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Forum Post: Noam Chomsky on Privatization

Posted 9 years ago on May 13, 2014, 2:18 p.m. EST by struggleforfreedom80 (6584)
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UikhLJNLFK4

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5 Comments


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[-] 4 points by shadz66 (19985) 9 years ago

"Privatization does not mean you take a public institution and give it to some nice person, it means you take a public institution and give it to an unaccountable tyranny." (Noam Chomsky).

A brilliant, short [5:40m] video compilation !!! Highly recommended !! Thanx sff ! Also fyi, I append ..

''Capitalism may have found an honored place for many of its anti-public intellectuals, but it certainly has no room for the likes of Chomsky. Conservatives and liberals, along with an army of unyielding neoliberal advocates, have virtually refused to include him in the many discussions and publications on social issues that work their way into the various registers of the dominant media. In many ways, Chomsky’s role as an intellectual and activist is a prototype of what may be called an American radical tradition and yet appears out of place. Chomsky appears to be an exile in his own country by virtue of his political interventions, the shock of his acts of translation, and his displays of fierce courage. This is not to suggest that he would make a claim to be in exile in the sense claimed by many intellectuals, though he might agree with the late Edward Said, who was interested in what he called "travelling theory" in the sense of "being errant, provisional, intellectually on the hoof, [as one of] several ways in which he remained true to the exiled people to whom he lent his voice." Exile in this sense suggest that as a "traveler," Chomsky is not interested staking out academic territory and consequently has no disciplinary sphere to protect. The latter, of course, being the hallmark of many academics today who are caught in the cult of specialization and forms of disciplinary terror - forever excoriating those intellectuals who attempt to breach the steadfast rules of the discipline.''

''He may be one of the few public intellectuals left of an older generation who offers a rare glimpse into what it means to widen the scope of the meaning of political and intellectual inquiry - an intellectual who rethinks in a critical fashion the educative nature of politics within the changed and totalizing conditions of a neoliberal global assault on all vestiges of democracy. He not only trades in ideas that defy scholastic disciplines and intellectual boundaries, he also makes clear that it is crucial to hold ideas accountable for the practices they legitimate and produce, while at the same time refusing to limit critical ideas to simply modes of critique. In this instance, ideas not only challenge the normalizing discourses and representations of commonsense and the power inequities they legitimate, but also open up the possibilities inherent in a discourse that moves beyond the given and points to new ways of thinking and acting about freedom, civic courage, social responsibility, and justice from the standpoint of radical democratic ideals.''

solidaritet igjen ...

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[-] 3 points by struggleforfreedom80 (6584) 9 years ago

Hey! Thanks. I liked this one:

"And when the economy tanks, there's a technique: you pick up your copies of Milton Friedman, Hayek and Ayn Rand, and you run to the nanny state that you've nurtured, and make sure they bail you out; that's really existing capitalism -- and it means that the scam can go on."

Brilliant.

Solidarity!

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[-] 6 points by shadz66 (19985) 9 years ago

Nice Chomsky Quote !!! Everyone needs to watch that 5.40m video !! Absolutely essential viewing, imo !

Solidarity Andy and from a more 'mainstream' source, I also recommend the following for consideration :

per ardua ad astra ...

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[-] 3 points by shadz66 (19985) 9 years ago

''Finance in today’s world has become war by non-military means. Its object is the same as that of military conquest: appropriation of land and basic infrastructure, and the rents that can be extracted as tribute. In today’s world this is taken mainly in the form of debt service and privatization. That is how neoliberalism works, subduing economies by indebting their governments and using unpayably high debts as a lever to pry away the public domain at distress prices.

''This means that the further economic inequality widens and the more a population is ground down into poverty and debt, the more the weak identify their interests with those of their oppressors. They believe that their best hope is that somehow the rich will reciprocate by accepting them in a patronage system. The effect is to demoralize populations and make them so fearful that they feel even more dependent on their oppressors, whom they hope will see how obediently they are behaving and will treat them better.

''The past century has seen a counter-revolution against the Enlightenment, classical economics and its culmination in socialist hopes to steer industrial capitalism to evolve into democratic socialism. What is occurring today is a self-destructive financial dynamic of impoverishment, dependency and breakdown in many ways like what happened when Rome’s creditor oligarchy plunged the Empire into the Dark Age two thousand years ago. The post-feudal real estate and financial oligarchies, the landed aristocracies of Europe and the great banking families and American trust builders have made a comeback, and the New Cold War is intended to lock in their victory. Ukraine is simply the latest battlefield, and battlefields end up devastated.'' Excerpted and abridged from :

A long, deep, insightful article and at a slight tho' very relevant tangent from your short, sharp Chomsky video, forum-post but I strongly recommend Prof. Hudson's excellent piece to you and all readers here.

fiat lux ...

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[-] 2 points by SparkyJP (1646) from Westminster, MD 9 years ago

Whenever you hear the term "Public Private Partnership" a red flag of caution should immediately pop up in your head.

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