The Common Good

8/8/2018 The Common Good
The Common Good
Noam Chomsky
Talk given in February 2013, published at Truthout: Part I, Part II
Whether public education contributes to the Common Good depends, of course, on what kind of
education it is, to whom it is available, and what we take to be the Common Good. There’s no need
to tarry on the fact that these are highly contested matters, have been throughout history, and
continue to be so today.
One of the great achievements of American democracy has been the introduction of mass public
education, from children to advanced research universities. And in some respects that leadership
position has been maintained. Unfortunately, not all. Public education is under serious attack, one
component of the attack on any rational and humane concept of the Common Good, sometimes in
ways that are not only shocking, but also spell disaster for the species.
All of this falls within the general assault on the population in the past generation, the so-called
“neoliberal era.” I’ll return to these matters, of great significance and import.
Sometimes the attacks on education and on the Common Good are very closely linked. One current
illustration is the “Environmental Literacy Improvement Act” that is being proposed to legislatures
by ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-funded lobby that designs
legislation to serve the needs of the corporate sector and extreme wealth. This act mandates
“balanced teaching of climate science in K-12 classrooms.”
“Balanced teaching” is a code phrase that refers to teaching climate change denial, to “balance”
authentic climate science – what you read in science journals. It is analogous to the “balanced
teaching” advocated by creationists to enable the teaching of “creation science” in public schools.
Legislation based on ALEC models has already been introduced in several states.
The ALEC legislation is based on a project of the Heartland Institute, a corporate-funded Institute
dedicated to rejection of the scientific consensus on the climate. The Institute project calls for a
“Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 Classrooms,” which aims to teach that there is “a major
controversy over whether or not humans are changing the weather.” Of course, all of this is dressed
up in rhetoric about teaching critical thinking, and so on. It is much like the current assault on
teaching children about evolution and science quite generally.
https://chomsky.info/the-common-good/ 1/13
There is indeed a controversy: on one side, the overwhelming majority of scientists, all of the
world’s major National Academies of Science, the professional science journals, the IPCC
(Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change): all agree that global warming is taking place, that
there is a substantial human component, and that the situation is serious and perhaps dire, and
that very soon, maybe within decades, the world might reach a tipping point where the process will
escalate sharply and will be irreversible, with very severe effects on the possibility of decent
human survival.
It is rare to find such consensus on complex scientific issues.
True, it is not unanimous. Media reports commonly present a controversy between the
overwhelming scientific consensus on one side, and skeptics on the other, including some quite
respected scientists who caution that much is unknown – which means that things might not be as
bad as thought or they might be worse: only the first alternative is brought up. Omitted from the
contrived debate is a much larger group of skeptics: highly regarded climate scientists who regard
the regular reports of the IPCC as much too conservative: the Climate Change group at my own
university, MIT, for example. And they have repeatedly been proven correct, unfortunately. But
they are scarcely part of the public debate, though very prominent in the scientific literature.
The Heartland Institute and ALEC are part of a huge campaign by corporate lobbies to try to sow
doubt about the near-unanimous consensus of scientists that human activities are having a major
impact on global warming with truly ominous implications. The campaign was openly announced,
including the lobbying organizations of the fossil fuel industry, the American Chamber of Commerce
(the main business lobby) and others. It has had an effect on public opinion, though careful studies
show that public opinion remains much closer to the scientific consensus than policy is. That is
undoubtedly why major sectors of the corporate world are launching their attack on the
educational system, to try to counter the dangerous tendency of the public to pay attention to the
conclusions of scientific research.
You probably heard that at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting recently, Gov.
Bobby Jindal warned the leadership that “We must stop being the stupid party…We must stop
insulting the intelligence of voters.” ALEC and its corporate backers, in contrast, want the country
to be “the stupid nation” – which may encourage them to join the stupid party that Jindal warned
about.
The major science journals give a sense of how surreal all of this is. Take Science, the major US
scientific weekly. A few weeks ago it had three news items side by side. One reported that 2012
was the hottest year on record in the US, continuing a long trend. The second reported a new study
by the US Global Climate Change Research Program providing additional evidence for rapid climate
change as the result of human activities, and discussing likely severe impacts. The third reported
the new appointments to chair the committees on science policy chosen by the House of
Representatives, where a minority of voters elected a large majority of Republicans thanks to the
shredding of the political system.
In Pennsylvania, for example, a considerably majority voted for Democrats but they won just over
one-third of House seats. All three of the new chairs deny that humans contribute to climate
change, two deny that it is even taken place, one is a longtime advocate for the fossil fuel industry.
The same issue of the journal has a technical article with new evidence that the irreversible
tipping point may be ominously close.
For those whom Adam Smith called the “Masters of Mankind,” it is important that we must become
the stupid nation in the interests of their short-term gain, damn the consequences. These are
essential properties of contemporary market fundamentalist doctrines. ALEC and its corporate
sponsors understand the importance of ensuring that public education train children to belong to
the stupid nation, and not be misled by science and rationality.
This is far from the only case of sharp divergence between public opinion and public policy. That
tells us a lot about the current state of American democracy, and what that means for us and the
world. The corporate assault on education and independent thought, of which this is only one
striking illustration, tells us a good deal more.
In climate policy, the US lags behind other countries. Quotes a current scientific review: “109
countries have enacted some form of policy regarding renewable power, and 118 countries have set
targets for renewable energy. In contrast, the United States has not adopted any consistent and
stable set of policies at the national level to foster the use of renewable energy” or adopted other
means that are being pursued by countries that do have national policies. Some things are being
done in the US, but sporadically, and with no organized national commitment. That’s no slight
problem for us, and for the world, in the light of the great predominance of American power –
declining to be sure as power is diversified internationally, but still unchallenged.
There are other respects in which the concept of Common Good that has come to dominate policy –
but not opinion — in the US is diverging from the affluent developed societies of the OECD, and
many others. A recent OECD study shows that the US ranks 27th out of 31 countries in measures of
social justice, barely above Mexico. It ranks 21st in inequality, poverty, life expectancy, infant
mortality, maternity leave, environmental performance, 18th in mental health and 19th in welfare
of children. Also ranks toward the bottom in high-school dropout rates and poor student
performance in math.
Figures like these are signs of very severe systemic disorders; particularly striking because the US is
the richest country in the world, with incomparable advantages.
Another crucial case is healthcare. US costs are about twice the per capita costs of comparable
countries, and outcomes are relatively poor. Studied by economist Dean Baker reveal that the
deficit that obsesses the financial sector and Washington, but not the more realistic public, would
be eliminated if we had healthcare systems similar to other developed societies, hardly a utopian
idea. The US healthcare system deviates from others in that it is largely privatized and lightly
regulated, and – not surprisingly – is highly inefficient and costly. There is an exception in the US
healthcare system: the Veterans Administration, a government system, much less costly.
Another partial exception is Medicare, a government-run system, hence with far lower
administrative costs and other waste, but still more costly than it should be because it has to work
through the privatized system and is trapped by the extraordinary political power of the
pharmaceutical industry, which prevents the government from negotiating drug prices so that they
are far higher than in other countries.
Current policy ideas include proposals to increase age eligibility to cut costs: actually it increases
costs (along with penalizing mostly working people) by shifting from a relatively efficient system to
a highly inefficient privatized one. But the costs are transferred to individuals and away from
collective action through taxes. And the concept of the Common Good that is being relentlessly
driven into our heads demands that we focus on our own private gain, and suppress normal human
emotions of solidarity, mutual support and concern for others. That I think is also an important part
of what lies behind the assault on public education and on Social Security that has been waged by
sectors of corporate wealth for years, on pretexts of cost that cannot be sustained, and against
strong public opposition.
What lies behind these campaigns, I suspect, is that public education and Social Security, like
national healthcare, are based on the conception that we care for other people: we care that the
disabled widow across town has food to eat, or that the kids down the street have schooling (“why
should I pay taxes for schools? I don’t have kids there”). And beyond that, that we care about the
tens of millions are dying every year because they cannot obtain medical care, or about dying
infants, and others who are vulnerable.
These conflicts go far back in American history. It’s particularly useful to look back to the origins of
the industrial revolution, in the mid-19th century, when the country was undergoing enormous
social changes as the population was being driven into the industrial system, which working people
bitterly condemned, because it deprived them of their basic rights as free men and women – not
the least women, the so-called factory girls, who were leaving the farms to the mills.
It is worth reading the contributions in the press of the time by factory girls, artisans from Boston,
and others. It’s also important to note that working-class culture of the time was alive and
flourishing. There’s a great book about the topic by Jonathan Rose, called The Intellectual Life of
the British Working Class. It’s a monumental study of the reading habits of the working class of the
day. He contrasts “the passionate pursuit of knowledge by proletarian autodidacts” with the
“pervasive philistinism of the British aristocracy.”
Pretty much the same was true in the new working-class towns here, like eastern Massachusetts,
where an Irish blacksmith might hire a young boy to read the classics to him while he was working.
On the farms, the factory girls were reading the best contemporary literature of the day, what we
study as classics. They condemned the industrial system for depriving them of their freedom and
culture.
This went on for a long time. I am old enough to remember the atmosphere of the 1930s. A large
part of my family came from the unemployed working-class. Many had barely gone to school. But
they participated in the high culture of the day. They would discuss the latest Shakespeare plays,
concerts of the Budapest String Quartet, different varieties of psychoanalysis and every conceivable
political movement. There was also a very lively workers’ education system with which leading
scientists and mathematicians were directly involved. A lot of this has been lost under the
relentless assault of the Masters, but it can be recovered and it is not lost forever.
The labor press of the early industrial revolution took strong positions on many issues that should
have a resonance today. They took for granted that, as they put it, those who work in the mills
should own them. They condemned wage labor, which to them was akin to slavery, the only
difference being that it was supposedly temporary.
This was such a popular view that it was even part of the program of the Republican Party. It was
also a main theme of the huge organized labor movement that was taking shape, the Knights of
Labor, which began to establish links with the most important popular democratic party in the
country’s history, the Farmers Alliance, later called the Populist movement, which originated with
radical farmers in Texas and then spread through much of the country, forming collective
enterprises, banks and marketing cooperatives and much more, movements that could have driven
the country toward more authentic democracy if they had not been destroyed, largely by violence –
though, interestingly, similar developments are underway today in the old Rust Belt and elsewhere,
very important for the future, I think.
The prime target of condemnation in the labor press was what they called “The New Spirit of the
Age: Gain Wealth, Forgetting All But Self.” No efforts have been spared since then to drive this
spirit into people’s heads. People must come to believe that suffering and deprivation result from
the failure of individuals, not the reigning socioeconomic system. There are huge industries
devoted to this task. About one-sixth of the entire US economy is devoted to what’s called
“marketing,” which is mostly propaganda. Advertising is described by analysts and the business
literature as a process of fabricating wants – a campaign to drive people to the superficial things in
life, like fashionable consumption, so that they will remain passive and obedient.
The schools are also a target. As I mentioned, public mass education was a major achievement, in
which the US was a pioneer. But it had complex characteristics, rooted in the sharp class conflicts
of the day. One goal was to induce farmers to give up their independence and submit themselves to
industrial discipline and accept what they regarded as wage slavery. That did not pass without
notice. Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that political leaders of his day were calling for popular
education. He concluded that their motivation was fear. The country was filling up with millions of
voters and the Masters realized that one had to therefore “educate them, to keep them from (our)
throats.”
In other words: educate them the “right way” — to be obediently passive and accept their fate as
right and just, conforming to the New Spirit of the Age. Keep their perspectives narrow, their
understanding limited, discourage free and independent thought, instill docility and obedience to
keep them from the Masters’ throats.
This common theme from 150 years ago is inhuman and savage. It also meets with resistance. And
there have been victories. There were many in the struggles of the 1930s, carried further in the
1960s. But systems of power never walk away politely. They prepare a new assault. This has in fact
been happening since the early 1970s, based on major changes in the design of the economic
system.
Two crucial changes were financialization, with a huge explosion of speculative financial flows, and
deindustrialization. Production didn’t cease. It just began to be offshored anywhere where you
could get terrible working conditions and no environmental constraints, with huge profits for the
Masters. Within the US, that set off a vicious cycle, leading to sharp concentration of wealth, which
translates at once to concentration of political power, increasingly in the financial sector. That in
turn leads to legislation that carries the vicious cycle forward, including sharp tax reduction for the
rich and deregulation, with repeated financial crises from the ‘80s, each worse than the last. The
current one is so far the worst of all. And others are likely in what a director of the Bank of England
calls a “doom loop.”
There are solutions, but they do not fit the needs of the Masters, for whom the crises are no
problem. They are bailed out by the Nanny State. Today corporate profits are breaking new records
and the financial managers who created the current crisis are enjoying huge bonuses. Meanwhile,
for the large majority, wages and income have practically stagnated in the last 30-odd years. By
today, it has reached the point that 400 individuals have more wealth than the bottom 180 million
Americans.
In parallel, the cost of elections has skyrocketed, driving both parties even deeper into the pockets
of those with the money, corporations and the super-rich. Political representatives become even
more beholden to those who paid for their victories. One consequence is that by now, the poorest
70% have literally no influence over policy. As you move up the income/wealth ladder influence
increases, and at the very top, a tiny percent, the Masters get what they want.
Whether public education contributes to the Common Good depends, of course, on what kind of
education it is, to whom it is available, and what we take to be the Common Good. There’s no need
to tarry on the fact that these are highly contested matters, have been throughout history, and
continue to be so today.
One of the great achievements of American democracy has been the introduction of mass public
education, from children to advanced research universities. And in some respects that leadership
position has been maintained. Unfortunately, not all. Public education is under serious attack, one
component of the attack on any rational and humane concept of the Common Good, sometimes in
ways that are not only shocking, but also spell disaster for the species.
All of this falls within the general assault on the population in the past generation, the so-called
“neoliberal era.” I’ll return to these matters, of great significance and import.
Sometimes the attacks on education and on the Common Good are very closely linked. One current
illustration is the “Environmental Literacy Improvement Act” that is being proposed to legislatures
by ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-funded lobby that designs
legislation to serve the needs of the corporate sector and extreme wealth. This act mandates
“balanced teaching of climate science in K-12 classrooms.”
“Balanced teaching” is a code phrase that refers to teaching climate change denial, to “balance”
authentic climate science – what you read in science journals. It is analogous to the “balanced
teaching” advocated by creationists to enable the teaching of “creation science” in public schools.
Legislation based on ALEC models has already been introduced in several states.
The ALEC legislation is based on a project of the Heartland Institute, a corporate-funded Institute
dedicated to rejection of the scientific consensus on the climate. The Institute project calls for a
“Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 Classrooms,” which aims to teach that there is “a major
controversy over whether or not humans are changing the weather.” Of course, all of this is dressed
up in rhetoric about teaching critical thinking, and so on. It is much like the current assault on
teaching children about evolution and science quite generally.
There is indeed a controversy: on one side, the overwhelming majority of scientists, all of the
world’s major National Academies of Science, the professional science journals, the IPCC
(Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change): all agree that global warming is taking place, that
there is a substantial human component, and that the situation is serious and perhaps dire, and
that very soon, maybe within decades, the world might reach a tipping point where the process will
escalate sharply and will be irreversible, with very severe effects on the possibility of decent
human survival.
It is rare to find such consensus on complex scientific issues.
True, it is not unanimous. Media reports commonly present a controversy between the
overwhelming scientific consensus on one side, and skeptics on the other, including some quite
respected scientists who caution that much is unknown – which means that things might not be as
bad as thought or they might be worse: only the first alternative is brought up. Omitted from the
contrived debate is a much larger group of skeptics: highly regarded climate scientists who regard
the regular reports of the IPCC as much too conservative: the Climate Change group at my own
university, MIT, for example. And they have repeatedly been proven correct, unfortunately. But
they are scarcely part of the public debate, though very prominent in the scientific literature.
The Heartland Institute and ALEC are part of a huge campaign by corporate lobbies to try to sow
doubt about the near-unanimous consensus of scientists that human activities are having a major
impact on global warming with truly ominous implications. The campaign was openly announced,
including the lobbying organizations of the fossil fuel industry, the American Chamber of Commerce
(the main business lobby) and others. It has had an effect on public opinion, though careful studies
show that public opinion remains much closer to the scientific consensus than policy is. That is
undoubtedly why major sectors of the corporate world are launching their attack on the
educational system, to try to counter the dangerous tendency of the public to pay attention to the
conclusions of scientific research.
You probably heard that at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting recently, Gov.
Bobby Jindal warned the leadership that “We must stop being the stupid party…We must stop
insulting the intelligence of voters.” ALEC and its corporate backers, in contrast, want the country
to be “the stupid nation” – which may encourage them to join the stupid party that Jindal warned
about.
The major science journals give a sense of how surreal all of this is. Take Science, the major US
scientific weekly. A few weeks ago it had three news items side by side. One reported that 2012
was the hottest year on record in the US, continuing a long trend. The second reported a new study
by the US Global Climate Change Research Program providing additional evidence for rapid climate
change as the result of human activities, and discussing likely severe impacts. The third reported
the new appointments to chair the committees on science policy chosen by the House of
Representatives, where a minority of voters elected a large majority of Republicans thanks to the
shredding of the political system.
In Pennsylvania, for example, a considerably majority voted for Democrats but they won just over
one-third of House seats. All three of the new chairs deny that humans contribute to climate
change, two deny that it is even taken place, one is a longtime advocate for the fossil fuel industry.
The same issue of the journal has a technical article with new evidence that the irreversible
tipping point may be ominously close.
For those whom Adam Smith called the “Masters of Mankind,” it is important that we must become
the stupid nation in the interests of their short-term gain, damn the consequences. These are
essential properties of contemporary market fundamentalist doctrines. ALEC and its corporate
sponsors understand the importance of ensuring that public education train children to belong to
the stupid nation, and not be misled by science and rationality.
This is far from the only case of sharp divergence between public opinion and public policy. That
tells us a lot about the current state of American democracy, and what that means for us and the
world. The corporate assault on education and independent thought, of which this is only one
striking illustration, tells us a good deal more.
In climate policy, the US lags behind other countries. Quotes a current scientific review: “109
countries have enacted some form of policy regarding renewable power, and 118 countries have set
targets for renewable energy. In contrast, the United States has not adopted any consistent and
stable set of policies at the national level to foster the use of renewable energy” or adopted other
means that are being pursued by countries that do have national policies. Some things are being
done in the US, but sporadically, and with no organized national commitment. That’s no slight
problem for us, and for the world, in the light of the great predominance of American power –
declining to be sure as power is diversified internationally, but still unchallenged.
There are other respects in which the concept of Common Good that has come to dominate policy –
but not opinion — in the US is diverging from the affluent developed societies of the OECD, and
many others. A recent OECD study shows that the US ranks 27th out of 31 countries in measures of
social justice, barely above Mexico. It ranks 21st in inequality, poverty, life expectancy, infant
mortality, maternity leave, environmental performance, 18th in mental health and 19th in welfare
of children. Also ranks toward the bottom in high-school dropout rates and poor student
performance in math.
Figures like these are signs of very severe systemic disorders; particularly striking because the US is
the richest country in the world, with incomparable advantages.
Another crucial case is healthcare. US costs are about twice the per capita costs of comparable
countries, and outcomes are relatively poor. Studied by economist Dean Baker reveal that the
deficit that obsesses the financial sector and Washington, but not the more realistic public, would
be eliminated if we had healthcare systems similar to other developed societies, hardly a utopian
idea. The US healthcare system deviates from others in that it is largely privatized and lightly
regulated, and – not surprisingly – is highly inefficient and costly. There is an exception in the US
healthcare system: the Veterans Administration, a government system, much less costly.
Another partial exception is Medicare, a government-run system, hence with far lower
administrative costs and other waste, but still more costly than it should be because it has to work
through the privatized system and is trapped by the extraordinary political power of the
pharmaceutical industry, which prevents the government from negotiating drug prices so that they
are far higher than in other countries.
Current policy ideas include proposals to increase age eligibility to cut costs: actually it increases
costs (along with penalizing mostly working people) by shifting from a relatively efficient system to
a highly inefficient privatized one. But the costs are transferred to individuals and away from
collective action through taxes. And the concept of the Common Good that is being relentlessly
driven into our heads demands that we focus on our own private gain, and suppress normal human
emotions of solidarity, mutual support and concern for others. That I think is also an important part
of what lies behind the assault on public education and on Social Security that has been waged by
sectors of corporate wealth for years, on pretexts of cost that cannot be sustained, and against
strong public opposition.
What lies behind these campaigns, I suspect, is that public education and Social Security, like
national healthcare, are based on the conception that we care for other people: we care that the
disabled widow across town has food to eat, or that the kids down the street have schooling (“why
should I pay taxes for schools? I don’t have kids there”). And beyond that, that we care about the
tens of millions are dying every year because they cannot obtain medical care, or about dying
infants, and others who are vulnerable.
These conflicts go far back in American history. It’s particularly useful to look back to the origins of
the industrial revolution, in the mid-19th century, when the country was undergoing enormous
social changes as the population was being driven into the industrial system, which working people
bitterly condemned, because it deprived them of their basic rights as free men and women – not
the least women, the so-called factory girls, who were leaving the farms to the mills.
It is worth reading the contributions in the press of the time by factory girls, artisans from Boston,
and others. It’s also important to note that working-class culture of the time was alive and
flourishing. There’s a great book about the topic by Jonathan Rose, called The Intellectual Life of
the British Working Class. It’s a monumental study of the reading habits of the working class of the
day. He contrasts “the passionate pursuit of knowledge by proletarian autodidacts” with the
“pervasive philistinism of the British aristocracy.”
Pretty much the same was true in the new working-class towns here, like eastern Massachusetts,
where an Irish blacksmith might hire a young boy to read the classics to him while he was working.
On the farms, the factory girls were reading the best contemporary literature of the day, what we
study as classics. They condemned the industrial system for depriving them of their freedom and
culture.
This went on for a long time. I am old enough to remember the atmosphere of the 1930s. A large
part of my family came from the unemployed working-class. Many had barely gone to school. But
they participated in the high culture of the day. They would discuss the latest Shakespeare plays,
concerts of the Budapest String Quartet, different varieties of psychoanalysis and every conceivable
political movement. There was also a very lively workers’ education system with which leading
scientists and mathematicians were directly involved. A lot of this has been lost under the
relentless assault of the Masters, but it can be recovered and it is not lost forever.
The labor press of the early industrial revolution took strong positions on many issues that should
have a resonance today. They took for granted that, as they put it, those who work in the mills
should own them. They condemned wage labor, which to them was akin to slavery, the only
difference being that it was supposedly temporary.
This was such a popular view that it was even part of the program of the Republican Party. It was
also a main theme of the huge organized labor movement that was taking shape, the Knights of
Labor, which began to establish links with the most important popular democratic party in the
country’s history, the Farmers Alliance, later called the Populist movement, which originated with
radical farmers in Texas and then spread through much of the country, forming collective
enterprises, banks and marketing cooperatives and much more, movements that could have driven
the country toward more authentic democracy if they had not been destroyed, largely by violence –
though, interestingly, similar developments are underway today in the old Rust Belt and elsewhere,
very important for the future, I think.
The prime target of condemnation in the labor press was what they called “The New Spirit of the
Age: Gain Wealth, Forgetting All But Self.” No efforts have been spared since then to drive this
spirit into people’s heads. People must come to believe that suffering and deprivation result from
the failure of individuals, not the reigning socioeconomic system. There are huge industries
devoted to this task. About one-sixth of the entire US economy is devoted to what’s called
“marketing,” which is mostly propaganda. Advertising is described by analysts and the business
literature as a process of fabricating wants – a campaign to drive people to the superficial things in
life, like fashionable consumption, so that they will remain passive and obedient.
The schools are also a target. As I mentioned, public mass education was a major achievement, in
which the US was a pioneer. But it had complex characteristics, rooted in the sharp class conflicts
of the day. One goal was to induce farmers to give up their independence and submit themselves to
industrial discipline and accept what they regarded as wage slavery. That did not pass without
notice. Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that political leaders of his day were calling for popular
education. He concluded that their motivation was fear. The country was filling up with millions of
voters and the Masters realized that one had to therefore “educate them, to keep them from (our)
throats.”
In other words: educate them the “right way” — to be obediently passive and accept their fate as
right and just, conforming to the New Spirit of the Age. Keep their perspectives narrow, their
understanding limited, discourage free and independent thought, instill docility and obedience to
keep them from the Masters’ throats.
This common theme from 150 years ago is inhuman and savage. It also meets with resistance. And
there have been victories. There were many in the struggles of the 1930s, carried further in the
1960s. But systems of power never walk away politely. They prepare a new assault. This has in fact
been happening since the early 1970s, based on major changes in the design of the economic
system.
Two crucial changes were financialization, with a huge explosion of speculative financial flows, and
deindustrialization. Production didn’t cease. It just began to be offshored anywhere where you
could get terrible working conditions and no environmental constraints, with huge profits for the
Masters. Within the US, that set off a vicious cycle, leading to sharp concentration of wealth, which
translates at once to concentration of political power, increasingly in the financial sector. That in
turn leads to legislation that carries the vicious cycle forward, including sharp tax reduction for the
rich and deregulation, with repeated financial crises from the ‘80s, each worse than the last. The
current one is so far the worst of all. And others are likely in what a director of the Bank of England
calls a “doom loop.”
There are solutions, but they do not fit the needs of the Masters, for whom the crises are no
problem. They are bailed out by the Nanny State. Today corporate profits are breaking new records
and the financial managers who created the current crisis are enjoying huge bonuses. Meanwhile,
for the large majority, wages and income have practically stagnated in the last 30-odd years. By
today, it has reached the point that 400 individuals have more wealth than the bottom 180 million
Americans.
In parallel, the cost of elections has skyrocketed, driving both parties even deeper into the pockets
of those with the money, corporations and the super-rich. Political representatives become even
more beholden to those who paid for their victories. One consequence is that by now, the poorest
70% have literally no influence over policy. As you move up the income/wealth ladder influence
increases, and at the very top, a tiny percent, the Masters get what they want.
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8/8/2018 The Common Good

The Common Good

Talk given in February 2013, published at Truthout: Part I, Part II

It is rare to find such consensus on complex scientific issues.

It is rare to find such consensus on complex scientific issues.

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