YOU SAY YOU WANT A DEVOLUTION
Chomsky, Noam
You Say You Want a Devolution BY NOAM CHOMSKY Imagine yourself in the office of a public-relations firm trying to turn people into ideal, manipulatable atoms of consumption who are going to...
...But that's not what people worry about...
...But you can't vote to decide what GE ought to do, and you can't participate in those decisions...
...It's not those pointy-headed bureaucrats in insurance offices who are making us fill out these forms and telling us what to do, and we've got to pay for their lunches and their advertising while they propagandize us...
...They'll be out selling rags...
...Their attitudes are extremely vicious...
...Unless that range of decisions is under democratic control, you have one or another form of tyranny...
...But the long and very successful effort over many, many years to get people to focus their fears and angers and hatreds ol the government has had its effect...
...General Electric is not influenceable by the population except very indirectly through regulatory mechanisms, which are very weak and which they mostly control anyhow...
...There's only one way of defending rights that have been attained, or of extending their scope in the face of these private powers, and that's to maintain the one form of illegitimate power that happens to be somewhat responsible to the public and which the public can indeed influence...
...Take, say, health care...
...How else are Newt Gingrich's rich constituents going to stay rich...
...Pure sadism...
...Devolution under these circumstances is a great way to increase tyranny and to decrease the threat of democracy as well as to shift resources even more dramatically toward the rich and away from the poor...
...Some disabled veteran didn't want to move into a well-known drug den...
...OK, out in the street...
...They come out of the same intellectual roots, in the early Twentieth Century...
...That means total dismantling of all the totalitarian systems...
...What kind of federal structure should there be...
...That is as old as the hills and as American as apple pie...
...What's that got to do with anything...
...Suppose you're trying to do that...
...They saw it as life...
...And in this world there happen to be huge concentrations of private power that are as close to tyranny and as close to totalitarian as anything humans have devised...
...That's worth a lot of thought...
...It's straight out of the mainstream American tradition...
...That's not what people's anger is focused on...
...Box 551, Boulder, Colorado 80306, or call 1-800-444-1977...
...Even middle-sized businesses have all kinds of ways of pressuring states to make sure that this money ends up in their pockets and not in the pockets of hungry children...
...But it's overwhelmingly significant...
...What's discussed are complete irrelevancies, like whether we can trust the governors to care for the poor...
...On the other hand, right now, I'd like to strengthen the federal government...
...They thought that the Civil War was fought to end slavery, not to institute it...
...Devolution could be a step toward democracy, but not when you've got private tyrannies around...
...So let's hate them and let's kick them in the face...
...But that kind of absurdity is what's discussed, not the obviThis article was excerpted from a two-hour interview with David Barsamian...
...In fact, this manipulation is almost off the agenda, unless you read the business press...
...And he's trying to build public support for it by building up fear and hatred...
...It is under the influence of private powers...
...They are quite willing to try to engender fear and hatred against immigrants and poor people...
...But we're a long way from that...
...The reason is, we live in this world, not some other world...
...They were strongly opposed to what they called "the new spirit of the age: gain wealth, forgetting all but self...
...The security system is expanding, not only the Pentagon, but even the internal security system—jails, etc...
...In fact, the criminal security system is beginning to take on this character...
...Which means that person's child gets deported...
...What happens in the country...
...So American citizens have to be deported, according to the governor, if he doesn't like their parents being here...
...Take women...
...But unless you sense it, identify it, understand it, you cannot proceed to the next step, which is: How can we change the system...
...I would propose a system that is democratic, and you don't have democracy unless people are in control of the major decisions...
...At this point you're beginning to think about how a free and democratic society might look and operate...
...And that's the liberal side...
...This aggression runs across the spectrum...
...DENNIS NEChvstal So just like other forms of totalitarianism have to go, private tyrannies have to go...
...What are working conditions like...
...That's true of every system of oppression...
...All of these things are perfectly common perceptions, perfectly correct...
...People hate the government, fear the government, are worried about the bureaucrats...
...And it's part of the same anti-politics: to weaken the federal government...
...Take the governor of Massachusetts, William Weld, who's supposed to be a moderate, nice-guy type...
...The Pentagon's budget stays the same...
...They want to go for the jugular...
...They think they do...
...How is it distributed...
...What's going on now with the attempt at devolution—the effort to reduce decision-making to the state level—makes great sense if you believe in tyranny...
...Should it be workers' councils, or community organizations, or some integration of them...
...That's one day...
...You don't have to go to Marxism or anything else...
...It's not the Gingrich shock troops...
...We all know there's plenty to be upset about...
...We don't want to let them do that...
...who came off the farms and were working in the factories...
...150 years ago...
...But then to deal with W by giving private, unaccountable interests even more power is just beyond absurdity...
...That's real fascism...
...So it's not that the government is getting weaker...
...But not all of the federal government is being weakened...
...They didn't want to be slaves...
...They're never going to get together to challenge anything, and they won't have a thought in their heads except doing what they're told...
...politics, foreign policy, and the media...
...They wanted to retain the high culture they already had...
...And the major decisions, as has long been understood, are fundamentally investment decisions: What do you do with the money...
...Anybody who doesn't meet their standards, they want to kill, not just oppose, but destroy...
...the solidarity, the sympathy, the control...
...When you've got private tyrannies around, the only institution that at least in part reflects public involvement, that can cope with them, is the federal government...
...What it's focused on, after a very conscious manipulation and a perfectly rational design, is this dangerous federal bureaucracy...
...It's totally meaningless...
...This is not a joke...
...That's the liberal, moderate, educated side...
...They wouldn't know what it means to exist in a market...
...If slaves don't recognize that slavery is oppression, it doesn't make much sense to ask them why they don't live in a free society...
...The corporations are just as totalitarian as Bolshevism and fascism...
...There's a lot of concern that the government bureaucrats will be controlling it, yet there are many more bureaucrats in insurance offices who are already in control...
...That's not just for control, although it's partly for thai...
...It ought to be a front-page article every day...
...By now the sham is so obvious it's hard to miss...
...The fact that you don't see it as oppression doesn't mean that you don't know it at some level...
...Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at MIT, is the author of many books on U.S...
...The first thing you've got to do is to recognize the forms of oppression that exist...
...What's produced...
...The child could well be an American citizen...
...It's reached, if not the scale of the Pentagon, a sufficient scale so that the big investment firms and even the high-tech industry, the defense industry, are getting intrigued by the prospects of feeding off another public cash cow...
...Then you look at the modalities of public control...
...You don't want people to see that...
...Weld is not a fool...
...They are very happy to do that...
...It's just being changed...
...That's the obvious consequence of the current devolution...
...For information about obtaining cassette copies or transcripts, write to David Barsamian, P.O...
...You Say You Want a Devolution BY NOAM CHOMSKY Imagine yourself in the office of a public-relations firm trying to turn people into ideal, manipulatable atoms of consumption who are going to devote their energies to buying things they don't want because you tell them they want those things...
...But I've never seen it discussed in the mainstream...
...A Utopia...
...Very self-conscious...
...That's what has happened in America...
...in fact, it's even going up...
...It's a real achievement of doctrinal managers to have been able to carry this off...
...What you do is get them to hate and fear the government, fear the bigness of the government, but not look at the Fortune 500, nor even medium-sized businesses, not ask how they work...
...Just last week every day in the newspapers there was another headline about forcing people out of homeless shelters if he didn't like the way they lived...
...The next day he says state social services have to report to the INS if they think somebody may be an illegal immigrant...
...You can see it all over...
...This is day after day...
...Where does it go...
...Barsamian has a forthcoming book of Chomsky interviews, including this one, called "Class Warfare" (Common Courage...
...In the long term, I think the centralized political power ought to be eliminated and dissolved and turned down ultimately to the local level, finally, with federalism and associations and so on...
...The way in which you know it can take very harmful forms for yourself and everyone else...
...I think you can figure out how to change the system by reading the newspapers that were produced by twenty-year-old young women in Lowell, Massachusetts...
...So you develop a mood of anti-politics...
...The Russians are gone...
...What they know is, the government puts money in their pockets, and the main way it does so is through the whole Pentagon system...
...How is it produced...
...There's a real sadism...
...The primary thing to be upset abort is that the government is not under popular influence...
...And they have to be put under public control...
...Then that person gets deported...
...The new Republicans represent a kind of proto-fascism...
...They knew how to change the system...
...Let's say you send block grants down to the states...
...He thinks she should work, not take care of her child...
...That's the major fact...
...Overwhelmingly, and for a long time, they may have sensed oppression, but they didn't see it as oppression...
...It's also a way of transferring resources to the rich, which is virtually never discussed...
...You obviously can't subject them to market discipline...
...You can turn them into ways in which a much more free society can function...
...The idea is, there are these teenage kids who are black by implication (although you don't say that in a liberal state) who are just ripping us off by having lots and lots of babies...
...ous, overwhelming fact that distributing governmental resources to the lower levels will simply make them more susceptible to the influence and control of private power...
...So you end up supporting centralized state power even though you oppose it...
...He doesn't like that...
...You want them to worry about the one thing they might get involved in and that might protect them from the depredations of private power...
...Some mother took a day off to take care of a mentally retarded child...
...It's there for the same reason it always was...
...Where is it sold...
...OK, out of the homeless shelter...
Vol. 60 • March 1996 • No. 3
