Noam Chomsky: America's Economic Suicide!

Noam Chomsky has not just been watching the Occupy movement. A veteran of the civil rights, anti-war, and anti-intervention movements of the 1960s through the 1980s, he's given lectures at Occupy Boston and talked with occupiers across the US. His new book. Occupy, published in the Occupied Media Pamphlet Series by Zuccotti Park Press brings together several of those lectures, a speech on "occupying foreign policy" and a brief tribute to his friend and co-agitator Howard Zinn. From his speeches, and in this conversation, its's clear that the emeritus MIT professor and author is as impressed by the spontaneous, cooperative communities some Occupy encampments created, as he is by the movement's political impact. We're a nation whose leaders are pursuing policies that amount to economic "suicide" Chomsky says. But there are glimmers of possibility - in worker co-operatives, and other spaces where people get a taste of a different way of living. We talked in his office, for Free Speech TV on April 24: Let's start with the big picture. How do you describe the situation we're in, historically? NC: There is neither a crisis or a return to the norm of stagnation. One view is the norm is stagnation and occasionally you get out of it. The other is that the norm is growth, and occasionally you can get into stagnation. You can debate that, but it's a period of close to global stagnation. In the major state capitalists economies, Europe and the US, it's low growth and stagnation, and a very sharp income differentiation a shift, a striking shift, from production to financialization. The US and Europe are committing suicide in different ways. In Europe it's austerity in the midst of recession, and that's guaranteed to be a disaster. There's some resistance to that now. In the US, it's essentially off-shoring production and financialization and getting rid of superfluous population through incarceration.