Noam Chomsky: People should vote against McCain and for Obama – but without illusions
Chomsky: In swing states vote Obama
see
The Financial Crisis 2008 Interview with Noam Chomsky
Chomsky: If I were in a swing state, I’d vote for Obama
Anti-democratic nature of US capitalism is being exposed by Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky: The United States Has Essentially a One-Party System
If McCain Wins, Obama’s Policies Get Implemented by Joel S. Hirschhorn
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Yes we must, but clearly we won’t, or don’t want to, and haven’t wanted to any time soon.
I’ve voted every time for third parties for decades. This is clearly not what the people want. If anything was proven by every vote and admin in my era which started with raygun), it’s that the USA is a vile culture of selfish miscreants bent on voting against their best interest and for the corporate system, regardless of whether that system sponsors the best interest of the people.
What the people clearly WANT and crave is greed, god, guns and the freedom to exploit everyone and everything else at will. They are not interested in rights, healthcare, social uplift nor an egalitarian philosophical approach to society in any way. They are not even interested in the constitution nor the rule of law.
As Chomsky points out, it was a nation built by the aristocracy for the aristocracy, and any possible alternative was only hard won with struggle and sacrifice against a public and an establishment lockstep behind the abusive corporate model. We must face the fact that this is what the people have chosen over and over, even given the many chances to choose otherwise.
As was also pointed out in the ‘communistic’ model post, any effort to reform or regulate the corporate lock on capital and commerce which corners all the cash and controls our lives, is ultimately taken apart but agents for the corporate class who own the earth.
And yet the people still support and believe wholeheartedly in this system, buying into it out of their own ‘greed is god’ mouth-frothing fanaticism.
In the end the populace of the USA has proven itself beyond any possible doubt to be selfish, racist, daft, anti-intellectual, gun-toting, greed-mongering, and viciously, unapolagetically warmongering, brutal jingoists.
If there’s even the slimmest chance that some slim majority can possible work to reign in only the unapologetic brutality of the US cultural style to any even small degree, then it’s the moral requirement of anyone with morals, (which is a micro-minority in this land), to support that effort in their state, if their state is likely in danger of going ‘red’.
Barack has made it clear that he will do all kinds of unilateral war in Afghanistan. I personally can’t support this, but then I can afford a lost vote in a decidedly blue state.
But if you live in a ’swing state’ (IE a red-state backwater of selfish, god-greed-mongering gun-toting racist cultists, IE most of the USA), then you have an obligation to commit your vote to the lesser of warmongers for the sake of the innocents this criminal culture will eventually otherwise bomb to smitherines as a matter of sport.
But if you don’t live in this majority of vile cowboy cultist states, then by all means pursue a progressive, third-party agenda and hope some century the culture will realize the errors of its ways– just bear in mind that it took the Scandinavians a thousand years to evolve from brutal gangs of marauding conquistadors to their modern Social Democracies which Bernie Sanders so rightfully espouses.
Likely the USA will need to similarly self-destruct (as did the Vikings), and perhaps in some distant century may come to its senses.
But be not fooled– third parties, peace, social reforms, justice, law, progressive ideology, or even regulating the corporate class in any way at all is clearly NOT what the people want.
They WANT greed, they WANT corporate abuse, and they WANT endless wars, Nothing could be clearer. They probaly still want slaves and to slaughter all the indians, and animals, and drill-baby-drill till its all gone and given away to the corporations they so love.
No amount of hardship nor idealism will ever change the nature of the culture of this land, only, perhaps total and complete cultural and economic collapse, which will be a long time coming yet.
Meanwhile, our first obligation is to keep these warmongering cultists from bombing people, and the second obligation is to keep the vile corportations and ultra-rightist gun-toting states-rights cultists from killing nature in the name of private property.
Whatever happens otherwise to the people of the USA, that is their choice, If after the past months and years they still support the industrial corporate model which now owns them and their government and all their treasure, then they are daft, and can’t be helped.
But we who see otherwise are obligated to vote to spare the world and life on earth the antics of this ‘night of the living dead’ nationalistic gang of greedmongering obese gun-toting right-wing evangelical goons which comprises the entire culture of the USA.
Let the amerigoons eat eachother alive before infecting the world further with their ‘preemptive’ horrors.
I don’t get it either, John. “If not now, when?” We must break from the corporate 2 party (one party) system.
Why the hell are these left-wing intellectuals telling people to vote for Obama? Screw these bastards.
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How interesting his point that the only reason national healthcare is on the agenda is because big business says private healthcare adds to their cost of goods as compared with outsourcing production to Canada.
Yet he also points out that the people’s programs only prevail through popular struggle against the aristocracy that was designed into this system by the framers.
Chomsky often points to the importance of popular struggle, alluding to its absence. Yet it seems the people just don’t care, and would rather be hypnotized by twisted rightist ideology designed to make them vote against their own best interests. The backward daftness of this electorate always baffles me.
But the real evil has nothing to do with domestic policy, that’s for the people to struggle for, or not. The real evil to vote against is US militarism. If we are to live here, we are obligated to support the lesser of two warmongers.
Until this nation decides to disarm, which it someday likely must, we have a moral obligation to prevent warcriminals like McBomb from getting near that button.
Beyond that, the ‘people’, if still unable to wake up about this endemic and unfair aristocracy, deserve what they get.
But if you live in a state that’s not a swing state, then by all means, keep investing votes in third parties, just be certain it won’t negatively impact the required electoral defeat of McBomb/Impalin.
I miss Dennis Kucinich, the only candidate I could actually feel 100% good about voting for. A true constitutionalist statesman who stoically fights for the people and for peace. Now there’s a ‘Maverick’!
They are different faction of the same party. This is one of Chomsky’s statements. Then the lesser of two evils argument loses validity, because they are still the same party. While making the argument for the lesser of two evils, Chomsky effectively makes a better argument for voting third party.
This is the first time I’ve ever seen the Professor makes such an error in logic.