Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

it’s what has sometimes been called an emerging “de facto world government.” That’s what all of the new international trade agreements are about, N.A.F.T.A., G.A.T.T., and so on; it’s what the E.E.C. [European Economic Community] is about; it’s increasingly taking shape in international financial organizations like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Trade Organization, the G-7 planning meetings of the rich industrial countries, and so on and so forth. These are all efforts to try to centralize power in a world economic system geared towards ensuring that “policy is insulated from politics”—in other words, towards ensuring that the general populations of the world have no role in decision-making, and that the level of policy planning is raised to be so remote from people’s knowledge and understanding and input that they have absolutely no idea about the various decisions that are being made that will affect their lives, and certainly couldn’t influence them if they did. The World Bank has its own term for the phenomenon: they call it “technocratic insulation.”