BOUND BY POWER

Montreal/New York/London

BOUND BY POWER

Intended Consequences

Jeffery Klaehn, editor

Copyright © 2006 BLACK ROSE BOOKS

“Understanding Power: An Interview with Noam Chomsky”

Copyright © 2005 Noam Chomsky and Jeffery Klaehn

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means electronic or

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of brief passages quoted by a reviewer in a newspaper or magazine.

Black Rose Books No. II344

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Bound by power : intended consequences / Jeffery Klaehn, editor

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN: 1-55164-283-2 (bound) ISBN: 1-55164-282-4 (pbk.)

(alternative ISBNs 9781551642833 [bound] 9781551642826 [pbk.])

1. Power (Social sciences). 2. Conformity.

JC328.3.B67 2005 303.3’3 C2005-902392-9

Cover design: Associés libres

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Table of Contents

Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .ix

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi

Chapter One . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Understanding Power: An Interview with Noam Chomsky

Jeffery Klaehn

Chapter Two . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

The New ‘P.C.’: Patriotic Correctness and the Suppression of Dissent

on American Campuses

Valerie Scatamburlo-D’Annibale

Chapter Three . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

Demystifying the Cult of Impotence and Global Capitalism: An Interview

with Linda McQuaig

Jeffery Klaehn

Chapter Four . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

Unspinning Social Inequality: An Interview with David Miller

Jeffery Klaehn

Chapter Five . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64

The Myth of the Neutral Professional

Robert Jensen

Chapter Six . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

Power Over Principle, The Costs of Dissent: An Interview with

Brian Martin

Jeffery Klaehn

Chapter Seven . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90

Absurd Silence and Misplaced Pragmatism: How Dissent is Kept

to Manageable Levels

David Cromwell

Chapter Eight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

The Meta-Program of Power: An Interview with John McMurtry

Jeffery Klaehn

Chapter Nine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119

Ghost in the Machine: An Assessment of the Physical, Emotional

and Economic Impact(s) of Workplace Injury

Jean Chen, Teresa Chen, Jeffery Klaehn

Chapter Ten . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150

How Jimmy Carter Spent His Cuba Vacation: Media Coverage and

Ideological Bias

James Winter, Robert Everton

Chapter Eleven . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188

The East Asian Financial Crisis

Robert Bertuzzi

Chapter Twelve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

Partnership in an Evil Action: Canadian Universities, Indonesia,

East Timor and the Question of Intellectual Responsibility Again

Peter Eglin

Contributors

ROBERT BERTUZZI is an MA candidate in the Department of Communication

Studies and Social Justice at the University of Windsor, Ontario. His interest in the

East Asian financial crisis is both personal and professional, having lived in Japan in

1998 during the height of the crisis. He holds a Bachelor of Journalism degree from the

University of King’s College in Halifax.

JEAN CHEN is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Strath-

clyde in Glasgow, Scotland, and holds a MA in Social Work from Wilfrid Laurier Univer-

sity. Her research interests include theory, political-economy, media, human rights,

gender, and social inequality. She is co-editor, with Jeffery Klaehn, of the forthcoming

Women Across Borders.

TERESA CHEN is a Human Resources Management specialist. Her research interests

include organizational development and international labor law. She has participated in

a number of initiatives aimed at improving the working conditions and well being of

workers within the private sector. She enjoys travel and oragami.

DAVID CROMWELL is an oceanographer, writer, and author of Private Planet: Corpo-

rate Plunder and the Fight Back. Together with David Edwards, he is co-editor of Media

Lens, a UK-based media-watch project, and co-author of the forthcoming Guardians of

Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media (2006). His articles have been published in nu-

merous magazines including: the Guardian, the Independent, the Financial Times, and

the Herald.

PETER EGLIN is Professor of Sociology at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo

where he teaches courses in Human Rights, Ethnomethodology, Theory and Practice,

and the Sociology of Crime. He was, as well, Humboldt Research Fellow at the

Universitat Konstanz, 1980-1981, and Visiting Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Newcas-

tle- upon-Tyne Polytechnic, 1985-1987. He is the author of Talk and Taxonomy: A

Methodological Comparison of Ethnosemantics and Ethnomethodology (1980), and

co-author, with Stephen Hester, of The Montreal Massacre: A Story of Membership Cat-

egorization Analysis and A Sociology of Crime (1992), and co-editor of Culture in Action:

Studies in Membership Categorization Analysis (1997). He is currently working a book

on intellectual responsibility.

ROBERT EVERTON (1952–2004) taught extensively in both Communication Studies

and Latin American Studies since first instructing at Simon Fraser University in 1992.

As well as an academic, he was a social and political activist for over two decades. In-

volved in the efforts to demand government accountability to its citizenry, he partici-

pated widely in citizen efforts to make the so-called free trade agreements both

transparent and accountable.

ROBERT JENSEN teaches media law, ethics, and politics at the University of Texas.

Prior to his academic career, he worked as a professional journalist and continues to

write for the popular media, both alternative and mainstream. His opinion and analytic

pieces on such subjects as foreign policy, politics, and race have appeared in papers

around the country. He is also involved with a number of activist groups working against

U.S. military and economic domination of the rest of the world. Jensen is author of Writ-

ing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (2001).

JEFFERY KLAEHN’s work has been published in a wide range of scholarly journals, in-

cluding the European Journal of Communication, Gazette: The International Journal for

Communication Studies, Portuguese Studies Review, Cultural Dynamics, Journalism

Studies, and the Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology. He is the editor of Fil-

tering the News: Essays on Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model (2005) and of the

forthcoming Comic Books and Comic Book Culture: Studies in Popular Culture (2006).

VALERIE SCATAMBURLO-D’ANNIBALE is an award-winning educator (recipient

of the 2001-2002 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Teaching Award) who teaches at

the University of Windsor. Her first book, Soldiers of Misfortune: The New Right’s Cul-

ture War and the Politics of Political Correctness (1998), received the American Educa-

tional Studies Association’s 2000 Critics Choice Award. Her work on social and cultural

theory and critical pedagogy has been published in Current Perspectives in Social The-

ory, Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies, the Journal of Educational Philosophy and

Theory and in books including the Dictionary of Cultural Theorists; Alienation, Ethnicity

and Postmodernism; and Bringing Capitalism Back for Critique by Social Theory. She is

a contributor to Filtering the News: Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model (2005).

JAMES WINTER is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Windsor

and the author of numerous books, including Common Cents: Media Portrayal of the

Gulf War and Other Events (1992), Democracy’s Oxygen: How the Corporations Control

the News (1997), MediaThink (2000), and, the forthcoming, Lies the Media Tell Us

(2006). He is also a contributor to Radical Mass Media Criticism (2005) and to Filtering

the News: Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model (2005).

Preface

How would you define the concept of power? This is a question I’ve been asked many

times in the past, and (to a large extent) this book constitutes my response. When I ini-

tially set about creating Bound by Power, there were many questions (and even more

topics and issues) that I hoped to delve into. Many were what you could safely charac-

terize as “big questions” dealing with the structure of society, how ideology “works”

within various (institutional) contexts, ways in which power may be seen to be political.

In soliciting the essays featured in Bound by Power, I expressed to each contribu-

tor my view of the book as a whole: it would be concerned to examine the interplay be-

tween power, ideology and the institutional framework of society. Because the

question of power is so extensive and far-reaching in terms of its implications, I also

chose to undertake a series of interviews for inclusion in the book. My initial thought

was that the interview format would significantly enhance the degree of play I would

have available to me in terms of the sheer range of material that could potentially be

taken up within the book. Those I interviewed have essentially devoted the whole of

their professional lives to studying the multiplicity of topics covered in the interviews.

And they have actively sought to engage with vital “public issues” and to participate in

public discussions about these issues. Their insights, knowledge and impressions, to-

gether with the brilliant and engaging research essays featured within the book, bring

the concept of power out into the open, affording a unique window into power, its di-

mensions and intended consequences.

One of my initial aims with the book was to rescue the concept of power from var-

ious discourses within the social sciences where the concept seemed, to my mind at

least, to be languishing. It seemed to me that the terms of sociology’s engagement with

the concept ought to quite literally be exploded out. Power should, I thought, be high-

lighted, and its implications made front-and-center in terms of critical focus. Bound

by Power, then, is intended to enter the fray as a catalyst, expanding and redefining the

boundaries of critical scholarship and engagement, across a range of academic disci-

plines: media and communication studies, sociology, cultural studies, philosophy and

history. In effect, the book was built to engage with numerous “real world” public is-

sues, as they relate to the question of how power can be seen to impact (and shape) the

broader intellectual culture. These include spin, information management, public re-

lations, education, universities and academic culture, social control, suppression of

dissent, self-censorship, patriotic correctness, whistleblowers, institutional backlash

and victimization, social inequality, markets, ethics, domestic and foreign policy,

global politics, social policy, social class, workplace injury, social status, human rights,

democracy, patriarchy, history and social change. In looking at the book, now that it is

finally completed, my sense is that Bound by Power: Intended Consequences is a vitally

important book, one that seems destined to change the landscape, as it were, in various

ways. It is my hope that readers will engage with the book, and that, in turn, the book

will prompt and encourage much public and scholarly debate about the ideas, topics

and issues that it raises and takes up throughout.

In conclusion, I would like to thank my publisher and give a very special thank you

to each of the contributors to the book.

Jeffery Klaehn

Kitchener, Ontario, Canada

December, 2005

Acknowledgements

Louis and Sharyn Klaehn

Shirley and Frank Russo

James Winter

Linda Barton

Noam Chomsky

John McMurtry

Brian Martin

Val Scatamburlo-D’Annibale

Linda McQuaig

David Miller

Jean Chen

Cees J. Hamelink

David Cromwell

Robert Jensen

Bob Franklin

Jack Kirby

Johnny Cash

Albert Camus

For many different reasons—

I bet there’s rich folk eatin’

In a fancy dining car,

They’re prob’ly drinkin’ coffee,

And smokin’ big cigars…

—Johnny Cash, Folsom Prison Blues