{"id":9422,"date":"2012-05-03T12:09:08","date_gmt":"2012-05-03T19:09:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=9422"},"modified":"2012-05-03T12:09:08","modified_gmt":"2012-05-03T19:09:08","slug":"u-s-and-europe-committing-suicide-in-different-ways","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=9422","title":{"rendered":"U.S. and Europe ‘committing suicide in different ways’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chomsky: U.S. and Europe \u2018committing suicide in different ways\u2019<\/strong>
\nBy David Ferguson – 2 May, 2012 – Raw Story<\/p>\n

In an interview with GritTV\u2019s Laura Flanders, author and MIT professor Noam Chomsky discussed the potentially bleak future facing both the United States and the European Union. Both, he said, are facing historic crises and are going about trying to resolve them in exactly the wrong ways.<\/p>\n

According to Chomsky, we are currently living in a period of \u201cpretty close to global stagnation\u201d but that the world\u2019s great powers are reacting to the lack of growth in exactly the wrong manner. \u201cThe United States and Europe are committing suicide in different ways, but both doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n

He called European austerity measures \u201ca disaster\u201d and indicated that he expects them to fail, the question being more about how long it will take. The spending cuts and slashing of benefits to workers are ultimately part of a plan designed to dismantle the social contract, he said, although some governmental leaders are more willing than others to call it that.<\/p>\n

The U.S., Chomsky believes, has failed in that our electoral system has been \u201cshredded\u201d by the introduction of private money. Our nation has shipped production and manufacturing offshore and concentrated on the \u201cfinancialization\u201d of our economy. The social safety net has essentially been replaced by the prison system, he said, with the U.S. \u201cgetting rid of the superfluous population through incarceration.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also a mistake, he said, to treat the Republican Party as a genuine political party rather than the \u201clock-step\u201d policy arm of the superrich. Of course, the wealthy can\u2019t sell the idea of a plutocracy to the population outright, so they mobilize the socially conservative base by stoking the so-called \u201cculture wars.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chomsky has a new book, Occupy, about the Occupy Wall Street movement, what it says about society and humanity\u2019s way forward through this time of economic and social stagnation. He calls OWS \u201cthe first major public response to 30 years of class war\u201d and believes that the movement\u2019s greatest success has been the introduction of the inequalities of everyday life into the public dialogue. …more<\/a><\/p>\n

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Chomsky: U.S. and Europe \u2018committing suicide in different ways\u2019 By David Ferguson – 2 May, 2012 – Raw Story In an interview with GritTV\u2019s Laura Flanders, author and MIT professor Noam Chomsky discussed the potentially bleak future facing both the United States and the European Union. Both, he said, are facing historic crises and are more \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[247],"tags":[2944],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9422"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9422"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9423,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9422\/revisions\/9423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}