That piece Andreas posted on ownership percentages
is certainly gloomy if true, and I wonder if it is
corroborated elsewhere? Anyone know?
And Paul mentioned Chomsky a while ago. My
favorite Chomsky piece was a lecture he gave on
the book, _The Crisis of Democracy_ (NYU Press
1975), apparently the only publication of the
Trilateral Commission, a group Lawrence alluded to
last week. Chomsky pointed out an essay by Samuel
P. Huntington in that book.
Essentially it was a blueprint for all the social
changes that have occurred in the US since the end
of the Vietnam War. Chomsky quoted Huntington to
the effect that for modern democracies to be
manageable (the crisis of the book's title) "newly
mobilized strata, recently awakened by the process
of industrialization, had to be persuaded to
return to a measure of passivity and defeatism."
In other words, there was too large a populist
groundswell in the 1960s, and that threatened to
wrest control from the power elite, who were
finding democracy "unmanageable," (a word used in
the subtitle of the book).
Chomsky's lecture contained the key elements of
his yet-to-be published Engineering of Consent
tome, and explained in careful steps how America
would be converted from a nation of slaphappy
hippies to a country of demoralized, overworked
people with low expectations of life. Chilling.
And remarkably accurate in some ways, a process
that has continued under Democrat and Republican
leadership with no change or let up. Part of this
necessary return to passivity was, to my mind, a
lot like implementing martial law so slowly nobody
would notice.
Interesting composition of the Trilateral
Commission at that time. According to the book,
the then-unknown and soon-to-be-known Jimmy Carter
was on it, as well as his sidekick Zbig Brzezinski
(sp?), Huntington, and several European and
Japanese contributors.
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