100 Slaves 100 Enemies

What’s holding us back is the last century of intense efforts to atomize people, to drive them towards the superficial things in life, like consumption. You have to fabricate consumers. You have to make people hate governments.

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Go back to the days when organizations and movements had to be built from scratch. There’s never some shining leader who comes along and says, “I’m going to lead you out of the woods.” These things are built up by consciousness-raising groups.

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I think small actions here and there and elsewhere are fine, but they have to coalesce.

Take the antiwar movement again. When I got started giving talks in the early 1960s, I was talking to small groups of people in somebody’s living room or maybe a church basement. Or we’d have to set up a meeting at the university with 20 different issues just to get people out to hear about the Vietnam War.

This is one thing they don’t teach you in school or write about in the papers; it’s too dangerous. People aren’t supposed to know what they can achieve, working together.

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The hard part is always going from understanding among individuals and small groups to integration and focused action. That takes effort and commitment. It doesn’t happen by itself; there are no manuals.

Kick-starting the environmental movement: An interview with Noam Chomsky | Briarpatch Magazine – Fiercely independent (& often irreverent) news & views..

found via The Comsky Archive – comsky.info

Apparently, it is not Clifford’s alter-ego, but in fact a Democrat who receives almost, but not quite, as much money from special corporate interest groups such as the health insurance and financial industries as Republicans.

From today’s front page of the Washington Post, Blue Dogs Receive More Health Industry Backing Than Other Democrats (found via Beat the Press):

[The Blue Dog Coalition] has set a record pace for fundraising this year through its political action committee, surpassing other congressional leadership PACs in collecting more than $1.1 million through June. More than half the money came from the health-care, insurance and financial services industries, marking a notable surge in donations from those sectors compared with earlier years, according to an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity.

A look at career contribution patterns also shows that typical Blue Dogs receive significantly more money — about 25 percent — from the health-care and insurance sectors than other Democrats, putting them closer to Republicans in attracting industry support.

A little later in the article we get this:

“I know there were some that thought we were trying to stop health-care reform,” Ross said in an interview this week for The Washington Post’s “Voices of Power” series. “Nothing could be further from the truth. We simply wanted to slow the process down and ensure that we were working toward the kind of health-care reform that the American people need and want.“

According to these poll results, the American people want universal government-run health care. The Physicians for a National Health Program blog tells us that we could have this with the passage of one of three bills: “The House already has Rep. John Conyers’ H.R.676 and Rep. Jim McDermott’s H.R.1200, and now the Senate has Sen. Bernie Sanders’ S.703“.

OK, so that seems simple enough. So, why won’t Ross do what the majority of people want him to? Oh, right…

Ross has received nearly $1 million in contributions from the health-care sector and insurance industry during his five terms in Congress, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign contributions.

At the end of the article, Charles W. Stenholm, a former congressman from Texas who was part of the original Blue Dog group in the mid-1990s and who is now a agriculture and health care lobbyist answers criticism that money in politics is corrupting the political system by saying that the Blue Dogs “have played a tremendously important role in keeping the process from getting out of control.”

Indeed. Real health care reform would take health care out of the control of the health insurance corporations. And we can’t have that. As Noam Chomsky points out, universal health care “has no political support; only the majority of the public.”

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link: The Center for Responsive Politics’ health care reform section

“They should build spaceships of rice-paper and bamboo, decorated with poems.” – J.G. Ballard

Let’s keep this whole romantic view of the man on the moon anniversary in perspective, shall we?

Start @ 28:30 if you want a quick dose of reality from Noam Chomsky; the reality being that government spending on the computer industry and the space industry was a way to shift spending from the public (i.e. taking care of the population, public welfare) to corporations (i.e. corporate welfare). “Putting a man on the moon” was merely a cover (i.e. propaganda) to gain public approval for doing this in the case of space industry funding.

Chomsky mentions the book Forces of Production by David F. Noble, which delves deeper into this topic.

The Militarization of Science and Space, a talk given at M.I.T. on February 14, 2005.

The classic Manufacturing Consent documentary about Noam Chomsky and his work by the same name (written with Edward S. Herman) is now apparently available in its entirety from the following page in Free Thought Pedia:

http://www.freethoughtpedia.com/wiki/Manufacturing_consent