Liberal icon catches up: Racist teabagger Noam Chomsky slams Obama, defends Tea Party, Palin

Portland Examiner ^ | 4/21/10 | D.K. Jamaal

[tatown]

Not everyday that I find myself agreeing with a radical militant leftist like Noam Chomsky.

Or rather, not every day that Noam Chomsky agrees with a stubborn (left-leaning) centrist like me.

But last week while receiving the University of Wisconsin’s A.E. Havens Center’s award for lifetime contribution to critical scholarship, Chomsky warned that fascism looms if Americans are not careful: “I’m just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler’s speeches on the radio, and I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering…”

Well, la dee da. Now where have you heard something like that before? Right here, over and over again.

The very first article published here on Post-Partisan Examiner was a siren call, warning that Obama’s leadership would slide America towards corporate fascism. We have kept calling out the fascististic Washington-Wall Street corporate oligarchy and urging post-partisanship ever since. No one should put one hundred percent of one's faith, money, time, and support in one party one hundred percent of the time.

Chomsky's speech went on to cite a poll showing that at least half of independent voters sympathize more with the Tea Party than with any partisan movement or political figure, to slam Obama for coziness with Wall Street and Big Corporate, and to explain why the upset disaffection of tea partiers is “understandable”: The level of anger and fear is like nothing I can compare in my lifetime. Ridiculing the tea party shenanigans is a serious error. For over 30 years, real incomes have stagnated or declined…The bankers, who are primarily responsible for the crisis, are now reveling in record bonuses while official unemployment is around 10 percent and unemployment in the manufacturing sector is at Depression-era levels. The financial industry preferred Obama to McCain. They expected to be rewarded and they were. Then Obama began to criticize greedy bankers and proposed measures to regulate them. And the punishment for this was very swift: they were going to shift their money to the Republicans. So Obama said bankers are ‘fine guys’ and assured the business world: ‘I, like most of the American people, don't begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system.’ People see that and are not happy about it. People want some answers. They are hearing answers from only one place: Fox, talk radio, and Sarah Palin.

According to Chomsky, this is what is fueling “the indignation and rage of those cast aside.” Of course, Obama critics have been pointing this out all along.

While Obama’s Big Media pals have been denigrating the disaffected as racist, ignorant, hick teabaggers who represent a meaningless minority of the country we defended the movement as legitimate civil disobedience and the inevitable reaction to Obama’s blatant hypocrisy and poor leadership.

While deranged Palin haters have used every low, cruel, misogynistic trick in the book to knock her down, we have warned that she deserves to be treated with respect even when we disagree with her policy views.

We have constantly knocked Obama for his sellouts to Big Corporate and warned that Obamacrats are turning their backs on the working classes with their odious policy of endless bailouts for their bankster friends on the back of taxpayers.

Chomsky’s public truth-telling indicates that even the most hardcore leftists are waking up to the awful truths centrists warned about for two years.

We need more Noam Chomsky’s willing to admit reality and fewer lamestream media elites with their biased heads buried up the President’s butt. We need people on the left respected by the left who can see through Obamacratic empty rhetoric and announce to their friends on the left that the emperor has no clothes. That liberals and progressives have been duped. Obama is not who he said he was. He is not a change agent.

He is a tool of the regressive anti-Main Street, pro-Wall Street status quo which plots daily to subjugate working folks while consolidating more and more of America’s wealth into their own insatiably greedy hands.

Chomsky's statements will startle those who view he and Obama as two of the biggest living liberal heroes. They will be alone in their astonishment. Chomsky has merely admitted the obvious.

Hillary promoting PUMAs were the first to realize that Obama’s inexperience, incompetence, and corporate hackery would lead to disaster. They were followed by Republicans, then independents, and now Tea Partiers. Together, these group represent the growing majority whose votes will rescue America from Obamacratic corporate cronyism and remind politicians and pundits, once more, that Americans are the deciders.

Chomsky need not worry. The voting booth will save ourselves from ourselves. Democracy and the will of the people – and the right of the people to govern themselves as they see fit – will prevail again.

Obama can lay with the bankers all he wants: America will not be sacrificed upon a cross of credit default swaps.

[ansel12]

Wiki: Libertarian socialism
The first person to describe himself as a libertarian was Joseph Déjacque, an early French anarchist communist. The word stems from the French word libertaire, and was used to evade the French ban on anarchist publications.[17] In the context of the European socialist movement, libertarian has conventionally been used to describe those who opposed state socialism, such as Mikhail Bakunin. In the United States, the movement most commonly called libertarianism follows a capitalist philosophy; the term libertarian socialism therefore strikes many Americans as a contradiction in terms. However, the association of socialism with libertarianism predates that of capitalism, and many anti-authoritarians still decry what they see as a mistaken association of capitalism with libertarianism in the United States.[18] As Noam Chomsky put it, a consistent libertarian "must oppose private ownership of the means of production and the wage slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer."

In a chapter recounting the history of libertarian socialism, economist Robin Hahnel relates that thus far the period where libertarian socialism has had its greatest impact was at the end of the 19th century through the first four decades of the twentieth century.

[aft_lizard]

I have always thought that Chomsky was an anarchist. THe kind of anarchist that believes if they bring down the state the new state built would be more in line with an idealistic socialist view, ie the classless system where everyone is viewed to be equal from the leader to the garbage man. Leftist anarchy and libertarianism can seem similar but the end goals are far different.

[free_life]

And if enough voters are anti-Obama next election, who are they going vote for, the GOP is just as corrupt as the Dems and the O?

[4rcane]

Are you sure about that? Libertarians are supporters of capitalism and I’m pretty sure Noam Chomsky is not that

[FreeKeys]

The bankers, who are primarily responsible for the crisis,

WRONG! It's the POLITICIANS !!  The only bankers left these days are the creatures of our modern culture of "crony capitalism" (fascism) -- the ones who are wiling to be pawns of the politicians and who use the government to ensure some kind of way to acquire money.  The financial disaster is COMPLETELY traceable to the millions of bad loans THE POLITICIANS FORCED THEM TO MAKE SINCE THE DAYS OF JIMMY CARTER.  Even the derivatives the current Goldman Sachs charges are based on have to do with trying to find people to finance that garbage in the first place (I am NOT endorsing the way they decided to do it).

CLICK ON THIS TO FIND WHERE YOU CAN GET A FULL-SIZE PDF:

AND FIND A LOT MORE POSTERS HERE.

[Hank Kerchief]

“Noam Chomsky is a libertarian.”

So he claims, but what he says and teaches is right out of what used to be called the leftist-anarchist handbook.

“Still, this geographic division should not be over-stated. The French anarchist Proudhon and the German Max Stirner both embraced modified forms of individualism; a number of left-anarchists (often European immigrants) attained prominence in the United States; and Noam Chomsky and Murray Bookchin, two of the most influential theorists of modern left-anarchism, both reside within the United States.”

http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/anarfaq.htm

He really is a bag of contradictions.

Hank

[oldbrowser]

Hillary promoting PUMAs were the first to realize that Obama’s inexperience, incompetence, and corporate hackery would lead to disaster. They were followed by Republicans, then independents, and now Tea Partiers.

I think there were many of us FReepers who saw him for what he was early in the primaries. I don't believe most Americans are that gullible. I think that they just don't take elections that seriously. To them the presidential election is just another diversion, like American Idol or Survivor "Washington DC".

[Deagle]

I’m sorry - way too many of the posters here are just plain ignorant or history! If you really don’t know about Chomsky, then please look him up. He is a horrible person - anti-liberal, anti-Constitution, anti-just about everything that is America!

To give him any credence at all is just wrong... I don’t give a damn what he is now saying...

[ansel12]

See post 21, as some of us say, (American) libertarianism is liberalism with conservative economics which is the most bizarre fantasy of all and a corruption of it’s roots.

[Melchior]

I also thought that. It seems the author avoided quoting Chomsky at length. This article (and the sophmoric use of “Chomsky’s” for Chomskys) makes me wonder.

[decimon]

I've heard him described as a "libertarian socialist", which seems about as oxymoronic of a phrase as possible.

Not in northern Europe. I consider myself some sort of libertarian but the term itself is too vague.

[ansel12]

“There isn’t much point arguing about the word “libertarian.” It would make about as much sense to argue with an unreconstructed Stalinist about the word “democracy” — recall that they called what they’d constructed “peoples’ democracies.” The weird offshoot of ultra-right individualist anarchism that is called “libertarian” here happens to amount to advocacy of perhaps the worst kind of imaginable tyranny, namely unaccountable private tyranny. If they want to call that “libertarian,” fine; after all, Stalin called his system “democratic.” But why bother arguing about it?”
Noam Chomsky

[4rcane]

quote: As Noam Chomsky put it, a consistent libertarian “must oppose private ownership of the means of production and the wage slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer.” /quote

I’m confused by this paragraph

[Hank Kerchief]

“anti-just about everything that is America”

Yes, especially Capitalism. I know his history. I wasn’t praising him.

Perhaps you meant that for someone else.

Hank

[Deagle]

Well, really you and everyone else that does not read history. He is such a anti-American (yet living here under it’s protection) that I had to say something. To even give him any leeway in an argument is just stupid.

[Deagle]

Actually Hank, you are among the worst because you tend to take his ideas seriously or at least don’t condemn them outright. That makes you one of these so called “open-minded” leftists that pretend to understand the Constitution but have no idea what it really means.

Take a few weeks off and study Madison, Jefferson, and other writings. Then maybe you can begin to understand the idea and concept that was for America. It is NOT what you seem to think it is...

[Deagle]

What a stupid statement!

[ansel12]

Chomsky is a libertarian, did posting the source in post 21 overwhelm you emotionally causing you to attack me?

Here are some more libertarians, Hugh Hefner, Jesse Ventura, Frank Zappa, Bill Maher, Sandra Bernhard and Jason Alexander, even Naomi Wolf.

[Blado]

“The heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism”

- Ronald Reagan

[Deagle]

Chomsky is no more a libertarian that Chevez is! Geez, fellow, read history! He is a Communist, anarchist, and some other things, but a libertarian, please... You are ignoring history and common sense.