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Government Involvement with Science And Art
An interview with Noam Chomsky
By Noam Chomsky and Ollie Mikse
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Another thing that's surprising is that a considerable majority thinks the U.S. shouldn't take the lead in international crises. It should rely on the United Nations. In fact, the majority of the population thinks we should give up the veto in the Security Council. Take Iran. I don't know what the attitudes are now because there's been a tremendous propaganda campaign over the last two years. But two years ago, a very large majority of the population thought Iran should have the right to enrich uranium as a signer of the non-proliferation treaty, but of course not have nuclear weapons. Over time this propaganda does change attitudes, though. If the polls were taken now, they'd say that Iran is a major threat. So, propaganda works. But still there's a substantial split between public attitudes and public policies.
Same on health care. If you read the headlines, they tell you that the public is turning against Obama's health-care program, which is true. They say it's because we want to get the government off our backs. But you take a look at the polls that those headlines are based on and they show that you have people against it because it doesn't go far enough, that they gave everything away, like the public option, the Medicare buy-in, and so on.
A strong focus of the previous and current Administration is on safety of the public. As such, money is being cut from science and the National Institute of Health and shifted more towards militarization....
If I may interrupt, the safety of the public is a low priority for governments. In the Bush administration, for example, terror was quite a low priority and it's very clear. Take invading Iraq. The invasion of Iraq was undertaken with the assumption that it would increase terror and, in fact, it did, significantly. Their data showed that it went up a factor of seven the year after the invasion.
Take after 9/11. If there had been any concern for reducing terror, there was a policy that could have been pursued. The jihadi movement is a big movement and it bitterly condemned al-Qaida. It condemned the 9/11 attacks as non-Islamic. There were also sharp condemnations from universities and from radical clerics. Suppose you were interested in reducing terror, what could have been done was to exploit the fact that the jihadi movement, let alone the general population, was appalled by this. You try to isolate al-Qaida and break them off from their constituencies and supporters. Instead, the government decided to do the opposite. It decided to weld the jihadi movement back together and create massive new recruiting for al-Qaida. That's what the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq did.
Would it be more precise to say that funding has been cut from the NIH and shifted more towards militarization?
Under the Bush administration, there were significant cuts. It was a very anti-science administration. But let's take Obama, who's supposed to be progressive. You read every day about the deficit. The headlines are concerned that the debt's been misplaced. In fact, if you want to reduce the deficit, most economists will tell you—even conservative economists—the way to do it is to spend more government money. With a bigger stimulus it will get people back to working. That will increase economic growth, it will increase taxes. It's pretty much the consensus among economists and it's pretty straightforward.
Let's take a look at the deficit. Where is it coming from? Almost half of next year's deficit is coming from the military budget. Obama has submitted the biggest military budget of any president since World War II. And it's close to half the deficit. Are they talking about reducing the military budget? No. What they're talking about is reducing Social Security, services for the population. If you're an executive in the business roundtable, or business lobbies, it's just what you want. Their power is extraordinary.
One of the issues that was discussed in the movie The Corporationis that the genetic code is slowly being owned by corporations as they copyright different genes for their profit. What do you think the ethical merits are of this and is the idea of life at risk of being property?
Sure, and it's not just there. One of the main issues of the World Trade Organization was called "trade and services." What are services? "Services" are usually anything a person cares about, like education, health, environment. So what are trade and services? Well, to the WTO, et al., They mean that anything people care about is put into the hands of unaccountable private tyrannies. That's a tremendous attack on democracy. It means you can have formal democratic institutions, but there's nothing for them to do because everything is in the in the hands of private tyrannies—corporations.
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