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

his base pay was more than tripled. Well, that means he—the rules of
corporate governments have been modified in the last 30 years by the U.S.
government to allow the chief executive officer to pretty much set their
own salaries. There’s various ways in which this has been done, but it’s
government policy. And one of the effects of it is—people talk about
inequality, but what’s a little less recognized is that although there is
extreme inequality, it’s mostly because of the top tiny fraction of the
population, so like a fraction of one percent of the population, their wealth
has just shot through the stratosphere. You go down to the—you know, the
next 10 percent are doing pretty well, but it’s not off the spectrum. And
this is by design.
AMY GOODMAN: The New York Times coverage of Madison?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, that was very interesting. In fact, I urge people to
take a look at the February 12th issue of the New York Times, the big frontpage
headline, you know, banner headline, "Mubarak Leaves," its kind of
subheadings say, "Army Takes Over." They’re about 60 years late on that; it
took over in 1952, but—and it has held power ever since.
But then if you go to an inside page—I don’t know what page it is—there’s
an article on the Governor of Wisconsin. And he’s pretty clear about what
he wants to do. I mean, certainly he is aware of and senses this attack on
public workers, on unions and so on, and he wants to be upfront, so he
announced a sharp attack on public service workers and unions, as the
questioner said, to ban collective bargaining, take away their pensions. And
he also said that he’d call out the National Guard if there was any
disruption about this. Now, that’s happening now to Wisconsin. In Egypt,
public protests have driven out the president. There’s a lot of problems
about what will happen next, but an overwhelming reaction there.
And I was—it was heartening to see that there are tens of thousands of
people protesting in Madison day after day, in fact. I mean, that’s the
beginning, maybe, of what we really need here: a democracy uprising.
Democracy has almost been eviscerated. Take a look at the front-page
headlines today, this morning, Financial Times at least. They predict—the
big headline, the big story—that the next election is going to break all
campaign spending records, and they predict $2 billion of campaign
spending. Well, you know, a couple of weeks ago, the Obama administration
selected somebody to be in charge of what they call "jobs." "Jobs" is a funny
word in the English language. It’s the way of pronouncing an
unpronounceable word. I’ll spell it: P-R-O-F-I-T-S. You’re not allowed to say
that word, so the way you pronounce that is "jobs." The person he selected
to be in charge of creating jobs is Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General
Electric, which has more than half their workforce overseas. And, you know,
I’m sure he’s deeply interested in jobs in the United States. But what he has
is deep pockets, and also, not just him, but connections to the tiny sector
of the ultra-rich corporate elite, which is going to provide that billion or
billion-and-a-half dollars for the campaign. Well, that’s what’s going on.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I’d like to ask you about this whole issue of the
assault on unions. Clearly, it has arisen in the last few months in a
coordinated way. Here in New York State, all the major business people
have gotten together, raised $10 million to begin an ad campaign, and
they’re being supported by both the Democratic new governor, Andrew
Cuomo, and as well as the Republican-Independent Mayor Bloomberg. But
they seem to be going after the public sector unions after having essentially
destroyed most of the private sector union movement in the United States.
They realize that the public sector unions are still the only vibrant section
of the American labor movement, so now they’re really going after them in