Liberal icon catches up: Racist teabagger Noam Chomsky slams Obama, defends Tea Party, Palin



April 21, 4:28 PM
D.K. Jamaal - Post-Partisan Examiner


Not everyday that I find myself agreeing with a radical militant leftist like Noam Chomsky.

Or rather, not every day that Noam Chomsky agrees with a stubborn (left-leaning) centrist like me.

But last week while receiving the University of Wisconsin’s A.E. Havens Center’s award for lifetime contribution to critical scholarship, Chomsky warned that fascism looms if Americans are not careful:

“I’m just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler’s speeches on the radio, and I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering…”

Well, la dee da. Now where have you heard something like that before? Right here, over and over again.

The very first article published here on Post-Partisan Examiner was a siren call, warning that Obama’s leadership would slide America towards corporate fascism. We have kept calling out the fascististic Washington-Wall Street corporate oligarchy and urging post-partisanship ever since. No one should put one hundred percent of one's faith, money, time, and support in one party one hundred percent of the time.

Chomsky's speech went on to cite a poll showing that at least half of independent voters sympathize more with the Tea Party than with any partisan movement or political figure, to slam Obama for coziness with Wall Street and Big Corporate, and to explain why the upset disaffection of tea partiers is “understandable”:

The level of anger and fear is like nothing I can compare in my lifetime. Ridiculing the tea party shenanigans is a serious error. For over 30 years, real incomes have stagnated or declined…The bankers, who are primarily responsible for the crisis, are now reveling in record bonuses while official unemployment is around 10 percent and unemployment in the manufacturing sector is at Depression-era levels. The financial industry preferred Obama to McCain. They expected to be rewarded and they were. Then Obama began to criticize greedy bankers and proposed measures to regulate them. And the punishment for this was very swift: they were going to shift their money to the Republicans. So Obama said bankers are ‘fine guys’ and assured the business world: ‘I, like most of the American people, don't begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system.’ People see that and are not happy about it. People want some answers. They are hearing answers from only one place: Fox, talk radio, and Sarah Palin.

According to Chomsky, this is what is fueling “the indignation and rage of those cast aside.” Of course, Obama critics have been pointing this out all along.

While Obama’s Big Media pals have been denigrating the disaffected as racist, ignorant, hick teabaggers who represent a meaningless minority of the country we defended the movement as legitimate civil disobedience and the inevitable reaction to Obama’s blatant hypocrisy and poor leadership.

While deranged Palin haters have used every low, cruel, misogynistic trick in the book to knock her down, we have warned that she deserves to be treated with respect even when we disagree with her policy views.

We have constantly knocked Obama for his sellouts to Big Corporate and warned that Obamacrats are turning their backs on the working classes with their odious policy of endless bailouts for their bankster friends on the back of taxpayers.

Chomsky’s public truth-telling indicates that even the most hardcore leftists are waking up to the awful truths centrists warned about for two years.

We need more Noam Chomsky’s willing to admit reality and fewer lamestream media elites with their biased heads buried up the President’s butt. We need people on the left respected by the left who can see through Obamacratic empty rhetoric and announce to their friends on the left that the emperor has no clothes. That liberals and progressives have been duped. Obama is not who he said he was. He is not a change agent.

He is a tool of the regressive anti-Main Street, pro-Wall Street status quo which plots daily to subjugate working folks while consolidating more and more of America’s wealth into their own insatiably greedy hands.

Chomsky's statements will startle those who view he and Obama as two of the biggest living liberal heroes. They will be alone in their astonishment. Chomsky has merely admitted the obvious.

Hillary promoting PUMAs were the first to realize that Obama’s inexperience, incompetence, and corporate hackery would lead to disaster. They were followed by Republicans, then independents, and now Tea Partiers. Together, these group represent the growing majority whose votes will rescue America from Obamacratic corporate cronyism and remind politicians and pundits, once more, that Americans are the deciders.

Chomsky need not worry. The voting booth will save ourselves from ourselves. Democracy and the will of the people – and the right of the people to govern themselves as they see fit – will prevail again.

Obama can lay with the bankers all he wants: America will not be sacrificed upon a cross of credit default swaps.





 
 
 
 
 
obama

Noam Chomsky: An Ode to an Old Hypocrite

The head of the pack - hypocrites all. What the article does not mention is Chomsky, a professor at MIT in linguistics, receives his paycheck from, or did until recently, the US Defense Department.


The story below, while a little dated (2006) is brilliant in production! I cannot locate it online, although I do have the hardcopy in my hands.






Noam Chomsky

One of the most persistent themes in Noam Chomsky's work has been class warfare. The iconic MIT linguist and left-wing activist frequently has lashed out against the "massive use of tax havens to shift the burden to the general population and away from the rich," and criticized the concentration of wealth in "trusts" by the wealthiest 1%. He says the U.S. tax code is rigged with "complicated devices for ensuring that the poor -- like 80% of the population -- pay off the rich."

By National Post
March 21, 2006
Canada.com


One of the most persistent themes in Noam Chomsky's work has been class warfare. The iconic MIT linguist and left-wing activist frequently has lashed out against the "massive use of tax havens to shift the burden to the general population and away from the rich," and criticized the concentration of wealth in "trusts" by the wealthiest 1%. He says the U.S. tax code is rigged with "complicated devices for ensuring that the poor -- like 80% of the population -- pay off the rich."
But trusts can't be all bad. After all, Chomsky, with a net worth north of US$2-million, decided to create one for himself. A few years back he went to Boston's venerable white-shoe law firm, Palmer and Dodge, and, with the help of a tax attorney specializing in "income-tax planning," set up an irrevocable trust to protect his assets from Uncle Sam. He named his tax attorney (every socialist radical needs one!) and a daughter as trustees. To the Diane Chomsky Irrevocable Trust (named for another daughter) he has assigned the copyright of several of his books, including multiple international editions.

Chomsky favours massive income redistribution -- just not the redistribution of his income. No reason to let radical politics get in the way of sound estate planning.

When I challenged Chomsky about his trust, he suddenly started to sound very bourgeois: "I don't apologize for putting aside money for my children and grandchildren," he wrote in one e-mail. Chomsky offered no explanation for why he condemns others who are equally proud of their provision for their children and who try to protect their assets from Uncle Sam. (However, Chomsky did say that his tax shelter is OK because he and his family are "trying to help suffering people.")

Indeed, Chomsky is rich precisely because he has been such an enormously successful capitalist. Despite his anti-profit rhetoric, like any other corporate capitalist Chomsky has turned himself into a brand name. As John Lloyd recently put it in the lefty New Statesman, Chomsky is among those "open to being "commodified" -- that is, to being simply one of the many wares of a capitalist media market place, in a way that the badly paid and overworked writers and journalists for the revolutionary parties could rarely be."

Chomsky's business works something like this. He gives speeches on college campuses around the country at US$12,000 a pop, often dozens of times a year.

Can't go and hear him in person? No problem: You can go online and download clips from earlier speeches -- for a fee. You can hear Chomsky talk for one minute about "Property Rights"; it will cost you US79 cents. You can also buy a CD with clips from previous speeches for US$12.99.

But books are Chomsky's mainstay, and on the international market he has become a publishing phenomenon. The Chomsky brand means instant sales. As publicist Dana O'Hare of Pluto Press explains: "All we have to do is put Chomsky's name on a book and it sells out immediately!"

Putting his name on a book should not be confused with writing a book because his most recent volumes are mainly transcriptions of speeches, or interviews that he has conducted over the years, put between covers and sold to the general public. You might call it multi-level marketing for radicals. Chomsky has admitted as much: "If you look at the things I write -- articles for Z Magazine, or books for South End Press, or whatever -- they are mostly based on talks and meetings and that kind of thing. But I'm kind of a parasite. I mean, I'm living off the activism of others. I'm happy to do it."

Chomsky's marketing efforts shortly after Sept. 11 give new meaning to the term "war profiteer." In the days after the tragedy, he raised his speaking fee from US$9,000 to US$12,000 because he was suddenly in greater demand. He also cashed in by producing another instant book. Seven Stories Press, a small publisher, pulled together interviews conducted via e-mail that Chomsky gave in the three weeks following the attack on the Twin Towers and rushed the book to press. His controversial views were hot, particularly overseas. By early December 2001, the publisher had sold the foreign rights in 19 different languages. The book made the best-seller list in the United States, Canada, Germany, India, Italy, Japan and New Zealand. It is safe to assume that he netted hundreds of thousands of dollars from this book alone.

Over the years, Chomsky has been particularly critical of private property rights, which he considers simply a tool of the rich, of no benefit to ordinary people. "When property rights are granted to power and privilege, it can be expected to be harmful to most," Chomsky wrote on a discussion board for the Washington Post. Intellectual property rights are equally despicable, apparently. According to Chomsky, for example, drug companies who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing drugs shouldn't have ownership rights to patents. Intellectual property rights, he argues, "have to do with protectionism."

Protectionism is a bad thing -- especially when it relates to other people.

But when it comes to Chomsky's own published work, this advocate of open intellectual property suddenly becomes very selfish. It would not be advisable to download the audio from one of his speeches without paying the fee, warns his record company, Alternative Tentacles. (Did Andrei Sakharov have a licensing agreement with a record company?) And when it comes to his articles, you'd better keep your hands off. Go to the official Noam Chomsky Web site (www.chomsky.info) and the warning is clear: "Material on this site is copyrighted by Noam Chomsky and/or Noam Chomsky and his collaborators. No material on this site may be reprinted or posted on other web sites without written permission." (However, the Web site does give you the opportunity to "sublicense" the material if you are interested.)

Radicals used to think of their ideas as weapons; Chomsky sees them as a licensing opportunity.
Chomsky has even gone the extra mile to protect the copyright to some of his material by transferring ownership to his children. Profits from those works will thus be taxed at his children's lower rate. He also thereby extends the length of time that the family is able to hold onto the copyright and protect his intellectual assets.

In October, 2002, radicals gathered in Philadelphia for a benefit entitled "Noam Chomsky: Media and Democracy." Sponsored by the Greater Philadelphia Democratic Left, for a fee of US$15 you could attend the speech and hear the great man ruminate on the evils of capitalism. For another US$35, you could attend a post-talk reception and he would speak directly with you.

During the speech, Chomsky told the assembled crowd, "A democracy requires a free, independent, and inquiring media." After the speech, Deborah Bolling, a writer for the lefty Philadelphia City Paper, tried to get an interview with Chomsky. She was turned away. To talk to Chomsky, she was told, this "free, independent, and inquiring" reporter needed to pay US$35 to get into the private reception.

Corporate America is one of Chomsky's demons. It's hard to find anything positive he might say about American business. He paints an ominous vision of America suffering under the "unaccountable and deadly rule of corporations." He has called corporations "private tyrannies" and declared that they are "just as totalitarian as Bolshevism and fascism." Capitalism, in his words, is a "grotesque catastrophe."

But a funny thing happened on the way to the retirement portfolio.

Chomsky, for all of his moral dudgeon against American corporations, finds that they make a pretty good investment. When he made investment decisions for his retirement plan at MIT, he chose not to go with a money market fund or even a government bond fund. Instead, he threw the money into blue chips and invested in the TIAA-CREF stock fund. A look at the stock fund portfolio quickly reveals that it invests in all sorts of businesses that Chomsky says he finds abhorrent: oil companies, military contractors, pharmaceuticals, you name it.

When I asked Chomsky about his investment portfolio, he reverted to a "what else can I do?" defence: "Should I live in a cabin in Montana?" he asked. It was a clever rhetorical dodge.

Chomsky was declaring that there is simply no way to avoid getting involved in the stock market short of complete withdrawal from the capitalist system. He certainly knows better. There are many alternative funds these days that allow you to invest your money in "green" or "socially responsible" enterprises.

They just don't yield the maximum available return.








Chomsky