I'm going to leave a link for those who want to read the entire article, which appears to have been from a recent Chomsky lecture. But this paragraph I found priceless.
... I left home for graduate studies at Harvard, where I had my first extensive experience with the elite intellectual world. On arrival, I went to the standard faculty-run party for incoming students and was regaled by a very distinguished philosopher with an account of the Depression - which, he assured me, had not taken place. It was a liberal fabrication. There were no rag-pickers coming to our door in desperation in the early '30s, no women workers being beaten by security forces while on strike at a textile factory that I passed on a trolley with my mother when I was about five, none of my unemployed working class relatives. A few businessmen might have suffered, but there was nothing beyond that.
I guess that means I never saw the more recent problems, either, like a solid crowded city block of dudes waiting for a few day-labor employers to drive up in their pickups. It didn't happen. I never saw it. Ever. -- MJ
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Orwell said it best through Winston Smith, "Those who control history can rewrite it." I'm getting to the point where I just want to shout FTW, I just live hear till I go hoarse...
-WageslaveZ-
There is nothing quite as foul, dastardly, insulting, or ignorant as a right wing revisionist historian.
Here's what "Time" magazine had to say when America was in the grip of hard times during the 1930s economic meltdown:
"The Depression would go away if one worked and prayed hard enough, and if some people starved, well, it was pretty much their own fault. (Henry) Luce never had any sympathy for losers."
(From "The People's Almanac" by David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace).
A remote shut-off valve that is required in other nations (but not the U.S.) could have prevented the Gulf oil spill disaster.
The cost of this device (called an acoustic switch)? A mere half a million dollars.
This, from the Wall Street Journal:
"Regulators in the United States considered requiring acoustic switches several years ago, but drilling companies were concerned about the cost, and the Minerals Management Service decided they were not necessary"
I'll bet this is one of the topics that Cheney discussed with oil execs during his secret energy meetings in the White House.
Those records have been sealed for years. Perhaps this disaster can persuade a judge to order that they be released.
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