| Capitalism Failed
by Great Orion Voyager � 2009 freyakorps CAPITALISM FAILED: Stores are flooded with crap made in China. Capitalist desesperados flood media with pathetic ads for mortgage refinancing, debt consolidation, bankruptcy protection, ambulance chasing lawyers, used car salesmen, real estate sharks, stock market guru conmen, deceiving cellphone plans, deceiving internet provider plans, fraudulent life insurance, fraudulent aging formulas, baldness cures, impotence cures, quack medical cures, snake oil health potions, herbal supplements, pyramid schemes, money laundering schemes, get rich quick schemes, worthless private colleges offering worthless college degrees. All superfluous crap. CAPITALISM IS AN EMBARASSMENT: It is shocking to listen to radio and TV advertisements today: How embarrassing! No one needs these absurd products or services. Why do these gits make commercials hawking unnecessary products and services? The entire market economy is a sick joke built on nonsense, a house of cards waiting to collapse. If consumers opened their eyes, no one would buy anything and the entire market economy would collapse overnight. CAPITALISM IS SLAVERY: If you have no capital, you can only be a slave or runaway slave. Capitalism is a Total Failure for the Worker Class: Where is our American Dream, our mansion, our wealth, our Quality of Life? We work too hard to acquire anything. Hharder we work, poorer we get. Capitalism works only for the Property Class, Greedy Gangsters, Vampire Parasites. CAPITALISM IS MORIBUND: Adam Smith and Karl Marx predicted the Death Stage as Monopoly: Rule by a few giants that strangle competition and stifle progress: Oligarchy. Plutocracy. Crony Contractor Corruption. Economic stagnation. We are right now in this Monopoly Death Stage. The Property Class refuses to admit it because they benefit from it even as it fails. Capitalism already failed for the vast majority. It will also fail for the Property Class, because the Monopoly Stage cannot be sustained. CAPITALISM FAILED. GLOBALIZATION FAILED. Globalization is capitalism at its worst: Slavery on a planetary scale. NAFTA and CAFTA and WTO did nothing but collapse American Quality of Life and transform us all into underemployed desesperados. It is time for a Revolution in trade, manufacturing and tariffs. It is time to replace capitalism with American Social Democracy. IT IS TIME FOR AMERICAN SOCIALISM: BE AN AMERICAN SOCIALIST. Don�t wait for your nation. Revolucion in your own life. BREAK THE CHAINS OF LANDLORD AND EMPLOYER. LIVE LIFE WITH PRINCIPLES. BE LA REVOLUCION. Noam Chomsky, THE PROSPEROUS FEW AND THE RESTLESS MANY, 1994 "There are two important consequences of Globalization: First, it extends the Third World Model to Industrialized Nations. In the Third World there is a two-tiered society: a sector of extreme wealth and privilege, and a sector of huge misery and despair among useless, superfluous people.... South Central Los Angeles once had factories. They moved to Eastern Europe, Mexico, Indonesia.... As you'd expect, this whole structure of decision-making answers to transnational corporations and international banks and raises decision-making to the executive level, leaving a 'democratic deficit,' parliaments and populations with less influence. Not only that, but the public doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know." http://www.democracynow.org/ 2008/11/17/naomi_klein_on_the_bailout_profiteers Naomi Klein interviewed by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now, Nov 17 2008 "Amy, the last time I was on Democracy Now, we were talking about Henry Paulson�s original three-page proposal, the $700 billion stickup, where he basically said, 'Give me $700 billion. Don�t ask any questions. I can never be challenged by any arm of government or any court of law.' Now, that aspect of the bailout was supposedly dealt with.... But now we�re finding out that, in fact, Henry Paulson has achieved his original goal by stealth, because there is no accountability, and lawmakers are very hesitant to challenge this, because they�re afraid of causing a run on the banks, of causing more market instability.... "This is a classic example of what I call disaster capitalism or the shock doctrine: Banks had been pushing for this tax break for many years; they weren�t able to get it through during normal circumstances; but in a crisis they push it through the back door when everybody is focused on�well the point they pushed this through, September 30th, was the worst economic crisis and people were focused on the collapse of Lehman.... So why is it that we are not questioning this solution, the so-called solution to the crisis, which is creating even bigger banks, banks that will once again be too big to fail? We�re really heading to a future where there will be three or four large banks, all of them too big to fail... which means that if they get themselves into trouble again, they will be bailed out again.... "This bailout is really not a bailout at all; it�s a parting gift to people Bush once referred to as 'my base.' I liken it to what European colonial rulers used to do when they finally realized they had to hand over power; they would loot the treasury on the way out the door.... But we�re supposed to somehow not notice that $250 billion, an astronomical sum, was just wasted, going to bonuses, going to shareholder payouts, going to CEO salaries.... "This crisis isn�t over, and the same people who justified this bailout, who clamored for this bailout, are the very people who are going to turn around and say to Obama, 'We can�t afford universal healthcare. In fact, we can�t afford what meager services Americans get in exchange for their tax dollars, like Social Security payments.'... So this really is reverse Robin Hood gone mad. The money has been given to the people who needed it least, and it�s going to be used to justify austerity measures imposed against those who need it most. It�s going to be used to justify cuts to food stamps. It�s going to be used to justify cuts to Social Security, to healthcare, to justify why more ambitious plans for a national healthcare program, for green energy are not affordable.... What we�re seeing is a resurrection of discredited free trade agenda.... The Colombia free trade deal, the International Monetary Fund, the Doha round, they�re all coming back from the dead at precisely the moment we should be burying, for good, this whole agenda of deregulation." Naomi Klein, THE SHOCK DOCTRINE: THE RISE OF DISASTER CAPITALISM, Henry Holt 2007 pp 5-6 "One of those who saw opportunity in the floodwaters of New Orleans was Milton Friedman, grand guru of the movement for unfettered capitalism.... Friedman's radical idea was that instead of spending a portion of the billions of dollars in reconstruction money on rebuilding and improving New Orleans' existing public school system, the government should provide families with vouchers, which they could spend at private institutions, many run at a profit, that would be subsidized by the state.... The administration of George W Bush backed up their plans with tens of millions of dollars to convert New Orleans schools into 'charter schools,' publicly funded institutions run by private entities.... Within nineteen months, with most of the city's poor residents still in exile, New Orleans' public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools. Before Hurricane Katrina, the school board had run 123 public schools; now it ran just 4. Before that storm, there had been 7 charter schools in the city; now there were 31. New Orleans teachers used to be represented by a strong union; now the union's contract had been shredded, and its forty-seven hundred members had all been fired. Some of the younger teachers were rehired by the charters, at reduced salaries; most were not.... I call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, 'disaster capitalism.'" pp 8-9 "Friedman first learned how to exploit a large-scale shock or crisis in the mid-seventies, when he acted as adviser to the Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet.... Friedman advised Pinochet to impose a rapid-fire transformation of the economy: tax cuts, free trade, privatized services, cuts to social spending, and deregulation. Eventually, Chileans even saw their public schools replaced with voucher-funded private ones. It became known as a 'Chicago School' revolution, since so many of Pinochet's economists had studied under Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago.... Pinochet also facilitated the adjustment with his own shock treatments; these were performed in the regime's many torture cells, inflicted on the writhing bodies of those deemed most likely to stand in the way of the capitalist transformation. Many in Latin America saw a direct connection between the economic shocks that impoverished millions and the epidemic of torture that punished hundreds of thousands of people who believed in a different kind of society.... The formula reemerged with far greater violence in Iraq. First came the war, designed according to authors of the Shock and Awe military doctrine, to 'control the adversary's will, perceptions and understanding, and literally to make an adversary impotent to act or react.' Next came the radical economic shock therapy, imposed while the country was still in flames, by US Chief Envoy L Paul Bremer: mass privatization, complete free trade, a 15 percent flat tax, a dramatically downsized government.... When Iraqis resisted, they were rounded up and taken to jails where bodies and minds were met with more shocks, these ones distinctly less metaphorical." pp 10-12 "The three trademark demands--privatization, government deregulation and deep cuts to social spending--tended to be extremely unpopular with citizens.... Some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era were in fact committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public.... In Argentina in the seventies, the junta's 'disappearance' of thirty thousand people, most of them leftist activists, was integral to the imposition of the country's Chicago School policies, just as terror has been a partner for the same kind of economic metamorphosis in Chile. In China in 1989, it was the shock of the Tiananmen Square massacre and subsequent arrests of thousands that freed the hand of the Communist Party to convert much of the country into a sprawling export zone, staffed with workers too terrified to demand their rights. In Russia in 1993, it was Boris Yeltsin's decision to send in tanks to set fire to the parliament building and lock up the opposition leaders that cleared the way for the fire-sale privatization that created the country's notorious oligarchs.... In Latin America and Africa in the eighties, it was a debt crisis that forced countries to be 'privatized or die.'... In Asia, it was the financial crisis of 1997-98--almost as devastating as the Great Depression--that humbled the so-called Asian Tigers, cracking open their markets to what the New York Times described as 'the world's biggest going-out-of-business sale.'" pp 14-15 "When the September 11 attacks hit, the White House was packed with Friedman's disciples, including his close friend Donald Rumsfeld. The Bush team seized the moment of collective vertigo with chilling speed--not, as some claimed, because the administration deviously plotted the crisis, but because key figures in the administration were part of a movement that prays for crisis the way drought-struck farmers pray for rain.... The Bush Administration immediately seized upon the fear generated by the attacks not only to launch the War on Terror, but to ensure that it is an almost completely for-profit venture, a booming new industry.... This is global war fought on every level by private companies whose involvement is paid for with public money, with the unending mandate of protecting the United States homeland in perpetuity while eliminating all 'evil' abroad.... The ultimate goal for the corporations at the center of this complex is to bring the model of for-profit government... in effect, to privatize the government. To kick-start the disaster capitalism complex, the Bush Administration outsourced, with no public debate, many of the most sensitive and core functions of government, from providing health care to soldiers, to interrogating prisoners, to gathering and 'data-mining' information on all of us." pp 18-19 "A more accurate term for a system that erases boundaries between Big Government and Big Business is not liberal, conservative or capitalist, but corporatist. Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor... bottomless spending on security... aggressive surveillance... mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties, and often, though not always, torture." p 297 "This points to a nagging and important question about free-market ideologues: Are they 'true believers,' driven by ideology and faith that free markets will cure underdevelopment, as is often asserted, or do the ideas and theories frequently serve as an elaborate rationale to allow people to act on unfettered greed while still invoking an altruistic motive?... Chicago School economics does seem particularly conducive to corruption. Once you accept that profit and greed as practiced on a mass scale create the greatest possible benefits for any society, pretty much any act of personal enrichment can be justified as a contribution to the great creative cauldron of capitalism, generating wealth and spurring economic growth--even if it's only for yourself and your colleagues." pp 300-301 "In 1989 before shock therapy, 2 million people in the Russian Federation were living in poverty, on less than $4 per day. By the time the shock therapists had administered their bitter medicine in the mid-nineties, 74 million Russians were living below the poverty line.... As miserable as life under communism was, with crowded, cold apartments, Russians at least were housed; in 2006 the government admitted that there were 715,000 homeless kids in Russia, and UNICEF has put the number as high as 3.5 million children.... In Russia today, wealth is so stratified that the rich and poor seem to be living not only in different countries but in different centuries. One time zone is downtown Moscow... where oligarchs race around in black Mercedes convoys, guarded by top-of-the-line mercenary soldiers.... In the other time zone, a seventeen-year-old provincial girl, asked about her hopes for the future, replied, 'It's difficult to talk about the twenty-first century when you're sitting here reading by candlelight.... It's the nineteenth century here.'" pp 304-309 "The entire thirty-year history of the Chicago School experiment has been one of mass corruption... from Chile's piranhas, to Argentina's crony privatizations, to Russia's oligarchs, to Enron's energy shell game, to Iraq's 'free fraud zone.' The point of shock therapy is to open up a window for enormous profits to be made very quickly, not despite the lawlessness but precisely because of it.... Under Chicago School economics, the state acts as the colonial frontier, which corporate conquistadors pillage with the same ruthless determination and energy as their predecessors showed when they hauled home gold and silver of the Andes.... Wall Street saw 'green field opportunities' in Chile's phone system, Argentina's airline, Russia's oil fields, Bolivia's water system, the United States' public airwaves, Poland's factories, all built with public wealth, then sold for a trifle.... After every one of these profit frenzies come the promises: next time, there will be firm laws in place before the country's assets are sold off, and the entire process will be watched over by eagle-eyed regulators.... Lawlessness on the frontier, as Adam Smith understood, is not the problem but the point, as much a part of the game as the contrite hand-wringing and pledges to do better next time." pp 562-563 "In December 2006, a month after Friedman died, a UN study found that 'the richest 2 percent of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth.' The shift has been starkest in the US, where CEO's made 43 times what the average worker earned in 1980.... By 2005, CEO's earned 411 times as much.... By 2006... Augusto Pinochet was under house arrest.... In Argentina, the courts stripped the country's former junta leaders of immunity, sending ex-president Jorge Videla and Admiral Emilio Massera to jail for life.... In Bolivia, former president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada... was wanted on several charges relating to the gunning down of protestors.... In Russia, not only had the Harvard Men been found guilty of fraud, but many of the Russian oligarchs... were either in jail or living in exile.... Enron's Ken Lay, poster boy for the ill effects of energy deregulation, died in July 2006 having been convicted of conspiracy and fraud." pp 565-572 "On the international stage, the staunchest opponents of neoliberal economics were winning election after election. Venezuelan Presidente Hugo Chavez... was reelected for a third term.... Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was reelected as president of Brazil largely because he turned the vote into a referendum on privatization.... Shortly afterward in Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, former head of the Sandinistas, made the country's frequent blackouts the center of his winning campaign.... In November 2006, Ecuador's presidential elections turned into a similar ideological battleground. Rafael Correa, a forty-three-year-old leftwing economist, won the vote against Alvaro Noboa, a banana tycoon and one of the richest men in the country.... By then, Bolivian Presidente Evo Morales was already approaching the end of his first year in office. After sending in the army to take back the gas fields from multinational plunderers, he moved on to nationalizing parts of the mining sector. In the same period in Mexico, the results of the fraud-tainted 2006 elections were being contested through the creation of an unprecedented 'parallel government' of the people.... In the Mexican state of Oaxaca... a statewide rebellion against the corruption of the corporatist state raged for months.... Chile and Argentina are both led by politicians who define themselves against their countries' Chicago School experiments.... Chile's Presidente Michelle Bachelet was one of thousands who were victims of Pinochet's reign of terror. In 1975 she and her mother were imprisoned and tortured in Villa Grimaldi.... Her father, a military officer, had refused to go along with the coup and was murdered by Pinochet's men. In December 2006, a month after Friedman's death, Latin American leaders gathered for a historic summit in Bolivia, held in the city of Cochabamba, where a popular uprising against water privatization had forced Bechtel out of the country several years earlier." pp 575-579 "In Brazil, the phenomenon is best seen in the million and a half farmers of the Landless Peoples Movement (MST) who have formed hundreds of cooperatives to reclaim unused land. In Argentina, it is clearest in the movement of 'recovered companies,' two hundred bankrupt businesses that have been resuscitated by their workers, who have turned them into democratically run cooperatives. For the cooperatives, there is no fear of facing an economic shock of investors leaving, because investors had already left.... In Venezuela, Chavez has made the co-ops a top political priority, giving them first refusal on government contracts, and offering them economic incentives to trade with one another. By 2006, there were roughly 100,000 cooperatives in the country, employing more than 700,000 workers.... Venezuela has emerged as a major lender to other developing countries, allowing them to do an end run around Washington.... Brazil is refusing to enter into a new agreement with the IMF. Nicaragua is negotiating to quit the fund, Venezuela has withdrawn from both the IMF and the World Bank, and even Argentina... has been part of the trend.... President Kirchner said... 'no way in hell are we going to make an agreement again with the IMF.'... In 2005, Latin America made up 80 percent of the IMF's total lending portfolio; in 2007, the continent represented just 1 percent.... The World Bank faces an equally grim future. In April 2007, Ecuador's Presidente Rafael Correa revealed he had suspended all loans from the bank and declared the institution's representative in Ecuador 'persona non grata'-- an extraordinary step.... Evo Morales announced that Bolivia would quit the World Bank's arbitration court.... Paul Wolfowitz was forced to announce his resignation as president of the World Bank in May 2007... The Financial Times reported that when World Bank managers dispensed advice in the developing world, 'they were now laughed at.' Add the collapse of the World Trade Organization talks in 2006 (prompting declarations that 'globalization is dead') and the futures of the three main institutions that had imposed the Chicago School ideology are at risk of extinction.... But the most remarkable mood change is taking place in China. For many years, the raw terror of the Tiananmen Square Massacre succeeded in suppressing popular anger at the erosion of worker rights and deepening rural poverty. Not anymore. According to official government sources, in 2005 there was a staggering 87,000 large protests in China involving more than 4 million workers and peasants." pp 586-588 "Despite all successful attempts to exploit the 2004 Tsunami, memory proved to be an effective tool of resistance.... Dozens of coastal villages were flattened by the wave, but unlike in Sri Lanka, many Thai settlements were successfully built within months.... Thailand's politicians were just as eager as those elsewhere to use the storm as an excuse to evict fishing people and hand over land tenure to large resorts.... Instead, within weeks hundreds of villagers engaged in what they called land 'reinvasions.' They marched past armed guards on the payroll of developers, tools in hand, and began marking off sites where their old houses had been.... All along the Thai coast where the tsunami hit, this kind of direct action reconstruction is the norm.... The results are communities stronger than they were before the wave. The houses on stilts built by Thai villagers in Ban Tung Wah and Baan Nairai are beautiful and sturdy; they are also cheaper, larger and cooler than the sweltering prefab cubicles on offer from foreign contractors.... A year after Katrina hit, a remarkable exchange took place in Thailand between the leaders of that country's grassroots reconstruction effort and a small delegation of hurricane survivors from New Orleans. Visitors from the United States were taken aback by the speed with which rehabilitation had become a reality.... After community leaders from New Orleans returned home, there was indeed a wave of direct action in the city.... In February 2007, groups of residents who had lived in the public housing projects the Bush Administration was planning to demolish began 'reinvading' their old homes and taking up residence. Volunteers helped clean out apartments and raised money to buy generators and solar panels.... The reinvasion turned into a block party complete with a New Orleans brass band." Howard Zinn, Lecture at Binghamton University, NY, Nov 8 2008 "A single-payer health system will be sort of run like Social Security. It won�t depend on middle people, on insurance companies. You won�t have to fill out forms and pay and figure out whether you have a preexisting medical condition.... No, something happens, you just go to a doctor, you go to a hospital, you�re taken care of, period. The government will pay for it. That�s what governments are for. They do that for the military. The military has free insurance. I was once in the military. I didn�t have to fool around with deciding what health plan I�m in.... But when you ask that the government do this for everybody else, they cry, �That�s socialism!� Well, if that�s socialism, it must mean socialism is good.... I was really gratified when Obama said, �Let�s tax the rich more; let�s tax the poor and middle class less.� And they said, �That�s socialism.� And I thought, �Finally, socialism is getting a good name.�... "Newspapers this morning report highest unemployment in decades. The government needs to create jobs. Private enterprise is not going to create jobs. Private enterprise fails, the so-called free market system fails again and again. When the Depression hit in the 1930s, Roosevelt and the New Deal created jobs for millions of people. And there were people out there on the fringe who yelled, �Socialism!� Didn�t matter. People needed it.... "Obama should have been saying, �Let�s take that $700 billion, let�s give it to people who can�t pay their mortgages. Let�s create jobs.� You know, instead of pouring $700 billion into the top and hoping it will trickle down to the bottom, no, go right to the bottom, where people need it.... "Roosevelt did challenge economic interests, boldly. He called them economic royalists. He wasn�t worried people would say, �Oh, you�re appealing to class conflict,� you know, as if there hasn�t always been class conflict.... �You�re creating class conflict. We�ve never had class conflict. We�ve always all been one happy family.�... "The other factor that stands in the way of a real bold economic and social program is the war, you know, a $600 billion military budget. Now, how can you call for the government to take over the healthcare system? How can you call for the government to give jobs to millions of people? How can you offer free education, free higher education? We should have free higher education. How can you do all these things, which will do away with poverty in the United States? It all costs money. Where�s that money going to come from? Well, it can come from two sources. One is the tax structure.... You have a tax system where 200 of the richest corporations pay no taxes.... Don�t we need $600 billion for a military budget? Don�t we have to fight two wars? No. We don�t have to fight any wars.... They�re horrible, and they�re absurd. You know, the deaths and the mangled limbs and the blindness and the three million people in Iraq losing their homes, having to leave their homes, three million people having to look elsewhere to live because of our occupation, because of our war for democracy, our war for liberty.... "The United States has 10,000 nuclear weapons.... In one hundred different countries we have military bases. That doesn�t look like a peace-loving country. What do we need those bases for? We have to declare ourselves a peaceful nation. We don�t have to be a military superpower. We don�t have to be a military power at all, you see? We can be a humanitarian superpower. We�ll still be powerful. We�ll still be rich. But we can use that power and that wealth to help people all over the world.... "There was a British Empire, a Russian Empire, a German Empire, a Japanese Empire, a French Empire, a Belgian Empire, a Dutch Empire and a Spanish Empire. And now there�s the American Empire.... Our history shows expansion: Doubling our territory with the Louisiana Purchase, which I remember on our school maps looked very benign. �Oh, there�s all that empty land, and now we have it.� It wasn�t empty! Hundreds of Indian tribes were living there, you see? And if it�s going to be ours, we�ve got to get rid of them. And we did. And then we instigated a war with Mexico from 1846 to 1848, and at the end of the war we take almost half of Mexico. And why? Well, we wanted that land. That�s very simple. We want things. And the United States has done that again and again. Then we expanded into the Caribbean, then we expanded out into the Pacific into Hawaii and the Philippines.... And now in the Middle East, everywhere. An expansionist country, an imperialist power. For what? To do good things for these other people? No. We�re an empire like other empires. We�re as aggressive and brutal and violent as the Belgians were in the Congo, as the British were in India, and all these other empires. Yeah, we�re just like them. We have to face it. And when you face that, you sober up a little, and then you don�t think you can just go all over the world and say, �We�re doing this for liberty and democracy,� because then, if you know your history, you know how many times that was said: �We�re going into the Philippines to bring civilization and Christianity to the Filipinos.� �We�re going to bring civilization to the Mexicans.�... "When government does bad things, the most patriotic thing you can do is to criticize the government, because that�s our basic democratic charter. The Declaration of Independence says governments are set up by the people to ensure certain rights, the equal right to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. So when governments become destructive of those ends, the Declaration said, �it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish� the government. It�s OK to abolish the government when the government violates its trust.... "We need to redefine �terrorism.�... Terrorism means that you kill people for some belief that you have.... But if that�s the definition: War is Terrorism.... There�s the interest of the president of the United States, and then there�s the interest of the young person he sends to war. They�re different interests, you see? There is the interest of Exxon and Halliburton, and there�s the interest of the worker, the nurse�s aide, the teacher, the factory worker. Those are different interests.... No, the government is not looking out for your interest. The government has its own interests, and they�re not the interests of the people.... Governments do not represent the interests of their people. See? That�s why governments keep getting overthrown.... That's why governments lie. They have to lie, because their interests are different than the interests of ordinary people. If they told the truth, they would be out of office.... "I was in World War II as an Air Force bombardier. I dropped bombs on various cities in Europe.... I was an enthusiastic enlistee in the Air Force. I wanted to be in the war against fascism, the �good war,� right? But at the end of the war, I looked around and thought about what I had done and learned about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Dresden and Hamburg and learned things I didn�t even realize while I was bombing, because when you�re involved in a military operation, you don�t think. You're just an automaton, really, you�re not questioning why. �Why are they sending me to bomb this little town? The war is almost over, there�s no reason for dropping bombs on several thousand people.� No, you don�t think. Well, I began to think after the war that this good war is not good. This best of wars, no.... "You make an interesting psychological jump: Since they�re the bad guys, you must be the good guys. No, they may very well be the bad guys. They may be fascists and dictators and really bad guys. That doesn�t mean you�re good, you know? And when I began to look at it that way, I realized that wars are fought by evils on both sides. You know, one is a little more evil than the other. But even though you start in a war with sort of good intentions�we�re going to defeat fascism�you end up killing a lot of innocent people, because you�ve decided from the beginning that you�re right.... Then you can kill 100,000 people in Dresden.... �Oh, now we�re rid of fascism. Now we�re going to have a good world, a peaceful world. Now the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 50 million people died in World War II, but now it�s going to be OK. Well, you�ve lived these years since World War II. Has it been OK?... War wastes people. It wastes wealth. It�s an enormous, enormous waste.... "If you don�t know history, it�s as if you were born yesterday. If you were born yesterday, then any leader can tell you anything, you have no way of checking up on it. History is very important. I don�t mean formal history, what you learn in a classroom. Go to the library and learn history.... History tells us injustices have not been remedied by the three branches of government. They�ve been remedied by great social movements, which then push and force and pressure and threaten the three branches of government until they finally do something.... "If you look at history, you see people felt powerless until they organized, and they got together, and they persisted, and they didn�t give up, and they built social movements. Whether it was the anti-slavery movement or the black movement of the 1960s or the antiwar movement in Vietnam or the women�s movement, they started small and apparently helpless; they became powerful.... We�re not powerless. We just have to be persistent.... If you join some group, it will make you feel better.... Life becomes more interesting and rewarding when you become involved with other people in some great social cause." Hugo Chavez, World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, Brazil, January 2005 "When imperialism feels weak, it resorts to brute force. The attacks on Venezuela are a sign of weakness, ideological weakness. Nowadays almost nobody defends neoliberalism. Up until three years ago, just Fidel Castro and I raised these criticisms at Presidential meetings. We felt lonely, as if we infiltrated those meetings. Just look at the internal repression inside the United States, the Patriot Act, which is a repressive law against US citizens. They put into jail a group of journalists for not revealing their sources. They won't allow them to take pictures of the dead soldiers coming home from Iraq, many of them Latinos. Those are signs of Goliath's weaknesses. The south also exists. The future of the north depends on the south. If we don�t make that better world possible, if we fail, and through the rifles of the US Marines, and through Mr. Bush's murderous bombs, if there is no south to resist the offensive of neo-imperialism, and the Bush doctrine is imposed upon the world, the world shall be destroyed. Every day I become more convinced, there is no doubt in my mind: It is necessary to transcend capitalism. But capitalism cannot be transcended from itself, but only through socialism, true socialism, with equality and justice. I�m convinced it is possible to do in a democracy, but not in the type of democracy imposed from Washington. We have to re-invent socialism: It cannot be the kind of socialism we saw in the Soviet Union, but it will emerge as we develop new systems built on cooperation, not competition. Privatization is a neoliberal imperialist plan. Healthcare cannot be privatized because it is a fundamental human right, nor can education, water, electricity, other essential public services. They cannot be surrendered to private capital that denies the people of their rights!" Che Guevara, "Notes for the Study of Man and Socialism in Cuba," 1965 "The laws of capitalism act upon the individual without his thinking about it. He sees before him only the vastness of an infinite horizon. That is how it is painted by capitalist propagandists who purport to draw their lesson from the example of Rockefeller about the possibilities of success. Well, the amount of poverty and suffering required for the emergence of one Rockefeller, and the amount of depravity that such an accumulation of such a fortune entails, are left out of the picture. The reward is always seen in the distance; the way is lonely. Further on it is a route for wolves: One can succeed only at the cost of failure for others. Wealth is far beyond reach of the masses simply through the process of appropriation. Capitalism uses force but it also educates: Direct propaganda is carried out by those entrusted with explaining the inevitability of class system, either through some theory of divine origin or some theory of natural selection. This lulls the masses since they see themselves as being oppressed by an evil against which it is impossible to struggle. Immediately following comes the hope of improvement, and in this, capitalism differs from preceding caste systems which offered no possibilities for advancement.� Karl Marx, DAS KAPITAL, 1867, Chapter 6: The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power �He who before was the money-owner now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but: a hiding.� Karl Marx, Alienated Labour, 1844 �The more wealth the worker produces, the more his production increases in power and scope, the poorer he becomes. Indeed, work itself becomes an object which he can obtain only with the greatest effort. His work therefore is not voluntary, but it is coerced, forced labor. If my own activity does not belong to me, if it is alien, a forced activity, to whom, then, does it belong? To a being other than me. Now who is that other being? The gods???� Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848 �In proportion as the bourgeoisie developed, in the same proportion developed the proletariat, the modern working class, a class of workers who live only so long as they can find work, and who can find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These workers must sell themselves piecemeal as a commodity, exposed to all the competition and fluctuations of the market. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class and the bourgeois state; but they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine and the overseer. No sooner is the exploitation of the worker by the manufacturer, then he is set upon by other portions of the bourgeoisie: the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker. Law, morality and religion are to the worker just so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces above all, are its own grave-diggers!� Noam Chomsky, 1973 "Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are under autocratic control. A corporation is fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level. Just as I'm opposed to political fascism, I'm opposed to economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under popular control, it's pointless to talk about democracy." Noam Chomsky, UNDERSTANDING POWER, 2002, p 200 �The United States is off the spectrum: What�s called �libertarianism� here is unbridled capitalism. Now if you have unbridled capitalism, you have extreme authority. If capital is privately controlled, then people must rent themselves in order to survive. Now you can say, �well they freely rent themselves in a free contract,� but that�s a joke. If your only choice is �do what I tell you or starve,� that isn�t a choice�it�s wage slavery. Now there are consistent libertarians, and if you read the world they describe, it�s a world so full of hate that no human would want to live in it. This is a world where you don�t have any roads because you don�t see any reason why you should cooperate in building a road you�re not going to directly use. If you need a road, you get together with other people who need it and you build it, and then you charge people to ride on it! Now who would want to live in a world like that? It�s a world built on hatred. The whole thing�s not worth talking about. It couldn�t function for one second. And even if it could, all you�d want to do is get out, escape, commit suicide or something.� Noam Chomsky, UNDERSTANDING POWER, 2002 "So long as power remains privately concentrated, everybody, everybody, has to be committed to one goal, and that�s to make sure that the rich folk are happy, because unless they are happy, nobody is going to get anything. So if you�re a homeless person sleeping in the streets of Manhattan, your first concern must be that the guys in the mansions are happy, because if they�re happy, they�ll invest, and the economy will work, and things will function, then maybe something might trickle down to you somewhere along the line. But if they�re not happy, everything is going to grind to a halt, and you�re not even going to get anything trickling down." Noam Chomsky, CLASS WARFARE, 1995 "Public 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, because if you don't educate them, they're going to take control, they being what Alexander Hamilton called the great beast, namely the people. Because the freer the society gets, the more dangerous this great beast becomes, and the more careful you have to be to cage it somehow." Noam Chomsky, UNDERSTANDING POWER, 2002 "Remember 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. Typically the elites are the most indoctrinated because they are exposed to the most propaganda and take part in decision-making. So for them you have the New York Times and Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. There�s also a mass media whose main function is to just get rid of the rest of the population, to eliminate them from decision-making. So for them it�s TV sitcoms, National Enquirer, sex and violence, babies with three heads, football, that kind of stuff." Noam Chomsky, UNDERSTANDING POWER, 2002 "You're trained to be obedient, you don't have an interesting job, there's no work around for you that's creative, in the cultural environment you're merely a passive observer. Political and social life are out of your range: they're in the hands of rich folk. So what's left? Well one thing that's left is sports, so you put a lot of intelligence and thought and self-confidence into that. Sports occupies the public and keeps them from getting involved with anything that matters." Noam Chomsky, UNDERSTANDING POWER, 2002, pp 276-279 "You might ask why popular movements in the United States have to look to small community radio stations to get programming. Why doesn�t mainstream radio do that? Well in every major country in the world, radio was turned into a public forum. The United States went the other way; here radio was privatized, put into private hands.... When television came along in the 1940�s, there wasn't even a battle for it�it was just completely handed over to private power. I think the internet is going to be the same basic story: If it's put into the hands of private power, we know exactly how it�s going to turn out: It'll be used as another technique for control, and for keeping people in their role as mindless consumers." Noam Chomsky, UNDERSTANDING POWER, 2002, pp 396-399 �There�s complete disaffection about everything: People don�t trust anyone, they think everyone�s lying. The whole civil society has completely broken down. Take these guys in militias: They�re high school graduates, mostly white males, a segment of society that has really taken a beating. I mean, real wages in the United States have dropped about 20% since 1973. Their wives now have to work just to put food on the table, their families are broken up. Their kids are running wild. I mean, a lot of people don�t even read. We should bear in mind how illiterate our society has become. So these groups certainly represent a response to worsening conditions. Or take this guy called Unabomber. When I read his manifesto, I thought if I don�t know him, I know his friends�they�re the kind of people I run into on the Left all the time: demoralized, fed up, desperate. The LA riots were not a constructive response: South Central Los Angeles was just a riot, the reaction of a completely demoralized devastated poor working-class population. All people could do was mindlessly lash out, just steal from stores. The only effect was: we�ll just build more jails. Can you marginalize a large part of the population as superfluous because they�re not helping you make those dazzling profits�can you set up a world in which production is carried out by the most oppressed people for the happiness of rich people? Could it lead to a civil war? It definitely could. There�s a streak of independence and opposition to authority in the United States. It can show up in antisocial ways, like running around with assault rifles. But it can show up in healthy ways, like opposition to illegitimate authority. My friend was listening to one of my gloomy disquisitions and said: �Y�know, what you are describing is an organizer�s dream.� And I think that is true.� Friedrich Nietzsche, THE DAWN, 1881 "I would not know what to say to workers of factory slavery, provided they do not consider it altogether shameful to be used up as they are, as gears of a machine. Phew! To believe that higher pay could abolish your misery, to be talked into thinking that such an increase could transform the Shame of Slavery into a Virtue! Phew! To have a price upon which you become a gear! Are you co-conspirators in the current folly of nations who want to produce as much as possible and be rich as possible? What vast sums of Inner Worth are thrown away. Better to emigrate, and in savage fresh regions seek to be Master of the World and master of myself! Keep changing locations so long as slavery beckons: Never avoid adventure. Be prepared for death. What began at home as dangerous discontent will once outside gain a wild beauty and be called Heroism." |