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

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, world-renowned political dissident. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest for the hour is Noam Chomsky. He has authored
over a hundred books; his latest, Hopes and Prospects, among others.
Professor Chomsky, I want to ask you about former President Ronald
Reagan. A very big deal is made of him now on the hundredth anniversary of
his birth. Last year President Obama signed legislation establishing a
commission to mark the centennial.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: President Reagan helped, as much as any
president, to restore a sense of optimism in our country, a spirit that
transcended politics, that transcended even the most heated arguments of
the day.
AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, your response?
NOAM CHOMSKY: This deification of Reagan is extremely interesting and a
very—it’s scandalous, but it tells a lot about the country. I mean, when
Reagan left office, he was the most unpopular living president, apart from
Nixon, even below Carter. If you look at his years in office, he was not
particularly popular. He was more or less average. He severely harmed the
American economy. When he came into office, the United States was the
world’s leading creditor. By the time he left, it was the world’s leading
debtor. He was fiscally totally irresponsible—wild spending, no fiscal
responsibility. Government actually grew during the Reagan years.
He was also a passionate opponent of the free market. I mean, the way he’s
being presented is astonishing. He was the most protectionist president in
post-war American history. He essentially virtually doubled protective
barriers to try to preserve incompetent U.S. management, which was being
driven out by superior Japanese production.
During his years, we had the first major fiscal crises. During the ’50s, ’60s
and ’70s, the New Deal regulations were still in effect, and that prevented
financial crises. The financialization of the economy began to take off in
the ’70s, but with the deregulation, of course you start getting crises.
Reagan left office with the biggest financial crisis since the Depression: the
home savings and loan.
I won’t even talk about his international behavior. I mean, it was just
abominable. I mean, if we gained our optimism by killing hundreds of
thousands of people in Central America and destroying any hope for
democracy and freedom and supporting South Africa while it killed about a
million-and-a-half people in neighboring countries, and on and on, if that’s
the way we get back our optimism, we’re in bad trouble.
Well, what happened after Reagan left office is that there was the
beginnings of an effort to carry out a kind of—this Reagan legacy, you know,
to try to create from this really quite miserable creature some kind of
deity. And amazingly, it succeeded. I mean, Kim Il-sung would have been
impressed. The events that took place when Reagan died, you know, the
Reagan legacy, this Obama business, you don’t get that in free societies. It
would be ridiculed. What you get it is in totalitarian states. And I’m waiting
to see what comes next. This morning, North Korea announced that on the