#NotAChomskyQuote I watched a recent interview with Willem Middelkoop on GoldRepublic Global in which he references this interesting 2015 book.

#ChomskyReadingList Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs By Noam Chomsky (2015, Preview: 89 pages) www.google.com/books/editio...

#NotAChomskyQuote Amazingly one-sided description by Jamie Dimon recently on why the world is not safe: "The brutal invasion of Ukraine, the indescribable terrorist attack on Israel and other major conflicts should dispel any illusion that the world is safe." (1/2)

If you’ve taken an economics course, you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. You take a look at the first ad you see on television and ask yourself … is that it’s purpose? No it’s not.

#NotAChomskyQuote There was an article in the WSJ recently quoting a tail-hedging hedge fund manager. "The markets are perverse," [Mark] Spitznagel said. "They exist to screw people."

Referenced in the bibliography of Noam Chomsky's book "Year 501: The Conquest Continues" #ChomskyReadingList Stannard, David. American Holocaust (Oxford, 1992) Preview (46 pages): www.google.com/books/editio...

The elections — Tom Ferguson’s stellar work has demonstrated, very conclusively, that for a long period, way back, U.S. elections have been pretty much bought.

A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production and the wage slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer. (1/2)

[Ernst Mayr's] argument was, you’re just not going to find intelligent life elsewhere, and you probably won’t find it [on earth] for very long either because it’s just a lethal mutation. (1/2)

The term libertarian as used in the US means something quite different from what it meant historically and still means in the rest of the world. Historically, the libertarian movement has been the anti-statist wing of the socialist movement. Socialist anarchism was libertarian socialism. (1/3)

[T]he entire idea of “white male science” reminds me, I’m afraid, of “Jewish physics.” Perhaps it is another inadequacy of mine, but when I read a scientific paper, I can’t tell whether the author is white or is male. The same is true of discussion of work in class, office, or somewhere else. (1/2)

[Edward] Bernays made his name right at that time — late 20s — by running an advertising campaign to convince women to smoke cigarettes: women weren’t smoking cigarettes, this big group of people who the tobacco industry isn’t able to kill...

[Death] is just one of the things that happens in life. Life goes on for everyone else. Source: chomsky.info/20130524/

#NotAChomskyQuote A snippet from Nomi Prins' book "Permanent Distortion"

[T]here is a recent discovery that cockroaches have evolved in such a way as to overcome the main poisons that are used to kill them. The poisons are based on the idea that certain things are bitter and cockroaches keep away from them. (1/2)

The desert ants in my backyard have minuscule brains, but far exceed human navigational capacities, in principle, not just performance. There is no Great Chain of Being with humans at the top.

When a lot of young people decide to de-platform some speaker, I think they’re making a bad mistake, even from a tactical point of view. There are much better ways to deal with it — you can run a counter-session, where you expose what’s going on and use it as an educational opportunity.

Thomas Jefferson in a letter to John Taylor: "And I sincerely believe with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."

Any form of concentrated power, whatever it is, is not going to want to be subjected to popular democratic control or, for that matter, to market discipline. (1/3)

Concentration of income confers political power, which in turn leads to legislation that further enhances the privilege of the super-rich: tax policies, deregulation, rules of corporate governance and much else.

#NotAChomskyQuote cepr.org has a new report out titled "The Economic Consequences of The Second Trump Administration: A Preliminary Assessment" cepr.org/voxeu/column...

That’s one of the striking differences you notice as soon as you get out of the First World into the Third World. Minds are much more open. We live in a highly indoctrinated society. (1/2)

As shown particularly by the political economist Thomas Ferguson’s important work, campaign funding alone—one of many elements of private power—is a powerful determinant of electability.

Frankly, I didn’t expect much from Obama, so I wasn’t actually disillusioned. When he came into office, at the height of the financial crisis, the first thing he needed to do was put together an economic team. Who did he pick? He picked the people who created the crisis. (1/3)

The belief in markets is a religious belief. Rationally, we know of all kinds of fundamental, what are called, “inefficiencies” in markets. But the belief that they can solve everything and that everything can have a value determined by the market, I think you can regard that as a religious belief.

Up to the end, Putin was saying, “We insist on a neutral Ukraine, move towards the Minsk agreements.” No reaction from Washington: “Not our business, we’ll expand as we like.” (1/2)

Ukraine is a traditional invasion route. Take a look at a map: flat terrain right to Moscow and St. Petersburg. I’m sure Germans went through there twice in the last century. No Russian leader is going to allow it to be part of a hostile military alliance.

I think the [university] faculty is a very conservative group. That is, it is considered liberal within the spectrum of American opinion...(1/3)

According to received doctrine in scholarship and general intellectual discourse, the prime goal of state policy is “national security.” There is ample evidence, however, that the doctrine of national security does not encompass the security of the population. (1/2)

Whether the instinct for freedom is real or not, we do not know. If it is, history teaches that it can be dulled, but has yet to be killed. The courage and dedication of people struggling for freedom, their willingness to confront extreme state terror and violence, is often remarkable.

Advertisers will want, more generally, to avoid programs with serious complexities and disturbing controversies that interfere with the "buying mood." They seek programs that will lightly entertain and thus fit in with...the dissemination of a selling message. (1/2)

A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production and the wage slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer. (1/2)

The whole gun culture in the United States is mostly manufactured. It is PR. There never was a gun culture in the 19th century. There were just farmers who had old muskets to drive coyotes away. (1/2)

I think Eisenhower’s warning was appropriate, but either he didn’t understand or else commentators don’t understand, but the military-industrial complex, as he called it, is actually the core of the modern economy. It’s not specifically military. (1/2)

As the United States was mobilizing for war eighty years ago, then Secretary of War Henry Stimson explained: “If you are going to try to go to war, or to prepare for war, in a capitalist country, you have got to let business make money out of the process or business won’t work.” (1/2)

Society has been plagued for a century by massive corporate campaigns to encourage disdain for science, topics well studied by Naomi Oreskes among others. It began with corporations whose products are murderous: lead, tobacco, asbestos, later fossil fuels. (1/2)

After the Soviet Union collapsed, a fair question arose as to why NATO should survive. And what it did was, in fact, expand. Expanded all the way to the Russian border, initially under the first Bush, then extensively under Clinton... Source: chomsky.info/20180926/

Well, where did electronics and, you know, aviation and telecommunications come from? Well, from public funds. They didn’t have anything to do with the free market. They came from public funds, which were transferred to high-technology industry, under the conscious guise, deceit, of security.

[I]f you allow industries to...as they have done already, to deposit toxic wastes without cost, because you have deregulation, it increases their profits, but it also increases water and sewage rates, which is a regressive tax on everybody else who’s got to pay that. Source: chomsky.info/19960413/

[W]hatever you think about the Korean War, and there is a pretty complicated story when you really look at it, but nevertheless the bombings in North Korea in 1951 and 1952 was just an outright war crime. (1/2)

In 1948, with postwar pent-up consumer demand exhausted and the economy sinking back into recession, Truman’s “cold-war spending” was regarded by the business press as a “magic formula for almost endless good times” (Steel), a way to “maintain a generally upward tone” (Business Week). (1/2)

Elements of the Christian fundamentalist right are one of the strongest components of “support for Israel” — support in an odd sense, because they presumably want to see it destroyed in a cosmic battle at Armageddon, after which all the proper souls will ascend to heaven...

(2006) chomsky.info/20060405/ Here are a few simple suggestions for the US:

The term "permanent war economy" is attributed to Charles Wilson, CEO of GE, who warned at the end of World War II that the US must not return to a civilian economy, but must keep to a “permanent war economy”...(1/2)

[2020] Washington openly takes pride in being the prime rogue state, which exercises its will with abandon. More accurately, Washington exercises the current whims of “the chosen one,” as [Trump] modestly calls himself before an adoring crowd while lifting his eyes to heaven.

So go back to, say, 1945 when the U.S. pretty much took over domination of the world. It was incredibly powerful without any counterpart in history, half the world’s wealth, incomparable security, military powers. (1/4)

Let’s say you are the CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase and you may advocate markets, for others, but you don’t want them for yourself. You want the government insurance policy that enables you to survive. And, as soon as you get in trouble, you run, cap in hand, to the taxpayer and say “save me.”