The Russians served the purpose for many years; their collapse has called for innovative and audacious tactics. As the standard pretext vanished, the domestic population has been frightened – with some success – by images of Qaddafi’s hordes of international terrorists, Sandinistas marching on Texas, Grenada interdicting sea lands and threatening the homeland itself, Hispanic narcotraffickers directed by the arch-maniac Noriega, and crazed Arabs generally, most recently, the Beast of Baghdad, after he underwent the usual conversion from favored friend to Attila the Hun after committing the one unforgivable crime, the crime of disobedience, on August 2 1990. ibid.
Since each foreign triumph is in fact a fiasco, the aftermath must be obscured as the government-media alliance turns to some new crusade. ibid.
The notable rise in the moral and cultural level of the general population since the 1960s, including the unwillingness to tolerate atrocities and aggression, a grave disease called ‘the Vietnam syndrome, has further limited the options’. ibid.
The US has no problem with murderous thugs who serve US interests, and will attack and destroy committed democrats if they depart from their service function. ibid.
Those who do not follow the rules must be severely punished, and others must learn these lessons – but not the American public, who are to be regaled with tales about the nobility of our aspirations, the grand achievements of our leaders, and the moral depravity of others. ibid.
The goal is to eliminate public meddling in policy formation. This has been largely achieved in the United States, where there is little in the way of political organizations, functioning unions, media independence of the corporate oligopoly, or other popular structures that might offer people means to gain information, clarify and develop their ideas, put them forth in the political arena, and work to realize them. As long as each individual is facing the television tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege. ibid.
Fiscal policy constitutes a long-term shift of resources to the wealthy. The ‘staggering’ costs discussed by the federal auditors will be paid by the poor and the working class who have left out of the consumption binge that economists now blame for the clouds on the horizon, just as the taxpayer is called upon to bail out speculators hoping to profit from deregulation of the Savings and Loans institutions, and probably, before too long, the banks that reaped enormous profits by lending to the wealthy classes and neo-Nazi military rulers who took over much of Latin America with US backing from the early 1960s. ibid.
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. Noam Chomsky, The Common Good
Political leaders operate within a pretty narrow framework which is set by external factors, power systems of various kinds. Noam Chomsky, New York Peace Action Benefit lecture, ‘Obama’s Imperialist Policies’, Youtube 56.24
The cost of elections has skyrocketed … democracy has eroded … 70% of the population is essentially disenfranchised and over 70% on the income scale: their opinions have no effect on policy; influence increases slowly as wealth increases; you get to the top fraction of 1%, they pretty much get what they want. Noam Chomsky, lecture 8th July 2017, ‘The Corporatization of the Universities’, Youtube 1.39.35
The spectrum is basically from centre to extreme right, extreme right, way off the spectrum. Noam Chomsky: The Empire’s Election Extravaganza, interview Abby Martin, The Empire Files, Youtube 2015
Both parties shifted to the right as everywhere in the world, and the Republicans just went off the spectrum. ibid.
Obama is running a global terror programme of a kind that has never been envisioned before. ibid.
The right to use force and violence at will is accepted pretty much across the spectrum. ibid.
About 70% of the public, the lowest 70% of the income scale, are pretty much disenfranchised; their attitudes have no detectable influence on the policies of their own representatives. ibid.
A plutocracy with democratic forms. ibid.
The United States which only a few years ago was held to stride the world as a colossus with unparalleled power and unmatched is in decline ominously facing the prospects of its final decay. Noam Chomsky, lecture Deacon University November 2011, ‘American Decline: The Changing Contours of Global Order’
In the foreseeable future I don’t see any indication that there’s any competitor for a hegemonic global power. ibid.
The US political system should acknowledge it is now the dominant threat to everyone else … The United States will not remain a democracy worth of the name … It will be a failed state endangering its own population with democratic forms that have little substance. Noam Chomsky, lecture Washington State University 2005, ‘Imminent Crises’
The guiding principles and facing the consequences: fomenting terror, crashing our own economy, inspiring hatred among oppressed populations that sooner or later are likely to explode. Noam Chomsky, lecture University of Tennessee 25th January 2011
The decline is real but it’s not new: it’s been going on since 1945. Noam Chomsky, lecture University of Massachusetts at Amherst 27 September 2012, ‘Who Owns the World? Resistance and Ways Forward’
There is a distribution of power internal to this country – enormous disparity of economic and other power – and that influences everything that happens in dramatic ways, so many issues simply don’t come up in elections. Noam Chomsky, Conversation with Charlie Rose 2003, Youtube 54.54
The United States is essentially a one-party state: it has two factions of the business party. ibid.
Ever since the Cold War ended there were people who were fuming on the Right thinking this is the golden opportunity now that Russia’s out of the way for American to take over the world. We’re not doing anything about it. Those damned liberals, those soft-heads, are keeping us from doing what is our godly mission. Norman Mailer, author
For more than five decades, throughout the third world, the United States has deliberately targeted civilians or engaged in violence so indiscriminate that there is no other way to understand it except as terrorism. And it has supported similar acts of terrorism by client states. Robert Jensen, Houston Chronicle
The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes. Felix Frankfurter, US Supreme Court Justice
In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left such is the capability to monitor everything – telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.
If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.
I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return. Frank Church, NBC’s Meet the Press 17th August 1975
It is simply intolerable for any agency of the government of the United States to engage in murder. Frank Church, senator & committee chairman
The question is, What kind of a country is the United States? That in the last few years has killed a president, President Kennedy. Has killed Martin Luther King. And now attempts to kill Robert Kennedy. Malcolm X, the black militant leader. What kind of curious strain of violence is there in the American people? Bill O’Reilly, interview Mike Wallace is Here, Sky Documentaries 2022
While vast sums of money are being siphoned off into hidden coffers, America's schools, hospitals and public services are facing cutbacks and closures. Henry Waxman
America’s punitive and reactive response to crime is an integral part of the new social Darwinism, the criminal justice counterpart of an increasingly harsh attack on living standards and social supports, especially for the poor ... America [is] a society in which a permanent state of social disintegration is held in check only by the creation of a swollen apparatus of confinement and control that has no counterpart in our own history or in any other industrial democracy. Elliott Currie
Draining the Swamp: I want to confront the mainstream media and I want to take them down one by one. Sacha Baron Cohen: Who is America? I, Channel 4 2018
I’d prefer to be anally raped rather than give one more dollar to the Treasury. ibid. Billy