11
" The legislation, essentially bipartisan, drives new fiscal policies, tax changes, also rules of corporate governance, and deregulation. Alongside of this began the very sharp rise in the costs of elections, which drives the political parties even deeper than before into the pockets of the corporate sector. The parties dissolved, essentially, in many ways. It used to be that if a person in Congress hoped for a position such as a committee chair or some position of responsibility, he or she got it mainly through seniority and service. Within a couple of years, they started having to put money into the party coffers in order to get ahead, a topic studied mainly by Tom Ferguson. That just drove the whole system even deeper into the pockets of the corporate sector, increasingly the financial sector. "
― Noam Chomsky , Occupy (Occupied Media Pamphlet Series)
14
" How likely is it that the ruling class in America could develop an openly fascist system here? I think it’s very unlikely, frankly. They don’t have the force. About a century ago, in the freest countries in the world at that time—Britain and the United States—the dominant classes came to understand that they can’t control the population by force any longer. Too much freedom had been won by struggles like these. They realized this, they were self-conscious about it, and it’s discussed in their literature. The dominant class recognized they had to shift their tactics to control of attitudes and beliefs instead of just the cudgel. They didn’t throw away the cudgel, but it can’t do what it used to do. You have to control attitudes and beliefs. In fact, that’s when the public relations industry began. It began in the United States and England, the free countries where you had to have a major industry to control beliefs and attitudes; to induce consumerism, passivity, apathy, distraction—all the things you know very well. And that’s the way it’s been going on. It’s a barrier, but it’s a lot easier to overcome than torture and the Gestapo. I don’t think the circumstances exist any longer for instituting anything like what we called fascism. "
― Noam Chomsky , Occupy (Occupied Media Pamphlet Series)
15
" For the majority, real incomes have pretty much stagnated, sometimes declined. Benefits have also declined and work hours have gone up, and so on. It’s not Third World misery, but it’s not what it ought to be in a rich society, the richest in the world, in fact, with plenty of wealth around, which people can see, just not in their pockets. "
― Noam Chomsky , Occupy (Occupied Media Pamphlet Series)
16
" Over the following years, the concept of “person” was changed by the courts in two ways. One way was to broaden it to include corporations, legal fictions established and sustained by the state. In fact, these “persons” later became the management of corporations, according to the court decisions. So the management of corporations became “persons.” It was also narrowed to exclude undocumented immigrants. They had to be excluded from the category of “persons.” And that’s happening right now. So the legislations that you’re talking about, they go two ways. They broaden the category of persons to include corporate entities, which now have rights way beyond human beings, given by the trade agreements and others, and they exclude the people who flee from Central America where the U.S. devastated their homelands, and flee from Mexico because they can’t compete with the highly-subsidized U.S. agribusiness. "
― Noam Chomsky , Occupy (Occupied Media Pamphlet Series)
18
" The population is angry, frustrated, bitter—and for good reasons. For the past generation, policies have been initiated that have led to an extremely sharp concentration of wealth in a tiny sector of the population. In fact, the wealth distribution is very heavily weighted by, literally, the top tenth of one percent of the population, a fraction so small that they’re not even picked up on the census. You have to do statistical analysis just to detect them. And they have benefited enormously. This is mostly from the financial sector—hedge fund managers, CEOs of financial corporations, and so on. "
― Noam Chomsky , Occupy (Occupied Media Pamphlet Series)
