posted April 25, 2006 12:20 PM              

There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provisions should be made to prevent its ascendancy."
-- Thomas Jefferson, third US president, architect and author (1743-1826)

"[Being a humorist] is a useful trade, a worthy calling; that with all its lightness and frivolity it has one serious purpose, one aim, one specialty, and it is constant to it -- the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence; and that whoso is by instinct engaged in this sort of warfare is the natural enemy of royalties, nobilities, privileges and all kindred swindles, and the natural friend of human rights and human liberties."
-- Mark Twain

"War, at first, is the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn't any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off."
-- Karl Kraus, writer (1874-1936)

"Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws."
-- John Adams, 2nd US president (1735-1826)

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
-- Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778)

"It does not require many words to speak the truth."
-- Chief Joseph, native American leader (1840-1904)

"When we have the courage to speak out -- to break our silence -- we inspire the rest of the "moderates" in our communities to speak up and voice their views."
-- Sharon Schuster

"Lying is done with words and also with silence."
-- Adrienne Rich, writer and teacher (1929- )

"If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul."
-- Isaac Asimov, scientist and writer (1920-1992)

" It is one of the maladies of our age to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where graver issues are at stake."
-- Janos Arany, poet (1817-1882)

"Whoever imagines himself a favorite with God holds others in contempt."
-- Robert Green Ingersoll, lawyer and orator (1833-1899)

"We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security."
-- Dwight David Eisenhower, U.S. general and 34th president (1890-1969)

" Propaganda is a soft weapon; hold it in your hands too long, and it will move about like a snake, and strike the other way."
-- Jean Anouilh, playwright (1910-1987)

"An open mind is a prerequisite to an open heart."
-- Robert M. Sapolsky, neuroscientist and author (1957- )

"Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear."
-- Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)

"A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression, whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its business, cannot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy it."
-- Lewis H. Lapham, editor and writer (1935- )

"In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful."
-- Leo Tolstoy, author (1828-1910)

"For all our conceits about being the center of the universe, we live in a routine planet of a humdrum star stuck away in an obscure corner ... on an unexceptional galaxy which is one of about 100 billion galaxies. ... That is the fundamental fact of the universe we inhabit, and it is very good for us to understand that."
-- Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer (1934-1996)

"Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality."
-- Theodor Adorno, philosopher and composer (1903-1969)

"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd US President (1882-1945)

"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could
do only a little."
-- Edmund Burke, statesman and writer (1729-1797)

"I place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt."
-- Thomas Jefferson, third US president, architect and author (1743-1826)

"Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of
a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough."
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd US President (1882-1945)

"When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt."
-- Robert T. Pirsig, author and philosopher (1928- )

"Political freedom cannot exist in any land where religion controls the state, and religious freedom cannot exist in any land where the state controls religion."
-- Samuel James Ervin Jr., lawyer, judge, and senator (1896-1985)

"A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury."
-- John Stuart Mill, philosopher and economist (1806-1873)

"Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."
-- Flannery O'Connor, writer (1925-1964)

"The high minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think."
-- Aristotle, philosopher (384-322 BCE)

"A sneer is the weapon of the weak."
-- James Russell Lowell, poet, editor, and diplomat (1819-1891)

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view."
-- Harper Lee, writer (1926- )

"People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them."
-- Dave Barry, author and columnist (1947-)

"It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry."
-- Thomas Paine, philosopher and writer (1737-1809)

"The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause. A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business."
-- Eric Hoffer, philosopher and author (1902-1983)

"If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner."
-- H. L. Mencken, quoted from The Gist Of It

"We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstractions police and threaten us."
-- Robert Hayden, poet and educator (1913-1980)

"No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded."
-- Margaret Mead, anthropologist (1901-1978)

"True religion is the life we lead, not the creed we profess."
-- Louis Nizer, lawyer (1902-1994)

"The most tyrannical of governments are those which make crimes of opinions, for everyone has an inalienable right to his thoughts."
-- Baruch Spinoza, philosopher (1632-1677)

"Wherever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship."
-- Harry S. Truman, 33rd US president (1884-1972)

"Doubt everything at least once, even the proposition that two times two equals four."
-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, scientist and philosopher (1742-1799)

"The people never give up their liberties, but under some delusion."
-- Edmund Burke, statesman and writer (1729-1797)

"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)

"I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, and of the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an Islander, that I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term among the few allies our wars have left us."
--Lord Byron, poet (1788-1824)

"There is no pillow so soft as a clear conscience."
-- French proverb

"The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out."
-- Chinese proverb

"Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein."
-- H. Jackson Brown, Jr., writer

"If it is committed in the name of God or country, there is no crime so heinous that the public will not forgive it."
- Tom Robbins, writer (1936- )

"As I stood before the gates I realized that I never want to be as certain about anything as were the people who built this place."
- Rabbi Sheila Peltz, on her visit to Auschwitz

"Nature can provide for the needs of people; [she] can't provide for the greed of people."
- Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)

"To know how to say what others only know how to think is what makes men poets or sages; and to dare to say what others only dare to think makes men martyrs or reformers - or both."
- Elizabeth Charles, writer (1828-1896)

"The more people are reached by mass communication, the less they communicate with each other."
- Marya Mannes, writer (1904-1990)

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity."
- George Orwell, writer (1903-1950)

The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life - the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
- Hubert Horatio Humphrey, US Vice President (1911-1978)

"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
- George Orwell, writer (1903-1950)

"Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it."
- Mark Twain, author and humorist (1835-1910)

"Whenever 'A' attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon 'B', 'A' is most likely a scoundrel."
- H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)

"The spirit of democracy cannot be imposed from without. It has to come from within."
- Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)

"When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?"
- Eleanor Roosevelt, diplomat and writer (1884-1962)

"The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none."
- Thomas Carlyle, writer (1795-1881)

"I love my country too much to be a nationalist."
- Albert Camus, writer, philosopher, Nobel laureate (1913-1960)

"It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell."
- William Tecumseh Sherman, Union General in the American Civil War (1820-1891)

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
- George Santayana, philosopher (1863-1952)

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
- Aldous Huxley, novelist (1894-1963)

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."
- Charles Darwin, naturalist and author (1809-1882)

"It is always the secure who are humble."
- G.K. Chesterton, essayist and novelist (1874-1936)

"A great war leaves the country with three armies - an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves."
- German proverb

"It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defence, we would sanction the subversion of one of those liberties which make the defence of our nation worthwhile."
- Earl Warren, jurist (1891-1974)

"The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children."
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, theologian (1906-1945)

"All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies."
- John Arbuthnot, writer and physician (1667-1735)

"I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made."
- Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd US President (1882-1945)

"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."
-Susan B Anthony, reformer and suffragist (1820-1906)

"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."
-William O. Douglas, judge (1898-1980)

"Never vote for the best candidate, vote for the one who will do the least harm."
-- Frank Dane

"Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense."
-- Mark Twain

"Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing the ground."
-- Frederick Douglass, abolitionist, editor and orator (1817-1895)

"The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on."
-- Joseph Heller, novelist (1923-1999)

"If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. general and 34th president (1890-1969)

"Some people think they are worth a lot of money just because they have it."
-- Fannie Hurst, writer (1889-1968)

"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
-- Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778)

"Everyone wishes to have truth on his side, but not everyone wishes to be on the side of truth."
-- Richard Whately, philosopher, reformer, theologian, economist (1787-1863)

"We can put television in its proper light by supposing that Gutenberg's great invention had been directed at printing only comic books."
-- Robert M. Hutchins, educator (1899-1977)

"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one."
-- George Bernard Shaw, writer, Nobel laureate (1856-1950)

"Did you know that the worldwide food shortage that threatens up to five hundred million children could be alleviated at the cost of only one day, only ONE day, of modern warfare."
-- Peter Ustinov, actor, writer and director (1921-2004)

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
-- Abraham Lincoln, 16th U.S. President (1809-1865)

"The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts."
-- Edmund Burke, statesman and writer (1729-1797)

"It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."
-- Robert F. Kennedy (1925 - 1968)

"Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat."
--Jean-Paul Sartre, writer and philosopher (1905-1980)

"The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice."
-- Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

"The penalty that good men pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by men worse than themselves."
-- Plato, philosopher (427-347 BCE)

"I particularly condemn the way our political leaders supplied the manpower for that war [The Vietnam War]. The policies determining who would be drafted and who would be deferred, who would serve and who would escape, who would die and who would live, were an anti-democratic disgrace.... I am angry that so many sons of the powerful and well-placed ... managed to wangle slots in Reserve and National Guard units. Of the many tragedies of Vietnam, this raw class discrimination strikes me as the most damaging to the ideal that all Americans are created equal and owe equal allegiance to our country."
-- Colin Powell in his book "My American Journey"

"What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label 'Liberal?' If by 'Liberal' they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer' s dollar, then the record of this party and its members demonstrate that we are not that kind of 'Liberal.' But if by a 'Liberal' they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a 'Liberal,' then I' m proud to say I'm a 'Liberal.'"
- John F. Kennedy, September 14, 1960

"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day."
-Theodore Roosevelt, April 19, 1906

"Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels--men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, we may never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, May 31, 1954

"Wars cause suffering, put a premium on fraud and cruelty, infect whole societies with anger, fear & pride. They are crusades that make the world safe for spiritual darkness."
- Aldous Huxley

"Rush Limbaugh is a lame professional Swine and he makes a good living at it."
- Hunter S. Thompson

"Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservative."
-John Stuart Mill, 1806-1873, British philosopher

"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against its government."
- Edward Abbey, naturalist and author (1927-1989)

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing."
- Albert Einstein

"Truth never envelops itself in mystery, and the mystery in which it is at any time enveloped is the work of its antagonist, and never of itself."
–Thomas Paine

"Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?"
-Abraham Lincoln, 16th US president (1809-1865)

"Face it," wrote Garrison Keillor, of A Prairie Home Companion, in Time Magazine, "a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality."

"Politics is the only endeavor for which no previous experience is considered necessary..."
-- Robert Louis Stevenson

Mahatma Ghandi was once asked what he thought about Western civilization. He replied, "That would be a good idea."

"Trusting to escape scrutiny by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory, that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood-- that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy, he plunged into war."
--Congressman Abraham Lincoln

"A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own."
--H. G. Wells (The Salvaging of Civilization)

"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."
--Plato

"Statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."
-- Mark Twain, "Chronicle of Young Satan"

"The bane of ideology is that it exalts abstractions over human beings. It impoverishes our sense of reality, and it impoverishes our imagination, too."
-- Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality."
-- Dante

"Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good."
-- Thomas Paine, "The Rights of Man, Part II." (1792)

"War can't end terrorism. War is terrorism."
-- Philip Berrigan

"When even one American - who has done nothing wrong -- is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all Americans are in peril."
-- Harry S. Truman

"Helen Thomas is a legend. She's known and covered every president since JFK. In a candid moment, Ms. Thomas spoke a powerful truth. "George W. Bush is the worst president in all of American history." Given how Mr. Bush has squandered the surplus, trashed the economy and is now hurdling toward a war that is unpopular, unjust, unwise and unwarranted, I think I see Helen's point. Now, the GOP has moved into smear mode. The RNC is urging it's faithful to, "call her out," which apparently means harassing Helen by e-mail, and phone, and fax. I guess nothing makes a Republican feel better than beating up on an 82-year-old woman."
- Paul Begala, Crossfire, 02/24/03

"An elective despotism is not the government we fought for."
- Thomas Jefferson

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
- Margaret Mead

"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."
- Franklin Roosevelt

"Every gun that is made, every warship that is launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold, and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children....This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953

"Actually, there is a class war raging in this country, but it is being waged not by the poor, but against them. Those who would deny government relief to the poor but demand they find jobs, when all of the jobs are hard to find and decent ones impossible, are waging a class war."
-- Fr. Charles Owen Rice

"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind... And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded with patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader, and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar."
-- William Shakespeare in The Tragedy of Julius Caesar

"Those who are willing to sacrifice their basic liberties to assure their security deserve neither."
--Benjamin Franklin

"If ever time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin."
-- Samuel Adams

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
--Theodore Roosevelt

"Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad."
-- James Madison

posted April 25, 2006 05:10 PM              

Here is a picture for one of them.....

quote:

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"A sneer is the weapon of the weak."
-- James Russell Lowell, poet, editor, and diplomat (1819-1891)

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posted April 25, 2006 05:18 PM              

quote:

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"If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner."
-- H. L. Mencken, quoted from The Gist Of It

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posted April 25, 2006 05:32 PM              

quote:

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“I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars.”

"You measure a democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists."

---

Abbie Hoffman

posted April 25, 2006 05:59 PM              

quote:

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"Thomas Jefferson, the leading Enlightenment figure in the United States, along with Benjamin Franklin, who took exactly the same view, argued that dependence will lead to "subservience and venality", and will "suffocate[s] the germs of virtue". And remember, by dependence he meant wage labor, which was considered an abomination under classical liberal principles. There's a modern perversion of conservatism and libertarianism, which has changed the meanings of words, pretty much the way Orwell discussed. So nowadays, dependence refers to something else. When you listen to what's going in Congress, and people talk about dependence, what they mean by dependence is public support for hungry children, not wage labor. Dependence is support for hungry children and mothers who are caring for them. [...] We see this very dramatically right at this moment in Congress, under the leadership of Newt Gingrich, who quite demonstrably is the leading welfare freak in the country. He is the most avid advocate of welfare in the country, except he wants it to go to the rich. His own district in Cobb County Georgia gets more federal subsidies than any suburban county in the country, outside of the federal system itself... And it's supposed to continue, because this kind of welfare dependency is good. Dependent children, that's bad. But dependent executives, that's good. You gotta make sure they keep feeding at the public trough. [...] the nation is not an entity, it's divided into economic classes, and the architects of policy are those who have the economic power. In his days, he said, the merchants and manufacturers of England, who make sure that their interests are "most peculiarly attended to", like Gingrich. Whatever the effect on others, including the people of England. To Adam Smith, that was a truism. To James Madison, that was a truism. Nowadays, you're supposed to recoil in horror and call it vulgar Marxism or something, meaning that Adam Smith and James Madison must have been disciples of Marx. And if you believe the rest of the story, you might as well believe that. But those are facts which you can easily discover if you bothered reading the sacred texts, that you're supposed to worship, but not read."

"...jingoism, fear, racism, 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."

"The Bush Administration do have moral values. Their moral values are very explicit: shine the boots of the rich and the powerful, kick everybody else in the face, and let your grandchildren pay for it. That simple principle predicts almost everything that's happening."

"Personally I'm in favor of democracy, which means that the central institutions in the society have to be under popular control. Now, 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. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level -- there's a little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward. Just as I'm opposed to political fascism, I'm opposed to economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it's pointless to talk about democracy."

"Take the Kyoto Protocol. Destruction of the environment is not only rational; it's exactly what you're taught to do in college. If you take an economics or a political science course, you're taught that humans are supposed to be rational wealth accumulators, each acting as an individual to maximize his own wealth in the market. The market is regarded as democratic because everybody has a vote. Of course, some have more votes than others because your votes depend on the number of dollars you have, but everybody participates and therefore it's called democratic. Well, suppose that we believe what we are taught. It follows that if there are dollars to be made, you destroy the environment. The reason is elementary. The people who are going to be harmed by this are your grandchildren, and they don't have any votes in the market. Their interests are worth zero. Anybody that pays attention to their grandchildren's interests is being irrational, because what you're supposed to do is maximize your own interests, measured by wealth, right now. Nothing else matters. So destroying the environment and militarizing outer space are rational policies, but within a framework of institutional lunacy. If you accept the institutional lunacy, then the policies are rational."

"By comparative standards, the country is undertaxed. And it's also regressively taxed, the tax burden falls mostly on the poor. What we need is a progressive tax system, of, incidently, the kind that Jefferson advocated. You know, traditional libertarians, like Jefferson, advocated sharply progressive taxes, because they wanted a system of relative equality, knowing that that's a prerequisite for democracy. Jefferson specifically advocated it. We don't have it anymore, it's sort of there in legislation but it's gone. What we need is different social policies. And social policies which ought to be funded by the people who are gonna benefit from it, that's the general public. So we'd be a lot better off if we were higher taxed, and it was used for proper purposes. And we know what those are. I mean, for example, for women taking care of children. You know, it makes sense to pay them for that work, they're doing important work for the society. And they should be paid for it, but that requires tax payments. And the same is true about protection of the environment."

"In a dictatorship, taxation is theft. In a true democratic community, people make decisions, including decisions about how to deal with problems of concern to the community, like schools, health services, transportation, etc. Insofar as this leads to expenditures, they make decisions about taxes or some counterpart. There is no theft. Societies like ours are somewhere in between. To take your case, suppose your neighbor never uses a road or a bus at the other end of town. Why should he fund it? Maybe we should each just pay for the roads we use -- and that means, of course, that we have to prevent others from using them, so we hire private armies, and if someone comes along with a bigger army we get nuclear weapons to keep them from using our road, and... Actually, proposals like this are made, in all seriousness, in literature that is taken seriously. And it extends to everything else, leading to a world in which no sane person would want to live, even if it would be possible to survive in it."

"Mass education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose. And don't think people didn't know it. They knew it and they fought against it. There was a lot of resistance to mass education for exactly that reason. It was also understood by the elites. Emerson once said something about how we're educating them to keep them from our throats. If you don't educate them, what we call "education," they're going to take control -- "they" being what Alexander Hamilton called the "great beast," namely the people. The anti-democratic thrust of opinion in what are called democratic societies is really ferocious. And for good reason. Because the freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow."

"[The "liberal media"] love to be denounced from the right, and the right loves to denounce them, because that makes them look like courageous defenders of freedom and independence while, in fact, they are imposing all of the presuppositions of the propaganda system."

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"Remember that the media have two basic functions. One is to indoctrinate the elites, to make sure they have the right ideas and know how to serve power. In fact, typically the elites are the most indoctrinated segment of a society, because they are the ones who are exposed to the most propaganda and actually take part in the decision-making process. For them you have the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, and so on. But there’s also a mass media, whose main function is just to get rid of the rest of the population -- to marginalize and eliminate them, so they don’t interfere with decision-making. And the press that’s designed for that purpose isn’t the New York Times and the Washington Post, it’s sitcoms on television, and the National Enquirer, and sex and violence, and babies with three heads, and football, all that kind of stuff."

"...evidence-based approach, the U.S. negotiators argued, is interference with free markets, because corporations must have the right to deceive. [...] the claim itself is kind of amusing, I mean, even if you believe the free market rhetoric for a moment. The main purpose of advertising is to undermine markets. If you go to graduate school and you take a course in economics, you learn that markets are systems in which informed consumers make rational choices. That's what's so wonderful about it. But that's the last thing that the state corporate system wants. It is spending huge sums to prevent that, which brings us back to the viability of American democracy. For many years, elections here, election campaigns, have been run by the public relations industry and each time it's with increasing sophistication. And quite naturally, the industry uses the same technique to sell candidates that it uses to sell toothpaste or lifestyle drugs. The point is to undermine markets by projecting imagery to delude and suppressing information, and similarly, to undermine democracy by same method, projecting imagery to delude and suppressing information. The candidates are trained, carefully trained, to project a certain image. Intellectuals like to make fun of George Bush's use of phrases like “misunderestimate,” and so on, but my strong suspicion is that he's trained to do that. He's carefully trained to efface the fact that he's a spoiled frat boy from Yale, and to look like a Texas roughneck kind of ordinary guy just like you, just waiting to get back to the ranch that they created for him..."

"Of course, everybody says they're for peace. Hitler was for peace. Everybody is for peace. The question is: what kind of peace?"

"A good way of finding out who won a war, who lost a war, and what the war was about, is to ask who's cheering and who's depressed after it's over - this can give you interesting answers. So, for example, if you ask that question about the Second World War, you find out that the winners were the Nazis, the German industrialists who had supported Hitler, the Italian Fascists and the war criminals that were sent off to South America - they were all cheering at the end of the war. The losers of the war were the anti-fascist resistance, who were crushed all over the world. Either they were massacred like in Greece or South Korea, or just crushed like in Italy and France. That's the winners and losers. That tells you partly what the war was about. Now let's take the Cold War: Who's cheering and who's depressed? Let's take the East first. The people who are cheering are the former Communist Party bureaucracy who are now the capitalist entrepreneurs, rich beyond their wildest dreams, linked to Western capital, as in the traditional Third World model, and the new Mafia. They won the Cold War. The people of East Europe obviously lost the Cold War; they did succeed in overthrowing Soviet tyranny, which is a gain, but beyond that they've lost - they're in miserable shape and declining further. If you move to the West, who won and who lost? Well, the investors in General Motors certainly won. They now have this new Third World open again to exploitation - and they can use it against their own working classes. On the other hand, the workers in GM certainly didn't win, they lost. They lost the Cold War, because now there's another way to exploit them and oppress them and they're suffering from it."

"We certainly shouldn't trust to deal with [Saddam Hussein] anyone who supported him through his worst crimes, that's insane."

"Somebody's paying the corporations that destroyed Iraq and the corporations that are rebuilding it. They're getting paid by the American taxpayer in both cases. So we pay them to destroy the country, and then we pay them to rebuild it."

"I choose to live in what I think is the greatest country in the world, which is committing horrendous terrorist acts and should stop."

"If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don't like. Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're in favor of freedom of speech, that means you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise."

# "If you look into the history of what is called the CIA, which means the US White House, its secret wars, clandestine warfare, the trail of drug production just follows. It started in France after the Second World War when the United States was essentially trying to reinstitute the traditional social order, to rehabilitate Fascist collaborators, wipe out the Resistance and destroy the unions and so on. The first thing they did was reconstitute the Mafia, as strikebreakers or for other such useful services. And the Mafia doesn't do it for fun, so there was a tradeoff: Essentially, they allowed them to reinstitute the heroin production system, which had been destroyed by the Fascists. The Fascists tended to run a pretty tight ship; they didn't want any competition, so they wiped out the Mafia. But the US reconstituted it, first in southern Italy, and then in southern France with the Corsican Mafia. That's where the famous French Connection comes from. That was the main heroin center for many years. Then US terrorist activities shifted over to Southeast Asia. If you want to carry out terrorist activities, you need local people to do it for you, and you also need secret money to pay for it, clandestine hidden money. Well, if you need to hire thugs and murderers with secret money, there aren't many options. One of them is the drug connection. The so-called Golden Triangle around Burma, Laos and Thailand became a big drug producing area with the help of the United States, as part of the secret wars against those populations."

# "Having a substance should not be considered a crime, because so far it's victimless. If you want to talk about distributing substances that are lethal, yeah, that oughta be brought up, but then, let's be serious. Tobacco is far ahead of anything else. Alcohol is second. Hard drugs are way down the bottom, and furthermore most drug use, though it's very harmful for the person, has very little social effect. The crime associated with hard drugs is mostly a consequence of criminalization. [Q: so should we go after the people who make cigarettes?] If the principle is, let's not get lethal substances out to the public, the first one you'd go after is tobacco, the next one you'd go after is alcohol, way down the list you'd get to cocaine, and sort of invisibly low you'd get to marijuana. [Q: a lot more violence comes from someone snorting some coke?] No, it doesn't. It comes from purchasing coke and selling coke, but that's because it's illegal. That's because of the criminalization of it, not the effect. There're good studies of this. Tobacco doesn't happen to cause violence, but alcohol definitely does. The deaths that are alcohol related are way beyond the deaths that are hard drugs related, if you separate, in the hard drugs case, the deaths that are the result of criminalization. So yeah, when you have drug gangs and narcotraffickers fighting for turfs and so on, sure, then there's gonna be plenty of killings. Just like when you had Al Capone running Chicago. But that's a consequence of the criminalization, not the drugs. What drugs tend to do is make people passive. Alcohol on the other hand makes them violent. There're extensive studies in the criminality literature, and you can take a look at the results. The basic result is that tobacco related deaths are way beyond anything else, just an order of magnitude greater. Furthermore those are not just to the user, they're to everybody else. So deaths from passive smoking alone are much higher than drug related deaths. Furthermore they're transferred on to the next generation. Alcohol is the next biggest killer, and it's a killer not only to the people who use it, which is bad enough, but also to others, because of its relation to violence. Next is things like hard drugs, and they are rarely harmful to others, they're harmful to the user. When you get down to marijuana, last time I looked there had been about 60 million users and not one known case of overdose. I mean it's not good for you, undoubtably, but it's probably at the level of coffee. And in fact notice that there has never been a medical reason for criminalizing marijuana. I've looked through the history of this if you're interested, I don't know if you want me to run through it, but it's an interesting history. Very commonly substances are criminalized because they're associated with what's called the dangerous classes, you know, poor people, or working people. So for example in England in the 19th century, there was a period when gin was criminalized and whiskey wasn't, because gin is what poor people drink. That's kinda like the sentencing for crack and powder. In the early stages of Prohibition in the United States, one of the targets was immigrant workers, these guys hanging around the saloons in New York, gotta go after them. The rich guys in upstate New York, they're gonna drink no matter what, you know, they wanna come home after work, they'll drink. But, go after those guys. What about marijuana? Marijuana was brought in by Mexicans, and the first criminalization of marijuana was in the southwest, in the states. It was in New Mexico, later Utah, and so on, and it was specifically targeted against Mexicans. It didn't get criminalized in the United States until shortly after Prohibition ended. After Prohibition ended we had this huge bureau of narcotics, and it had to do something. So they discovered, you know, that marijuana is gonna do all kind of terrible things to you. The Senate testimony about this is mind-boggling. They did have a representative of the American Medical Association, who said we don't have any medical evidence about this. He was shut up, denounced, you know, get rid of him right away. Then they found somebody else, this is literally true, they found a pharmacologist, a guy teaching at Temple University, who was doing experiments with marijuana and dogs. The testimony is hilarious, you really have to read it. They brought this guy and he testified that when he gave marijuana to dogs they went insane, you know, they'd do all kind of things. And then, some senator or somebody asked him, this is from memory, so it's probably a little off, but something like this, it's in the thirties. They asked the guy, well have you ever tried marijuana on humans? So he said, yeah, he tried it on himself. And he said, well, what happened? He said, I turned into a vulture, I started flying around the room. So they, oh my god, this stuff is terrible, it makes people insane. And it was declared by Congress that marijuana makes people insane. But then something happened. It turned out that lawyers, defense lawyers, got the idea, OK, I can use this for an insanity defense. So if a guy who killed 3 cops, his lawyer would say, well, you know, he had marijuana before so he was insane, so you can't do anything. And people were getting off on charges, like cop killing for example, on the claim that they had marijuana. So all of a sudden it was discovered that marijuana doesn't make you insane. Congress decided, sorry, it doesn't make you insane, because we wanna wipe that out. The next idea was, marijuana is an entry drug, it's the drug you take and then you go on to something else. Well, there was never any evidence for that, but that was decided. And then in the early fifties, something else happened, marijuana is being brought in here by Red Chinese to poison the American population and destroy us. So therefore we gotta stop marijuana. And it kinda goes on like this. Actually, the peak of marijuana use was as I said, in the seventies, but that was rich kids, so you don't throw them in jail. And then it got seriously criminalized, you know, you really throw people in jail for it, when it was poor people."

# "There's one white powder which is by far the most lethal known, it's called sugar. If you look at the history of imperialism, a lot of it has to do with that. A lot of the imperial conquest, say in the Caribbean, set up a kind of a network... The Caribbean back in the 18th century was a soft drug producer: sugar, rum, tobacco, chocolate. And in order to do it, they had to enslave Africans, and it was done largely to pacify working people in England who were being driven into awful circumstances by the early industrial revolution. That's why so many wars took place around the Caribbean."

"I think we can be reasonably confident that if the American population had the slightest idea of what is being done in their name, they would be utterly appalled."

[Q: do you believe that a nation should suffer a detrimental cost in order to compensate for wrongs committed by the governors of that nations, or by segments of that nation in the past?] "Suppose you're living under a dictatorship, and the dictators carry out some horrendous acts. So you're living in Stalinist Russia, let's say, and Stalin carries out horrible crimes. Are the people of Russia responsible for those crimes? Well, to only a very limited extent, because living under a brutal, harsh, terrorist regime, there isn't very much they can do about it. There's something they can do, and to the extent that you can do something, you're responsible for what happens. Suppose you're living in a free, democratic society, with lots of privilege, enormous, incomparable freedoms, and the government carries out violent, brutal acts. Are you responsible for it? Yeah, a lot more responsible, because there's a lot that you can do about it. If you share responsibility in criminal acts, you are liable for the consequences."

---

Noam Chomsky

posted April 25, 2006 07:26 PM              

I really like that guy...

Did you say you saw him in person the other day? (if it wasn't you, then someoneone else did)

I was going to comment on it at the time, but didn't get around to it....

Must have been interesting....

*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*

quote:

---

# "If you look into the history of what is called the CIA, which means the US White House, its secret wars, clandestine warfare, the trail of drug production just follows

---

Yeah, I read that somewhere else too....

posted April 25, 2006 07:37 PM              

I like this stuff, but my daddy likes
another kind. (Why do you suppose
they call him "Poppy?")

posted April 25, 2006 10:56 PM              

quote:

---

Let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.

---

posted April 26, 2006 12:49 PM              

Chomsky truly told it like it is in his article.

The root cause of what is happening in our country ( and the world in general) is capitalism run amok. Not really true capitalism as it was designed to be but more a "Merchantism" as a wise friend once termed it, which is really a form of fascism.

Bush and his adminstration are not an aberration but instead the natural result of capitalism run amok. Corporations are not only running our government in America but they are running the entire world. This has been going on for a very, very long time and it doesn't matter what political party is in office.

In the 1950's President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about the dangers of what he termed the Military Industrial Complex and it's marriage with government. No one heeded Eisenhower's warning and what we are seeing today is the natural result of that marriage. Corporations are profit based and will do anything, legal or not to make more profit. That is why there is so much corruption in our government today, because there is so much corruption in large corporations. Most politicians do not become politicians to serve the people as our government was designed to be, but instead they find it a great profession to line their pockets by selling their votes and they then become a part of the wealthy aristocrasy. Not that there are not some honest, sincere members of Congress and government in general, but as long as there is lobbying in this country, their numbers are fewer than the career politicans who sell out the country to become rich at any cost. In fact they are selling the country itself piece by piece to foreign investors and corporations.

I think the Vietnam War, the war in Iraq and the war that Bush and his administration is planning in Iran is all about corporate profit and it is really an attempt to gain total control of the world by the corporations. Some say, and they may be right, that it is really a war to protect the American dollar against the Euro. In the months preceding the pre-emptive attack on Iraq, Hussein came out publically and said he was switching to the Euro exchange and Iran switched to the Euro long ago. The U.S. obtains very little of it's oil supply from the Middle East. We are not, as some think, dependent on Middle Eastern oil but China and all of Europe is dependent on Middle Eastern oil. The American dollar is the exchange currancy of all oil sales in the world and while it used to be gold that our dollar was based on, long ago it became oil. If the Middle Eastern countries all switched to the Euro monetary exchange it would destroy the U.S. as the world power. Pretty much what Bush and his administration who are all corporate CEO's are doing in Iraq is showing the rest of the world what we will do to protect the American dollar against the Euro. Democrat or Republican the U.S. government which is corporate owned and corporate run will go to war to protect the dollar because it is their profits that not only benefit from war but are at stake if countries exchange the Euro instead of the American dollar for oil.

Wars with other countries are also a good way to distract people from the real war that is going on in this country and other countries which is the class war.

Squidward explained the system very well to Spongebob in one of the segments of the "Spongebob Squarepants" show when he said: "Spongebob it's like this. I give you the orders for the crabbie patties, you make the crabbie patties, I serve the crabbie patties. We do this for 40 years and then we die." lol That sums the class system up very well, not only in the U.S. but all over the world.

posted April 26, 2006 01:02 PM              

Who is running and owning almost every Convenience store..providing Gas ssales..in America..well..they are all from India..so who controls oil and gas?

posted April 26, 2006 03:51 PM            

A man so befuddled he talks in terms of Libertarian Socialists? As though those two words could possibly be connected in a political sense?

Noam Chomsky is a dud, a communist twit hiding behind nonsense terms to spread his drivel to the unwary.

How anyone could buy into anything this sh*t for brains says or thinks is beyond me. This is the guy who denied Pot Pol murdered about 2 million Cambodians. Hello, they were communists too, just not the ideologically pure commies Pot Pol revered.

Face it, all the heroes of the left are communists. Which brings me to another point.

How could anyone with 2 brain cells look around at the 200,000,000 people communists have directly murdered, look at the repressive, oppressive societies they construct, the absolute poverty and starvation existing in communist countries and the subversion of the human spirit, the human spirit they attempt to extinguish and find any common ground with communists, communist countries or those who spout their drivel?

posted April 26, 2006 04:06 PM            

Professor of linguistics, prolific pamphleteer, highly influential leftist
Known for his extreme views (e.g., that America is worse than Nazi Germany)
"The so-called War on Terror is pure hypocrisy, virtually without exception"

The dust jacket of Hegemony or Survival, Noam Chomsky's attack on U.S. foreign policy and the elites that control it, calls the author "the world's foremost intellectual activist." Normally such a statement could be dismissed as the usual publisher's hyperbole, but this claim about Chomsky exists in an echo chamber of similar sentiments. According to the Chicago Tribune, Chomky is "the most cited living author" and ranks just below Plato and Sigmund Freud among the most cited authors of all time. While acknowledging that he is reviled in some quarters for his ferocious anti-Americanism and cavalier relationship with the factual record, a recent New Yorker profile calls Chomsky "one of the greatest minds of the 20th century."

Even this rapturous praise does not quite capture the extent of the Chomsky phenomenon. At this point in his career, Chomsky is more a cult figure—"the L. Ron Hubbard of the New Left," one writer called him—than a writer or even a theorist. (Most of his "books" are pamphlets in disguise, collections of speeches, or interviews strung together, as in the case of the best selling 9-11, which was assembled by email with the assistance of his acolytes.) Rock groups such as Rage Against the Machine and Pearl Jam promote Chomsky at their concerts the way the Beatles once promoted the Guru Mahraraji, solemnly reading excerpts from his work in between sets and urging their followers to read him too. Manufacturing Consent, a documentary adapted from a Chomsky book of the same title, has achieved the status of an underground classic in university film festivals. And at the climactic moment in the Academy Award-winning Good Will Hunting, the genius-janitor played by Matt Damon, vanquishes the incorrect thinking of a group of sophomoric college students with a fiery speech quoting Chomsky on the illicit nature of American power.

The devotion of Chomsky's followers is summarized by radio producer David Barsamian, who describes the master's effulgence in openly religious terms: "He is for many of us our rabbi, our preacher, our rinpoche, our sensei."

But unlike other cult figures, Chomsky's power is not commanded by the authority of charisma or the electricity of revelation. His speeches are flat and fatwa-like, hermetically sealed against the oxygen of disagreement by syllogism and self reference. His power comes not from his person, but from the fact that he, more than any other public intellectual, gives an authentic voice to the hatred of America that has been an enduring fact of our national scene since the mid-1960s. It is a voice that is also easily distinguished from others with similar commitments. Chomsky is interested in a few "truths" which are always "beyond dispute." His citations often loop back narcissistically to his own works. He argues with such streamroller-like disregard for other explanations that he often seems to be talking to himself: "The so-called War on Terror is pure hypocrisy, virtually without exception. Can anybody understand that? No, they can't understand it."

The Anti-Chomsky Reader does not seek to deprogram members of the Chomsky cult. But it does offer a response and antidote to the millions of words Noam Chomsky has emitted over the last 35 years, and tries to explain to those who do not yet accept him as their rinpoche what he has stood for during that time. Some of the ideas on his intellectual curriculum vitae that are discussed in the following pages—his defense of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge; his support of holocaust revisionism—may surprise those who know Chomsky only generally as a critic of U.S. foreign policy. Other of his commitments—the assertion that the U.S. as a world power is continuing the program of Nazi Germany and his fierce hatred of Israel—will, unfortunately, be more familiar. But either way, as Chomskyism continues to grow at home and abroad, it is clearly time for a reckoning.

Any work about Chomsky must begin with linguistics, the field he remade so thoroughly by his scholarly work of the late 1950s that he was often compared to Einstein and other paradigm shifters. Those who admire this achievement but not his politics are at pains to explain what they take to be a disjunction between his work in linguistics and his sociopolitical ideas. They see the former as so brilliant and compelling as to be unarguable -- in all a massive scientific achievement - and the latter as so venomous and counter-factual as to be emotionally disturbing. In their contribution to this volume, Paul Postal and Robert Levine, linguists who have known and worked with Chomsky, take the view that the two aspects of his life's work in fact manifest the same key properties: "a deep disregard of, and contempt for, the truth; a monumental disdain for standards of inquiry; a relentless strain of self-promotion; notable descents into incoherence; and a penchant for verbally abusing those who disagree with him."

Whatever flaws have retroactively appeared, Chomsky's work in linguistics allowed him to make a transition from the university to the public arena in the mid-1960s and be taken seriously as a critic of the war in Vietnam. In a series of influential articles that appeared in the New York Review of Books and other publications and in American Power and the New Mandarins, he distinguished himself by the cold intellectual ferocity of his attacks on American policy. Although a generation older than most members of the New Left, he shared their eagerness to romanticize the Third World. As Anders Lewis notes in "The Irresponsibility of An Intellectual," Chomsky found in Hanoi a radical version of the Eternal City. He traveled there with other revolutionary tourists to make speeches of solidarity with the communists (whose heroism he believed revealed "the capabilities of the human spirit and human will") and to sing songs and declaim poems.

But Chomsky was unlike other anti-war intellectuals in that he never made a cerebral return to Vietnam to rethink the consequences of the communist takeover there. As Lewis shows, Hanoi has remained for him a place of the radical heart where unblemished goodness continues to engage the absolute evil of American aggression in a freeze-frame death struggle.

He expected Cambodia to yield a similar epiphany. But then came word of the Khmer Rouge's killing fields. Many of those who had joined him in seeing Pol Pot as a revolutionary hero were shaken. Chomsky held fast, initially trying to minimize the deaths (a "few thousand") and comparing those killed to the collaborators who were executed by resistance movements in Europe at the end of World War II. Steven Morris describes Chomsky's savage attacks in the Nation in 1977 against the witnesses, some of them fellow leftists, who brought out news of the developing holocaust. In 1980, when it when it was no longer possible to deny that some 2 million of Cambodia's 7.8 million people had indeed perished at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, Chomsky continued to deny the genocide, proposing that the problem may have been a failure of the rice crop. As late as 1988, when the skulls were piled too high to ignore any longer, Chomsky returned to the subject and insisted that whatever had happened in Cambodia, the U.S. was to blame.

As he was establishing himself as a permanent scourge of American foreign policy, Chomsky occasionally called himself an "anarchist socialist" (which any linguist should have identified as an oxymoron). But aside from genuflections in the direction of Mao's totalitarian China (which he refers to as a "relatively just" and "livable" society) and Castro's Cuban gulag (he has endorsed Project USA/Cuba-InfoMed, which seeks to "increase awareness about health achievements in Cuba and the impact of U.S. policies on the health of the Cuban people," and "to build opposition to the U.S. embargo of Cuba"), and his equally superficial engagements with Vietnam and Cambodia, he has not been much interested in the theory or practice of other countries, socialist or otherwise. His only subject—David Horowitz is right to call it an "obsession"-- is America and its "grand strategy of world domination." In 1967 Chomsky wrote that America "needed a kind of denazification." The Third Reich has provided him with his central metaphor ever since.

Chomsky has denounced every president from Wilson and FDR to Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton as the front men in "four year dictatorships" by a ruling elite. In his view, the U.S., led by a series of lesser Hitlers, picked up where the Nazis left off after they were defeated (primarily by the Soviets) in 1945. Thus, a case could be made for impeaching every president since World War II because "they've all been either outright war criminals or involved in serious war crimes." In their efforts to prevent a Communist takeover in Latin America, JFK and LBJ in particular used "the methods of Heinrich Himmler's execution squads."

As Thomas Nichols shows in "Chomsky and the Cold War," the long conflict with the Soviets and the fact that it was fought out primarily in the Third World allowed Chomsky to elaborate on his analogy with the Nazis and "to spin his master narrative on the evils of American power…." The Soviet dictatorship was not only "morally equivalent" to democratic America, but in Chomsky's view actually better because it was less powerful. The chief sin of Stalinism in his eyes was not the murder of millions but giving socialism a bad name. Nichols opens a window onto Chomsky's rage in 1990 when the Wall came down, communism collapsed, and the USSR disintegrated—all events that were previously undreamt of in his philosophy: "The world that emerged was the complete reverse of what Chomsky and his cult followers had hoped for and expected during a quarter century of insistence that the U.S. was morally indistinguishable from the USSR."

Many of the other critics of the war in Vietnam Chomsky had stood with during the 1960s had moved on by the 90s. He remained behind, a bitter ender operating what sometimes seemed an intellectual version of a one man government in exile from his office at MIT and frequently complaining of being ignored and marginalized. In Manufacturing Consent he explained how such a thing could happen: the American media, reflecting the views of the corporate elites that control them, made sure that ideas such as the ones he held remained on the fringe. As Eli Lehrer shows in "A Kept Press and a Manipulated People," Chomsky's "propaganda model" of the media is a key to his worldview, explaining how the American people are so suffocated by false consciousness that they are willingly accede to the horrors perpetrated in their name. Lehrer writes, "[Chomsky believes] they are either too stupid to understand how the media manipulates every aspect of their lives or complicit pawns who `goosestep' to every whim of the dictatorial rich."

Chomsky has rigorously argued against personal motive in discussing policy, preferring to see elected officials, for instance, as robotic actors in a Marxoid drama of sinister ruling classes and falsely conscious masses. For the most part, he has kept his own personality out of his work too, cultivating a guru-like persona that communicates as easily by tape recordings as by public appearances. The one exception involves the Jews and Israel. Here there is an unacknowledged and perhaps unassimilated personal content that is hard to ignore.

In "Israel and the Art of Disinformation," Paul Bogdanor discusses the "astonishing displays of polemical rage and vindictiveness" in Chomsky's long hate affair with Israel, a country he regards as playing the role of Little Satan to the American Great Satan and functioning strategically as an "offshore military and technology base for the United States." The animus toward Israel is so great—Chomsky sees it as a terror state "with points of similarity" to the Third Reich—that it seems to call for a psychological explanation, especially given the fact that his father, an immigrant from the Ukraine, was a Hebrew teacher; his mother wrote children's stories about the heroism of Jews trying to form a new country in the face of Arab hatred; and Chomsky himself was once a member of a pro-Israel youth group.

Even more bizarre is Chomsky's involvement with neo-Nazis and holocaust revisionism. This strange and disturbing saga began in 1980 with Chomsky's support of a French crank named Robert Faurisson, a rancorous anti-Semite who was fired by the University of Lyon for his hate-filled screeds. ("The alleged Hitlerite gas chambers and the alleged genocide of the Jews form one and the same historical lie.") Chomsky defended Faurisson as an "apolitical liberal" whose work was based on "extensive historical research" and said that he saw "no hint of anti-Semitic implications" at all in his work. In his carefully documented "Partners in Hate," Werner Cohn follows Chomsky into this murky world, locating him at the intersection where his loathing of Israel and his "paroxysm of self-hatred" meet Faurisson and the neo-Nazi groups Chomsky allowed to print his books and to promote them alongside the works of Joseph Goebbels.

In the post 9/11 political ferment, Chomsky's reputation, which had suffered because of his support of Pol Pot and his dalliance with figures like Faurisson, is on the upswing again. His following has grown, particularly in Europe and Asia, where his views have helped inform an inchoate anti-Americanism, and on the university campus, where divesting from Israel (a cause he has led) and attacks against the War on Terror are de rigueur. The New York Times and Washington Post, which had for the most part ignored the dozens of Chomsky books that had appeared clone-like over the past few years, both treated Hegemony and Survival as a significant work, with Pulitzer prize winner Samantha Power writing in the Times that Chomsky's work was "sobering and instructive."

On 9/12 and for several days afterward, Chomsky discussed the attack on America without particular regret as an understandable response to a longstanding grievance. His audience was far broader than the true believers who had followed him in his idees fixes about East Timor. Those Chomsky rallied were as high as he was on schadenfreude and as committed to the idea that America had it coming for a history of misdeeds stretching back at least to 1812, the last time foreigners attacked the homeland, and actually to 1492, where the nightmare began, according to another Chomsky tract (Year 501: The Conquest Continues).

While bodies were still being pulled out of the rubble of the Twin Towers, Chomsky was charging that the U.S. military response against the terrorists would immediately lead to a "silent genocide" that would cause the wintertime starvation of 3-4 million Afghans. But as David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh show, nothing remotely resembling Chomsky's scenario actually happened. Relatively few civilian deaths occurred in the U.S. offensive against the Taliban and of those virtually none were the result of starvation. But Chomsky, obeying the first law of the left-- never look back—offered no explanations and certainly no apologies about being so wrong. After going to Pakistan to repeat his calumnies in the weeks after the attack on the Twin Towers, he continued to spread his Big Lie around the world by a slender collection entitled 9/11 that was translated into 23 languages and published in 26 countries. And when asked about his lie Chomsky simply denied that he had ever made it.

Chomsky is more hopeful about the war in Iraq than the general staff of the U.S. forces there. "You don't undertake violence on the grounds that maybe by some miracle something good will come of it," he says. "Yet sometimes violence does lead to good things. The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things." This statement bears his indelible stamp. The first part ridicules the effort to remove Saddam's regime, one of those actually existing fascisms that gets crowded out of Chomsky's worldview by the imaginary fascism of America. The second part perversely summons the specter of Pearl Harbor to suggest that al Qaeda's attack may mark the moment when the guns were finally turned around and trained on the real aggressor. Now, as throughout his long career, America's peril is Noam Chomsky's hope. http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1232

posted April 26, 2006 05:20 PM              

If you looked around futher you will note that it is the oil companies who want control of all the alternative energy sources. I mentioned on the other thread about the BP oil company working on the production of ethanol. However, the oil companies want to have total control of alternative energy sources as they do gasoline production. And it will all be profit based and they will play with the price of ethanol or any other energy alternative at their whim to make more profit the same way they do gasoline.

posted April 26, 2006 05:24 PM              

Here is some info regarding what I was saying about the dollar and the Euro:

Feb. 11, 2002

The Euro versus the Dollar: Resolving a Historical Puzzle

by

Ronald McKinnon1

Elsewhere in this volume, Peter Kenen provides an excellent statistical overview of the continued dominance of the dollar as "the" international currency. Although the euro has been extremely successful in unifying financial markets within Europe since its introduction on January 1, 1999, it has not significantly displaced the dollar’s central role in the world’s foreign exchange markets as many had anticipated.

This puzzle has a dual historical aspect. First, why under the postwar dollar standard did the evolution of a separate regional money in Europe eventually become necessary? Second, given the success of European Monetary Union (EMU) by 1999, why has the new euro done surprisingly little to displace the dollar’s role as international money outside of Europe? I shall try to explain both aspects of this puzzle. But first consider Kenen’s evidence.

The Dollar as International Money

Comparing 1998 to 2001, Kenen’s Table 1 shows that the dollar retains its dominant role as vehicle currency by being on one side of about 90 percent of foreign exchange transacting. In his Table 5, he also shows that the dollar remains the dominant official reserve asset of governments. If one allocates the "other" category (his Table 5) in proportion to acknowledged foreign exchange holding, developing countries hold more than 70 percent of their official foreign exchange reserves in dollars. Other than the United States which holds negligible official reserves in foreign currencies, the other industrial countries hold more than three-quarters of their official reserves in dollars. In the realm of worldwide primary commodity trade in oil, copper, wheat, and so on, there is no evidence yet of any switching away from dollar invoicing.

The dollar’s continued monetary dominance may seem surprising given that Euroland is now of an economic and financial size, particularly with its rapidly growing euro-denominated bond market, comparable to the United States. Most puzzling is the absence of any significant move toward official international portfolio diversification elsewhere—where treasuries and central banks diversify out of dollars into euro-denominated reserve assets. Before January 1 1999, financial pundits generally expected the euro to appreciate against the dollar as foreign central banks chose to diversify their asset portfolios away from the dollar toward the euro.

1 William E. Eberle Professor, Department of Economics, Stanford University, Stanford California 94305-6072. E-mail: mckinnon@leland.stanford.edu, Http://www.stanford.edu/~mckinnon/

1

What explains the surprising persistence of the dollar as international money in the face of competition from other national monies such as the newly created euro? The stock answer is that an international money is both necessary and a natural monopoly. In the absence of a purely non national international money such as gold, world financial and goods markets will naturally pick one national currency to be at once the interbank vehicle currency, the invoice currency of choice in international trade, the preferred official intervention currency, and the principal official reserve asset. To facilitate international exchange, the network effects and cost saving from using just one national money are so strong that, once established, it cannot easily be displaced.

A second complementary role of an international money is to provide a nominal anchor for the price levels of some or most of the other countries in the system. After the U.S. dollar had become generally accepted as the central facilitating currency in 1945, other countries naturally tended to peg their currencies to the dollar as the nominal anchor of their domestic price levels. And in the 1950s well into the 1960s, sufficient intra European exchange rate stability was achieved by the simple expedient of all the European countries pegging to the dollar under the cover of the old Bretton Woods par value system.

But this nominal anchor role of the dollar could only work well if the American price level was stable. As my figure shows, the American price level—as measured by what is now the U.S producer price index, but was then called the wholesale price index—was remarkably stable up to about 1968. Thus, the Europeans had no great incentive to begin thinking of separate currency arrangements before 1968.

American Inflation in the 1970s and the Rise of the Deutsche Mark

as Key Currency in Europe

Calls for a separate European monetary regime to support European economic integration began only after cumulative American inflation caused the collapse of the Bretton Woods par value system in 1971. The high and volatile U.S. inflation in the 1970s into the 1980s—see the middle three panels of the figure—made necessary a separate fixed exchange regime within Europe to support the deep economic integration that the Europeans had in mind.

However, a fixed exchange rate regime is not feasible unless one currency serves as the nominal anchor or key currency around which the others can peg. By the early 1970s, Germany emerged as the one big European country with both a stable domestic price level (at least more stable than the American) and no capital controls on currency flows. Although the European Monetary System (EMS) was formalized in 1979 with bilateral exchange rate bands as if it was a partnership among equals, in fact everybody knew that the EMS was a D-Mark zone.

Within Europe, the D-Mark zone in the 1980s well into the 1990s worked similarly to the way the dollar standard works on a worldwide scale. Germany provided the nominal anchor for the intra European exchange rate regime, and the other European

2

countries strove—albeit imperfectly—to peg their currencies to the D-Mark. Because of perceived lower risk, D-Mark assets became the preferred "risk free" assets in the European financial system. European countries on the German periphery were then subject to periodic runs from their currencies into the stronger D-Mark, the fundamental money in the system.

The German monetary system became stronger as the financial systems of other European countries weakened—with higher risk premia in their interest rates and shorter terms to maturity in bond markets denominated in their national currencies. This unfortunate currency asymmetry in European financial markets was then swept away by the prospective and actual advent of the euro in late 1990s. Now all the European countries are on a financial par with more or less the same, if lower, interest rates—and German hegemony has vanished. EMU has been a big success in integrating the European financial markets and lengthening terms to maturity in European bond markets.

American Price Level Stability in the 1990s

Now we come to the second part of our historical puzzle. Why hasn’t the successful introduction of the euro done more to displace the dollar in world financial markets at large? The euro must now compete with a dollar stronger than it was in the 1970s when the idea of EMU was born. The remarkable return to actual price level stability in the United States in the 1990s is evident in the figure. But equally important is the return to stable price-level expectations as manifested by the much lower nominal interest rates today in U.S. financial markets than was the case in the 1970s and 1980s.

So all the natural monopoly functions of a single international money—vehicle currency, unit of account, reserve asset, and so on—are reinforced if the central money is itself stable valued. Back in the American inflation of the 1970s, if by some miracle a full fledged and stable valued euro had then been introduced, the displacement of the dollar role would have been substantial. At the very least, foreign central banks would have hastened to build up the proportion of euros in their official exchange reserves.

Instead, the advent of the euro occurred when the dollar standard had been reinforced by ongoing price stability in the United States. In these circumstances, the entrenched central role of the dollar in the world’s money machine is simply too hard to displace by the arrival of new strong monies on the international scene. Although in the 1970s monetary instability in the United States provided the initial impetus to develop a separate European money, the return to American monetary stability now prevents any significant erosion of the dollar’s international role outside of Europe.

References

Kenen, Peter, "The Euro Versus the Dollar: Will There be a Struggle for Dominance?",

Panel, Annual Meeting, American Economic Association, Atlanta, Jan.4, 2002.

posted April 26, 2006 05:38 PM              

The Bottom Dollar
The way to check American power is to support the Euro
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 22nd April 2003

The problem with American power is not that it's American.

Most states with the resources and opportunities the US possesses would have done far worse.

The problem is that one nation, effectively unchecked by any other, can, if it chooses, now determine how the rest of the world shall live.

Eventually, unless we stop it, it will use this power. So far, it has merely tested its new muscles.

The presidential elections next year might prevent an immediate entanglement with another nation, but there is little doubt about the scope of the US government's ambitions.

Already, it has begun to execute a slow but comprehensive coup against the international order, destroying or undermining the institutions which might have sought to restrain it.

On these pages two weeks ago, James Woolsey, an influentiual hawk and formerly the director of the CIA, argued for a war lasting for decades, 'to extend democracy' to the entire Arab and Muslim world. 1

Men who think like him - and there are plenty in Washington - are not monsters. They are simply responding to the opportunities which power presents, just as British politicians once responded to the vulnerability of non-European states and the weakness of their colonial competitors.

America's threat to the peace and stability of the rest of the world is likely to persist, whether George Bush wins the next election or not. The critical question is how we stop it.

Military means, of course, are useless. An economic boycott, of the kind suggested by many of the opponents of the war with Iraq, can never be more than symbolic: US trade has penetrated the economies of almost all other nations to such an extent that to boycott its goods and services would be to boycott our own.

Until recently, as Bush's government sought international approval for its illegal war, there appeared to be some opportunities for restraint by diplomatic means.

But now it has discovered that the United Nations is unnecessary: most of its electors will approve its acts of aggression with or without a prior diplomatic mandate.

Only one means of containing the US remains. It is deadly and, if correctly deployed, insuperable. It rests within the hands of the people of the United Kingdom.

Were it not for a monumental economic distortion, the US economy would, by now, have all but collapsed. It is not quite a West African basket case, but the size of the deficits and debts incurred by its profligacy would, by any conventional measure, suggest that it was in serious trouble.

It survives only because conventional measures do not apply: the rest of the world has granted it an unnatural lease of life.

Almost 70% of the world's currency reserves - the money which nations use to finance international trade and protect themselves against financial speculators - takes the form of US dollars.

The dollar is used for this purpose because it is relatively stable, it is produced by a nation with a major share of world trade, and certain commodities, in particular oil, are denominated in it, which means that dollars are required to buy them.

The United States does very well from this arrangement. In order to earn dollars, other nations must provide goods and services to the US. When commodities are valued in dollars, the US needs do no more than print pieces of green paper to obtain them: it acquires them, in effect, for free.

Once earned, other nations' dollar reserves must be invested back into the American economy. This inflow of money helps the US to finance its massive deficit. 2

The only serious threat to the dollar's international dominance at the moment is the euro. Next year, when the European Union acquires ten new members, its gross domestic product will be roughly the same as that of the US, and its population 60% bigger.

If the euro is adopted by all the members of the union, which suffers from none of the major underlying crises afflicting the US economy, it will begin to look like a more stable and more attractive investment than the dollar.

Only one further development would then be required to unseat the dollar as the pre-eminent global currency: nations would need to start trading oil in euros.

Until last week, this was already beginning to happen. In November 2000, Saddam Hussein insisted that Iraq's oil be bought in euros. 3

When the value of the euro rose, the country's revenues increased accordingly.

As the analyst William Clark has suggested, the economic threat this represented might have been one of the reasons why the US government was so anxious to evict Saddam. 4

But it may be unable to resist the greater danger.

Last year, Javad Yarjani, a senior official at OPEC, the oil producers' cartel, put forward several compelling reasons why his members might one day start selling their produce in euros. 5

Europe is the Middle East's biggest trading partner; it imports more oil and petrol products than the US; it has a bigger share of global trade; and its external accounts are better balanced.

One key tipping point, he suggested, could be the adoption of the euro by Europe's two principal oil producers: Norway and the United Kingdom, whose Brent crude is one of the 'markers' for international oil prices. 'This might', Yarjani said, 'create a momentum to shift the oil pricing system to euros.' 6

If this happens, then oil importing nations will no longer need dollar reserves in order to buy oil.

The demand for the dollar will fall, and its value is likely to decline. As the dollar slips, central banks will start to move their reserves into safer currencies, such as the euro and possibly the yen and the yuan, precipitating further slippage.

The US economy, followed rapidly by US power, could then be expected to falter or collapse.

The global justice movement, of which I consider myself a member, has, by and large, opposed accession to the euro, arguing, correctly, that it accelerates the concentration of economic and political power, reduces people's ability to influence monetary policy and threatens employment in the poorest nations and regions. 7

Much of the movement will have drawn comfort from the new opinion polls suggesting that almost 70% of British voters now oppose the single currency, 8 and from the hints dropped by the Treasury last week that British accession may now be delayed until 2010.

But it seems to me that the costs of integration are merely a new representation of the paradox of sovereignty. Small states or unaffiliated tribes have, throughout history, found that the only way to prevent themselves from being overrun by foreign powers was to surrender their autonomy and unite to fight their common enemy.

To defend our sovereignty - and that of the rest of the world - from the US, we must yield some of our sovereignty to Europe.

That we have a moral duty to contest the developing power of the United States is surely evident.

That we can contest it by no other means is equally obvious. Those of us who are concerned about American power must abandon our opposition to the euro.

By George Monbiot

References:

posted April 27, 2006 06:23 PM            

quote:

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Realize that there is no enemy to fight, only an illusion to overcome.

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-Bruce Lee

posted April 30, 2006 02:19 AM              

Very true, both of them.