Noam Chomsky: The Conscience of America
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Category Archives: Capitalism
War Profiteers Escalate Their War on Jobs
How to Beat Terrorism: Refuse to Be Terrorized
The U.S. has to embrace the reality that terrorism is not anything remotely like the existential threat we make it out to be. We can honor those 2,996 without being permanently haunted by them . . . The culture of fear: It’s a bipartisan race to the bottom. And it’s why the National Security State constructed by the George W. Bush administration has found a diligent steward in President Obama . . . The Bush administration never had an endgame for the war on terrorism, preferring to conceive of a “Long War” that amounted to an epochal, generation-spanning struggle . . . Only when citizens make it acceptable for politicians to recognize that the threat of terrorism isn’t so significant can the country finally get what it really needs, 10 years later: closure. Read more . . .
Robert Reich, “Inequality: The Real Cause of America’s Economic Woes”
Look back over the last hundred years and you’ll see the pattern. During periods when the very rich took home a much smaller proportion of total income — as in the Great Prosperity between 1947 and 1977 — the nation as a whole grew faster and median wages surged. Germany has grown faster than the United States for the last 15 years, and the gains have been more widely spread . . . How has Germany done it? Mainly by focusing like a laser on education (German math scores continue to extend their lead over American), and by maintaining strong labor unions . . . Reviving the middle class requires that we reverse the nation’s decades-long trend toward widening inequality. Read more . . .
America’s Greatest Enemy: Ignorance
An educational system born in an agrarian culture, and later industrialized to produce compliant employees, mass produces the skills of how, but inhibits questions as to why. The result is a debilitating kind of existential ignorance taught in assembly-line fashion, as millions of people learn to be human doings, but not human beings . . . Willful ignorance is human tragedy writ-large; it contains seeds of destruction for mankind and for most of the species on the earth . . . Why is so little attention given to being responsible for the veracity of one’s opinions ?
. . . It is a sad commentary that legions of our citizens decry elitism instead of striving to become living, breathing examples of it . . . Why are exceptional athletes who break records revered, while exceptionally well-educated people are reviled? . . . Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is a self-destructive, self-defeating void where misspent emotion provides the substance needed to sow distrust and keep hatred at the forefront of public discourse. Read more . . .
GOP Leaders Stop Taking Credit for Job Data
When the jobs reports were looking quite good in the early spring, Republican leaders were eager to take credit for the positive numbers they had nothing to do with . . . But if Republicans demanded credit for the job totals in the spring, these same Republicans are desperate to avoid blame for job totals in the summer. . . I can appreciate why the GOP wouldn’t want the blame, even though it’s conservative policies standing in the way of improving the economy. But if Republicans want to claim credit for the job market in April, they should expect responsibility for the same job market in September. Read more . . .
The Liberal Agenda
Robert Redford, “Is the Obama Administration Putting Corporate Profits Above Public Health?”
Since early August, three administration decisions—on Arctic drilling, the Keystone XL pipeline and the ozone that causes smog—have all favored dirty industry over public health and a clean environment. . . What’s going on here? . . . Putting corporate profits above public health is unconscionable . . . Instead of going to the ends of the earth to feed our national addiction to oil, and putting irreplaceable waters, habitat and even the American breadbasket at risk, we need to invest in the clean energy strategies of tomorrow. That’s the way to put Americans back to work, developing renewable sources of power and fuel and building the next generation of energy efficient cars, homes and workplaces. Read more . . .
Aphorism: “On Private-Sector Callousness”
By Madison S. Hughes (09.03.2011)
Am I the only one that noticed how, the probabilistically nearly impossible, latest jobs report showed that 17,000 private-sector jobs were created, while government payrolls were cut by an exact equal 17,000? Seriously, an EXACT inverse relationship . . .
Is this just irony? It could certainly be interpreted as such, and maybe I just have a warped way of interpretation. Nevertheless, I don’t see it as irony, but instead take it as insult. The “Haves” have been incessantly attempting to privatize the public sector for private profit since government’s genesis. Of course this comes with a blatant disregard for the “Have-nots” that they so easily exploit. However, in the past the “Haves” would at least go through the gyrations of herd concealment so that only the helpless minority of politically astute would realize its happening.
The zero sum of private-sector gain at the total expense of public-sector loss is reprehensible. It is yet another outwardly demonstration of the unfettered callousness of which the “Haves” regularly display.
In Solidarity!
Millions Make Change
The two main eras of progressive change in our country in the last century were accompanied by a broad and spirited upsurge of people . . . Social progress without mass pressure is never easy in a capitalist system. Capitalism is structured to resist change of a progressive and radical nature. But it is especially tough going in circumstances where the right wing controls many levers of power, as it currently does . . . The political imperative of this moment, therefore, is clear: the quantitative and qualitative strengthening of the people’s movement for progressive change. Read more . . .
Always Question Authority 