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Showing posts with label Chomsky. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chomsky. Show all posts
Friday, September 17, 2010
Chomsky refutes capitalist apologist
Listen to the first minute or so of this, if you can make it through the long-winded, and rather unlettered question from the audience that begins the clip.
The guy in the audience basically ends with the thought that capitalism has been triumphant because it has enabled rising standards of living (the clip is from 2006, so most of us will be scratching our heads when we hear this today in the midst of the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression).
Chomsky's response is excellent: slave societies, overtime, often saw a rise in the standard of living, but that doesn't suggest that slave societies were just by any stretch whatsoever. After all, black slaves in the United States were, in some respects, "better off" in the 19th Century than they had been in the 18th Century, but at the end of the day slavery was just as deplorable and horrifying in both centuries. As Malcolm X put it in a different context, "you don't stick a knife in a man's back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you're making progress".
So whatever else is true, the mere fact that capitalism has enabled some modest increases in the standard of living is no argument in its favor, not unless we allow that the argument above is an argument for slavery.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Chomsky on the "War on Drugs"
View it here.
4:32 - Chomsky asks us to compare the following with "Plan Colombia": "suppose that, say, China established military bases near the US... to carry out chemical warfare in Kentucky and North Carolina to kill this leathal crop [tobacco] that's killing large numbers of Chinese... I mean, is that all right? It's part of the imperial mentality [in the US] that this doesn't register... since we're the owners of the world."
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Chomsky on Obama's Foreign Policy and the Economy
At counterpunch, an interview with Noam Chomsky on Obama's emerging foreign policy. (Hint: It's not good.) I think the most original analysis comes in the end, however, when Chomsky briefly discusses the economic downturn and Obama's response to it:
It is a worldwide crisis and it is very serious. It is striking that the ways that Western countries are approaching the crisis [entirely contradict] the model that they enforce on the Third World when there is a crisis. So when Indonesia has a crisis, [or] Argentina and everyone else, they are supposed to raise interest rates very high and privatize the economy, and cut down on public spending, measures like that. In the West, it is the exact opposite: lower interest rates to zero, move towards nationalization if necessary, pour money into the economy, have huge debts. That is exactly the opposite of how the Third World is supposed to pay off its debts. That this seems to pass without comment is remarkable.
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