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The United States Is A Special Case, And For Me, Very Interesting. It's Studied Carefully And We Know A Lot About It. One Of The Most Striking Features Of The Elections Is The Class-based Character Of The Vote. Now, Class Is Not Discussed Or Even Measured In The United States. In Fact, The Word Is Almost Obscene, Except For The Term "middle Class." And You Can't Get Exact Class Data; The Census Doesn't Even Give Class Data. But You Can Sort Of See The Significance Of It Just From Income Figures.

-Noam Chomsky

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The United States Is

Noam Chomsky

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The United States Is A Special Case, And For Me, Very Interesting. It's Studied Carefully And We Know A Lot About It. One Of The Most Striking Features Of The Elections Is The Class-based Character Of The Vote. Now, Class Is Not Discussed Or Even Measured In The United States. In Fact, The Word Is Almost Obscene, Except For The Term "middle Class." And You Can't Get Exact Class Data; The Census Doesn't Even Give Class Data. But You Can Sort Of See The Significance Of It Just From Income Figures.

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Those Who Wish To Change The World Should Have The Best Possible Understanding Of The World, Including What Is Revealed By The Sciences, Some Of Which They Might Be Able To Use For Their Purposes. That's Why Workers Education, Including Science And Mathematics, Has Commonly Been A Concern Of Left Intellectuals.

Real Wages For Male Workers In The United States Are About What They Were In The '60s.

Scientists Generally, Not Just Evolutionary Biologists, Don't Take Much For Granted.

A Lot Of The People Involved In The Media Are Very Serious, Honest People, And They Will Tell You, And I Think They Are Right, That They Are Not Being Forced To Write Anything.

I Admire Ralph Nader And Denis Kucinich Very Much, And Insofar As They Bring Up Issues And Carry Out An Educational And Organisational Function - That's Important, And Fine, And I Support It.

Why Did The People Think [vietnam War] Was Fundamentally Wrong And Immoral? The Guys Who Ran The Polls, John E. Rielly, A Professor At The University Of Chicago, A Liberal Professor, He Said What That Means Is That People Thought Too Many Americans Had Being Killed. Another Possibility Is They Didn't Like The Fact That We Were Carrying Out The Worst Crime Since The Second World War. But That's So Inconceivable That Wasn't Even Offered As A Possible Reason.

If You Ask The Ceo Of Some Major Corporation What He Does, He Will Say, In All Honesty, That He Is Slaving 20 Hours A Day To Provide His Customers With The Best Goods Or Services He Can And Creating The Best Possible Working Conditions For His Employees.

Under Capitalism, We Can't Have Democracy By Definition. Capitalism Is A System In Which The Central Institutions Of Society Are In Principle Under Autocratic Control.

I Hope That A Move Toward Clemency With Judge Afiuni Would Be A Step Towards The Importance Of Maintaining A Properly Functioning Justice System.

For 500 Years, Since European Explorers Came, Latin American Countries Had Been Separated From One Another. They Had Very Limited Relations. Integration Is A Prerequisite For Independence.

Anyone Who Studies Declassified Documents Soon Becomes Aware That Government Secrecy Is Largely An Effort To Protect Policy Makers From Scrutiny By Citizens, Not To Protect The Country From Enemies.

If The United States Is Accommodating, The North Koreans Become Accommodating. If The United States Is Hostile, They Become Hostile.

If You Have To Control People, You Have To Have An Administrative Force That Does It. So In U.s. Industry, Even More Than Elsewhere, There's Layer After Layer Of Management - A Kind Of Economic Waste, But Useful For Control And Domination. And The Same Is True In Universities.

The Whole Educational And Professional Training System Is A Very Elaborate Filter, Which Just Weeds Out People Who Are Too Independent, And Who Think For Themselves, And Who Don't Know How To Be Submissive, And So On -- Because They're Dysfunctional To The Institutions.

Bradley Manning Should Be Regarded As A Hero. He Is Doing What An Honest, Decent Citizen Should Be Doing: Letting Your Population Know What The Government, The People Who Rule You Are Doing. They Want To Keep It Secret Of Course.

In A Democracy The Day When You Pay Your Taxes, April 15, Would Be A Day Of Celebration, Because You're Getting Together To Provide Resources For The Programs You Decided On.

Democratic Societies Can't Force People. Therefore They Have To Control What They Think.

The Syntactic Component Of A Grammar Must Specify, For Each Sentence, A Deep Structure That Determines Its Semantic Interpretationand A Surface Structure That Determines Its Phonetic Interpretation.

If You Look Back To The Anti-intervention Movements, What Were They? Let's Take The Vietnam War - The Biggest Crime Since The Second World War. You Couldn't Be Opposed To The War For Years. The Mainstream Liberal Intellectuals Were Enthusiastically In Support Of The War. In Boston, A Liberal City Where I Was, We Literally Couldn't Have A Public Demonstration Without It Being Violently Broken Up, With The Liberal Press Applauding, Until Late 1966.

One Of The Best Predictors Of Policy Around Is Thomas Ferguson's Investment Theory Of Politics, As He Calls It - Very Outstanding Political Economist - Which Essentially - I Mean, To Say It In A Sentence, He Describes Elections As Occasions In Which Groups Of Investors Coalesce And Invest To Control The State.

In Egypt The Neoliberal Programs Have Meant Statistical Growth, Like Right Before The Arab Spring, Egypt Was A Kind Of Poster Child For The World Bank And The Imf [international Monetary Fund:] The Marvelous Economic Management And Great Reform. The Only Problem Was For Most Of The Population It Was A Kind Of Like A Blow In The Solar Plexus: Wages Going Down, Benefits Being Eliminated, Subsidized Food Gone And Meanwhile, High Concentration Of Wealth And A Huge Amount Of Corruption.

What Matters Is What Happens Among The Powerful.

It's Not Radical Islam That Worries The Us -- It's Independence

Terror Became A Big Issue When The Reagan Administration Came In. They Immediately Announced [their Plans] And Kind Of Disparaged Carter's Alleged Human Rights Programs. The Main Issue Is State-directed International Terrorism. Right At That Time That Big Industry Developed. That's When You Start Getting The Academic Departments On Terrorism.

The Educational System Is Pretty Much Geared To Passing The Next Exam. You're Educated To Pass Tests And Not To Understand.

Capitalism’s Concept Of Competitive Man Who Seeks Only To Maximize Wealth And Power, Who Subjects Himself To Market Relationships, To Exploitation And External Authority, Is Anti-human And Intolerable In The Deepest Sense

Maybe The Science Is Uncertain, Maybe We Don't Have To Worry About It. Climate Change Is The Worst, But There's Others.

If Scientists And Scholars Were To Become "collectively Self-organised And Consciously Activist" Today, They Would Probably Devote Themselves To Service To State And Private Power. Those Who Have Different Goals Should (and Do) Become Organized And Activist.

From The 1970s, There Has Been A Significant Change In The Us Economy, As Planners, Private And State, Shifted It Toward Financialization And The Offshoring Of Production, Driven In Part By The Declining Rate Of Profit In Domestic Manufacturing.

Significant Change

[after Vietnam] The Type Of Interventions That Are Carried Out Are Designed So As Not To Elicit Public Reactions.

There's An Interesting Question, Whether The Anarchists Had Alternatives [in Spain]. If They Did Tend To Support The Government That Had Been Destroyed, What Were The Alternatives? There Was Actually A Proposal By Camillo Berneri, An Italian Anarchist Who Was In Spain At The Time, Which Is Not A Crazy Notion In My Opinion. He Opposed Participation In Government And Was Against The Formation Of An Army, Meaning A Major Army To Fight [francisco] Franco.

A Large Part Of The Left Is Pro-assad. In Those Circles, You Can't Criticize Assad, But You Know He's A Monstrous War Criminal. And Anyone Who Criticizes Assad Is Joining The Us Imperialists. That's Just Ludicrous.

Education Must Provide The Opportunities For Self-fulfillment; It Can At Best Provide A Rich And Challenging Environment For The Individual To Explore, In His Own Way.

In Fact, When Drugs Are Legalized, Use Sometimes Goes Down, It's Been Claimed. Part Of The Reason Is That Teenage Kids Use Illicit Drugs Because They Are Illicit. They Are Thumbing Their Noses At Society. If They Were Legal, They Might Not.

There Isn't Much Point Arguing About The Word "libertarian." It Would Make About As Much Sense To Argue With An Unreconstructed Stalinist About The Word "democracy" - Recall That They Called What They'd Constructed "peoples' Democracies." The Weird Offshoot Of Ultra-right Individualist Anarchism That Is Called "libertarian" Here Happens To Amount To Advocacy Of Perhaps The Worst Kind Of Imaginable Tyranny, Namely Unaccountable Private Tyranny. If They Want To Call That "libertarian," Fine; After All, Stalin Called His System "democratic." But Why Bother Arguing About It?

There Was A Time Traditionally - Say, Gm In The 1950s - It Was Trying To Develop A Consumer Base That Would Be Loyal And Lasting And They Were Thinking In Terms Of An Institution That Would Remain And Grow And Thrive In The Society. By Now, A Lot Of The Investment Firms - Bankers, Hedge Funds - Are Perfectly Happy To Destroy What They're In And Come Out With Huge, Tremendous Benefits. That's A New Stage Of Capitalism.

The General Public Are Not Even Aware Of Major Decisions That Will Determine Their Fate, Hence Are In No Position To Influence Them

To Understand How People Organize Social Systems, We Have To Discover The Principles That We Create To Make Some Societies Intelligible.

So If You Look At The Writings Of Intellectuals, There Are Two Kinds. One Said, L"look, If We Fought Harder We Could Have Won.but The Others, Who Were Way At The Left, People Like Anthony Lewis Of The New York Times, Way Out In Left Stream, His View In 1975 Was The Vietnam War Began With Blundering Efforts To Do Good. But By 1969, It Was Clear That It Was A Disaster, That Was Too Costly To Us.

Citizens Of The Democratic Societies Should Undertake A Course Of Intellectual Self Defense To Protect Themselves From Manipulation And Control, And To Lay The Basis For Meaningful Democracy.

Unlimited Economic Growth Has The Marvelous Quality Of Stilling Discontent While Maintaining Privilege, A Fact That Has Not Gone Unnoticed Among Liberal Economists.

The Us Is The Wrecking Machine That Is Destroying Everything. The World Is Hoping That China Will Somehow Come To The Rescue.

The Country Was Founded On The Principle That Primary Role Of Government Is To Protect Property From The Majority, And So It Remains.

The Kind Of Work That Should Be The Main Part Of Life Is The Kind Of Work You Would Want To Do If You Weren't Being Paid For It. It’s Work That Comes Out Of Your Own Internal Needs, Interests And Concerns.

I Was In Mexico City. It's A Very Pleasant City In Many Ways. It's Vibrant, Lively, Pretty Exciting Society, But Also Depressing In Other Ways, And Sometimes Almost Hopeless, You Know. So It's A Combination Of Vibrancy And, I Wouldn't Say Despair, But Hopelessness, You Know. Doesn't Have To Be, But It Is. I Mean, There Is Almost No Economy.

The Two Countries [pakistan And India] Have Already Come Close To Nuclear Confrontation Twice And This Could Get Worse. So Dealing With The Relationship With India Is Extremely Important.

September 11 Shocked Many Americans Into An Awareness That They Had Better Pay Much Closer Attention To What The Us Government Does In The World And How It Is Perceived. Many Issues Have Been Opened For Discussion That Were Not On The Agenda Before. That's All To The Good.

Most Of What Is Done I Think Is To Kept Secret So The Public Won't Know. The Same Is True Of What Wikileaks Exposed.

Thanh Hoa Itself Is A Rich Agricultural Province. Rice Fields, A Pattern Of Many Shades Of Green, Stretch Far Into The Distance Along The Road, Which Also Winds Through Foothills And The Fringes Of Heavy Jungle Where Tigers Are Said To Roam. The Vegetation, Wild Or Cultivated, Is Lush.

My Feeling Is That The Supreme Court Reached A Reasonable Standard Of Protection Of Speech In The 1960s, A Standard Higher Than Any Other Country In The World, To My Knowledge. In Brief, Speech Should Be Protected Up To Participation In Imminent Criminal Action.

The Us And Europe Are Committing Suicide In Different Ways. In Europe It's Austerity In The Midst Of Recession And That's Guaranteed To Be A Disaster. There's Some Resistance To That Now. In The Us, It's Essentially Off-shoring Production And Financialization And Getting Rid Of Superfluous Population Through Incarceration.

The U.s. Has The Most Dysfunctional Healthcare System In The Industrial World, Has About Twice The Per Capita Costs, And Some Of The Worst Outcomes. It's Also The Only Privatized System.

There's A Very Striking Fact About The Elections Which You Can't Miss If You Looked At The Red-and-blue Electoral Map The Next Day: It's The Same Political Landscape That You Saw During The Civil War - Nothing Much Has Changed Except The Party Names.

Nobody Is Going To Pour Truth Into Your Brain. It's Something You Have To Find Out For Yourself.

If You Owned Everything And A Tiny Little Piece Gets Out Of Control, Then Your World's Gone. Like Some Unusual Child Who Has A Million Toys And One Of Them Is Stolen, He's Going To Perish.

What's Called Obamacare Is An Effort To Mildly Change This [health-care System], Not Change It As Far As It Should Go Or As Much As The Population Wants It To Go, But To Make It A Little Better And A Little More Affordable.

China Is The Center Of The Asian Energy Security Grid, Which Includes The Central Asian States And Russia. India Is Also Hovering Around The Edge, South Korea Is Involved, And Iran Is An Associate Member Of Some Kind. If The Middle East Oil Resources Around The Gulf, Which Are The Main Ones In The World, If They Link Up To The Asian Grid, The United States Is Really A Second-rate Power. A Lot Is At Stake In Not Withdrawing From Iraq.

Hence, A Generative Grammar Must Be A System Of Rules That Can Iterate To Generate An Indefinitely Large Number Of Structures. This System Of Rules Can Be Analyzed Into The Three Major Components Of A Generative Grammar: The Syntactic, Phonological, And Semantic Components... The Syntactic Component Of A Grammar Must Specify, For Each Sentence, A Deep Structure That Determines Its Semantic Interpretation And A Surface Structure That Determines Its Phonetic Interpretation. The First Of These Is Interpreted By The Semantic Component; The Second, By The Phonological Component.

We Don't Use The Term 'working Class' Here Because It's A Taboo Term. You're Supposed To Say 'middle Class,' Because It Helps Diminish The Understanding That There's A Class War Going On.

The Zionist Movement Based In Palestine Pretty Much Took Over The Camps And Instituted The Policy That Every Man And Woman Between The Ages Of Seventeen And Thirty-five Should Be Directed To Palestine - Not Allowed To Go To The West.

Governments Will Use Whatever Technology Is Available To Combat Their Primary Enemy - Their Own Population.

It Is One Thing For The Institution To Offer Space For Serious Engagement, In Thought And Action, And To Encourage Free And Independent Use Of Such Opportunities; It Is Something Else For The University To Become Engaged As An Institution, Beyond A Fairly Narrow Range Where True Consensus Exists, And Even That Raises Questions.

Raises Questions

While Trump Keeps The Spotlight On Himself, The "respectable" Republican Establishment Chips Away At Government Programs That Benefit The General Population.

Capitalism Is Based On The Principle That Everything Has To Be Privately Owned; It Can't Be Held In Common. There Is Even A Dogma, Which Is Today Called, The "tragedy Of The Commons" Which Holds That If Things Are Held In Common They Are Going To Be Destroyed. If They're Privatized, Like You Give Them To Bechtel Or Monsanto Or Exxonmobil, Then They'll Be Preserved Because That's The Capitalist's Religion.

The Criminalization Of Black Life Was Something Specific To The United States In The Post-reconstruction Period And There's Something Like It Happening Today With Mass Incarceration, Directed Largely Against Black Males.

What's The Point Of Being Better Than Someone Else?

Us Wars Are Going To Be Against Much Weaker Enemies. And They Have To Be Won Quickly And Decisively Before A Popular Reaction Develops.

It Was Reported In The Left-wing Press In The Late 1930s That The Texas Company (texaco), Headed By The Nazi Sympathizer Torkild Rieber, Diverted Its Oil Shipments From The Republic, With Which It Had Contracts, To [francisco] Franco.

States Are Violent Institutions. The Government Of Any Country, Including Ours, Represents Some Sort Of Domestic Power Structure, And It's Usually Violent. States Are Violent To The Extent That They're Powerful, That's Roughly Accurate.

Bear In Mind That Capitalism Is A Tiny Period Of Human Society. You Never Really Had Capitalism, You Always Had One Or Another Variant Of State Capitalism.

Independent Development Can Be A Virus That Can Infect Others.

It’s Pretty Ironic That The So-called ‘least Advanced’ People Are The Ones Taking The Lead In Trying To Protect All Of Us, While The Richest And Most Powerful Among Us Are The Ones Who Are Trying To Drive The Society To Destruction.

This Is Class War On An International Scale, And Power Is In The Hands Of Those Who Control The International Economic System.

To Summarize, Draft Resistance Can Make Use Of The Inegalitarian Nature Of American Society As A Technique For Increasing The Cost Of American Aggression, And It Threatens Values That Are Important To Those In A Decision-making Position.

The Goal Is To Keep The Bewildered Herd Bewildered. It's Unnecessary For Them To Trouble Themselves With What's Happening In The World. In Fact, It's Undesirable - If They See Too Much Of Reality They May Set Themselves To Change It.

For The Powerful, Crimes Are Those That Others Commit.

Every Time There Has Been An Effort By The Haitian People To Overcome The Misery And Poverty That Comes From 200 Years Of Bitter Attacks, Really Bitter, The U.s. Steps In And Blocks It.

Tough Love Is Just The Right Phrase: Love For The Rich And Privileged, Tough For Everyone Else.

There Was Very Little International Support, Even England Wouldn't Support [bombing Of Syria], Which Is Amazing.

I Had Two Spinster Aunts Who Were Seamstresses, And Of Course Unemployed In The 1930s, But The Union Gave Them A Life. They Had A Couple Of Weeks In The Country For A Union Installation And They Had Educational Programs And All Sorts Of Things. There Was A Life, You Know, A Real Community.

Technologies Can Be Liberating, But It Can Also Be A Tool Of Coercion And Control.

What Happened In The Missile Crisis In October 1962 Has Been Prettified To Make It Look As If Acts Of Courage And Thoughtfulness Abounded. The Truth Is That The Whole Episode Was Almost Insane.

The Us Is Off The Spectrum In Religious Commitment. It's Been Increasing Since 1980 But It's A Major Part Of The Voting Base Of The Republican Party So That Means Committing To Anti-abortion Positions, Opposing Women's Rights.

What's Called "liberal" In The Intelectual Culture Means Highly Conformist To Power, But Mildly Critical.

Jingoism, Racism, Fear, Religious Fundamentalism: These Are The Ways Of Appealing To People If You're Trying To Organize A Mass Base Of Support For Policies That Are Really Intended To Crush Them.

Those Lucky Enough To Qualify As "intellectuals" Have Their Own Special Responsibilities, Deriving From Their Good Fortune. Among These Is The Task That [edward] Said Describes, Surely An Important One.

There Is A Noticeable General Difference Between The Sciences And Mathematics On The One Hand, And The Humanities And Social Sciences On The Other. It's A First Approximation, But One That Is Real. In The Former, The Factors Of Integrity Tend To Dominate More Over The Factors Of Ideology. It's Not That Scientists Are More Honest People. It's Just That Nature Is A Harsh Taskmaster. You Can Lie Or Distort The Story Of The French Revolution As Long As You Like, And Nothing Will Happen. Propose A False Theory In Chemistry, And It'll Be Refuted Tomorrow.

Of Course, Everybody Says They're For Peace. Hitler Was For Peace. Everybody Is For Peace. The Question Is: What Kind Of Peace?

Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously.

Censorship Is Never Over For Those Who Have Experienced It. It Is A Brand On The Imagination That Affects The Individual Who Has Suffered It, Forever.

Labor Has Been Severely Undermined, But That's Happened Before. In The 1920s, The Labor Movement Was Virtually Crushed, In Large Part By Wilson's Red Scare, But It Dramatically Revived In The 1930s. It Spearheaded The Social-democratic New-deal Style Changes Which Were Beneficial To The Country - Not Sufficient, But Beneficial. That Could Happen Again.

The Press Is Owned By Wealthy Men Who Only Want Certain Things To Reach The Public.

The Un Can Go As Far As The U.s. Will Allow, And No Further. And It's Bound By Conditions That The Powerful States, Which Means Mostly The U.s., Impose.

In A Moment Of Crisis, Of Which There Are All Too Many, Russian Military Planners May Conclude That Lacking A Deterrent, The Only Hope Of Survival Is A First Strike - Which Means The End For All Of Us.

Every Book That Comes Out, Every Article That Comes Out, Talks About How - While It May Have Been A "mistake" Or An "unwise Effort" - The United States Was Defending South Vietnam From North Vietnamese Aggression. And They Portray Those Who Opposed The War As Apologists For North Vietnam. That's Standard To Say. The Purpose Is Obvious: To Obscure The Fact That The United States Did Attack South Vietnam And The Major War Was Fought Against South Vietnam.

Hamas Must Agree To First Recognize Israel, Second To End All Violence, Third To Accept Past Agreements. Try To Find A Mention Of The Fact That The United States And Israel Reject All Three Of Those. They Obviously Don't Recognize Palestine, They Certainly Don't Withdraw The Use Of Violence Or The Threat Of It - In Fact They Insist On It - And They Don't Accept Past Agreements, Including The Road Map.

You Can Go Into The Library Of Congress And Find Information On Just About Anything, But That Doesn't Do You Much Good Unless You Know What You Are Looking For.

Historically, Several Policy Domains, Including That Of Foreign Policy Towards The Us And India, Budget Allocations Etc, Have Been Controlled By The Pakistani Military, And The Civil-military Divide Can Be Said To Be The Most Fundamental Fracture In Pakistan's Body Politic.

The Imf Economists Were Doubtless Shaken By The Extreme Failures Of Their Prescriptions Over Many Years, And By The Collapse Of The Intellectual Edifice Of Economic Theory On Which They Were Relying.

I Remember Talking To, 40 Years Ago, One Of The Leading People In The Government Who Was Involved In Arms Control, Pressing For Arms Control Measures, Détente, And So On. He's Very High Up, And We Were Talking About Whether Arms Control Could Succeed. And Only Partially As A Joke He Said, "well It Might Succeed If The High Tech Industry Makes More Profit From Arms Control Than It Can Make From Weapons-related Research And Production. If We Get To That Tipping Point Maybe Arms Control Will Work." He Was Partially Joking But There's A Truth That Lies Behind It.

To Say That The United States Has Pursued Diplomacy With North Korea Is A Little Bit Misleading. It Did Under The Clinton Administration, Though Neither Side Completely Lived Up To Their Obligations. Clinton Didn't Do What Was Promised, Nor Did North Korea, But They Were Making Progress. So When Bush Came Into The Presidency, North Korea Had Enough Uranium Or Plutonium For Maybe One Or Two Bombs, But Then Very Limited Missile Capacity. During The Bush Years It's Exploded. The Reason Is, He Immediately Canceled The Diplomacy And He's Pretty Much Blocked It Ever Since.

Welsh Is Now Almost A National Language In Wales. The Scottish Dialects Are Reviving To Some Extent. I Don't Think It's A Major Thing, But It's There, And It's Happening Elsewhere.

George Kennan Is Another Extreme Case. He Was The American Consul In Berlin Until The War Between Germany And The United States Broke Out In December 1941. And Until Then He Was Writing Pretty Supportive Statements Back Stressing That We Shouldn't Be So Hard On The Nazis If They Were Doing Something We Didn't Agree With - Basically Repeating The Idea That They Were People We Could Do Business With.

To Object That The Facts About Human Nature Set Limits On Our Ability To Change The World And Ourselves Makes About As Much Sense As The Lament That Our Lack Of Wings Sets Limits On Our Ability To 'fly' As Far As Eagles Under Our Own Power.

I'm Into Eating As Little As Possible, Paying As Little Attention As Possible. I Never Cook. Never Use The Stove Or Anything.

As A Zionist Youth Leader In The 1940s, I Was Among Those Who Called For A Binational State In Mandatory Palestine. When A Jewish State Was Declared, I Felt That It Should Have The Rights Of Other States - No More, No Less.

Another Problem Is The Confrontation With India. Pakistan Just Cannot Survive If It Continues To Do So (continue This Confrontation).

[companies That Specialized In How To Destroy Unions] Don't Make It A Secret, And They Have All Sorts Of Techniques For Management To Destroy Unions.

We Naturally Assume That Our Mental Structures Are Universal. But I Suppose An Outside Biologist Looking At Us Would See Something Very Different. He Would See That, Like Other Organisms, We Have A Narrow Sphere Within Which We Are Very Good, But That Sphere Is Very Limited. And That, In Fact, The Very Achievements We Can Have Within That Sphere Are Related To Lack Of Achievements In Other Spheres.

I Think The Foreign Policy Is Really Not Donald Trump Administration Concern. Like The Syria Strike. I Mean, It Meant Almost Nothing. They Hit An Empty Air Base. Within A Day, It Was Functioning Again. Planes Were Flying Off It. It Was For A Domestic Show, You Know - Show What A Tough Guy I Am; I'm Not Barack Obama.

Luckily For [barack] Obama, The Russians Came Along And Rescued Him With This Proposal [to Confiscate Assad's Chemical Weapons] Which He Quickly Accepted - It Was A Way Out Of The Embarrassment Of Facing Likely Defeat. They Still Have The Option Of Bombing If They Want To. And Incidentally, To Add One Comment About This, You'll Notice That This Would Be A Very Good Moment To Institute A Call For Imposing The Chemical Weapons Convention On The Middle East.

By Accident Of Geography, The World's Major Oil Resources Are In Shi'ite-dominated Areas. Iran's Oil Is Concentrated Right Near The Gulf, Which Happens To Be An Arab Area, Not Persian. Khuzestan Is Arab, Has Been Loyal To Iran, Fought With Iran Not Iraq During The Iran-iraq War. This Is A Potential Source Of Dissension. I Would Be Amazed If There Isn't An Attempt Going On To Stir Up Secessionist Elements In Khuzestan.

The Intellectual Is An Individual With A Specific Public Role In Society That Cannot Be Reduced Simply To . . A Faceless Professional.

In Fact, It's Pretty Dramatic When You Get To 1975, Very Revealing, The [vietnam] War Ends. Everybody Had To Write Something About The War, What It Meant. You Also Had Polls Of Public Opinion, And They're Dramatically Different.

Evaluating Countries Is Senseless And I Would Never Put Things In Those Terms, But That Some Of America's Advances, Particularly In The Area Of Free Speech, That Have Been Achieved By Centuries Of Popular Struggle, Are To Be Admired.

Nothing Can Justify Crimes Such As Those Of September 11, But We Can Think Of The United States As An Innocent Victim Only If We Adopt The Convenient Path Of Ignoring The Record Of Its Actions And Those Of Its Allies, Which Are, After All, Hardly A Secret.

From The U.s. Point Of View, Negotiations Are, In Effect, A Way For Israel To Continue Its Policies Of Systematically Taking Over Whatever It Wants In The West Bank, Maintaining The Brutal Siege On Gaza, Separating Gaza From The West Bank And, Of Course, Occupying The Syrian Golan Heights, All With Full U.s. Support.

Today, The Danger Of Some Sort Of A Nuclear Catastrophe Is Greater Than It Was During The Cold War, And Most People Are Blissfully Unaware Of This Danger.

Elements Of The Christian Fundamentalist Right Are One Of The Strongest Components Of "support For Israel" - Support In An Odd Sense, Because They Presumably Want To See It Destroyed In A Cosmic Battle At Armageddon, After Which All The Proper Souls Will Ascend To Heaven - Or So I Understand, Again, Not From Close Reading.

Our Only Real Hope For Democracy Is That We Get The Money Out Of Politics Entirely And Establish A System Of Publicly Funded Elections.

There Are Questions As To Whether It Should Even Exist. Who Should Corporations Be Responsive To, The Management Of A Corporation? Theoretically They Are Responsive To The Shareholders, But I Why Not To The So - Called Stakeholders, The Work Force And The Community? Nothing In Economic Theory Opposes That. Those Are Social And Political Decisions.

In General, I Think, U.s. Policies Remain Constant, Going Back To The Second World War. But The Capacity To Implement Them Is Declining.

My Position Is That We Should Not Succumb To Irrational Belief.

To Live A Life Of Honesty And Integrity Is A Responsibility Of Every Decent Person.

When Something Isn't Constantly Drummed-up By The Media, [people] Just Don't Know About It.

The United States Is Off The International Spectrum In Religious Extremism.

If You And I Go Into A Store To Rob It, And I Say "shoot," That's Not Protected. Like All Judicial Decisions And Legislation, This Leaves Plenty Of Gray Areas, Including Many Of Great Significance That Are Rarely Discussed: Advocacy Of Imminent War Crimes, Such As Aggression, For Example. I Think We Would All Agree That Such Speech Should Be Protected, Despite The Often Horrific Consequences, But It's Worth Noting That That Stretches The Doctrine To Its Limits.

In The Literal Sense, There Has Been No Relevant Evolution Since The Trek From Africa. But There Has Been Substantial Progress Towards Higher Standards Of Rights, Justice And Freedom - Along With All Too Many Illustrations Of How Remote Is The Goal Of A Decent Society.

Anarchism Means All Sort Of Things To Different People But The Traditional Anarchists' Movements Assumed That There'd Be A Highly Organized Society, Just One Organized From Below With Direct Participation And So On. Actually, One Piece Of The Media Confusion Has A Basis Because There Really Are Two Different Strands In The Occupy Movement, Both Important, But Different.

Colombia Was A Big Wheat Producer In The 1950's. That Was Eliminated By What Sounds Like A Nice Plan, Called "food For Peace. " It's A Plan By Which Us Taxpayers Subsidized Us Agribusiness To Send Food To Poor Countries. This, Of Course, Destroyed The Domestic Agricultural Markets Of These Countries, Opening These Markets To Us Agribusiness.

The Prescription For Endless War Poses A Far Greater Danger To Americans Than Perceived Enemies Do, For Reasons The Terrorist Organisations Understand Very Well.

During The Terrorist Regime In Haiti In The 1990s, The Cia, Under The Administration Of Bill Clinton, Was Reporting To Congress That Oil Shipments Had Been Blocked From Entering Haiti. That Was Just A Lie. I Was There. You Could See The Oil Terminals Being Built And The Ships Coming In.

For Fifty Years, We Heard Nato Is Necessary To Save Western Europe From The Russian Hordes, You Know The Slave State, Stuff I Was Taking About. In 1990-91, No Russian Hordes. Okay, What Happens? Well There Are Actually Visions Of The Future System That Were Presented. One Was [mikhail] Gorbachev. He Called For A Eurasian Security System, With No Military Blocs. He Called It A Common European Home. No Military Blocs, No Warsaw Pact. Just An Integrated Security System With No Conflicts.now The Other Vision Was Presented By George Bush, This Is The "statesman".

Security Systems

Education Is Not For Profit. If You're Not In Education For Profit, It's Not Going To Be A Fair Critique For Education.

'reform' Is A Word You Always Aughta' Watch Out For. 'reform' Is A Change That You're Supposed To Like. And Watch It - As Soon As You Hear The Word 'reform', You Should Reach For Your Wallet And See Who's Lifting It.

Corporations Are Totalitarian Institutions. Board Of Directors At The Top Of Managers Give Orders, Everyone Follows Orders..... At The Very Bottom Of Command, If You Are Lucky You Can Rent Yourself To It And Get A Job , And If You Are Sufficiently Propagandized You May Even Buy Some Of The Junk They Produce And So On.

The Major Organizing Centers, Like The Labor Movement, Have Been Severely Weakened In The United States By Policy.

Sea Level Rise And Destruction Of Water Resources As Glaciers Melt Alone May Have Horrendous Human Consequences.

Karl Marx Was In Favor Of Socialist And Communist-socialist Revolutions, But He Had A Pretty Nuanced View About It.

The Leading, The Most Respected Vietnam Historian, Military Historian Bernard Fall -he Was A Hawk Incidentally, But He Cared For The Vietnamese - He Said It Wasn't Clear To Him Whether Vietnam Could Survive As A Historical And Cultural Entity Under The Most Massive Attack That Any Region That Size Had Ever Suffered. He Was Talking About South Vietnam, Incidentally.

The Drug Problem Is In The United States, Not In Mexico. It's A Demand Problem And That Is To Be Dealt With Here, And It Is Not Being Dealt With. It's Been Shown Over And Over That Prevention And Treatment Are Far More Cost Effective Than Police Action, Out-of-country Action, Border Control, And So On.

Anti-americanism Is A Pure Totalitarian Concept. The Very Notion Is Idiotic.

Anything Feasible And Potentially Effective Should Be Explored.

Humans May Be Destroying Their Chances For Decent Survival. It Won't Kill Everybody, But It Would Change The World Dramatically.

The Iraq War Is The First War In History, In Which There Were Huge Demonstrations Before The War Was Launched, Not Beginning Five Years Later And Then Being Broken Up. All Of These Are Changes, And The People Who Are Writing In Journals Today Lived Through These Changes.

What The [james] Monroe Doctrine Stated, In Effect, Is That The Us Should Dominate The Hemisphere.

The Left, In A General Sense, Is Very Much Atomized. We Live In Highly Atomized Societies. People Are Pretty Much Alone; It's You And Your Ipad.

The Second World War Ended With A Radicalization Of The Population In The United States And Everywhere Else, And Called For All Kinds Of Things Like Popular Takeovers, Government Intervention, And Worker Takeovers Of Factories. Business Propagated A Tremendous Propaganda Offensive. The Scale Surprised Me When I Read The Scholarship - It's Enormous, And It's Been Very Effective. There Were Two Major Targets: One Is Unions, The Other Is Democracy.

Government Intervention

I Don't Like Piracy But If Anybody's Concerned About Piracy, Why Don't They Pay Attention To Our Role In It?

By Most Accounts, Aristide Is The Most Popular Figure In Haiti.

There Are Cases - For Example, The American Revolution. George Washington's Army Lost Just About Every Battle With The British, Who Had A Much Better Army. The War Was Basically Won By Guerrilla Forces That Managed To Undermine The British Occupation.

Our Concern Is To Help People Counter The Efforts Of Those Who Seek To "regiment The Public Mind Every Bit As Much As An Army Regiments The Bodies Of Its Soldiers," So That The Self-designated "responsible Men" Will Be Able To Run The Affairs Of The World Untroubled By The "bewildered Herd" - The General Public - Who Are To Be Marginalized And Dispersed, Directed To Personal Concerns, In A Well-regulated "democracy."

What Can One Say About A Country Where A Museum Of Science In A Great City Can Feature An Exhibit In Which People Fire Machine Guns From A Helicopter At Vietnamese Huts, With A Light Flashing When A Hit Is Scored? What Can One Say About A Country Where Such An Idea Can Even Be Considered? You Have To Weep For This Country.

During The 1960s, Large Groups Of People Who Are Normally Passive And Apathetic Began To Try To Enter The Political Arena To Press Their Demands.... The Naive Might Call That Democracy, But That's Because They Don't Understand. The Sophisticated Understand That That's The Crisis Of Democracy.

Because They Don't Teach The Truth About The World, Schools Have To Rely On Beating Students Over The Head With Propaganda About Democracy. If Schools Were, In Reality, Democratic, There Would Be No Need To Bombard Students With Platitudes About Democracy. They Would Simply Act And Behave Democratically, And We Know This Does Not Happen. The More There Is A Need To Talk About The Ideals Of Democracy, The Less Democratic The System Usually Is.

If The Rewiring Of The Brain That Yielded Recursive Generation Of Hierarchically Structured Expressions Took Place In An Individual, Not A Group (and There Seems To Be No Coherent Alternative), Then Interaction Must Have Been A Later Phenomenon.

Take Any Country That Has Laws Against Hate Crimes, Inspiring Hatred And Genocide And So On. The First Thing They Would Do Is Ban The Old Testament. There's Nothing Like It In The Literary Canon That Exalts Genocide, To That Extent. And It's Not A Joke Either. Like Where I Live, New England, The People Who Liberated It From The Native Scourge Were Religious Fundamentalist Lunatics, Who Came Waving The Holy Book, Declaring Themselves To Be The Children Of Israel Who Are Killing The Amalekites, Like God Told Them.

It Happened: The First 9/11, It Happened On September 11, 1973, In Chile. We Did It. Was That Interfering Or Hacking A Party? This Record Is All Over The World, Constantly Overthrowing Governments, Invading, Forcing People To Follow What We Call Democracy, As In The Cases I Mentioned. As I Say, If Every Charge Is Accurate, It's A Joke, And I'm Sure Half The World Is Collapsing In Laughter About This, Because People Outside The United States Know It. You Don't Have To Tell People In Chile About The First 9/11.

Education Is Imposed Ignorance.

Popular Support For Alternative Energy Has Been Very High For Years. But It Harms Corporate Profits.

Of Course, We [ With Edward Herman] Have A Purpose: Namely, To Encourage Readers To Undertake What Might Be Called "a Course In Intellectual Self-defense," And To Suggest Ways To Proceed; In Other Words, To Help People Undermine The Dedicated Efforts To "manufacture Consent" And To Turn Them Into Passive Objects Rather Than Agents Who Control Their Own Fate.

It's Perfectly Obvious That There Is Some Genetic Factor That Distinguishes Humans From Other Animals And That It Is Language-specific. The Theory Of That Genetic Component, Whatever It Turns Out To Be, Is What Is Called Universal Grammar.

Why Not Stakeholder Action? There's No Economic Principal That Says That Management Should Be Responsive To Shareholders, In Fact You Can Read In Texts Of Business Economics That They Could Just As Well Have A System In Which The Management Is Responsible To Stakeholders.

There Is Always Room For Gramsci's "optimism Of The Will."

I See No Anti-semitic Implications In Denial Of The Existence Of Gas Chambers, Or Even Denial Of The Holocaust.

I Suspect Most Likely That More Nazis Came To America. I Was A Student At Harvard During The Early 1950s. There Was Practically No Jewish Faculty There.

The People Who Were Honored In The Bible Were The False Prophets. It Was The Ones We Call The Prophets Who Were Jailed And Driven Into The Desert.

We Should Not Want To Permit Providers, For Example To Have Control Over Access.

Popular Struggles To Bring About A Freer And More Just Society Have Been Resisted By Violence And Repression, And Massive Efforts To Control Opinion And Attitudes. Over Time, However, They Have Met With Considerable Success, Even Though There Is A Long Way To Go, And There Is Often Regression.

Surely Few If Any Readers Have Come Across The Sentence They Are Now Reading, And Someone Who Had By Chance Heard Or Seen It Could Not Possibly Remember Such A Fact.

A Default Of The Us Government Would Not Only Be Very Harmful Here, It Would Probably Send The Country Back Into Deep Recession, But It Just Might Crash The International Financial System.

How It Is We Have So Much Information, But Know So Little?

No Use In Waiting, We Can All Work Hard To Bring About Changes.

Democracy, In Any Rational Form, Also Imposes Conditions On Majority Rule. That's What The Bill Of Rights Is About, For Example.

Borders Are Semiporous. Capital Flows More Freely Than People Across Them. On C Span.

In Much Of The World The U.s. Is Regarded As A Leading Terrorist State.

People Are Capable Of Seeing The Deceit They're Ensnared In. They Just Have To Make The Effort.

There Are Very Deep And Restrictive Principles That Determine The Nature Of Human Language And Are Rooted In The Specific Character Of The Human Mind

Trump Keeps The Spotlight On Himself With One Act After Another, Assuming Correctly That Yesterday's Antics Will Be Swept Aside By Today's.

When I Wrote About The Spanish Civil War Many Years Later, I Used Documents That I Picked Up When I Was A Child, As A Lot Hadn't Been Published (a Lot More Resources Are Available Now).

Right Now, Where Do We Stand? Well Right At The Russian Border, Both Sides Have Been Taking Provocative Actions, Both Sides Are Building Up Military Forces. Nato Forces Are Carrying Out Maneuvers Hundreds Of Yards From The Russian Border, The Russian Jets Are Buzzing American Jets. Anything Could Blow Up In A Minute.

Groupings Of People That Get Together, Think Things Through, Come Out To Plan And So On, Like Unions Or True Political Organizations, They've Disintegrated. And People Tend To Be Atomized - You Get Down To A Society Based On Social Units Based On An Atom - An Atomic Element - Which Is A Person And Their Computer. Not A Society That Is Going To Be Able To Function Freely And Democratically. The Tendency Is There; It Doesn't Have To Be, But Its Something To Worry About.

It's This Kind Of Wild Unpredictability, Megalomania, Thin-skinned Craziness That Really Has Me Worried, More Than [donald Trump] Statements. Now, On The Climate Change There's Just Nothing To Say, He's Perfectly Straightforward.

Given Their Unusual Privilege, Western Intellectuals Can Realistically Accomplish A Great Deal. The Limits Are Imposed By Will More Than Objective Circumstances. And About Human Will Predictions Are Without Value.

Academics Are Not Necessarily Nice People.

And If You Look At All This Academic Work In The Conferences And So On There's A Constant Theme That Terrorism Is Extremely Hard To Define And We Therefore Have To Have A Deep Thinking About It. And The Reason It's Hard To Define Is Quite Simple. It's Hard To Find A Definition That Includes What They Do To Us But Excludes What We Do To Them. That's Quite Difficult. So It Takes A Global War On Terrorism.

Millions Of People Are Getting The Vote, And We Have To Educate Them To Keep Them From Our Throats. In Other Words, We Have To Train Them In Obedience And Servility, So They're Not Going To Think Through The Way The World Works And Come After Our Throats.

In Fact, The Capitalist Class In The '50s Was Sort Of Part Of A Social Contract. It Was Part Of The Tenor Of The Times.

We [ With Edward Herman] Believe That The Empirical Evidence We Review There - And Elsewhere, In A Great Deal Of Joint And Separate Work - Lends Substantial Support To The Conclusions; Whether That Is True Is For Others To Judge.

We Recriminalized Black Life. Incarceration Rates Since The 1908s Have Gone Through The Roof, Overwhelmingly Black Males, Women And Hispanics To Some Extent. Essentially Re-doing What Happened Under Reconstruction. That's The History Of African Americans - So How Can Any One Say There's No Problem. Sure, Racism Is Serious, But It's Worse Than That.

African American

When [bill] Clinton Came Along, It Sort Of Moderated A Little Bit, But Clinton Had A Different Device For Breaking Unions Called Nafta [north America Free Trade Agreement]. Because The Government Was Entirely Lawless, Employers Could Exploit Nafta To Threaten Union Organizers With Transfer. It's Illegal, But When You've Got A Lawless Government, It Doesn't Matter If It's Illegal. I Think The Number Of Union Drives Blocked Increased By About 50 Percent.

You Never Know How [donald Trump] Is Going To React. When He Learned For Example That He'd Lost The Election By About Three Million Votes, His Instant Reaction Was Insanity; You Know, Three To Five Million Illegal Immigrants Somehow Were Organized In Some Incredible Fashion To Vote.

The United States Is A Special Case, And For Me, Very Interesting. It's Studied Carefully And We Know A Lot About It. One Of The Most Striking Features Of The Elections Is The Class-based Character Of The Vote. Now, Class Is Not Discussed Or Even Measured In The United States. In Fact, The Word Is Almost Obscene, Except For The Term "middle Class." And You Can't Get Exact Class Data; The Census Doesn't Even Give Class Data. But You Can Sort Of See The Significance Of It Just From Income Figures.

It's Not A Free Trade Agreement. It Has Virtually Nothing To Do With Free Trade... It's A Protectionist Agreement; It's Anti Free-trade.

As Long As Individuals Are Compelled To Rent Themselves On The Market To Those Who Are Willing To Hire Them, As Long As Their Role In Production Is Simply That Of Ancillary Tools, Then There Are Striking Elements Of Coercion And Oppression That Make Talk Of Democracy Very Limited, If Even Meaningful.

It's Not A Matter Of Public Relations And Rhetorical Style But Of Actions. It's The Actions And Policies Under George W.bush Administration That Have Left The Us Government Remarkably Isolated, Feared And Often Hated To An Extent With No Historical Precedent.

For Thirty Years, Isreal Has Been Highjacking Ships In International Waters, Killing People, Taking Hostages, Bringing Them To Israel, Putting Them In Secret Prisons, All With The Help Of The United States. That's Serious Piracy.

There Is A Considerable Polarization Taking Place Here, Increasing The Gap Between Rich And Poor. It's Most Dramatic In Third World Countries, Of Course, But In The Rich Countries It's Also Very Noticeable.

Chemistry, Until My Childhood, Not That Long Ago, Was Regarded As A Calculating Device. Because You Couldn't Reduce To Physics. So It's Just Some Way Of Calculating The Result Of Experiments. The Bohr Atom Was Treated That Way.

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