More recent Chomksy video. This one has him speaking about the continued imperialist policies of the USA under the Obama administration and the fate of the people in Gaza.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiwAFIgGCkQ&hl=en_US&fs=1]
It’s been fascinating to me to note the difference between the way the media has been treating the two Americans who have lashed out at their government in the last month – John Patrick Bedell, who shot a couple of Pentagons guards, and Joe Stack, who flew a plane into an IRS building in Austin – and they way the media treats civilian deaths at the hands of US and NATO troops in Afghanistan. The media, completely unable to even explore whether or not men like Bedell and Stack might have had genuine grievances, have immediately closed ranks to write both men off as being crazy. There’s no investigative reporting, no genuine inquiry into what would make these US citizens commit acts of suicide to make a point about the actions of the US government. Both men have just been tarred and brushed. The media grabs quotes from family and friends that make it sound like each man was a loony and then they editorialise with descriptions to back that up.
Some examples:
On Bedell:
The Washington Post just puts it in the headline “Pentagon shooter’s spiral from early promise to madness”.
The Boston Globe, in its first paragraph, says Bedell “crisscrossed the country in a frenetic and sometimes doped-up state”.
The Mirror in the UK claims he was a “conspiracy theorist”.
The Associated Press claims Bedell “a history of mental illness”.
CBS News leads with the headline that Bedell was a “nut”.
On Stack:
The Christian Science Monitor refers to Stack’s online writing as a “lengthy, disjointed screed”.
USA Today says his writing “drips with cynicism, paranoia and narcissism.”
Of course, the 535 Afghani civilians who were murdered by US & NATO bombs in 2009, are just “collateral damage” or “civilian casualties”. When one out of every three people killed by US bombs in Afghanistan is a civilian, that’s just unfortunate. Obama is actually increasing the use of drones, not decreasing them. The media makes no psychological analysis about the people who are sending in drones that kill THOUSANDS of innocent civilians, men, woman and children. They don’t ask whether or not those people, the politicians or the soldiers, are paranoid or suffering from a mental illness. The issue isn’t even broached.
The lesson? When “we” kill civilians, it’s justifiable. But when someone, even one of our own, attacks us, then they suffer from a mental illness.
On holidays in Melbourne, having an awesome time showing @fddlgrl all of my favourite haunts. Just have one quick thought to share with you.
We need to stop referring to the “Clinton” administration, the “Bush” administration and the “Obama” administration. We need to start referring to the last 16 years collectively as the “Goldman Sachs” administration.
I was prompted to think of this while reading this post on Crooks and Liars about the TARP bailout. The suggestion is that the bailout isn’t Obama’s fault, because Bush was still in power when it happened. They seem to be forgetting that the US Senate said NO to the original bailout vote, and it wasn’t until Obama took time out of his election campaign to “work Capitol Hill” that the bailout finally passed. I remember him getting the credit for it at the time. So he doesn’t get a pass on that shit.
The point, though, is that the US Treasury, under Clinton, Bush and Obama, has continued to be run by ex-Goldman Sachs executives. So let’s not fool ourselves about who is in power. Goldman were the single largest private investor in Obama’s election campaign. And now they are they have managed to wipe out their competition. As they say here, “Like on the TV program SURVIVOR – the last survivor standing is Goldman Sachs – who receives the grand prize. But in this case it is not just the fame and one million dollar prize. It is infamy with trillions of dollars in rewards.”
The banksters seem to be running things, at least in the USA. A friend of mine who works in finance told me recently how the big four banks in Australia have emerged from the GFC even more arrogant than ever. They managed to buy out most of their competition and now they have an even stronger lock on the marketplace, deciding who gets finance and at what usurious rates. Which is just another reason for all of your to join me on the “Million Bank March” campaign. It’s the only way I can see that we can start to reign them in.
Another criticism I have of Michael Moore’s “Capitalism” is that nowhere in the film did he discuss the alternatives to capitalism. There is one very short segment that discusses the attitudes of Americans about socialism in the lead up to the 2008 election, but there was no detail on what socialism is.
This morning I read this rant about the evils of socialism on “American Thinker” which claims:
“…the Achilles heel of collectivist dogma: for a planned economy to succeed, there must be central planners, who by necessity will insist on universal commitment to their plan.How do you attain total commitment to a goal from a free people? Well, you don’t. Some percentage will always disagree, even if only for the sake of being contrary or out of a desire to be left alone. When considering a program as comprehensive as a government-planned economy, there are undoubtedly countless points of contention, such as how we will choose the planners, how we will order our priorities when assigning them importance within the plan, how we will allocate resources when competing interests have legitimate claims, who will make these decisions, and perhaps more pertinent to our discussion, how those decisions will be enforced. A rift forming on even one of these issues is enough to bring the gears of this progressive endeavor grinding to a halt. This fatal flaw in the collectivist design cannot be reengineered. It is an error so critical that the entire ideology must be scrapped.”
This guy obviously doesn’t realize that capitalism also requires a “total commitment to a goal from a free people”. We have laws in a capitalist society, just as they do in a socialist society. We even have laws (a LOT of them) that dictate how we operate economically. For example – try setting up a bank in your town without getting a banking licence from some government authority. Watch how long you last.
If the so-called “Achilles heel” or “fatal flaw” of socialism is that they have laws then capitalism has the same fatal flaw.
We have “central planners” in capitalist countries as well. They are called “government departments”.
This kind of stupid argument demonstrates how blinded many Americans are by the ideological programming they have been receiving for the last century.
Tonight we finally got to see Michael Moore’s latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story.
While it’s undeniably a powerful film that everyone should see, I have one major complaint with it – he let Obama off the hook.
Everyone knows that Moore isn’t a big fan of Bush and Cheney. That has been very clear in his last couple of films. So it isn’t surprising that in Capitalism, he continues to (rightfully) blame a lot of America’s current financial woes on the Bush / Cheney administration.
However Bush isn’t in office today. And Moore’s only critique of Obama is to mention VERY briefly that Goldman Sachs were the biggest private investor in Obama’s election campaign. Apart from that slight jab, he not only completely let’s Obama off the hook for the current crisis, he actually continues to paint Obama in a positive light, as a beacon of hope that things are changing in the USA.
Now while I know Obama wasn’t in power during the years when the Clinton and Bush administrations whittled away most of the regulations in the financial system, it definitely WAS Obama who, late last year, convinced Congress to pass the bailout vote – a disastrous piece of legislation that Moore spent a great deal of time discussing. Yet in all of his coverage of that event, he never once showed an image of Obama or mentioned Obama’s critical role in making sure the bill passed.
And I have to ask – why not? I know that Moore championed hard for Obama on the election trail. But I thought that would make sure that he would have determined to hold his man to at least an equal if not higher standard than the other guys. It looks like I was wrong. At least in this film, Moore has given Obama a Get Out Of Jail Free card. It saddens me.
There’s a great scene in the film where Moore debunks Ronald Reagan and explains how RR was just a pretty boy frontman for the financial cartels. It’s sad that he can’t see that Obama is EXACTLY the same.
On another note, I hope that Moore’s next film shines a light on his own religion. He says he’s been a practising Catholic all of this life. In this current film, he makes the Catholics out to be good guys. I wonder if he has the integrity to turn his keen eye on his own? He could start by interviewing Irwin Zalkin.