Chomsky: The U.S. behaves nothing like a democracy
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This is a feature of the design of the U.S. federal government. The framers of the Constitution were very familiar with the history of governments and knew that direct democracy was a disaster. It devolves into mob rule, and let's face it, most people don't know much about most things.
Chomsky says that the lower 70% of the population has no effect on policy, but there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. The U.S. system of income taxation is progressive and refundable, meaning that there is substantial transfer of wealth from the richest people to the poorest. The upper income brackets pay a disproportionately large percentage of all income taxes.
U.S. states fund universal public education through high school; a policy that benefits the poor and middle class far more than the rich, who can afford to send their children to private schools. Health care funding like Medicare and Medicaid
I'm not saying that these are bad! Just that they demonstrate the extent to which U.S. policy does benefit a broader swath of the population than you might think from reading this essay.
Ironically, some of the things that Noam Chomsky likes the least are in fact popular with a majority of the U.S. population. Pew reports that 61% of American citizens approve of the drone assassination program, for instance [1].
[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/07/25/big-gender-g...
No, it doesn't mean that, because income tax isn't the only tax (or even the only tax on incomes, as the payroll tax, which is regressive, also exists, and, on top of that, forms of income that tend to be distributed more to the richest -- long term cap gains -- have preferential tax treatment over other income), and because while the nominal rates are progressive the distribution of deductions and credits (including refundable credits) are not.
The real bias in the tax code is, perhaps unsurprisingly, around the median income, where many expenses that the poor do not incur to the same degree (home ownership, college tuition, IRAs) are highly subsidized, with most credits and deductions dropping off as you hit a higher income level.
Most people are not like you. They have a home country that they care strongly about and want it protected. If that means killing some terrorists in a desert, so be it. And if a few people in said desert end up getting killed by mistake (and they tend to give benefit of the doubt to the drone operator) - that's war. Perhaps they shouldn't be hanging out near the terrorists.
My point is not to say whether this view is right or wrong - but to explain that the 'majority' who support the drone strikes understand what is going on and are ok with it.
I agree some do, but it's wrong to suggest all do. I think mostly people are uninformed (certainly in the US). Actually I'm headed to Portugal in a week or so, if you're in Lisbon or north do send me an email and we can have a drink :)
Does anyone have any insight into this? Is there truth to this claim?
We need better democracies.
Quacks like a democracy with a unitary executive and high level of electoral disproportionality, see Patterns of Democracy, Arend Lijphard (1999).
> We need better democracies.
We have better democracies (i.e., most modern democracies), and we can only understand how they are better and what the defects are in the US system when we understand the US as a democracy, and understand the features that make it a poor one in terms of effective representation.
Hyberpolic polemic like claiming the US behaves "nothing like a democracy" might sometimes have value in drawing attention to the problems (but probably not if it is coming from Chomsky), but it doesn't help understand or fix the problems, and if actually taken seriously it inhibits understanding and progress.
Yes. But for that we need better people
I like his ability to cut to the truth of the matter. What the people vote for and desire is quite secondary at the end of the day.
> After a long period – decades in fact – of hard, creative work, the primary research and development, the results are handed over to private enterprise for commercialization and profit. That’s Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and so on. It’s not quite that simple of course. But that’s a core part of the picture. The system goes way back to the origins of industrial economies, but it’s dramatically true since WWII that this ought to be the core of the study of the productive economy.
Can someone comment on this? I am of course aware of ARPA and DARPA but is it really as one sided as he says?
1) Unix - AT&T
2) WWW - CERN
3) The transistor - NASA
4) The computer - Government Code and Cypher School
5) The compiler - IBM
6) The internet - DARPA
While it might very well be interesting and worthy of discussion somewhere, that somewhere should be somewhere else.
It's probably not worth complaining anymore though, this site really turned a corner with the NSA stuff.
Not to mention when I woke up this morning the top post was somebody writing for an online magazine of "Art-activism, eco-anarchism, subversion and sedition" positing a conspiracy by the plutocrats to put people in make-work jobs.
Alas, I lost my flagging privileges around the time we had a front page with half a dozen postings about a plane to Cuba that no one of interest was on.
Congratulations!
if one compares the deaths caused by US forces and those of Castro, Castros atrocities are dwarfed to subatomic levels.
Besides, a two-party system can't be democratic.