Las gisteren een verslag van een interview met Noam Chomsky op het blog van Stan van Houcke, hij plaatste het onder de titel 'Noam Chomsky: Socialism for the Rich' (
origineel komt van Truthout).
Chomsky geeft een analyse van het hedendaagse kapitalisme en concludeert terecht, dat wat betreft de welgestelden in tijden van crises plotsklaps socialistische regels van stal worden gehaald, om hun kapitaal te beschermen.
Een en ander zagen we nadat de huidige crisis in 2008 begon, de grote banken, die de crisis NB veroorzaakten, werden met honderden miljarden aan belastinggeld op de been gehouden, daar ze 'te groot waren om failliet te laten gaan' (too big to fail)...... Terwijl onder kapitalistische regels deze banken failliet waren gegaan en daarmee de welgestelden hadden meegetrokken in hun val (althans wat betreft risicovolle investeringen, uiteraard niet voor het geld dat ze in belastingparadijzen hadden ondergebracht >> wat mij betreft een zware misdaad!!).......
Deze manier van doen, zou hooguit passen in een socialistisch systeem, dat ten gunste stond van de armsten....... Wat betreft die armsten, voor hen geldt, zeker in de VS (maar ook hier), dat zij afgeknepen worden met kapitalistische wet- en regelgeving. Na de crisis in 2008 zijn de armen in Nederland er met 20 miljard op achteruit gegaan, de middengroepen met 30 miljard (maar die hebben nog wat vet op de botten, ook al doen ze nu net of ze arm zijn), terwijl de welgestelden in ons land, houdt u vast, er met 50 miljard euro op vooruit zijn gegaan...!!!
In feite zou je dat laatste, die 50 miljard erbij voor de rijken, ook een vorm van socialisme voor de rijken kunnen noemen.......... Een schande, die een revolutie waard zou zijn!!!
Hier het interview met Chomsky:
SOCIALISM
FOR THE RICH, CAPITALISM FOR THE POOR: AN INTERVIEW WITH NOAM CHOMSKY
The
United States is rapidly declining on numerous fronts -- collapsing
infrastructure, a huge gap between haves and have-nots, stagnant
wages, high infant mortality rates, the highest incarceration rate in
the world -- and it continues to be the only country in the advanced
world without a universal health care system. Thus, questions about
the nature of the US's economy and its dysfunctional political system
are more critical than ever, including questions about the status of
the so-called American Dream, which has long served as an inspiration
point for Americans and prospective immigrants alike. Indeed, in a
recent documentary, Noam Chomsky, long considered one of America's
voices of conscience and one of the world's leading public
intellectuals, spoke of the end of the American Dream. In this
exclusive interview for Truthout, Chomsky discusses some of the
problems facing the United States today, and whether the American
Dream is "dead" -- if it ever existed in the first place.
C.J.
Polychroniou: Noam, in several of your writings you question the
usual view of the United States as an archetypical capitalist
economy. Please explain.
Noam
Chomsky: Consider
this: Every time there is a crisis, the taxpayer is called on to bail
out the banks and the major financial institutions. If you had a real
capitalist economy in place, that would not be happening. Capitalists
who made risky investments and failed would be wiped out. But the
rich and powerful do not want a capitalist system. They want to be
able to run the nanny state so when they are in trouble the taxpayer
will bail them out. The conventional phrase is "too big to
fail."
The
IMF did an interesting study a few years ago on profits of the big US
banks. It attributed most of them to the many advantages that come
from the implicit government insurance policy -- not just the
featured bailouts, but access to cheap credit and much else --
including things the IMF researchers didn't consider, like the
incentive to undertake risky transactions, hence highly profitable in
the short term, and if anything goes wrong, there's always the
taxpayer. Bloomberg Businessweek estimated the implicit taxpayer
subsidy at over $80 billion per year.
Much
has been said and written about economic inequality. Is economic
inequality in the contemporary capitalist era very different from
what it was in other post-slavery periods of American history?
The
inequality in the contemporary period is almost unprecedented. If you
look at total inequality, it ranks amongst the worse periods of
American history. However, if you look at inequality more closely,
you see that it comes from wealth that is in the hands of a tiny
sector of the population. There were periods of American history,
such as during the Gilded Age in the 1920s and the roaring 1990s,
when something similar was going on. But the current period is
extreme because inequality comes from super wealth. Literally, the
top one-tenth of a percent are just super wealthy. This is not only
extremely unjust in itself, but represents a development that has
corrosive effects on democracy and on the vision of a decent society.
What
does all this mean in terms of the American Dream? Is it dead?
The
"American Dream" was all about class mobility. You were
born poor, but could get out of poverty through hard work and provide
a better future for your children. It was possible for [some workers]
to find a decent-paying job, buy a home, a car and pay for a kid's
education. It's all collapsed -- and we shouldn't have too many
illusions about when it was partially real. Today social mobility in
the US is below other rich societies.
Is
the US then a democracy in name only?
The
US professes to be a democracy, but it has clearly become something
of a plutocracy, although it is still an open and free society by
comparative standards. But let's be clear about what democracy means.
In a democracy, the public influences policy and then the government
carries out actions determined by the public. For the most part, the
US government carries out actions that benefit corporate and
financial interests. It is also important to understand that
privileged and powerful sectors in society have never liked
democracy, for good reasons. Democracy places power in the hands of
the population and takes it away from them. In fact, the privileged
and powerful classes of this country have always sought to find ways
to limit power from being placed in the hands of the general
population -- and they are breaking no new ground in this regard.
Noam
Chomsky at a SISSA event on September 17, 2012. In a democracy, the
public influences policy but the US state largely works to benefit
the privileged and powerful. (Photo: Dimitri
Grigoriou / SISSA;
Edited: JR / TO)
Concentration
of wealth yields to concentration of power. I think this is an
undeniable fact. And since capitalism always leads in the end to
concentration of wealth, doesn't it follow that capitalism is
antithetical to democracy?
Concentration
of wealth leads naturally to concentration of power, which in turn
translates to legislation favoring the interests of the rich and
powerful and thereby increasing even further the concentration of
power and wealth. Various political measures, such as fiscal policy,
deregulation, and rules for corporate governance are designed to
increase the concentration of wealth and power. And that's what we've
been seeing during the neoliberal era. It is a vicious cycle in
constant progress. The state is there to provide security and support
to the interests of the privileged and powerful sectors in society
while the rest of the population is left to experience the brutal
reality of capitalism. Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the
poor.
So,
yes, in that sense capitalism actually works to undermine democracy.
But what has just been described -- that is, the vicious cycle of
concentration of power and wealth -- is so traditional that it is
even described by Adam Smith in 1776. He says in his famous Wealth
of Nations that,
in England, the people who own society, in his days the merchants and
the manufacturers, are "the principal architects of policy."
And they make sure that their interests are very well cared for,
however grievous the impact of the policies they advocate and
implement through government is on the people of England or others.
Now,
it's not merchants and manufacturers who own society and dictate
policy. It is financial institutions and multinational corporations.
Today they are the groups that Adam Smith called the
masters of mankind.
And they are following the same vile maxim that he formulated: All
for ourselves and nothing for anyone else.
They will pursue policies that benefit them and harm everyone else
because capitalist interests dictate that they do so. It's in the
nature of the system. And in the absence of a general, popular
reaction, that's pretty much all you will get.
Let's
return to the idea of the American Dream and talk about the origins
of the American political system. I mean, it was never intended to be
a democracy (actually the term always used to describe the
architecture of the American political system was "republic,"
which is very different from a democracy, as the ancient Romans well
understood), and there had always been a struggle for freedom and
democracy from below, which continues to this day. In this context,
wasn't the American Dream built at least partly on a myth?
Sure.
Right through American history, there's been an ongoing clash between
pressure for more freedom and democracy coming from below and efforts
at elite control and domination from above. It goes back to the
founding of the country, as you pointed out. The "founding
fathers," even James Madison, the main framer, who was as much a
believer in democracy as any other leading political figure in those
days, felt that the United States political system should be in the
hands of the wealthy because the wealthy are the "more
responsible set of men." And, thus, the structure of the formal
constitutional system placed more power in the hands of the Senate,
which was not elected in those days. It was selected from the wealthy
men who, as Madison put it, had sympathy for the owners of wealth and
private property.
This
is clear when you read the debates of the Constitutional Convention.
As Madison said, a major concern of the political order has to be "to
protect the minority of the opulent against the majority." And
he had arguments. If everyone had a vote freely, he said, the
majority of the poor would get together and they would organize to
take away the property of the rich. That, he added, would be
obviously unjust, so the constitutional system had to be set up to
prevent democracy.
Recall
that Aristotle had said something similar in his Politics.
Of all political systems, he felt that democracy was the best. But he
saw the same problem that Madison saw in a true democracy, which is
that the poor might organize to take away the property of the rich.
The solution that he proposed, however, was something like a welfare
state with the aim of reducing economic inequality. The other
alternative, pursued by the "founding fathers," is to
reduce democracy.
Now,
the so-called American Dream was always based partly in myth and
partly in reality. From the early 19th century onward and up until
fairly recently, working-class people, including immigrants, had
expectations that their lives would improve in American society
through hard work. And that was partly true, although it did not
apply for the most part to African Americans and women until much
later. This no longer seems to be the case. Stagnating incomes,
declining living standards, outrageous student debt levels, and
hard-to-come-by decent-paying jobs have created a sense of
hopelessness among many Americans, who are beginning to look with
certain nostalgia toward the past. This explains, to a great extent,
the rise of the likes of Donald Trump and the appeal among the youth
of the political message of someone like Bernie Sanders.
After
World War II, and pretty much up until the mid-1970s, there was a
movement in the US in the direction of a more egalitarian society and
toward greater freedom, in spite of great resistance and oppression
from the elite and various government agencies. What happened
afterward that rolled back the economic progress of the post-war era,
creating in the process a new socio-economic order that has come to
be identified as that of neoliberalism?
Beginning
in the 1970s, partly because of the economic crisis that erupted in
the early years of that decade and the decline in the rate of profit,
but also partly because of the view that democracy had become too
widespread, an enormous, concentrated, coordinated business offensive
was begun to try to beat back the egalitarian efforts of the post-war
era, which only intensified as time went on. The economy itself
shifted to financialization. Financial institutions expanded
enormously. By 2007, right before the crash for which they had
considerable responsibility, financial institutions accounted for a
stunning 40 percent of corporate profit. A vicious cycle between
concentrated capital and politics accelerated, while increasingly,
wealth concentrated in the financial sector. Politicians, faced with
the rising cost of campaigns, were driven ever deeper into the
pockets of wealthy backers. And politicians rewarded them by pushing
policies favorable to Wall Street and other powerful business
interests. Throughout this period, we have a renewed form of class
warfare directed by the business class against the working people and
the poor, along with a conscious attempt to roll back the gains of
the previous decades.
Now
that Trump is the president-elect, is the Bernie Sanders political
revolution over?
That's
up to us and others to determine. The Sanders "political
revolution" was quite a remarkable phenomenon. I was certainly
surprised, and pleased. But we should remember that the term
"revolution" is somewhat misleading. Sanders is an honest
and committed New Dealer. His policies would not have surprised
Eisenhower very much. The fact that he's considered "radical"
tells us how far the elite political spectrum has shifted to the
right during the neoliberal period. There have been some promising
offshoots of the Sanders mobilization, like the Brand New Congress
movement and several others.
There
could, and should, also be efforts to develop a genuine independent
left party, one that doesn't just show up every four years but is
working constantly at the grassroots, both at the electoral level
(everything from school boards to town meetings to state legislatures
and on up) and in all the other ways that can be pursued. There are
plenty of opportunities -- and the stakes are substantial,
particularly when we turn attention to the two enormous shadows that
hover over everything: nuclear war and environmental catastrophe,
both ominous, demanding urgent action.
Copyright,
Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
C.J.
Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has
taught and worked in universities and research centers in Europe and
the United States. His main research interests are in European
economic integration, globalization, the political economy of the
United States and the deconstruction of neoliberalism's
politico-economic project. He is a regular contributor to Truthout as
well as a member of Truthout's Public Intellectual Project. He has
published several books and his articles have appeared in a variety
of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. Many of
his publications have been translated into several foreign languages,
including Croatian, French, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and
Turkish.
RELATED
STORIES
Voor meer berichten n.a.v. het bovenstaande, klik op één van de labels, die u onder dit bericht terug kan vinden, dit geldt niet voor de labels: Chomsky, Madison en A. Smith.
