[log in to unmask] wrote:
>Some Truths and Myths About
> Free Market Rhetoric
> Noam Chomsky
> Lies of Our Times
>Letter from Lexington January 7, 1994
>Dear LOOT,
>Hardly a day passes without acclaim for the exciting new idea of the New
>World Order: free market capitalism that will liberate the energies of
>active and creative people, for the benefit of all. Euphoria peaked as
>Clinton savored his NAFTA triumph at the Asia-Pacific summit in Seattle,
>where he expounded his "grand vision for Asia," bringing leaders together
>"to preach the gospel of open markets and to secure America's foothold in
>the world's fastest growing economic community." This "may be the biggest
>rethinking of American policy toward Asia" since World War II, David
>Sanger observed. Clinton outlined the "new vision" before a "cheering
>throng... inside a giant airplane hangar at the Boeing Company," "a model
>for companies across America" with its "booming Asian business" -- and its
>plans for "multimillion-dollar job-creating investments outside the United
>States on a scale that would terrify NAFTA's opponents."1
>Unmentioned is another fact: Boeing is also the model for radical state
>intervention to shield private profit from market discipline. It would not
>be America's leading exporter, nor probably even exist, were it not for a
>huge public subsidy funneled through the Pentagon and NASA, institutions
>in large part designed to serve that function for high tech industry
>generally. Clinton's gospel, then, is that the taxpayer should provide
>massive welfare payments to investors and their agents, safely protected
>within their totalitarian institutions from interference by public or
>workforce, pursuing profit and market share as they choose, by
>"job-creating investments" abroad if that suits their interests.
>"China alone now buys one of every six of [Boeing's] planes," Sanger
>continued. And lofty rhetoric aside, Clinton's one achievement at the
>summit was to open the door to more exports to China, expected to be "the
>magic elixir that can cure many of the ills of the American economy"
>(Apple). Clinton arranged for sales of supercomputers and nuclear power
>generators; the manufacturers (Cray, GE) are also leading beneficiaries of
>the state-subsidized private profit system, and the items sold can be used
>for nuclear weapons and missiles, Pentagon officials and other experts
>observed. A problem, perhaps, because of a ban on such exports imposed
>last August "after American intelligence agencies produced conclusive
>proof" that China was engaged in missile proliferation, while also
>continuing "nuclear cooperation" with Iran, probably weapons production.
>But the problem was only superficial: Secretary of State Warren
>Christopher informed China that Washington would "interpret an American
>law governing the export of high technology to China to allow the export
>of two of the seven sophisticated American-made satellites banned by
>sanctions imposed on China in August, senior Administration officials
>said," adding that "there was no linkage" between the supercomputer and
>nuclear generator sales and the issue of proliferation.2
>These decisions illustrate the "very different notion of national
>security" to which Clinton "is drawn...with the Communist threat having
>receded," reported by Thomas Friedman in an adjacent column: "promoting
>free trade and stemming missile proliferation."
>There was also "no linkage" to human rights, another slight problem, if
>only because of Clinton's impassioned campaign rhetoric denouncing his
>predecessor for ignoring China's horrendous record in order to enhance
>corporate profits (called "jobs," in PC parlance). Just as Clinton's new
>export initiative was announced with much fanfare, a fire killed 81
>workers in a factory with doors and windows locked "to keep people inside
>the factory during working hours," a spokesman said.3 Appended to
>Friedman's lead story "Clinton Preaches Open Markets at Summit" the next
>day was a brief notice of "deadly accidents involving fire and poisonous
>gas" that had killed 100 workers "in booming Guandong Province," widely
>hailed as a free market model.
>Though there was "no linkage" to human rights issues or proliferation, it
>would be unfair to suggest that the New Democrats have no qualms about
>China's bad behavior. "Clinton administration officials are considering
>imposing trade sanctions against China," The Wall Street Journal reported
>a month later. The reason is China's "resolve to withstand U.S. pressure"
>to cut its textile exports. "Washington is angry over what it claims are
>more than $2 billion of Chinese-made textiles and apparel shipped
>illegally to the U.S. each year through third countries."4
>December 31 was the deadline for Chinese submission to U.S. protectionist
>demands, and also "for China to meet promises made to the U.S. in 1992 to
>open up its market." After China failed to live up to these paired
>obligations, "the Clinton administration is set to slash China's textile
>quotas by as much as a third while also lifting a ban on the sale of two
>communication satellites to Beijing," the Journal reports further,
>describing this as the "good-cop, bad-cop style": the "bad-cop" will
>punish China for its brazen defiance of U.S. barriers to free trade, and
>the "good-cop" will sell them satellites (despite the ban) to show that
>the U.S. is "ready to reward China if it makes demonstrable progress" --
>also, incidentally, rewarding GM's Hughes Aircraft unit, which is looking
>forward to $1 billion in future business5
>Careful students of free trade gospel will have no difficulty seeing how
>all this hangs together.
>The punishment was duly administered, Thomas Friedman reported in the lead
>story the next day. U.S. trade representative Mickey Kantor announced
>harsher quotas that should cost China over $1 billion, "to insure that
>China abides by its commitments to follow fair, nondiscriminatory trade
>practices" and to show the Administration's determination "to stand up for
>U.S. jobs" as demanded by the textile manufacturers' lobby, noted for its
>single-minded dedication to "jobs."6
>Protectionist measures had been greatly enhanced under Reagan, who, in his
>impassioned pursuit of free trade, had "granted more import relief to U.S.
>industry than any of his predecessors in more than half a century,"
>Secretary of Treasury James Baker proudly informed the business community.
>Not enough for the New Democrats, however. As Clintonites announced their
>National Export Strategy, which is to surpass the "less coordinated
>efforts" of Reagan and Bush to undermine free trade, including new
>GATT-violating measures, Secretary of Treasury Lloyd Bentsen explained:
>"I'm tired of a level playing field. We should tilt the playing field for
>U.S. businesses."7
>The contours of the inspiring new gospel come into still sharper focus.
>Though market discipline is not for us, the lesser breeds are to adhere
>rigorously to its strictures. The promise and problems are illustrated by
>three December 22 stories.
>In the Christian Science Monitor, Sheila Tefft reported from Beijing under
>the heading "Growing Labor Unrest Roils Foreign Businesses in China."
>"Industrial tragedies and labor disputes are stirring tensions between
>Chinese workers and their foreign bosses," she reports, giving two
>examples: the November fire that killed 81 women trapped "behind barred
>windows and blocked doorways," and another a few weeks later that killed
>60 workers in a Taiwanese-owned textile mill. More than 11,000 Chinese
>workers were killed in industrial accidents in the first eight months of
>1993, double the 1992 rate, the Labor Ministry reported. "Chinese
>officials and analysts say the accidents stem from abysmal working
>conditions, which, combined with long hours, inadequate pay, and even
>physical beatings, are stirring unprecedented labor unrest among China's
>booming foreign joint ventures." "The tensions reveal the great gap
>between competitive foreign capitalists lured by cheap Chinese labor and
>workers weaned on socialist job security and the safety net of
>cradle-to-grave benefits." Their minds poisoned by socialist
>indoctrination, workers fail to comprehend that after their rescue by the
>Free World, they are to be "beaten for producing poor quality goods, fired
>for dozing on the job during long work hours" and other such misdeeds, and
>locked into their factories to be burned to death.
>In a New York Times report from Shanghai, Patrick Tyler ruminates on the
>problem from a different perspective. The city "is racing to recapture the
>glory of capitalism that flourished here 60 years ago" when it "reached
>the zenith of power and allure," before it "crumbled under the scorn and
>persecution of Communism." In those glory days, "expatriate merchants
>imported European architecture and society, living in mansions behind high
>walls in the concession areas they were granted" by China's rulers -- the
>"grants" assisted now and then by foreign guns. "The masses of Chinese
>outside these walls suffered the instability of warlord rule, gang rivalry
>and political struggle between the underground Communist movement and the
>corrupt Nationalist Government" -- though they remained untouched, it
>seems, by "Western imperialism" (cited in horror quotes, if at all). "Old
>Shanghai had opium dens, cabarets imitating Europe's best, pink gin,
>cigars," and for "the masses of Chinese," indescribable misery and
>torment. The city then sank into its "long decline" with Japan's conquest
>and the Communist takeover, which "drained the city of its foreign
>population and investment" and "deflated what capitalist spirit remained."
>While the spirit is now reviving, it is not certain that the grandeur of
>yore can be regained: "Whether Shanghai can rival its position of old is a
>much contested question," Tyler observes.
>Progress in that direction is reported by Joseph Kahn in the Wall Street
>Journal. He describes government projects to "usher out hundreds of
>thousands" of people from Shanghai to "satellite cities created by diktat
>to make way for office buildings, hotels and luxury apartments," so that
>Shanghai will "become a city for the rich and the powerful people," an
>expelled shopkeeper complains. The representative for a foreign developer
>disagrees: "The people are very happy to move out," he says, much like
>those who enjoy "urban renewal" in advanced capitalist countries. Shanghai
>may never quite recapture the "glory of capitalism," but perhaps it can at
>least come to look more like New York and Chicago.
>There are additional signs of progress on that front. "Murder, robbery and
>other violent crimes are sharply on the rise in China," the official press
>reported, up 17.5% in 1993.8
>Russia has moved more rapidly towards the "glory of capitalism." Under
>Western-prescribed "shock therapy," the population starves with "poverty
>now visible in Russia in ways that it never was before," while more
>Mercedes 600 SEL's are sold at $130,000 each than in New York, Celestine
>Bohlen reports. Purchasers are the new rich (many of them the old
>Nomenklatura), who are working for foreign companies or selling off
>Russia's resources. Others belong to the criminal syndicates springing up
>as "crime and business have become interwoven in Russia to an alarming
>degree." "Crime has risen dramatically...as the controls of the
>totalitarian state have fallen away and before the certainties of a
>law-abiding society have emerged to take their place," though "Moscow
>is still lagging behind American levels of murder and violence," with only
>about half the murder rate of New York, where capitalist democracy
>implanted "the certainties of a law-abiding society" long ago. "Russian
>society has begun to break down into social layers, with people at the top
>who are extraordinarily rich and people at the bottom who are poor,"
>Bohlen adds; oddly, just the pattern that prevails where Western guidance
>has proceeded without interruption, and increasingly, in the rich
>industrial societies themselves.9
>Could there be some lessons here?
>The great hope in the East is Poland, where the free fall of the economy
>since 1989 finally bottomed out. It resembles other Third World success
>stories, not only in the divide between great wealth and mass misery and
>in providing supercheap labor to allow Western investors to drive down
>wages and social services at home, but down to fine detail. Poland's
>foreign expert was Harvard's Jeffrey Sachs, now plying his wares in
>Russia. He earned his fame by helping to orchestrate an economic
>miracle in Bolivia, a macroeconomic success and human disaster; Bolivians
>suffer the social reality, the West applauds the statistics and the
>opportunities for enrichment, unconcerned that the statistical successes
>are based in large measure on sharply increased production of illegal
>drugs, which may have become the major export earner. Sachs then moved on
>to Poland, which now provides Western Europe with its highest-quality
>illegal drugs, including 20% of the amphetamines confiscated in 1991, up
>from 6% in the late 1980s. Poland may also be the biggest transshipment
>point for narcotics from Central America, Afghanistan, and the Southeast
>Asian golden triangle, though "drug trafficking has also increased sharply
>throughout the region," Raymond Bonner reports. Costa Rica's Ambassador to
>Poland was arrested at the Warsaw airport with almost $1 million worth of
>pure heroin, and "a staggering 1.2 tons of cocaine was seized in St.
>Petersburg," from Colombia, where cartels are hiring Polish couriers to
>smuggle cocaine to the West. The former Soviet regions of Central Asia are
>expected to become major drug producers down the road.10
>This standard pattern under Western tutelage, perhaps the most persuasive
>example of maximization of utility and efficient use of resources under
>free market conditions, should gain more respect than it does.
>Meanwhile market discipline retains its traditional dual aspect: rigid for
>the victims, quite different for the victors. GM purchased an auto plant
>near Warsaw, but "on the under-the-table condition that the Polish
>government provide it with 30 percent tariff protection," Alice Amsden
>observes. Similarly, "VW is capitalizing on low labor costs" to build cars
>in the Czech Republic for export to the West, but "the tortuous journey
>towards free markets" includes "a very attractive deal" in which VW was
>able to reap the profits and "to leave the Government with the debts and
>with enduring problems like how to clean up pollution," while "stiff
>tariffs" guarantee the profits of the foreign investors. Daimler-Benz
>recently worked out a similar "attractive deal" with Alabama, on the Third
>World model, The Wall Street Journal noted.11
>The former Soviet domains still fall short of Western standards for Third
>World dependencies, however. Some of the distance yet to be travelled was
>revealed in a Canadian Broadcasting Company investigation, The Body Parts
>Business, "a gruesome litany of depredation," reporting murder of children
>and the poor to extract organs, "eyeballs being removed from living skulls
>by medical pirates armed only with coffee spoons," and other such
>entrepreneurial achievements.12 Such practices, long reported in Latin
>America and perhaps now spreading to Russia, have recently been
>acknowledged by one of the most prized U.S. creations, the government of
>El Salvador, where the procurator for the defense of children reported
>that the "big trade in children in El Salvador" involves not only
>kidnapping for export, but also their use "for pornographic videos, for
>organ transplants, for adoption and for prostitution."13
>The dead hand of socialist values is impeding progress beyond countries
>like China that are now reforming. At the Pan-American games in Puerto
>Rico, extraordinary efforts were made to lure Cuban athletes, but though
>"ardently courted," almost all "spurned the pleas to jump ship" despite
>"the desperate Cuban economy and the potential for million-dollar
>major-league contracts."14 Under the heading "Defects in the System?,"
>referring to the fact that some Cubans did succumb to the courting, Steve
>Fainaru reports in more detail on the ardent efforts and their general
>failure. Boxer Felix Savon was offered a $20 million contract, but
>refused, saying that "money is not the essential thing for a human being."
>"Savon is crazy," one of the defectors said: "He's been reading too much
>Communist propaganda." The most painful tragedy was the failure of any
>baseball players to defect, though scouts from every major league team
>were dangling huge contracts in front of their eyes. "There's so much
>wasted talent over there," a scout for the Dodgers complained: "It really
>makes me mad when I think about how these guys could be making millions"
>instead of returning to the country that they say they love: "But there's
>nothing we can do. [Castro] is the one who has the last word," his mystic
>presence forcing the athletes to return to the "economic despair"
>at home.15
>Applebome reviews the "struggle for daily survival in Cuba" while
>maintaining a stony silence on the U.S. role, the norm for respectable
>commentary. Thus, reviewing a book on Castro, Mark Uhlig scornfully
>derides the "failing regime" of the "the Ego That Devoured Cuba," the
>villain who "has no one else to blame for its deepening crisis," surely
>not terror and economic warfare from Washington and Miami, which merit not
>a word in this typical display of moral cowardice.16 Fainaru departed
>from good taste, at least mentioning the embargo.
>The "deepening crisis" for which Castro bears sole responsibility is
>driving many women to prostitution, as in the days before the capitalist
>spirit was deflated. But whether Havana "can rival its position of old"
>under the "glory of capitalism" is also "a much contested question," now
>that women have been "schooled in that socialist certainty that she must
>bow to no one."17 As the gospel reaches Cuba, that malady too may pass.
>For a deeper understanding of the gospel we should lift our eyes to the
>higher reaches of thought. Some help is offered in an address to a January
>1993 conference of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences by the
>distinguished philosopher, anthropologist, and historian Ernest Gellner.18
>He explains that "humankind in general is dominated by three types of
>motivations: honor, interest, and salvation." Honor was displaced by
>interest after the scientific revolution and economic growth under
>capitalism; perhaps that explains the "craziness" of backward Cubans,
>still in the primitive grip of honor. The third option is "salvationism"
>-- in its modern form, "secular salvationism (read: Marxism)": "the idea
>of running an industrial society through the establishment of
>righteousness on earth," the goal to which Stalin dedicated his every
>waking moment. That option was repudiated in 1989, signalling the end of
>Marxism, which inevitably leads to totalitarianism, just as "modern
>industrial totalitarianism must be Marxist." What remains is "a kind of
>International of Consumerist Unbelievers," who understand that public
>policies to change the near-perfect social arrangements geared to private
>profit and accumulation would lead straight to the Gulag.
>At last all is clear.
>Sincerely,
> Noam Chomsky
>Footnotes
>1 R.W. Apple, Thomas Friedman, Sanger NYT, Nov. 21, 1993.
>2 Elaine Sciolino, NYT, Nov. 19.
>3 Reuters, NYT, Nov. 19.
>4 Lawrence Zuckerman and Asra Nomani, WSJ, Dec. 30, 1993.
>5 Zuckerman, WSJ, Jan. 4; Bob Davis and Robert Greenberger, WSJ, Jan. 6,
>1994.
>6 NYT, Jan. 7.
>7 Keith Bradsher, NYT, Sept. 28; Michael Frisby, WSJ, Sept. 29, 30) -- as
>"we" have been doing
>for 2 centuries.
>8 AP, Boston Globe, Dec. 29.
>9 NYT, July 31, Aug. 16, Nov. 13, 1993.
>10 Rensselaer Lee and Scott Macdonald, Foreign Policy, Spring 1993;
>Bonner, NYT, Dec. 30,
>1993.
>11 Amsden, American Prospect, Spring 1993; Richard Stevenson, "In a Czech
>Plant, VW Shows
>How to Succeed in the East," NYT, June 22, 1993; Helene Cooper and Glenn
>Ruffenbach, WSJ,
>Sept. 30, 1993.
>12 John Haslett Cuff, Globe & Mail (Toronto), Nov. 20, 1993.
>13 Hugh O'Shaughnessy, Observer (London), Sept. 26, 1993.
>14 Peter Applebome, "Passing Up Big Money and Plea to Leave Cuba," NYT,
>Dec. 3, 1993.
>15 BG, Dec. 5, 1993.
>16 Uhlig, NYT Book Review, Sept. 19, 1993.
>17 Tom Mashberg, BG, Jan. 25 1993.
>18 Laura Reed and Carl Kaysen, eds., Emerging Norms of Justified
>Intervention, Cambridge
>1993.
>----------------------------------------
>Dan Clore
>mailto:[log in to unmask]
>The Website of Lord We˙rdgliffe
>http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/index.html
>Welcome to the Waughters....
>The Dan Clore Necronomicon Page
>http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/necpage.htm
>Because the true mysteries cannot be profaned....
>"Hziulquoigmnzhah" ([log in to unmask]) wrote:
>> Iqhui dlosh odhqlonqh!
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Thanks , Dan for this important Missive from NC !
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