“When elites fail, what should we do about it?” Noam Chomsky asked a crowd of Portlanders on Friday. “Simple answer: get rid of them,”
The crowd attending his lecture at The First Unitarian Church downtown loved that opening statement and much of his hourlong lecture, followed by a Q & A – giving him a standing ovation.
At 80 years old, Chomsky is soft-spoken and eager to educate his audience -which ranged from people in their early 20s to people in their 80s.
Chomsky is long-winded and humorously self-aware of it. He spoke about the gap between public opinion and politics. “All of you are dedicated to trying to build democracy from below, but the elites are trying to build it from above,” he said. He reminded the audience that President Obama’s campaign was the most successful marketing campaign on 2008. “They market candidates like they market toothpaste,” he said.
The lecture spanned a variety of topics including foreign policy, the war on drugs, and nuclear arms. On health care reform, Chomsky said a universal or national health insurance system is “not on the agenda” and Obama is making deals with pharmaceutical companies to not touch their drug prices.
His outlook isn’t the most optimistic: the government is big business, with its own bottom line, and runs itself that way. He criticizes the Obama administration on how the economic crisis is being handled, saying that Obama’s funds come from the financial institutions.
Chomsky donated his time to be a keynote speaker for the weekend long EcoNvergence, a conference focusing on the inter-connectivity of the economic and ecological problems facing the world today. His reflections on the current state of the U.S. are grim. But he seems to inspire people, at least momentarily, to feel like they can participate in changing the way the world operates by standing up for what they think is right.
(photo taken by Anvi Bui)
Tags: EcoNvergence, Noam Chomsky
RE: “He criticizes the Obama administration on how the economic crisis is being handled, saying that Obama’s funds come from the financial institutions.”
One example of Mr Obama’s dependence on the financial institutions was described in a longer piece on JPM Chase’s Jamie Dimon in the 21Sept Newsweek, which concluded:
“In the past year, however, Dimon’s opinions on issues like the deficit, tax cuts, and stimulus have become part of the national conversation. Barack Obama, whom Dimon had avidly supported, routinely sought out Dimon’s views. The esteem in which Obama holds Dimon was revealed by The Wall Street Journal’s Monica Langley in a story about a March 2009 meeting at the White House. Business executives, she wrote, ‘implored Mr. Obama to get credit flowing again. “All right,” the president said. He’d have his people “talk to Jamie.” ‘ Even today, it’s a fair bet that those conversations are continuing.”
It was Jamie Dimon who — with the enthusiastic collaboration of GW Bush’s last Treasury Secretary, Henry Merritt Paulson, Jr, and Bush-appointee, FDIC head Sheila Bair — obtained $307bill of WaMu’s assets last year for a risible $1.888bill, removing enormous wealth from the Northwest for the benefit of Wall St Nation.
After swallowing WaMu in an afternoon, JPM Chase eliminated 14,000 jobs, including many, many in the NW. Millions of dollars in the 401(k)s of former WaMu employees have been nearly erased, with only litigation holding out a possibility of restoration. And billions of common shareholder dollars have been wiped away by Ms Bair’s rash determination, with, again, hope for restitution remaining only in litigation.
Mr Obama’s intimate dependence upon Mr Dimon suggests that our future includes ever greater consolidation and increasingly unassailable arrogance among financial institutions. The Northwest is too distant from Wall St not to be a large net loser. The economic experiment in deregulation begun during the Reagan era and continued under Clinton — and especially Bush ‘43 — will continue,
with, perhaps, a minor patch here and there.