Occupy. Chomsky.
InterOccupy conference call with Noam Chomsky
74. "One of the real achievements of the Occupy movement, I think, has been to develop a real manifestation of rejection of this in a very striking way. The people involved are not in it for themselves. They're in it for one another, for the broader society and for future generations. The bonds and associations being formed, if they can persist and if they can be brought into the wider community, would be the real defense against the inevitable repression with its sometimes violent manifestations."
"How best do you think the Occupy movement should go about engaging in these, what methods should be employed, and do you think it would be prudent to actually have space to decentralize bases of operation, at least within New York City, the five boroughs?
It would certainly make sense to have spaces, whether they should be open public spaces or not. To what extent they should be is a kind of a tactical decision that has to be made on the basis of a close evaluation of circumstances, the degree of support, the degree of opposition. They're different for different places, and I don't know of any general statement."
"You might go into a neighborhood and fin that their concerns may be as simple as a traffic light on the street where kids cross to go to school. Or maybe their concerns are to prevent people from being tossed out of their homes on foreclosures. Or maybe it's to try to develop community-based enterprises, which are not at all inconceivable--enterprises owned and managed by the work force and the community which can then overcome the choice of some remote multinational and board of directors made out of banks to shift production somewhere else. These are real, very live issues happening all the time. And it can be done. Actually, a lot of it is being done in scattered ways.
A whole range of other things can be done, like addressing police brutality and civic corruption. The reconstruction of media so that it comes right out of the communities, is perfectly possible. People can have a live media system that's community-based, ethnic-based, labor-based and other groupings. All of that can be done. It takes work and it can bring people together."
82. "Centuries ago, political theorists like David Hume, in one of his foundations for government, pointed out correctly that power is in the hands of the governed and not the governors. This is true for a feudal society, a military state or a parliamentary democracy. Power is in the hands of the governed. The only way the rulers can overcome that is by control of opinions and attitudes."
On Gramsci
"I like Gramsci. He's an important person. He talked about things not unlike what David Hume was saying--how cultural hegemony was established by systems of power. I personally think that his work is worth reading. When I read it, it says much of what we already know. I don't find anything novel. Maybe it's just my inadequacy; you can read it and see what you think."
84. On Growth
"...growth can mean simpler lives and more livable communities. It takes work and doesn't just come by itself. It takes work and doesn't just come by itself. It takes labor and development of a different kind. Part of what functioning, free communities like the Occupy communities can be working for and spreading to others is just a different way of living, which is not based on maximizing consumer goods, but on maximizing values that are important for life. That's growth, too, just growth in a different direction."
86. On the 2007 crash.
"At the root of its occurrence is the major shift in the economy that began to take place in the 1970s. It was escalated radically under Reagan, Thatcher in England and on from there. There was a big growth period in the United States, the largest in history, during the 1950s and 1960s. At that time, there was also egalitarianism: the lowest quintile did as well as the highest quintile and it absorbed into the mainstream society. African Americans for example, could finally be integrated into society. That came to an end in the 1970s when, for one thing, there was a shift towards increasing the role of finance in the society.
One of the great financial correspondents, Martin Wolf, wrote recently that the financial systems are wiping out functioning markets the way larva destroys a host. He's one of the most respected financial economists in the world and not a radical. That's what the effect of the financial system has been. Combined with this were corporate decisions to ship production abroad. It's not a law of nature, again. You can have decent working condition and production at home and abroad, but they made more profit that way. These decisions greatly changed the economy. One effect of this was that wealth became concentrated heavily in financial industries and that led to concetration of political power that leads to legislation, so on and so forth, keeping the cicious cycle going.
Part of this was deregulation. During the 1950s and 60s , the great growth period, the banks were regulated and there was no crisis. No major bubbles burst. Starting in the 1980s, you started getting financial crises, bubbles. There were several during the Reagan administrations. The Clinton administration ended with a huge tech-bubble burst.
There is a lot of money floating around, and much less real production that people need. One of the ways in which households were able to survive during the period of stagnation was just by getting caught up in bubbles. Early in this century, housing prices started to shoot up way beyond the trend. There is a kind of trend line for about a century. Housing prices roughly match gross domestic product. About ten years ago, they just started shooting way out of sight, with no fundamentals. A lot of it was essentially robbery: subprime mortgages and complicated devices by which the banks could slice up mortgages so that others would have responsibility when it collapsed, complicated derivatives and other financial instruments. All of this took off and created a huge bubble that was obviously going to burst. It was barely even noticed by the entire economist profession, including the Federal Reserve.
The minutes of the 2006 Federal Reserve meeting came out recently, you might have seen them. And rather strikingly, there was no recognition there that there was a multi-trillion dollar housing bubble that had no basis whatsoever and was going to collapse. As a matter of fact, they were congratulating themselves on how marvelously they were running the economy. Well, of course, it collapsed as it had to, maybe 8 trillion dollars lost.
For much of the population, that's all they had. Many African Americans' net worth was practically reduced to nothing, and many others, too. It's a disaster. This kind of thing is going to happen as long as you have unregulated capital markets, which furthermore have a goveernment insurance policy. It's called "too big to fail": if you get in trouble, the taxpayer will bail you out--policies that, of course, lead to underestimation of risk.
Credit agencies already take into account the fact that it's going to be rescued next time it goes bust. Well, that of course increases risk even further. If not housing, it'll be something else, commodities or whatever.
It's a financial casino instead of a protected economy, and of course people get hurt who are not rich and powerful, the 99 percent."
92. On 1968.
"If you read the Pentagon Papers, one of the most interesting sections is the final section, which ends in mid-1968. If you take a look at that section, you'll see that during the first few motnhs of 1968, the president wanted to send hundreds of thousands more troops to South Vietnam. The military and Joint Chiefs were opposed because they said that they would need the troops for civil disorder control in the United States. The population was just going to gt out of control--young people, women, minorities, others. They knew that they would need the troops to control the population here so they didn't send them. Well, you know, when the government gets that wary, you've had an effect. They did other horrible things-clandestine things that could've been worse, but it was bad enough, like I mentioned."
"The protests against the Iraq War were historically totally unique. I think it's the first war in history where there was massive portest before the war was officially launched. I can't think of a case that ever happened."
94. On women's rights
"In the 1960s, women literally still were not guaranteed the right to serve on juries. They'd won the right to vote forty years before, but by the 1960s, in many states, they couldn't serve on juries. In 1960, my university was almost 100 percent white male. Now it's much more diverse and that's the case over much of the country."
104. Quote by Howard Zinn.
" 'To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places--and there are so many--where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.'* -Howard Zinn
*You Can't be Neutral on A Moving Train, Beacon Press, 1994.