Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Challenge Ahead
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
356
which have been replayed over and over since President Andrew
Jackson “became the first U.S. President to send troops to break a
strike, while all levels of government largely declined to interfere with
employers ‘rights’ to dismiss, spy upon, or blacklist any worker they
chose . . . American history is replete with examples of business groups
and individual firms retaining vast arrays of military and paramilitary
forces for long periods of time.” 17 The significant point, Ferguson
continues, is that
In industrial societies perhaps the single most important and
obvious dimension to examine [in respect to the interests served
by public policy] is state policy toward the “secondary”
organizations of the citizenry. By far the most important of such
organizations, of course, are labor unions. Though most
discussions of American “democracy” elide the often ugly facts,
the truth is that if employers are allowed untrammelled rights to
destroy organizations created by their laborers then claims about
‘‘citizen sovereignty’’ are merely cynical rationalizations for elite
investor dominance whether in Poland in the 1980s,
Massachusetts in the 1850s, Pennsylvania before the New Deal,
or much of the South and West today.
One expression of the current phase of the attack on democracy is a
form of Newspeak devised for the 1980 and 1984 elections: the use of
the term “special interests” with reference to working people, women,
the aged, the handicapped, ethnic groups, etc.; in short, the population
at large. Only one group does not achieve the rank of “special interests”:
the corporate elite. The Democrats are the party of the “special
interests,” the Reaganites charged, while the Republicans had no such