By KEANE BHATT

For decades, Noam Chomsky has been an analyst and activist working in support of the Haitian people. In addition to his revolutionary linguistics career at MIT, he has written, lectured and protested against injustice for 40 years. He is co-author, along with Paul Farmer and Amy Goodman of Getting Haiti Right This Time: The U.S. and the Coup. His analysis "The Tragedy of Haiti" from his 1993 book Year 501: The Conquest Continues is available for free online. This interview was conducted in late February 2010 by phone and email. The interviewer thanks Peter Hallward for his kind assistance.

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Labor and the Democrats

By DAVID MACARAY

“I worry that no matter how cynical I become, it’s never going to be enough.”

—Lily Tomlin

The way the Republican Party, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and American Enterprise Institute (not to mention the mainstream media) tell it, organized labor is able to get the Democrats to do pretty much anything it wants them to do because, as everybody knows, the Democrats are in labor’s pocket.  That’s how powerful America’s unions are. 

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A devastating 7.0 earthquake hit Haiti Tuesday January 12th. Thousands have been killed, and much Port au Prince leveled. This follows a series of deadly hurricanes in late 2008, and decades of foreign-influenced economic terrorism, culminating in a US-led coup in 2004, and continuing UN occupation. Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, is the only country to successfully liberate itself from slavery and the former colonial masters have not let them forget. Most people live on less than $2 a day, and many on less than $1. In April 2008 representatives of the ISC participated in an IWW delegation to Haiti where they met with workers and peasants struggling against neo-liberal slavery. We pledged our continued support to their struggle, and FW's donated generously to support their organizing, and again for aid following the hurricanes. Currently communications with Haiti are nearly impossible, but no doubt they will need our help again.

By DAVID MACARAY

One of life’s gross inequities is that the people who actually do the work receive relatively little in the way of credit or compensation, while the people in charge of the work—the ones who plan it, assign it, oversee and critique it—receive regular promotions and large paychecks. 

This discrepancy wouldn’t be so objectionable if it could be shown that the planning and supervisory aspects of the job were what made all the difference—that it was the boss’s contributions, the efforts of the guys in the front office, and not those of the workers on the floor, that determined the success or failure of a venture, but, unfortunately, that’s not always the case.

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