Noam Chomsky on How the Military Is Bankrupting Us and Why Corporate Interests Want to Destroy Public Programs

Noam Chomsky on How the Military Is Bankrupting Us and Why Corporate Interests Want to Destroy Public Programs | World | AlterNet:

Chomsky describes the problems affecting the US economy, including Military spending.

The healthcare system...the huge military spending, the very low taxes for the rich [and corporations]...those are fundamental problems that have to be dealt with if there’s going to be anything like successful economic and social development in the United States."

He comments on Ron Paul's statements about Al Qaeda and 911 and its successes in "bankrupting the US at home".

...he (Bin Laden) was pretty explicit about that. He wanted to draw the United States into what intelligence agencies called a trap, which would inflame and incite hostility in the Muslim world, he hoped, help mobilize people for his cause—I don’t think that happened—but also bankrupt the U.S. at home. I mean, current estimates—there was a recent estimate, a study at Brown University, estimated the cost just of the two wars at about $4 trillion. If you count in the costs of, you know, homeland security and so on, probably doubles that. That’s pretty serious. Between the wars, the housing bubble and Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, that—it creates the economic crisis that we’re now.

And finally why cut Social programs instead of Military spending. This is a dark view of the elites who now run our company through purchase of its democratic institutions:

Social Security is based on a principle. It’s based on the principle that you care about other people. You care whether the widow across town, a disabled widow, is going to be able to have food to eat. And that’s a notion you have to drive out of people’s heads. The idea of solidarity, sympathy, mutual support, that’s doctrinally dangerous. The preferred doctrines are just care about yourself, don’t care about anyone else. That’s a very good way to trap and control people. And the very idea that we’re in it together, that we care about each other, that we have responsibility for one another, that’s sort of frightening to those who want a society which is dominated by power, authority, wealth, in which people are passive and obedient.

But I think we all can recognize people exactly like this. They applauded someones death at the recent debates and their rhetoric is consistently "non-caring".

Vets for Peace is countering this rhetoric with the facts in our War Economy pickets on tuesdays from 4:30 to 6:30. Join us!