Noam Chomsky answers questions from 6 personalities

professor Chomsky first question comes from john bersia political practice often surprises political vocabulary for example the recent revolution the Middle East is said to demand democracy can we find multiquote words isn't the use of the old and frequently betrayed words a way of absorbing this shock instead of were coming it and transmitting it further well I just to begin I think the word revolution is a bit of an exaggeration maybe it'll turn it into a revolution but for the moment it's a call for moderate reform short there are elements in it like the workers movement that are trying to move beyond that but that remains to be seen however is correct but there's no way out of that it's not just the word democracy it's every word that is involved in discussion of political affairs has two meanings as its literal meaning has a meaning that's assigned to it for political warfare for ideology for doctrine so either we stop talking or we try to use the words in a sensible way and it's not just democracy it I mean take the word a simple word like person sounds simple let's take a look at it the in the United States it's quite interesting the United States has guarantees of personal rights go beyond maybe any other country would have a look at them be a constant the amendments to the Constitution a state very explicitly that no person can be deprived of Rights was the rights without due process of law well that was it reappears in the 14th amendment was in the fifth amendment and it was intended to apply to freed slaves but it had never been ever been applied to them the courts narrowed the meaning and broadened the meaning crucially they broadened the meaning to include corporations fictitious legal entities established by state power so they were given the rights of persons by now rights way beyond persons on the other hand was also narrowed because the term persons you might think would apply to those creatures walking around to do the dirty work in the society but don't happen to have documents and that wouldn't do because they must be deprived of Rights so the courts and their wisdom decided they're not persons the only persons are people with citizenship so now nonhumans corporate entities like the Barclays Bank meeting next door they're persons with rights way beyond persons humans and the people you know sweeping the streets are not persons they don't have rights and the same is true in just about every term you look at so it takes a free trade agreements for example there's a North American Free Trade Agreement Canada the United States and Mexico the only accurate term in that is North American certainly not an agreement at least if human beings are part of their societies because the population in all three countries was against it so it's not an agreement it's not about free trade in fact it has it's highly protectionist you know tremendous protections for monopoly pricing rights for pharmaceutical corporations and so on a lot of it isn't about trade at all in fact what we call trade is a kind of a joke so for example in the old Soviet Union if parts were manufactured say in Leningrad and shipped to Warsaw for assembly and then sold in Moscow we didn't call that trade although it did cross national borders it was interactions within a single command economy and exactly the same is true if General Motors manufactures the parts in Indiana sends them to Mexico for assembly then sells them in Los Angeles but we call that trade both ways in fact if you look at the trade it's about 50% of it not small at a lot of the agreement is just about investor rights say granting General Motors of the rights of national companies in Mexico for example which Mexicans of course don't get in the United States and it pick the term you want you're going to find exactly the same thing so yes that's a problem and we get around it by trying to be clear about the way we use our own terminology second questions come from award-winning journalist Chris Hedges Julian bender in the treason of intellectuals argued that it is only when intellectuals are not in the pursuit of practical aims of material advantages that they can serve as a conscience and as a corrective can you address the loss of philosophers religious leaders writers journalists artists and scholars whose lies were once lived in direct opposition to the realism of the multitudes and what this has meant for our intellectual and role life well the only I understand his feelings and share them but I don't know what the loss was when was it ever true and at no time that I can remember the term intellectual came into pretty common usage in the modern sense at the time of the Dreyfus ARDS they were a small minority a small vilified minority the massive intellectual supported state power during the first world war shortly afterwards the intellectuals of every one of the countries passionately supported their own statements on the violin now there were a handful of exceptions like Bertrand Russell in England or the Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Germany or Eugene Debs in the United States they were all in jail they were a margin and they were in prison yes oh yes they were there in the John Dewey circle the liberal intellectuals in the United States passionately pro-war there was one member Randolph Bourne who didn't go along with it he wasn't put in jail the United States a pretty free country but he was thrown out of the journals you know intellectually exiled and so on that's the way it's always been during the 1960's big activist period they take a careful look intellectuals were very supportive of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement as long as he was attacking somebody else as long as the civil rights movement was going after racist sheriffs in Alabama that was wonderful everybody praised it big high rhetoric and so on as soon as he turned to class issues and he was marginalized and suppressed people tend to forget that he was killed when he was taking part in a sanitation worker strike and on his way to Washington to help organize a Poor People's Movement well that crosses the boundary that goes after ice because after privilege in the north and so on so the intellectuals disappeared with regard to the Vietnam War is exactly the same thing it was almost a note among known as look you know there's of course people on the fringes they were young people and so on but among well-known intellectuals and practice nothing at the very end after after the Tet Offensive in 1968 when the business community turned against the war then you started getting a drifting of people saying yes I was always a longtime anti-war activist no trace of it or whatever but that's in fact he can take this back to the earliest history they go back to classical Greece who drank the hemlock a guy was accused of corrupting the youth of Athens with false gods I'm going to take the biblical records they didn't have the term intellectual but they had a term which meant what we mean by intellectual that it's called prophets a bad translation of an obscure Hebrew word whether were so-called prophets and lecturers who carried out geopolitical critique you know condemned the King for bringing about disaster condemned the Kings crimes called for mercy for widows and orphans and so on what we would call dissident intellectuals how are they treated they were denounced as haters of Israel it's the exact phrase that was used the origins of the phrase self-hating Jew in the modern period and they were imprisoned driven into the desert and so on there were intellectuals were praised the flatterers of the court centuries later they were called false prophets but not at the time and that's almost the entire history since there are few exceptions in the modern period the one major exception I know is actually Turkey it's the only country I know we're leading prominent artists academics journalists publishers a very broad range of intellectuals and not only condemned the crimes State but are involved in consuls obedience against them facing often enduring very severe punishment I have to laugh when I come to Europe and hear people complaining about how the Turks aren't civilized enough to join our advanced society you could learn some lessons from Turkey but that's pretty unusual in fact it's so unusual that it can its barely known you can't bring it up but aside from the word loss I think Chris Hedges comments are accurate but I just can't perceive any laws I think it's about the same as it's always been and in fact the way in dissident intellectuals are treated of course does vary so in the United States let's say maybe they're vilified or something in the old Soviet Union saying Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and 70s they could be in prison like Havel was in prison if you were an American domains at that time like El Salvador you get your plane's brains blown out by elite battalion trained in the u.s. Special Warfare school so yes people are treated differently depending on the country third question comes from an Israeli journalist Amira Hass of the uprising in the Arab states menu change revise some of the past evaluations are they and how affected your notions of for example masses hope Facebook Western intervention or surprised well actually a Amira and I met in Turkey a couple of months ago a couple of hours chance to talk and neither of us and maybe she did if she did it was a secret I certainly didn't anticipate anything that was going to happen in the Arab world so yes it changed my opinion in that respect it was unexpected on the other hand when you look back at it it's not that different from what's happened before except that in the past the uprisings were brutally suppressed and indeed they were this time too so the first of the uprisings was actually in November that was in the Western Sahara which is occupied by Morocco 25 years ago Morocco invaded violated UN resolutions as a brutal occupation the in November there was a nonviolent protest which Moroccan troops came in and crushed violently as they've been doing for 25 years it was serious enough so that was brought to the UN for a potential inquiry but France intervened France is the primary protector of atrocities and crimes in western Africa it's the old French possessions so they blocked any UN inquiry that was the first the next one was in Tunisia again more or less French area and you know there were scandals as you know like the minister of tourism or one of the ministers went for vacation right in the middle of the uprising and gotten some bad publicity but that one was successful it threw out the dictator then came Egypt which is the most important because of its significance in the Arab world and that was pretty remarkable was a remarkable display of the courage dedication commitment it did succeed in getting rid of the dictator it didn't hasn't yet changed the regime maybe it will but the regime is pretty much in place different names the but it's nothing new that uprising the January 25th uprising it was led by young people who call themselves the April 6th movement well April 6th has him for a reason April 6 they picked the name because it was the date of a major strike action a couple years earlier at the mahalo textile complex big industrial complex that was supposed to be a major strike support activities and so on well they were crushed by violence that's April 6 and that's only one of a series incidentally shortly after the crushing of the April 6th uprising President Obama came to Egypt to deliver his famous address outreach to the Muslim world and so on on his way he was asked at a press conference whether he would say anything about the authoritarian government of President Mubarak and he said no he wouldn't he said in Mubarak's a good man he's doing good things he's keeping stability like crushing the April six strike and so on so that's just fine then the uprisings went beyond the most striking one is Bahrain that's frightening to the West first of all because Bahrain hosts the fifth fleet the major military force in the region u.s. fleet a second because it's largely Shia and it's right across a causeway from Eastern Saudi Arabia which is majority Shiite it happens to be where most of the oil is now that gets frightening for years Western planners have been concerned about a kind of a geographical and historical accident most of the world's oil is in Shiite areas right around that part of the Gulf Iran southern Iraq and eastern Saudi Arabia well if the uprising Bufferin spreads to Saudi Arabia then Western power is really in trouble and in fact Obama has changed the rhetoric of that's used officially for the talk about the uprisings for a while it was a regime change incidentally that's after the uprising succeeded then kind of move in say I was fine now its regime alteration we don't want to change it's too valuable to have our dictators run things actually rather striking fact about all of this is that take a look the WikiLeaks exposures pretty interesting they the ones that got the most exposure in the West the big headlines are you for commentary were the leaks from the ambassador's which said that the Arab world supports us against Iran well one thing was missing in that reaction in the newspapers by the colonists and others namely our of opinion what they meant was the Arab dictators support us it would have had our of opinion it's known but it's not reported in the United States zero I think one report in England Jonathan Steele reported it probably nothing in France but it's it's well-known western US polling agencies released by very prestigious agencies it turns out that some Arabs think I think Iran is a threat about 10 percent a majority a vast majority think the major threat is the United States in Israel in Egypt ninety percent say the United States is the major threat in fact opposition to US policy is so strong that in Egypt I think it's close to 80 percent think the region be better off if Iran had nuclear weapons over the whole region its majority well who cares you know Erik going back to John burgers term democracy Western intellectual contempt for democracy is so profound and deep-seated that it doesn't even occur to anyone to ask well what Arabs think when we are euphoric that the Arab support us well the answer is it doesn't matter as long as they are quiet and subdued and controlled as long as there's what's called stability if no matter what they think the dictator support us period were you for it well okay that kind of ties together a number of these questions but going back to Amira Hass is comments yeah it what's happened it does should lead us to think about what has been happening not on the Arab world but elsewhere has often arisen and has been subdued by violence and that's been true for a century I mean the Britain the British were suppressing democracy movements in Iran this over a century ago in Iraq there was a Shiite uprising and as soon as the British cobbled the country together after the first world war big uprising violently suppressed one of the first uses uses of aircraft to attack civilians in fact Britain was very proud of that now the famous Lloyd Jordan succeeded in blocking a disarmament conference in 1932 they prevented it from barring use of aircraft against civilians Lloyd George famous Lloyd George wrote in his diary that this was a great thing because we have to reserve the right to bomb so there was a very good thing that the British government did and it continued in 1953 the United States and Britain combined to throw out the parliamentary government and in the near and 1936 to 39 there was an Arab uprising Palestine against the British violently crushed the First Intifada was again a very significant popular uprising almost entirely nonviolent and a real popular movement women's groups attack you know that protests against the feudal structure try to dismantle it and so on it was crushed by violence so sure these things like this happened what time they just crushed what's unusual this time is that strong enough so it was most of the country's Able's able to sustain itself what will happen in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain Jordan we don't know in fact we really don't know what will happen in Egypt the military has so far retained control and the top military command at least is deeply embedded into the old oppressive regime they own a lot of the economy that they were the beneficiaries of the Mubarak dictatorship they're not going to give it up easily so it remains to be seen what happens there next question is from Ken Loach award-winning filmmaker how do we overcome sectarianism on the Left I don't think we'll ever over to comment for one thing one form of sectarianism should be welcomed namely disagreement there are a lot of a lot of things are quite unclear we ought to have discussion disagreement to pursue different options and so on but what he means by sectarianism and what is generally meant by it is initiatives that sometimes attempt to and often succeed in breaking up popular movements so individuals or political groups that have their own agenda and want to take control you know become little Lenin's and so on and so forth that kind of sectarianism I don't think is ever going to really be suppressed it can be marginalized so for example during the during the uprisings in the Arab world say Egypt Toffler square surprisingly little sectarianism and there were many different points of view you know but there was a unity in a common goal and it's beginning to fall apart unfortunately so just yesterday there was a women's demonstration calling for women's rights it was attacked by it's a very sexist society and the women were attacked and driven out okay that's sectarianism there's now also religious sectarianism developing I mean when a common goal is no longer sort of uniting people in a struggle then you do get sectarianism and that's the way to bring people together so for example in the labor movement the American say in the United States same else within the United States the labor has often been extremely racist they did not necessarily just against Blacks for example Irish in the late 19th century were treated very much like blacks I mean walk around Boston and see signs saying no dogs or Irish allowed and so on what we're called Huns that meant anybody from Eastern Europe bitter racism against the Huns it gets the Italians and you know it goes all the way back but when the strike waves began in the late 19th century and they really became significant than places like the coal and steel centers in western Pennsylvania working for people took over cities and ran them you know at that point the sectarianism disappeared the racism disappeared there was unity to achieve something and the same was true in CIO organizing in the 1930s it overcame you know black racism against blacks they work together that's the only way to do it that I know same happen in the civil rights movement if you've got a common goal and you can combine and trying to achieve it then sectarian efforts are marginalized they don't disappear there's still people hanging around the periphery and maybe if if if the motive and commitment declines they may begin to take over as we're beginning to see in Egypt but I don't have any other way to do it next question is from Paul a very close associate to Ken Loach and also award-winning screenwriter there has probably never been a time where there's been such concentration of wealth and power in so few hands the powerful are sophisticated in maintaining the state of affairs but perhaps we use this too as an excuse to hide our shortcomings on the left what do you think has been lacking in our imaginative effort to build a mass international campaign to democratize resources and challenge corporate power can you imagine a time where we can organize our lives and economy successfully on a cooperative basis instead than a competitive one certainly I can imagine it and in fact there have been successful experiments with it as some of them right now none of them are utopia none of them would iru or others would aspire to but they're not insignificant like they say the Mondragon system in Spain it's it's not work or managed but it's worker owned it's a form of co-operative quite successful very broad lots problems but quite real if you look around the United States there they're probably hundreds of self-managed enterprises you know not huge some of them are pretty large but huge they're successful it takes a gift right now now one of the interesting things that's happening in Egypt is that the labor movement which has been very militant for years as I mentioned this is not a uprising out of nothing there they've now apparently it's hard to get information because not covered very well but actually I think of your house has been reporting this that in some of the industrial centers like again the mahalo big industrial center apparently workers have taken over the the enterprises and are managing them themselves well if that's true that would be to be the beginning of a revolution to active young workers words so yes it's it's certainly feasible what's been lacking the the comment about the inequality is very real I don't know the detailed statistics for other countries but in the United States where I know it it's inequality is back to the highest level has ever been in history the 1920s but that's misleading because the inequality in the United States is highly concentrated it's mostly in the top fraction of 1% of the population you take a look at the the income distribution it goes very sharply up towards the high end and literally 1/10 of 1% of the population now has extraordinary wealth in fact that's driving the inequality if you take that part away it's not equal but not totally out of sight who are they they're hedge fund managers CEOs and bankers and so on well something quite significant has been happening since the 1970s the economy has changed significantly it's been financialized go back to say 1970 financial institutions you know banks vestment firms were small percentage of corporate profits at the peak now their 2007 they reached 40 percent the they don't they don't benefit the economy in fact to probably harm the economy there's no essential social utility to them but they're powerful and they with economic power it comes political power for obvious reasons so they have gained extensive political power for example those financial institutions that put Obama into office pretty much so as most as funding came from with political power comes the opportunity to modify the legals of the legislative system and they've been doing it so since the 1970 1980s mainly fiscal policies have been changed say tax policies to ensure rapid concentration very high concentration of wealth rules of corporate governance have been changed they allow for example the CEO of a corporation to select the board that determines his salary you can imagine what the consequences of that are actually read them in the front pages of the newspapers every day about the huge bonuses being given to management that's where that comes from the regulation has been has collapsed with very striking effects New Deal regulation instantly this generalizes to the rest of the world I'm talking about the United States because I know it better deburr a new deal regulation prevented any financial crises up until the 1980s really 1970s it started to be dismantled since the 1980s crisis after crisis several during the Reagan years pretty serious ones phicorp Egan left office with the worst financial crisis since the depression loan came Clinton and the tech crisis then this finally this housing crisis 8 trillion dollars is a fake money disappeared devastating the economy well all of these are leaked our political decisions I mean while the cost of campaigning went way up and that compels the parties to climb pretty deep into the pockets of corporate sector that's where the money is the next election 2012 is expected to cost about two billion dollars and take a look at the the Obama administration you notice he's staffing the government right now with executives you know they are the ones who have the access to the corporate funding that's going to buy the election elections we just becoming farces you know run by public relations industry their marketing efforts and they kind of say it openly but in fact Obama won the award from the advertising industry for the best marketing campaign of 2008 they know exactly what's going on well you know all of this is kind of a vicious cycle the increased concentration of wealth increased political power it acts to further increase wealth why is there no reaction actually there is a reaction right now for the first time at what's going on in Wisconsin is a very significant reaction there are tens of thousands of people in the streets day after day with a lot of popular support maybe two-thirds of the population supporting them trying to defend labor rights the right of collective bargaining which is under attack I mean the business world understands very well that the one barrier to this total corporate tyranny is the organized workers movement so that's got to be destroyed very a labor history in the United States been extremely violent more so than in Europe have been effort after effort to wipe out the unions they keep reviving now is a major one going on but it's being resisted it's being resisted by large popular movements well where's the left actually what's happened to the left is interesting it since the 1960s when there was a big revival there is a quite an activist left there more young activists now than there were in the 60s but the issues have changed the issues are order sometimes we'll post materialist they're important issues and don't denigrate them so gay rights environmental rights women's rights you've all really important things but they don't reach to the concerns of the people who are living under depression level unemployment they don't reach to the 20% of the population roughly they need food stamps there hasn't been that kind of outreach and organizing so when the protests started in Wisconsin a couple of weeks ago it was practically no left initiative I mean a couple of well-known figures came in to give talks but it was not organized by the left groups who ought to be right at the heart of it it's it's there and it's like it better come or else we're in bad trouble but while left activism is significant very significant it's pretty much divorced from the daily struggles for survival and a decent life of most of the population and that's a gap that has to be overcome somehow last question is from Alice Walker award-winning author I believe that one state solution to the palestine-israel impasse is inevitable and more than just a two-state solution could ever be this is because I don't believe Israel will ever give up trying to control Palestinians whether citizens of Israel or those living in the occupied territories and a two-state solution would be Israel and Palestine man to Stan I have been struck by a dismissal of the one state ID as something and most absurd and would like to understand where you see it this way he then no hope that Israelis and Palestinians might live together as white and black people do after the fall of apartheid in South Africa this an interesting question she's a very she's a wonderful woman does fine work she's really committed to the Palestinian cause but the question tells you something about the recent Palestine Solidarity movement I mean if I had asked her let's say that why do you think it's absurd to try to advocate for civil rights for blacks in the United States it should be nonplussed she's devoted a lot of her life to that in fact the only possible response would be you know what planet are you coming from that's what I've been doing all my life that's exactly the same here it's now about seventy years that I've been advocating for what in the recent reincarnation is called a one state settlement the one state settlement notice not solution the one state settlement used to be called a bi-national settlement and if you think about it yes it'll have to be by national settlement so that's what I was when I was a young activist in the 1940s opposed to a Jewish state that was what we were struggling for by national state and one state settlement and that's continued without a break and it's kind of hard to miss since the late 1960s a series of books a huge number of articles constant talks all the time thousands of them interviews all the same trying to work for a bi-national settlement opposition to a Jewish state then a kind of work on this activist work of writing and so on but it's it's not it just a slogan and I think that's why somebody like I also Walker doesn't know it it's not just a slogan let's all live together half it's trying to look at the problem seriously if you're serious about it you ask how do we get there you ask what are the steps that'll take us there not just wouldn't be nice if we had peace that's easy how do we get there well that depends on circumstances like all tactical choices so in the pre 1948 period it was straightforward so we don't want to do a state let's have a bi-national state 48 to 67 you couldn't sensibly take that position you're talking to yourself in 1967 it opened up again the work there was an opportunity in 67 to move towards some kind of a federal system which could then proceed further to closer integration maybe become a true by national secular state and in fact at that time 67 on I was writing about it all over the place because I had books articles interviews and so on up til about 1975 1975 Palestinian nationalism crystallized and appeared on the agenda and the PLO turned to it to state settlement this huge overwhelming international consensus by that time for two-state settlement in the form that our windows 6775 it was possible to advocate for it directly and it was anathema hated you know denounced because it was threatening it was threatening because it could be fulfilled and that would harm policy formation so you know if you were if it was noticed at all it was denounced vilified 75 on you can still maintain the position but you have to face reality it's going to have to be achieved in stages and there's only one proposal that I've ever heard other than you know let's all live in peace together the one proposal that I know is glad to listen if there's another one is begin with the international consensus to state settlement it would reduce the level of violence cycle of violence it would open up possibilities for a closer interaction which already to some extent takes place even in today's circumstances commercial cultural other forms of interaction that could lead to erosion of boundaries that could move on to closer integration and maybe something like the old concept of a bi-national State now I call that a settlement because I don't think that's the end of the road and see a particular reason to worship imperialist boundaries so like when I was my wife and I back when we were students were backpacking up in northern Israel and happened to cross into Lebanon because there's no marked border you know somebody finally yelled at I said you better get back but why should it be a border there it was imposed by a British and French violence you should move towards a closer integration of the whole region than those state so that if you want the word and there's plenty wrong with States anyway why should we worship state structures they should be eroded so it's a step it's a series of steps not if anyone can think of another way to get there then they ought to tell us we could listen to it and talk about it but I don't know of any other way so what you end up with at least I end up with what I've been writing and speaking about is something that's too complex to put on a Twitter message and in this age that means it doesn't exist you have to support both the to state and the one state solution set settlement not solution support both of them because one of them is the path to getting to the other if you don't make the first move you're not going to get anywhere now Alice Walker says Israel wouldn't it won't accept a two-state settlement if she's right it a a 40 or is not going to accept the one state settlement so if that argument has any force her proposal is out the window mine too and the same by the same argument you could show they can never be an end to apartheid white nationalist would never accept an end to apartheid which was true okay therefore let's give up the anti-apartheid struggle Indonesia would never give up East Timor in fact the generals said so loudly it's our province we're going to keep it and that would have been true if actions were taken in a vacuum but they're not taken in a vacuum there are other factors involved and one factor which is significant and in fact in these cases decisive is US policy well that's not graven in stone when US policy shifted on the Indonesian East Timor it literally took one phrase from President Clinton to get the Indonesian generals out the one point he said it's over they withdrew in the case of apartheid a little more complicated Cuba played a big role cubed drove South Africans out of Namibia for example and protected Angola tone that had a big impact if it was when the u.s. changed policy around 1990 there was a change of policy it was at that point that apartheid collapsed now in the case of Israel it's just the u.s. is decisive I mean Israel can't do anything except what the u.s. supports it has to it use a diplomatic military economic ideological support if that prop is pulled out they do what the US says in fact that's happened over and over so yes it's true that if they were acting in a vacuum they'd never accept anything but what they're now doing taking over you know guys a prison and take over as much of the occupied territory as you want yeah they'll continue but they're not acting in a vacuum there are things we can do as in other cases to change it and in that case I think you can consider and they even lay out a plan for a move towards a one-state settlement as a step toward something even better which can can go on you know but if as far as I can see the only way to do that is by supporting the international consensus as a first step that step to be a prelude and further steps and that means very concrete actions that we don't have to talk about we don't have to have a seminar in which we discuss you know abstract possibilities there are very concrete moves that can be made so for example withdrawal of the IDF the Israeli army from the West Bank that's a concrete proposal and there are steps that can be taken to implement it for example Amnesty International which is hardly a revolutionary organization that called for an arms embargo on Israel well if the United States and Britain France others could be if the public could compel the governments to accept the that proposal as an arms embargo unless you pull your army out of the West Bank that would have an effect other actions can - if the Army's pulled out of the West Bank the settlers are going to go with them now they'll climb into the war is provided to them and move from their subsidised homes in the West Bank to subsidize those in Israel just like they do in Gaza when they got the order some will probably remain but that's okay they want to remain in a Palestinian state that's their business so there are quite concrete things that can be done it's not going to be like you know snapping your fingers but not not beyond the kinds of things that have happened elsewhere wind policy if the great powers changed primarily professor Chomsky thank you very much

Channel: duffer2205

Views: 87,107

Rating: 4.8732572 out of 5

Keywords: Chomsky, Berger, Hass, Hedges, Loach, Laverty, Walker, Barat

Id: eTMfel0CCK0

Length: 45min 58sec (2758 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 01 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/IMJGalt]

And this turned the gap into a canyon

[u/Narrator]

I know people who know people in both these categories. Let me explain the difference this way: The 1% owns a $4 million dollar house that they've worked their whole life for. The .1% spends 20 million dollars on a birthday party!

[u/philly_bob]

Kim Kardashian: 210 million Google results Noam Chomsky: 13 million Google results

This calm, articulate, well-spoken elder doesn't even get on Sunday morning talk shows.

[u/OliveOliveo]

For those of you who are not familiar with Noam Chomsky, he is one of the most cited scholars ever, right after Plato and Freud and right b4 Hegel and Cicero. (Granted: most of these citations are probably due to his work in linguistics and not as much to his political writings.)

We have a subreddit devoted to him.

[u/telecaster]

The .1%ers have begun to consume the wealth of the other .9% of the 1%ers.

[u/jobstijl]

This is also what Paul Krugman will tell you.

[u/wadcann]

I don't see how a CEO is a finance worker.

[u/sakebomb69]

Oh, Chomsky said it? Then this appeal to false authority is not fallacious!