Paul Interviews Noam Chomsky

I was honored to interview political and social activist Noam Chomsky in Cambridge today, as part of the long-awaited American Debtors Prison documentary film (still in progress, I'm afraid). Look for more details here when I announce the launch of the film-related website and podcast.

For now, a brief transcript excerpt follows:

So people are working hard. I mean we now have some of the lowest wages and highest working hours in the industrial world. You go back twenty five years and it was the reverse, as you'd expect in the richest country in the world. Well, that means people are working really hard. They're being deluged with propaganda, which is called advertising, and mass media, and cinema and so on, but it's just propaganda, which is designed to make you feel that your worth in life depends on how many useless commodities you pick up. And this starts with infants....

You got a family with a husband and a wife that are working hard to put food on the table. And back at night, you know, your kids want this, that, and the other thing because somebody else has them or they saw it on television. And okay, you get it for them, and it just keeps going. Pretty soon you're in a debt trap. And that's a traditional way to enslave people. They didn't invent it.

I mean, when there were slave revolts back in the early nineteenth century, in Jamaica, the Caribbean and so on. . . you had to figure out a way to keep the slaves under control once they were technically free. And everybody hit on the same technique: get them to want useless commodities. And then they go to the company store, and you tell them you're gonna give them a little credit, and--you know the game. Pretty soon you're back in slavery.

Thank you to Professor Chomsky for consenting to the interview, and to Bev for setting everything up.

All the best,
Paul