Reference:
From an interview by David Barsamian with Noam Chomsky 3 salient question/answer pairs:
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DB: [...] There is a recent poll which showed that 71 percent of Americans feel that corporations have too much influence in the political system.
NC: If you look at those polls, some of them are outlandish. 95 percent of people think that "Corporations should sometimes sacrifice some profit for workers and the community." That was the way the question was asked. That shows overwhelming feeling. You never get numbers like that in polls unless something is seriously wrong. On the other hand, notice that that's still a call for welfare capitalism. It falls way short of what working people were asking for, say, 150 years ago right here in Boston.
I wrote up some of this stuff in Z [Magazine] a couple of months ago. At that time, the question wasn't being more benevolent, "give us a little bit of your profits." It was, "You have no right to rule. We should own the factories." A benevolent autocrat is always going to try to make it appear as if autocracy is necessary. The only choice is, will I be a harsh autocrat or will I be a benevolent autocrat? The propaganda system obviously wants to have the same attitude with regard to the contemporary autoc rats.
So business can be a little nicer and maybe you don't have quite as much corporate welfare but you have more welfare capitalism and the autocratic structure must remain. That, you're not allowed to challenge. That's distinct from the past where of course it was challenged, and rightly.
DB: Voter turnout in the 1996 election was 49 percent, the lowest since 1924.
NC: It's actually the lowest ever -- 1924 is misleading because it was the first year in which women were allowed to vote. So a smaller percentage of the electorate voted because it was the first time around. But if you take a realistic picture, this is t he lowest percentage ever.
[...]
DB: There is a campaign to undermine public confidence in Social Security.
NC: Most of the talk about Social Security is pretty fraudulent. Take the question about privatizing it. That's a non-issue. If people believe that it would be better for Social Security to be invested in the stock market rather than in, say, Treasury bon ds, that can be done whether it's public or private.
I think the main goal is really to privatize it, that is, to make people in charge of their individual assets and not to have the solidarity that comes from doing something together. It's extremely important [for elites] to break down the sense that I hav e any responsibility for the next person. The ideal [for elites] is a society based on a social unit which consists of you and your television set and nothing to do with any other people. If a person next door has invested her assets badly and is now star ving in her old age, well, it isn't my responsibility.
Social Security was something that brought people together. They said, We're going to have a common responsibility to ensure that all of us have a minimal standard of living. That's dangerous [for elites], because it implied that people can work together. If you can work together, for example, you can replace corporate tyranny by worker control. You can get involved in the democratic process and make your own decisions. Much better [for elites] to create a mentality in which each person behaves individual ly. The powerful will win. The poor will get smashed. There won't be any solidarity or communication or mutual support or information sharing or any of these things that might lead to democracy and justice. I think that's what lies behind the Social Secur ity propaganda.
The other issues are technical and of whatever significance they are, but probably not much. So [for example, on the issue of future solvency], a *slightly* more progressive taxation could keep Social Security functioning the way it is functioning for the indefinite future.
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