Chomsky Figures It Out Again
Every now and then you hear something that completely adjusts your viewpoint. For us, many of these occasions occur when listening to Noam Chomsky. He gave a talk at MIT called the Militarization of Space, which discussed how industrial subsidy works by taking money from taxpayers and performing early research, private industry then come by and make private profits off of these investments. Examples include the following:
- Commercial aircraft based upon military investment in bombers
- Semiconductors based upon government research into integrated circuits
- The internet, based upon DARPA and university investment
- Computers based upon government research into air defense
- Pharmaceuticals based upon taxpayer research which is then given away to industry through “public-private partnerships.”
(hold, on we will get to the cancer research implication)
This subsidization of privileged industries always has some ridiculous pretext. During the space race, which was partially a cover for the development of solid fuel rockets that were eventually used to carry a nuclear payload — called Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), people from the very top get on board to confuse and mystify the public.
“We don’t go to the Moon because it is easy, we go to the Moon because it is hard.” – John F Kennedy
Here is a direct quote:
In the early 60’s it shifted to a space cover, so it is extremely important to put a man on the moon for no known reason other than to provide massive funding for high technology industry. There was no other purpose. When people got bored watching some cloun stumbling around on the moon for no purpose, they change the story. There was also a story about competing with the Russians.
Things are changing, pentagon funding is declining, but NIH funding is increasing. Its generally understood that the cutting edge of the economy was electronics based, and in order to get the public to pay the costs and take the risks for that, The best way to do it is through the Pentagon, the space program or something like that. The cutting edge of the future is expected to be biology based, so genetic engineering, biotech, and so on. If you look at the spin offs from MIT, they were small electronics firms, which then got bought up by Ratheon and IBM, now they are little biotechnology firms. They will get bought up by the big pharmaceutical companies. So you have to get the public to pay the costs and take the risks. So you have growth of the NIH funding. However, there must be a new pretext. You can have a defense pretext such as protection from bioterrorism, and so on. But the main pretext has been, we are going to cure cancer or something like that. Now if you talk to the scientists working on molecular biology in the cancer institute, they don’t really think they are going to cure cancer, but you can sell it to congress and the public that way. and then go and do your work on big molecules.
Cancer as a Pretext for Moving Public Money to Biotech Industry
Cancer is the new cover for industrial policy. Cancer is used to scare the public into providing public resources to research something that will never be cured, in order to provide a gift to private biotech companies. What is also unmentioned is that cancer is strongly related to the exposure of artificially created chemicals, which were previously invested in in order to provide “better living through chemistry.” What is guaranteed is that the public will fund this policy, and will receive no patents or income from this policy (all of which will go to private industry) and the ordinary citizens will have no say over how a very dangerous technology (biotech) is regulated. Another beneficiary of all of this biotech research will be agricultural seed and herbicide companies such as Monsanto and Dow. Biotech is not merely a benign technology, it has a number of uses that have the potential of getting completely out of control. Monstanto has already created terminator seeds that only grow for one generation and are sterile after that (promoting more seed purchases from Monsanto) this seed will cross with fertile natural seed, possibly sterilizing large areas of agriculture. There are many other negative ramifications to biotech that are not being explained to the public. Furthermore Monsanto and others virtually own the EPA. Secondly, this biotech industry is highly unregulated. In fact, the major companies would deny consumers the right to know if the foods they buy have been genetically modified.
