AMY GOODMAN: You are listening to Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman.

Establishment pundits have characterized globalization as an irreversible force, much like gravity. They say we should accept it and get on with our lives. Powerful forces like the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank are main proponents of these globalization policies. But critics point out that this formula of globalization is being enforced and propelled by transnational corporations largely unaccountable for their actions, aided by governments and institutions like the WTO, the World Trade Organization.

Well, this coming month, as ministers from all over the world gather in Seattle to discuss free trade at the WTO summit, thousands of labor, environmental and human rights activists will also converge in Seattle to protest the WTO’s pro-corporate policies and so-called globalization. Democracy Now! will be there to chronicle the events and to bring you these voices from around the world. Farmers from India and France, trade unionists from the U.S. and from numerous other countries, advocates of the poor, AIDS coalitions and many others will hold a series of teach-ins, rallies and protests during that last week of November.

Well, few people have been as astute in decoding the realities of globalization and double standards in U.S. foreign policy as professor Noam Chomsky, renowned intellectual figure, political dissident and critic of U.S. policy. He was one of the first people to speak out against Vietnam, has been a symbol of resistance to tyranny and to private and state power. He’s so in demand for public speaking that he’s booked years in advance. And everywhere he speaks, he draws huge, overflowing crowds. Unfortunately, he’s not as popular in the corporate media, where he is rarely invited. Well, today we’re going to bring you a speech he recently gave in Boulder, Colorado, about the issue of globalization, human rights and the new world order.

NOAM CHOMSKY: These last few years, the years — the last years of the 1990s, are sort of a season of semicentennial anniversaries. The reason is obvious. World War II marked a very significant turning point in human affairs. The industrial societies were mostly destroyed. The U.S. economy prospered during the war. The U.S. ended the war in a position of extraordinary power. It had about half the wealth of the world, incomparable military power and security. And naturally, it used this power to attempt to organize the world, to construct a new world order, which, in fact, was — really deserved the term. It has — it’s now half a century. We can look back and ask how it’s fared.

The new world order of the late '40s was based on three fundamental building blocks. One was an international economic order, what's called the Bretton Woods system. A second was an international political order of which the foundation is the United Nations Charter. And the third was a set of international norms for the behavior of governments toward their populations. That’s the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So, what I want to do is review where these stand, what’s happened to them, what it suggests for the future. And I’ll focus primarily on the third, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Well, the Bretton — the first, the Bretton Woods system, is often described as a system of liberal internationalism. Actually, I’ve described it that way, but that’s not quite correct. The intent of the founders of Bretton Woods, the — Harry Dexter White, the U.S. negotiator, and John Maynard Keynes, the British negotiator — their intent was, partially, to create an international liberal order. They intended to try to liberalize trade, but at the same time to regulate capital. Those two principles were related. And they’re, in fact, reflected in the rules of the IMF, the International Monetary Fund. Those rules state that — the charter of the IMF states that countries are entitled to regulate capital, and the IMF is, in fact, prohibited by its charter from providing credit, what are called “rescue packages” these days, to cover capital flight. That’s prohibited.

The reason for the regulation of capital flow was, in part, a belief, widely held among economists, including Keynes and White, that liberalization of capital, allowing free flow of capital, would undermine free trade. That’s a thesis. Like most laws of economics, it’s largely speculative, but plausible and, in fact, rather well supported by the experience of the last 25 years, looking back. But the major reason was something which wasn’t a thesis, it was a virtual truism, and that is that free movement of capital undermines democracy and, essentially, dismantles the welfare state, which was very popular, had an enormous amount of support among the public and throughout the world, including the United States, so that couldn’t be simply abandoned. In fact, they wanted to strengthen it.

The problem is that free flow of capital creates what some international economists call a “virtual senate,” meaning financial capital can impose the social policies that it chooses on governments, and it can punish those that deviate by capital flight, that naturally restricts democracy. It undermines the possibility for governments — meaning, to the extent that they’re democratic, people — to participate in socioeconomic planning. And it also undermines efforts to use public resources in a way, what’s called inefficiently. That means for people, not for investors. So, for example, efforts to stimulate the economy or to create full employment or to use public resources for health or education, social welfare, for the environment, for improved working conditions and other irrational purposes can be terminated and punished by simply flight of capital, which even these days rich and powerful states can’t withstand. That’s the main reason for the insistence in the Bretton Woods system that capital flight be regulated and controlled, and the prohibition on the IMF to assign — provide credits to cover capital flight.

Well, those principles — the second principle, the prohibition on credits for capital flight, that was never taken seriously. The rescue packages, as they’re called, for the Third World quite substantially do cover capital flight. The Third World debt would be very close to eliminated — in some cases, completely eliminated — if the societies were able to control their own wealthy people, meaning keep the capital at home and keep the wealthy from robbing the country. In the case of Indonesia, for example, the current IMF rescue package is approximately equal to the estimated wealth of the Suharto family. So, there’s an easy way to pay off the debt: just go to the people who’ve been robbing the country blind ever since they took power in a huge massacre 30 years ago. The Latin American debt, capital flight from wealthy Latin Americans, comes pretty close — and sometimes, in fact, exceeds — the Third World debt, the Latin American debt, which was such a catastrophe since 1982. The way things work, the money is borrowed by the wealthy and by dictators and generals and so on, and then it’s paid by the poor — they pay it off — and by Western taxpayers, who — when the debt is socialized. But those aren’t economic laws, those are social constructions. And they indicate, they reflect the failure to take seriously this founding principle of the new world order.

It isn’t, incidentally, just the Third World. That began back in the late 1940s with the reconstruction of Europe. There was money in Europe, in the hands of wealthy Europeans, but U.S. planners preferred to have wealthy Europeans send their wealth to New York banks, with American taxpayers paying for the reconstruction of Europe. There’s actually a name for that. It’s called the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan, if you look at the figures — and this was well understood at the time — the Marshall Plan funding comes, as approximately the same order, and may even have been exceeded, by a flight of capital from wealthy Europeans to New York banks. So, that’s — so, that principle was words. It’s never been applied.

On the other hand, the other principle, about constraining capital flow, that was taken quite seriously. That was — that principle was enforced during what’s usually called the golden age of postwar economic growth, high economic growth, high productivity growth, expansion of the social contract, the period of the 1950s and '60s. That was a period in which, in fact, capital was closely regulated. That system, the Bretton Woods system, was broken down and dismantled by Richard Nixon in the early 1970s, with the assistance of Britain and, later, other countries, and it had the — pretty much the predicted effect. It was predicted right away, in the early ’70s, when capital controls were dismantled, that this would lead to a period of low growth, low wages, and, in fact, very high profits, which is pretty much what we've seen. There was also an attack on the welfare state, primarily in the United States and Britain, but, to an extent, in other rich countries, as well. These are major features of the past 25 years, also lower productivity growth and, indeed, lower growth of trade, because, as the thesis suggested, the reduction, the elimination of capital controls introduced various forms of protectionism, pretty much as predicted.

So, this has been a period of what’s been called a sustained assault on free trade by the head of the economic — head of economic research at World Trade Organization, in a major technical study. He, incidentally, estimates Reaganite
barriers to imports at about — as having about three times the effect of other trade barriers instituted by other rich countries. And, in fact, the Reagan administration broke records in market interference in this and other ways. There is — it was — it is — has been a period of very high concentration of the sum wealth that has been produced, and it’s been very highly concentrated. As you all know, inequality has risen very sharply, primarily in the United States and Britain. In the U.S., it’s back to the levels of the 1920s.

We’re currently in the midst of something called a fairy-tale economic boom. It is a fairy tale. It’s the weakest recovery in postwar history, far below the '50s and the ’60s, and not even at the level of the rather anemic ’70s and ’80s. In fact, U.S. economic growth in the 1990s is roughly at about at the norm for the rich countries, the OECD countries. The economic boom, the fairy-tale economic boom, is unique in another respect. It's the first one in American history where there has been no increase in median income. For about two-thirds of the population, wages and incomes have either stagnated or even significantly declined in the last 20, 25 years. And while they’re rising slightly now, it’s not even back to the 1989 level, let alone the 1970s. People are working longer. The average worker is working about a month longer than 25 years ago. Working conditions are much worse. There’s less pay. There’s far less securit. But there is enormous wealth, very highly concentrated. All the odes to the fairy-tale economic boom quite consistently point to the stock market as proof of how great things are. And it is great for the people who own stock. One percent of the population owns about — of households, owns about half the stock, and most of the rest is owned by the top 10%. If you bring in pension funds, you get a little shuffling in the top 20%. But for most of the population, roughly three-quarters, this is just something you watch, not something you take part in, and you watch it while your own conditions stagnate or decline. That’s the fairy-tale economic boom.

It’s understood why the boom is taking place. It was explained in this fashion. It was actually explained by the man who the business press calls “the saintly Alan Greenspan.” In his — I didn’t make it up. The Financial Times of London, the leading business paper in the world. The saintly Alan testified about the fairy-tale economic boom before Congress about a year ago, and he took great pride in it, as head of the Federal Reserve. He attributed the fairy tale to what he called “greater worker insecurity.” In other words, workers are too intimidated to ask for benefits or wages or better working conditions, and that contributes to something called “the health of the economy.” That’s a technical term that’s uncorrelated with the health of the population, often contrary to it. But greater worker insecurity does contribute to that.

The Clinton administration, in the economic report of the president last year, the last one, they also took pride in the great economic achievements, and they basically gave the same explanation. They attributed them to what they called “significant wage restraint.” Well, yeah, that’s the result of growing worker insecurity. Workers are frightened, and with cause.

So, for example, one of the consequences of NAFTA, which was studied in — under NAFTA, as you recall, had — it’s basically an investor rights agreement, but it did have some wording thrown in to make it look as if labor rights and environmental rights were going to be considered. Under that, the side agreements, there is a requirement that complaints about unfair labor practices must be investigated, and in the course of one of these investigations, a study was done by a well-known U.S. labor economist, Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University, studying the effects of NAFTA on organizing efforts in the United States. Her report was, in fact, released by Canada and Mexico. It was delayed by the Clinton administration. She discovered that in — fully half of the organizing efforts since NAFTA have been disrupted by threats to transfer production to Mexico.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to professor Noam Chomsky. He’s the author of many books, including The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo, a longtime political activist, writer and professor of linguistics. We’ll be back with Professor Chomsky in just a minute.

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AMY GOODMAN: This is Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now!, the Exception to the Rulers. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue with a recent speech given by Professor Chomsky in Boulder, Colorado, on the issue of globalization, the new world order and human rights.

NOAM CHOMSKY: For example, a trailer can be put up outside a plant with a sign on it saying “Mexico transfer job” or something like that. That’s all illegal, but the Reagan administration, and now the Clinton administration, have basically informed the business community that they’re not going to apply the laws. So it may be illegal, but it happens. And those threats are not idle. After NAFTA, if, when organizing efforts nevertheless succeed, the rate of actual transfer is three times the level prior to NAFTA. These are reasons why workers are intimidated, and there are plenty of others.

So, during this period of dazzling profit growth in the fairy-tale economic boom, major corporations have made plenty of money. In fact, they don’t know what to do with it. Some of them do know what to do with it. For example, the Caterpillar Corporation just won a major strike, a big blow to labor in Illinois. One of the techniques that they used was to make use of excess production facilities that they had created abroad, not for purposes of economic efficiency, but for class warfare. They could use their excess capacity, production capacity abroad, to undermine domestic workers, which they did, along with other measures such as the use of permanent replacement workers in violation of international conventions. The United States has been censured for that by the International Labor Organization, but of course doesn’t care. These are contributory factors to greater worker intimidation, and they’re related to the lack of constraints on capital flow. In the Third World, it ends up with miserable poverty and structural adjustment programs and so on. Here, it leads to a fairy-tale economic boom based on growing worker insecurity. Well, that’s the international economic system in a very quick nutshell.

What about the international political system, based on the U.N. Charter? That one, we can go through very — we can be brief. The fundamental principle of the United Nations Charter is a flat prohibition against the threat or use of force in international affairs. Sole exception is either self-defense if somebody attacks you, until the Security Council acts, or else when authorized by the Security Council. Well, we’ve just been through a dramatic illustration of how — of the status of this principle, namely the Iraq crisis. There was a good deal of discussion of what measures the United States should take. Should it do this? Should it do that? Should it do the other thing? But I couldn’t find any discussion at all of the idea that maybe we should live up to what is technically the supreme law of the land under the Constitution, namely, the United Nations Charter, which bars the United States from doing anything except on the specific authorization of the Security Council. That wasn’t even an option, so that’s not considered. In fact, if you read Secretary of State Albright’s statements and others, President Clinton and the rest, they simply said, “We will act as we determine appropriate in the judgment of our so-called national interest.” If we decide that we will use force or threaten force, nobody’s going to change that, because we regard ourselves as a rogue state, which is free from any international obligations, and certainly any conditions imposed by the U.N. Charter.

Well, that’s dead, the Charter’s words, thanks to the actions of the most powerful states. And there’s nothing new about this. More than 10 years ago, back in 1986, the United States even went so far as to veto a Security Council resolution which called on all states to observe international law, mentioning no one in particular, but everyone knew who they meant. It was an oblique reference to the fact that the World Court had just determined that the United States was guilty of what the court called unlawful use of force, a polite way of referring to aggression, in its terrorist war against Nicaragua. And, of course, the U.S. rejected the judgment of the court with complete contempt, as did intellectual opinion. But then it went to the Security Council, where the U.S. vetoed a resolution calling on states to observe international law, and it then proceeded to veto several General Assembly resolutions with the same — you can’t technically veto the General Assembly resolution, but when the U.S. votes against it, if the vote is, let’s say, 150 to one, as it often is, the resolution is essentially vetoed. So, this is old. The political — international political system is basically weapons that you can use against the weak.

Well, let’s turn to the third pillar of the new world order, the Universal Declaration. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is based on the principle — the fundamental principle of it is given in the phrase, “universal.” The provisions of the Universal Declaration are to have equal standing. That is, there are no grounds for what is called relativism, self-serving relativism, a decision to selectively use — adopt one or another of the provisions. And there certainly are no grounds for the particularly ugly form of selective relativism, which involves appeal to the Universal Declaration as a weapon against enemies. Now, this, there was a vast amount of discussion about this just about five years ago. There was a conference at Vienna in 1993 on the Universal Declaration. There was — you look back at the press, many of you will remember, there was a deluge of impressive rhetoric which was praising Washington’s courage in standing up against — in upholding the universality of the Universal Declaration against what were called Third World relativists, people who appeal to Asian values or other deviations from the sacred principles. Well, those are good principles, maybe even noble principles, and we can ask how well they have fared over the years, concentrating on the most important case, the most powerful state, the self-appointed guardian of global virtue and defender of the universality of the Universal Declaration, and apart from those objective facts, the state that’s, of course, most important for us, for the obvious reason that we share responsibility for what it does, either by lending support or by tacit acquiescence.

Well, you look at the Universal Declaration, you find that its provisions fall into two major categories. The first is what are called civil and political rights, the second what are called socioeconomic rights. Let’s start with the civil and political rights. The U.D., the Universal Declaration, is not very well known in the United States. So, you can ask your friends to list the resolutions, and you probably won’t get very good answers. But there is one article which is very well known, the most famous of all. That’s Article 13. It says everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own. The reason why that is very well known is that every year on Human Rights Day, December 10th, December 10th, there were huge demonstrations and big advertisements and so on denouncing the Soviet Union — correctly — for rejecting Article 13 and not allowing Soviet Jews to leave. So, that’s Article 13.

Actually, that’s part of Article 13. Actually, what Article 13 says is something a little different, and I have never seen the final words quoted in all of this, in all of this massive publicity. What Article 13 says is everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and return to his own country. Well, those final words are omitted. Their meaning was spelled out on December 11th, 1948, the day after the acceptance of the Universal Declaration in U.N. Resolution 194, which was unanimously accepted, as well, and which stated that Palestinian refugees who had fled or been expelled from their homes had the right of return, or, if they chose not to return, of compensation. The compensation would have been no small matter. The government of Israel secretly — it’s now released in secret documents — estimated the compensation costs at that time at about a billion dollars, which would be roughly $6 billion today, not counting interest, far greater than German reparations. Well, that’s Resolution 194. That’s Article 13. Half of it states that anyone, and specifically Palestinians — they were the ones they were talking about — have the right to return to their own country.

Well, that’s — the history of this is kind of interesting. If you think it through, you’ll notice that the most passionate and vocal defenders of Article 13 were — and the ones who were most angrily denouncing the Soviet Union for rejecting it, are, in fact, the strongest opponents of Article 13. They would never have considered for a moment permitting Article 13 to apply. Article 13 — the Resolution 194, calling for the right of Palestinians to return, that was voted, as I mentioned, unanimously, and again every year, year after year, it was endorsed — completely hypocritically, of course. No one really meant it. But notice that this is a case of really extreme relativism. We take an article of the Universal Declaration and decide that the last five words of it don’t exist, the ones that apply in a fashion which the powerful — in this case, the United States and its clients — do not accept. That’s relativism pushed to an extreme, apart from the hypocrisy.

To the credit of the Clinton administration, they did end the hypocrisy. In 1993, for the first time, the United States voted against Resolution 194, along with Israel. That rescinds the second half of Article 13. The first half is now irrelevant with the Soviet Union gone. So there’s no more hypocrisy. Article 13 is simply removed from the Universal Declaration by U.S. fiat. As for the refugees, the millions of refugees, they have been disappeared, to borrow a term of our Latin American clients. The so-called peace process offers them — doesn’t even mention them, offers them nothing. Well, that’s Article 13. It’s relativism triumphant.

Let’s move on to Article 14. Article 14 says that everyone has the right to seek and enjoy asylum from persecution — Haitians, for example. Right in the middle of the Vienna conference, in fact, just as it opened, 87 more Haitians were captured by Clinton’s illegal blockade of the island and forcibly returned to their torture chamber. There was a terrorist military regime at the time which was carrying out brutal murders and assassinations. This event was virtually unmentioned in the press, in the national press, unmentioned in The Boston Globe. It did make page 68, was mentioned in a story on another topic. So, that’s everyone having the right to seek and enjoy asylum from persecution.

The Clinton administration, of course, didn’t invent this. This policy of forcibly returning Haitians to terror and oppression goes back to Jimmy Carter. There was an agreement made between Carter and the — an informal agreement between Carter and the dictator of Haiti, Duvalier, to return refugees, that in violation of Article 14. That agreement was formalized under the Reagan administration, so there’s a formal arrangement to illegally blockade Haiti and force the refugees back. That was continued under the Bush administration.

But it did change. It changed in January 1991. What had happened was that Haiti had its first democratic election, and to everyone’s surprise, a very lively and vibrant popular movement, based in the hills and in the slums, which nobody had been paying attention to, succeeded in sweeping its own candidate into office, a populist priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. That was a very impressive demonstration of democracy in action. The United States was totally appalled. It had very confidently expected the victory of its own candidate, a World Bank — former World Bank official, who got 14% of the vote. The U.S. was instantly hostile and tried to undermine the regime. It terminated aid. It actually maintained aid, but it switched it to opponents of the government in the business community. It also changed the refugee policy. Up until that time, refugees had been forcibly returned. After the democratic regime was established, refugee flow slowed to a trickle. In fact, it actually reversed, because people were returning to the country in a moment of hope. But the U.S. at that point began to accept asylum claims, in fact, at 50 times the previous rate during the democratic interlude.

Well, things returned to normal seven months later, when there was a military coup that instituted huge terror, with tacit support of the Bush and Clinton administrations. But it did also change refugee policy, moving it back into direct violation of Article 14, with another blockade forcing people back to terror. Well, that’s Article 14. It’s not the only example, but maybe the most dramatic one.

Let’s move on to Article 19. Article 19 says that everyone has the freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media. Well, there’s no law that bars that in the United States, but the institutional structures very clearly do prevent it, and quite radically. So, there’s no law that bars me from saying now, correctly, that the United States has been one of the leading opponents, maybe the leading opponent, given its strength, of the three major pillars of the postwar order: the Bretton Woods system, the U.N. Charter and the Universal Declaration. There’s no law that prevents me from saying that the United States attacked South Vietnam under the Kennedy administration in 1961, then extended the war to all of Indochina. Or there’s no war to — law that prevents me from doing what I just did, pointing out that the World Court condemned the U.S. for unlawful use of force in Nicaragua and that the U.S. was carrying out a major terrorist war in the region, in large part a war against the church. There’s nothing that prevents saying all these things, but they’re not part of — to say that people have access to relevant information about that would be a joke. They certainly don’t, either in the media or the schools or the universities or the journals of opinion, or, for that matter, in most of academic scholarship. That’s institutional structure — it’s not laws — which, in effect, undermine Article 19.

Let me just take one example, which is current and rather dramatic and potentially of quite great significance. That’s the — has to do with the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, the MAI. You’ll recall that last fall there was huge hubbub about fast track. There’s a lot to say about that, but I’ll put it aside. But one element of the fast track discussion was that, almost certainly, the MAI was a major factor entering into it. In fact, even before the fast-track legislation had been introduced, the U.S. Council for International Business had demanded of — “requested,” I suppose, is the word — of the Clinton administration that they include the MAI as a central element in fast track.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Noam Chomsky. He is a longtime political activist, writer and professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of numerous books and articles. His latest book, The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo. We’ll be back with Professor Chomsky in a minute.

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AMY GOODMAN: This is Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue with professor Noam Chomsky talking about the new world order, the end of the century, human rights and globalization.

NOAM CHOMSKY: And surely that was true. That’s a lot more important than, say, bringing Chile into NAFTA or the kinds of things that were talked about. All of that was known. All of this has been known, but suppressed. Can’t find anything about it in discussion. Why is that the case? The corporate world was enthusiastic, but it understood perfectly well that the public was opposed. It was not voted through, which is quite a victory for grassroots activism.

The reason was explained by The Wall Street Journal during this period. It said that — although they regarded fast track as what they called a “no-brainer.” It’s so obvious that we should have it, that you can’t even discuss it. They said that critics have what they called an ultimate weapon — namely, the public is opposed. And it’s kind of difficult to deal with that. The public is what Alexander Hamilton once called “the great beast.” And when the great beast gets out of its cage, you get into all kinds of trouble.

Why should the public have been opposed to fast track, incidentally? Well, there was very little discussion of what it was all about, but people were instinctively opposed, and for good instincts. Contrary to what was being discussed, fast track didn’t have anything to do with free trade, for one thing because the agreements they had in mind aren’t really free trade agreements, but for another because the issue was not trade at all. The issue was democracy. The fast-track legislation allows the president to negotiate trade agreements without any public knowledge or any public or, for that matter, congressional participation. Congress is simply offered the option to say yes or no, which means you say yes. The most ardent advocate of free trade would oppose fast track if they happen to believe in democracy, that if they happen to believe that the public has a right to know what’s happening to them and have a voice in shaping policy. Well, all of that was suppressed. The major issue, the MAI, was suppressed — again, all known, but suppressed for good reasons. You don’t want the great beast to find out what’s going on and to serve as the ultimate weapon against what the serious people intend, intend to push through.

The free press in the United States and the intellectuals were super disciplined in violating Article 19. There was virtually nothing about it. Last November, 25 members of Congress sent a letter to the White House in which they said, “It has come to our attention” — through the efforts of grassroots activists and public interest groups. They said, “It has come to our attention that for almost three years the White House has been negotiating a very comprehensive trade agreement in secret.” And they asked, “How can this be possible, given that, under the Constitution, international commerce has to be — is the province of the Congress, not the president, and furthermore, the terms of the treaty,” which had been leaked — they had been illicitly obtained and leaked — “the terms of the agreement endorse investor rights, corporate rights, that go far beyond the provisions of U.S. law. So, how can this be going on?” Well, they didn’t get any real response. They got the kind — you know, sort of a vacuous letter a couple of months later. This was all known to the press, but unreported.

However, there was a kind of response, and quite an interesting one. The White House made its public statement, the only one I know of, on the MAI. And in that statement, an undersecretary of state and the trade representative assured their audience that the Clinton administration was fervently committed to the ideals of democracy, and it was making sure that, as they put it, the domestic constituencies that have a vital stake in this issue are informed and directly involved. And in fact, they said the U.S. is leading the way at the OECD in ensuring that this will be the case.

This public statement, as far as I know, was never reported. But it’s an interesting one. If you think it through, it tells you very clearly what — how the democratic process and the Universal Declaration are conceived by those in power. So, who are the domestic constituencies who are directly involved and have a stake? Well, not Congress, because they weren’t informed. Certainly not the public. They were kept out of it totally, thanks to the free press and its commitment to Article 19 of the UD. But there were domestic constituencies which were informed and intimately involved, like the U.S. Council for Business Operations.

Well, you think it through — it’s not a very hard job — you learn an important lesson, one that really ought to be taught in eighth grade civics and graduate departments of political science and so on. It’s a lesson that’s — the powerful rarely express with such vulgar clarity their total contempt for democracy and their fear and hatred of the great beast. So, it makes sense, makes good sense, for all of this to be suppressed. Article 14 is just too dangerous to power to be allowed to survive. Article 19, the one that grants people the right of access to information through the media and so on.

Well, it’s kind of interesting that — and very interesting and an important lesson that despite the valiant efforts of the free press to keep the great beast uninformed, it nevertheless escaped the cage. Grassroots opposition became so powerful that the OECD, the rich countries, were forced to back down. The target date for the MAI was April 27th, and they couldn’t sign. And they explained why. They said there’s just too much opposition. That’s quite a victory for grassroots opposition, grassroots organizing, confronting the most powerful concentration of power in the world, maybe that ever existed, the rich countries in the OECD, the transnational corporations, the international financial institutions all strongly in favor of it, free press completely backing it almost, with rare exceptions, as in Canada, and nevertheless, they couldn’t ram it through.

The reaction has been interesting in the business press. So, the Financial Times of London, which is, as I said, the major international business journal, they had an article bewailing this outcome. They said that “hordes of vigilantes” — I’m quoting it — “hordes of vigilantes” had overwhelmed the OECD and the corporate world, using their “organizational abilities” and their “strong finances” and their “influence with the media.” I’m quoting all of this. In the U.S., the influence with the media was zero. It was barely above elsewhere in the OECD. But the point is that even the slightest breach in total subordination is regarded as a catastrophe to the totalitarian mind.

The article goes on to say that it will be necessary to drum up business support to beat back the hordes. You know, just overwhelmed by the vigilantes. They then quote diplomats and World Trade Organization officials who fear, quoting, that there may no longer be — “it may no longer be possible to do deals behind closed doors” and submit them for rubber-stamping by parliament, as in the good old days. The Australian press — it’s important. People feel — you know, many people feel, quite unjustly, discouraged and gloomy about the opportunities to do things, but there have been really remarkable victories in the last couple of years, and this is one of the most dramatic of them. And the business world knows it, even if they won’t tell you.

The press in Australia blamed what they called the “xenophobic hysteria” of the “unholy alliance of aid groups, labor and environmentalists.” A column — yeah, really bad news. In The New Republic, a columnist wailed about what he called “the flat earth and black helicopter crowd” that are on the loose, determined to find out what’s being done to them by the serious guys, who are used to doing deals behind closed doors and then having them rubber-stamped. Well, you know, that’s important. The threat of democracy is quite real, and it’s a major and encouraging victory for popular activism against very great odds. The game isn’t over, of course. Class war is much too serious a matter to relinquish.

But let’s proceed to the universality of the Universal Declaration, of having dismissed Articles 13, 14 and 19 as inoperative by virtue of the extreme relativism of the United States with regard to the Universal Declaration. Well, these articles all fall within civil and political rights. That’s the category that the U.S. considers privileged. I’ll return to some more in that category if there’s time. But first, let’s have a look at the second category, the sociopolitical rights.

Well, according to the principle of universality, these have the same status as the political and civil rights. But the leaders of the Western relativist challenge, they insist that the Universal Declaration must be modified in accord with their values, which assign no status to the socioeconomic principles. Jeane Kirkpatrick once described them as a “letter to Santa Claus,” not to be taken seriously.

Morris Abram, who’s the U.S. representative to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights — was a few years ago — he spelled that out in explaining Washington’s opposition to a convention that was being considered, the Convention on the Right to Development. Here’s the definition of it: the right of individuals, groups and peoples to participate in, contribute to and enjoy economic, social, cultural and political development in which all human rights can be fully realized. Abram pointed out that — Morris Abram pointed out that these are not rights. In fact, they’re preposterous, he said. They’re, in fact, a dangerous incitement. The error of the Convention on the Right to Development is that it endorses the principle that everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. Notice, that’s a virtual paraphrase of the right of development that’s preposterous and a dangerous incitement, so, therefore, that must be preposterous, even a dangerous incitement. And we therefore abrogate Article 25 of the Universal Declaration, which I’ve just quoted. Notice that it includes the right to security. And in fact, it’s worker insecurity that is the key to the fairy tale, as the saintly Alan has explained. Well, the U.S. vetoed the Declaration on the Right to Development, effectively nullifying Article 25. I don’t have to bother spending time on how well Article 25 is observed here.

There are other elements involved in Article 25. The World Health Organization has pointed out that what it calls the devastation of hunger isn’t — is clearly in violation of Article 25. It’s transparent. They also pointed out that there are more deaths every two years from hunger than during both World Wars. But that has no status from the relativist standard of the rich. In fact, the U.S. acts forthrightly to increase hunger. And that’s the — the most striking example of that is the embargo against Cuba since 1962, which is the longest sanction in history and the only one that effectively bars food and medicine. That’s a direct violation of Article 25. It’s also a direct violation of a principle that the United States itself has introduced into the — at the Human Rights Commission. The U.S. — at the Commission, the United States introduced a resolution declaring that the deliberate impeding of delivery of food and medical supplies to civilian populations is a violation of international humanitarian law, and those who commit it or order such acts are to be held individually responsible. That’s fair and accurate. It’s an accurate interpretation of international law, meaning people responsible for this should be brought before international tribunals. The reference is to Bosnia, but, of course, it applies very clearly to every president of the United States since the early 1960s. That, however, would be completely incomprehensible to Western relativists.

Time’s going on, and I won’t have time to run through the rest, but if you run through the rest of the socioeconomic provisions, you discover that the respect for them is approximately comparable. The U.S. opposition to the Universal Declaration is so extreme and so deeply internalized among educated people that they simply can’t comprehend when it’s challenged. And that leads to some very strange results. For example, in The New York Times on Human Rights Day a couple years ago, December 10th, the editors condemned the countries of Asia that, as they put it, reject the Universal Declaration and call instead for addressing the more basic needs for people, for food and shelter, medical aid and schools — yeah, exactly in conformity with the Universal Declaration. But so, how can that be rejection? Well, the reasoning is very simple. The United States rejects these provisions, so, therefore, they’re null and void, and by upholding them, the Third World relativists are rejecting them.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Noam Chomsky is a longtime political activist, writer and professor of linguistics at MIT, author of numerous books and articles on foreign policy, on human rights, on international affairs.

That does it for today’s program. Democracy Now! is produced by María Carrión and David Love. Errol Maitland is our technical director. Special thanks to David Barsamian of Alternative Radio. I’m Amy Goodman, from the studios of WBAI in New York. Thanks for listening to another edition of Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now!