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Chomsky on the economy and democracy

Apr 1, ’09 7:52 AM

RNN inter­view with Noam Chom­sky, who quickly gets to the nub of things as usual, e.g.:

… for example, take … the AIG bonuses that are … caus­ing such anger, right­fully. Dean Baker poin­ted out that there’s an easy way to deal with it. Since the gov­ern­ment pretty much owns AIG any­way (it just doesn’t use its power to make decisions), split off the sec­tion of AIG — the fin­an­cial invest­ment sec­tion that caused all the prob­lems — split it off, and let it go bank­rupt. And then the exec­ut­ives can seek to get their bonuses from a bank­rupt firm if they like … And with the banks, the big banks, like Bank of Amer­ica, one of the big prob­lems is nobody knows what’s going on inside. They’re are very opaque devices … they’re not going to tell you them­selves … But the gov­ern­ment could find out — namely … take over the banks.

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Why more equal societies always do better

Mar 15, ’09 9:00 PM

It’s been a long time com­ing but two people, Richard Wilkin­son and Kate Pick­ett, have finally put the num­bers together and con­clus­ively shown that mod­ern social prob­lems are sub­stan­tially worse in those soci­et­ies with wider gaps between rich and poor.

Any curs­ory look at the world tells you this but these are the first people to show it sci­en­tific­ally. This, I would sug­gest, is going to be huge. The implic­a­tions are profound.

Will Hut­ton, writ­ing for The Guard­ian:

Income inequal­ity, they show bey­ond any doubt, is not just bad for those at the bot­tom but for every­one. More unequal soci­et­ies are socially dys­func­tional across the board. There is more teen­age preg­nancy, men­tal ill­ness, higher prison pop­u­la­tions, more murders, higher obesity and less numer­acy and lit­er­acy in more unequal soci­et­ies. Even the rich report more men­tal ill health and have lower life expect­an­cies than their peers in less unequal societies.

They have pro­duced a book on their find­ings called The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Soci­et­ies Almost Always Do Bet­ter. And they’ve also cre­ated web­site, equalitytrust.org, to make the evid­ence they set out bet­ter known.

As John Carey points out in his review of their book in the Times: “It might be said that The Spirit Level merely for­mu­lates what every­one has always felt.”

Now maybe we can get on with chan­ging a few things around here.

External links:

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Must-read from George Monbiot

Feb 11, ’09 9:15 AM

hezel_blearsIf you read noth­ing else about polit­ics today read this:

George Mon­biot: Just what exactly do you stand for, Hazel Blears — except election?

For some con­text in the lead up to this piece check out No Right Turn’s links on the mat­ter.

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Noam Chomsky: What Next? The Elections, the Economy, and the World

Nov 26, ’08 9:17 AM

Noam Chom­sky dis­cusses the mean­ing of President-Elect Barack Obama’s vic­tory and the pos­sib­il­it­ies ahead for real demo­cratic change at a speech last week in Boston.

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So you think Obama’s going to change things?

Nov 16, ’08 1:02 AM

Think again (think Tony Blair):

Tim Bald­win:

I shut my eyes when I listen to [Obama] and it could be Tony. He is doing the same thing that we did in 1997.

Mat­thew Par­ris:

Here we have a hand­some, dash­ing and intel­li­gent man, a man with gen­er­ous instincts and a sil­ver tongue; but a man with no dis­tinct­ive plan for gov­ern­ment that he has seen fit to share with us; a dar­ing oppor­tun­ist; some­body we may one day judge as a sort of Tony Blair with brains. And here we go again, all over again, hook, line and sinker.

Jon Snow:

Even after so many months of speech-making it’s still not clear what are the con­crete changes that may now ensue and in par­tic­u­lar, there are some big for­eign policy areas where Obama is not prom­ising a hugely dif­fer­ent tack from Bush …

Tariq Ali:

As for what the policies are going to be, the situ­ation is pretty depress­ing. I mean, Obama, dur­ing his cam­paign, didn’t prom­ise very much, basic­ally talked in cliches and syn­thetic slo­gans like “change we can believe in.” No one knows what that change is. In for­eign policy terms, dur­ing the debates, his — what he said was basic­ally a con­tinu­ation of the Bush-Cheney policies. And in rela­tion to Afgh­anistan, what he said was worse than McCain …

Ralph Nader:

He doesn’t like to take on power … I think his record in the state sen­ate in Illinois and in the US Sen­ate is that he doesn’t like to take on power. And if you don’t take on power, you know, the cor­por­ate power that dom­in­ates every depart­ment in our gov­ern­ment, you’re going nowhere, because they con­trol the budget, they con­trol the pri­or­it­ies, they have heavy con­trol on the media.

Jonathan Steele:

… his pos­i­tion con­tains massive incon­sist­en­cies … he has not repu­di­ated the war on ter­ror. Rather, he insists that by focus­ing excess­ively on Iraq, the Bush admin­is­tra­tion “took its eye off the ball”. The real tar­get must be Afgh­anistan and if Osama bin Laden is spot­ted in Pakistan, bomb­ing must be used there too.

John Pil­ger (who was right about Blair back in 1997):

Like all ser­i­ous pres­id­en­tial can­did­ates, past and present, Obama is a hawk and an expan­sion­ist. He comes from an unbroken Demo­cratic tra­di­tion, as the war-making of pres­id­ents Tru­man, Kennedy, John­son, Carter and Clin­ton demon­strates. Obama’s dif­fer­ence may be that he feels an even greater need to show how tough he is.

Michael Albert:

My guess is, sadly, that within one week, lit­er­ally one week, Obama’s staff and cab­inet choices will make decis­ively evid­ent that without mass act­iv­ism for­cing new out­comes, change will stop at the sur­face. I fer­vently hope I am wrong.

Vice President-elect, Joe Biden, is a pro-war Zion­ist. Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, helped push through NAFTA and favoured the war on Iraq. 

Alex­an­der Cock­burn on Rahm Emanuel:

He’s a former Israeli cit­izen, who volun­teered to serve in Israel in 1991 and who made brisk mil­lions in Wall Street. He is a super-Likudnik hawk, whose father was in the fas­cist Irgun in the late Forties, respons­ible for cold-blooded mas­sacres of Palestinians.

Nader on Obama’s record:

Far more than Sen­ator McCain, you have received enorm­ous, unpre­ced­en­ted con­tri­bu­tions from cor­por­ate interests, Wall Street interests and, most inter­est­ingly, big cor­por­ate law firm attor­neys… Why, apart from your uncon­di­tional vote for the $700 bil­lion Wall Street bail­out, are these large cor­por­ate interests invest­ing so much in Sen­ator Obama? Could it be that in your state Sen­ate record, your U.S. Sen­ate record and your pres­id­en­tial cam­paign record (favor­ing nuc­lear power, coal plants, off­shore oil drilling, cor­por­ate sub­sidies includ­ing the 1872 Min­ing Act and avoid­ing any com­pre­hens­ive pro­gram to crack down on the cor­por­ate crime wave and the bloated, waste­ful mil­it­ary budget, for example) you have shown that you are their man?

Obama: bought and paid for.

(thanks to Media Lens for this post)

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Scammer Blossom Goodchild and the aliens that stood her up

Oct 27, ’08 2:21 PM

Blos­som Good­child, the scam­mer who claimed ali­ens were com­ing to town on 14 Octo­ber, now has her own Wiki­pe­dia page (since deleted).

I can see the point of record­ing it, con­sid­er­ing the num­ber of people she hood­winked, but I won­der how many more book sales she’ll receive as a res­ult of a ded­ic­ated webpage on Wikipedia.

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Israeli best seller challenges Zionism

Oct 16, ’08 3:14 PM

Jonathan Cook on Dr. Shlomo Sand’s new book:

Dr. Shlomo Sand argues that the idea of a Jew­ish nation — whose need for a safe haven was ori­gin­ally used to jus­tify the found­ing of the state of Israel — is a myth inven­ted little more than a cen­tury ago.

In addi­tion, he argues that the Jews were never exiled from the Holy Land, that most of today’s Jews have no his­tor­ical con­nec­tion to the land called Israel and that the only polit­ical solu­tion to the country’s con­flict with the Palestini­ans is to abol­ish the Jew­ish state.

… he pre­dicted a rough ride from the pro-Israel lobby when the book is launched … in the United States next year.

In con­trast, he said Israelis had been, if not exactly sup­port­ive, at least curi­ous about his argument.

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The difficulty stealing U.S. election this time

Oct 10, ’08 8:13 AM

Michael Collins on Scoop:

Elec­tion 2008 — The Dif­fi­culty Steal­ing It This Time

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Chomsky on Latin America and the Carribean

Oct 5, ’08 1:47 PM

Chom­sky speak­ing at the Social Sum­mit in Venezuela a couple of weeks ago.


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Aliens coming to town, 14 October

Sep 8, ’08 9:52 AM

Appar­ently there’s a big event on the hori­zon. A group of ali­ens call­ing them­selves the Galactic Fed­er­a­tion of Light are com­ing to earth on the 14th of Octo­ber, in a pre­lude to sav­ing us from the shit heads who cur­rently run the place.

The mes­sage addresses “all people of earth” but then goes on to say “it shall be in the south of your hemi­sphere and it shall scan over many of your states … We give to you the name of Alabama.” So either it addresses all people of earth but then goes on to ignore them and speak to just the Amer­ic­ans (those in the south­ern part of the north­ern hemi­sphere), or the event is to be in the South­ern Hemi­sphere and someone got their geo­graphy screwed up because Alabama ain’t in the South­ern Hemisphere.

I’m pick­ing the earlier; that Blos­som, our mes­sen­ger, is Amer­ican and it’s a simple eth­no­cen­tric mis­take. This is prob­ably the same reason the alien guy in the back­ground of the video is a blond white dude. Blos­som and friends are pre­sum­ably white Americans.

If these ali­ens have mastered inter­galactic space travel you’d think they would have mastered a little plain Eng­lish. “We give to you the name of Alabama”? They could have brushed up on their gram­mar a little too: “Author­it­ies will be intrud­ing into ‘our’ atmo­spher­ics that sur­round our ship.” “We do not come to destruct.”

And where’re the trans­la­tions? English-only seems a little short-sighted, if not plain uneth­ical com­ing from such eth­ical beings.

Then there’s the fore­warn­ing and demon­isa­tion of those who may be scep­tical, a feather out of the cap of reli­gion. And we all know why reli­gions do that. Why would such ali­ens even feel the need to men­tion this? Self doubt? It’s no skin off their nose if people are scep­tical, as “a craft of great size shall be vis­ible … for all to see.”

Lastly, the mes­sage comes from someone called ‘Blos­som Goodchild.’

As much as I would dearly love for there to be peace­ful ali­ens who come to save the day, wish­ing it doesn’t make it so.

I don’t blame people for clutch­ing at this sort of thing. They think, as I think, that human­ity has infin­itely more poten­tial than it’s cur­rently demon­strat­ing. Essen­tially they’re search­ing for out­ward answers as to why we’ve fucked it up so badly; why we’re steer­ing down the bar­rel of plan­et­ary dev­ast­a­tion and World War III. They don’t want to believe that we could be the mas­ters of our own destruction.

It may also have some­thing to do with many of us com­ing to believe in the dicho­tomy of good and evil; that there are good people and that there are evil people. People don’t want to believe they’re evil so this inev­it­ably leads one to ques­tion how the evil people got here and what we can do about them. Thus enter the alien super hero.

Search­ing for out­ward answers is a huge mis­take in my opin­ion. Humans are neither good nor bad but have the capa­city for both. Whether we’re destined for brighter things or an evol­u­tion­ary dead end is unknown but it cer­tainly seems we have the capa­city to have a say in the mat­ter. Blam­ing ali­ens, or hedging bets on ali­ens in shin­ing armer, or simply gambling on an after­life (as reli­gions do) dis­tracts one from doing what we need to do here and now on planet earth.

So, I’ve read this mes­sage from Blos­som Good­child and taken a look at the evid­ence and this is my mes­sage to those who want to believe this stuff: if this event doesn’t take place, don’t dis­count this but remem­ber it as a piece of evid­ence that strongly con­tra­dicts those who pro­fess to know about ali­ens and their inten­tions. And in the mean time go read this piece about con­firm­a­tion bias.

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