticing that there’s not a whole lot of national representation of our struggle and our movement, and it’s really been troubling me. So my question to you is, how exactly is it that we can get the attention of our national Democratic and progressive leaders to speak out against these measures and to help end union busting here in the United States?AMY GOODMAN: That was a question from Ryan Adserias in Madison, Wisconsin, where more than 10,000—some say tens of thousands of people, teachers, students, are protesting in the Capitol building, schools closed, as Ryan said. So, from Manama to Madison, from Manama, Bahrain, to Madison, Wisconsin, Noam Chomsky?
NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s very interesting. The reason why you can’t get Democratic leaders to join is because they agree. They are also trying to destroy the unions. In fact, if you take a look at—take, say, the lame-duck session. The great achievement in the lame-duck session for which Obama is greatly praised by Democratic Party leaders is that they achieved bipartisan agreement on several measures. The most important one was the tax cut. And the issue in the tax cut—there was only one issue—should there be a tax cut for the very rich? The population was overwhelmingly against it, I think about two to one. There wasn’t even a discussion of it, they just gave it away. And the very same time, the less noticed was that Obama declared a tax increase for federal workers. Now, it wasn’t called a "tax increase"; it’s called a "freeze." But if you think for 30 seconds, a freeze on pay for a federal workers is fiscally identical to a tax increase for federal workers. And when you extend it for five years, as he said later, that means a decrease, because of population growth, inflation and so on. So he basically declared an increase in taxes for federal workers at the same time that there’s a tax decrease for the very rich.
And there’s been a wave of propaganda over the last couple of months, which is pretty impressive to watch, trying to deflect attention away from those who actually created the economic crisis, like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, their associates in the government who—Federal Reserve and others—let all this go on and helped it. There’s a—to switch attention away from them to the people really responsible for the crisis—teachers, police, firefighters, sanitation workers, their huge pensions, their incredible healthcare benefits, Cadillac healthcare benefits, and their unions, who are the real villains, the ones who are robbing the taxpayer by making sure that policemen may not starve when they retire. And this is pretty amazing, like right in the middle of the Madison affair, which is critical.
The CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, got a $12.5 million bonus, and his base pay was more than tripled. Well, that means he—the rules of corporate governments have been modified in the last 30 years by the U.S. government to allow the chief executive officer to pretty much set their own salaries. There’s various ways in which this has been done, but it’s government policy. And one of the effects of it is—people talk about inequality, but what’s a little less recognized is that although there is extreme inequality, it’s mostly because of the top tiny fraction of the population, so like a fraction of one percent of the population, their wealth has just shot through the stratosphere. You go down to the—you know, the next 10 percent are doing pretty well, but it’s not off the spectrum. And this is by design.
AMY GOODMAN: The New York Times coverage of Madison?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, that was very interesting. In fact, I urge people to take a look at the February 12th issue of the New York Times, the big front-page headline, you know, banner headline, "Mubarak Leaves," its kind of subheadings say, "Army Takes Over." They’re about 60 years late on that; it took over in 1952, but—and it has held power ever since.
But then if you go to an inside page—I don’t know what page it is—there’s an article on the Governor of Wisconsin. And he’s pretty clear about what he wants to do. I mean, certainly he is aware of and senses this attack on public workers, on unions and so on, and he wants to be upfront, so he announced a sharp attack on public service workers and unions, as the questioner said, to ban collective bargaining, take away their pensions. And he also said that he’d call out the National Guard if there was any disruption about this. Now, that’s happening now to Wisconsin. In Egypt, public protests have driven out the president. There’s a lot of problems about what will happen next, but an overwhelming reaction there.
And I was—it was heartening to see that there are tens of thousands of people protesting in Madison day after day, in fact. I mean, that’s the beginning, maybe, of what we really need here: a democracy uprising. Democracy has almost been eviscerated. Take a look at the front-page headlines today, this morning, Financial Times at least. They predict—the big headline, the big story—that the next election is going to break all campaign spending records, and they predict $2 billion of campaign spending. Well, you know, a couple of weeks ago, the Obama administration selected somebody to be in charge of what they call "jobs." "Jobs" is a funny word in the English language. It’s the way of pronouncing an unpronounceable word. I’ll spell it: P-R-O-F-I-T-S. You’re not allowed to say that word, so the way you pronounce that is "jobs." The person he selected to be in charge of creating jobs is Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, which has more than half their workforce overseas. And, you know, I’m sure he’s deeply interested in jobs in the United States. But what he has is deep pockets, and also, not just him, but connections to the tiny sector of the ultra-rich corporate elite, which is going to provide that billion or billion-and-a-half dollars for the campaign. Well, that’s what’s going on.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I’d like to ask you about this whole issue of the assault on unions. Clearly, it has arisen in the last few months in a coordinated way. Here in New York State, all the major business people have gotten together, raised $10 million to begin an ad campaign, and they’re being supported by both the Democratic new governor, Andrew Cuomo, and as well as the Republican-Independent Mayor Bloomberg. But they seem to be going after the public sector unions after having essentially destroyed most of the private sector union movement in the United States. They realize that the public sector unions are still the only vibrant section of the American labor movement, so now they’re really going after them in particular. Yet, you’ve got these labor leaders who helped get Obama elected and who helped get Andy Cuomo elected, and they’re not yet making the stand in a strong enough way to mobilize people against these policies.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. There has been a huge attack against private sector unions. Actually, that’s been going on since the Second World War. After the Second World War, business was terrified about the radicalization of the country during the Depression and then the war, and it started right off—Taft-Hartley was 1947—huge propaganda campaigns to demonize unions. It really—and it continued until you get to the Reagan administration.
Reagan was extreme. Beginning of his administration, one of the first things was to call in scabs—hadn’t been done for a long time, and it’s illegal in most countries—in the air controller strike. Reagan essentially—by "Reagan," I mean his administration; I don’t know what he knew—but they basically told the business world that they’re not going to apply the labor laws. So, that means you can break unions any way you like. And in fact, the number of firing of union organizers, illegal firing, I think probably tripled during the Reagan years.
Then, in fact, by the early '90s, Caterpillar Corporation, first major industrial corporation, called in scabs to break a strike of industrial workers, UAW. That's—I think the only country that allowed that was South Africa. And then it spread.
When Clinton came along, he had another way of destroying unions. It’s called NAFTA. One of the predicted consequences of NAFTA, which in fact worked out, was it would be used as a way to undermine unions—illegally, of course. But when you have a criminal state, it doesn’t matter. So, there was actually a study, under NAFTA rules, that investigated illegal strike breaking organizing efforts by threats, illegal threats, to transfer to Mexico. So, if union organizers are trying to organize, you put up a sign saying, you know, "Transfer operation Mexico." In other words, you shut up, or you’re going to lose your jobs. That’s illegal. But again, if you have a criminal state, it doesn’t matter.
Well, by measures like this, private sector unions have been reduced to, I think, maybe seven percent of the workforce. Now, it’s not that workers don’t want to join unions. In fact, many studies of this, there’s a huge pool of workers who want to join unions, but they can’t. And they’re getting no support from the political system. And part of the reason, not all of it, is these $2 billion campaigns. Now, this really took off in the late '70s and the ’80s. You want to run for office, then you're going to have to dig into very deep pockets. And as the income distribution gets more and more skewed, that means you’re going to have to go after Jeffrey Immelt and Lloyd Blankfein, and so on and so forth, if you want to even be in office. Take a look at the 2008 campaign spending. Obama way outspent McCain. He was funded—his main source of funding was the financial institutions.
AMY GOODMAN: Now they’re saying he’s going to raise, Obama is going to raise $1 billion for the next campaign.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah, and it’ll probably be more than that, because they’re predicting $2 billion for the whole campaign, and the incumbent usually has advantages.
AMY GOODMAN: Noam, we have to break. We’re going to come right back.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, world-renowned political dissident. Stay with us.
[break]AMY GOODMAN: Our guest for the hour is Noam Chomsky. He has authored over a hundred books; his latest, Hopes and Prospects, among others.
Professor Chomsky, I want to ask you about former President Ronald Reagan. A very big deal is made of him now on the hundredth anniversary of his birth. Last year President Obama signed legislation establishing a commission to mark the centennial.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: President Reagan helped, as much as any president, to restore a sense of optimism in our country, a spirit that transcended politics, that transcended even the most heated arguments of the day.AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, your response?
NOAM CHOMSKY: This deification of Reagan is extremely interesting and a very—it’s scandalous, but it tells a lot about the country. I mean, when Reagan left office, he was the most unpopular living president, apart from Nixon, even below Carter. If you look at his years in office, he was not particularly popular. He was more or less average. He severely harmed the American economy. When he came into office, the United States was the world’s leading creditor. By the time he left, it was the world’s leading debtor. He was fiscally totally irresponsible—wild spending, no fiscal responsibility. Government actually grew during the Reagan years.
He was also a passionate opponent of the free market. I mean, the way he’s being presented is astonishing. He was the most protectionist president in post-war American history. He essentially virtually doubled protective barriers to try to preserve incompetent U.S. management, which was being driven out by superior Japanese production.
During his years, we had the first major fiscal crises. During the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, the New Deal regulations were still in effect, and that prevented financial crises. The financialization of the economy began to take off in the ’70s, but with the deregulation, of course you start getting crises. Reagan left office with the biggest financial crisis since the Depression: the home savings and loan.
I won’t even talk about his international behavior. I mean, it was just abominable. I mean, if we gained our optimism by killing hundreds of thousands of people in Central America and destroying any hope for democracy and freedom and supporting South Africa while it killed about a million-and-a-half people in neighboring countries, and on and on, if that’s the way we get back our optimism, we’re in bad trouble.
Well, what happened after Reagan left office is that there was the beginnings of an effort to carry out a kind of—this Reagan legacy, you know, to try to create from this really quite miserable creature some kind of deity. And amazingly, it succeeded. I mean, Kim Il-sung would have been impressed. The events that took place when Reagan died, you know, the Reagan legacy, this Obama business, you don’t get that in free societies. It would be ridiculed. What you get it is in totalitarian states. And I’m waiting to see what comes next. This morning, North Korea announced that on the birthday of the current god, a halo appeared over his birthplace. That will probably happen tomorrow over Reagan’s birthplace. But when we go in—I mean, this is connected with what we were talking about before. If you want to control a population, keep them passive, keep beating them over the head and let them look somewhere else, one way to do it is to give them a god to worship.
AMY GOODMAN: Noam, you’ve written about, over the years, COINTELPRO, FBI raids. We’re seeing that today. There’s almost no attention given to what we have focused on a good deal on Democracy Now!, from Minneapolis to Chicago, the FBI raids, activists being subpoenaed to speak about in various cases.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah, that’s a pretty—it’s not just—the raids are serious enough, but what’s more significant is what lies behind them. These are the first actions taken under new rulings by the Supreme Court. A very important case was six or eight months ago, I guess, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project. It was initiated by the Obama administration. It was argued by Elena Kagan, Obama’s new court appointment. And they won, with the support of the far-right justices. The case is extremely significant. It’s the worst attack on freedom of speech since the Smith Act 70 years ago. The case determined that any material support to organizations that the government lists on the terrorist list is criminalized, but they interpreted "material support"—in fact, the issue at stake was speech. Humanitarian Law Project was giving advice—speech—to a group on that’s on the terrorist list, Turkish PKK. And they were also advising them on legal advice and also advising them to move towards nonviolence. That means if you and I, let’s say, talk to Hamas leaders and say, "Look, you ought to move towards nonviolent resistance," we’re giving material support to a group on the terrorist list.
Incidentally, the terrorist list is totally illegitimate. That shouldn’t exist in a free society. Terrorist list is an arbitrary list established by the executive with no basis whatsoever, by whim, for example, but no supervision. And if you take a look at the record of the terrorist list, it’s almost comical. So, take Reagan again. In 1982, the Reagan administration decided it wanted to aid their friend Saddam Hussein. He had been—Iraq had been on the terrorist list. They took it off the terrorist list. They had a gap. They had to put someone in.
AMY GOODMAN: South Africa, ANC.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Put in Cuba. They put in Cuba, and I suppose in honor of the fact that, in preceding several years Cuba had been the target of more international terrorism than the rest of the world combined. So, Saddam Hussein goes off, Cuba goes on, no review, no comment. And now, with the new Obama principle, giving—advising groups that are arbitrarily put on this group is criminal. And that was the background for those raids.
AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, we’re going to continue this conversation online and play it on the show again. Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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