Noam said it best...

[Lodestar]

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.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/Common_Good_Chomsky.html

p17

The big transnationals want to reduce freedom by undermining the democratic functioning of the states in which they're based, while at the same time ensuring the government will be powerful enough to protect and support them.


p19
... it's ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They're totalitarian institutions - you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There's about as much freedom as under Stalinism.


p29
The goal is a society in which the basic social unit is you and your television set. If the kid next door is hungry, it's not your problem. If the retired couple next door invested their assets badly and are now starving, that's not your problem either.


p29
Boards of directors are allowed to work together, so are banks and investors and corporations in alliances with one another and with powerful states. That's just fine. It's just the poor who aren't supposed to cooperate.


p34
Business wants the popular aspects of government, the ones that actually serve the population, beaten down, but it also wants a very powerful state, one that works for it and is removed from public control.


p35
There's a very committed effort to convert the US into something resembling a Third World society, where a few people have enormous wealth and a lot of others have no security ...


p35
Now that ... workers are superfluous, what do you do with them? First of all, you have to make sure they don't notice that society is unfair and try to change that, and the best way to distract them is to get them to hate and fear one another.


p37
Both prisons and inner-city schools target a kind of superfluous population that there's no point educating because there's nothing for them to do. Because we're a civilized people, we put them in prison, rather than sending death squads out to murder them.


p41
You need something to frighten people with, to prevent them from paying attention to what's really happening to them.



p48
Vietnam wasn't a "disastrous mistake" - it was murderous aggression.


p53
... the best defense against democracy is to distract people.


p57
A corporate executive's responsibility is to his stockholders - to maximize profit, market share and power. If he can do that by paying starvation wages to women who'll die in a couple of years because their working conditions are so horrible, he's just doing his job. It's the job that should be questioned.


p64
... corporations are fundamentally illegitimate, ... they don't have to exist at all in their modern form. Just as other oppressive institutions - slavery, say, or royalty - have been changed or eliminated, so corporate power can be changed of eliminated. What are the limits? There aren't any. Everything is ultimately under public control.

[democrank]

1. Speaking of strictly limiting the "spectrum of acceptable opinion"

what do you suppose is The Establishment`s intent toward meaningful, substantive grassroots` influence? Seems to me this Democratic Party election cycle is a solid example of dissident vs. passive and obedient.

[rhett o rick]

2. Well said. And political correctness and condeming dissent as conspiracy theories

are tools of the "passive and obedient."

[whereisjustice]

37. I've been advised your opinion hasn't been approved by Debbie Wasserman Shultz...

authorities have been alerted. And you call yourself a Democrat?

[99th_Monkey]

40. + 10 n/t

[Dont call me Shirley]

3. A corporation is merely a kingdom without borders.

[Lodestar]

6. Sounds like something Noam would say...1000+

[Dont call me Shirley]

7. Wow, thank you, Lodestar!

[BeanMusical]

11. +1 Very well said.

[Dont call me Shirley]

13. ...

[JEB]

4. K&R&bookmark

[bbgrunt]

5. thanks Lodestar--great collection, especially

"... it's ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They're totalitarian institutions - you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There's about as much freedom as under Stalinism."

[raven mad]

8. And to make sure they are uneducated in "public" schools -

corporations don't want y'all to learn.

[lastlib]

24. "An informed and enlightened citizenry..."

"...is the arch-enemy of tyranny." --Thomas Jefferson

If they keep the serfs uneducated (cut public education and control private education), uninformed (Kardashians), and unenlightened (ditto both), then it's much easier to impose the corporate tyranny on them. Dissenters are expensive. They hurt the profit margin. Can't have that.

[whereisjustice]

38. lol... Jesus rode his dinosaur to work.

[Doctor_J]

9. Parenti phrases it differently but says the exact same thing

Big Media no longer has to censor their "journalists", since anyone with an outlook that's the least bit liberal never gets hired in the first place.

[nashville_brook]

42. yep, you have to hide your opinions as if we live in an occupied country -- and we do

it's occupied by corporations that don't share our interests. hence we hide our beliefs so we can feed our families and have healthcare so we don't die of disease.

it's absolutely barbaric.

[BillZBubb]

53. Too many also grow to accept the control of the masters.

They are convinced it is the best of all possible worlds. And they'll fight to maintain the status quo.

[silvershadow]

10. K&R&B

[BeanMusical]

12. Kick and R

[nadinbrzezinski]

14. More and more relevant by the second

[TIME TO PANIC]

15. K & R!

[zentrum]

16. Always so brilliant.

[RoccoR5955]

17. Great quotes from today's connsumate philosopher

Every time I read these things coming from Chomsky, I am convinced that the man is THE greatest philosopher of our time.
He has been saying this sort of stuff for as long as I can remember, yet a majority of the public here in the US have never heard of him.
The mainstream media tends to quiet dissidents like Chomsky, i suppose, because if they actually heard and understood what he was saying there would be a real revolution on their hands.

Even at 87, the man is one of the sharpest minds on the planet!

I know that I have heard these before, so I looked at the website, only to find that these quotes go back to 1989. They are as relevant to day than they were then. Probably more so today.

[jwirr]

41. In a true revolution everyone does not need to understand

the philosophy. They only need to recognize their part in the situation. My guess is that many of Bernie's supporters do not know who Chomsky is but they are still dedicated to the movement.

We need to keep informing the public of this a bit at a time.

[hopemountain]

18. "capitalism and sociopathology"

from earth at risk 2014 aired this morning on link tv - charles derber, derrick jensen, stephanie mcmillan.

thank you, lodestar - this concise review is handy.

[ronnie624]

19. "...advertising...

is tax deductible, so we all pay for the privilege of being manipulated and controlled."

[Admiral Loinpresser]

20. KnR! n/t

[hfojvt]

21. actually there is a fair amount of freedom in a large corporation

I mean, at a job, you kinda have to do your job, but it is not like your whole day is regimented by somebody constantly giving you orders.

I don't necessarily agree about what he said about Vietnam either. "murderous aggression"? In what respect?

He also seems to contradict himself there in that last quote. Saying that oppressive institutions like slavery or royalty have been changed seems kinda positive for him. I thought he would be more likely to claim that the oppression was just transformed, but it is still just as bad. So when we got rid of royalty we didn't just exchange one elite ruler for another set of elites?

Some of this stuff is just crap. I mean it is radical in its hostility to our society, but it is preposterous on its face.

"Both prisons and inner-city schools target a kind of superfluous population that there's no point educating because there's nothing for them to do. Because we're a civilized people, we put them in prison, rather than sending death squads out to murder them."

"Nothing for them to do?" What is that supposed to mean? Why can't they work the same kind of sh*t jobs that I have had all of my life? Why can't they have hobbies? Joe Inner City has just as much to do as I do, and just as much to do as Noam. And prison? Well, it would be nice if there was more education and opportunity and less need for prison, but really lots of people are put in prison because they shot at other people or because they stole things. But it is bad to punish murderers and thieves and/or to lock them up to prevent recividism?

[ArcticFox]

22. Delve deeper

Your thinking just scratches the surface. You're stuck between those narrow lines Chomsky talks about in those first cites.

[ronnie624]

26. How can the invasion and destruction of Indochina

be characterized as anything other than murderous aggression? None of the tiny, defenseless countries there were a threat to the US.

It's your questions that make no sense. You should read Chomsky's books for clarification.

[hfojvt]

30. it's not about a threat to the US

look, for example, at the Korean war. Was North Korea a threat to the US? Was that was "murderous aggression"?

Are the people of South Korea somehow NOT a lot better off because of the sacrifice of the US?

Presumably we were in Vietnam for similar reasons.

[ronnie624]

34. The people of both countries,

by vast majorities were opposed to US intervention. Only with US military power, were the US imposed dictatorships of both S Korea and S Vietnam able to survive against the will of the majority.

One of your underlying assumptions, is that China and the USSR were existential threats to the US, but this has been shown to be false with declassified CIA documents.

Another assumption, is that both countries were better off being bombed almost to oblivion, than to allow communist dictatorships to exist there. This line of reasoning is truly bizarre, and completely at odds with any concept of human rights.

[hfojvt]

43. well it would seem that the North was doing some of the bombing

and it still seems to me that the people of South Korea have been much better off these last sixty years after the war.

I did not say anything about an existential threat to the US. I am only talking about the people of Korea. 50 million people, most of whom are better off than the average person in North Korea.

[ronnie624]

47. Things would have been very different there

had the US not intervened.

US bombs accounted for the vast majority of casualties in Korea and Indochina. And your position assumes the US has a moral imperative to intervene wherever it chooses.

[bvar22]

50. Have you seeen Saigon lately?

They seem to be doing pretty good under "Boot Heel of the Red Menace."

[RoccoR5955]

48. You forgot the "Domino Theory."

The military was so damned paranoid that communism would take over the globe that they believed that we had to protect the world from it. Their theory that China and Russia, being the main powers in that part of Asia, and being communist would hop into all the smaller countries, make them communist, and then go after the rest of the world.
That is the real reason why we invaded Korea and Viet Nam AFAIC.

[YOHABLO]

29. Pretty shallow perception here. You could use a little more education yourself.

"I mean, at a job, you kinda have to do your job, but it is not like your whole day is regimented by somebody constantly giving you orders."

"you kinda have to"? What kind of work do you do?

[hfojvt]

35. We can all use more education

For example, I worked for Kraft, which was owned by Phillip Morris. Worked there for almost three years.

Yes, there is a fairly wide latitude in what a person does at work. For example, I took the initiative - myself - to learn various positions. I worked on line 8, which was a new line, but I also took the time to get trained on the other lines, so I could fill in if my line was down (as it often was, being new). I learned a variety of things on my own, sometimes taught other people too, but often not. At some point, working as a temp, I got pissed off. So I spent about nine months working there with a very bad attitude. For a while there I went to work with the intention to cost the company at least $100 in lost production per day.

By doing nothing, On a production line, time is money. The line produces $100 worth of product per minute. I used to have the attitude of trying to save that money. For example, when something goes wrong, the machine stops automatically and it is our job to fix the problem and get it re-started. Having been there a while, I learned to be pro-active. I could spot problems and reduce the down time. Or I could fail to do so - on purpose. When I see the machine is about to crash, I could busy myself doing something else.

My favorite example was when there was a computer problem. I knew I could fix it, but I refused to do so, handed it off to my co-workers, feeling pretty sure that they could NOT fix it. The line was down for an hour - before they gave up, and then I went and fixed it, just to prove that I could. It wasn't my job to fix it. I was a temp, and I really got no reward for fixing it.

There's a wide variety of ways to do a job, and also a large difference in tasks to do or what order to do them.

Consider volunteer work - take the corporation away. Next Tuesday, like I do twice a month, I will volunteer two hours at one of our city's "free community meals" at two local churches (there are about a dozen churches doing them, I volunteer at two nearby churches). Last month I was kinda slaving over a hot sink washing dishes by hand. Work is work, even in some more ideal arrangement, like, say, a phalanx (look it up if you want - Charles Fourier) there's stuff that needs to be done and somebody's got to do it.

[haikugal]

52. Dilbert talks about it all the time, life in a cubical for the white color and if your manufacturing

Every movement is charted, just like clerical....your bathroom breaks are timed...on and on...it's very dehumanizing.

Unless your in the upper tier...but even then Brazil comes to mind....

[Urchin]

44. Chomsky is right.

There's nothing for them to do because we have more workers than jobs in America. What would you have happen, the government send unskilled people to college? Like we don't already have enough college graduates who can't find jobs?

Thanks to technology not only factory jobs but now office jobs are being sent offshore.

And increasingly most of the remaining work of both kinds still being done in the USA is rapidly being taken-over by increasingly intelligent machines.

Our civilization destroys all hope in the poor, and then when they turn to drugs to escape or theft out of desperation, throws them into America's prisons, which prison system subjects prisoners to the worst kind of existence.

I am not surprised that people sent to American prisons come out more dangerous to society than they went in.

And the middle class is rapidly joining the ranks of the poor. Many of us are already competing for the few remaining minimum wage job the poor have held.

[hfojvt]

45. oh I know

we are doomed. We are all gonna die.

Life is not all about jobs. And just because some people are unemployed doesn't mean any group of people have to be part of that unemployment.

"our civilization destroys all hop in the poor".

I find stuff like that to be too sweeping and too simplistic. Especially since I have spent a lot of time being poor, or near to poor.

But welcome to DU. You should fit in. "Life sucks in America and it is gonna suck even more in the future.We are all doomed to poverty." That is certainly a major theme here.

[bhikkhu]

49. I tend to agree, having worked for several large corporations

For example, many US corporations were actually leaders in marriage rights, extending benefits to same-sex couple long before it was socially acceptable outside of the workplace. Or, in another way, in 2006 your employer might have recognized you and your partner as a couple, while your government did not. In some states, your employer might have recognized you and your partner as a couple, while your government held laws on its books that made your existence as a couple punishable by imprisonment.

For the most part, I did my job and was paid adequately, and what I did after I clocked out was never a concern of my employer. I don't think employment for a large corporation is in any way less free than any other kind of employment.

[raouldukelives]

23. Some invest themselves in Democracy for all, some in Wall St.

One cannot simultaneously claim to be a defender of democracy when they are counted themselves as an owner of multi-national corporations that do all they can to subvert it.

Slavery didn't end because we voted for it to end. It ended because good people refused to profit from the suffering of others. No matter the loss of wealth, no matter the hardship on themselves, they preferred personal grace over personal profit.

We have never faced a man-made evil like climate change and the ignorance of the environmental destruction bequeathed to us by Wall St. and its associated owners. IMHO it dwarfs them all. If there was ever call to liberals, to act, to be part of the change and not part of the problem, it is today, in our time.

For those too evil or ignorant to care or too invested to be bothered with facts. I don't know what the answer is. As before, they will cling to it until it is dragged from their hands and set free.

[ronnie624]

27. Very well said. n/t

[Enthusiast]

31. Thank you for that.

[840high]

39. .that^

[haikugal]

54. Excellent...thank you!

[fasttense]

25. Capitalism is destroying the world and it will change.

It must evolve like feudalism and slavery did. It's just a matter of time and how many deaths we are willing to put up with.

[OxQQme]

28. From the home page

"Some believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as "internationalists" and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."

David Rockefeller in his "Memoirs"

"The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd. And it's the responsible men who have to make decisions and to protect society from the trampling and rage of the bewildered herd. Now since it's a democracy they - the herd, that is - are permitted occasionally to lend their weight to one or another member of the responsible class. That's called an election."

Noam Chomsky

"Governments don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking, That is against their interests. They want obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept it."

George Carlin

[Enthusiast]

32. K&R! This post deserves hundreds of recommendations.

I hope this post receives several hundreds of recommendations.

All the replies are good save one and it is ridiculous. What a contrast! Maybe we will get to see more replies.

I'm 63 years old. I have never felt so negative toward the government even during the Vietnam War.

[Jitter65]

33. So, do we want anarchy? Socialism? Communism? What are we asking for exactly?

To bring everyone down to a median level and raise others up to the same level? What does freedom mean? To be a law unto ourselves?

What was it about American that made it work before? Or has it never worked? If the other socialist nations are so great, why do we have so many of them coming here? The immigrants I see around me here in Maryland, are Russian, Scandinavian, French, Greek, and mercy...British.

What are we asking for.
There never has been a world or country anywhere without two things: war and the poor. Find me a nation without either one.

[lostnfound]

36. Happy mediums would include respect for the public sphere and incentives for cooperatives

The wealth contained in modern corporations is an accumulation of knowledge, retained earnings over decades, and effort of employees and management that exceeded the amount they were compensated.

Very little of the capital used by the companies consists of actual investment by investors. Exceptions are startups or sole proprietorships.
Shareholders hold title as if they were lottery tickets, but their rewards are far more dependable though still carrying some risks. Like owning title to a feudal estate.

[ronnie624]

46. The primary purpose of capitalism

Last edited Mon Apr 25, 2016, 10:28 AM - Edit history (2)

is to exploit resources and human labor for the enrichment of a tiny minority. Distribution of goods and services is secondary.This renders the for-profit motive completely inconsistent with any concept of democratic principles.

Your questions assume the existence of the concept of economic 'freedom', when in fact, there is no such thing. Every physical occurrence is strictly limited by the Laws of Thermodynamics, therefore, creating wealth is impossible if your goal is equitable distribution. All one can ever do, is convert the stored energy of the earth's resources and the available energy of human labor, into the usable energy of goods and services, and in the process, there will always be a net loss.

The sooner people come to the realization of the fundamental principles of science and logic that govern economic activity, the more quickly we can move to an equitable system that will enable us to mitigate the effects of the impending climate disaster that threatens our civilization.

[kcjohn1]

51. Chomsky is one of the best Philosophers ever!

The quote about Vietnam is very telling even todays dialogue. Huge Bernie supporter, but he and Obama opposed the Iraq war.

But when you hear them on why they oppose it, they will tell you it was greatest "Strategic Blunder" of the 20th century. Just like Vietnam. The line of argument is we had right to go in, but for strategic reasons should not have because x,y,z.

How about it was war of aggression, and crime against humanity, and that is the reason we shouldn't have gone in there? You will never hear that discourse in the political system.