Noam Chomsky on Liberal Disillusionment with Obama

[Ben]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6Jbnq5V_1s

[Coroner]

Keep them coming, Ben. I highly recommend the texts on his website chomsky.info

[hippifried]

Chomsky's still full of shit.

He's disillusioned. So what? Chomsky's a radical, & the distinction needs to be made between radical & liberal. In this sense, there's no difference between him speaking for liberals & some right wing reactionary speaking for conservatives. Disillusionment comes from creating illusions in the first place. I'm not disillusioned because I never allowed myself to be duped by pundits & "philosophers" into believing that the President of the United States abandon his platform to follow theirs. I live in the real world, & I've never bought into the BS from both the left & right that Barack Obama was actually a secret socialist. Chomsky's as guilty of trying to misinform the electorate as the Madison Av yokels he whines about. He just has a smaller audience.

[Ben]

Chomsky's still full of shit.

He's disillusioned. So what? Chomsky's a radical, & the distinction needs to be made between radical & liberal. In this sense, there's no difference between him speaking for liberals & some right wing reactionary speaking for conservatives. Disillusionment comes from creating illusions in the first place. I'm not disillusioned because I never allowed myself to be duped by pundits & "philosophers" into believing that the President of the United States abandon his platform to follow theirs. I live in the real world, & I've never bought into the BS from both the left & right that Barack Obama was actually a secret socialist. Chomsky's as guilty of trying to misinform the electorate as the Madison Av yokels he whines about. He just has a smaller audience.

Actually, Noam Chomsky is a conservative.... Now to understand conservatism, well, you gotta go back a hundred years. Conservatives railed against corporate power, railed against concentrated power structures. And believed in morality and traditional values.

Here's the difference between Liberals and Progressives:

The Difference Between Liberalism and Progressivism
by David Sirota

As a progressive, I'm often asked if there is a real difference between progressivism and liberalism, or if progressivism is merely a nicer-sounding term for the less popular L-word.

It's a fair question, considering that Democratic politicians regularly substitute "progressive" for "liberal" in news releases and speeches. Predictably, Republicans call their opponents' linguistic shift a craven branding maneuver, and frankly, they're right: Most Democrats make no distinction between the two words.

However, that doesn't mean the ideologies are synonymous. In fact, if the last decade of economic policy proves anything, it is that even as the word "progressive" is now ubiquitous, a perverted form of liberalism has almost completely snuffed out genuine progressivism.

Some background: Economic liberalism has typically focused on using the government's Treasury as a means to ends, whether those ends are better health care (Medicare/Medicaid), stronger job growth (tax credits) or more robust export businesses (corporate subsidies). The idea is that taxpayer dollars can help individuals afford bare necessities and entice institutions to support the common good.

Economic progressivism, by contrast, has historically trumpeted the government fiat as the best instrument of social change — think food safety, minimum wage and labor laws, and also post-Depression financial rules and enforcement agencies. Progressivism's central theory is that government, as the nation's supreme authority, can set parameters channeling capitalism's profit motive into societal priorities — and preventing that profit motive from spinning out of control.

Looked at this way, liberalism and progressivism once operated in tandem. But regardless of which of the two economic ideologies you particularly favor (if either), three of the recent epoch's most far-reaching initiatives make clear the former now dominates both parties.

It started in 2003 with Republicans' Medicare drug benefit. Rather than go the progressive route — imposing price controls, permitting government to negotiate lower bulk prices or letting wholesalers buy drugs at cheaper foreign prices — the bill hinged on taxpayer money.
Essentially, the government gave $1.2 trillion to the pharmaceutical industry in exchange for the industry providing medicines to seniors.

This became the bank bailout's model. Instead of first responding to the Wall Street crisis with progressive, New Deal-style regulations, presidents Bush and Obama opted for liberal bribe theory: Specifically, they bet that giving banks trillions in loans, subsidies and guarantees would convince financial institutions to halt their riskiest behavior and start lending to small businesses again.

Now, it's health care.

The Democratic bill began as a hybrid. On the liberal side, it proposed growing Medicaid and trading subsidies to insurance companies for expanded coverage. On the progressive side, the original legislation included measures like premium regulation and a government-run insurer to compete with private firms. But save for a few fairly weak consumer protections, the final bill was stripped of most major progressive provisions. Ultimately, the celebrated "reform" is based primarily on a liberal wager that Medicaid plus subsidies will equal universal health care.

Which, for a short time, may be the case.

The trouble, though, is what The Washington Post reports: "The (subsidies') buying power could erode over time in an era of rapid medical inflation."

There, of course, is the rub.

Liberalism sans progressivism — i.e., public money sans regulation — turns the Treasury into an unlimited gift card for whichever private interests are being sponsored.

In this era of corporate-tethered lawmakers, such public-to-private transfers often face less congressional opposition than progressivism's inherent confrontations. But the inevitable result is taxpayers being bilked, as subsidized industries freely raise prices and continue engaging in destructive behavior, knowing government and/or captive consumers will keep financing the binge.

So to answer the question — is there a difference between liberalism and progressivism? Yes — and without both, we end up paying a steep price.

David Sirota is the author of the best-selling books "Hostile Takeover" and "The Uprising." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com or follow him on Twitter @davidsirota.

COPYRIGHT 2010 CREATORS.COM

[hippifried]

I'm not buying any of it. Conservatism isn't defined by specific political positions any more than liberalism is. These are general attitudes toward social relationships between people & power, & the rate of changes in the general society. I assume that people who put labels on themselves understand what the label means to them, even if other people using the same label may disagree. After reading that diatribe on progressive v liberal, I'm still not sure exactly what "a progressive" is, other than an adjective trying to be a noun. Regardless of being published, I have serious doubts as to Mr Sirota's credentials to speak for "progressivism".

Personally, I resent the labels. I especially resent the pomposity of claiming that my position on one issue can be predicted by my position on a totally different issue. I resent the equasion of liberal & conservative with left & right. Politics isn't linear. It's spherical, & people are multidimential. I resent these continuous attempts, from all around the fringes of the sphere, to revise the language in order to make the labels fit specific agendas. It's patently dishonest. I call myself liberal without reservation, but not necessarily "a liberal". Noam Chomsky doesn't speak for me, & I resent his claim to be able to analyze my thought process the same as I do when Limbaugh tries it. Don't like that equasion? Too bad. They're both doing the same thing regardless of political bent, style, intensity, or motivation. It's condescending. I don't like it, I can do without it, & I really don't think I'm alone.

[Ben]

Hey hippifried,
What about labels like "gay" and "straight". Should we use those labels? Because a lot of so-called "gay" people aren't at ease with the "gay" label. And what do we describe men who like shemales as? Are we gay? Bisexual? Or should we even attach a label to us? I, too, don't like labels.
The crucial difference between Chomsky and Limbaugh: Chomsky is a moralist and Limbaugh is a corporatist. Chomsky, like Howard Zinn and Naomi Klein, is a saint.
Limbaugh may be a great guy in his private life. I've no idea. (Alex Jones has said that the overclass use the left-right paradigm so as to DIVIDE us. Interesting! So-called: Conservatives and Liberals have a great deal in common. More than we think. We all want decent lives etc. etc. etc.)
And take elections. Why would -- and do -- people vote for either the Republicans or Dems? I mean, are they serving your interests? I can understand if you're either Ted Turner or Bill Gates. Sure. But are either the Dems or the Republicans serving the interests of middle class and working class Americans?
Paul Craig Roberts, a conservative author and journalist, has been bemoaning the fact that middle class jobs are being outsourced. Roberts, too, has been griping over the fact that capital is being offshored.
We often bitterly complain about the influx of immigrants. But there's never any mention about the movement of capital. About how American capital is leaving America. In order for markets to work [aside from having informed consumers making rational choices/decisions] capital needs to stay in America.
Markets work by perfectly informed consumers making rational choices, by the sellers bearing the FULL COST of the things they produce, by investment income staying in the country and by savings being spent on real wealth, not phantom wealth. None of this happens. So therefore markets are inefficient.
Corporations work to undercut markets.)
Chomsky is seen as a "radical" because he's fervently in favor of democracy. Strange, eh? He has said, and this is true, that the vast majority of the population are to the right of him. He's fine with that. That's democracy. He trusts the decency and morality of the vast majority of people. People are decent and moral. Institutions aren't.
Chomsky believes people should control their own labor. Is that radical? I don't think so. He thinks people should have a say in the decision-making process. Is that radical?
And we've elections. Not democracy. The difference is crucial.
Chomsky speaks about the democratic deficit: the difference between public opinion and public policy. Well, public policy should reflect public opinion. Is that radical? In a meaningful democracy the government and the people are IDENTICAL.
I think conservatives and liberals (so-called) all want democracy, all want to control their own lives. Am I wrong about that???

[hippifried]

I'm not happy with the sexual labels either. Sexuality is chemical. I don't think there's a gene. All kinds of things affect our chemistry & everybody has differences in their chemical balances. The differences are just degrees in a continuous tone. There's no hard lines of separation where you can say this or that label fits from here to here. The labels don't work because they aren't accurate.

Moralist? So was Æsop. Aren't we all? I don't care if they're shrieking in my face or patting me on the head like Father Flannigan with a poor orphan waif, I don't like self righteous condescention. I certainly don't think a gift of gab & freedom from dislexia is grounds for canonization. I'm also not all that impressed with the alphabet soup credentials of the professional students in academic philosophy. It doesn't reflect the real world.

Corporatist? Yeah, that's pretty close. But I think it goes beyond that. It's hard to get an accurate bead on Limbaugh because of all the bullshit being spouted by him, his adherents, & his detractors. Personally, I'm not inclined to pay enough attention to him to refine my opinion that he's just another shameless self promoting asshole hawking a book. Really, I just don't care about who's who in the world of ideological conspiratorialists. That includes Chomsky & all that psychobabble about the masses being duped by people who disagree with his point of view when they really think like he does... On & on ad-nauseum. The truth is that most people aren't fringe lunatics, & the fringers are all complaining about the same thing & putting different labels on it.

People vote for those nearest to their political bent & against those whom they perceive to be most likely to be detrimental to their particular comfort level. I think most people think it's a waste of time to vote for an automatic loser. If they really dont care who wins, they just stay home. That's a big chunk of the population too. Abstention is a vote. Maybe if somebody came along that they liked... Nobody has the same interests, but I don't really like the class labels either. Middle class? What are we talking about here? Al Bundy the sole bread winning shoe salesman, or the Huxtables with the combined income of a lawyer & a doctor? They both have the same size house. Working class? Is that different than middle class? Is there a non-working class? & their interests are...? The only thing I really want or need from the government is a good working infrastructure. That's their purpose.

I don't care where capital goes. There's no limit to capital. There's no limit to the money supply. I don't have a problem with the immigrant wave either. I find this nationalism & nativism, as a "leftist" cause, just a bit odd. Oh well. Just goes to show that the labels don't work.

The free market just kind of muddles along. But preplanned economies don't work at all. You can't codify all contingencies, & there's always going to be somebody finding a workaround. You certainly can't preplan corruption, & no ideology or socio-economic theory takes it into account. All ideas have flaws. Economic theory is just an attempt to describe what's already happening compared to what's already happened. Economics has become theology. Capitalists won the crusade. It matters not because the whole argument is just over which group of know-it-all elitists will make up the arbitrary rules to enforce their ideology. I prefer the muddling.

Pure democracy doesn't work. The initiative process has screwed California. Arizona to an extent too. I can't speak for the other States. I'm a desert rat. The current democratic republic system is a mess, but replace it with what? Democracy? People will vote their personal interest. They always do. Might as well have anarchy. Personally, I prefer anarchy. I think sooner or later, that'll be the system again. All it requires is a commitment to the moral code.

I don't claim to have the answers, & I tend to develop a deep distrust toward anyone who claims they do. I put no stock in philosophy. I put no stock in economic theology or any theology. I don't trust politicians, but I get to see what they're up to because nobody else trusts them either & they can't hide. I don't have the time or inclination to pour over every rule or dime that gets spent by the various levels of government. That's why I have representatives to take care of all that tedius crap. It's a huge job & I'm busy. This isn't utopia, but I don't see that coming any time in the forseeable future. I have ideals like anyone does, but I'm not an ideologue. Most people aren't ideologues. The have lives & live in the real world.

[buckjohnson]

Chomsky's still full of shit.

He's disillusioned. So what? Chomsky's a radical, & the distinction needs to be made between radical & liberal. In this sense, there's no difference between him speaking for liberals & some right wing reactionary speaking for conservatives. Disillusionment comes from creating illusions in the first place. I'm not disillusioned because I never allowed myself to be duped by pundits & "philosophers" into believing that the President of the United States abandon his platform to follow theirs. I live in the real world, & I've never bought into the BS from both the left & right that Barack Obama was actually a secret socialist. Chomsky's as guilty of trying to misinform the electorate as the Madison Av yokels he whines about. He just has a smaller audience.

I agree, esp about Obama is justg a politician. I have been to socialist countries, and for those who think that Obama is a socialist they are just a crazy as the eagles trading Mcnabb.

[Schimmel]

hippyfreid obviously doesn't know what he's talking about

[hippifried]

Well that was profound.

Perhaps you could elaborate with all that knowlege & insight...

By the way: I before E, except after C... & there's no Y. It's right there at the top of my posts.

[Ben]

hippifried, there has to be some limit, or limits, to the money supply. Otherwise we'll see rapid inflation.
Bush thought we could keep spending and spending and spending. (Obama, too, is doing the same.) I thought Bush was and is, like me, a conservative. Well, Bush and Cheney aren't conservatives. They're extreme nationalists.
I like sensible conservatives, real conservatives. Who believe in tight/controlled spending, morality and traditional values.
Palin, Bush, Cheney etc. etc. aren't conservatives.
And building up the infrastructure is socialism.... So is the police and fire department and roads and highways and the military. Should we, say, scrap socialism altogether? I loathe when politicians or so-called conservatives decry socialism. Because we've socialism all around us.
Anyway, as ol' Gore Vidal said, It's socialism for the rich (think bank bailouts) and free enterprise for everyone else. It's true.

[trish]

...And building up the infrastructure is socialism.... So is the police and fire department and roads and highways...I thought you said you believe in traditional values!? Traditionally, people look out for each other.


Anyway, as ol' Gore Vidal said, It's socialism for the rich (think bank bailouts) and free enterprise for everyone else. So let's tax the rich for a change and have some socialism for the poor...transport, roads, schools, communications...you know...infrastructure we all can use.

[hippifried]

Hey Trish, ya pinko. What? You want to tax the hard earned bonuses from those productive & horribly maligned money lauderers? Think of all the used yacht salesmen you'd be putting out of work. You godless trotskyites are just so damn insensitive. You'd begrudge someone's chance to gamble with other people's money & expect them to share the winnings. "Sorry. That bet I lost on was your stake. The winning ones were all mine. Just borrow some more money & we'll try it again."



Ben,
Pray tell, what is the limit? How much money is there? Got a figure? Based on what?

You don't think there's inflation now? Tried to buy anything lately?
Inflation is kind of a misnomer. There's a reason to use the term, but it doesn't work in real English. Inflation is degredation in the purchasing power of a currency unit. In simple language; Prices aren't going up. The value of the money's going down. The problem with that simplification is that money's not a commodity. It has no actual value. It's merely an abstract constant to compare the different values of actual goods & services. All currencies are in decline. Forex is just a betting parlor where you wager on the rate of decline. Number crunchers twist things around by pitting wages aginst prices. Stifle wages & you subtract what they should be to keep up with the rate from price hikes on everything else so that it all looks neutral. It's a sham. Smoke & mirrors. We've been in a continuous inflation spiral since August 15, 19971. The currency trades for less than 10% of what it did then. Prior to the shock, there was a stable boom that lasted 25 years. The money supply has nothing to do with it because it's all artificial. Volcker put the brakes on the money supply back in '79 & nothing happened except more recession to go with the stagflation we already had. Wages got stifled by '82, & everybody said there wa no inflation, even though price tags kept going up at the same rate. The money supply went through the roof in the last decade & nothing happened. If you really want to stop inflation, just peg the currencies to each other & put the forex speculators out of business.

Money's not a commodity. It's not affected by supply & demand the way a commodity is. It's just an exchange medium to simplify barter, & it's completely faith based. People accept money as payment for whatever they're trading because they have a reasonable certainty that someone else will accept it as payment for the other end of the trade. We're still swapping eggs for cheese or labor for coal or whatever. Money just shortens the steps between trading what you have for what you want. Treating money like a commodity just confuses the issue. There's no "up" in the currency market. It's all short trades, & that degrades the currencies. There's no limit to the money supply because money's not tangible. It's just a promise of value for things that are. The actual numbers don't mean anything anymore because the purchasing power of the currency keeps changing. It takes an inflated amount of money to do the same thing. This is unstable, & dicking around with the money supply isn't helping the situation.

We need to refix the exchange rates. We did it before & it worked. The flaw in Bretton Woods was the use of a single national currency as a reserve, pegging all other currencies to that, & pegging that to gold. The Brits were able to undermine the dollar by paying more that $32 an ounce for gold. The system crumbled. The "Nixon Shock" abrogated the treaty, & the world's currencies have been floating & declining ever since. The "gold standard" myth was exploded, but the gold mystique still enthralls some. The Mexican peso & the Chinese yuan have been repegged to the dollar. The Europeans dumped all of their currencies for the euro. Ithink the pegs should be multi lateral with no single currency as a reserve. I think we'll end up with more continental or regional currencies, & a world currency sooner or later. Pegs will work in the interim. We just have to admit that the shock was a worse mistake than the keynesian flaws in Bretton Woods in the first place. Supply side economics is bunk.

[Ben]

I thought you said you believe in traditional values!? Traditionally, people look out for each other.

So let's tax the rich for a change and have some socialism for the poor...transport, roads, schools, communications...you know...infrastructure we all can use.



Oh, Trish, I hope it didn't come across that I disapprove of socialism. (But) I'm against state socialism &/or state control. Which means: the dearth or lack of democracy. (State control whether it be socialist or capitalist means power, of course, resides in very few hands.) I believe in democracy. What we have is a democratic deficit: the difference between public policy and public opinion. This pervades the social landscape, as it were.
I'm for something along the lines of libertarian socialism. Whereby I remain mistrustful of authority/domination/submission. (Chomsky, of course, is a libertarian socialist.) And this WAS at the core of conservative philosophy. Going back a century.
Conservatives resisted corporate control. So, therefore people would be controlling their own lives, their own labor and participating in the decision-making process. I mean, is it radical to say, well, people should possess power over their own lives?
What we see in places all over the the world is state socialism intermixed with so-called capitalism. Like China. And then corporatism like we see in America, Canada and Great Britain. Albeit Britain does have a more government &/or socialist run health system. Like doctors working for the government.
America is dependent on the state sector. Nothing inherently wrong with this. But it isn't pure capitalism.
Capitalism has never been tried. Neither has pure socialism. And Obama isn't a socialist. I'd describe Obama as a mild nationalist with a firm commitment to the corporate state. He's not an unadulterated capitalist.
Ron Paul probably comes the closest to a pure capitalist. But, well, who is going to build the public schools? Roads? I want Ron Paul to articulate what a pure capitalist country would look like. I'm not opposed. Merely curious. What happens to the government-run military? The Fire Dept.? Police? and on and on....
I'm curious to see pure/authentic/total capitalism. Would it work? Would it be a disaster?
And, lastly, radio host and author, Thom Hartmann, says that socialism (democratic socialism) can only work in small populations. Were talking 200 people or less. Is he right???????
Anyway, I loathe when, say, politicians decry (state) socialism. Because we've (state) socialism all around us.

[Ben]

YouTube- Noam Chomsky on Indoctrination (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKWxsFobY8Q)

[hippifried]

Ben,
You're still slinging labels like hash. You can't pigeonhole everybody. There aren't enough labels to go around, & no 2 people will fit comfortably in any label you can possibly concoct.

The problem with all this talk about "socialism" is that it's constantly equated to the defunct Soviet Union, & defined according to Karl Marx. Sorry all you academic purists who don't believe it exists before it shows up in a book, but Marx didn't pull the concept out of his ass. I can't be absolutely positive because I wasn't there, but I seriously doubt that he even came up with the term. People have been living in communal social settings since there's been people. It's really our natural system. It's all the other stuff that's artificial. All the various 'isms, monarchies, private property, organized religion, borders, the state itself, governments, money, etc..., are all johnny-come-lately abstract inventions.

What the hell is "pure capitalism" or "pure socialism"? According to whom? Are we looking for natural artificiality? There's no such thing as a pure manmade system. Everybody has a different idea of what it's supposed to be. It can never work out the way it's drawn up on paper because there's always those who oppose it & are smart enough to find the loopholes & workarounds. "...best laid plans..." & all that happy horseshit.

Capitalism is just one system for forming a resource pool. Don't confuse a capitalist or corporate system with free markets. Left unbridled, such a system will consolidate into ever larger companies that will swallow the competition & become monopolies. Monopolies tend to keep consolidating until they're controlled by a single individual. Monopolies are anathema to a free market. Corporate control of government is called fascism (Ask your pal Chomsky), not to be confused with the Nazis who were racist & nationalistic zealots & unfocused on the grand scheme. Mussolini & Franco were the founders of fascism. Mussolini got stuck having to ally himself with the German nutcase to keep from being invaded. Due to geography, namely the Pyrenees buffer zone peopled by the Basques, Franco was able to stay neutral during the war & complete the task. When the smoke cleared, he reinstituted the monarchy with himself as regent. The ultimate goal of the fascist is the return of feudalism. That's what happened in Russia under Yeltsin. Freedom & democracy my ass. The Russians were better off under the Soviets, or at least no worse off. They realy have no experience with anything other than tyranny. People tend to take comfort in whatever they're used to, regardless of what it is.



And, lastly, radio host and author, Thom Hartmann, says that socialism (democratic socialism) can only work in small populations. Were talking 200 people or less. Is he right???????

History says he isn't. Just look at precolumbian America. We tend to denigrate these people because they hadn't developed complex metalurgy, but their system of social governance was way advanced. There was no hereditary power. There was no monetary system or even the concept of private property & land ownership. They created huge confederacies of multiple nations. Group decisions were made by acclimation. The Iroquois Compact is one of the chief inspirations for our own system of government. The Huron, Sioux, & Apache were all confederacies. There were more, but I'm not the expert, & so much cultural lore was lost in the conquest. Democracy isn't necessarily about casting ballots. The Missippians built cities all over the complex, with roads connecting them & mounds in the floodplains. They didn't even have beasts of burdon. Cohokia, across the river from St Louis, had upwards of 40,000 residents around the 11th century, & lasted from approximately 600 to 1400 CE. They terraformed the whole place. 120 mounds that we know of, with 80 still existing, in a 6 sq mi area. The Hohokam built over 130 miles of canals in the Salt-Verde-Gila river complex, around what is now Phoenix AZ & vicinity, over 1000 years ago. Big ones. The farmers who settled the area near the turn of the century, & formed the Salt River Project to irrigate the desert, built dams on the rivers & just dredged out the Indian canals to use as their mains. That's just examples from here in what is now the continental US. So much for the pompous ramblings & claims of claire voyance from talk radio.

[Ben]

Quoting Noam Chomsky:
“I try to encourage people to think for themselves, to question standard assumptions. Don’t take assumptions for granted. Begin by taking a skeptical attitude toward anything that's conventional wisdom. Make it justify itself. It usually can’t. Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted. Try to think things through for yourself. There is plenty of information. You have got to learn how to judge, evaluate and compare it with other things. You've to take some things on trust or you can’t survive. But if there's something significant and important don’t take it on trust. As soon as you read anything that is anonymous you should immediately distrust it. If you read in the newspapers that Iran is defying the international community, ask who is the international community? India is opposed to sanctions. China is opposed to sanctions. Brazil is opposed to sanctions. The Non-Aligned Movement is vigorously opposed to sanctions and has been for years. Who is the international community? It is Washington and anyone who happens to agree with it. You can figure that out, but you have to do work. It is the same on issue after issue.”

[Ben]

hippifried (http://www.hungangels.com/vboard/member.php?u=15810),
I think democracy is key.
We need to organize society along democratic lines.
America is the freest country in the world. Unusually free. But not democratic, not meaningful democracy. Most Americans think that in poll after poll. Corporations have undue sway over the government.
So:
Take Athenian democracy. It was 6,000 people selected at random to run things.
We could do something along those lines.
If not, well, I think if there was enough public pressure politicians would start serving the interests of people.
The problem of corporations, again, is simple: they control our government. We've UNELECTED officials running our country. (I mean, I don't remember voting for Lloyd Blankfein, the current CEO and Chairman of Goldman Sachs.) And we know corporations write the legislation. (Even Lou Dobbs told his audience that.) Democracy, again, is key. (We'd an expanding middle class after the second world war because of unions and tax policies. Far more progressive taxation. America was the envy of the world in terms of our massive middle class.
And please people don't pay attention to FOX News. I mean, as they say, if ya tax companies more, well, who is gonna create the jobs. Well, corporations aren't concerned with job creation. They've one function and one function only: maximize profits. Not job creation and looking after communities and being concerned about the widow down the street.
They're amoral institutional structures designed to create massive amounts of money for their stockholders.
Adam Smith despised corporations. He was a moral philosopher. He and David Ricardo, as such, were moral philosophers. Morality. Conservatism. That's disappeared from our economic system.
As I mentioned before about capital. Well, capital needs to stay in the country of origin. Adam Smith agreed with that. Ricardo wanted that.)
Conservative columnist and author Paul Craig Roberts said if you don't control your own labor, well, you're a serf or slave. Such is wage-slavery: renting yourself to the marketplace.)
Anyway, true: Fascism, as coined by Mussolini, is the fusion of state power with corporate power.
Finally. Markets.
The problem with markets are simple: one dollar, one vote. But there are people who don't participate in markets. Namely the unborn. So, well, these are externalities. Say one buys a car. One is looking for the best deal possible. You're not concerned about the pollution caused by the car. (An externality is a market transaction where a third party doesn't participate and consent. A huge problem, even according to Milton Friedman.) So, one isn't taking into account the effects on other people. That's called a market inefficiency.

[hippifried]

Ben,

The biggest & potentially most powerful democracy in planetary history is the consumer market. It's just a mess because everybody keeps ignoring it. We don't organize ourselves as consumers & the pullers of the pursestrings. Yet by your own admission, that's where the power is. We already have it. We're just not using it. Investment folows consumer trends.

Whenever the word "democracy" gets bandied, nobody bothers to look beyond government. Why? Athenian democracy lasted what, 1 generation? If that? Random selection is conscription. We wax poetic about how great it was, but apparently it didn't work. It wasn't democracy anyway because only the landed elite & the merchant class were allowed to participate. Democracy is people deciding what they want or need & organizing themselves to get it. That's really all the capitalists are doing. The difference is that they know what they want. Their goals are simple. What do you want? Do you know, or do you just think you know what you don't like? How can you move positively toward a negative goal?

Yes, capitalism is amoral, but the monetary system we've evolved is amoral. The monetary system predates capitalism, & the hoarding of wealth has always been a power toool since the envisioning of private property & ownership of land, a strictly afro-eurasian feudal monarchist concept. Lately, we've tried to expand the concept so that every man can be a king, but kingdom is still in the mindset equasion. There would seem to be a conflict between the American dream & the founding principle of self-evident truth that all are equal.

Morality is individual. As soon as you start combining people into groups, morality starts breaking down, especially if the organization has a specific goal. That goal tends to trump social mores as far as the group is concerned, even if the individual members manage to maintain their morality in general. So we create control entities to regulate the amoral. It works somewhat, but lends itself to abuse by those who seek power or confuse governance with rule. The problem with ideologies is that they assume morality & project it onto the perceived system. Systems are amoral.

I'm skeptical, maybe cynical, when I hear people barking about problems & flaws. I don't buy into the ramblings of philosophers, ideologues, or economic theologians. There's always going to be problems, inefficiencies, incompetence, & systemic flaws. You can talk ideology, & it's entertaining, but you have to deal with reality. Disillusionment comes from buying into illusions. We can't really change anything unless we can definitively say what it is that we want. Being in constant attack mode gets in the way of that. Discussion isn't war, & power posturing adds nothing to the discussion. I think, in general, differences of opinion pale in the face of our commonalities. The differences just sell ads.

[Ben]

Hey Hippifried,
You wrote: "The biggest & potentially most powerful democracy in planetary history is the consumer market."
But that is not democracy. Democracy is one person, one vote. Not one dollar, one vote.
If democracy were one dollar, one vote, well, Bill Gates has a helluva lot more democratic power than me.
People don't shape government policy. Big business does. Power is concentrated. As we know. And dispersing power is democracy.
There's a difference, again, between public opinion and public policy.
Chomsky has talked about how America is a business run society. Unusually so. Business interests trump everything else. And this means a dearth or lack of democracy.
Look at Iraq. Most Americans want the troops home. Obama has said no. So the troops stay. A failure of democracy.
Most Americans want higher taxes on big business. The government has said no. So once again a failure of democracy.
Most Americans want big business to invest in their communities. Big business doesn't do it. A failure of democracy. Notice a trend -- ha!ha!ha!
An interesting book is called What's the matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank. It's about how conservative Republicans have taken control of the political debate through issues concerning culture. Like gun control, gay marriage and abortion.
Anyway, toodles -- :)

[hippifried]

Over 70% of US GDP is consumer spending. Who do you think buys all this stuff? Where do you think they're getting their money? So what if Bill Gates is rich? He built a better mousetrap. I'm not going to begrudge success. A major part of the American dream is that anyone can become the next Bill Gates, so they can retire & give it all away. That's what he's doing now y'know. The class war is phoney. Rich people are as diverse in their social oinions as poor people. There's no such thing as a wealth based mindset. Chomsky's wrong. America's a consumer run society. There's no business without consumers.

How do you know what the American people want? Polls? Doesn't Chomsky rail about the manipulation of polling data? Everythings just a big bamboozle unless it falls into lockstep with his ideology? Y'know what peope really want? They want to hit the lottery. They want Walmart. That's obvious because they vote for them with their dollars. If they get pissed off at Walmart over some bogus ideological claptrap, they take their dollars & buy their Chinese goods at Target. They want to work for GM & drive a Toyota. They want their 401Ks & mutual funds to make a profit for them in the stock market. They want an income that they can live on & count on till their house & cars are paid off. They want some disposable income so they can go out to dinner now & then or to a ball game. They want their kids to stay out of trouble & have even more opportunities to cash in on the American dream. They want crooks locked up & terrorists dead. They want to turn on American Idol & forget about all this bullshit till tommorow. They want to be comfortable.

I don't necessarily want higher taxes on big business. Corporations don't pay taxes. They just figure it into the pricing structure & pass it on to the consumer. Corporate taxes are a hidden VAT, & I don't like consumption taxes because they're regressive. I wan't personal income taxed, higher rates on the upper brackets, & I want to get rid of the special rate for capital gains.

Each business has it's own agenda. Communities should invest in their communities. Got a blighted area? Go clean it up. Neighborhood school's nasty? Why don't parents, teachers, & neighbors get together a few times a year & go scrub it out & patch it up. Make a neighborhood party out of it. Etc etc etc... Start organizing things like this & everybody'll chip in, including businesses. Any corporation of size has community outreach built into their advertizing budget. Want something done? Put together a plan & submit a proposal. Retailers, manufacturers, & media love this kind of stuff. The advertizing's free. You just have to do it instead of sitting around whining & waiting for somebody else to do it for you. An organized community is a business magnet too. Start knocking on doors. A good idea grows exponentially. I've seen this happen.

I don't know where all this doom & gloom comes from. It just seems like everybody's got some kind of magic 8-ball saying we're all going to hell in a handbasket. Not so. Look around. We've never had it so good. Could things be better? Sure. There's always room for improvement. That's the idea. Each generation has it just a little better than the last, & makes it a little better for the next. We could probably do a lot more a lot faster, but we're too busy fretting over what might be. When I see evidence of actual clairvoyance, I might think about giving some of this psycho-philosophical mumbo jumbo some credence.

[Ben]

Noam Chomsky on neoliberalism:

YouTube- Noam Chomsky sur le néoliberalisme (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tivfjqHnV_0&feature=related)

[Aimee]

Chomsky is a legend! I'd recomend anyone check out his book Failed State, really turns the so-called 'War on Terror' on its head. Awsome bloke!

[trish]

I like him for his theorems classifying the grammars accepted by finite state automata.

[Aimee]

hehe, i'm assuming that was part of his linguistic work? i'm more into his political science stuff. Did you know that one of the chimps they taught sign language to was called Nim Chimpsky in his honour?

btw, didn't partick henry die....?

[Ben]

Chomsky is a legend! I'd recomend anyone check out his book Failed State, really turns the so-called 'War on Terror' on its head. Awsome bloke!

He is indeed an awesome bloke. A saint. His book Hegemony or Survival is also very good.

Noam Chomsky: Israel - Servant to US Empire:


YouTube- Noam Chomsky: Israel - Servant to US Empire (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEJ4OfbFZF0)

[Ben]

The Ideas of Chomsky BBC interview:

YouTube- The Ideas of Chomsky-BBC interview (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EksuA4IAQIk&feature=related)


YouTube- The Ideas of Chomsky-BBC interview (2) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nC4emxhrE0k&feature=related)


YouTube- The Ideas of Chomsky-BBC interview (3) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2Zt6aCiypY&feature=related)

[Ben]

And lastly:
Free Market Fantasies: Capitalism in the Real World:

http://www.chomsky.info/talks/19960413.htm

[trish]

He's definitely not a saint. Had he not been strayed from automata theory to wilder and wilder diversions (like linquistic modeling of mental capacities and political theory) he might have actually continued to contribute positively to our accumulated knowledge. C'est la vie.

[Ben]

Noam Chomsky on The Left, Class, Racism, Xenophobia and the Right (6/8) - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Yed2NlLWgY)

[hippifried]

When Chomsky stops lying about being liberal, maybe I'll pay some attention to his take on liberals. No way I'm buying the far fetched notion that he speaks for liberalism in any way.