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From a recent interview of Noam Chomsky by Michael Learner –
ML: […]What path is rational for a movement seeking to build a world of environmental sanity, social justice, and peace, yet facing such a sophisticated, powerful, and well-organized social order?
NC: […]At the moment we can’t realistically talk about challenging global capital, because the movements that might undertake such a task are far too scattered and atomized and focused on particular issues. But we can try to confront directly what global capital is doing right now and, on the basis of that, move on to further achievements.
For example, it’s no big secret that in the past thirty years there has been enormous concentration of wealth in a very tiny part of the population, 1 percent or even one-tenth of 1 percent, and that has conferred extraordinary political power on a very tiny minority, primarily [those who control] financial capital, but also more broadly on the executive and managerial classes. At the same time, for the majority of the population, incomes have pretty much stagnated, working hours have increased, benefits have declined — they were never very good — and people are angry, hostile, and very upset. Many people distrust institutions, all of them; it’s a volatile period, and it’s a period which could move in a very dangerous direction — there are analogues, after all […]
Noting the concentration of wealth and concentration of power must be the first step in realizing the imbalance growing within Canadian society. Chomsky is referring to the US of course, but we in Canada are stripping down the balancing factors that makes Canadian society egalitarian and thus a better, safer place to live. The social redistribution of wealth is an important feature of Canadian society and must be maintained, the Harper government needs to reaffirm this corner stone of our society lest we follow the Americans into their hellish free-market dystopia.
Americans are not fond of their particular slice of hell either…
As a proponent of progressive taxation and egalitarian society I still hear about benefits “trickling down” from the top of society to the bottom. This of course is still horsepucky but as a meme still shows a great amount of resiliency as it continues to crop up again and again. Another sticking point is all the doom and gloom being written about the economy, despite a rebound of corporate earnings. Sociological images provides a graph and analysis about the economy.
“Using Bureau of Economic Analysis data, he looked at total U.S. domestic profits, as well as the proportion of all domestic profits earned by the financial sector, between 2001 and the end of 2010. And what we see is that both overall corporate profits, and the finance sector so central to the economic crisis, have bounced back quite well, returning to the levels we saw just before the peak of the boom period:
:
“Point is, it complicates the general perception we might get from news reports that everything in the economy is awful and there are no profits to be made. Ongoing job stagnation and media focus on the negative economic news doesn’t mean all parts of the economy are suffering equally, or that as soon as corporate earnings rebound, the benefits would quickly reach workers in the form of new job opportunities.”
I’m thinking that the workers are not seeing the rebound as quickly or at all if one is to believe the graph. In a country with more redistributive policies in place I would predict that more people would be on the rebound instead of just the corporate elite.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…