Power Systems Quotes

“In his book Politics, which is the foundation of the study of political systems, and very interesting, Aristotle talked mainly about Athens. But he studied various political systems - oligarchy, monarchy - and didn't like any of the particularly. He said democracy is probably the best system, but it has problems, and he was concerned with the problems. One problem that he was concerned with is quite striking because it runs right up to the present. He pointed out that in a democracy, if the people - people didn't mean people, it meant freemen, not slaves, not women - had the right to vote, the poor would be the majority, and they would use their voting power to take away property from the rich, which wouldn't be fair, so we have to prevent this.

James Madison made the same pint, but his model was England. He said if freemen had democracy, then the poor farmers would insist on taking property from the rich. They would carry out what we these days call land reform. and that's unacceptable. Aristotle and Madison faced the same problem but made the opposite decisions. Aristotle concluded that we should reduce ineqality so the poor wouldn't take property from the rich. And he actually propsed a visin for a city that would put in pace what we today call welfare-state programs, common meals, other support systems. That would reduce inequality, and with it the problem of the poor taking property from the rich. Madison's decision was the opposite. We should reduce democracy so the poor won't be able to get together to do this.

If you look at the design of the U.S. constitutional system, it followed Madison's approach. The Madisonian system placed power in the hands of the Senate. The executive in those days was more or less an administrator, not like today. The Senate consisted of "the wealth of the nation," those who had sympathy for property owners and their rights. That's where power should be. The Senate, remember, wasn't elected. It was picked by legislatures, who were themselves very much subject to control by the rich and the powerful. The House, which was closer to the population, had much less power. And there were all sorts of devices to keep people from participation too much - voting restrictions and property restrictions. The idea was to prevent the threat of democracy. This goal continues right to the present. It has taken different forms, but the aim remains the same.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“There's no point in reading a book if you let it pass before your eyes and then forget about it ten minutes later. Reading a book is an intellectual exercise, which stimulates thought, questions, imagination.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“Settler colonialism, which is what this is, is by far the worst kind of imperialism, because it gets rid of the native population. Other kinds of imperialism exploit them, but settler colonialism eliminates them, “exterminates” them, to use the words of the Founding Fathers.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“Reading a book is an intellectual exercise, which stimulates thought, questions,”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“War is a racket. The few profit, the many pay.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“Take Ron Paul. He appeals to a lot of progressives. He said on Fox, 'The greatest hoax I think that has been around for many, many years if not hundreds of years has been this hoax on the environment and global warming.' He doesn't provide any argument or evidence as to why he disregards the scientific consensus--just, I say so, period. With that attitude, you really are approaching the edge.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“The people who call themselves conservatives say, 'We have to maintain family values by preventing women from having a choice as to whether they will have children, and then by not giving them any support when they have to take care of their children. That's how we preserve family values.' The internal contradictions are amazing.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“So, just to take King, because he's visible. On Martin Luther King Day, he's greatly celebrated for what he did in the early 1960s when he was saying 'I Have a Dream' and 'let's get rid of racist sheriffs in Alabama.' That was okay. By 1965 he was getting to be a dangerous figure. For one thing, he was turning against the war in Vietnam pretty strongly. For another, he was working to be at the head of a developing poor people's movement. He was assassinated when he was taking part in a strike of sanitation workers and he was on his way to Washington for a poor people's convention. He was going beyond racist sheriffs in Alabama to northern racism, which is much more deep-seated and class-based.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“Rand Paul...said national health insurance is slavery. He said, I'm a physician, and if there's national health insurance, the government is forcing me to take care of somebody who is ill. Why should I be a slave to the state? Here we're getting capitalist pathology in its most extreme, lunatic form. It is the opposite of solidarity, mutual support, mutual help.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“The Republican Party today has a catechism. If you want to be a candidate, with very rare exceptions, you have to repeat the catechism in lockstep uniformity: global warming isn't happening, no taxes on the rich. There are about ten things that you have to repeat, whether you believe them or not. Anybody who departs from them is in trouble.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“With official slavery gone, there were big parliamentary debates about how to sustain the same regime. What would stop a former slave from going up into the hills, where there was plenty of land, and just living happily there? They hit on the same method that everyone hits on: try to capture them with consumer goods. So they offered teasers—easy terms, gifts. And then when people got trapped into wanting consumer goods and started getting into debt at company stores, pretty soon you had a restoration of something similar to slavery, from the plantation owners’ point of view.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“So is America over? A long time ago we "lost" China, we've lost Southeast Asia, we've lost South America. Maybe we'll lose the Middle East and North African countries. Is America over? It's a kind of paranoia, but it's the paranoia of the superrich and superpowerful. If you don't have everything, it's a disaster.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“You have to understand that you're not going to win by sitting in the president's office. You don't get a world of love and peace that way. You may get a little victory, but then you're going to have a bigger struggle ahead. It's like mountain climbing. You climb a peak, you think you're at the top--and then you notice there is a bigger peak right beyond it, and you've got to climb that one. That's what popular struggle is like. And that's lacking. Our quick-gratification culture is not conducive to that kind of commitment.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“By the time John F. Kennedy became involved in 1961, the situation was out of control. So Kennedy simply invaded the country. In 1962, he sent the U.S. Air Force to start bombing South Vietnam, using planes with South Vietnamese markings. Kennedy authorized the use of napalm, chemical warfare, to destroy the ground cover and crops. He started the process of driving the rural population into what were called 'strategic hamlets,' essentially concentration camps, where people were surrounded by barbed wire, supposedly to protect them from the guerillas who the U.S. government knew perfectly well they supported. This 'pacification' ultimately drove millions of people out of the countryside while destroying large parts of it. Kennedy also began operations against North Vietnam on a small scale. That was 1961.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“So you have to  ask, “Is it better to help the worse candidate to be elected?” You can make a case for doing that. In fact, there was an old Communist Party principle back in the  early 1930s: “the worse, the better.” If you get the worse candidate in, it’s going to be better, because then there will be more support for a revolution.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“Once we break out of the framework of national states as unified entities with no internal divisions within them, we can see that there is a global shift of power, but it's from the global workforce to the owners of the world: transnational capital, global financial institutions. So, for example, the earnings of working people as a percentage of national income has by and large declined in the last couple of decades, but apparently it's declined in China more than in most places. There is certainly economic growth in China and India. Hundreds of millions of people live a lot better than they did before, but then there are hundreds of millions more who don't. In fact, it's getting worse for them in many ways.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“Similar things are happening in Africa, here, and in Europe. The indignados in southern Europe and the Occupy movements here are in a sense similar, even if that are from different worlds. The protests are not against dictatorships but against the shredding of democratic systems and the consequences of the Western version of the neoliberal system, which has had structurally consistent effects for the past thirty years: a very narrow concentration of wealth in a fraction of 1 percent of the population, stagnation for a large part of the rest, deregulation, and repeated financial crises, each one harsher than the last.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“In the case of Tunisia, it was indeed this single act that sparked what had been long-standing active protest movements and moved them forward. But that's not so unusual. Let's look at our own history. Take the civil rights movement. There had been plenty of concern and activism about violent repression of blacks in the South, and it took a couple of students sitting in at a lunch counter to really set it off. Small acts can make a big difference when there is a background of concern, understanding, and preliminary activism.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“We're taught to talk about the world as a world of as states conceived as unified, coherent entities. If you study international relations (IR) theory, there's what's called "realist" IR theory, which says there is an anarchic world of states and states pursue their "national interest." It's in large part mythology. There are a few common interests, like we don't want to be destroyed. But, for the most part, people within a nation have very different interests. The interests of the CEO of General Electric and the janitor who cleans his floor are not the same.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“The studies of Larry Bartels and other political scientists show that working people and the poor tend to do somewhat better under Democratic than Republican administrations. But that just means that the Republicans are deeper in the pockets of the corporate system than the Democrats are. They're both nuzzled there quite happily.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“The United States is a business-run society, much more so than comparable ones. Correspondingly, it has a very brutal labor history . . .”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“There are major efforts to replace public schools with semi-privatized systems that would still be supported by the public but run more or less privately, such as charter schools. There is no evidence that they are any better. For all we know, they're even worse. But this privatization of schools does undermine solidarity and mutual support--dangerous ideas that harm concentrated power.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“. . . public education and Social Security are residues of a dangerous conception that we're all in this together and we have to work together to create a better life and a better future. If you're trying to maximize profit or maximize consumption, then working together is the wrong idea. It has to be beaten out of people's heads. Solidarity makes people hard to control and prevents them from being passive objects of private power. So you have to have a propaganda system that overcomes any deviation from the principle of subjugation to power systems.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“Private power doesn't like public education, for many reasons. One is the principle upon which it's based, which is threatening to power. Public education is based on a principle of solidarity. So, for example, I had my children fifty years ago. Nevertheless, I feel and I'm supposed to feel that I should pay taxes so the kids across the street can go to school. That's counter to the doctrine that you should just look after yourself and let everyone else fall by the wayside, a basic principle of business rule. Public education is a threat to that belief system because it builds up a sense of solidarity, community, mutual support.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“The Democratic Party and even the Democratic Left are not going to tell people, 'Look, your problem is that, back in the 1970s, we took part in a major process of the financialization of the economy and the hollowing out of the productive system. So your wages and incomes have stagnated for thirty years, while that wealth is produced in a very few pockets. Those are our policies.' They're not going to tell them that. No, there is no real Left now.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“Germany was beginning to change even before the Depression. In 1925, there was a mass popular vote for Paul von Hindenburg for president. He was a Prussian aristocrat, yet his supporters were petty bourgeois storekeepers, disillusioned workers, and others--in fact, demographically not unlike the Tea Party movement. And they became the mass bass for Nazism. In 1928, the Nazis still got under 3 percent of the vote. In 1933--that's only five years later--they were so powerful that Hindenburg had to appoint Adolf Hitler as chancellor.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“In 1963, the Kennedy administration got wind of the fact that the government of Ngo Dinh Diem it had installed in South Vietnam was trying to arrange peace negotiations with the North. Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, were trying to negotiate a peace settlement. So the Kennedy liberals determined that they had to be thrown out. The Kennedy administration organized a coup in which the two brothers were killed and they put in their own guy, meanwhile escalating the war. Then came the assassination of President Kennedy. Contrary to a lot of mythology, Kennedy was one of the hawks in the administration to the very last minute. He did agree to proposals for withdrawal from Vietnam, because he knew the war was very unpopular there, but always with the condition of withdrawal after victory.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“By the time John F. Kennedy became involved in 1961, the situation was out of control. So Kennedy simply invaded the country. In 1962, he sent the U.S. Air Force to start bombing South Vietnam, using planes with South Vietnamese markings. Kennedy authorized the use of napalm, chemical warfare, to destroy the ground cover and crops. He started the process of driving the rural population into what were called 'strategic hamlets,' essentially concentration camps, where people were surrounded by barbed wire, supposedly to protect them from the guerillas who the U.S. government knew perfectly well they supported. This 'pacification' ultimately drove millions of people out of the countryside while destroying large parts of it. Kennedy also began operations against North Vietnam on a small scale. That was 1962.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“To everyone except a dedicated ideologue, it was pretty obvious that we invaded Iraq not because of our love of democracy but because it's maybe the second- or third-largest source of oil in the world and is right in the middle of the major energy-producing region. You're not supposed to say this. It's considered a conspiracy theory.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“About half the population thinks that every person in Congress, including their own representative, should be thrown out. That's the center not holding.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire