Reply #54: It doesn't necessarily. [View All]

[Imperialism Inc.]

You are right on target mentioning the 40% that stay at home. I can't get inside the head of the party leaders but my instinct tells me that the leaders of both parties prefer it that way. That is the real reason for running to the center. They know if that 40% comes out their corporate wet dreams will likely be quickly lost.

I'm reminded of a talk given by Robert McChesney, a media and social analyst, http://www.robertmcchesney.com/ . He was talking about Chile around 1973. 95% voter turnout, 12 daily papers, a well informed, involved populace. They of course elected the socialist Allende. Well, we can't have that so he must be overthrown and in its a place a society with much lower numbers of daily papers and low voter turnout put in its place.

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Forgive the reference to "liberals" and Carter and do realize that this is the "good" side of the issue. On the other side of the coin are the conseratives who take it even further.

"Crisis of Democracy"
http://www.terrelibere.it/chomsky_eng.htm
Chomsky: They don’t care because they are under tremendous pressure – this is not Italy but the world – to try to remove the population from the political arena. That gets called neoliberal, which has its core in Britain and the United States – again the most advanced countries – but it’s spread all over, which is a major effort to reverse what happened in the 1960s. What happened in the 1960s was extremely frightening to international elites. You see this very strikingly, and perhaps most strikingly, in The Crisis of Democracy.

Pacitti: It was published in 1975 and was the first major study of the Trilateral Commission founded by David Rockefeller. Is that correct?

Chomsky: Yes. The Commission was an elite, a mostly liberal internationalist elite, from Europe, the United States and Japan. And it was mostly people like the Carter administration, which was made up almost entirely from liberals, liberal in the American sense of social democrats and internationalists. They were deeply concerned about what happened in the 1960s around the world. What they were concerned about was an increase in democracy, that is, through the 1960s parts of the public which had usually been apathetic and passive began to get organised and began to enter the political arena and press their demands and so on. That included women, working people, minorities, the elderly, in general the large part of the population which was usually passive. They began to enter and to encroach on forbidden territory. The way the thing’s supposed to work is that the political system is supposed to be in the hands of private tyrannies, private power, and that was beginning to erode. That’s the crisis of democracy. And what they said is that there’s too much democracy and that’s no good, it’s a crisis, that we have to have more moderation in democracy and we have to restore people to passive apathy. They said that they had to prove that they were worried about what they called the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young – their words, not mine. That means the schools, the officials, media, the churches – they were not indoctrinating people, they were becoming too independent and thoughtful, too active, and something had to be done to reverse this, the crisis of democracy. Since then there have been major efforts to restore people to their marginal existence, and this takes many forms. One form is what’s called minimising the state within the neoliberal framework. So remove decisions from the public arena and back into private hands, one or another form of privatisation. Another form is the centralisation of financial authorities. So the European central bank has enormous authority and it’s not accountable to parliament. Still more important is the liberalisation of finance since the 1970s, dismantling the Bretton Woods system. That creates what economists call a virtual parliament and you have to pay attention to what investors say or else they can destroy the economy. And that restricts enormously what governments can do. But right now there are extremely important meetings on the general agreement for trade in services. And the idea is to privatise services, services meaning anything the government can do – education, health, etc. And the idea is to liberalise, meaning open them to private competition, and that’s got to mean private control.

Pacitti: This is exactly along the lines of what Berlusconi has in mind, incidentally.

Chomsky: That’s exactly it. But let’s remember that this is a small part of something going on internationally, trying to deal with a major problem that arose because of the democratising process. And it’s showing up all over the place and in an effort to undermine the Left. You can no longer control people by violence in the West. You can’t just throw them into a torture chamber. You have to find other means. One means is propaganda. Another means is rabid consumerism, to try to drive people into massive consumption. In the United States the economy has suffered under the neoliberal policies, as has been the case worldwide, and is maintained to a high extent by consumer spending. Household debt is now higher than disposable funds. And that’s good because it traps people, and trapped into debt you can’t do much. You’ve got to just work harder and try not to think about it. So from infancy children are deluged by propaganda telling them: buy, buy, buy, and so on. The same is done with countries. The Third World is trapped by debt which was imposed by immense propaganda from the IMF and the World Banking Organisation. These are devices to try to control the populations and ensure that the private tyrannies endure. So that’s what you have to do in times of increasing freedom.