Chomsky says Bush and Obama beholden to corporate interests

MIT Professor Noam Chomsky, introduced as the eighth most-cited human being in history after Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Bible, Plato, and Ford during an interview earlier this week with The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur [see video clip on the left], said the U.S. was defeated in Iraq of achieving its chief war aim which was securing preferential access to Iraq’s oil reserves.  And Mr. Chomsky speculated that President Barack Obama is trying to salvage some form of victory in Afghanistan lest he’s slaughtered by the right-wing propaganda system.  During the discussion Chomsky also chastised Obama for enriching the very same people who created the financial meltdown.

U.S. FOREIGN POLICY-CORPORATE NEXUS

The first part of the interview focused on the problem with U.S. foreign policy, which Chomsky said is rooted in Amercia's rise as a global power after WWII when U.S. planners came together to outline a “grand area” that would be completely under U.S. control and within which the U.S. would not tolerate any expression of sovereignty that interfered with their global designs, which included the Western Hemisphere, East Asia, Eurasia, and the former British colonies, especially the Middle East with its energy reserves. Planners determined early on that if “they could control Middle East oil they could control the world.”

The same essential policy remains intact which is why the U.S. has 800 bases around the globe and spends as much on the military as the rest of the world combined.  Although governments make and implement decisions, the state sector is closely entwined with concentrated private capital, including the financial industry, the military, and energy corporations which serve as a closely-linked nexus that crafts policies to ensure their own interests are served.

DEFEATED IN IRAQ

Chomsky stated that there were very solid reasons for invading Iraq, chief among them being that Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world. Establishing a client-regime with a major military base in Iraq and getting preferential access to its resources would be of great value to the aforementioned nexus.  However, Chomsky said the U.S. did not achieve their goals:

Iraq is an interesting case because it was a defeat. U.S. goals were defeated in Iraq, very important fact. At the beginning there were of course all sorts of pretexts, “they’re tied with Al Qaeda”, “weapons of mass destruction”, when that collapsed there was a new pretext “we’re bringing democracy”. The U.S. in fact fought democracy every step of the way. It tried to prevent elections, and when it couldn’t prevent them it tried to manipulate them.

By 2008 when it was pretty clear the U.S. was not going to achieve its goals, the Bush administration made strong significant declarations in which they discussed what the outcome must be, and what they said it must include was the U.S. right to use military bases in Iraq indefinitely as a base for combat and other operations and privileged access to Iraqi energy resources for U.S. corporations. At that point it was said pretty explicitly because they were getting pretty desperate.

Well they didn’t get either of those because the United States had not been able to suppress Iraqi nationalism. The U.S. could kill any number of insurgents that wasn’t a big problem but what they couldn’t deal with was the mass popular non-violent resistance.  The U.S. was defeated. But it’s clear what the war aims were, they were sensible aims.

AFGHANISTAN POLITICAL QUAGMIRE

The interviewer then asked Chomsky about Afghanistan, which didn’t have oil although it had pipelines.  Chomsky said the U.S. didn’t invade Afghanistan because of its resources and added:

On speculation, Obama and his advisors are making a political decision. They know that the war is unpopular. A majority of the population now thinks we shouldn’t be there. But they also know that if they don’t get out of Afghanistan with something they can call a victory they’ll be slaughtered by the right-wing propaganda system. And I suspect they are trying to find a way to hang on long enough so they can have a situation that they can maybe sell as a victory and then partially withdraw. That’s not so simple, tried the same thing in Iraq.

MARSHALL PLAN WAS GOOD, BUT LET'S NOT HAVE ILLUSIONS

Uygur asked if there were any bright spots to U.S. foreign policy, like the Marshall Plan for example. Chomsky responded:

The Marshall Plan was a good thing, it did to some extent help Europe recover, but its basic goal was for the benefit of U.S. corporate power, and that was barely concealed. I mean remember the situation then, the industrial world had mostly been destroyed by the second world war, the U.S. which was already the richest country in the world quadrupled industrial production, we literally had half the wealth of the world at the end of the second world war. The U.S. manufacturers had an enormous surplus and they needed a market. Well, where’s the other market gonna be? Well, only in the other industrial societies. So they had a real stake in using tax-payer funding to help the other industrial societies reconstruct and not only a market for U.S. industry but also an area for expansion, that’s how multi-national corporations really got started.

Incidentally, this isn’t particularly my idea, you can read it - Reagan’s Commerce Department said the same thing and you can read it in the business press which understood it particularly well. So, it was a good thing to do but we shouldn’t have any illusions.

OBAMA BAILS OUT HIS CRONIES

Uygur wondered if America had a functional democracy at all considering the system was so captured and Chomsky said:

Democracy isn’t a yes or no affair, it isn’t even a more or less affair, it has many dimensions.  In some respects the United States is very free.  So, take for example freedom of speech.  That is protected more in the United States than any other country I know of, and that’s a very good thing. It is an achievement, it’s not in the Bill of Rights incidentally, it was gained mostly in the 1960s - that’s when the great Supreme Court cases were reached under the impact of the Civil Rights Movement.

On the other hand, we barely have a political system. 50 years ago analysts pointed out that the U.S. has essentially one political party – the business party, which has two factions called Republicans and Democrats, they consistently follow policies that are in the interests of their business constituency, sometimes they do some help to the population, sometimes not.

Take President Obama.  The core of his funding was financial institutions. By now they are the largest part of the economy, they don’t contribute much to the economy but they have enormous weight - they are probably 40% of corporate profits. Very questionable what they contribute to the economy, anyway they’re very powerful. And in the tradition of U.S. politics which has been quite well-studied and well-documented, it’s typically the case that concentration of funding pretty much determines the policies. The funders expect to be paid off.

So it comes as no great surprise the greatest beneficiaries of Obama’s policies were the very financial institutions who tanked the economy. And you could see that right away. I mean the people he picked for his economic advisors - they were not Nobel Laureates who condemned the policies that led to the crisis, not people like Josef Stiglitz or Paul Krugman and others, he picked the people who created the crisis such as Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers - who was famous for having undermined the regulation of derivatives, one of the main causes of the crisis  - and Tim Geinther, and they created an enormous bail-out of financial institutions. Something obviously was needed, the financial institutions had destroyed the economy, something had to be done. But it’s doubtful it had to be done in a way that enriches those who created the crisis and makes them more powerful than ever. But that’s what you’d expect from the way politics works.

The interviewer then wondered if it was a conscious decision by President Obama, to pick the guys that destroyed the economy because they were the ones that paid him. Chomsky responded:

If you go back to the Politburo in the Soviet Union, we have a good idea what they were thinking because there have been internal documents released. They were thinking that they were saving people from the assault by the fascists led by the United States, and they thought they were going to bring wealth and benefits to people. You read Japanese fascists, we have a ton of documentation because they’re a conquered country.  The documents of Japanese fascists are just overflowing with loving kindness.  I mean when they were carrying out huge massacres but thought they were bringing an earthly paradise to China and protecting the people from the bandits. You will always find self-serving ideologies created.

Uygur asked Chomsky if Obama had been brainwashed by the system.  Chomsky’s classic response was:

I don’t know anything about Obama. You’ll have to ask his psychiatrist or his family and I also don’t think it matters. I mean I don’t care what Brezhnev actually thought, I care what he did.