Chomsky: The U.S. Behaves Nothing Like a Democracy, But You'll Never Hear About It in Our 'Free Pres
August 15, 2013 |
The following is a transcript of a recent speech delivered Noam Chomsky in Bonn, Germany, at DW Global Media Forum, Bonn, Germany. You can read more speeches by Chomsky here.
I'd like to comment on topics that I think should regularly be on the front pages but are not - and in many crucial cases are scarcely mentioned at all or are presented in ways that seem to me deceptive because they're framed almost reflexively in terms of doctrines of the powerful.
In these comments I'll focus primarily on the United States for several reasons: One, it's the most important country in terms of its power and influence. Second, it's the most advanced - not in its inherent character, but in the sense that because of its power, other societies tend to move in that direction. The third reason is just that I know it better. But I think what I say generalizes much more widely - at least to my knowledge, obviously there are some variations. So I'll be concerned then with tendencies in American society and what they portend for the world, given American power.
American power is diminishing, as it has been in fact since its peak in 1945, but it's still incomparable. And it's dangerous. Obama's remarkable global terror campaign and the limited, pathetic reaction to it in the West is one shocking example. And it is a campaign of international terrorism - by far the most extreme in the world. Those who harbor any doubts on that should read the report issued by Stanford University and New York University, and actually I'll return to even more serious examples than international terrorism.
According to received doctrine, we live in capitalist democracies, which are the best possible system, despite some flaws. There's been an interesting debate over the years about the relation between capitalism and democracy, for example, are they even compatible? I won't be pursuing this because I'd like to discuss a different system - what we could call the "really existing capitalist democracy", RECD for short, pronounced "wrecked" by accident. To begin with, how does RECD compare with democracy? Well that depends on what we mean by "democracy". There are several versions of this. One, there is a kind of received version. It's soaring rhetoric of the Obama variety, patriotic speeches, what children are taught in school, and so on. In the U.S. version, it's government "of, by and for the people". And it's quite easy to compare that with RECD.
In the United States, one of the main topics of academic political science is the study of attitudes and policy and their correlation. The study of attitudes is reasonably easy in the United States: heavily-polled society, pretty serious and accurate polls, and policy you can see, and you can compare them. And the results are interesting. In the work that's essentially the gold standard in the field, it's concluded that for roughly 70% of the population - the lower 70% on the wealth/income scale - they have no influence on policy whatsoever. They're effectively disenfranchised. As you move up the wealth/income ladder, you get a little bit more influence on policy. When you get to the top, which is maybe a tenth of one percent, people essentially get what they want, i.e. they determine the policy. So the proper term for that is not democracy; it's plutocracy.
Inquiries of this kind turn out to be dangerous stuff because they can tell people too much about the nature of the society in which they live. So fortunately, Congress has banned funding for them, so we won't have to worry about them in the future.......................
This is a long speech and powerful
twelve pages........
http://www.alternet.org/visions/chomsky-us-poses-number-threats-future-humanity-our-youll-never-hear-about-it-our-free-press?page=0%2C1
= new reply since forum marked as read
He's usually right.
K&R
- Now:
''No one who lives in error is free.'' ~Euripides
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"Battle not with monsters - lest ye become a monster." ~Friedrich Nietzsche
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"To fight the empire is to be infected by its derangement. Whoever defeats part of the empire becomes the empire; it proliferates like a virus... thereby it becomes its enemies." ~Philip K. Dick
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"When masses are made to believe something negative, they may create what they did not want, which is how for instance the 'N.W.O.' works. You are believing it is taking shape, so it will take shape and so-called think tanks and political theorists are major players in helping this take shape by bombarding us with the 'facts' that it obviously is taking shape. Those facts claim that you are giving-in to their power everyday, and they control you more... while in reality you are in full control.
So the people who are 'waking up' to it are the ones who are creating it. They say: ''Resist, the control being forced upon humanity. React, when they do their political manueverings to bring about less sovereignty and greater suffering for the nations of the world.''
But we mustn’t resist and react to this control. As Carl Jung said, ''What you resist, persists.'' What the powers that be want is for us to become that radical element (again it doesn’t matter which side we choose -- [font color=red]they always play both sides[/font]).
We can be either for them or against them. It doesn't matter. If we react and if we resist, we give them the manipulative power to push the agenda along. By resisting and reacting, we are demonstrating that we believe in the underlying, subliminal and hypnotic suggestion of this reality, thereby making it our reality, and the events they wish to occur concerning humanity, and that they wish to appear real, will occur and then it ''becomes reality.''
Do not pay attention to the 'world events', they are all orchestrated to make you pay attention to them. The struggle you should pay attention to is on a personal level."
~The Insider
- The way out, is in.....
Global Consciousness Project
and the uber-wealthy rather than promoting the general welfare were not a democracy, but rather a plutocracy? Does anyone on this board have a more accurate depiction than Noam Chomsky or is our government, for all practical matters, a plutocracy? 