Power Systems (15 page)

That can be done at any level of education. A friend of mine who teaches sixth grade described to me once how she had taught her students about the American Revolution. A couple of weeks before they got to that assignment, she started acting very harshly, issuing orders and commands, making the kids to do all kinds of things they didn't want to do. They got pretty upset, and they wanted to do something about it. They started to get together and protest. By the time it got to the right point, she opened the lesson on the American Revolution. She said, “Okay, now you can see why people rebel.” And they understood why you would. That's the type of creative teaching that doesn't pass some standardized test necessarily, but it allows children to learn. That can be done at any level, from kindergarten to graduate school, in any subject—history, science, whatever it may be.

So those are the two concepts. And it's pretty clear which way the educational system is being pressed—and I think there's a reason why. We've got to educate people to keep them from our throats, as Emerson put it a long time ago. At the K-to-12 level, there is now an effort to destroy the public educational system. That's essentially what charter schools are about. They don't have any better outcomes. They feed at the public trough, the public pays for them, but they're essentially out of the public system and under much more private control, essentially privatized. It's destroying the ethic of the public education system. The ethic of that system is solidarity. You have a public education system because you're supposed to care whether children you don't know and have nothing to do with have the opportunity to go to school. That's social solidarity, but that's very dangerous—the opposite of atomization.

My feeling is that Social Security is under attack for the same reasons. There's no economic reason. It's in very good shape. With a little tinkering, it could go on indefinitely.
²⁰
But it's always listed as one of the big problems. We've got to do something about Social Security. I think the issue is the same: it's a system based on the concept that you should care about others, that you should care whether elderly people you don't know can live decent lives. You can't have that sort of thing. If a widow somewhere doesn't have food, it's her problem. She married the wrong husband or didn't invest properly. In a society in which everyone is out just for themselves, you don't pay attention to anyone else.

Ron Paul was asked at a Republican presidential debate what if “something terrible happens” to some guy who has no health insurance? What do you do? He said, “That's what freedom is all about: taking your own risks.”
²¹
Actually, when the moderator pushed back on this, he backed off and he said that people without health insurance would be taken care of by their families or their church. Then Rand Paul—this is more interesting—said national health insurance is slavery.
²²
He said, I'm a physician, and if there's national health insurance, the government is forcing me to take care of somebody who is ill. Why should I be a slave to the state? Here we're getting capitalist pathology in its most extreme, lunatic form. It is the opposite of solidarity, mutual support, mutual help.

 

Is it a form of social Darwinism?

 

I wouldn't even call it social Darwinism. That's too sophisticated. It's just, I'm out for myself, nobody else—and that's the way it ought to be. There was a recent study done at Harvard University's Institute of Politics on attitudes of young people from ages eighteen to twenty-nine.
²³
It was pretty striking. There's a lot of commitment to what in the United States are called libertarian ideas. Libertarian in the United States is pretty close to totalitarian. If you really think through what are called libertarian concepts, they basically say that we're going to hand over decision making to concentrations of private power and then everybody will be free. I'm not saying the people who advocate it intend that, but if you think it through, that's the consequence, plus the breaking down of social bonds. A lot of young people are attracted to that. For example, less than half of the people in the Harvard survey felt that the government should provide health insurance or “basic necessities, such as food and shelter” to those in need who cannot afford them.
²⁴

When people talk about the government in the United States, they're talking about some alien force. Hatred of democracy is so deeply embedded in the doctrinal system that you don't think of the government as your instrument. It's some alien instrument. It's taken a lot of work to make people hate democracy that much. In a democratic society, to the extent that it's a democratic society, the government is you. It's your decisions. But the government here is depicted as something that's attacking us, not our instrument to do what we decide.

Actually, one of the most frightening statistics for the Harvard survey has to do with the environment. Only 28 percent think that the “government should do more to curb climate change, even at the expense of economic growth.”
²⁵
If that continues, that's a death sentence for the species. But it's the anticipated result of the major attack on social solidarity, on participation, on interaction, and on the fundamentals of democracy.

April 15, the day when you pay your taxes, gives you a good index of how democracy is functioning. If democracy were functioning effectively, April 15 would be a day of celebration. That's a day on which we get together to contribute to implementing the policies that we've decided on. That's what April 15 ought to be. Here it's a day of mourning. This alien force is coming to steal your hard-earned money from you. That indicates an extreme contempt for democracy. And it's natural that a business-run society and doctrinal system should try to inculcate that belief.

C
AMBRIDGE
, M
ASSACHUSETTS
(M
AY
15, 2012)

There was a big sex scandal around the Cartagena Summit of the Americas in Colombia in spring 2012, but in a column for the
New York Times Syndicate
you pinpointed some more substantive developments.
¹

 

It was actually a very interesting and significant conference. The participants didn't come out with a formal declaration because they couldn't reach agreement. The reason they couldn't reach agreement was that, on the two major issues, the United States and Canada rejected what the rest of the hemi sphere insisted on, which was inclusion of Cuba and serious consideration of the decriminalization of drug policy.
²
That's very significant, another step in the isolation of the United States and Canada—and in the integration of the Latin American and Caribbean countries, which is very important.

About a year ago, a new organization formed called CELAC, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States.
³
CELAC includes all the countries in the hemi sphere minus the United States and Canada. There is some belief that it might actually replace the traditionally U.S.-dominated Organization of American States. There are already steps in that direction, with UNASUR, the Union of South American Nations, which has functioned with some success in a number of cases.

Latin America also has shown increasing independence in international affairs. Brazil, for example, has taken on a very interesting role in the international system, which the United States doesn't like.

If there is another hemispheric summit and Cuba is admitted, the United States will presumably stay home. Or if the United States blocks Cuba's participation again, there just won't be a summit. Washington is also isolated on its position on drugs. More and more countries in the hemi sphere are moving to change drug policy. Even conservative presidents are calling for decriminalization. Not legalization, but shifting possession of drugs from a criminal offense to an administrative matter, like a parking ticket. These policies have been pretty successful in Europe. That's essentially what most of Latin America is moving toward, beginning with marijuana, maybe moving on to other drugs. Again, the United States just refuses flat out.

It's quite significant, because the people of Latin America and the Caribbean are the victims of these policies. In Mexico alone, tens of thousands of people have been killed in the drug-related violence. And the United States is the source of the problem, a dual source, actually—in terms of demand, which is obvious, and also supply, which is hardly discussed. The guns to the Mexican cartels are increasingly from the United States. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, a federal government bureau, analyzed guns that were confiscated in Mexico. According to their figures, about 70 percent came from the United States.
⁴
Furthermore, the type of guns has been shifting over the years. A couple of years ago, maybe people were smuggling in pistols, now it's assault rifles.
⁵
Next year who knows what it will be?

This is all connected to the crazy gun culture in the United States. I don't know if you saw this, but Rand Paul just came out with an appeal for a new organization that will counter the efforts by Obama and Hillary Clinton to shred the last remnants of our sovereignty by allowing the United Nations to take away our guns.
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And then, of course, they will come and conquer us. The basis for this is that the UN is now debating a small arms treaty.
⁷
Small arms doesn't mean pistols. It means anything less than a tank. These are just slaughtering people all over the world. Hundreds of thousands of people every year are killed with small arms, and a high percentage come from the United States.
⁸
So there is an effort to have some sort of small arms treaty to regulate their flow. In the minds of the Rand Paul libertarians, this is just another effort by this ominous, fiendish outfit, the United Nations, to take away our freedom.

 

Rand Paul is the Republican senator from Kentucky and son of Ron Paul.

 

And apparently is being groomed as the future of libertarianism or something.

 

What about Canada's role in all of this? Why is Ottawa so yoked to Washington's policy?

 

It's an interesting development in recent years. It's related to NAFTA, but it reflects more general trends. Canadian and U.S. capital are increasingly integrated, which is bringing elites closer together. You can ask about cause and effect but Canadian policies, particularly under Stephen Harper, the prime minister, are not just drawing closer to U.S. policies but in some cases even going beyond them in extremism. Canada is becoming less and less of an independent country in many respects, culturally, economically, politically. It's increasingly embedded within the U.S.-run system as a kind of client state.

The energy system is a key part of this integration. The tar sands in Canada are a huge source of potential energy—and of environmental destruction. There's a controversy going on about who is going to exploit the tar sands. The United States wants to, but Canada occasionally warns that it will partner with China, which is eager to develop these fields if the United States won't.
⁹
This is a major issue now. In his 2012 State of the Union address, Obama was very enthusiastic about the idea that we could have a century of energy independence by making use of fossil fuels in North America—natural gas in the United States and fuel from tar sands.
¹⁰
He didn't talk about what kind of a world it would be in one hundred years if we use these fossil fuels. There's some discussion of the local environmental effects of developing the Canadian tar sands, but there's a much broader question about the general effect on the global environment. These are very serious issues.

Canada is also one of the major centers of mining operations around the world. Conflicts over mining of natural resources are leading to wars and violence globally, from Latin America to India. Internally, India is practically at war over natural resources.
¹¹
The same is true of Colombia and other countries.

 

What can you say about the process of hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas, known as fracking?

 

Fracking has local environmental ramifications that are pretty severe. It uses huge amounts of water. The process itself is destructive of the local environment in many respects, and there is considerable public opposition to it on that basis.
¹²
But I think that we shouldn't overlook the deeper problem. Suppose it were environmentally pure. You're still using fossil fuels. And we are coming to a tipping point on fossil fuels. We can't continue in this direction for long without getting to a point of irreversible devastation. You can't be sure of the date, but it's pretty clear that it's coming.

 

The Vikings football team was threatening to move to Los Angeles, so the good taxpayers of the state of Minnesota will provide almost half a billion dollars in public money for the construction of a new stadium to keep the team there.
¹³

 

Florida also announced recently that it's cutting back funding for the state university. The University of Florida is getting rid of some major academic programs, including computer science, but increasing funding for sports.
¹⁴

 

Athletic departments on U.S. campuses operate in a separate world. The salaries of the coaches are in the millions of dollars.
¹⁵

 

I remember going to some college for a talk—I forget where it was—but the first thing we drove to was some huge stadium. Right next to the sports stadium was a big building. I asked the students what it was, and they said, “That's where the football players live.” They get special training to enable them to pass the courses so they can keep playing football.

 

Years ago, you talked about listening to talk radio sports shows. I don't know if you're still doing that.

 

I still do.

 

I remember at the time you commented that these talk shows give the lie to the idea that the average Joe is unable to grasp complex and arcane data. And also, callers demonstrate fearlessness. You hear them saying, “Fire the bum,” “Get rid of that coach,” “Trade that player.”

 

It's very striking. First of all, there's an enormous amount of knowledge, and a lot of self-confidence and challenging of authority, which is normal. If you don't like what the coach did, you say he made a stupid decision, get rid of him. We're smarter than he is. If you could carry that over to other domains of life, it would have some significance.

 

I don't know if you've read that your hometown, Philadelphia, is closing forty of its public schools.
¹⁶

 

I didn't see that, but it's happening elsewhere, too. I was invited a couple of months ago by a black community in Harlem to give a talk at one of the churches there, a famous church with a long civil rights history. They wanted me to talk about education. And a lot of the concerns people articulated there were that the public education system is under serious attack, both by defunding and by charter schools, which are breaking up the community and undermining the basic contributions of the public education system, which are quite real in the black community.

In California, which is one of the richest places in the world, but is now under severe budgetary constraints, the major public universities, Berkeley and UCLA, the jewels in the crown, are effectively being privatized. They're not very different from Ivy League universities now. Tuitions are sky high. They have endowments. At the same time, the state college system is being downgraded, so much so that students and teachers are planning a rolling strike against the budgetary cuts.
¹⁷
California State University announced that it's just going to have to refuse to accept any students for the spring 2013 term.
¹⁸
The educational system is being degraded for the general population. But you have a private education for the rich and the privileged, and some small group that will be selected out to receive scholarships. It's a sharply two-tiered system.

One of the amazing things that's happened in recent years is the corporatization of the universities, which shows up in many ways. There's been a rapid increase in the number of administrators and layers of administration. They bring in a corporate mentality. Each new administrator has to have a sub-administrator, and that one has to have a sub–something else. Meanwhile, the role of the faculty in running the university is sharply declining. There's a useful book on this topic by Benjamin Ginsberg called
The Fall of the Faculty
.
¹⁹

All of these developments are part of the general assault on education, which we should remember is part of a much more general assault on the whole society. That's the neoliberal program, which is being protested all over the world, by the Occupy movement here, by the activists in Tahrir Square in Egypt, in different forms in different countries, but all over. It's a very harmful system, except for the very rich. Actually, there's a nice little monograph that just came out from the Economic Policy Institute—which is the main source of reliable, regular data on working America and the economy—called
Failure by Design
.
²⁰
The author, Josh Bivens, reviews the economic policies of the past forty years roughly and points out that they're a class-based failure. Of course, they're a great success for the top tenth of a percent of the population—the traders, CEOs—but they're a failure for the large majority. By design. There are plenty of alternative policies, but these others are the ones that are chosen.

We're seeing similar dynamics right now in dramatic form in Europe, where the banks and the bureaucrats have been imposing a policy of austerity under stagnation, which is almost bound to make things worse and will make it harder to pay debts. They've been pretty sharply criticized by economists, even by the business press, but they're pursuing austerity. It's difficult to give a rationale on economic grounds. In fact, I think impossible. But you can find a rationale. In fact, it was more or less stated by the president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, in an interview in the
Wall Street Journal
in which he said that the social contract in Europe is over.
²¹
In other words, we're killing the social contract.

 

You always talk about the institutional imperatives and the structural underpinning of these policies. But don't you have to keep the patient in reasonably good health and functioning? Aren't they killing the goose?

 

It depends on what time scale you have in mind. There's plenty of cheap labor around the world. You can outsource production. If you're Apple, one of the world's richest corporations, you can have workers employed by Foxconn, a Taiwanese company, in southwestern China, living and working in hideous conditions, committing suicide, and you can make a lot of profit out of that.
²²
If China turns out to be too expensive, you can go to Bangladesh and sub-Saharan Africa. You can keep that going for a long time. Yes, there's a long-term problem, but there are long-term problems in capitalist economies anyway. There's a problem with overproduction. There's a crisis of accumulation. These are long-term problems that you try to keep at bay in various ways, all while planning for short-term wealth and privilege. That's the way business works.