Chomsky Interview with Subrata Ghoshroy

Chomsky Discusses Economy, Military Hegemony

By Subrata Ghoshroy -- THE TECH -- October 28, 2008

This is the second of a three-part interview with Institute Professor Noam A. Chomsky, conducted in early September by Subrata Ghoshroy, a researcher in the Science, Technology, and Global Security Working Group at MIT. In this part, Ghoshroy and Chomsky discussed the development of the modern tech economy, the current economic crisis, and the power of U.S. propaganda.

Another version of this interview was previously published at Alternet.org.

Noam Chomsky: The New York Times happened to have an article by its economic correspondent in its magazine section [in August] about Obama.s economic programs. He talked about Reagan as the model of passionate commitment to free markets and reduction of the role of the state, and so on.

Where are these people? Reagan was the most protectionist president in post war American history. In fact, more protectionist than all others combined. He virtually doubled protective barriers. He brought in the Pentagon to develop the "factory of the future" to teach backward American management how to catch up on the Japanese lead in production. SEMATECH ["Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology"] was formed.

If it was not for Reagan.s protectionism and calling in of state power, we would not have a steel industry, or an automobile industry, or a semi-conductor industry or whatever they protected. They reindustrialized America by protectionism and state intervention.

All of this is washed away by propaganda as though it never happened. It is very interesting to look at a place like MIT which was right in the center of these developments. My department -- you are teaching a course in the Military Industrial Complex -- my department is an example of it.

I came here in the mid-50s. I don.t know the difference between a radio and a tape recorder, but I was in the electronics lab. I was perhaps the one person who refused to get clearance on principle. Not that it made any difference; everything was open anyway.

The electronics lab, along with the closely connected Lincoln Labs, was just developing the basis of the modern high tech economy. In those days, the computer was the size of this set of offices and vacuum tubes were blowing all over the place [with] computer printouts, paper running everywhere.

By the time they finally got computers down to the size of a marketable mainframe, some of the directors of the project pulled out and formed DEC [Digital Equipment Corporation], the first main frame producer.

IBM was in there at government expense learning how to move from punch cards to electronic computers. By the early l960s IBM was capable of producing its own computers, but no one could buy them. They were too expensive. So they were bought by the National Security Agency.

Bell Labs did develop transistors. That is about the only example you can think of a significant part of the high tech system which came out of private enterprise. But that is a joke too!

Bell Labs were able to run a great laboratory because they had a monopoly, so they could use monopoly pricing powers to set up a great laboratory. They worked on technology. Their transistor producer was Western Electric, who could not sell them on the market; they were too expensive. So the government bought about 100 percent of advanced transistors.

Finally, of course, all of this gets to the point where you can market them privately. It was not until the l980s after 30 years of development essentially in the state sector that these things became marketable commodities and Bill Gates could get rich.

The Internet was the same thing. I was here when they were starting to work on the Internet. It was not until l995 that it was privatized, after 30 years. If you look at the funding at MIT, in the l950s and l960s, it was almost entirely Pentagon. For a very simple reason, the cutting edge of the economy was electronics based.

A good cover for developing an electronics-based economy was the Pentagon. You sort of frighten people into thinking the Russians are coming, so they pay their taxes and their children and grandchildren have computers.

Through the 70s and 80s funding has been shifting to NIH. Why? Because the cutting edge of the economy is becoming biology-based. So, therefore, the state sector is shifting its priorities to developing biology-based industries.

In the meantime, all of this is going on with accolades to the free market. You don.t know whether to laugh or cry.

The point is, to get back to the new international economic order: it was a serious proposal which was immediately kicked out the window and UNCTAD was reduced to a data collecting agency with no policy initiatives and the new information order was destroyed, along with UNESCO.

What we had were the neo-liberal programs rammed down the throats of the poor. Although the rich did not accept them, and to the extent that they do accept them, it is harmful to them too.

This went along with the great shift to the liberalization of finance. It was a disaster in the making all along, serious economists have been pointing out since the early 70s that the freeing up of financial capital flows is just a disaster in the making, with in fact periodic crises.

Also, Reagan the great free marketer carried out one of the biggest bailouts in American history when he bailed out [and virtually nationalized] a major bank.

Subrata Ghoshroy: This was the Latin American crisis? Brazil?

NC: This was before that. This was Continental Illinois. Later they had the savings and loan crisis; Citibank was overexposed in Latin America. The federal government has to continually step in to insure that the financial institutions that it is letting run wild survive.

SG: Do you see any special characteristics to this crisis?

NC: This is apparently considerably worse, for one thing, because no one seems to understand what is really going on. There was clearly a housing bubble and some of the better, more serious economists began writing about it a couple of years ago.

So Dean Baker, for example, has been regularly pointing out that housing prices are completely unsustainable. Greenspan was saying, "Don.t worry about it." It is the Greenspan crisis. It has turned into a crisis for the entire credit industry. And a major one.

I don.t think that the banks and the hedge funds even understand the instruments that they are using, but they are very delicate and they could crash. I presume that the financial institutions are strong enough to be able to weather it somehow, but no one really knows. Just like no one knows whether China, Japan and Dubai and Singapore will continue to keep what from their point of view are poor investments in the U.S. economy, treasury securities, etc., or whether they will diversify.

If they diversify, what happens to the U.S. economy? The U.S. has become a low production, high consumption economy. What happens if the Chinese, the Japanese, and Dubai stop funding the American consumers? A lot of things could happen, but unlike poor countries, U.S. does not really have to pay its debts. There are a lot of ways to avoid doing so, but these are real hammer blows to the international economy, the kind that are not understood.

The bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie [Mac], was described pretty well by Martin Wolf, the economic correspondent for the Financial Times. He says it is outrageous, a case of the public taking the risks and being forced to pay for the foolishness and incompetence of the private management of the market institutions.

The public takes the risks and pays for the costs.

SG: So, the public debt goes up tremendously.

NC: Yes, enormously; liabilities from these takeovers are, I forget the number, but it is a substantial proportion of the national debt.

SG: They are talking about close to a $200 billion injection from the treasury.

NC: I think, it is something like one-third of the deficit, the public debt. It is huge. That is the public debt, that.s my grandchildren, you know. It is permitting financial institutions to run wild without regulation. So, if you allow unregulated capital, of course you will have corruption and disaster.

Read Adam Smith. He points out if you see two business men talking in the corner, they are probably arranging a conspiracy against the public. That.s their job. It is not that they are bad people. That is just what they are supposed to do.

Just like a corporation is not evil to try to maximize profit. If managers are not trying to maximize profit, they are breaking the law. They are not supposed to be ethical institutions; they are supposed to be operating in the interests of their shareholders.

SG: Because of the integrated nature of the global economy, are there others who would want to keep the American economy vibrant?

NC: Sure that.s why China buys U.S. treasury securities. They want to keep America spending. So, in a way that may be stabilizing, but it is a very uncertain kind of stability. They might decide to devote their resources to increase purchasing power inside China, for example, instead of inside the U.S. It is conceivable, which would mean a big shift in the international economy.

SG: If China makes a precipitous decision to do something -- for example, there is one fund, a Sovereign fund; it is $200 billion dollars -- and if they pull money out, will there be military threats from the U.S.?

NC: But what do the military threats mean from the U.S.? Of course, the U.S. outspends the rest of the world in military spending and is more technologically advanced. But what are they going to do? Are they going to bomb Beijing? I mean, they can.t [even] control Afghanistan.

Sure, they have a huge military, but I doubt that the U.S. will use it as a weapon. U.S. capacity to undermine governments by military threats has been declining in recent years.

Take Latin America, a traditional region where U.S. has regularly overthrown governments through military coups and so on, in the last 10 years it has been very hard. U.S. sponsored a military coup in Venezuela, but could not carry it off, had to back down, partly because the military coup was immediately overthrown by popular uprising and partly because of the uproar in Latin America, where they would not tolerate it any longer.

If you look at the history, it is quite a change. U.S. and France did effectively carry out a military coup in Haiti and threw out the government, but you know that Haiti is a desperate country. It was the richest colony in the world and the source of much of France.s wealth, but it has been tortured by France and then the U.S. for 200 years, now it barely survives. Overthrowing the government of Haiti was not that difficult a task.

SG: So, do you see a decline in the military ability of the U.S.?

NC: There is a very serious decline in the ability of the U.S. to undermine and overthrow governments. South America for the first time since the European conquest, 500 years, is moving uneasily, but noticeably, in the direction of independence and gaining sovereignty. The U.S. is unable to do much about it.

One of the main military bases for the United States until recently was Paraguay; the U.S. just lost Paraguay with the last election of a liberation theology priest. That was one of the few remaining U.S. military bases in South America. In Central America, which was devastated by Reaganite terrorist wars, nevertheless, there are beginnings of a recovery. In Honduras, which was the center of the whole U.S. terrorist apparatus, President Zelaya has been moving towards alliances with Venezuela. There is not much that the U.S. can do about it.

[The U.S. is] trying; the training of Latin American officers has risen very sharply. The School of the Americas has been renamed. In fact, if you look at U.S. aid to Latin America, the percentage of military aid, as compared to economic aid, is far higher now than at the peak of the cold war. I think that the U.S. is trying to rebuild some kind of military capacity to deal with its loss of control over Latin America. It used to be able to overthrow governments easily or destroy a country back in the l980s, but now it is harder.

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www.alternet.org/story/101290/chomsky%3A_"the_majority_of_the_world_supports_iran"/?page=entire

Subrata Ghoshroy: (Comparing India) with the situation in Latin America, there is a lot more explicit stance (in Latin America) against imperialism and toward independence.

Noam Chomsky: It exists (in India), but I think that India should be in the lead, as it was in the l950s when it was in the lead in the non-aligned movement.

SG: This is the tension in the Indian situation. The Indian government, the Congress Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party, they think NAM is anachronistic and a relic of the Cold War.

NC: I think that they are quite wrong. I think that it is a sign of the future. The positions of the Non-Aligned Movement, and the South Commission before it, and alongside of it, are pretty sound. A good indication of how sound they are is they are almost entirely suppressed in the West, which tells you a lot.

Take the question of Iranian enrichment. The U.S, of course, takes a militant position against it, which is kind of ironic because the same officials who are now having tantrums about it are the ones who supported the same programs under the shah. MIT is right at the center of that; I can remember in the l970s there was an internal crisis at MIT when the institute authorities pretty much sold the nuclear engineering department to the shah in a secret agreement. The agreement was that the Nuclear Engineering Department would bring in Iranian nuclear engineers, and in return, the shah would provide some unspecified -- but presumably large -- amount of money to MIT. When (this was) leaked, there was a lot of student protest and a student referendum -- something like 80 percent of students were opposed to it. There was so much turmoil, the faculty had to have a large meeting. Usually faculty meetings are pretty boring things; nobody wants to go. But this one, pretty much everybody came to it. There was a big discussion. It was quite interesting. There were a handful of people, of whom I was one, who opposed the agreement with the shah. But it passed overwhelmingly. It was quite striking that the faculty vote was the exact opposite of the student vote, which tells you something quite interesting, because the faculty are the students of yesterday, but the shift in institutional commitment had a major impact on their judgments -- a wrong impact, in my opinion. Anyway, it went through. Probably the people running the Iranian program today were trained at MIT. The strongest supporters of this U.S.-Iranian nuclear program were Henry Kissinger, Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.

SG: This was right around Nixon?

NC: This was in the mid-'70s. Kissinger now says, "How can Iran be pursuing a peaceful program when they have so much oil -- they don't need nuclear energy." In 1975 he was saying the opposite. He was saying, "Of course Iran has to develop nuclear energy. It cannot rely upon its oil resources." Kissinger was asked by the Washington Post why he had completely changed his judgment on this issue. He was quite frank and honest. He said something like, "They were an ally then, so they needed nuclear energy. Now they are an enemy, so they don't need nuclear energy." OK, I appreciate honesty. It is ironic to see this developing right now.

When you read the media on this, say the New York Times, the coverage is uniform. "Iran is defying the world." "Iran is defying the international community."

The fact of the matter is that the majority of the world supports Iran. The non-aligned movement supports Iran. The majority of the world is part of the non-aligned movement. But they are not part of the world, from the U.S. point of view. It is a striking illustration of the strength and depth of the imperial mentality. If the majority of the world opposes Washington, they are not part of the world. Strikingly, the American population is not part of the world. A large majority of Americans -- something like 75 percent -- agree that Iran has the right to develop nuclear energy, if it is not for nuclear weapons. But they are not part of the world either. The world consists of Washington and whoever goes along with it. Everything else is not the world. Not the majority of Americans. Not the majority of countries of the world.

All of this illustrates many things, among them the importance of the non-aligned movement. Just as the South Commission was important, the same is true of NAM. But the commission's important positions were never quoted or mentioned; they were treated as insignificant. They are not insignificant.

The same is true of NAM. India should be in the lead of ensuring that the voice of what is euphemistically called "developing countries" should be heard, should be influential and should be powerful. Not just what comes out of Washington and London!

(In India), on one hand, there has been significant growth and development in the past 20 years or so. On the other hand, the internal problems are simply overwhelming. If you look at the human development index, for example, when the neoliberal reforms, so-called, began, India was 125th or so. Now it is 128th, the last time I looked. Meaning that the fundamental internal problems of India which are so overwhelming, when you just even walk the streets, have clearly not been addressed. If you go to places like Hyderabad or Bangalore, you see wonderful laboratories, high-tech industries, software and a few miles away a sharp increase in peasant suicides coming from the same source. The same social and economic policies are driving both processes.

In places like West Bengal, there has been serious internal strife over land rights and industrial development, and I don't think that the Left has worked out a way to come to terms with that constructively. On issues like the U.S.-India nuclear pact, from what I read of the Left's positions, I have found them quite disappointing. They seem to be opposing the pact on nationalist grounds, that India might be surrendering some element of sovereignty. But the real problem is quite different; it is a major step toward undermining the Non-Proliferation Treaty -- as India's refusal to join it and its secret bomb was in the first place. You know that India does have a tradition about disarmament and non-alignment and so on going back to Nehru, of pressing for nuclear disarmament, non-alignment and so on, and the U.S.-India pact is directly counter to that honorable tradition. And I would have expected the Left to be emphasizing this.

SG: And what you are saying is that this is where the Left should be much more vocal and active?

NC: To an extent, they are. It is very hard to break through Western propaganda. This was dramatically true in the l970s, in the early period of decolonization, when there were calls for a new international economic order, a new information order -- a restructuring of the world to give the voiceless some voice. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) was an important institution at the time. UNESCO was pressing for an international information order in which the Third World would have a voice. There was bitter opposition to that here. It was really brutal here; UNESCO was practically destroyed.

SG: And the U.S. left UNESCO for a while?

NC: First it practically destroyed UNESCO, and then it left it for a long time. Media and commentators were full of outright lies about how UNESCO was trying to destroy freedom of the press, and so on and so forth. What they were trying to do, very clearly, was to break the Western monopoly and to allow independent voices to appear. That is intolerable to Western intellectual communities. We have to have an absolute monopoly; otherwise it violates freedom.

There is quite a good book on this running through the details. It is called Hope and Folly, and it could never be reviewed, because of the devastating story that it tells about the efforts of the media and the intellectual community and so on to destroy UNESCO out of fear that it might open the international communications system to Third World voices. Take a look at the book -- it is very devastating, and what happened is incredible.

The same thing happened with the new international economic order. Instead of a new international economic order of the kind that UNCTAD was pressing for, which made a lot of sense, what happened was the opposite. That's when the West -- with U.S. and Britain in the lead -- rammed through neoliberal programs, which have been pretty much of a disaster. International economists often say it has been a great success, pointing to average growth rates and the rise out of poverty during the past 30 years. That is a scam. The rising growth rates and rise out of poverty are primarily from China. But China was not following neoliberal rules. They were pursuing a policy of export orientation with a state-directed economy. State-directed export orientation is not the Washington consensus. Muddling the two things together is real dishonesty.

SG: I see. Because of sheer numbers in China? A billion Chinese are growing

NC: If you have a billion Chinese who are growing, the average growth rate increases. So you have an increase in average growth rate mainly through the efforts of countries that are not following the rules. The same is true of India. One of the reasons that India escaped the Asian financial crisis was that it maintained financial controls.

SG: Right, which would not be the case anymore.

NC: Not anymore. But in that period (it was the case). It escaped the disaster that took place. Take South Korea: It has had spectacular growth. It is heralded as a success of neoliberal principles. That is not even a bad joke. In South Korea, the controls over capital were so strict that a capital export could bring the death penalty. What does that have to do with neoliberalism? It was a state-directed economy, more or less on the Japanese model. Incidentally, just to make the irony even more extreme, one of the leading state-based economies in the world is the United States. Surely, everyone at MIT knows that. What pays their salaries? MIT is part of the funnel by which the taxpayer pays the costs and takes the risks of high-tech development, and the profits are ultimately privatized.

SG: Absolutely.

NC: That's where you get computers and Internet and the biotech. The entire high-tech economy almost derives from the dynamic state sector.

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Subrata Ghoshroy: If Obama wins, will that bring any changes in U.S. foreign policy?

Noam Chomsky: The prior question is whether he will win. My assumption all along is that McCain will probably win. Now that he has picked Sarah Palin as his vice president, I think those probabilities have increased, for reasons that are understood by party managers and have been expressed very well by McCain’s campaign manager.

He said the election is not about issues, it is about character and personality, and so on. Meaning, it is not a serious election. That is the way U.S. elections are run. Issues are marginalized. They don’t talk about them and the media coverage is about Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermons or Sarah Palin’s pregnant daughter.

McCain is supposed to be a specialist on national security issues. Why? Suppose that some Russian pilot was shot down bombing heavily populated areas in Kabul and tortured by Reagan’s freedom fighters in the l980s. Well, we might feel sorry for him, but does that make him an expert on national security?

But McCain is an expert on national security because he was shot down bombing heavily populated urban areas in Hanoi and he was tortured by the Vietnamese. Well, we feel sorry for him, but he is no expert on national security. But you can’t say that. These elections are run by the public relations industry. The intellectual community goes along. Issues are marginalized. …

In that terrain, the Republicans have a big advantage. They also have a formidable slander and vilification machine which has yet to go into full operation. They can appeal to latent racism, as they are already doing. They can construct a class issue. Obama is the elite Harvard liberal; McCain is the down to earth ordinary American, and it so happens that he is one of the richest people in the Senate.

Same thing they pulled for Bush. You have to vote for Bush because he is the kind of guy you would like to meet in a bar and have a beer with; he wants to go back to his Ranch in Texas and cut brush. In reality, he was a spoiled fraternity boy who went to an elite university and joined a secret society where the future rulers of the world are trained, and was able to succeed in politics because his family had wealthy friends.

I am convinced, personally, that Bush was trained to mispronounce words to say things like “mis-underestimate” or “nu-cu-ler” so liberal intellectuals would make jokes about it; then the Republican propaganda machine could say see these elitist liberals who run the world are making fun of us ordinary guys who did not go to Harvard (but he did go to Yale, but forget it).

These are games run by the public relations industry, which is a huge industry. It spends enormous resources manipulating attitudes and opinions. They design and control elections so that the public in effect is marginalized.

They keep away from issues for a very good reason. We know a lot about American public opinion. It is a very heavily polled country, mainly because business wants to keep its finger on the public pulse. So there is a ton of information, valid information.

On a host of major issues, domestic and international, both political parties are well to the right of the population. So therefore, you don’t want to talk about issues, not if you want to keep the business parties in power.

Further, the population is aware of this, but the press won’t publish it: 80 percent of the population says the country is run by a few big interests, looking out for themselves, not the benefit of the people. By about 3-1, people object to the fact that issues are not at the center of the campaigns. They want issues to be discussed, not personalities.

Party managers know that, but they won’t go along with it; it is too dangerous. They have got to make sure that the two factions of the business party, Republicans and Democrats, stay in power. So you don’t deal with public concerns.

SG: Some in the Left and progressive community say that Obama’s campaign is a historic opportunity.

NC: I prefer that Obama be elected without any illusions. He is a centrist Democrat who will very likely back away from the more extreme, crazed elements of the Bush programs, but will go pretty much to the center.

After all, what is traditional U.S. policy? So people were outraged by the Bush doctrine of preventive war? What was the Clinton doctrine? It was official. The Clinton doctrine was explicit, it was literally more extreme: The U.S. has the right to use force unilaterally to protect markets and access to raw materials without even the pretexts that Bush insisted on.

He [Clinton] said it quietly in a message to Congress. He was not brazen; he was not waving his fist in their face. We could pretend it was not there. Why did they bomb Serbia? It can’t be reported here because it conflicts with the image of America’s nobility and Serb villainy. We know from the highest levels of the Clinton administration, but it can’t be reported.

Strobe Talbot, the highest Clinton administration official in charge of Eastern

European affairs, wrote an introduction to a book by his associate John Norris, in which he says: If you want to understand the thinking at highest levels of the Clinton Administration during the Kosovo war, this is the book that you have to read.

Norris speaks with full acquaintance of the Clinton administration at top level. What does Norris say? He says that the bombing had nothing to do with concern with Kosovar Albanians. It was because Serbia was not carrying out the required social and economic reforms. In other words, it was the last holdout in Europe to the Clintonite neo-liberal policies.

That is straight from the top level of the Clinton administration. You won’t find a word about it in the press or in the intellectual journals because it conflicts with the party line.

This is a very free country, but also a much disciplined country. Intellectuals keep to the party line. They don’t depart very far. Even though they are free to and they won’t be punished for it. …

The same is true of Iran, the major upcoming foreign policy issue. The mere fact that the U.S. and its collaborators happen to be opposed by most of the world and by the majority of the American population cannot be published. Nobody knows it.

Going back to the election, it is the same story, major issues of concern to the population have to be marginalized. It must stay focused on personalities; on character; on qualities. Everything we hear about McCain is that he is a war hero and so on.

Even liberal critics, like James Carroll in the Boston Globe, says of this noble character that people who opposed the Vietnam war have to go to McCain to apologize. Why do we have to go to McCain to apologize? In Russia, did people who opposed the invasion of Afghanistan go to some pilot who was shot down to apologize? American and western intellectuals can’t understand this, can’t comprehend this.…

Take Obama, I think that the talk about the surge is mostly false, but let’s suppose it were true. Suppose that the U.S. surge had succeeded in cutting down violence in Iraq. What would that mean? That would mean that Bush was almost as successful as Putin was in Chechnya. The Russians destroyed the place, there were massacres, but it is quiet, it is rebuilding. The New York Times says there is a building boom, there is electricity. Do we praise Putin for that? No! we condemn him for that.

The fact that they were able to pacify a country, you don’t praise them for that. On the other hand, if the U.S. were able to achieve anything like that in Iraq, it would lead to accolades and praise. And Obama would be silenced. After all, he had no principled criticism of the war. His only criticism was that it was pointless, silly, or waste of money.

SG: Or, that it was a distraction from the war in Afghanistan, which has become the standard line. It gives the Democrats a chance to be for a war.

NC: It is kind of interesting. As the pretexts for the Iraq war are collapsing, weapons of mass destruction, promoting democracy, all of that, and it becomes harder to stand up to Iraqi opinion and even the Iraqi government which is pressing for withdrawal.

As all of that is happening, there is a little honesty beginning to creep in about the real reasons for the war. Washington Post editors had a very interesting comment when Obama made his speech saying that Afghanistan is the top priority. They said he is making a terrible mistake; the priority is Iraq because Iraq is the country where the oil resources are, which is at the center of the Middle East’s energy producing region. So, Iraq must be the top priority.

Finally, they are telling the real reasons for the war, after lying about it since 2003. OK, no weapons of mass destruction, no promoting democracy, no liberation. We want to maintain control over energy resources. That’s why we invaded. Sure.

SG: And Afghanistan?

NC: You can have a low intensity war going on for 30 years where you send predator drones to bomb madrassas in Pakistan and kill dozens of people. Who cares?

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About one year ago,Dick Cheney has ordered top Neo-Con media outlets, including Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, to unleash a PR blitz to sell a war with Iran from today, according to Barnett Rubin, the highly respected Afghanistan expert at New York University.

The New Yorker magazine reports that Rubin had a conversation with a member of a top neoconservative institution in Washington, who told him that "instructions" had been passed on from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day.

"It will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects, writes Rubin, "It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don.t think they.ll ever get majority support for this--they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is "plenty."

Unconfirmed rumour:

A Chinese secret society with a membership of 6 million, including 1.8 million gangsters and 100,000 professional assassins has issued an ultimatum to the Neo-Cons, warning them that if they persist with their plan to depopulate the earth, they will be stopped.

Victim of a landmine

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