(From the Activist Mailing List - http://get.to/activist "Who runs America? Forty minutes with Noam Chomsky" Interview by Adrian Zupp ... I don't see why we have to have a system in which the wealth that gets created is directed, overwhelmingly, to a tiny percentage of the population. Nor do I see a system that has to be as radically undemocratic. I mean, remember *how* undemocratic it is. A private corporation, let's say General Electric, is, in fact, just a pure tyranny. You and I have *nothing* to say about how it works. The people *inside* the corporation have nothing to say about how it works, except that they can take orders from above and give them down below. It's what we call tyranny. And when those institutions also control the government, the framework for popular decision-making very much narrows. In fact, that's the purpose of shrinking government. It's so that the sphere of popular decision-making will narrow and more decisions will fall into the hands of the private tyrannies. "Government" is a kind of interesting term in American political mythology. The government is presented as some enemy that's outside, something coming from outer space. So when the IRS comes to collect your taxes, it's this enemy coming to steal your money. That's driven into your head from infancy, almost. There's another way of looking at it, which is that the IRS is the instrument by which you and I decide how to spend our resources for schools and roads and so on. Whatever faults the government has, and there are plenty, it's the one institution in which people can, at least in principle and sometimes in fact, make a difference. So government's shrinking, meaning the public role is shrinking. And business -- that is, unaccountable private power -- has to take its place. That's the dominant ideology. Why should we accept that? Suppose someone said, "Look, you've got to have a king or a slave owner." Should we accept it? I mean, yes, there are much better systems. Democracy would be a better system. And there are a lot of ways for the country to become way more democratic. Handing over the digital spectrum, or for that matter the Internet, to private power -- that's a huge blow against democracy. In the case of the Internet, it's a particularly dramatic blow against democracy because this was paid for by the public. How undemocratic can you get? Here is a major instrument, developed by the public -- first part of the Pentagon, and then universities and the National Science Foundation -- handed over in some manner that nobody knows to private corporations who want to turn it into an instrument of control. They want to turn it into a home shopping center. You know, where it will help them convert you into the kind of person they want. Namely, someone who is passive, apathetic, sees their life only as a matter of having more commodities that they don't want. Why give them a powerful weapon to turn you into that kind of a person? ... ==========
