Noam Chomsky, once described by the New York Times as “arguably the most important intellectual alive”, is one of the leading figures on the international left today. NLP’s David Wearing spoke with him about nuclear proliferation, climate change, Haiti and the financial crisis.

David Wearing: During the presidency of George W. Bush, you named nuclear weapons and climate change as the two most serious threats facing humanity, with those dangers being seriously exascerbated by US government policy. Has the Obama administration’s approach to these issues reduced the threat level to any substantive extent?
     
Noam Chomsky: Not significantly.  The rhetoric has improved, and there are a few actions.  But not much.  For example, Obama called for reconfiguring somehow the missile systems in Eastern Europe, which Russia naturally found threatening (for good reasons, as prominent US strategic analysts discussed).  But the administration just announced that they will be deployed in northern Poland, 35 miles from Russian territory.  Last fall the UN Security Council passed a resolution calling for states to join the NPT and to resolve all issues within that framework.  Obama hastened to assure India that it was exempt—and India responded to the resolution by declaring that it can now produce nuclear weapons of the same yield as the US and USSR.  When the IAEA called on Israel to join the NPT and open its nuclear facilities to inspection, the US (and Europe) tried to block it, but when it passed, Obama assured Israel that it was exempt.  On the climate threat, Copenhagen was a predictable failure, and the US is doing almost nothing, though this is not entirely Obama’s fault, with huge corporate campaigns denying the facts (by now barely 1/3 of Americans believe that human agency plays a role in global warming), and Congress mostly in the pocket of the corporate sector—even more so after Thursday’s grotesque Supreme Court decision.

DW: At the recent international conference on climate change in Copenhagen, many developing countries described global warming primarily as an issue of justice. They spoke of “climate debt” and of “reparations” being owed to them by the West. Is this a useful way of looking at the issue, and a message Western activists should be taking up and amplifying?
     
NC: I think so.  But it will be a hard task, just as it’s hard to bring up reparations on numerous other issues.  Take, for example, the horrendous class-based catastrophe in Haiti.  By rights the two traditional torturers of Haiti, France and the US, who have a large share of responsibilty for its current travail, should be paying huge reparations.  The words can barely be expressed, or comprehended, within the reigning intellectual/moral culture, including media.

DW: The Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz said that the financial crisis “is for market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for communism”. Yet despite the enormity of those events, very little real reform seems to have taken place subsequently. Is ‘free-market’ dogma so deeply ingrained amongst policymakers and opinion-formers that no financial disaster (or taxpayer bailout) is big enough to ‘disprove’ its merits?
     
NC: The dogma was always nonsense.  Neither the US, nor Britain, nor any functioning economy adheres to free market principles, except partially and for temporary convenience.  It’s true that financial institutions approach this model more closely than most, one reason why they have regular crises, and have to be bailed out by the public.  Those who benefit from the dogma know perfectly well that it is false, but as long as they can rely on their government insurance policy, they can enrich themselves with abandon.  There is little in the way of regulatory reform, and is unlikely to be, because of the enormous power of the financial sector over the political system.