Noam Chomsky - The New Order of World Government
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1 The rapid escalation of transnational corporations - banking institutions, financial institutions
2 and so on - around them, there is also coalescing a network of structures of governance what the
3 worlds leading businesses pay for, the London Financial Times describes them as a de facto world
4 governement with such institutions as the IMF, the World Bank, the new World Trade Organisation,
5 the GATT, the G7 executive branches of the seven rich countries, that's a kind of a framework, of
6 a World Government, what they call it. A de facto world governmement, that also operates very re-
7 motely, in secret, without scrutiny, without accountability. Its primary constituants are in fact
8 precisely those transnational corporations and the financial institutions, and it reflects their
9 intrests. The new Trade Agreements (which is a rather misleading term in my opinion), but the new
10 Trade Agreements are accelerating this transfer of effective power towards these absolutist, un-
11 accountable instututions. This is now happening on a vast scale. Corporations themselves are ab-
12 solutist institutions. Power lies in the hands of owners and managers, the only debate is about
13 how you divvy out the shares. There is a fairly strict authority structure in a corporation. An
14 individual can sometimes enter into that hierarchy, which means you essentially take orders from
15 above an transfer orders down below. It's a fairly strict hierarchy, as much as any we know of in
16 any institution. If you're an outsider, you're not part of it, you have basically nothing to say.
17 You can rent yourself to it, that's called getting a job, you can buy what they sell if you like,
18 you can watch, but you can't see very much, because they operate mostly in secret. And now that
19 they're remote enough to be transnational, and have their governing institutions in Brussels and
20 Geneva and so on, they are even more operating in secret. Actually it is all well known and old
21 stuff. About ten years ago I was in a conference in Switserland on international affairs and one
22 of the participants was a swiss diplomatic historian. In fact, he told me he was THE swiss diplo-
23 matic historian from the university of Geneva, and we got kind of friendly and we were out having
24 a beer or something one night and he told me that the world job in the world was is to be a Swiss
25 diplomatic historian and he reason for that is quite simple. Diplomatic historians are people who
26 look at archival materials, primarily. They try to figure out what's going on by looking at the
27 archives. Well, in most counties, there is sort of a buffer between private power which basically
28 rules, and policy: the buffer's called the government. And governments do leave a kind of a paper
29 trail, and we're pretty good in that respect by comparative standards, so we wait thirty, thirty-
30 five years, and sometimes even earlier, and you get some kind of a record, in fact often quite an
31 interesting and complete record of what the governement was up to. But in Switserland, they don't
32 bother with the buffer. The corporations just rule straight so they make the decisions: the banks
33 and the transnationals and so on, and the corporations don't leave a paper trail at all. They are
34 secret societies. They are secret, absolutist organisations. If you learn anything about them, it
35 is because the multinational operations comittee in congress in the mid seventies, under pressure
36 of the popular movements of the sixties in fact got subpoenic power and released some information
37 about them and occasionally find out something in other ways. But basically, you learn nothing so
38 being a Swiss diplomatic historian without this kind of intervening level, leaves you with not a
39 lot to do, he was complaining. Well, we have something to do because there is this 'transmission
40 bill', but the picture is not all that different if you think about it, if you think about where
41 power actually is, how decisions are made, and how much you can find out about the centres of po-
42 wer. Well, this has its consequences, naturally. For example, the other aspects, the deficiencies
43 of democracy, I can use the word, I mean, absurditive, using the term democracy to refer to the
44 Soviet system of tiranny, in various respects we also have the same features, information is very
45 narrowly concentrated in pretty much the same hands as other decision making, the major media are
46 just huge corporations, selling people like you, selling audiences to other businesses to adver-
47 tisers, and that's the framework whithin which most of the rest operates. Actually we have a dif-
48 ferent information system and all sorts of different properties. One of these properties is that
49 people here have much less access - they have access - they don't seek access to other sources of
50 information, so the proportion of the population here that listens to foreign broadcasts is minu-
51 scule, and publications that are outside the very narrow and ridgid ideological framework reach a
52 statistically insignificant part of the population, nothing like, say, Soviets Amistad. There are
53 reasons for that, and they're interesting ones, but again, that's not the topic. With regard to
54 popular organisations that permit people to function in the political sphere: very limited, we do
55 not have functioning political parties, we do not have political clubs. There is very little in
56 that way, and furthermore, most people are so busy trying to survive, that even if such organisa-
57 tions existed, and even if information were readily available, there'd be a limited amount that
58 they could do with it, and under such conditions, again, democracy is a fairly thin read. I don't
59 want to suggest that here it's like soviet tirany, but some of the structures are quite similar.
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