The imperialist ideology, you say, can readily tolerate a quite large number of contradictions, infractions, and criticisms – all these remain acceptable, except one: to reveal the economic motives.
Governments are bigger than ever, but under neoliberalism they have far less pretense to being concerned with addressing non-corporate interests. And.
Aristotle was right – the way to overcome the paradox of democracy is by reducing inequality, not reducing democracy.
If a man acts in a purely mechanical way, reacting to external demands or instruction rather than in ways determined by his own interests and energies and power, “we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is.”14.
See, one of the serious illusions we live under in the United States, which is a major part of the whole system of indoctrination, is the idea that the government is the power – and the government’s not the power, the government is one segment of power. Real power is in the hands of the people who own the society; the state-managers are usually just servants.
Look, if you have a political movement that’s strong enough that the power structure has to accommodate it, it’ll get accommodated in some fashion-as in the case of union organizing rights here, the Wagner Act. But when that movement stops being active and challenging, those rights just aren’t going to matter very much anymore.
The kinds of things that I would say on Nightline, you can’t say in one sentence because they depart from standard religion. If you want to repeat the religion, you can get away with it between two commercials. If you want to say something that questions the religion, you’re expected to give evidence, and that you can’t do between two commercials. So therefore you lack concision, so therefore you can’t talk.
The seventh myth was that Israel intended to conduct a benevolent occupation but was forced to take a tougher attitude because of Palestinian violence. Israel regarded from the very beginning any wish to end the occupation – whether expressed peacefully or through struggle – as terrorism. From the beginning, it reacted brutally by collectively punishing the population for any demonstration of resistance.
He did not foresee that in a predatory capitalist economy, state intervention would be an absolute necessity to preserve human existence and to prevent the destruction of the physical environment – I speak optimistically.
Part of the doctrinal system in the United States is the pretense that we’re all a happy family, there are no class divisions, and everybody is working together in harmony. But that’s radically false.
The ritual denunciation of the so-called ‘socialist’ states is replete with distortions and often outright lies.
At Harvard they teach people how to rule the world and at MIT they teach them how to make the world work. This is for the elite schools. For the rest, turn them into servants.
About half the population thinks that every person in Congress, including their own representative, should be thrown out. That’s the center not holding.
The picture of the world that’s presented to the public has only the remotest relation to reality. The truth of the matter is buried under edifice after edifice of lies upon lies. It’s all been a marvellous success from the point of view in deterring the threat of democracy, achieved under conditions of freedom, which is extremely interesting.
But for another thing, there’s no law of nature which says that control over capital has to be in a few hands – that’s like saying that political power has to be in a few hands. Why? There wasn’t a law that said that the king and the nobles had to run everything, and there isn’t a law that says that corporate owners and managers have to run everything either. These are social arrangements. They developed historically, they can be changed historically.
US relations with the World Court and other international institutions have undergone a similar evolution, to which we return.
There are practical problems of tomorrow on which people’s lives very much depend, and while defending these kinds of programs is by no means the ultimate end we should be pursuing, in my view we still have to face the problems that are right on the horizon, and which seriously affect human lives.
And they make sure that their own interests are very well cared for, however “grievous” the impact on the people of England, or others. Now it’s not merchants and manufacturers, it’s financial institutions and multinational corporations. The people who Adam Smith called the “masters of mankind” – and they’re following “the vile maxim,” “All for ourselves and nothing for anyone else.” They’re just going to pursue policies that benefit them and harm everyone else.
Reagan sent money to the Contras to spend as they wish. National media remained unperturbed in accordance to the doctrine that the United States stands above any law of international agreement.
It means that students, if they don’t come from very wealthy families, they’re going to leave college with big debts. And if you have a big debt, you’re trapped. I mean, maybe you wanted to become a public interest lawyer, but you’re going to have to go into a corporate law firm to pay off those debts. And by the time you’re part of the culture, you’re not going to get out of it again.