DONE 00:45 Keep policy insulated from politics
| position | ease | box | interval | due |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| front | 2.50 | 0 | 0.00 | 2024-07-20T04:14:18Z |
CLOCK: [2024-07-20 Sat 06:31]–[2024-07-20 Sat 07:06] => 0:35
page 380 in Understanding power: the indispensable chomsky shows an important article in the wall street journal. Also see it's footnotes in the foot notes book.
How democracy is ruled? Noam Chomsky explains in (Chomsky 2002) how democracy in its current shape is immune to real change, in the United States of America for example with Bill Clinton administration:
Just to give you an indication, right after the 1992 election, the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article just informing its readers that there was no reason to fear that any of the alleged “lefties” around Clinton would do things differently when they got into office. Of course, the business community already knew that perfectly well, as you can see by taking a look at the stock markets towards the end of the election campaign. But in any event, the Wall Street Journal explained why, if by some accident Clinton or any other candidate did try to initiate a program of social reform in the United States, it would immediately be cut off. They simply stated what’s obvious, and they gave the numbers.
The United States is deeply in debt—that was part of the whole Reagan/Bush program, in fact: to put the country so deeply in debt that there would be virtually no way for the government to pursue programs of social spending anymore. And what “being in debt” really means is that the Treasury Department has sold a ton of securities—bonds and notes and so on— to investors, who then trade them back and forth on the bond market. Well, according to the Wall Street Journal, by now about $150 billion a day worth of U.S. Treasury securities alone is traded this way. The article then explained what this means: it means that if the investing community which holds those securities doesn’t like any U.S. government policies, it can very quickly sell off just a tiny signal amount of Treasury bonds, and that will have the automatic effect of raising the interest rate, which then will have the further automatic effect of increasing the deficit. Okay, this article calculated that if such a “signal” sufficed to raise the interest rate by 1 percent, it would add $20 billion to the deficit overnight—meaning if Clinton (say in someone’s dream) proposed a $20 billion social spending program, the international investing community could effectively turn it into a $40 billion.
program instantly, just by a signal, and any further moves in that direction would be totally cut off.
In Poland:
Similarly, there was a great article in the London Economist—you know, the big free-trade pop-ideology journal—about the fact that Eastern European countries have been voting Socialists and Communists back into power. But the basic line of the article was, don’t worry about it, because as they said, “policy is insulated from politics”—meaning, no matter what games these guys play in the political arena, policy’s going to go on exactly the way it is, because we’ve got them by the balls: we control the international currencies, we’re the only ones who can give them loans, we can destroy their economies if we want to, there’s nothing they can do. I mean, they can play all of the political games they want to, they can pretend they have a democracy if they like—anything they please—so long as “policy remains insulated from politics.
Misc
from On The U.S. Human Rights Record:
The Economist recently described how important it is to keep policy “insulated from politics.” If the policy is insulated from politics, you can have democratic forms, certain that they’re not going to harm anything. The insulated technocrats can work for the health of the economy in the technical sense of that term, meaning low growth and low wages — but high profits for that small section of the world’s population that already enjoys extreme wealth and privilege.
I was able to find a citation(Economist 1994). Here is the full text:
The elections of September 1993 [in Poland] sounded like a death-knell for reform. Voters turned out parties that sprang from the Solidarity movement and chose instead the Democratic Left Alliance (S.L.D.) and the Polish Peasant Party (P.S.L.). These two parties won in September by promising higher wages, fatter pensions and more aid to farmers – pledges that, if kept, would have wrecked reform. The coalition quickly set about breaking its promises. The 1994 budget passed on March 5th by the Sejm, the more-important lower house of parliament, offered little relief from earlier austerity. Clearly, policy works better than democracy. Coalitions rise and fall but the main outlines of policy have been remarkably consistent since the semi-free elections of June 1989 that thrust Solidarity into power. The first Solidarity government, led by Tadeusz Mazowiecki, was as unprepared for power as the communists were to relinquish it. Its shock therapy was as alien to most Solidarity members as it was to central planners. Governments have stuck to it in part because the strongest Polish institutions stand outside politics. . . . Does that matter? It is sometimes necessary to insulate policy from the chaos of politics, as Russia has signally failed to do. And in some ways Poland has the best of both worlds: a vigorous press and free elections, coupled with apolitical sanity in the making of policy.
TODO there is a similar quote to find
I remember reading that quote somewhere but can not be exactly where. Probably "Who rules the world" or "Media Control", one of Noam Chomsky Arabic-translated works.
I was about an interview with a US militarily representative talking about the U.S. invasion in Iraq. The interviewer informed him that the majority of the public does not want a war in Iraq, "so what", he responded.
References
- Noam Chomsky and Peter R. Mitchell (Editor) and John Schoeffel (Editor) (2002). Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky. The New Press. Link
- The Economist (1994). Politics Versus Policy: Polish Economic Reform Progresses Despite Political Disfavor. Economist.