Slubbert skrev:
Selvsagt. Forkast gruppetilhørigheten, forkast klassetenkningen, og du ser at hindrene for din selvrealisering er den eneste undertrykkelse som mulig kan eksistere.
Oversatt:
"Forkast alle dine solidaritet- og rettferdprinsipper, og underkast deg de rådende maktstrukturer. Evig konformitet er bedre enn innsats som også kan gavne andre og følgelig er mot sin hensikt." (?)
*So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal*
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It was understood that the kind of financial liberation that opened the neoliberal era in the 1970s reduces the options for democratic choice, transferring decisions to the hand of a "virtual Senate" of investors and lenders.
James Mahon, Mobile Capital and Latin American Development
(Penn State 1996)
"The consistent anarchist, then, should be a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat."
"...so long as power remains privately concentrated, everybody, everybody, has to be committed to one overriding goal: and thats to make sure that the rich folk are happy -- because unless they are, nobody else is going to get anything. So if youre a homeless person sleeping in the streets of Manhattan, lets say, your first concern must be that the guys in the mansions are happy -- because if theyre happy, then theyll invest, and the economy will work, and things will function, and then maybe something will trickle down to you somewhere along the line. But if theyre not happy, everythings going to grind to a halt, and youre not even going to get anything trickling down."
"Thomas Jefferson, the leading Enlightenment figure in the United States, along with Benjamin Franklin, who took exactly the same view, argued that dependence will lead to "subservience and venality", and will "suffocate(s) the germs of virtue". And remember, by dependence he meant wage labor, which was considered an abomination under classical liberal principles. There's a modern perversion of conservatism and libertarianism, which has changed the meanings of words, pretty much the way Orwell discussed. So nowadays, dependence refers to something else. When you listen to what's going in Congress, and people talk about dependence, what they mean by dependence is public support for hungry children, not wage labor. Dependence is support for hungry children and mothers who are caring for them. [...] We see this very dramatically right at this moment in Congress, under the leadership of Newt Gingrich, who quite demonstrably is the leading welfare freak in the country. He is the most avid advocate of welfare in the country, except he wants it to go to the rich. His own district in Cobb County Georgia gets more federal subsidies than any suburban county in the country, outside of the federal system itself... And it's supposed to continue, because this kind of welfare dependency is good. Dependent children, that's bad. But dependent executives, that's good. You gotta make sure they keep feeding at the public trough. [...] the nation is not an entity, it's divided into economic classes, and the architects of policy are those who have the economic power. In his days, he said, the merchants and manufacturers of England, who make sure that their interests are "most peculiarly attended to", like Gingrich. Whatever the effect on others, including the people of England. To Adam Smith, that was a truism. To James Madison, that was a truism. Nowadays, you're supposed to recoil in horror and call it vulgar Marxism or something, meaning that Adam Smith and James Madison must have been disciples of Marx. And if you believe the rest of the story, you might as well believe that. But those are facts which you can easily discover if you bothered reading the sacred texts, that you're supposed to worship, but not read."
"The United States is deeply in debt -- that was part of the whole Reagan/Bush program, in fact: to put the country so deeply in debt that there would be virtually no way for the government to pursue programs of social spending anymore. And what "being in debt" really means is that the Treasury Department has sold a ton of securities -- bonds and notes and so on -- to investors, who then trade them back and forth on the bond market. Well, according to the Wall Street Journal, by now about $150 billion a day worth of U.S. Treasury securities alone is traded this way. The article then explained what this means: it means that if the investing community which holds those securities doesnt like any U.S. government policies, it can very quickly sell off just a tiny signal amount of Treasury bonds, and that will have the automatic effect of raising the interest rate, which then will have the further automatic effect of increasing the deficit. Okay, this article calculated that if such a "signal" sufficed to raise the interest rate by 1 percent, it would add $20 billion to the deficit overnight -- meaning if Clinton (say in someones dream) proposed a $20 billion social spending program, the international investing community could effectively turn it into a $40 billion program instantly, just by a signal, and any further moves in that direction would be totally cut off."
The country was founded on the principle that the primary role of government is to protect property from the majority, and so it remains.
The principles are clear and explicit. The free market is fine for the third world and its growing counterpart at home. Mothers with dependent children can be sternly lectured on the need for self-reliance, but not dependent executives and investors, please. For them, the welfare state must flourish.
The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.
Noam Chomsky
