Noam Chomsky - Propaganda and Control of the Public Mind

Noam Chomsky:

Propaganda And Control of The Public Mind

Contents: 1 - A Real War 2 - Controlling The Public Mind 3 - Propaganda 4 - The Public Relations Industry 5 - Conscious Manipulation 6 - Labor Under Attack 7 - The Fate Of Democracy 8 - The Minority Of Opulent 9 - Regimentation 10 - Hysteria Among The Masters 11 - Americanism 12 - Mohawk Valley Formula 13 - Marginalization 14 - CIA Intervention 15 - Free Trade 16 - Welfare For The Rich 17 - Delusion 18 - Indoctrination 19 - Labor Struggles 20 - Authoritarian Structures 21 - Demonizing Labor 22 - Selling Free Enterprise 23 - Conspiracy Theories 24 - The Crisis Of Democracy 25 - Cuba And The U S 26 - Solutions 27 - Reshaping The Legal System 28 - Private Tyrannies 29 - Role Of The Media 30 - Poor People Pay 31 - The Country Is Flooded With Money 32 - Privatization 33 - Business Run Society 34 - Enlightenment Principles 35 - The Cold War 36 - Islam As The Enemy

1 - A Real War It should be understood to be what it is - a real war. And it's not a new war, it’s an old war. Furthermore, it’s a class-conscious war, everywhere, but, specifically in the United States, where there happens to be a very free country, but which happens to have a highly class-conscious business-class, and always has. And it's very free and open, so you’ve got a lot of information about it. They talk, you have the records, and they have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except that they don’t allow anybody else to know about it. Occasionally someone else gets the news. Rather famous case, which I'm sure you know, was Doug Fraser about 20 years ago, 1978, I think, when he pulled out a labor-management council and condemned business leaders for… words were roughly like this… for "having decided to fight a one-sided class war against working people", the poor, the unemployed, minorities, even members of the middle class, and for ''having torn up the fragile social compact that had been achieved during periods of growth and prosperity''. In fact these have been achieved primarily through rather militant struggle, very militant struggle, under harsh conditions, back in the 1930s. Now, the only thing wrong with this statement is that it was way too late. In fact, that war, that he's talking about, was initiated as soon as the ''fragile social compact'' was established, back in the 1930s, and very openly. You don’t have to go to the secret records to find out about it, nor did you have to be at the wrong end of the clubs when the strikes were broken up in the late 30s to know about it, - it was completely public. The reason it's not well known is because neither the educational system nor scholarship, like Harvard, and so on, pay any attention to it, it's not a topic that's studied.

2 - Controlling The Public Mind So, there's no doubt that one of the major issues of the 20th-century history, surely in the United States, is corporate propaganda. That's a huge industry, in fact, it extends over the, obviously, the commercial media, but also the whole range of the systems that reach the public: the entertainment industry, television, a good bit of what appears in schools, a lot of what appears in the newspapers, and so on. Huge amount of that comes straight out of the public relations industry, which was established in this country early in the century, and developed in the 20s and on. It has become an enormous industry: its now spreading over the rest of the world, but its primarily here, and it's goal from the beginning, perfectly openly and consciously, was to "control the public mind", as they put it. And the reason was that the public mind was seen as the greatest threat to corporations - that's from early in the century. Business power is strong, but it’s a very free country by comparative standards, and its hard to call on state violence, not impossible, but hard to call upon state violence to crush people's efforts to achieve freedom, and the rights, and justice. So, therefore, it was recognized early on that it's gonna be necessary to control people's minds. I should say that's not a new insight either – you can read it in David Hume, and the Enlightenment authors already recognized what might be called the earliest stirrings of democratic revolutions in England in the 17th-century. There already was a concern that they will not gonna be able to control people by force, and we therefore have to control them by the means of controlling what they think, what they feel, their attitudes or attitudes toward one another, - all sorts of mechanisms of control are gonna have to be devised, which will replace the efficient use of force and violence, that was available for much greater extent, earlier on, and which has, fortunately, been declining, although not uniformly, but declining through the years, particularly here, leading to the need for other methods of control.

3 - Propaganda You don't have to move very far from the Cambridge elite to learn about it. The major leading figure of

the public relations industry is a highly regarded Cambridge liberal, the Roosevelt-Kennedy liberal, who died recently, Edward Bernays, who wrote the standard manual of the public relations industry back in the 1920s, which is very much worth reading. Remember, I'm not talking about the right wing here, this is wa-a-ay at the left liberal end in American politics. His book is called "On propaganda", or maybe just "Propaganda". I should mention that terminology changed during the WW2. Prior to the WW2 the term ''propaganda'' was used quite openly and freely for controlling the public mind. It got bad connotation strings during the WW2 because, you know, Hitler, and that sort of things, so the term was dropped, and the other terms are used. But if you read literature in the social sciences and the public relations industry and so on, back in say 20s and the 30s, they describe what they're doing as ''propaganda''.

4 - The Public Relations Industry This manual is for the rising public relations industry, and he opens by pointing out that the ''conscious manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is the central feature of a democratic society'', its the ''essence'' of democracy, as it is later pointed out. And he said ''we have the means to carry this out'', ''we have the means to regiment people's minds as efficiently, as armies regiment their bodies'', and we must do this. First of all, that's the essential feature of democracy, but also it's a way to maintain power structures and authority structures, wealth and so on, roughly the way it is. Its worth remembering something else that they usually don't teach you very much about in school, and that is a view back at the origins of the American society. It was founded on the principle that was stated very explicitly by the leading framer, James Madison, in a Constitutional convention, that the, as he put it, the primary responsibility of the government is ''to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority''. Madison recognized, he was a smart guy, that this was going to be a serious problem if the democratic system were established, if the people have the right to vote. He used England as his model. England was a model for democracy for everyone in those days, around 1780s. And he pointed out in the debates on the Constitutional convention (something which everybody ought to read in the third grade, in a free society, and this is the origins of our society), he pointed out that in England if they had the right to vote, which, fortunately, they didn’t, he said, pretty soon you would find people calling for redistribution of property and for a tax on property rights, for what nowadays we call 'agrarian reform' (it was mostly an agricultural society, so he would use the term 'agrarian reform' which is basically the same thing…). He said people would start to call for agrarian reform – obviously, that's intolerable, and we have to protect our own society against that kind of 'injustice' by ensuring the rights of property prevail. He recognized the problem of what he was already concerned in the 1780s, of what he called ''the symptoms of a leveling spirit'', that the people are starting to fume that property ought to be more equitably distributed – that's a danger. But, he said, that the danger is going to become much more severe overtime as more and more people are marginalized and dispossessed, and ''secretly yearn for a more more equal distribution of life's blessings''. Now, if those people get to vote – we're gonna be in trouble, 'cos its gonna be very hard to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority, which is what the government is all about.

5 - Conscious Manipulation And he, therefore, designed a constitutional system which was intended to prevent that danger. The system, the way he set it up, he and the other framers, which was virtually unanimous and virtually no disagreement about this, the one person that might have disagreed – Jefferson - was not part of any of this stuff. The constitutional system as he designed it was supposed to put power in the hands of the wealthy, who are ''the more capable set of men'', and the power must reside in the hands of the

wealthy, the ''more capable set of men'', with the general population fragmented, factionalized, dispersed, in conflict and so on and so forth. While this was around 1780s, its been a pretty stable system and as the franchise has increased, so over time more and more people did get the right to vote, and that just raised the danger. Furthermore, the power of the state to coerce by violence, and that includes the private power, like the power of, say, Carnegie, to hire workers and so on, - that has declined, and the need to resort to these other measures of actualization, instilling hatred or marginalizing people, straight propaganda and so on, - that's increased, and very consciously. So by the time we get to the 1920s, where we started from, it's recognized that huge resources must go into the ''manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses''. We have to regiment them, their minds, as well as the army regiments their bodies, and we have the methods for it, and those methods are advertising, entertainment, straight propaganda, the media, schools and so on and so forth.

6 - Labor Under Attack The 20s was an important period in this regard. If it looks as if labor is under attack now, remember: in the 20s it had been smashed. The major American labor historian David Montgomery has a book which you probably should know, called "The fall of the House of labor" - a very important book on history of the labor movement - it ends in the 1920s 'cos that's when the House of labor had fallen, with a lot of violence in that case, state violence, Wilson's 'Red Scare', the leading labor leader in jail and so on. There's been a big strike wave during the end of the WW1, smashed, the labor movement destroyed, whole thing wiped out, as Montgomery points out at the end of his book. Labor had been virtually destroyed, working people had to ''privatize'' their lives and aspirations as a sort of workout survival strategies for themselves, not with others, because the modes of cooperation, and common struggle had been eliminated, and they did it, he ends up by saying, in a ''most undemocratic America''. Which is true - it was a highly undemocratic country, using a combination of modes of violence, and coersion, and repression and, increasingly, propaganda, to prevent the dangers that Madison was worrying about, almost 200 years earlier: that more and more people would ''secretly sigh for a better access to life's blessings'' and might do something about it, if they had a functioning democracy, which therefore could permit it.

7 - The Fate Of Democracy I should just comment, in fairness to James Madison, 'cos these remarks are not quite correct. The reason was that Madison was precapitalist, just like Adam Smith, and all great figures of the Enlightenment. They have been mostly precapitalist and very anticapitalist in the conception. You can't say they're anticapitalist, because there was no modern industrial capitalism around for them to have an opinion about, and its a matter of interpretation: when one reads texts, one can read them in many different ways, but the way I read them, they were very anticapitalist, and that includes Adam Smith, and I think you can demonstrate this. Certainly, Madison was. He believed that when he put power in the hands of the wealthy class of men, you know ''the more capable set of men'', that they were going to be, as he put it, ''enlightened statesmen'' and ''benevolent philosophers'', who would devote themselves to the welfare of all – that's a very precapitalist conception – that once you give power to the hands of the rich, they're just gonna be benevolent philosophers, and they're going to devote themselves to the welfare of everyone else. It’s a lot like what corporate executives tell you now, there is sort of understanding that they have to say that, but I suppose that nobody believes this, except the people who read these… watch these movies, which show you how it works. In those days Madison really believed it. And he very quickly discovered that it wasn’t true. Within a few years, by approximately 1790, he was already very upset about the fate of this democratic experiment which, he thought, was failing. He condemned what he called the ''daring

depravity of the time'': the business leaders who have now been given power, used that power, he said, to become the ''tools and tyrants of government'', - they overwhelm government with their power and combinations, and they are bribed by its largesses, and they're just serving self-interest, not the interest of the general public. And he thought that was deplorable and so on, but that's because he began to perceive the way the system he had designed was actually functioning.

8 - The Minority Of the Opulent That description, rhetoric, is kind of nice – some people don’t use fancy rhetoric like that today, but it is a perfect description of today. What's called the industrial capitalist system today, is in fact one in which private power is the ''tool and tyrant of government'', overwhelms it by its combinations, is bribed by its largesses, - that's a pretty good description of 1997, with all changes that have taken place since 1792. There's a good deal of stability to all this, including the commitment to the principle that the primary goal of the government is to protect the minority of the opulent from majority (Read yesterday's budget proposal carefully and you'll get a good example of how that commitment plays itself out), and the increasingly significant idea, overwhelmingly significant idea, particularly among liberals, like, say, Bernays, that it is necessary to control people's minds, because they are too much of a danger. Take a look at a, say, The Encyclopedia of the social sciences, 1933, - there is an entry on propaganda ('propaganda' was a usable term then), and the entry on propaganda is written by a very distinguished political scientist, liberal political scientist, Harold Lasswell - one of the founders of modern liberal science of communications, - it's worth reading. So he says, these are paraphrases, but pretty close to quote, he says that we ''must not succumb to Democratic dogmatism about people being the best judges of their own interests''. They're not, you know. We are the best judges of their interest, the smart guys. And we must therefore ensure that those idiots out there don't get into trouble, you know, by actually using their theoretical right to vote to interfere where they don’t belong, like in the public arena. So we gotta keep them out of the public arena somehow, and make sure that it's just us, the smart guys, who are in there. I mean, its for their good, of course. Its kind of like you don't let your 3-year old run across the street, because, you know, he might want to run across the street, and its improper to let him have that choice. And the same is true about the masses – they are to be controlled. They have to be controlled at the workplace, they have to be kept out of the political arena, they are not going to understand the need to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority, and they have all these strange 'leveling impulses', - they are gonna do all kinds of things which will mess the world up in all sorts of horrible ways.

9 - Regimentation So for their benefit we have to regiment their minds the way the army regiments their bodies, ensure that they're under control, make it very clear that they don't participate in workplace management, and certainly not in a political arena – they're to be outside somewhere. The dedication with which this task has been pursued is pretty awesome. If you come to take a picture just right after the fall of a House of labor in the 1920s, when American labor was really smashed, people were privatized and tried to accommodate individually to a ''most undemocratic America'', as Montgomery and others have pointed out, - that was a time when there was a great sort of awe about the 'end of history' and the 'utopia of the Masters' being achieved, and it's all over, you know, us good guys have won, and everybody else is at their feet - a kind of like some of the stuff you read today, and it sort of looked like that, pretty much looked that way. Well, a few years later, as you know, the whole thing collapsed, and there was a militant working-class

struggle, as well as some other popular activism, and there HAD to be an accommodation, there had to be some sort of accommodation to these unwashed masses, who were getting out of line: sitdown strikes and all sorts of things. And there was, indeed. There was this fragile social compact, that Fraser referred to, that was indeed established, and it wasn’t any gift: it was won by struggle, meaning the labor laws and limited social system. In fact American workers back in the 1930s began to get the rights that have been standard long before, even in much more brutal societies. If you read the right-wing British press over the, say, early part of this century, one can't believe how American workers were treated. The same was true of visitors from Australia and so on.

10 - Hysteria Among The Masters By the 1930s the US was sort of brought into the more or less mainstream industrial society on these matters, to a limited extent in fact, but to some extent, and that caused hysteria among the masters. So you read the business press by 1936 or 37 (again, these are things which in a really free society everybody would study in elementary school, because they are really important in that they give the real framework of the Society in my view), - they were talking about the ''hazard facing industrialists'' in the ''rising political power of the masses'', and how we must ''do something to save ourselves, or our way of life will be gone'', and there's not a lot of time to do it. They started right away - by the late 30s there was a big antilabor campaign, built with the new techniques. There was still the use of force, but it was understood that its not gonna work the way it did, so there was a shift to more propaganda. The main idea, its called "The Mohawk Valley Formula" was designed by public relations hot-shots around '37-'37 at the time of the steel strikes, to have a new, what they called, scientific methods of strikebreaking. We don’t just come in with clubs and shoot people and smash their heads, we do it the scientific way, because the old way doesn’t work anymore. The scientific methods of strikebreaking were in fact drawn from the public relations ideas of the time. The main idea was to mobilize the community against the strikers and the union activists, to present a picture which is by now so standard you can hardly turn on the tube without seeing it, 'cos it's just poured out ever since then.

11 - Americanism The basic idea is to present a picture of the world that looks like this. There's 'us', the big happy family in the community, the honest workman going off every morning with his lunchboxes, loyal wife making the meals and taking care of the kids, the hard-working executive who's toiling day and night in the interests of his workers and the community, the friendly banker who was running around looking for people to lend money to, and so on and so forth. That's 'us'. And we're all in harmony, 'harmony' was the big word, we are in harmony, we are all together, its 'Americanism'… You might take a look at that word 'Americanism'. It's an unusual term. it's kind of a term you only find in totalitarian societies, as far as I know, like in the Soviet Union: 'anti-Sovietism' was considered the gravest of all crimes, and the Brazilian generals had some concept like that - 'anti-Brasilian'. But try, say, posing a book on 'anti-Italianism', and see what happens in the streets of Rome and Milan – people will go by laughing, so ludicrous the idea. The idea of 'Italianism' or 'Norway-ism' or something like that is just the object of ridicule in the societies that have at least some residue of a democratic culture inside people's heads, and informal system. But in totalitarian societies it is used, and as far as I know the United States is the only free society that has such a concept. Anyhow, 'Americanism' and 'anti-Americanism' and 'un-Americanism' and so on – these are concepts which go along with

'harmony', and getting rid of those outsiders and all that kind of stuff. Another part is simply to induce hatred, hatred and fear among people. So it's a diverse society. When you have Europe - most places are pretty uniform. This is a very diverse society. So it's easy for propagandists, pretty easy to get people hate the guy next door because he looks a little different for one thing or another. Huge campaigns go on to instigate divisions among people. These are very natural techniques of social control. If you can't control people by force - you have to control their minds, you have to control their attitudes.

12 - Mohawk Valley Formula Going back to the Mohawk Valley formula, the idea was to move into a community where the strike was going on, flood it with propaganda, take over the media, the churches, the schools, everything else, pour in this propaganda about 'harmony' and so on the way I described it. And then, there are those 'bad guys' out there, that were trying to disrupt our harmonious lives, like those union organizers, probably communists, anarchists, probably 'un-American', trying to destroy all those wonderful things we have, and we gotta band together and kick them out, in order to defend our 'way of life'. A lot of religion gets thrown in, and, remember, the United States is extremely fundamentalist country, if you look comparatively, and comparative statistics shows that usually religious fundamentalism declines as industrialization goes out – its pretty close correlation. United States is off the chart - it ranks with devastated peasant societies, probably more fundamentalist than Iran. Why is it so I don’t know – it’s a complicated question. But one factor is that it was certainly consciously fomented by business leaders and it goes way back to the 19th century, when they were supporting John D. Rockefeller's favorite evangelist, who said that ''people ought to have more enlightened ideas than labor agitation'' – one of his famous phrases; and more enlightened ideas are to go to church, listen to orders, do what they tell you and shut up – that's the more enlightened ideas. And its a really interesting case, because the Mohawk Valley was the model later used for strikebreaking and destruction of the labor movement in the post-war period. So it's quite interesting to see what happened right there. And I still don’t know about any literature on this topic - these are untouchable topics. And you can almost say that anything that's important, that is going to matter for people's lives is got to be sort of off the agenda. And it sort of makes sense: you don’t want people to know about it, you don't want people to know the 'wrong' kind of thing, and that makes sense, its not a conspiracy, its just common sense if you have a certain degree of power and authority and privilege. You just don't want people to know things that might be harmful to them, because they are really like children, remember, and we're the ones who have to make the decisions for them.

13 - Marginalization There's an enormous amount of money and effort that goes into this, and its not the only thing by any means. There's a lot of other reasons why the United States is so unusual in this respect, and this is one of them. And its used, whether its the source or not, its certainly used, always. Another technique of trying to create the marginalization of people is that they were removing people from the actual social and political struggle that might make their lives better and to keep them from working with one another by providing all sorts of ways. And then, the myriad of techniques to find a fashion to keep the hated masses out of the public arena, where they don't belong, and certainly out of anything having to do with control of the economic system, where it's unthinkable that they should have a role. That's got to be in the hands of private tyrannies – that's unquestionable.

14 - CIA Intervention Where the United States has acted internationally, - it’s the same way. When you look at the trail of intervention – its almost always the same. And its not just the Third World countries. Italy was the target of the major CIA activity since its origins. The internal record runs dry around the mid-70s, so can't say after that, but from the origin of the CIA in 1947 up to at least the mid-70s Italy seems to have been targeted more than any other country in an effort to undermine Italian democracy. Italy was regarded as sort of a semi-Third World country, - it had a very strong labor movement, and when the American army, in fact American-British armies, when they 'liberated' Italy in 1943-44, they were appaled to discover the northern Italy had been already liberated by the resistance, which have established a functioning society with very strong labor control. The resistance was mostly labor and peasant based, they held off the Germans and liberated most of the place. They had instituted workers' management in factories, they were protecting workers, what were called, and Im quoting a U.S.-British document terminology here, they were keeping ''useless workers'', and throwing out arbitrarily and dismissing owners and bosses, and that's of course intolerable, and the system was functioning. And, furthermore, they were focusing on unemployment, which was recognized as Italy's major problem. But that is their problem, not our problem. Our problem was to restore the traditional structure, which meant traditional hierarchies, actually it meant restoring fascist structures and fascist collaborators and so on, and our big effort was made to do that. And it was not entirely successful. By 1948, when the first election took place, it looked as if labor-based forces would probably win, and a huge effort went into trying to ensure that that wouldt happen, - by withholding food (Italy was starving), by restoring the police to fascist control, by all sorts of threats and manipulation - pretty big operation, and the first major CIA operation among others. And they took it really seriously. Again, something you would learn in a free society is the thing about the National Security Council's Main planning outfit, which produces top level planning documents, which are among not the only important ones, but among the most important ones, - they can get released maybe 35 years later, so you have to look back at them. So we have them now from the late 40s, and the first one, NSC 1, 1947, is devoted to Italy. It says we're going to try all these measures to ensure that Italy doesn't have a free democratic government - they didn’t actually say that, but it amounts to it – in which there would be a big role for the organized working-class of Italy. And they say: but if this doesn't work, if the Communists, as they call them, come to power through a legal vote, through a legal election, than the United States is going to declare a national emergency and is gonna support the military activities inside Italy to overthrow the democratically elected government. That's how seriously they took it, back in 1947. They also knew exactly why the Communists were powerful, you read it in the records extensively: because they were honest, because they're supporting working-class interests, its true that they were collaborationists, they were trying to separate Italy from the Western alliance, but they were defending working-class interests and people supported them. They were mass working class party, and there were plenty of others besides communists. They had to be prevented, either by coersion, like, say, withholding food, and violence, or by direct intervention, military intervention, and it was taken very seriously, and in fact it goes up into the present.

15 - Free Trade Q.: - How is it that the wealthy can put a wall in front of the eyes of the American worker, by controlling the power and government and using them against the working public?

Well, take our times as an example. Couple of days ago I put myself through the pain of reading the New York Times every day for some masochistic reason which I won't try to explain. They got their chief correspondent, sort of the the main thinker, a guy named Thomas Friedman, who had an article there four days ago in which he says that the Cold war is over, so the breakdown isn't ''fox's and dogs'' anymore, we have to find something new, some new breakdown. The new breakdown, he says, is two. One is between integrationists and "anti-integrationists": the people who want more globalization, what they call 'free trade', which isn't free trade, and people who want to slow it down. That’s one break. And the other is between people who are in favor of a safety net and those who think that everybody should be on their own and do what he can. So those are the two ways people break up. And that gives you the four possible types of people. Two of them he sort of dismisses as lunatics – the Zapatistas and Ross Perot - they fit into two of those boxes. The other two boxes are sort of sane people - Clinton and Gingrich [laughter]. Gingrich is put in the corner that says ''integrationist'' and ''everybody for themselves''. Well, - that's testable, testable with what Gingrich's position is. For example on the question of whether Gingrich is an integrationist, like in favor of the free trade, we can ask how he reacted when the Reagan administration instituted the greatest wave of protectionism since the 1930s that's just straight protectionism, alongside a huge increase in public subsidies to private power, to industry, along with the biggest nationalisation in American history: takeover of the Continental illinois Bank and so on. That's all radically anti-integrationist, and Newt Gingrich reaction to that question is… "Great!".

16 - Welfare For The Rich What about the safety net story? Gingrich's in favor of people being out there on their own, rugged entrepreneurs and so on. You can check that too – he represents the county, district, Cobb County, Georgia, and he happens to be holding the national championship in bringing federal subsidies to his rich constituent. To be precise, among suburban counties in the United States, Cobb County ranks third in federal subsidies, right after Arlington, Virginia, which is a part of the federal government, so of course they get a lot of federal subsidies, like the Pentagon and so on. And Brevard County, Florida, which is the home of the space center, so that's another part of the federal government. But if you move outside of the federal government itself, Gingrich's district is number one - they get more federal subsidies than anybody. And the biggest employer in the Cobb County is Locheed, which is a publicly subsidized private profit corporation. Unveiled. They sell commercial planes, but that is just what everyone knows. They use military technology. The way the system is designed, technology is developed under the guise of the military, and then handed over to private power when it works. And it goes for everything: airplanes, computers and the Internet. And Cobb County is the center of that. And he is in favor of being all out on your own, fighting in this harsh world? Ridiculous, he's the biggest welfare freak in this country! That's literally true, except that he wants the welfare to go to very rich people. Notice this is not what's called ''corporate welfare''. What they call ''corporate welfare'' is attached to a different category, completely. That's like giving a special shot in the arm for some particular corporation. This isn't quite different, - this is the way in which our economy works. The way our economy works, - take just about any dynamic sector you know (which I know, 'cause I've studied it) and you find that it's based on massive public subsidy and privatizational profit. Public pays the costs and takes the risks, private systems make their profits, if there is any. Cobb County is just an extreme example of it.

17 - Delusion

Now, how come people could be so deluded? Well, how often do you read about this? These are not some subtle facts, these are glaringly obvious facts. People like Thomas Friedman and everyone else in the business know that you're not supposed to write about these things. I mean, I don't know, I'm not claiming he thinks about it, in fact people who write about it are probably more deeply propagandized even than the people you are talking to. You cannot be a good propagandist unless it's in your bones. It's extremely hard to lie – I think we all know this from personal experience. It's hard to lie to people. Everyone of us lies to people all the time, unless we are some kind of crazy angel. They way we do it, I'm sure you know it, is that you first convince yourself that what you're saying is true. It's like if you're an 8-year-old kid and you steal a toy from your brother, and your mother comes and yells at you. You don’t say "well, I wanted the toy, and he had it, so I took it 'cause im stronger than him". What you say is "it really wasn't his, and, besides, he has taken a toy of mine, and anyway, I needed it more than he did", so it was RIGHT for me to take it, ok? If people haven't had that experience they must be some other species, I think. But that kind of experience goes all the way up to being a hot-shot journalist at the New York Times. You dont even make it into those circles unless you are already so deeply overwhelmed by doctrine and propaganda that you can't even think in other terms. So you'll read the, say, liberal columnist in the New York Times very angrily, saying, when people talk like this: "Nobody's telling me what to write! I write anything I feel like!". Which is actually true. If the people with real power weren't sure that they are going to say the right things, - they wouldn't even be in a position to write anything they feel like.

18 - Indoctrination Well, how does that work? It starts from childhood, it starts in kindergarten, on television. There is selection for obedience from the very first moment. Just think about, well I'm guessing - maybe I'm wrong, but at least when I think about my own school experience, or any other school experience that I know about, there was a selection for obedience. I ended up going to fancy college, like this place, and the way I did it was – I know exactly how I did it – by shutting up. Like if I thought that the high school teacher was a horses ass, which I did most of the time, I didn't say "hey, what are you saying?" (well, actually, sometimes I did, in front of the class), but I learned not to say anything, to say "ok..", you know, "do the next stupid assignment". Because I know that that's the way I get ahead, ultimately, and I'll do this and that. And if you got this, whatever ability it takes, to do this kind of thing, you are sufficiently disciplined and passive, you sort of make it through up to the higher echelons. There are people who don't. I mean, I know some like that. Some of my own kids just didn't. And they got into trouble. They are called "behavior problems", or "disruptive", stick drugs into them - something or other. Because they are just too independent, and people who are independent are 'pain in the neck' – they disrupt the system. And they're going to be cut off, one way or another. I can tell you, its just like in graduate school, like in most graduate schools, - you read applications. You can detect between the lines when the person who's writing the recommendation is telling you ''keep away from this person – they're going to cause you trouble''. Which means, usually, they're going to go off and do the wrong thing, or something like that. I don’t want to exaggerate… In the scienses it is somewhat different. And the reason is that the sciences simply require this kind of independence, without doubt, unless people are challenging all time and questioning. So when you look at people, who are, say studying physics at MIT, its entirely different, because you just encourage people to be challenging. But in most areas you don't: you want them to be passive, and obedient, and supportive, and to sit there to fit some kind of niche inside a managerial system, which is top-down, or make the microphones and so on. And the people who don’t accept this are weeded out.

19 - Labor Struggles

It seems to me that an awful lot of the whole system of kinda thought control, and I mean education, television, the family life, all sorts of things, - are sort of geared to supporting that kind of passivity. And institutions that break out of it, as labor movement does, - they are subject to a lot of pressure, they are crushed. The labor movement ALWAYS broke out this, its picture was ALWAYS different, from the very beginning. At the beginnings of the labor movement it was farmers bitterly opposing the degrading and oppressive modes of industrial capitalist organization that were being forced on them. Actually, one of the most interesting books I know, if you havent read it - I urge you to, is the first modern book on labor history that I know of, by guy named Norman Ware (*The Industrial Worker, 1840-1860: The Reaction of American Industrial Society to the Advance of the Industrial Revolution), around 1924, it was just reprinted so its easy to get. It's about the labor movement in Eastern Massachusetts, around 1850s and 60s. It's mostly quotes from the labor press, which are just fascinating. Its mostly young women from the farms, what they called ''factory girls'', like 18-year-old kid comes in from the farm and she's working in the mills, or as an artisan in Boston, and people like that. Its very eloquent, very well written. They took for granted, as the labor movement always has, and what was to be beaten out of the people's heads, that those who work in the mills have to own them. They regarded industrial capitalism as just another form of slavery, and this is, you know, with no Marx, no Socialism, no foreign radicals – none of that stuff, it's all just working people from their own experience, very literate actually. And what they complained about was that their culture was being taken away from them, - like an artisan in Boston, he had extra money and would hire a boy to read to him, read Classics. They said: ''Look, the values that we fought for in the American Revolution are being taken away from us. We're being forced into another kind of tyranny, which we don’t want, namely the tyranny of the hierarchic industrial system''. And they also opposed, what they called, "the new spirit of the age", it was like 1850. The "new spirit of the age" is gaining wealth forgetting all but self - the same thing that is drilled in everyone's heads everyday today: "You got to gain wealth forgetting about everybody else". Well, they were trying to drill this into people's heads in 1850, and they were resisting, because it's degrading, to the way that human beings are. It takes a long time to drive normal human sentiments out of people's heads, and they keep popping up again. And in fact I think, at least it looks like that to me, that the whole history of the labor movement is a struggle against the "new spirit of the age". Well, that's one of the reasons its constantly repressed. And other independent efforts are also constantly repressed. Not always successfully - the world is a lot better than it was a hundred years ago, or 50 years ago for that matter. These struggles tend to get repressed, but they leave the residue. They have successes, and then they're beaten back, and then they go on from those successes, and over time it gets better.

20 - Authoritarian Structures Structures that are based on authority and dominance will, normally, even without thinking about it, try to block such tendencies. Sometimes they think about it, like in these manuals of the public relations industry, they think about it very hard, they're putting out billions of dollars a year to control the public mind – youre thinking about it when you're doing it. But most of the time you don't think about, - you're just part of it. Like when you don’t think about the fact that when you go through school you're being trained for obedience and passivity. But I think if you look back you'll probably, like it was in my experience, recognize that that happened. And when you watch television, say, some sitcom, you don't think ''well I'm been exposed to Mohawk Valley", but you are. That's the picture of life that's presented, day after day after day. Things like people's personal problems or something like that, but nothing that would bring them together to work for some cause, you known, to struggle against the ''new spirit of the age''. I mean, when was the last time you saw a sitcom about that? And in fact what you get is this stuff that flows out of the P.R. industry, very consciously, or in that case mostly consciously.

21 - Demonizing Labor Another aspect of it is demonizing labor. A major element in the huge public relations propaganda after the WW2 was strictly demonizing labor. And the labor movement knew that. There was a fairly substantial labor press even then, as late as the 1950s, there were still about the 800 labor newspapers, which were reaching maybe 20 or 30 million people, not commercial media but pretty substantial. And they are interesting to read too. I'm not talking about anything radical, like the left-wing press, just labor newspapers, you know, the conservative American labor movement. They were talking about ''developing antidotes for the poisons of the capitalist press'', the commercial media, who were ''demonizing labor at every opportunity, and trying to undermine our achievements, and glossing over of the crimes of the corporate rulers, who run the society''.

22 - Selling Free Enterprise The good book on this one too, the first study that I've ever heard of, in the United States, on this major theme of modern history just appeared in University of Illinois press, book called ''Selling free enterprise'' by a woman named Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf. It's kind of a political book, but the material in it is pretty revealing. Its the next part of the story that I was going to get to, this ''hazard facing industrialists'', ''the rising political power of the masses'', that led to the Mohawk Valley formula and so on. That terrified the daylights out of the business community. It was kinda put on hold during the WW2, but it took off immediately after the Second World war, at a huge scale, instantly. And that's what she's talking about: selling free enterprise. Remember that the United States came out of the second world war pretty social-democratic, like most of the world. It was just like the Italian workers, who had the ideas about workers' management, to be beaten out of their heads by force, and awful lot of people in the United States too, like maybe half, thought that there ought to be popular control over industry in some fashion – you know, this is so exotic in the United States, though the exact fashion was never describe but somehow, that the government will do a better job than private power - things like that. There was an enormous support for social programs, medical programs and so on. And that had to be beaten out of the people's heads, and FAST. The leaders of the public relations industry, she quotes a lot of them, they said "look, we have three to five years to save their… our way of life''. We have to fight and quickly win, what they call ''the everlasting battle for the minds of men'' and ''indoctrinate people with the capitalist story'', so fully that they can repeat it on every opportunity, - and on and on like that. And they weren't kidding around. I mean, for example about a third of the material in the American schools, elementary schools, was coming straight out of the corporate propaganda offices, by the early 50s. Sports leagues were taken over, the churches were taken over, the universities were attacked, there was a cross-the-board major effort to try to win the ''everlasting battle for the minds of men''. And it's still going on. I mean here it's conscious, that part of it is conscious, most of the participants of it are conscious, and there's nothing wrong for them in this. Especially if you've been through elite educational system, then you're really deeply indoctrinated. It's like I havent measured this, but it's my personal feeling that you'll find more passivity and obedience in the elite centers than you do in the streets or in a state college.

23 - Conspiracy Theories Now, Adam Smith – you're supposed to worship him, but not supposed to read him, and its worth reading too. Remark this somewhere: that if you find two businessmen talking to each other - they are involved in a conspiracy against the public. And there is, indeed, something to that.

You can read descriptions of this, incidentally, in the business press. For example the Financial Times of London, which is like the most important business newspaper in the world. So, a couple of years ago they had an article by the economics correspondent of the BBC over establishment stuff, in which he said something like this, that what's evolving, is what he called the ''de facto world government in a new imperial age'' and the ''de facto world government'' is a ''set of shadowy institutions'', under there (he sort of knows that they're there, but don’t know what they're doing), which basically serve the interests of transnational capital and financial institutions. And he said, for example the G-7 (you know, the seven big rich countries meeting, just their executives, under leadership, real smooth), the IMF, the World Bank, then the GATT council, - what now would be the World Trade Organization, - they are getting together and running the ''de facto world government''. I think that's kind of a metaphor, like they get together somewhere and say "ok, here's what we gonna do…". They do get together, but its usually extremely boring. If you were unfortunate enough to have gone to this Davos conference the other day, I'm sure you would have been bored out of your mind. I went there and I've seen the dosuments. But having read things like that, I do a lot of reading of this truff, like the Trilateral Commission was one of them, and they publish regular documents, so boring, that after couple of years I stopped subscribing – it was so predictable and boring. Besides you can read this in Foreign Affairs and there's a business page for everyone any day.

24 - The Crisis Of Democracy But yes, they do get together, and sometimes, when things get scary, they really do things. So, say, take the Trilateral Commission. There is one publication which really IS interesting and worth reading. This is the commission that was put together by David Rockefeller around 1973, and this is the one that people refer to when they talk about this secret nexus of the rulers and so on. In 1975 their first publication was very interesting, and I urge you to read it, if you haven't done it at school, "The Crisis of Democracy". It's very much in line with the stuff that I was talking about before. Remember, this is the first getting together after the 60s. All this fermenting went on in the 60s, when women and minorities and all kinds of people that were supposed to be kept in their place, were suddenly trying to get into the public arena to do something about their interests. That, again, drew people crazy, just as as did the working-class struggle in the 30s. So here you have a gathering of elites. "Trilateral" means United States, Europe and Japan. So these are elite elements, mostly liberal, on liberal side. If you look at the composition, its roughly speaking, something like the Carter Democrat. In fact the whole Carter demonstration, including Carter himself, was drawn from this group. That's roughly the complexion, in all three of these countries. And they were concerned about, what they called, the ''crisis of democracy''. It's interesting to read what they said, because at that point they were concerned. The ''crisis of democracy'' is the fact that normally passive and marginalized parts of the population, the overwhelming majority, are suddenly trying to get into the public arena to press their demands. Well, you know, if you believe the stuff they teach in the civics classes, that's supposed to be democracy. But if you're ''smart'' enough to make it to Harvard, you know that that's the crisis of democracy, and we're gotta stop it. And, in fact, the American reporteur, the guy who wrote the US part of it, is a professor at Harvard. Shortly after he got one of my favorite titles, he was called ''professor of the science of government'' – always liked that one. He's now a university professor or something. And he wrote the American side of this trilateral thing. But the others are more or less the same, I don’t mean to suggest he is different. I think he's the kind of like a 'New Deal' Democrat or something. He gave his ideal, described the 'good old days'. He said, in the 'good old days', before the crisis of democracy, he said that Truman, and this is almost quote, Truman ''had been able to run the country with the help of a few Wall Street lawyers and financiers". Now, that's that alleged conspiracy, of course its exaggerated, it wasn't just Truman and a bunch of the Wall Street lawyers and financiers. But that's the image that would be perfect – if we had that, there would be no crisis of democracy. But when you have women, and blacks, and young people, and old people, and farmers, and all these 'scum', trying to get into the public arena – yeah, that's the problem. Exactly the

problem that Madison worried about, in fact. So, you somehow have to marginalize them. But in this case this is public, in a way, so you can read it. I mean you gotta work a little bit to find it, but it's worth reading. But most of the stuff is fairly boring, its like the literature of social science.

25 - Cuba And The U S Q: - Most countries of the world have normal bilateral relations with Cuba. Why is the US virtually alone in its hostility toward Cuba? What explains US policy? Let me, again, report some truisms to you, that you would read on the front pages of newspapers if there was any commitment to trying to tell important and uncontroversial truth. There's nothing I'm going to say that's the least controversial. Let me just run through the history, because its interesting. Cuba was the first foreign policy problem for the United States. Back in the 1820s the 'nice guys', like Thomas Jefferson and so on, who were planning to take over the hemisphere, saw Cuba as the next place to pick up. They've already stolen Florida from its inhabitants, claiming from Spanish but actually from its inhabitants, and their eyes were now kinda moving toward the West, but also on Cuba – that was the next prize. Well, there was a little problem - the British fleet. There was a British tyrannt, just as in the 1960s there was a Soviet dictator, and the British were the hated enemy in those days. Mainly because of their power - they were preventing the United States from expanding. They prevented the United States from conquering Canada couple of times, which the U.S. has been trying to do since the 1775, and may finally achieve it in the so-called 'free trade' agreement. So Cuba was sitting right there, in a vital place, and you couldn't get there because the British are in the way. And John Quincy Adams, I guess it was, suggested that we just be patient. He said that it will ''drop into our hands like a ripe fruit, by the laws of political gravitation''. Meaning, by the time we get stronger and the British get weaker, things will shift around and we'll be able to take it over. By the end of the century that has happened. By the end of the century the British were sort of being pushed out of the game, the United States were getting more powerful, and during something that is so ludicrously mistitled as the Spanish-American war, the United States intervened in Cuba, primarily to prevent it from liberating itself from Spain. You take a close look, - that's an interpretation, so you want to make sure, don’t take my word for it. I think if you look you'll find that what happened is that the intervention in Cuba was primarily an effort to make sure that its liberation from Spain didn’t mean liberation. And in fact Cuba was quickly turned into an American plantation, with all kind of restrictions on its options, bought up by the American agribusiness and so on. When Cuba tried any 'funny' ideas about moving towards independence - it was smashed down. For example, Franklin Roosevelt was famous for the 'good neighbor policy': we don't intervene anymore in the affairs of our neighbors. Well, take a look at the 1934, when Cuba made the mistake of trying to elect a sort of, I guess, a moderate SocialDemocrat, of more or less independent ideas, as president – a-a! that's going too far. So, – out! So it continues up to 1959. In 1959 Castro comes along. There was a little bit of toying with question of whether we can maintain the new Cuba in our system or not. And this is not a new policy issue – since early 1920 it hasn't changed much. Within a couple months it was decided that Castro is too much of a scare: there was no Russians to speak of, he's anti-Communist, jailing the members of the Communist Party – there was no question of the Russians or the Communists or that kind of stuff. By late 1959 US planes were already bombing Cuba from Florida-bases. The State Department claimed that they didn’t know about it. Yeah, sure. Try that if, say, Cuban planes bombed the United States, and Cubans say they didn't know about it. So…, it was happening. In March 1960 the Eisenhower administration made a formal decision, up till now it was secret, but now declassified, so you can find out about it, they made a formal decision to overthrow the Cuban government and take it over. That's March 1960. Remember: no Cold war, no Russians, no Communists, just independent Cuba. From that point on, March 1960 up until today,

Cuba has been subjected to extensive international terrorism, economic strangulation without an end. It's not trivial stuff. Just to give you one small example, and this one comes from an absolutely impeccable source Raymond Garhouse, who was a very conservative and respected historian right inside the CIA and intelligence apparatus, who now writes historical stuff. Take a look at his books and reflections on the missile crisis, which he is writing sort of partially from the inside, and partly as a historian. There is this little item in there, somewhere at the peak of the missile crisis, before when it had sort of theoretically been solved, but when it was still not over, so that the missiles were still there. At the peak of the missile crisis one of these terrorist teams that Kennedy sent to Cuba to smash the place up, one of them, which apparently was acting out of control – at this time there is no evidence that Kennedy ordered it to do this, so maybe it was on its own, so one of them blew up a petrochemical plant in Cuba. Which, according to him, he doesn't verify it, but he says it's alleged and apparently takes this seriously, foreign workers were killed. Yeah, suppose Cuba blew up a factory in the United States and foreign people were killed – you think it might make it to the newspapers? In fact we'd probably… we'd nuke them. But this is 'us', and this is incidentally one tiny footnote to a long history of terrorism, and this was right at the peak of the missile crisis, when Cuba had its fingers on the missiles, ok, don’t know about that, but somebody did. For those of you who want to know about why people believe what they do, just do a little check and find out how much information you can find about this. I'm gonna save you the trouble. This is it, I've repeated it probably 20 times in books that nobody would dream of looking at and reviewing them and so on, but that's one little item. And then it goes on to poisoning crops and livestock, shooting down fishing boats, blowing up airplanes, - all sorts of things. Meanwhile the economic striangulation is going on, permanently. And the only issue debated in the United States, for a long time, was a pretense that we gotta do it because of the Russians. Because Cuba is a tentacle of the Russian 'monster', trying to strangle us. In an intellectually free country everybody would laugh at that. In fact, when Kennedy once tried to get the Mexican ambassador to join in some anti-Cuban action back in the early 60s, the Mexican ambassador actually told him he would like to do it, but if he announces in public in Mexico that Cuba is a threat, 40 million Mexicans will die laughing. And that's basically true. The idea that Cuba could be a threat, even if it's owned by the Russians, it's as if… I cannot think of a counterpart… suppose, say, that before the end of the Cold War Russia had been carrying out massive terrorism against Denmark and strangling the country, let's imagine it could do that, because it said that Denmark was a threat. You know, Denmark was wa-a-ay more of a threat to Russia, than Cuba is to the United States. I mean, Denmark is an advanced industrial country, it is a member of a hostile military alliance, well armed. If Russians have said that you wouldn’t laugh, it would be a sign of their lunacy, or alert, but we say that all the time and that's okay because that's ''us'', and we're properly indoctrinated. To judge how much of a Russian threat it was, bear in mind that the formal decision to overthrow the government was taken in March 1960, when there was no Russians. And it continued under the pretext of a Russian threat as long as the Russians were around. But what happened when Russians disappeared? So, okay, November 1989, Berlin wall falls, no more Russians… What happened to Cuba? If the story of the last 30 years, that we hear from Arthur Schlesinger and everyone, was true, we should have welcomed Cuba with open arms, no more tentacles of the Russians. Have that happened? No, we drew the noose tighter. All of a sudden it wasn't because the Russians were a threat, it was because we love democracy so much, as you can easily demonstrate by looking at what we do around the world. And if you take a look at the educated classes, they skip a beat: from one day to the next it's defending ourselves against the Russian threat to loving democracy. With this history out in the open - that's a real achievement. I doubt that the totalitarian state can achieve anything like that. Anyhow, up until now it's, well, ''we love democracy so much''. And then the only question is: what's the best way to achieve democracy? And this is discussed as if it was serious. That's the interesting part. This is discussed as if…, it is not ''40 million Amer.. Mexicans die laughing'',

which it ought to be. It's discussed as if it could conceivably be serious. It can't possibly be serious. The only question is how to make sure that Cuba will go back into the box in which it was supposed to be put in 1820. If they can force it back there, by one or other means, - fine. We will even call it a 'democracy', if it is run by some brutal murderer. Like we call Mexico a 'democracy'. Or we call Columbia a 'democracy', in fact 'the best democracy in the hemisphere'. It even has an independent political party, which was allowed to function in 1985. Since that time about 3,000 of its activists have been murdered, mostly by security and paramilitary forces, including every presidential candidate, and most of the mayors. But, well, you know, it's out there, it's got to be a democracy, and since we love democracy so much, we think it's fine. So maybe if Cubans were apt for democracy like that, it would be fine, as long as it follows orders. And you, know, there ought to be a hundred million Americans who 'die laughing' over this, and the fact that they're NOT, is an indication of the grip of the doctrinal system, which is really powerful, and in this case primarily among the more educated sectors. I mean, if they don't know these things, then it's a conscious decision not to know. It takes work not to know these things. Like you don't have to really explore.

26 - Solutions Q: - With this battle for the minds of men, and the fact that its critical to mobilize the masses, do you see any solutions short of revolution? Sure… I mean, the solutions that have worked all through history. How the workers' rights got established more or less in the 1930s. There was a threat, there was certainly a threat. Like when working people took over General Motors. And that's not a joke – people got scared. Because the next thing that will get into their heads is ''what do we need the bosses for?''. They will get as smart to say ''look, we don't need these guys, we'll run it ourselves''. And you gotta make sure that THAT doesn't happen, because that's really trouble. So, yes, there was an accommodation. And, in fact, right through history – that's the way it worked. Nowadays, people who consider themselves more or less 'progressive', whatever that term is supposed to mean, think that they've got a pretty rotten life – look at their problems. Well, you know, there's a lot of problems, but it's a lot better than it was 30 years ago, let alone 50 years ago, or 100 years ago. So like nowadays you're worried about how to defend some sort of medical system. Were you worrying about it 30 years ago? It wasn't there. Or take, say, women's rights. There's plenty of problems about women's rights, like the way Affirmative Action is being used, the tactic, - it wasn't a problem 30 years ago – there were NO rights. Or take the issue after issue, - over time the struggle takes off from the higher level than before. So if you think it's bad for labor now, how about the 1920s? You know, the "fall of the House of labor'', in ''the most undemocratic America'', when workers could do nothing more than try to pursue individual survival strategies. And that, remember, that was the period of mass industrialization, establishment of the automobile industry, its not a rural country. What you do is try to keep making things better. Is it a revolution or not - that's like a question of definition. I think myself, I agree with those mill hands in Massachusetts, that people who work at the mills ought to own them, generalized. Well, if there are steps toward that happening, I guess you could call it a revolution. But I don't see why it shouldn't just happen.

27 - Reshaping The Legal System Q: - Going back to your comments about the media, and grand public relations ploy, … You see, I think this whole stuff is totally illegitimate. And this goes wa-a-ay back to something much earlier. Why should corporations have any rights at all? I mean, it's not in the Constitution. And it's not

even by the legislation. Corporate rights were achieved mostly through courts and lawyers, and pretty recently. Main decisions are early in this century. It's not engraved in the stone or anything like that. There's pretty good literature on that. If you're interested, the best book is by Harvard professor Morton Horowitz who is at the law school, and has a couple of books called "Transformation of American Law". One of them goes, I think, to like 1860, and the other from the 1860s and 1960. But the main theme of these two big volumes, nevertheless interesting to read, is how the legal system was reshaped to accommodate to the needs of private power. Always, throughout history that's been the main theme of the legal system: how to modify it so that illegitimate tyrannical authority is given more and more power, undermining democratic principles. And the big step, the major step probably, was the transfer of rights to private tyrannies, which is what corporations are, early in this century. And, as he points out, and I think he's right, this developed out of the ideas, kind of Hegelian ideas, about the rights of 'organic entities' over individuals, which are also the root of Bolshevism and Fascism. And I should mention that that comparison may sound exotic now, but it wasn't 60 years ago. Read a mainstream American political economist like Robert Brady, important political economist, back in early 1940s, I guess. He wrote books about the big businesses system power, things like that, in which he points out that obvious things are basically totalitarian in structure, and which they are. Also where do they get their rights? Well, through courts and lawyers, by playing one state against one another. The point of getting power down to the states is so that any business, even middle sized business, can make sure that the money goes into their pockets, not in the pockets of poor people. It's trickier to do it at the federal level. That's why you got all this new philosophy about Federalism. Not that Federalism would be bad, but not when you got private tyrannies around.

28 - Private Tyrannies This establishment of private corporate power is a dramatic example that back early in this century, maybe around 1905 or something, the state of New Jersey figured it could make a killing by getting the big corporations to move from New York, where they always were, over to New Jersey simply by giving them a lot of 'gifts'. It's kind of like when Alabama gets the investment from Germany, it's sort of taxpayers pay for it, you know, but it makes the killing. And that's exactly what they did. So New Jersey gave corporations all sorts of 'gifts', essentially, to move across the river, and that's why you have so many things called like "Standard Oil" of New Jersey, and that sort of thing, - because they moved across the river and got incorporated there. It was a lot cheaper for the… power because the taxpayers of New Jersey have paid them. Delaware was another case. Well, of course New York had to accommodate, because these guys were moving across the river, - that's the new federalism, back in the early part of this century. So by such a mechanism public funds did end up in big deep private pockets, and corporations gradually got rights, that are totally illegitimate. Those rights can be taken away very simply and without a revolution. In fact, every corporation has a state Charter, and they're supposed to be there for some public good. Well, I guess it was true maybe 200 years ago. Like, 200 years ago we could establish a corporation that would build a bridge across the Charles River or something. That's what the corporation was supposed to be. It's changed a bit over the years. By now these are huge tyrannies, bigger than states, involved in all kind of strategic interactions with one another, in violation of any conceivable market principle and so on. That's not the reason they should exist, I don’t think it is. And the media is just a part of it.

29 - Role Of The Media

It's particularly harmful for democracy when media systems are in the hands of private tyrannies. It's bad enough when it's the guys who are making shoes and cars etc, but when its control over the doctrinal system and information - that's much worse. That's why I think the stuff that's going on in telecommnunications now should really get a lot more attention than it does. There is this huge system, built at public expense, you guys pay for it, and as usual being handed over to a private power, now that it's profitable, and it's very likely, I think, most media analysts, with their heads screwed on, see and often even report, that it's gonna end up in the hands of the half a dozen megacorporations, internationally. Well, that's worse than the oligopoly that is run stealing computers, because here we're talking about a new mode of information and communication and so on, as always, built at the public expense. And right now, we're right in the middle of it, being handed over to private power, it's certainly not been reported. I mean, it's not that there's no reporting - you've heard about the Telecommnunications Act, but it wasn't discussed as a public interest issue. It was discussed as a business issue. And in fact most of the reporting was on the business pages. This is a big legislative achievement of last Congress, Telecommnunications Act of 1996: reported in the business pages, and not as a public interest issue. But it's not supposed to be a question of public interest whether major systems of information and interchange are handed over as 'gifts' to Rupert Murdoch – that's not supposed to be an issue of public interest. The only thing that was discussed was whether to give it to six corporations or 12, it could be either this way or that way. Well, you know, that's an effective indoctrination when these ideas, these things occur to people. It takes real indoctrination. But I think you're right: this is worse than the handing over of decision-making power to private tyrannies, because in this case it's also handing over access to the things that they need to control the public mind. These systems could also be used to liberate the people.

30 - Poor People Pay The details haven't come out yet, but from the reporting that I've heard the actual proposals that are to come along, are going to be granting benefits of one kind or another to people of income levels kinda like mine, people up to the level of 80,000 thousand dollars a year. I forget the last figures, but I think the median income in the United States is something like around 30,000. The idea of giving rich people social benefits so their kids can go to school… Well, okay, who's paying? Well, the poor people are paying. So I'm not so sure it's such a great stuff when you look at it. The same with other things. Big investment firms, Lehman Brothers in this case, are now circulating a brochure (those of you who are wealthy enough must be receiving it), these things you know, they're distributing brochures to their rich customers, telling them "look, we've taken over the health system, we've taken over the criminal system, and we're now thinking about the welfare system. There is a new way to enrich ourselves at the public expense'', - not their words, my translation. The way we'll do it is by setting up EMO's, educational management organizations, which will do wonders for the educational system, like HMOs do for health care, about the same effect, namely they will be able to take more and more money away from the system and put it in private power, meanwhile shaping care so that it mostly benefits the rich and harms everybody else. And now we're getting to the educational system - a last big government monopoly. It's not put this way, - it's all put in terms of ''efficiency'', and what nice people we are, and we're gonna make everything better, much better for everyone, because we're just benefactors and so on. Go through it, and that's what it is. Yeah, I think those are probably the new plans that will be coming along and I would be very cautious about the Clinton's proposals. I'm really careful to see to what extent they're lending themselves. After all, remember, he is… he has made no secrets about what he is. He is, and always has been, a

moderate Republican candidate of the business community, he's never pretended to be anything else. He is a 'business' candidate, his main influence on the Democratic Party was to move it over to the Republican side, with the Democratic leadership council. That's not any secret – he said it, in a manner very clear. His record in Arkanzas is like that, his influence in the national government was like that, so whatever the Democratic Party may have been, which you can sort of debate, it's now like… if you define the difference between Dole and Clinton – I'd like to know what it was, I mean policy difference. They're both moderate Republicans. And the business press is very well aware of this. Just take a look at the Wall Street Journal editorials, the first couple of years, or their reporting throughout the whole Clinton years. At first they were a little nervous, because of all of his populist rhetoric. But pretty soon, within a few months, you start getting editorials in the Wall Street Journal and articles, in fact, not just editorials, about how Clinton is 'the best president the business has ever had', they quote the Ford company executive saying "we're getting along with him much better than we did with Bush and Reagan'', and on and on. Of course, you know they'd prefer the Gingrich guys, actually with some ambiguity I should say, because they don't like the small business aspect of the Gingrich people: there's a delicate balance there between holding off the crazies and making sure that the really rich people get everything. So there's been a problem there, but as far as Clinton was concerned - they were perfectly happy with him. Yeah, he's the moderate Republican. And I don't think you can say that he's deceived anyone. If you look at his positions all the way along, it'd be very clear, if people don't wanna see it - that's their choice. But it's been clear to the business press, it's been clear in his policies.

31 - The Country Is Flooded With Money Exactly what kind of education program would be crafted out of that - I'd be very suspicious. And I think it's worth of very careful look. There's plenty of problems with the educational system, but the main problem is that way too few resources go into it. That's not that we don’t' have money, we don’t have no budget crisis or anything like that, country is just flooded with money – again, read the business press. It cannot find adjectives exuberant enough to describe dazzling stupendous profit, ''what are we gonna do with all those funds?'', and so on, the country is just FLOODED with money. But it all is getting very narrowly concentrated. There's plenty of money around to improve educational system, and we know exactly where it has to come from. And that is, I think, the main problem: teachers are way underpaid, they're undereducated, they're not getting enough respect, too many kids in school, in classroom, not not enough educational materials, and so on so forth. There's no brilliant ideas about this side, I've never heard about how people should be educated, except kids - natural enthusiasm and creativity ought to be allowed, and work constructively – all of this kind of stuff. What's missing is the resources. Fine, so let's provide the resources, so maybe they won't have such dazzling and stupendous profits next year, and instead there will be a little better education. What I'm worried about is that the system is moving towards a kind of privatization, which just imposes costs on the public.

32 - Privatization Remember, all this privatization you're hearing about, is supposed to be very efficient, and by some measure, by some ludicrous measure it probably is efficient. The part of the reason why it is efficient is that you don't count the costs. So suppose the government privatizes the MTA or the public transportation system, suppose you privatize the system. You and I know how to make it more efficient, by the economists' measure: you throw out the union workers and you get the tickets for half the price. And if there is an accident, 'cos they never had any training, it is just people getting killed, - and you don’t measure that. And you cut off the so-called 'unprofitable bus routes', like you don't make a lot of money at 11 p.m. so let's throw them out. Well, suppose somebody is stuck somewhere at 11 p.m. and

wants to get home. Oh, well, it's entrepreneurial values, - let him hire a limousine or something. In ways like that you can make the system more efficient, simply by transferring the cost over the public, and we don't measure the cost. So, it looks nice and efficient on some economists' paper, but of course there is just huge cost transferred over to the public, which you don't measure - we all know this, and that's what the privatization of the educational system will be.

33 - Business Run Society Also it's doing something else. It's going after exactly that moral conception that underlies the labor movement from its origins, namely: ''We're in it together''. It's not just gaining wealth for gaining wealth itself, but we should care not only that my kid can go to school, but that the kid down the street can go to school too, - that's what's been driven out of people's heads. There has been a very powerful effort to drive any of that out of the people's heads. You're only supposed to care about yourself, unless you're rich, of course. If you're rich - you're part of big 'socialist' structures called 'corporations', with strategic alliances and plenty of support from the state, and then you're allowed to have all these feelings that, yeah, we work together for us, the rich guys. But everybody else is supposed to be on their own. You're not supposed to care whether the kid down the street goes to school. This should be very familiar to people in the labor movement. This is the main propaganda against the labor movement all the time, I mean right to work laws and everything else. You shouldn't work together – that's 'bad'. Because if you work together, you might DO something that matters. So just be out on your own. And if you can get a voucher - then your kid can go to school, - forget about everything else... This is a very much a business-run society. The last figures I saw: about one out of six dollars in the whole economy is spent on marketing. It's extremely inefficient use of funds, of course - marketing ain't producing any public goods. But marketing is a form of manipulation and deceit. It's an effort to create artificial wants, to control the way people look and think about things. A lot of that marketing is straight propaganda, advertising. Essentially, most of it is tax-free, which means the way our system works you pay for the privilege of being propagandized, of having all this stuff dumped unto you. Those are not small figures, that's like a $1 trillion a year in 1992, something of that order. And, yes, if you've got that much of a commitment to ontrolling minds and manipulating desires and so on, and doing all of the things they're talking about in the public relations literature, - I'm not making it up – you can read it there, and the social science literature, because this is also standard academic thought too, so when you've got those stakes you are going to work at it hard, and it's going to be hard defiling it. That's what makes organizing tough: you have to break through a lot of psychic resistance - the whole history of the labor movement tells you that. And, as I say, this was well understood by mill hands and Lowell 150 years ago. It's a big battle, and you're not just struggling against somebody who calls it a 'right to work' pack, you're struggling against five hours a day of television, and movie industry, and the books in the schools and everything else. The scale of the efforts to win the battle for men's minds is enormous. I thought I knew something about this stuff, but when I read Elizabeth Fones-Wolf book I was pretty shocked: just to see the scale of the efforts, and the dedication, the frenzied dedication to winning this everlasting battle – it's pretty impressive. Although, if you think about the stakes you should not be surprized.

34 - Enlightenment Principles Q: - I was curious about your remarks about mill hands and Lowell, and maybe the best idea for them was to run the farm on their own…

Let's just talk about the principle. The principle, as far as I can see goes back to the Enlightenment. If you go back to the classical Enlightenment thought, I'm not talking about Adam Smith, Jefferson and those guys, the sort of core idea is that people have the right to control their own work. That if a person, here I'll quote a standard formula back in the 18th century, leading heroes of the Enlightenment, so if a person does beautiful work under external command, meaning for wages, we may admire what he does but, we despise what he is. Because he is not a free human being. That goes all the way through classical Liberal thought, Enlightenment thought; Alexis de Tocqueville says ''under wage labor.. the art advances, the artisan declines''. If I were to define this, it goes right into the working-class movements and Lowell and Lawrence. I think it's natural, I wouldn't try to convince anybody of this. If you think about it: why should you work on command? I mean if you work on command – you're some kind of a slave. Why not work because it's coming out of your needs and interests? It's cheap for me to say, as I'm in a fancy University and a science department, and I can DO that - one of the nice things about being in the sciences in the fancy University is you really do have workers' control. Up to a very large extent we control what we do. I don’t wanna work on this topic, I'm gonna work on that topic. I mean you gotta sell it to funders, and this and that, but the degree of workers' control at the elite level is quite substantial. That's why it is such a privilege to be in a science department. Enormously privileged existence. Forget the money: if they pay you a 1/10 the amount of money it would still be a much better existence than working on command. I think people DO know that, and I don't think that these Enlightenment ideas are hard to grasp. I think people know that if you work under external control you may admire what the person does, but despise what he is. Because his labor, the sort of central part of your life, is being done at somebody else's orders, and you are not controlling the way it's done, or WHY it's done, or how it's used, or anything else. Well, you can't have every individual controlling every single thing, but that's why we have democratic structures - because people control things together. I wouldn’t try to convince anybody of this, because I frankly just don't believe that everyone doesn’t know it. I think maybe I'm sentimental, but it seems to me that if you sort of cut away, you know, layers of distortion and delusion,… - these things were considered pretty obvious 200 years ago, and are still obvious.

35 - The Cold War Q: - What about the idea that the Cold War served certain theological and political purposes for the US, and now the US is seeking a new paradigm? There's something true about the fact that the Cold War paradigm was extremely useful as a way of controlling people. Take the labor movement. One of the ways of controlling, undermining or destroying of the labor movement was weeding out the activist elements, on the principle that they're somehow not loyal enough to the state at this time, when the enemy is at our throats. Well, like any propaganda, even the most vulgar propaganda of the Stalinist Russia, there's always some thread of truth to it - you just couldn't have propaganda that has no, even just marginal, element of truth, and there was some marginal element of truth here too, but it wasn’t very real, - it's like the Cuba case. So, yes, this has been a very terrific hammer to use over people's heads. And it was understood, I should say. If you haven't read it yet you should read NSC 68, which was, everybody agrees, was the fundamental Cold War document. It's kind of interesting, its content. Everybody recognizes that it is a major document, but nobody quotes it, with a very few exceptions. I have a book called "Deterring democracy'', which in the first chapter has a lot of extensive quotes from NSC 68. It's April 1950, and it sort of lays out the basic picture the Cold War. It's quite fascinating to read, for one thing because you can see why diplomatic historians don't quote it. It was written by the real hot-shots, you know, Dean

Acherson, Paul Mitzy and all those smart guys. It reads like a bunch of raving lunatics. Don't take my word for it – read it! I conceive that I might have picked up the most dramatic examples, but read the whole thing if you feel like - its not that long. My view – it sounds like a bunch of raving lunatics, which is why nobody ever cites it. But they do make some points. The picture they tell us is kind like a fairytale: on one hand there is absolute evil - that's the other side. It's kind like a fairytale that you'd be embarrassed to read to your grandchildren: there's this total absolute evil, you know, the Kremlin, which is planning to destroy the whole world and everything that ever existed and so on. On the other side there is utter perfection – that's us. You know, we're like super angels. The only thing we ever do is work, slave for the benefit of this and that, and it is portrayed in the picture of an exaggerated fairytale, a parody of a fairytale. There is never any evidence given, because it's just like a matter of definition. They say it's an essential nature of the Kremlin that it acts this way, so you don’t even have to give evidence, because it's part of it's nature, and it's essential property of our nature that we do this sort of thing. So, there's no evidence given. In fact, there is evidence scattered around, very carefully scattered around, so if anybody is going to look for it its gonna be a hard time finding, and when you find and put together the evidence, like I've done in the same book, you find it completely undermines whatever thesis they have. Then comes the proposals. The proposals were involved in a real war, it's a real war, no Cold War, we had to fight it like a war, to prevent this monstrous thing from destroying everything and allowing our perfection magnificence to win. In a war you've got to have things like 'just suppression', we have to have suppression of dissent among us. One of our weaknesses is that we're too tolerant, and too open, and too free – they say that, and that's a weakness. So, we have to have 'just suppression', and control of dissent, make sure that everybody is obedient and so on. And the way to do it is what they also call 'military Keynesianism'. That means transferring public funds to private industry, which was a big issue then, because everybody knew that the economic system is not gonna function without a tremendous amount of public funding, state funding, poor paying again, so that was crucial. It was true about the international economy too, at the time: very heavily reliant on military spending to revitalize it. And they know all that, and it's laid out, but also that it would be an ideological weapon – it would be a weapon to control people. And that's true – it was. From then until the game started to go away, in 1989, it was a tremendous weapon of thought control. Anything you wanted to block, what you've got to do is just yell 'Cold War', didn’t matter how crazy it was. Sometimes there was some truth to it, sometimes not. So, yes, you need a new paradigm, because how we are going to beat people over their head now, if we don’t have that around anymore? If you look through the 80s, very obviously you'd see that this stuff is to lose its efficacy. You didn’t have to be a big genius to figure out that Soviet Union was in trouble. So you look at stuff, say, I was writing since the early 1980's, I've been saying that they will have to go to something else. And in fact right through the 80s there was almost desperate search for something else: international terrorism, or crazed Arabs, or Hispanic narcotraffickers or something or other that we have to defend ourselves against. Or, otherwise – how are you going to control everybody? Ok, domestic crime, mostly manufactured. U.S. doesn’t have crime levels very different from other industrial countries. But there's a different perception of crime: a concept of 'welfare queens', you know, sort of by implication of black driving around in Cadillacs – that sort of thing. There's all sorts of effort to manufacture enemies for people to hate. Foreign enemies are much better and so here's where the 'science of government' comes in.

36 - Islam As The Enemy Now, let's get back to this 'clash of civilizations' thing. You know, everybody is looking around for some paradigm, some big thing that you can use to control people. And Huntington's idea was 'clash of

civilizations'. So, you know there's Islam and Sintoists and other things, and the idea is that the reason why the world is disorderly is because, now that the Cold War's gone, you got all these ethnic group's killing each other. Well, as usual, its always a good thing to start by asking about the fact. Whenever you hear anything being said very confidently, the first thing that should come to mind is "wait a minute, is that true?". So, is it true? I mean, is it true that there's more ethnic conflict now than it was 20 years ago? Well, take a look. In most of the big conflicts that are going on around the world we're going right to the Cold War. Like Burundi in Rwanda: there were huge massacres going on in the early 70s. Actually I wrote about them at the time. Nobody was talking about it, 'cause it wasn't 'interesting', but they were there. In fact just about every one you pick goes way back. Now, there are some that are new, - those within the former Soviet system, what's called the old Communist system, including Yugoslavia, the war in Chechnya, Azerbaijan and Armenia, Tajikistan. But that's standard: anytime a tyrannical system breaks down you have all sorts of conflict internal to this. Just take a look at the breakdown of the European empires: every single one was like that, most of them were worse. So, first of all, the factual basis is very thin. Now, what about the principle, 'clash of civilizations'. Like, say, the big bad guy now is Islam. Well, there's a few problems with that. The most fundamentalist Islamic state in the world is our big ally Saudi Arabia. How does that feel? Saudi Arabia is not fundamentalist enough for some of the people in it, but it's pretty extreme. Are we trying to undermine Saudi Arabia? Of course not - they're sitting on our oil. In fact they are our 'clients' – that's a family of dictatorship that we keep in power because they make sure that the money from oil doesn't go to the people of the region, but goes to London and New York. So they're okay – that's not a 'clash of civilizations' there. That's state fundamentalism. What about individual, nonstate fundamentalism? Well, by far one of the worst are the guys that are tearing Afghanistan into pieces. Where you find more crazy Islamic fundamentals if not among them – I don’t know. Where they get their power from? Well, your pocket. They got $6 billion, or so it's claimed, from the United States and Saudi Arabia, through the 1980s, now they're tearing Afghanistan apart – but that's not what we do, we're wonderful people. So, where is this 'clash of civilizations' between Islam and the West? I don’t see it. I mean Indonesia is an Islamic state. Is D.C. trying to undermine Indonesia? There's a lot of rotten things in Indonesia, like for example, wages are about half the level of China, which is not so magnificent – is D.C. doing anything about that? I think this is all farce. And I don’t mean to say total farce. There must be a new paradigm, something that people can build their careers on, and write books about and so on so forth, which can then be turned into a device of controlling people - that part is true. And, maybe this'll work, or if it doesn't we'll try something else.