April 2011 - Centre for Civil Society - University of KwaZulu-Natal

were going to be in. And so, people were sending in their comments and
questions. We asked, on Facebook and Twitter, to send us questions. Here
is one of the questions.
RYAN ADSERIAS: Hello, Professor Chomsky. My name is Ryan Adserias, and
I’m a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and also the
child of a long line of working-class union folks. I don’t know if you’ve been
noticing, but we’ve been holding a lot of protests and rallies here in our
capital to protest Governor Scott Walker’s attempt to break collective
bargaining rights that Wisconsin workers worked hard for over 50 years ago
and have enjoyed ever since. We closed all the schools around here for
tomorrow—today and tomorrow, actually. The teaching assistants here at
the university are staging teach-outs. The undergraduates are walking out
of class to show solidarity. And all of this is because our governor and
governors all around the country are proposing legislation that’s going to
end collective bargaining and really break the unions. I’ve also been
noticing that there’s not a whole lot of national representation of our
struggle and our movement, and it’s really been troubling me. So my
question to you is, how exactly is it that we can get the attention of our
national Democratic and progressive leaders to speak out against these
measures and to help end union busting here in the United States?
AMY GOODMAN: That was a question from Ryan Adserias in Madison,
Wisconsin, where more than 10,000—some say tens of thousands of people,
teachers, students, are protesting in the Capitol building, schools closed, as
Ryan said. So, from Manama to Madison, from Manama, Bahrain, to Madison,
Wisconsin, Noam Chomsky?
NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s very interesting. The reason why you can’t get
Democratic leaders to join is because they agree. They are also trying to
destroy the unions. In fact, if you take a look at—take, say, the lame-duck
session. The great achievement in the lame-duck session for which Obama is
greatly praised by Democratic Party leaders is that they achieved bipartisan
agreement on several measures. The most important one was the tax cut.
And the issue in the tax cut—there was only one issue—should there be a tax
cut for the very rich? The population was overwhelmingly against it, I think
about two to one. There wasn’t even a discussion of it, they just gave it
away. And the very same time, the less noticed was that Obama declared a
tax increase for federal workers. Now, it wasn’t called a "tax increase"; it’s
called a "freeze." But if you think for 30 seconds, a freeze on pay for a
federal workers is fiscally identical to a tax increase for federal workers.
And when you extend it for five years, as he said later, that means a
decrease, because of population growth, inflation and so on. So he basically
declared an increase in taxes for federal workers at the same time that
there’s a tax decrease for the very rich.
And there’s been a wave of propaganda over the last couple of months,
which is pretty impressive to watch, trying to deflect attention away from
those who actually created the economic crisis, like Goldman Sachs,
Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, their associates in the government who—Federal
Reserve and others—let all this go on and helped it. There’s a—to switch
attention away from them to the people really responsible for the crisis—
teachers, police, firefighters, sanitation workers, their huge pensions, their
incredible healthcare benefits, Cadillac healthcare benefits, and their
unions, who are the real villains, the ones who are robbing the taxpayer by
making sure that policemen may not starve when they retire. And this is
pretty amazing, like right in the middle of the Madison affair, which is
critical.
The CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, got a $12.5 million bonus, and