War, Neoliberalism and Empire in the 21st Century
Noam Chomsky Connects the Dots

By SAMEER DOSSANI

Sameer Dossani: Let’s talk
about the recently passed Iraqi oil law. It’s well known that
the law was drafted in the U.S. and then consulted on by very
few Iraqis all loyal to Prime Minister Noori al-Maliki, then
finally pushed through the Iraqi parliament. This law paves the
way for regionalization and privatization of Iraqi oil. What’s
the U.S. economic agenda in Iraq and will it be able to carry
that agenda out, given the disastrous nature of the occupation
so far?

Noam Chomsky: It’s not very
clear. What you said is correct. The law was not even seen by
the Iraqi Parliament until it was finished, so it’s an inside
job. Exactly what this entails is still kind of open. It allows
for Production Sharing Agreements (PSAs) which have traditionally
been a way of gouging the producer and ensuring that foreign
corporations have control and make huge profits. It’s quite different
from other contractual arrangements in the region–it’s what
they used to have but they’ve since nationalized their oil production
and countries set terms more in their own interest with the corporations
that are moving in. This law is vague on that so it leaves it
open.

**size increase for easier reading**

As far as the U.S. economic
interests I think we have to make a distinction. The primary
interest, and that’s true throughout the Middle East, even in
Saudi Arabia, the major energy producer, has always been control,
not access, and not profit. Profit is a secondary interest and
access is a tertiary interest.

So in the years when the U.S.
was not using Middle East oil at all, [the U.S.] was the largest
producer and the largest exporter, it still had the same policies.
It wanted to control the sources of oil and the reasons are understood.
In the mid-1940s, the State Department made it clear that the
oil resources of the region, primarily then Saudi Arabia, were
a stupendous source of strategic power which made the Middle
East the most strategically important area of the world. They
also added that its one of the greatest material prizes in world
history. But the basic point is that it’s a source of strategic
power, meaning that if you control the energy resources, then
you can control the world, because the world needs the energy
resources.

This was made explicit by George
Kennan when he was one of the Middle East planners [in the U.S.
State Department]. [He said that] control over Middle East oil
will give us veto power over our rivals. He was specifically
talking about Japan, in case Japan industrialized, it was devastated
by the war still, we’ll have veto power as long we control the
oil. And that’s been understood through the years. So in the
early stages of the Iraq war [former U.S. National Security Advisor] Zbigniew Brzezinski, who’s one of the more astute of the planners–he
was not terribly enthusiastic about the war–said that if the
U.S. wins the war, which means that it succeeds in imposing a
client regime in Iraq, then the U.S. will have critical leverage
over its industrial rivals in Europe and Asia because it will
have its hand on the spigot.

And that is also understood
very well at the highest level of the administration. So a few
months ago, Dick Cheney said that control over [oil] pipelines
can be “tools for intimidation and [blackmail]”. He
was talking about control over pipelines in the hands of others,
so if our enemies have it, it’s a tool of intimidation and coercion.
But of course the same is true if it is in our hands. We’re not
supposed to think that because we’re supposed to be noble, but
the rest of the world certainly understands it. Yes, it’s a tool
of intimidation and coercion, whether it’s the direction of pipelines
or whether its control over the production or over the regimes
in question, and control can take many forms.

So that’s the primary concern–control.
A secondary concern is undoubtedly profit for U.S.-based corporations
and British based corporations and several others of course.
And yes [in the case of the Iraqi oil law] that’s a possibility.
The Production Sharing Agreements and the other arrangements
for long-term contracts at ridiculous rates, those are expected
to be sources of immense profit as they have been in the past,
so for example a couple of weeks ago Exxon-Mobil posted its profits
for 2006 which are the highest for any corporation in U.S. history.
That broke the record of the preceding year, which also happened
to be Exxon-Mobil and the other energy corporations are doing
just great–they have money pouring out of their ears. And the
same with the corporations that link to them, like Haliburton,
Bechtel and so on.

The material prize of oil production
is not just from energy. It’s also from many other things. Take
Saudi Arabia or the [United Arab] Emirates. They have huge constriction
projects paid for by petro-dollars which recycle back to Bechtel
and other major construction companies. A lot of it goes right
back to U.S. military industry. So these are huge markets for
U.S. military exports and the military industry in the United
States is very closely linked to the high-tech economy generally.
So it’s a sort of a cycle–high prices for oil, the petro-dollars
pour back to the U.S. for major construction projects for high-tech
industry, for development, for purchasing treasury securities
which helps bolster the economy–it’s a major part of the economy
and of course it’s not just the United States. Britain, France
and others are trying very hard to sell them the same things
and sometimes succeeding. There was a big bribery scandal in
Britain recently because of efforts to bribe Saudi officials
into buying jet aircraft and so on. So the basic idea of the
energy system is that it should be under the control of loyal
clients of the United States, and they’re allowed to enrich themselves,
become super rich in fact, but the petro-dollars are basically
to cycle back to the West, primarily the United States in various
forms. So that’s a secondary concern.

A tertiary concern is access.
That’s much less of a concern. One of the reasons is that the
distribution systems are pretty much in the hands of big energy
corporations anyway and once oil is on the high seas, it can
go anywhere. So access is not considered a major problem. Political
scientists, when they make fun of the idea that the U.S. invaded
Iraq to gain its oil, they point out is that the U.S. can get
Middle East oil in other ways so therefore that can’t be the
reason. That’s true, but it’s irrelevant because the true issues
are and always have been control and secondarily profit and in
fact U.S. intelligence projections for the coming years have
emphasized that while the U.S. should control Middle East energy
for the traditional reasons, it should rely primarily on more
stable Atlantic basin resources, namely West Africa and the Western
hemisphere. They’re more secure, presumably and therefore we
can use those, but we should control the Middle East oil because
it is a stupendous source of strategic power.

SD: The difficulties surround
the occupation Iraq has deflected the U.S.’s attention away from
other parts of the world, including Latin America. Recently,
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and others such as Rafael Correa
of Ecuador, Evo Morales of Bolivia, have been talking about regional
trade agreements such as ALBA and, in the case of Venezuela,
aid packages that are supposedly designed to actually benefit
local populations as opposed to transnational companies. Critics
claim that these policies are a) unsustainable, because they
depend on revenues from Venezuela’s oil wealth, and b) self serving
for the government of Hugo Chavez. What is your response to these
criticisms?

NC: It’s very odd criticism
in the first place. Are U.S. aid programs sustainable? No, not
if there’s a depression or even a recession. Furthermore, U.S.
aid happens to be about the lowest relative to the economy of
any advanced society so there isn’t much of it in the first place
and it also can be withdrawn at any time and often is.

As for doing it for self interest,
what do you think other countries provide aid for? They’re perfectly
open about it. Sometimes, there’s something done for altruistic
reasons maybe by Norway, but overwhelmingly, aid is openly presented
as “in our interest”, not just by the U.S. but by Britain
and France and others. It is part of general strategic policies
of controlling whatever part of the world you can. So, if in
fact Venezuela’s doing it for that reason, that just says, “yeah,
they’re just like us”. So whatever that is, it’s not a criticism.

What are the reasons? Well,
they’re complicated. First of all, there’s a background. For
the first time in 500 years since the Spanish conquest Latin
America–especially South America–is beginning to move towards
some sort of integration. Actually it’s a dual type of integration.
Part of it is international
integration meaning the countries are becoming more integrated
with one another. The traditional structure in LA has been that
each of the countries is primarily oriented towards Western imperial
powers. So [economies are oriented toward trade with] Spain,
and in recent years mostly the United States, not with one another.
That’s even true of the transportation systems. They’re designed
for export of resources abroad and import of luxury goods for
the rich within.

There’s a very clear contrast
with East Asia. East Asia is resource poor, Latin America is
resource rich. You would have expected Latin America to have
rapid growth, not East Asia, but it didn’t. One of the reasons
is that Latin America adhered very rigorously to the neo-liberal
policies of the last 25 years, the IMF World Bank policies, and
those are basically offshoots of the U.S. Treasury department.
They adhered to the rules and they suffered severely–most of
the population that is. The rich sectors did ok. East Asia just
disregarded the rules and followed the same kinds of programs
that the rich countries themselves, including the U.S., had followed
to gain their wealth and power. So East Asia grew, but in addition
to that, if you look at say imports and exports, Latin America
exported raw materials, which is low income basically, and imported
luxury goods for the wealthy. East Asia imported capital goods
and moved up the ladder of industrial progress and ended up exporting
high technology goods.

SD: What do you mean by
“capital goods”?

NC: Machine tools, things that
you can use for producing commodities, electronics, bio-technology
and so on. I mean those are the high-value exports, not rice.
I mean for the U.S., rice is such a low value export that agribusiness
has to get about 40% of its profit from U.S. government subsidies,
provided primarily since the Reagan administration, as part of
their efforts to undermine markets–they love rhetoric about
markets, but they greatly dislike the concept applied to us.
And the terms of trade tend to decline for commodities, you know
there’s variation, but they tend to decline for primary commodities
as compared with high value goods like industrial exports. So
[economists like to talk about] this notion called “comparative
advantage”, you should produce what you’re good at, but
the way countries develop is by rejecting that principle and
acting in order to shift their comparative advantage.

So let’s take the United States.
200 years ago the comparative advantage of the United States
was exporting fish and fur, and maybe cotton, thanks to slavery.
If the U.S. had followed the principles that are dictated to
the poor countries, we’d be a sparsely populated, pretty poor
country, exporting primary resources. Instead, the United States
violated all of the rules–the rules of the economists and the
neo-liberal principles. It imposed extremely high tariffs on
imports from Britain, textiles at first, later steel and others,
and it had the highest tariffs in the world, the highest protection
in the world in the 19th century. As a result, it was able to
shift its comparative advantage from primary resource exports
to manufacturing, finally high-tech technology and so on, and
that goes on right until today. Only the poor countries are supposed
to follow the principles that economists dictate. In the United
States there’s a state sector of the economy, which is the core
of high-technology advanced production. That’s where computers
come from, and the Internet, and lasers, and containers for trade;
civilian aircraft are mostly an offshoot of the military industry,
right now moving on to genetic engineering, bio-technology, pharmaceuticals,
and so on. Research and development–which are the risky, costly
parts of development–those costs are imposed on the public by
funding through the state sector and development in the state
sector. When there are profits to be made it’s handed over to
private corporations and that’s the basic structure of the advanced
economy.

That’s one reason why the U.S.
simply can’t enter into the free trade agreement–it just doesn’t
accept market systems internally. So going back to East Asia
and Latin America, Latin America followed the rules and became
impoverished; East Asia ignored the rules, and was able to grow
and develop pretty much the way the rich countries had themselves.
So one form of integration in Latin America is integration of
the societies with one another, although the alternative is the
more far-reaching version of this, but there are others. And
the second form of integration is internal. Latin America at
last is beginning to do something, not much, but something about
the internal fracturing of the societies, which is extreme. Each
of those societies is characterized by a very wealthy small elite,
and a huge impoverished mass. There’s also a pretty close correlation
to race. The wealthy elite tends to be the white, Europeanized
part of the society; the huge impoverished mass tends to be the
Mestizo, Indian, Black part of the society. Not a perfect correlation,
but it’s very noticeable. And that’s beginning to be addressed,
in large part as a result of the pressure of mass popular movements,
which are very significant in Latin America now more than any
other part of the world.

It’s in this context that the
Venezuelan phenomenon surfaces. Venezuela is indeed now, under
Chavez, using its oil wealth to accelerate these processes–both
the international integration and the internal integration. It’s
helped countries of the region free themselves from U.S. controls,
exercised in part through the traditional threat of violence,
which has been much weakened, and in part through economic controls.
That’s why country after country is kicking out the IMF, restructuring
their debts, or refusing to pay them, often with the specific
help of Venezuela. In Argentina particularly, Venezuela bought
about a third of the debt and enabled Argentina to “rid
herself of the IMF” as the President [Nestor Kirchner] put
it. The international integration is also proceeding, not just
through Venezuela. It doesn’t get reported here because it’s
sort of not the right story, but a lot of things are happening.
So in early December for example, there was a meeting of all
South American leaders in Cochabamba, Bolivia–which is right
at the heart of Morales territory, Indian territory–and they
proposed, they had constructive ideas and suggestions which could
lead towards sort of a European Union type structure for South
America.

The more extreme version of
this, advanced version of it is ALBA, which you mentioned, the
Venezuelan initiative, but there are others. MERCOSUR, which
is a regional trade alliance is stumbling, but it exists. There
are great barriers to integration, it’s not an easy matter to
dismantle 500 years of history, either internally or regionally,
but there are steps towards it, and Venezuela is playing a significant
role in them. In the U.S. there’s kind of a new party line on
this matter. The party line is that, OK, we admit the subcontinent
is drifting to the Left, but there are good Leftists and bad
Leftists, and we have to distinguish between them. The bad Leftists
are Chavez, of course, Morales, and probably Correa, not certain
yet, and Kirschner’s also one of the bad ones. The good Leftists
are Lula in Brazil, García in Peru, they don’t know about
Bachelet in Chile, and so on.

In order to maintain this propaganda
line, it’s necessary to suppress quite a lot of facts. For example,
the Cochabamba conference that I mentioned, or the fact that
when Lula was reelected in last October, his first foreign trip
and one of his first acts was to visit Caracas to support Chávez
and his electoral campaign, and to dedicate a joint Venezuelan-Brazilian
project, a major bridge over the Orinoco river, and to discuss
some other projects. Well that doesn’t fit the story so, as far
as I can tell, I don’t think it was reported anywhere in the
United States–I didn’t check everything, but I couldn’t find
it–and many other things like that. I mean with any kind of
propaganda, there’s at least some thread of truth to it, but
it’s much more complex than that. There’s a real will towards
integration and popular pressure towards internal integration,
which are very significant. It’s worth remembering that these
are steps toward reversing a 500-year-old pattern, and among
other things, it’s weakening the traditional measures of U.S.
control over South America. So the kind of governments the U.S.
is supporting now, including Lula, are the kinds of governments
they might well have been overthrowing not many years ago.

SD: In Latin America, Venezuela
is only one part of the general discontent that is driving governments
away from the IMF. But in other parts of the world, notably Africa,
the IMF and its neoliberal diktaats are as strong as ever, and
the predictable result is that extreme poverty is still on the
rise. Other countries — for example India — are not under this
pressure but still are wildly pursuing neoliberal economic policies.
What hope do you see for citizens and movements in these places?
Are there lessons to be learned from the case of Latin America?
How can we in the U.S. be supportive of struggles for economic
justice in these places?

A lot depends on what we do.
After all [the U.S. is] the most powerful country in the world
and the richest country in the world and has enormous influence.
These policies that you describe are not without reason called
the Washington Consensus; that’s where they emanate from.

Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin
America are the two areas of the world that most rigorously followed
the neo-liberal principles, the orthodox principles of the Washington
Consensus, and those are the two parts of the world that suffered
most severely. And you’re right, in Sub-Saharan Africa it largely
continues. They simply do not have the resources, the capacities,
the countries are torn to shreds as a result of history of imperial
conquest and devastation, and they’ve not been able to put themselves
back together again. Their hopes for revival after the the formal
end of colonialism were pretty much shattered by Western intervention.
So for example, the murder of [Patrice]Lumumba in the Congo,
which is the richest, and potentially the most powerful country
of the region, and the installation of the corrupt and brutal
murderer Mobuto [Sese Seko] not long after, I mean that set off
a chain of catastrophes which is still devastating the area and
no sign of resolution.

The French in their regions
of Africa did the same. One gangster after another, the French
backed state terrorism, and did all sorts of things. And pretty
much the British, too, in their regions. So [many African countries] have a hideous legacy to overcome, and it’s very difficult, and
they’re not getting much support from the outside. But we should
be doing what we can to support authentic liberation struggles
within the countries.

It’s too complicated to go
into the history here, but it’s worth remembering many of the
things that happened. So for example, when the Portuguese empire
collapsed in the mid-70’s, the former Portuguese colonies had
a chance, Angola, Mozambique, a couple other Portuguese colonies,
might have moved towards some sort of independent development.
But South Africa, with U.S. backing, would not allow it–remember
that’s apartheid South Africa. So for example in Angola, South
African troops backed by the United States just invaded to try
to throw out the elected government, and again, with U.S. support,
supported terrorist movements, the Savimbi movement, to try to
undermine the government, and they would have succeeded had it
not been for the fact that Cuba sent forces to support the government.

That led to hysteria in the
United States. You had [the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations] Daniel Moynihan saying ‘the Russians are trying to cut our lifeline,
our oil supplies to the Middle East’, [Henry] Kissinger raving
and so on, and it was all, believed to be or presented to be
a Russian operation. In fact, we now know from excellent contemporary
U.S. scholarship that it was a Cuban initiative–it was mainly
Piero Gleijeses at Johns Hopkins University who’s going through
the archival material and has done outstanding scholarship. What
happened is that Cuba entered on its own initiative and very
selflessly–they never took any credit for what they were doing,
it’s still mostly unknown–but Cuban troops beat back the South
African offensive, and not only did that prevent the re-conquest
of Angola, but it also had extraordinary symbolic significance.
Those Cuban troops were black, and that broke the kind of mythology
of white conquest; it was the first time that black soldiers
had defeated advanced white armies, South African with U.S. backing.
And that was a very important, had a very important effect on
all of Africa. For the South African whites it was a sign that
their conquest was not permanent. And for blacks in South Africa
and elsewhere in the region, it showed that you don’t have to
subordinate yourself to white power.

That breaking of the hold of
the mythology of [white] power is extremely significant, not
just in this case. The same is true with many other cases, slavery,
the women’s movement, all sorts of things. Just breaking the
idea that you must subject yourself to overwhelming power, when
that’s broken, a lot collapses with it. So that was a very important
step towards the liberation of Africa, and Cuba deserves enormous
respect for this, also for never taking credit for it, because
they wanted the credit to be taken by the African countries themselves.
It’s only now beginning to be known, and mostly only known in
scholarly circles because you don’t get front page stories in
the New York Times about topics like this. And then Angola fell
into total catastrophe, mainly because of the depredations of
the U.S.-backed terrorist forces, which were horrendous, and
now it’s a horror story. Similar things were happening elsewhere.
The United Nations commission on Africa estimated that in the
former Portuguese colonies alone–Mozambique and Angola–about
a million and a half people were killed by South African aggression
backed by the Reagan administration, just during the Reagan years.
That’s a pretty serious catastrophe. They also estimated about
60 billion dollars of damage, and the French and Algeria and
their regions elsewhere were doing pretty much the same. It’s
a hideous, ugly story, and sub-Saharan Africa has a long way
to go to extricate itself from these centuries of destruction
still continuing.

India is a complicated story;
it has been independent since 1947. Before the British conquest
back in the 18th century, India and China had been the commercial
and industrial centers of the world. British conquest turned
India into a poor, peasant society. [The British] built roads
and infrastructure, but they were mostly for the benefit of the
invaders, the export of goods and so on. There were hideous famines–Mike
Davis has a wonderful book on this Victorian famines, huge famines
that could have easily been prevented, right thru the British
rule up to the very end in the 1940s. Since Indian independence,
they resumed their growth and there were no more famines; it
became a more or less governable society and was beginning to
develop. In the 1980s, there was a significant increase in the
rate of growth. In the 1990s, they instituted the so-called neo-liberal
reforms on their own, I mean, that was not under IMF control,
as you said, and since then there have been changes.

They’re very highly praised
in the West–you know, the Thomas Friedman-style adulation of
the new India–and in fact growth has increased, and a sector
of the society has become much better off, has been raised from
poverty. But remember that means a sector of the society; the
large majority of the society is deeply impoverished, maybe even
harmed by the neo-liberal policies, the same policies that are
responsible for the marvelous labs in Hyderabad and Bangalore
– which are indeed marvelous, I’ve seen them and they’re just
like MIT – and there is increase in the wealth of that sector
of society. Those same policies are undermining the large majority
of the population, which is peasant-based. Also the government
has withdrawn support for peasant agriculture, meaning cheap
credits, irrigation, rural aid, assistance programs, and so on,
and they’ve also kind of pressured the poor farmers to turn from
subsistence crops to export crops–that’s the advice of economists
generally.

Mexico, for example, under
NAFTA was supposed to turn away from producing rice for the population
and corn, turned away from that to, say, producing flowers for
export to the United States with “more valued added”.
In some seminar somewhere that might look good, but in the real
world it happens not to work for very simple reasons. Commodity
prices tend to vary quite a lot, and if there’s like a natural
disaster, say a hurricane or whatever, and you’re producing flowers,
they might be wiped out that year, just like the citrus crop
has been pretty much wiped out in California this year because
of the cold spell. Well if you’re agribusiness, you can handle
that. So wiping out the citrus crop in California may raise the
price of oranges in the United States, but U.S. agribusiness
is going to survive it just fine. However, poor farmers cannot,
I mean a farmer can’t tell his children ‘don’t bother eating
this year’ because cotton prices went down, or because a storm
wiped out our flowers, and ‘maybe you’ll be able to eat the next
year’, you can’t do that. So what you have to do is to try to
get credit. Well with the government having withdrawn support
for the vast majority of the population, you go to usurers, who
charge you huge levels of interest, which you’re not going to
be able to pay, so then you have to sell off the little plot
of land you have, and pretty soon you can’t support your family
at all, so you commit suicide.

And in fact the rate of peasant
suicides has been rising [in India] about as fast as the adulation
by Thomas Friedman for the marvels of the economy. The per capita
grain intake for people in India has declined, the average has
declined considerably, since the onset of the reforms. Manufacturing
productivity has gone way up, manufacturing wages have gone way
down. At the beginning of the so-called reforms, India was ranked
around 124th or so in the UN development rankings, which measure
infant mortality and so on. Since the reforms have been undertaken,
it’s actually declined–the last time I looked I think it was
127th, it certainly hasn’t advanced.

Well, these are parts, I can
go on, but these are the several aspects of the Indian development
story. For some it’s been very good, and for others it’s been,
at best, stagnation, at worst, a disaster. And remember, for
huge parts of India, like say for women, life is kind of like
under the Taliban. Careful studies of say [the Indian state of] Uttar Pradesh, which maybe has 160 million people, has found
that they have about the lowest female to male ratio in the world
and it’s not because of female infanticide, it’s because of the
way women are treated, which would make the Taliban look pretty
decent. And these are huge areas, and they’re not getting better,
many are getting worse. The same is true in China, it’s harder
to say about China, it’s a closed society, I don’t know the details,
but it’s probably quite similar. India’s a more open society
so there’s a lot of evidence.

Going back to Mexico and producing
corn and beans, I mean, why is there a vast increase in illegal
immigration from Mexico in recent years? It’s partly the predicted
effects of NAFTA. If you flood, the worst is yet to happen but
even the beginning of it, if you flood Mexico with U.S. agribusiness
exports, which are highly subsidized–that’s how they get their
profits–then Mexican farmers aren’t going to be able to compete.
Then comes the economists’ theory, you know, turn from producing
corn and beans and rice to producing flowers and [other] export
crops, and you have the mode I described, and people can’t survive.
So there’s a flight of people from the countryside to the cities
where there are no jobs because Mexican businesses can’t compete
with U.S. multinationals, which are given enormous advantages
under the mislabeled trade agreements. And yes, you get a flight
of population [across the border]. The price of tortillas, you
know, the basic food for the poor, it’s gone out of sight, people
can’t pay for it. If you’re growing your own food, you can manage,
or if there’s a subsistence agriculture, yeah, you can kind of
manage, but not when you abandon it.

Again, for parts of the population
it’s been a benefit, so the number of billionaires has gone way
up, just like in India. India now ranks very high internationally
among the number of billionaires, but also for peasant suicides,
and for severe malnutrition and so on. These countries, which
are pretty rich, [are in some respects doing worse than] the
poorest countries. GDP per capita in India is below Bolivia.
That’s nothing to rave about, Bolivia is the poorest country
in South America. These are several sides of the same policies.

Remember that when NAFTA was
enacted in 1994, another policy was enacted. In 1994, Clinton
militarized the border in Operation Gatekeeper. Now previously,
that had been a pretty open border. The border, of course, was
established by conquest, like most borders. And there were similar
people on both sides, people who would cross the border to visit
their friends and relatives and that sort of thing. Now the border
was militarized in 1994. OK, maybe it’s a coincidence, more likely
I think it’s because the Clinton administration understood that
their glowing predictions [about the benefits of NAFTA] were
for propaganda, and that the likelihood was that there would
be effects in Mexico which would lead to substantial flight,
immigration, joined by people fleeing the wreckage of Central
America after Reagan’s terrorist wars there. And yes, now you
have what they call an immigration crisis. These things are connected,
you can’t look at them in isolation.

Sameer Dossani is the Director of 50
Years Is Enough: U.S. Network for Global Economic Justice.

Noam Chomsky is emeritus professor of linguistics
and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
His most recent books are Failed
States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy and
Interventions,
forthcoming from City Lights.