http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=38391
Chomsky Warns of the Threat of Fascism
Noam Chomsky, for many years the leading left intellectual in the US,
warned last week of signs that fascism may be coming to the United
States. He invoked Germany during the Weimar Republic, and drew
a parallel between it and today.
By Matthew Rothschild, editor
The Progressive: First Published 2010-04-13
Noam Chomsky, for many years the leading leftwing intellectual in the
country, warned last week of signs that fascism may be coming to the United
States.
"I'm just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler's speeches on the
radio," he said, "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" here at home.
Chomsky was speaking to more than 1,000 people at the Orpheum Theatre in
Madison, Wisconsin, where he received the University of Wisconsin's A.E.
Havens Center's award for lifetime contribution to critical scholarship.
"The level of anger and fear is like nothing I can compare in my lifetime,"
he said. He cited a statistic from a recent poll showing that half the
unaffiliated voters say the average tea party member is closer to them than
anyone else.
"Ridiculing the tea party shenanigans is a serious error," Chomsky said.
Their attitudes "are understandable," he said. "For over 30 years, real
incomes have stagnated or declined. This is in large part the consequence of
the decision in the 1970s to financialize the economy."
There is class resentment, he noted. "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," he said.
And Obama is linked to the bankers, Chomsky explained. "The financial
industry preferred Obama to McCain," he said. "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," said Chomsky. "The colossal
toll of the institutional crimes of state capitalism" is what is fueling
"the indignation and rage of those cast aside."
"People want some answers," Chomsky said. "They are hearing answers from
only one place: Fox, talk radio, and Sarah Palin."
Chomsky invoked Germany during the Weimar Republic, and drew a parallel
between it and the United States. "The Weimar Republic was the peak of
Western civilization and was regarded as a model of democracy," and he
stressed how quickly things deteriorated there.
"In 1928 the Nazis had less than 2 percent of the vote." And he warned, "Two
years later, millions supported them. The public got tired of the incessant
wrangling, and the service to the powerful, and the failure of those in
power to deal with their grievances."
Chomsky said the German people were susceptible to appeals about "the
greatness of the nation, and defending it against threats, and carrying out
the will of eternal providence."
When farmers, the petit bourgeoisie, and Christian organizations joined
forces with the Nazis, "the center very quickly collapsed," Chomsky said. No
analogy is perfect, but the echoes of fascism are "reverberating" today.
"These are lessons to keep in mind."
***
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dean-baker/attack-wall-street-not-so_b_535018.html
Attack Wall Street, Not Social Security
By Dean Baker
HuffingtonPost: April 12, 2010:
Suppose our top generals described the growing threat from a hostile Middle
East power. The country has tens of billions of oil dollars, a growing army,
chemical and biological weapons, and is in the process of developing nuclear
weapons. After carefully describing the risks posed by this country, our
generals suggested an immediate attack on Canada. They explain that
combating this Middle East country would be difficult, but defeating Canada
is easy.
This is essentially the story of the latest attack on social security.
Everyone who looks at the projections agrees; the scary budget stories being
hyped in the media and by the Wall Street crew are driven almost entirely by
projections of exploding health care costs. But instead of proposing ways to
fix the health care system, these deficit hawks want to attack social
security. They tell us that fixing health care is hard. By contrast they
think that cutting money from social security will be relatively easy.
The facts on this are straightforward and known by everyone involved in the
budget debate. The US health care system is broken. We pay more than twice
as much per person as the average for other wealthy countries.
And it is projected to get worse. In three or four decades we are projected
to pay three or four times as much per person for health care as people in
countries like Germany and Canada. Since more than half of our health care
is paid through public sector programs like Medicare and Medicaid, this
explosion in health care costs will bankrupt the government if it actually
occurs. Of course it will also devastate the private sector.
On the other hand, it is easy to show that if we contain health care costs
then our budget problems are relatively minor. In fact, the current
projections of enormous budget deficits two or three decades out would flip
over to projections of enormous budget surpluses if our health care costs
were comparable to those of any other wealthy country.
Logic would dictate that our top priority should be getting our health care
costs under control. But fixing health care is difficult because, as we saw
in the health care debate, this means confronting the health insurance
industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the medical supply industry, highly
paid medical specialists and other powerful lobbies.
The deficit hawks don't want to fight this fight. Defeating these powerful
interest groups would be a hard fight. And for the deficit hawks it would
likely be an especially painful fight since these are their friends.
By contrast, the Wall Street deficit hawks don't have friends who depend on
social security for their income. Wall Street investment bankers like Peter
Peterson and Robert Rubin are unlikely to associate with such people. This
is why they see attacking social security as easy.
Of course attacking social security makes as much sense as our generals'
plan to attack Canada. The Congressional Budget Office's projections show
that the program can pay full benefits until the year 2044 with no changes
whatsoever. Even after that date the program would always pay a higher
benefit than what current retirees receive, even though somewhat less than
the full scheduled benefits.
The long-term problem is not that anything improper has been done with the
program; the reason that social security is projected to eventually face a
shortfall is that future generations are projected to live longer than we
do. This raises costs since our children and grandchildren are projected to
enjoy longer retirements than we do. In short, there is no story of
generational inequity here, contrary to what the Wall Street deficit hawks
say.
If our deficit hawk generals are too scared to take on the health care
industry then we also have to also make them too scared to take on social
security. If we need to reduce the deficit the best place to start is a
financial speculation tax. A modest set of financial transactions taxes,
like the 0.5% tax on stock trades in the United Kingdom, can easily raise
$150bn a year. This would go a long way toward addressing future budget
shortfalls and it would raise money from people who can afford it: the Wall
Street crew whose financial shenanigans led to the meltdown.
Federal Reserve board chairman Ben Bernanke recently suggested cutting
social security because: "that's where the money is". That's not true, the
real money is on Wall Street. Let's go get it.
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