Noam Chomsky: Obama Would Have Been Called a ‘Moderate Republican’ in Recent Decades

From AlterNet:

Noam Chomsky, Professor Emeritus at MIT, and one of the nation's leading intellectual critics of the US political, corporate and national security apparatus. In this long interview, Cenk Uygur of TYT and Professor Chomsky discuss President Obama, the rightward shift of US politics over the past few decades, drone strikes, the labor movement, Aaron Swartz, the role of the media and what hope we have for the future.

In the interview, Chomsky argues that the country's political shift toward corporate and business interests in recent decades reflects a "realignment" of the economy.

Click here for the interview.

Chomsky is at his best, I think, in the interview format.  He's a lot less academic, a lot more conversational, and interviewers generally tend to keep him focused the stuff regular people like you and me need to know.  And this one is particularly good.  He lays it all out, how money tends to take over the democratic process, how far the political establishment, which is not to be confused with the population, has moved toward the concerns of big business, the limited successes the US has seen over the decades in undermining this rightward dynamic, and how we can undermine it now.

If you've never read any Chomsky before, it may very well be like he's describing a parallel universe, similar to the one we read about in, say, the New York Times, but radically different in a number of key ways.  You may even start to reject his assertions immediately based on your understanding of how the world works.  But if that's your urge, you really ought to ask yourself, "Do I really know that the mainstream media's narrative account of reality is correct?  And how do I know that I know?"  Chomsky is almost religious in his documentation and usage of facts.  He's not lying, not making shit up, not engaging in conspiracy theory.  He simply weaves the facts together in a different way, assigning different, and, I might add, more plausible, motivations to the big shots who run the world.  

Really, the MSM's Israel/Palestine narrative is so incoherent that I didn't truly understand the depths of depravity involved in the situation there until I started reading Chomsky.  In the end, he's the guy who makes the most sense.  I have never heard a compelling refutation of his overall understanding of how power functions in the modern world.  Ever.  I mean, sure, I've heard people trashing him on multiple occasions, but it's almost always along the lines of weird hysterical contradiction without any real argument: "everybody KNOWS the world is like this, so Chomsky just CAN'T be right."  And that's not really terribly compelling, just saying he's wrong.

If you listen to any interview at all over the next week or so, make it this one.  You'll be wiser for the effort.

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