"Domestic Spying" - Rob Rogers, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US
Showing posts with label security. Show all posts
Showing posts with label security. Show all posts
Monday, October 15, 2018
Friday, February 23, 2018
Culture of the National Security State - Deepa Kumar on RAI (Last part)
This last part of the interview with Deepa Kumar is all about how US controls its own public through fear mongering of Soviets, Chinese, Koreans, Talibans, & "terrorist" Muslims.
During the Cold War, Americans were indoctrinated to fear & obey the authorities due to the supposed attacks from Soviets, & their outpost in North America, Cuba. After all, imagine the whole continental America is being afraid of a tiny island nation of Cuba. Ridiculous.
That fear mongering also helped the military-industrial complex to stockpile nuclear weapons by the thousands & thousands. Millions of taxpayers money was poured into making those nuclear weapons & several other kinds of weapons, & instead of being used to create industries & building infrastructure, or helping the poor citizens.
Then, as the "wall came down," the fear mongering shifted towards Muslims & Islam. 9/11 became a pivotal moment to start a drive for global dominance, in the guise of War on Terror, & make & sell billions of weapons around the world. Billions more are being spent on refurbishment of nuclear weapons. Surveillance at home & abroad has become common, so much so, that American citizens are being suspicious of each other. That kind of state where everyone is afraid of everyone else ... I thought that happened in tyrannical states of Syria & Zimbabwe where anything said against the government can get you in prison. But, no, that is the sad state of affairs, or security, in none other than the developed world, & the bastion of democracy & freedom, the United States of America.
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PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: So what is the cultural politics of the national security state?
DEEPA KUMAR, ASSOC. PROF. MEDIA STUDIES AND MIDEAST STUDIES, RUTGERS UNIV.: ... So ... I'm looking at the Cold War period, the post-Second World War period, and the emergence and the birth of the national security state after the National Security Act of 1947, which creates the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and then the NSA in '52, and so on. And there is a wholesale militarization of American society. Every aspect of American life, social, intellectual, political, and so on, it gets militarized in this way.
And the question is: how does that become acceptable? And culture is very important in terms of understanding how that happens. And so you have these security rituals, right, the Civil [Defense] department drills, the kind of "duck and cover". ...
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KUMAR: But the whole point of a security ritual is to cultivate fear and obedience. So you give your consent to Cold War policies, to hot wars, to the complete militarization of society. And so I want to look at those sorts of drills, the various shows, the propaganda work overseas as well as domestically, but build it up to the present, because after 9/11 you see a strengthening of the national security state. And if we had "duck and cover" back then, we have see something, say something, which is the idea that you've got to be suspicious of anyone and anything, and you see and you text. That's the new ritual. And it again cultivates a sort of obedience to the national security state and all the draconian things that are being done--surveillance, drone strikes, all the rest of it--which otherwise would be unacceptable if it weren't for these various cultural practices that make it so.
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JAY: The origins of the national security state, I mean, it begins in World War II, except they don't demobilize. They go from World War II right into a kind of World War III, the Cold War with the Soviet Union. But it's somewhat a little different than what's happening now, in the sense that it seems to me that the leaders of the time and--Truman and such, they really did see the Soviet Union as an existential threat, partly because it isn't too long before the Soviet Union has nuclear weapons.
Now all of a sudden, America thought it was going to be the thing after World War II. There would be no one else on the planet to rival. And all of a sudden you have a rival. But not only you have a rival; you have what at least is perceived as a socialist rival. You have the beginnings of an enormous population not within the capitalist world. Not too many years later you have China. Now you have, what, almost half the population of the world not within the capitalist world. And this--I don't think--I mean, we've talked to people like Ray McGovern, who was briefing the White House during this period, and he was doing [it] to Reagan and others, and then before Reagan, and they were telling them, listen, the Soviet Union is not going to attack the United States, it's not that kind of a threat.
KUMAR: And mutually assured destruction, right?
JAY: Well, partly that, and partly there'd just be no reason for it. Well, how could the Soviet Union gain anything by attacking the United States?
But the underlying reason for this state is they're terrified of the spread of socialism around the world.
KUMAR: Absolutely. And therefore the Cold War is not only a sort of war that involves the setting up of bases and spheres of influence and all the rest of it, so as to prevent larger parts of the world from the domino theory, right, which is that the Soviet Union was going to collect larger and larger portions of the world and so on. So it was about that. But it's also about ideology. It's about presenting American capitalism and the free enterprise as being the same as free speech, as being the same as individual liberty and human rights and all the rest of it. Right? So it was in that sense both a war in terms of a militaristic war, an international policy, as well as a bolstering of a certain notion of what kind of society--a capitalist society--would actually realize the dreams and aspirations of individuals.
JAY: And so you create this massive machine, which is really about global dominance. And certainly for many years, until ... Soviet Union starts to implode and China starts to transition to capitalism. That kind of threat clearly isn't there anymore.
KUMAR: But then the terrorist threat comes along. And, actually, the terrorist threat, interestingly enough, the word terrorism never used to be used in the U.S. up until the late 1970s. One study of presidential speeches all the way up to the middle of the 1970s finds that the term was rarely used. It's not to say that things that are today called terrorist, such as hijackings of airplanes or kidnappings or what have you didn't happen, but the people who carried out these acts were called air pirates, sky pirates, bandits, rebels, and so on.
But there's a process through the 1970s--and Israel plays a part in this--in terms of defining who the terrorist is. And in the 1980s, in fact, you see this novel theory come into being, which is that terrorists are in league with the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union sponsors an international network of terrorists, and therefore the West should not only fight against the Soviet Union, but it should also be ready to take on the terrorist threat. And, of course, after the collapse of the Soviet Union--.
JAY: The baton gets picked up by Iran, supposedly.
KUMAR: Right. Exactly.
But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it's not immediately the terrorist threat. You have this idea of rogue states, failed states, and a whole bunch of enemies, and so forth. But 9/11 becomes the pivotal moment around which the war on terror can be launched, which in many ways is analogous to the Cold War. You have this enemy. Of course, it's not the same kind of enemy. Terrorists don't have nuclear weapons and all the rest of it. But nevertheless, it's the kind of ideology that's needed to justify war, intervention, and global domination.
JAY: And 13 years or so after--of war on terror, we get something more robust than al-Qaeda ever was, apparently, the Islamic State. What do you make of the media depiction of Islamic State, how this is being dealt with?
KUMAR: I mean, if you look at the very fact that there is a group like Islamic State and that it poses a threat to the United States, you can say one thing, that the world war on terror has failed, right, because if it was working, these groups would be dissolving and so on. And so they're not. But we have been so primed over the course of the 1980s, the 1990s, and so forth with Hollywood films which consistently show terrorists as brown people, as Middle Eastern people--. And there's a whole slew of films from Cannon--this is a company that two Israelis create in which they consistently--they put out dozens of films in which Palestinians fighting for national liberation are seen as the bad guys and so on. And so that's the steady diet on which a whole generation of Americans have grown up, automatically seeing brown people and Middle Easterners and so on as being terrorists. And so by the time we come to 9/11, we're so primed to think of these people as just being these horrible individuals that we need to go off and make war on them.
And it's not just culture. It's even in the news media sphere, right? Remember after the Oklahoma City bombing, when Timothy McVeigh, a homegrown terrorist we later discovered is responsible for it--. The immediate response, however? Middle Eastern. Right? And this was back in the 1990s, when the Oklahoma City bombing takes place. Before it was discovered who the perpetrators are, all of the talking heads, these so-called terrorism experts, are saying this is Middle Eastern, it has Middle Eastern marks all over it, and so forth. So that's sort of been the evolution, which then gets ratcheted up post-9/11.
JAY: One of the things Homeland's been critiqued about and shows like Homeland, and 24, for that matter, is that it justifies mass surveillance of mosques and Muslims in America. But isn't that kind of understandable? I don't mean the shows. But, I mean--and, frankly, that is where--if there's a terrorist threat right now, there's some from right-wing organizations. And in theory we hear about the arrests. And there is surveillance of them as well. And as far as I know, the FBI has people looking into some of the far-right militias and such. ... Now, I know it's a tiny sliver of mosques, it's a very small, marginal number of mosques, and what we're given the context for is mass surveillance of everybody in every mosque, but there's not like there's no basis for it.
KUMAR: Well, the way this can be done in a way that is fair and that is constitutionally valid is if there is sufficient grounds to suspect somebody, then institute some form of surveillance, right? And, actually, it's in response to the sort of complete, indiscriminate surveillance that we saw in the 1960s against all kinds of people, from Martin Luther King to Jane Fonda and so on, that some restrictions were actually placed around who you can surveil and so forth, and there had to be some basis for suspicion. That has been completely done away with in the post-9/11 context. And now, if you're Muslim, you're automatically suspicious. And if you see the theories of radicalization that the FBI, the NYPD, and so on operate around, they have, like, a four-stage or five-stage process where just being a Muslim puts you on the first stage; and then you happen to be religious, you start growing--you know, if you're a man and you start to grow facial hair and wear religious clothing and so on, you're automatically on a fast track towards jihadism. And that is ridiculous. You know, that's such a violation of people's religious freedom rights.
And the end result of that is that you've seen a massive infiltration. For instance, in New York, the NYPD Demographics Unit has people all over, not just in New York City, but in the entire Tri-state area, infiltrating college groups, infiltrating mosques, bookstores, and so on, and keeping detailed records of what people do, how they live their lives, which is such a violation of your privacy, not to mention that it creates such a chilling effect on free speech and all the rest of it. I have students who say, I'm so scared in terms of who to trust who not to trust, because I know that there are agents in our midst. That's not the way in which a free society should treat its citizens.
JAY: Well, ... I understand the logic of doing this, I understand systemic surveillance, I understand infiltrating mosques and all the rest, because if you're going to be a marauder abroad, you're going to have to have a police state at home.
KUMAR: Yes.
JAY: So if you won't question your role in the world, if you just leave that off the table, then, yeah, you're left with these kinds of policy options, because people legitimately want to come and get you. But you've got to kind of add that to it, because--.
KUMAR: No doubt, because actually the current surveillance practices that we have today come out of the U.S. occupation of the Philippines. And Alfred McCoy has a book called Policing America's Empire, in which he talks about this constabulary unit that's formed in--American unit that is formed in Manila which uses things like, recruits a bunch of informants, which uses things like spread disinformation about the leaders in the Philippines who are fighting back against American occupation, and so on. And those things come back home and inform the kind of surveillance practices that we have right here. So there's always absolutely--empire is not just something that happens elsewhere; it happens right here.
And I think the key thing that the American state is afraid of is that if people who live in this country, who have relatives who live in Egypt or in Iran or what have you, they will tell a very different story of what the U.S. has done in those countries and therefore have the potential to disrupt the propaganda narrative and feed into an antiwar movement. And they don't want that, and therefore keep them scared, monitor them, police them as a way to stop this kind of information from getting out.
Monday, December 26, 2016
Chris Hedges Interviews Noam Chomsky (Part 2 of 3)
Another interesting interview of Noam Chomsky by Chris Hedges. This one discusses how people around the world, & in the US, have been fed the idea that they are living in the most democratic country in the world. That the world should follow the lead of United States of America when it comes to democracy, liberty, & free speech. However, the reality is very very different.
As Chris Hedges says in the first paragraph that "we are the most monitored, watched, photographed, eavesdropped population in human history." The general public has been given the idea that if you don't concede to government's constant monitoring, then evil people will get you & ruin your life. Fear and hysteria is used to control the masses, & the ignorant masses follow along like a flock of sheep.
Continuing onwards, Chris Hedges puts out another question to Chomsky where he says that how our "liberal" political & legislative institutions have been actually "enslaved" within the power & money paradigm of modern politics. Power & money controls every aspect of modern politics. Those few at the top of social hierarchy who have amassed power & money, usually through illegal or immoral means, wield their significant influences to control the so-called "elected" officials to get what they want from the country.
As Chomsky says that "take a look at the literature, about 70% of the population, what they believe has no effect on policy at all. ... When you get to the top, which is probably, like, a tenth of one percent, they basically write the legislation." How is that even close to democracy? Does it really matter who the masses elect because at the end of the day, the masses will still get the same result, regardless of who is in the office. But, the ignorant & naive public of the West & around the world (US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, India, Australia, Singapore etc.) still believe that democracy exists in developed countries & developing countries are not developed because of a lack of democracy & liberty. Do they even have an idea what democracy actually is because frankly, voting is not democracy. Voting also happens in Egypt & Zimbabwe, for instance, but the public masses won't recognize them as democratic countries.
Through fear & propaganda of false information, the West has made it seem to the world that it is democratic & the rest of the world must follow its lead. Powerful elites has redefined democracy, knowing fully well that the ignorant masses will accept the propaganda without giving it a second thought. How can the masses fight back & bring true democracy back when they are sound asleep? That's why, political activism is dead nowadays & the public is easily controlled & manipulated by a small minority of the powerful elites in North America & around the world.
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CHRIS HEDGES, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST: But that system, of course, is constant. But what's changed is that we don't produce anything anymore. So what we define as our working class is a service sector class working in places like Walmart. And the effective forms of resistance--the sitdown strikes, going back even further in the middle of the 19th century with the women in Lowell--the Wobblies were behind those textile strikes. What are the mechanisms now? And I know you have written, as many anarchists have done, about the importance of the working class controlling the means of production, taking control, and you have a great quote about how Lenin and the Bolsheviks are right-wing deviants, which is, of course, exactly right, because it was centralized control, destroying the Soviets. Given the fact that production has moved to places like Bangladesh or southern China, what is going to be the paradigm now? And given, as you point out, the powerful forces of propaganda--and you touched upon now the security and surveillance state. We are the most monitored, watched, photographed, eavesdropped population in human history. And you cannot even use the world liberty when you eviscerate privacy. That's what totalitarian is. What is the road we take now, given the paradigm that we have, which is somewhat different from what this country was, certainly, in the first half of the 20th century?
NOAM CHOMSKY, LINGUIST AND POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: I think it's pretty much the same, frankly. The idea still should be that of the Knights of Labor: those who work in the mills should own them. And there's plenty of manufacturing going on in the country, and probably there will be more, for unpleasant reasons. One thing that's happening right now which is quite interesting is that energy prices are going down in the United States because of the massive exploitation of fossil fuels, which is going to destroy our grandchildren, but under the capitalist morality, the calculus is that profits tomorrow outweigh the existence of your grandchildren. It's institutionally-based, so, yes, we're getting lower energy prices. And if you look at the business press, they're very enthusiastic about the fact that we can undercut manufacturing in Europe because we'll have lower energy prices, and therefore manufacturing will come back here, and we can even undermine European efforts at developing sustainable energy because we'll have this advantage.
Britain is saying the same thing. I was just in England recently. As I left the airport, I read The Daily Telegraph newspaper. Big headline: England is going to begin fracking all of the country, even fracking under people's homes without their permission. And that'll allow us to destroy the environment even more quickly and will bring manufacturing back here.
The same is true with Asia. Manufacturing is moving back, to an extent, to Mexico, and even here, as wages increase in China, partly because of labor struggles. There's massive labor struggles in China, huge, all over the place, and since we're integrated with them, we can be supportive of them.
But manufacturing is coming back here. And both manufacturing and the service industries can move towards having those who do the work take over the management and ownership and control. In fact, it's happening. In the old Rust Belt-- Indiana, Ohio, and so on--there's a significant--not huge, but significant growth of worker-owned enterprises. They're not huge, but they're substantial around Cleveland and other places.
The background is interesting. In 1977, U.S. Steel, the multinational, decided to close down their mills in Youngstown, Ohio. Youngstown is a steel town, sort of built by the steelworkers, one of the main steel-producing areas. Well, the union tried to buy the plants from U.S. Steel. They objected--in my view, mostly on class lines. They might have even profited from it. But the idea of worker-owned industry doesn't have much appeal to corporate leaders, which means bankers and so on. It went to the courts. Finally, the union lost in the courts. But with enough popular support, they could have won.
Well, the working class and the community did not give up. They couldn't get the steel mills, but they began to develop small worker-owned enterprises. They've now spread throughout the region. They're substantial. And it can happen more and more.
And the same thing happened in Walmarts. I mean, there's massive efforts right now, significant ones, to organize the service workers--what they call associates--in the service industries. And these industries, remember, depend very heavily on taxpayer largess in all kinds of ways. I mean, for example, let's take, say, Walmarts. They import goods produced in China, which are brought here on container ships which were designed and developed by the U.S. Navy. And point after point where you look, you find that the way the system--the system that we now have is one which is radically anticapitalist, radically so.
I mean, I mentioned one thing, the powerful effort to try to undermine markets for consumers, but there's something much more striking. I mean, in a capitalist system, the basic principle is that, say, if you invest in something and, say, it's a risky investment, so you put money into it for a long time, maybe decades, and finally after a long time something comes out that's marketable for a profit, it's supposed to go back to you. That's not the way it works here. Take, say, computers, internet, lasers, microelectronics, containers, GPS, in fact the whole IT revolution. There was taxpayer investment in that for decades, literally decades, doing all the hard, creative, risky work. Does the taxpayer get any of the profit? None, because that's not the way our system works. It's radically anti-capitalist, just as it's radically anti-democratic, opposed to markets, in favor of concentrating wealth and power.
But that doesn't have to be accepted by the population. These are--all kinds of forms of resistance to this can be developed if people become aware of it.
HEDGES: Well, you could argue that in the election of 2008, Obama wasn't accepted by the population. But what we see repeatedly is that once elected officials achieve power through, of course, corporate financing, the consent of the governed is a kind of cruel joke. It doesn't, poll after poll. I mean, I sued Obama over the National Defense Authorization Act, in which you were coplaintiff, and the polling was 97% against this section of the NDAA. And yet the courts, which have become wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporate state, the elected officials, the executive branch, and the press, which largely ignored it--the only organ that responsibly covered the case was, ironically, The New York Times. We don't have--it doesn't matter what we want. It doesn't--I mean, and I think that's the question: how do we effect change when we have reached a point where we can no longer appeal to the traditional liberal institutions that, as Karl Popper said once, made incremental or piecemeal reform possible, to adjust the system--of course, to save capitalism? But now it can't even adjust the system. We see cutting welfare.
CHOMSKY: Yeah. I mean, it's perfectly true that the population is mostly disenfranchised. In fact, that's a leading theme even of academic political science. You take a look at the mainstream political science, so, for example, a recent paper that was just published out of Princeton by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, two of the leading analysts of these topics, what they point out is they went through a couple of thousand policy decisions and found what has long been known, that there was almost no--that the public attitudes had almost no effect. Public organizations that are--nonprofit organizations that are publicly based, no effect. The outcomes were determined by concentrated private power.
There's a long record of that going way back. Thomas Ferguson, a political scientist near here, has shown very convincingly that something as simple as campaign spending is a very good predictor of policy. That goes back into the late 19th century, right through the New Deal, right up till the present. And that's only one element of it. And you take a look at the literature, about 70% of the population, what they believe has no effect on policy at all. You get a little more influence as you go up. When you get to the top, which is probably, like, a tenth of one percent, they basically write the legislation.
I mean, you see this all over. I mean, take these huge so-called trade agreements that are being negotiated, Trans-Pacific and Transatlantic--enormous agreements, kind of NAFTA-style agreements. They're secret--almost. They're not secret from the hundreds of corporate lawyers and lobbyists who are writing them. They know about it, which means that their bosses know about it.
And the Obama administration and the press says, look, this has to be secret, otherwise we can't defend our interests. Yeah, our interests means the interests of the corporate lawyers and lobbyists who are writing the legislation. Take the few pieces that have been leaked and you see that's exactly what it is. Same with the others.
But it doesn't mean you have to accept it. And there have been changes. So take, say--in the 1920s, the labor movement had been practically destroyed. There's a famous book. One of the leading labor historians, David Montgomery, has a major book called something like The Fall of the House of Labor. He's talking about the 1920s. It was done. There had been a very militant labor movement, very effective, farmers movement as well. Crushed in the 1920s. Almost nothing left. Well, in the 1930s it changed, and it changed because of popular activism.
HEDGES: But it also changed because of the breakdown of capitalism.
CHOMSKY: There was a circumstance that led to the opportunity to do something, but we're living with that constantly. I mean, take the last 30 years. For the majority of the population it's been stagnation or worse. That's--it's not exactly the deep Depression, but it's kind of a permanent semi-depression for most of the population. That's--there's plenty of kindling out there which can be lighted.
And what happened in the '30s is primarily CIO organizing, the militant actions like sit-down strikes. A sit-down strike's very frightening. It's a step before taking over the institution and saying, we don't need the bosses. And that--there was a cooperative administration, Roosevelt administration, so there was some interaction. And significant legislation was passed--not radical, but significant, underestimated. And it happened again in the '60s. It can happen again today. So I don't think that one should abandon hope in chipping away at the more oppressive aspects of the society within the electoral system. But it's only going to happen if there's massive popular organization, which doesn't have to stop at that. It can also be building the institutions of the future within the present society.
HEDGES: Would you say that the--you spoke about propaganda earlier and the Creel Commission and the rise of the public relations industry. The capacity to disseminate propaganda is something that now you virtually can't escape it. I mean, it's there in some electronic form, even in a hand-held device. Does that make that propaganda more effective?
CHOMSKY: Well, and it's kind of an interesting question. Like a lot of people, I've written a lot about media and intellectual propaganda, but there's another question which isn't studied much: how effective is it? And that's--when you brought up the polls, it's a striking illustration. The propaganda is--you can see from the poll results that the propaganda has only limited effectiveness. I mean, it can drive a population into terror and fear and war hysteria, like before the Iraq invasion or 1917 and so on, but over time, public attitudes remain quite different. In fact, studies even of what's called the right-wing, people who say, get the government off my back, that kind of sector, they turn out to be kind of social democratic. They want more spending on health, more spending on education, more spending on, say, women with dependent children, but not welfare, no spending on welfare, because Reagan, who was an extreme racist, succeeded in demonizing the notion of welfare. So in people's minds welfare means a rich black woman driving in her limousine to the welfare office to steal your money. Well, nobody wants that. But they want what welfare does.
Foreign aid is an interesting case. There's an enormous propaganda against foreign aid, 'cause we're giving everything to the undeserving people out there. You take a look at public attitudes. A lot of opposition to foreign aid. Very high. On the other hand, when you ask people, how much do we give in foreign aid? Way beyond what we give. When you ask what we should give in foreign aid, far above what we give.
And this runs across the board. Take, say taxes. There've been studies of attitudes towards taxes for 40 years. Overwhelmingly the population says taxes are much too low for the rich and the corporate sector. You've got to raise it. What happens? Well, the opposite.
As Chris Hedges says in the first paragraph that "we are the most monitored, watched, photographed, eavesdropped population in human history." The general public has been given the idea that if you don't concede to government's constant monitoring, then evil people will get you & ruin your life. Fear and hysteria is used to control the masses, & the ignorant masses follow along like a flock of sheep.
Continuing onwards, Chris Hedges puts out another question to Chomsky where he says that how our "liberal" political & legislative institutions have been actually "enslaved" within the power & money paradigm of modern politics. Power & money controls every aspect of modern politics. Those few at the top of social hierarchy who have amassed power & money, usually through illegal or immoral means, wield their significant influences to control the so-called "elected" officials to get what they want from the country.
As Chomsky says that "take a look at the literature, about 70% of the population, what they believe has no effect on policy at all. ... When you get to the top, which is probably, like, a tenth of one percent, they basically write the legislation." How is that even close to democracy? Does it really matter who the masses elect because at the end of the day, the masses will still get the same result, regardless of who is in the office. But, the ignorant & naive public of the West & around the world (US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, India, Australia, Singapore etc.) still believe that democracy exists in developed countries & developing countries are not developed because of a lack of democracy & liberty. Do they even have an idea what democracy actually is because frankly, voting is not democracy. Voting also happens in Egypt & Zimbabwe, for instance, but the public masses won't recognize them as democratic countries.
Through fear & propaganda of false information, the West has made it seem to the world that it is democratic & the rest of the world must follow its lead. Powerful elites has redefined democracy, knowing fully well that the ignorant masses will accept the propaganda without giving it a second thought. How can the masses fight back & bring true democracy back when they are sound asleep? That's why, political activism is dead nowadays & the public is easily controlled & manipulated by a small minority of the powerful elites in North America & around the world.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHRIS HEDGES, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST: But that system, of course, is constant. But what's changed is that we don't produce anything anymore. So what we define as our working class is a service sector class working in places like Walmart. And the effective forms of resistance--the sitdown strikes, going back even further in the middle of the 19th century with the women in Lowell--the Wobblies were behind those textile strikes. What are the mechanisms now? And I know you have written, as many anarchists have done, about the importance of the working class controlling the means of production, taking control, and you have a great quote about how Lenin and the Bolsheviks are right-wing deviants, which is, of course, exactly right, because it was centralized control, destroying the Soviets. Given the fact that production has moved to places like Bangladesh or southern China, what is going to be the paradigm now? And given, as you point out, the powerful forces of propaganda--and you touched upon now the security and surveillance state. We are the most monitored, watched, photographed, eavesdropped population in human history. And you cannot even use the world liberty when you eviscerate privacy. That's what totalitarian is. What is the road we take now, given the paradigm that we have, which is somewhat different from what this country was, certainly, in the first half of the 20th century?
NOAM CHOMSKY, LINGUIST AND POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: I think it's pretty much the same, frankly. The idea still should be that of the Knights of Labor: those who work in the mills should own them. And there's plenty of manufacturing going on in the country, and probably there will be more, for unpleasant reasons. One thing that's happening right now which is quite interesting is that energy prices are going down in the United States because of the massive exploitation of fossil fuels, which is going to destroy our grandchildren, but under the capitalist morality, the calculus is that profits tomorrow outweigh the existence of your grandchildren. It's institutionally-based, so, yes, we're getting lower energy prices. And if you look at the business press, they're very enthusiastic about the fact that we can undercut manufacturing in Europe because we'll have lower energy prices, and therefore manufacturing will come back here, and we can even undermine European efforts at developing sustainable energy because we'll have this advantage.
Britain is saying the same thing. I was just in England recently. As I left the airport, I read The Daily Telegraph newspaper. Big headline: England is going to begin fracking all of the country, even fracking under people's homes without their permission. And that'll allow us to destroy the environment even more quickly and will bring manufacturing back here.
The same is true with Asia. Manufacturing is moving back, to an extent, to Mexico, and even here, as wages increase in China, partly because of labor struggles. There's massive labor struggles in China, huge, all over the place, and since we're integrated with them, we can be supportive of them.
But manufacturing is coming back here. And both manufacturing and the service industries can move towards having those who do the work take over the management and ownership and control. In fact, it's happening. In the old Rust Belt-- Indiana, Ohio, and so on--there's a significant--not huge, but significant growth of worker-owned enterprises. They're not huge, but they're substantial around Cleveland and other places.
The background is interesting. In 1977, U.S. Steel, the multinational, decided to close down their mills in Youngstown, Ohio. Youngstown is a steel town, sort of built by the steelworkers, one of the main steel-producing areas. Well, the union tried to buy the plants from U.S. Steel. They objected--in my view, mostly on class lines. They might have even profited from it. But the idea of worker-owned industry doesn't have much appeal to corporate leaders, which means bankers and so on. It went to the courts. Finally, the union lost in the courts. But with enough popular support, they could have won.
Well, the working class and the community did not give up. They couldn't get the steel mills, but they began to develop small worker-owned enterprises. They've now spread throughout the region. They're substantial. And it can happen more and more.
And the same thing happened in Walmarts. I mean, there's massive efforts right now, significant ones, to organize the service workers--what they call associates--in the service industries. And these industries, remember, depend very heavily on taxpayer largess in all kinds of ways. I mean, for example, let's take, say, Walmarts. They import goods produced in China, which are brought here on container ships which were designed and developed by the U.S. Navy. And point after point where you look, you find that the way the system--the system that we now have is one which is radically anticapitalist, radically so.
I mean, I mentioned one thing, the powerful effort to try to undermine markets for consumers, but there's something much more striking. I mean, in a capitalist system, the basic principle is that, say, if you invest in something and, say, it's a risky investment, so you put money into it for a long time, maybe decades, and finally after a long time something comes out that's marketable for a profit, it's supposed to go back to you. That's not the way it works here. Take, say, computers, internet, lasers, microelectronics, containers, GPS, in fact the whole IT revolution. There was taxpayer investment in that for decades, literally decades, doing all the hard, creative, risky work. Does the taxpayer get any of the profit? None, because that's not the way our system works. It's radically anti-capitalist, just as it's radically anti-democratic, opposed to markets, in favor of concentrating wealth and power.
But that doesn't have to be accepted by the population. These are--all kinds of forms of resistance to this can be developed if people become aware of it.
HEDGES: Well, you could argue that in the election of 2008, Obama wasn't accepted by the population. But what we see repeatedly is that once elected officials achieve power through, of course, corporate financing, the consent of the governed is a kind of cruel joke. It doesn't, poll after poll. I mean, I sued Obama over the National Defense Authorization Act, in which you were coplaintiff, and the polling was 97% against this section of the NDAA. And yet the courts, which have become wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporate state, the elected officials, the executive branch, and the press, which largely ignored it--the only organ that responsibly covered the case was, ironically, The New York Times. We don't have--it doesn't matter what we want. It doesn't--I mean, and I think that's the question: how do we effect change when we have reached a point where we can no longer appeal to the traditional liberal institutions that, as Karl Popper said once, made incremental or piecemeal reform possible, to adjust the system--of course, to save capitalism? But now it can't even adjust the system. We see cutting welfare.
CHOMSKY: Yeah. I mean, it's perfectly true that the population is mostly disenfranchised. In fact, that's a leading theme even of academic political science. You take a look at the mainstream political science, so, for example, a recent paper that was just published out of Princeton by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, two of the leading analysts of these topics, what they point out is they went through a couple of thousand policy decisions and found what has long been known, that there was almost no--that the public attitudes had almost no effect. Public organizations that are--nonprofit organizations that are publicly based, no effect. The outcomes were determined by concentrated private power.
There's a long record of that going way back. Thomas Ferguson, a political scientist near here, has shown very convincingly that something as simple as campaign spending is a very good predictor of policy. That goes back into the late 19th century, right through the New Deal, right up till the present. And that's only one element of it. And you take a look at the literature, about 70% of the population, what they believe has no effect on policy at all. You get a little more influence as you go up. When you get to the top, which is probably, like, a tenth of one percent, they basically write the legislation.
I mean, you see this all over. I mean, take these huge so-called trade agreements that are being negotiated, Trans-Pacific and Transatlantic--enormous agreements, kind of NAFTA-style agreements. They're secret--almost. They're not secret from the hundreds of corporate lawyers and lobbyists who are writing them. They know about it, which means that their bosses know about it.
And the Obama administration and the press says, look, this has to be secret, otherwise we can't defend our interests. Yeah, our interests means the interests of the corporate lawyers and lobbyists who are writing the legislation. Take the few pieces that have been leaked and you see that's exactly what it is. Same with the others.
But it doesn't mean you have to accept it. And there have been changes. So take, say--in the 1920s, the labor movement had been practically destroyed. There's a famous book. One of the leading labor historians, David Montgomery, has a major book called something like The Fall of the House of Labor. He's talking about the 1920s. It was done. There had been a very militant labor movement, very effective, farmers movement as well. Crushed in the 1920s. Almost nothing left. Well, in the 1930s it changed, and it changed because of popular activism.
HEDGES: But it also changed because of the breakdown of capitalism.
CHOMSKY: There was a circumstance that led to the opportunity to do something, but we're living with that constantly. I mean, take the last 30 years. For the majority of the population it's been stagnation or worse. That's--it's not exactly the deep Depression, but it's kind of a permanent semi-depression for most of the population. That's--there's plenty of kindling out there which can be lighted.
And what happened in the '30s is primarily CIO organizing, the militant actions like sit-down strikes. A sit-down strike's very frightening. It's a step before taking over the institution and saying, we don't need the bosses. And that--there was a cooperative administration, Roosevelt administration, so there was some interaction. And significant legislation was passed--not radical, but significant, underestimated. And it happened again in the '60s. It can happen again today. So I don't think that one should abandon hope in chipping away at the more oppressive aspects of the society within the electoral system. But it's only going to happen if there's massive popular organization, which doesn't have to stop at that. It can also be building the institutions of the future within the present society.
HEDGES: Would you say that the--you spoke about propaganda earlier and the Creel Commission and the rise of the public relations industry. The capacity to disseminate propaganda is something that now you virtually can't escape it. I mean, it's there in some electronic form, even in a hand-held device. Does that make that propaganda more effective?
CHOMSKY: Well, and it's kind of an interesting question. Like a lot of people, I've written a lot about media and intellectual propaganda, but there's another question which isn't studied much: how effective is it? And that's--when you brought up the polls, it's a striking illustration. The propaganda is--you can see from the poll results that the propaganda has only limited effectiveness. I mean, it can drive a population into terror and fear and war hysteria, like before the Iraq invasion or 1917 and so on, but over time, public attitudes remain quite different. In fact, studies even of what's called the right-wing, people who say, get the government off my back, that kind of sector, they turn out to be kind of social democratic. They want more spending on health, more spending on education, more spending on, say, women with dependent children, but not welfare, no spending on welfare, because Reagan, who was an extreme racist, succeeded in demonizing the notion of welfare. So in people's minds welfare means a rich black woman driving in her limousine to the welfare office to steal your money. Well, nobody wants that. But they want what welfare does.
Foreign aid is an interesting case. There's an enormous propaganda against foreign aid, 'cause we're giving everything to the undeserving people out there. You take a look at public attitudes. A lot of opposition to foreign aid. Very high. On the other hand, when you ask people, how much do we give in foreign aid? Way beyond what we give. When you ask what we should give in foreign aid, far above what we give.
And this runs across the board. Take, say taxes. There've been studies of attitudes towards taxes for 40 years. Overwhelmingly the population says taxes are much too low for the rich and the corporate sector. You've got to raise it. What happens? Well, the opposite.
Tuesday, December 13, 2016
Friday, May 8, 2015
NSA's plan: improve cybersecurity by cyber-attacking everyone else
I can do whatever I want to do to you, & if I even hear a peep out of you, then you will be branded as a terrorist for life. Sounds like modus operandi of a bully.
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The National Security Agency wants to be able to hack more people, vacuum up even more of your internet records & have the keys to tech companies’ encryption – &, after 18 months of embarrassing inaction from Congress on surveillance reform, the NSA is now lobbying it for more powers, not less.
NSA director Mike Rogers testified in front of a Senate committee ..., lamenting that the poor ol’ NSA just doesn’t have the “cyber-offensive” capabilities (read: the ability to hack people) it needs to adequately defend the US. How cyber-attacking countries will help cyber-defense is anybody’s guess, but the idea that the NSA is somehow hamstrung is absurd.
The NSA runs sophisticated hacking operations all over the world. A Washington Post report showed that the NSA carried out 231 “offensive” operations in 2011 - & that number has surely grown since then. That report also revealed that the NSA runs a $652m project that has infected tens of thousands of computers with malware.
And that was 4 years ago - it’s likely increased significantly. A leaked presidential directive issued in 2012 called for an expanded list of hacking targets all over the world. The NSA spends ten of millions of dollars per year to procure “‘software vulnerabilities’ from private malware vendors” – i.e., holes in software that will make their hacking much easier. The NSA has even created a system, according to Edward Snowden, that can automatically hack computers overseas that attempt to hack systems in the US.
Moving further in this direction, Rogers has also called for another new law that would force tech companies to install backdoors into all their encryption. The move has provoked condemnation & scorn from the entire security community - including a very public upbraiding by Yahoo’s top security executive - as it would be a disaster for the very cybersecurity that the director says is a top priority.
And then there is the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) the downright awful “cybersecurity” bill passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee ... in complete secrecy that is little more than an excuse to conduct more surveillance. The bill will do little to stop cyberattacks, but it will do a lot to give the NSA even more power to collect Americans’ communications from tech companies without any legal process whatsoever. The bill’s text was finally released a couple days ago, &, as EFF points out, tucked in the bill were the powers to do the exact type of “offensive” attacks for which Rogers is pining.
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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/21/nsa-plan-improve-cybersecurity-hacking-everyone
The National Security Agency wants to be able to hack more people, vacuum up even more of your internet records & have the keys to tech companies’ encryption – &, after 18 months of embarrassing inaction from Congress on surveillance reform, the NSA is now lobbying it for more powers, not less.
NSA director Mike Rogers testified in front of a Senate committee ..., lamenting that the poor ol’ NSA just doesn’t have the “cyber-offensive” capabilities (read: the ability to hack people) it needs to adequately defend the US. How cyber-attacking countries will help cyber-defense is anybody’s guess, but the idea that the NSA is somehow hamstrung is absurd.
The NSA runs sophisticated hacking operations all over the world. A Washington Post report showed that the NSA carried out 231 “offensive” operations in 2011 - & that number has surely grown since then. That report also revealed that the NSA runs a $652m project that has infected tens of thousands of computers with malware.
And that was 4 years ago - it’s likely increased significantly. A leaked presidential directive issued in 2012 called for an expanded list of hacking targets all over the world. The NSA spends ten of millions of dollars per year to procure “‘software vulnerabilities’ from private malware vendors” – i.e., holes in software that will make their hacking much easier. The NSA has even created a system, according to Edward Snowden, that can automatically hack computers overseas that attempt to hack systems in the US.
Moving further in this direction, Rogers has also called for another new law that would force tech companies to install backdoors into all their encryption. The move has provoked condemnation & scorn from the entire security community - including a very public upbraiding by Yahoo’s top security executive - as it would be a disaster for the very cybersecurity that the director says is a top priority.
And then there is the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) the downright awful “cybersecurity” bill passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee ... in complete secrecy that is little more than an excuse to conduct more surveillance. The bill will do little to stop cyberattacks, but it will do a lot to give the NSA even more power to collect Americans’ communications from tech companies without any legal process whatsoever. The bill’s text was finally released a couple days ago, &, as EFF points out, tucked in the bill were the powers to do the exact type of “offensive” attacks for which Rogers is pining.
Sunday, April 19, 2015
So, when do we start caring about privacy?
So at what point does the public mobilize? Privacy should, by every right, be the essential debate of our modern digital era; it is the newest & most pressing issue on our plate. ... Yet stories & revelations of our fumbling & slouching to Bethlehem—or, in some cases, our government’s rather insidious machinations—continue to earn yawns & swipe-pasts.
We are convinced, of course, that privacy is a matter that affects other people. R v. Fearon? That guy deserved it, because he... committed a crime; I don’t commit crimes. Breaking European law? Well, that’s not in North America! And government emails? So what? I don’t send them anything incriminating!
We are convinced, of course, that privacy is a matter that affects other people. R v. Fearon? That guy deserved it, because he... committed a crime; I don’t commit crimes. Breaking European law? Well, that’s not in North America! And government emails? So what? I don’t send them anything incriminating!
Except that creating caveats for our standards in these early days of an entire field is profoundly problematic. If Canadians don’t set the tone for what we want in our privacy, we will allow companies & governments to set the rules for us. This is indeed a problem, then, of other people—that is, the fact that other people will be setting the agenda for our own privacy.
Good thing there’s no upcoming bill in Canada that could set the stage for a genuine debate over our country’s privacy rights.
Friday, April 10, 2015
Monday, March 30, 2015
Edward Snowden urges caution over Bill C-51
Edward Snowden, the fugitive American who leaked state secrets, wants Canadians to know that anti-terrorism laws are easy to pass but very hard to undo.
He told the high school students that they should “always be extraordinarily cautious” & press for answers, whenever governments rely on “fear & panic” to set up powers that can be exercised in secret.
On Friday, the Conservative government introduced legislation that would empower Canadian authorities to “disrupt” suspected terrorist threats & remove extremist posts from the Internet. At the same time, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been resisting calls to step up scrutiny of Canada’s spy agencies.
Mr. Snowden was speaking to a crowd of more than 1,000 students at Toronto’s Upper Canada College via a Google Hangouts link from his exile in Russia. More people watched on the Internet, & it was the first time he directly addressed a Canadian audience.
Students pressed Mr. Snowden to do more to reveal the inner workings of Canada’s NSA counterpart, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE).
Last week, a leaked CSE document revealed that Canadian analysts have been scouring “free file upload” Internet sites in hopes of unearthing manuals related to jihadi activity.
The agency, which collects foreign intelligence signals for Canada, is technically banned from spying on domestic communications.
Previously, leaks have shown that CSE traced smartphones it had spotted moving through Toronto’s Pearson airport.
Many of Mr. Snowden’s leaks to date have highlighted secret spying collaborations among the NSA, CSE & counterpart agencies in Britain, Australia & New Zealand. The collective is known as the “Five Eyes.”
He told the high school students that they should “always be extraordinarily cautious” & press for answers, whenever governments rely on “fear & panic” to set up powers that can be exercised in secret.
On Friday, the Conservative government introduced legislation that would empower Canadian authorities to “disrupt” suspected terrorist threats & remove extremist posts from the Internet. At the same time, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been resisting calls to step up scrutiny of Canada’s spy agencies.
Mr. Snowden was speaking to a crowd of more than 1,000 students at Toronto’s Upper Canada College via a Google Hangouts link from his exile in Russia. More people watched on the Internet, & it was the first time he directly addressed a Canadian audience.
Students pressed Mr. Snowden to do more to reveal the inner workings of Canada’s NSA counterpart, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE).
Last week, a leaked CSE document revealed that Canadian analysts have been scouring “free file upload” Internet sites in hopes of unearthing manuals related to jihadi activity.
The agency, which collects foreign intelligence signals for Canada, is technically banned from spying on domestic communications.
Previously, leaks have shown that CSE traced smartphones it had spotted moving through Toronto’s Pearson airport.
Many of Mr. Snowden’s leaks to date have highlighted secret spying collaborations among the NSA, CSE & counterpart agencies in Britain, Australia & New Zealand. The collective is known as the “Five Eyes.”
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