THE US GOVERNMENT IS CORRUPT

THE US GOVERNMENT IS CORRUPT

1. GOVERNMENTS ARE CONTROLLED BY THE WEALTHY

Noam Chomsky, professor, 1999.

PROFIT OVER PEOPLE: NEOLIBERALISM AND GLOBAL ORDER, p. 20.

Whether accurate or not, this description serves to remind us that the governing institutions are not independent agents but reflect the distribution of power in the larger society. That has been a truism at least since Adam Smith, who pointed out that the “principal architects” of policy in England were “merchants and manufacturers,” who used state power to serve their own interests, however “grievous” the effect on others, including the people of England. Smith’s concern was “the wealth of nations,” but he understood that the “national interest” is largely a delusion: within the “nation” there are sharply conflicting interests, and to understand policy and its effects we have to ask where power lies and how it is exercised, what later came to be called class analysis.
2. THE US GOVERNMENT IS WILLING TO SACRIFICE RIGHTS FOR PROFIT

Noam Chomsky, professor, 1999.

PROFIT OVER PEOPLE: NEOLIBERALISM AND GLOBAL ORDER, p. 20-1

The United States had been the world’s major economy long before World War II, and during the war it prospered while its rivals were severely weakened. The state-coordinated wartime economy was at last able to overcome the Great Depression. By the war’s end, the United States had half of the world’s wealth and a position of power without historical precedent. Naturally, the principal architects of policy intended to use this power to design a global system in their interests. High-level documents describe the primary threat to these interests, particularly in Latin America, as “radical” and “nationalistic regimes” that are responsive to popular pressures for “immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses” and development for domestic needs. These tendencies conflict with the demand for “a political and economic climate conducive to private investment,” with adequate repatriation of profits and “protection of our raw materials” – ours, even if located somewhere else. For such reasons, the influential planner George Kennan advised that we should “cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization” and must “deal in straight power concepts,” not “hampered by idealistic slogans” about “altruism and world-benefactions” – though such slogans are fine, in fact obligatory, in public discourse.

Noam Chomsky, professor, 1999.

PROFIT OVER PEOPLE: NEOLIBERALISM AND GLOBAL ORDER, p. 21

“Radical nationalism” is intolerable in itself, but it also poses a broader “threat to stability,” another phrase with a special meaning. As Washington prepared to overthrow Guatemala’s first democratic government in 1954, a State Department official warned that Guatemala had “become an increasing threat to the stability of Honduras and El Salvador. Its agrarian reform is a powerful propaganda weapon; its broad social program of aiding the workers and peasants in a victorious struggle against the upper classes and large foreign enterprises has a strong appeal to the population of Central American neighbors where similar conditions prevail.” “Stability” means security for “the upper classes and large foreign enterprises,” whose welfare must be preserved.

Noam Chomsky, professor, 1999.

PROFIT OVER PEOPLE: NEOLIBERALISM AND GLOBAL ORDER, p. 22

Nationalist regimes that threaten “stability” are sometimes called “rotten apples” that might “spoil the barrel,” or “viruses” that might “infect” others. Italy in 1948 is one example. Twenty-five years later, Henry Kissinger described Chile as a “virus” that might send the wrong messages about possibilities for social change, infecting others as far as Italy, still not “stable even after years of major CIA programs to subvert Italian democracy. Viruses have to be destroyed and others protected from infection: for both tasks, violence is often the most efficient means, leaving a gruesome trail of slaughter, terror, torture, and devastation.

Dinesh D’Souza, scholar at Hoover Institution, 23 Feb. 2006.

THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION, accessed 7/27/06, .

Many European, Islamic, and Third World critics—as well as many American leftists—make the point that the United States uses the comforting language of morality while operating according to the ruthless norms of power politics. To these critics, America talks about democracy and human rights while supporting ruthless dictatorships around the world. In the 1980s, for example, the U.S. supported Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, the Shah of Iran, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. Today, America is allied with unelected regimes in the Muslim world such as Pervez Musharaff in Pakistan, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and the royal family in Saudi Arabia. Moreover, the critics charge that America’s actions abroad, such as in the Gulf War and Iraq, were not motivated by noble humanitarian ideals but by the crass desire to guarantee American access to oil. These charges contain an element of truth. In his book White House Years, Henry Kissinger says that America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests. It is indeed true that American foreign policy seeks to protect America’s self-interest, but what is wrong with this? All it means is that the American people have empowered their government to act on their behalf against their adversaries. They have not asked their government to remain neutral when their interests and, say, the interests of the Ethiopians come in conflict. It is unreasonable to ask a nation to ignore its own interests, because that is tantamount to asking a nation to ignore the welfare of its own people.

Dinesh D’Souza, scholar at Hoover Institution, 23 Feb. 2006.

THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION, accessed 7/27/06, .

But what about the United States backing Latin American, Asian, and Middle Eastern dictators such as Somoza, Pinochet, Marcos, and the Shah? It should be noted that, in each of these cases, the United States eventually turned against these dictatorial regimes and actively aided in its ouster. In Chile and the Philippines, the outcomes were favorable: The Pinochet and Marcos regimes were replaced by democratic governments that have so far endured. In Nicaragua and Iran, however, one form of tyranny promptly gave way to another. Somoza was replaced by the Sandinistas, who suspended civil liberties and established a Marxist-style dictatorship, and the Shah of Iran was replaced by a harsh theocracy presided over by the Ayatollah Khomeini. These outcomes help to highlight a crucial principle of foreign policy: the principle of the lesser evil. It means that one should not pursue a thing that seems good if it is likely to result in something worse. A second implication of this doctrine is that one is usually justified in allying with a bad guy in order to oppose a regime that is even more terrible. The classic example of this was in World War II. The United States allied with a very bad man, Josef Stalin, in order to defeat someone who posed an even greater threat at the time: Adolf Hitler. Once the principle of the lesser evil is taken into account, many of America’s alliances with tin-pot dictators become defensible. America allied with these regimes to win the Cold War. If one accepts what is today almost a universal consensus—that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire”—then the United States was right to attach more importance to the fact that Marcos and Pinochet were reliably anti-Soviet than to the fact that they were autocratic thugs.

Dinesh D’Souza, scholar at Hoover Institution, 23 Feb. 2006.

THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION, accessed 7/27/06, .

Critics of U.S. foreign policy judge it by a standard applied to no one else. They denounce America for protecting its self-interest while expecting other countries to protect theirs. Americans need not apologize for their country acting abroad in a way that is good for them. Why should it act in any other way? Indeed, Americans can feel immensely proud about how often their country has served them well while simultaneously promoting noble ideals and the welfare of others. So, yes, America did fight the Gulf War partly to protect its access to oil, but also to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi invasion. American interests did not taint American ideals; just the opposite is true: The ideals dignified the interests.

Noam Chomsky, professor, 1999.

PROFIT OVER PEOPLE: NEOLIBERALISM AND GLOBAL ORDER, p. 27

In the highly praised history of the Americanization of Brazil that I mentioned, Gerald Haines writes that from 1945 the United States used Brazil as a “testing area for modern scientific methods of industrial development based solidly on capitalism.” The experiment was carried out with “the best of intentions.” Foreign investors benefited, but planners “sincerely believed” that the people of Brazil would benefit as well. I need not describe how they benefited as Brazil became “the Latin American darling of the international business community” under military rule, in the words of the business press, while the World Bank reported that two-thirds of the population did not have enough food for normal physical activity. Writing in 1989, Haines describes “America’s Brazilian policies” as “enormously successful,” “a real American success story.” 1989 was the “golden year” in the eyes of the business world, with profits tripling over 1988, while industrial wages, already among the lowest in the world, declined another 20 percent; the UN Report on Human Development ranked Brazil next to Albania.

Noam Chomsky, professor, 1999.

PROFIT OVER PEOPLE: NEOLIBERALISM AND GLOBAL ORDER, p. 28

Changes in global order have also made it possible to apply a version of the Washington consensus at home. For most of the U.S. population, incomes have stagnated or declined for fifteen years along with working conditions and job security, continuing through economic recovery, an unprecedented phenomenon. Inequality has reached levels unknown for seventy years, far beyond other industrial countries. The United States has the highest level of child poverty of any industrial society, followed by the rest of the English-speaking world. So the record continues through the familiar list of third world maladies. Meanwhile the business press cannot find adjectives exuberant enough to describe the “dazzling” and “stupendous” profit growth, though admittedly the rich face problems too: a headline in Business Week announces “The Problem Now: What to Do with All That Cash,” as “surging profits” are “overflowing the coffers of Corporate America,” and dividends are booming. Profits remain “spectacular” through the mid-1996 figures, with “remarkable” profit growth for the world’s largest corporations, though there is “one area where global companies are not expanding much: payrolls,” the leading business monthly adds quietly. That exception includes companies that “had a terrific year” with “booming profits” while they cut workforces, shifted to part-time workers with no benefits or security, and otherwise behaved exactly as one would expect with “capital’s clear subjugation of labor for 15 years,” to borrow another phrase form the business press.

Noam Chomsky, professor, 1999.

PROFIT OVER PEOPLE: NEOLIBERALISM AND GLOBAL ORDER, p. 30

Standard economic history recognizes that state intervention has played a central role in economic growth. But its impact is underestimated because of too narrow a focus. To mention one major omission, the industrial revolution relied on cheap cotton, mainly from the United States. It was kept cheap and available not by market forces, but by elimination of the indigenous population and slavery. There were of course other cotton producers. Prominent among them was India. Its resources flowed to England, while its own advanced textile industry was destroyed by British protectionism and force. Another case is Egypt, which took steps toward development at the same time as the United States but was blocked by British force, on the quite explicit grounds that Britain would not tolerate independent development in that region. New England, in contrast, was able to follow the path of the mother country, barring cheaper British textiles by very high tariffs as Britain had done to India. Without such measures, half of the emerging textile industry of New England would have been destroyed, economic historians estimate, with large-scale effects on industrial growth generally.