Same As It Ever Was: Talking Corporate Hegemony with Noam Chomsky

Episode 6 Sneak Peak

This week’s newsletter starts with a tale of two tweets.

First, as the financial prospects of ordinary Americans become more and more dire, the Twitter account of the Democratic Party — which now controls the House, the Senate, and the presidency — went online to assure us all that nobody will be getting too much emergency money from the government. In fact, everyone will be getting less money than the Democrats promised, just to make sure that nobody gets too much.

The Democrats @TheDemocrats

.@POTUS will build on the $600 down payment provided by Congress last year, sending an additional $1,400 to households across America, totaling direct payments to $2,000 per person.

That’s right: to avoid the problem of accidentally giving people enough money to survive during a health and financial crisis, the Democrats have gone back on the campaign promise that propelled them to win the seats that have given them majorities. Don’t worry. It’s all on video. Watch the supercut of Democrats acknowledging that the full $2k checks are what Americans wanted, not some installment plan designed to make sure nobody gets a cent more than Joe Biden thinks you deserve:

RootsAction @Roots_Action

2k checks. Now @JoeBiden. #2kChecks

But the votes have been counted, the representatives sworn in, and now that they’re wearing the mantle of power, the Democrats are willing to pretend that we’re buying their penny-pinching math. Working people know that $600 now and $1400 in three months is a world away from an immediate $2k check. As we’ve heard from a number of guests on Krystal Kyle & Friends, though, the Democratic Party cut ties with working people decades ago. They have deliberately destroyed all methods of accountability to the very people who voted them into office, and whom their job it is to represent.

How does this take place? What ties together the Democrats’ blindness to the struggles of the ninety-nine percent, the broken promise of the $2k checks, and the control exercised by corporations over American politics? And of course: is there anyone better to ask than Noam Chomsky? That’s why we’re turning to Professor Chomsky for Episode 6 of Krystal Kyle & Friends. The author of Manufacturing Consent, Who Rules The World?, and many others, Chomsky provides his unparalleled analysis on how we’re not just watching working- and middle-class wealth mysteriously disappear — we’re watching the political and economic elite steal that wealth. Until regular citizens replace lobbyists at the reins of power, we can’t count on $2k checks, a real living wage, or any other tool to make this country livable for all.

For access to the video of our Friday conversation with Noam Chomsky, subscribe below. Audio access is released on Saturday via Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and other streaming platforms. We’re so looking forward to this conversation, and we hope you are, too.

In anticipation of our conversation at the end of this week, here’s an excerpt of Noam Chomsky discussing $2k checks, corporate theft, and the lack of working-class representation in government with Ana Kasparian on Jacobin’s program Weekends, January 12, 2021. Access the full video here.

Ana Kasparian: There has been a huge debate about $2000 direct checks to Americans, and our lawmakers failed to provide that at a time when so many Americans are desperate to put food on the table and a roof over their heads. Why is it that, following so much public support for certain policies, Congress continuously tells the American people that they will not deliver?

Noam Chomsky: Where's the money? Who funds Congress? There's a very fine, careful study of this by the leading scholar who deals with funding issues in politics, Thomas Ferguson. He and his colleagues did a study about a year ago, a careful study in which they investigated a simple question: What's the correlation, over many years, between campaign funding and electability to Congress?

It's almost a straight line. It's the kind of close correlation that you rarely get in the social sciences. The greater the funding, the higher the electability. You can find a few cases here and there that aren't right on the line, but from the standpoint of social science, it's a remarkable correlation. 

We all know what happens when a congressional representative gets elected. First day in office, they start making phone calls to potential donors for the next election coming up. Meanwhile, hordes of corporate lobbyists descend on their offices. They often have good staff people, often young kids, who are totally overwhelmed by the resources, the wealth, the power of the massive lobbyists who pour in. Out of that comes legislation which the representative later signs, maybe even looks at occasionally, if he can get off the phone to the donors.

What kind of system do you expect to emerge from this? We have good studies of it. For example, one recent high-level study analyzed by people's income as compared with decisions by their own representatives. For about ninety percent of the population, there's essentially no correlation. That is, they're fundamentally unrepresented. 

The general picture is clear. The working class and most of the middle class are basically unrepresented. The decisions reflect very highly concentrated amounts of campaign money — not just campaign funding, but in all sorts of other ways. If you're a congressional representative, you're going to leave Congress one of these days, either by decision or by being voted out. Where do you go? Do you become a truck driver? A secretary? Just take a look. We know where you go, and we know what the reasons are. If you voted the right way, you've got a cushy future ahead of you.

There are many, many devices by which you can ensure that the large majority of the population is unrepresented, and furthermore robbed. The scale is colossal. A few months ago, the RAND Corporation did a study of what they called the "transfer of wealth" — more accurately, the robbery of the public since the neoliberal assault began around 1980, in the last forty years. How much wealth has been transferred from the working class and the middle class, from the lower ninety percent of the income scale, to the very top, a fraction of the one percent?

Their estimate is $47 trillion. It's not small change. And it's a vast underestimate. When Reagan opened the spigots for corporate robbery — called neoliberalism — many devices were opened: tax havens, shell havens, all illegal before that. How much money was stolen that way? It's mostly a secret. Private tyrannies don't let us know what they're doing. But there are some reasonable estimates. There's an IMF study that came out recently, that estimated in the neighborhood of $35 trillion, just through tax havens over forty years.

Keep adding this up. It's not pennies. And it affects people's lives. People are angry; they're resentful, and for very good reasons. It's the perfect terrain for a demagogue to come along, Trump-style — someone very effective, who holds up a banner with one hand, saying, "I love you, I'm going to save you." His other hand stands you in the back to pay off the rich and powerful. That's what we've been seeing. The Democratic National Committee is not that different. They're different — but not that different. It's the same game.