	id AA18772; Sun, 23 Oct 94 22:44:23 CDT
Subject: Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 2 Num. 55


              Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 2  Num. 55
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                    ("Quid coniuratio est?")
 
 
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NOAM CHOMSKY -- 10/17/94
 
My transcript of part of a talk given by Noam Chomsky at UICC 
(University of Illinois at Chicago Circle) on October 17, 1994. 
Special thanks to Paul Mueth for travelling to Chicago, taping 
the talk, then broadcasting it on local radio station WEFT 90.1 
FM on Sunday, October 23, 1994.
 
 +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +
 
NOAM CHOMSKY:
 
[...]
 
...Well, the destruction of unions (quite apart from undermining 
article 23 [apparently of the U.N. universal human rights 
declaration of 1948]) has a lot of other consequences. One 
consequence is lowering wages. And, in fact, wages have been 
declining for most of the work force for about 20 years, but 
sharply since the, since the... under the Reaganites.
 
It's also undermined the benefits that are guaranteed by the 
universal declaration -- like health and safety standards in the 
workplace. So, industrial accidents have shot up, and so on, 
because the State is a criminal State. It doesn't enforce the 
laws [i.e., selectively enforces the laws, a.k.a. "Justice" = 
"Just us"].
 
It also destroys family values. Again, so if you look back at the 
UNESCO study on the Anglo-American attack... war against 
children, one of the reasons why families are disintegrating and 
why children are, you know, not doing well on school and that 
sort of thing is simply that parent-child contact has severely 
declined. In fact, it's declined by about 40 percent in the 
United States. And the reason it's declined is fairly 
straightforward: when 2 parents have to work a 55-60 hour week in 
order to survive and there's no public support systems and no day 
care, the children end up being latch-key kids or watching 
television. The rate of substance abuse goes way up. Alcoholism 
goes up. Violence against children and by children goes up. Uh, 
kind of automatically. Well that's part of the assault against 
families and against children by the people who are mislabeled 
"conservatives", you know, again, a propaganda achievement that 
would've blown Orwell's mind if he could see it.
 
But that's another consequence of the destruction of unions and 
the destruction of the whole social policy system that goes along 
with them. Incidentally, it's not that the State has been 
weakened. Under the Reaganites, State power was vastly increased. 
In fact, the ratio of State expenditures to GNP [Gross National 
Product] went *up* under Reagan, and we got a *huge* welfare 
State -- but for the rich! You know, none of this "nonsense" 
about support systems for the poor. Now we worry about the "bad 
genes". {1}.
 
Another effect of the destruction of unions has been to weaken 
democracy. Unions are one of the few means by which people, 
ordinary people, are able to pool their resources and to enter 
the political arena. They can't do it alone, they're not rich 
enough. But they can do it together. And one of the ways they've 
traditionally done it is unions. In fact, one of the reasons why 
the United States is so different from almost every other 
industrial country (even Canada, very much like us in other 
respects) is that they have unions and we don't. So they have 
ways for people to enter the democratic system that are lacking 
here.
 
In addition to that... And so, like, they have health care and 
social contract and things that we don't have. We're unlike other 
industrial countries in that respect. Although we're *very* 
advantaged. We have all kinds, I mean... U.S. the richest country 
in the world. It has absolutely unparalleled advantages. Which 
makes all of this even more dramatic.
 
And there's also a kind of psychological effect which is pretty 
hard to measure. But the effect of the destruction of unions and 
other aspects of functioning civil society is to sort of 
"privatize aspirations". It's to eliminate the sense that people 
can work together to achieve something. It means you're "out for 
yourself". That's the value that has to be instilled in everyone: 
"You're out for yourself. You don't care about anybody else." 
Actually, it took about 100 years of struggle to drive that into 
the heads of American working people. And it's been a long... 
'cause they wouldn't accept it. But, there's been a lot of 
success in this. And again, that's another major victory for the 
values that we in fact, that American power in fact supports.
 
Actually, all of this tells you something about what people ought 
to do who care about *other* values. That's, people who care 
about *actual* human rights, or democracy and freedom and so on. 
Human rights, like labor rights, were never a *gift*. Everybody 
knows that. They were won by struggle. And in the United States, 
often a struggle that met with plenty of State/Corporate 
violence. And labor was always an important part of that 
struggle, a leading edge, in fact. And that was particularly true 
when labor was associated with political forms, when there was 
something like a labor-based party, and when there was a labor- 
based press, and so on. Under those conditions, you really had 
effective struggle. So you look at, say, health care in Canada: 
it came not just because you had powerful labor unions, but there 
was also a political party associated with them and there was a 
labor-based press associated with them, and so on. So you could 
drive it through.
 
And an important part of the tremendous victory of the highly 
class-conscious U.S. business class {2} is not only to weaken 
labor unions but also to have eliminated any form of labor-based 
party and to have wiped out the labor-based press -- which was 
*alive* in the United States. Like in Chicago, right up until the 
1930s, in fact, it was quite lively. In England, it lasted even 
another 30 years, until it was finally destroyed by, just private 
power, basically.
 
And that tells you what people ought to do who want to bring the 
United States into, say, the 20th century. Or maybe even the 19th 
century. And there *are* initiatives. There are things that can 
be done. I'm sure you know plenty of them here. But one, for 
example, is the New Party, which is organizing around the country 
-- mostly locally, but if it can reach enough scale it could be 
nationally -- which could be a party based on popular 
organizations, labor being only one of them, of course, but a 
significant one. There are others, and they can be brought 
together so that labor's struggles become struggles for the 
*general* interest, not just for an isolated interest as they've 
been here to the extent that they take place at all. Another is 
the -- which I just learned about recently -- is the Chicago New 
Media Project and the Chicago Educational Network (if I've got 
the words right) which is bringing together (people here can tell 
you about it, no point in my doing it) educators, journalists, 
others, to set up alternative media and to bring parents and 
ordinary people... to *involve* them, to give them an opportunity 
to engage themselves in both learning about what's happening to 
their lives and *doing* something about it -- in the educational 
system and elsewhere. Community radio is another example. These 
are the kinds of things that *can* create alternatives; in fact, 
that offer *some* hope for the future. In fact, the *only* hope 
for the future. And if those opportunities, which do exist, are 
not pursued, the future is not gonna be very pretty to look at.
 
Well, I've talked about what's *here*... unnecessary to say that 
things are a *lot* worse in our "domains"... go on with that. 
Let's take another look at article 23 -- everyone has a right to 
work under just and favorable conditions. The International Labor 
Organization in Geneva recently published a report on working 
conditions around the world in which they pointed out that about 
a *third* of the work force in the world is unemployed. By that 
they mean, "lacks access to... doesn't earn enough for 
subsistence". So you know, like, maybe you can sell chewing gum 
in a market, but if you don't have enough for subsistence you're 
called "unemployed". That's about 30 percent, they say, of the 
world's population, last January, and increasing. They point out 
that that's a crisis. Kind of like the 1930s Depression, but in 
fact much worse, because it's global and it's part of a human 
rights catastrophe [all] over the world.
 
In the United States, of course, a richer country so it's not 30 
percent and there is indeed a so-called "recovery" -- which is 
*very* sluggish; about half the normal rate with about a third 
the rate of job growth of other post-war recessions. And 
different kinds of jobs. An unprecedented number of them are 
temporary jobs. (That's supposed to be a "good thing", 
incidentally, for those of you who've studied "economics". That 
increases labor "flexibility". That cuts down rigidities in labor 
markets. And that's really "good". It means, for example, you 
don't have to worry about things like pensions and, you know, the 
right to fire people, and organizing rights, and so on. Those are 
all "rigidities" which cut down efficiency. I mean, they may be 
good for *people*, but they're not good for the economy.)
 
And there's a crucial distinction that you want to have to master 
if you want to get ahead in the world, and that is to understand 
that economic health and the health of the population are un- 
correlated. In fact, they're often *negatively* correlated. So 
you're gonna have economic "miracles". I mean, everything very 
"healthy" by the, you know, the highly ideological measures that 
are defined, in fact, to measure how things are working out for 
rich people. But the general population can be declining. And 
labor flexibility is one of the things that contributes to that. 
So that's a "good thing" and, in fact, it's a contribution to 
something that the *Wall Street Journal* called "a welcome 
development of transcendant importance" no less, namely that 
labor costs in the United States, which were the highest in the 
world (as you'd expect of the richest country) back in the mid- 
80s, are now the *lowest* in the industrial world. Now they were 
the lowest, actually, in 1991. Then Thatcher succeeded in driving 
England even lower, so we're the second best in the world in the 
competition to see how much you can grind down our working 
people.
 
                   [...to be continued...]
 
--------------------------<< Notes >>----------------------------
{1} "Now we worry about the 'bad genes'." Refers to recent 
release of a book called *The Bell Curve* which is being widely 
covered by the establishment press. Two things regarding this 
book and its thesis:
   (a) Why is the establishment press giving this book so much 
coverage? Here is a book that has been "moved to the head of the 
class", so to speak. Why all the attention? Is it because the 
book is actually that good? Or is there a hidden purpose behind 
the promotion of this book?
   (b) I especially liked an article read on the air by G. Gordon 
Liddy on his "Radio Free D.C." show that reviewed this book. The 
article was from the *Washington Times* of on or about October 
21, 1994. The gist of the article was that because of the 
emphasis that has been placed on ethnicity and multiculturalism, 
we tend to view people as groups rather than as individuals. This 
leads to an emphasis on the "I.Q.s" (I say I.Q.s in quotes 
because a proper intelligence test requires a one on one 
evaluation -- my source for this assertion is a recent (10/21/94) 
Radio Free America show whose guest was a member of Mensa) of 
groups instead of individuals.
 
{2} "...the highly class-conscious U.S. business class..." Some 
confusion in terms may arise. Here, when Chomsky refers to what 
he calls the "U.S. business class", I take it to mean that part 
of business that is in cahoots with the State; that part of the 
business class that pays off the politicians who, in turn, favor 
them in their governmental policies.
   Likewise, in passing, there is a lack of conciseness in our 
references to "conservatives". The word "conservative" has at 
least 2 meanings that I can see: it means one who favors 
traditional American values, who strongly supports the U.S. 
Constitution, etc. It also has taken on a meaning of a sort of 
reactionary person who favors major repression. This is unfair to 
true conservatives, who most definitely do *not* want "big 
brother" in our lives, and who in my opinion are actually quite 
progressive in some areas -- for example science and medicine.
 
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Aperi os tuum muto, et causis omnium filiorum qui pertranseunt.
Aperi os tuum, decerne quod justum est, et judica inopem et 
  pauperem.                    -- Liber Proverbiorum  XXXI: 8-9 

 Brian Francis Redman    bigxc@prairienet.org    "The Big C"
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"Justice" = "Just us" = "History is written by the assassins."
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