"What is needed is people who will work to sweep away the mists of carefully contrived illusion, and be directly engaged in popular struggles that they sometimes help galvanize."
June 1, 2010 The following is the transcript of recent speech delivered by Noam Chomsky addressing more than a thousand people at the Left Forum at Pace university in New York. Chomsky: We Don't Want to End up Like Joe Stack, Do We?One month ago, Joseph Andrew Stack crashed his small plane into an office building in Austin, Texas, hitting an IRS office, committing suicide. He left a manifesto explaining his actions. It was mostly ridiculed, but I think it deserves a lot better than that.
Stack's manifesto traces the life history that led him to this final desperate act. The story begins when he was a teenage student living on a pittance in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, right near the heart of what was once a great industrial area. His neighbor -- I'm mostly quoting now -- his neighbor was a woman in her eighties, surviving on cat food, the widowed wife of a retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and the union that, for the thirty years of his service, he would have a pension and medical care to look forward to in his retirement. Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing, because the incompetent mill management and corrupt union, not to mention the government, raided the pension funds and stole their retirement. All she had was Social Security to live on. And Stack could have added that are concerted and continuing efforts by the super-rich and their political allies to take even that away on spurious grounds.
Stack decided then that he couldn't trust big business and would strike out on his own, only to discover that he couldn't trust a government that cared nothing about people like him, but only about the rich and privileged. And he couldn't trust a legal system, which -- in his words, in which "there are two 'interpretations' for every law, one for the very rich and one for the rest of us," a government that leaves us with "the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies
are murdering tens of thousands of people a year," with care rationed by wealth, not need, all in a social order in which "a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities…and when it's time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours." And much more, which I won't repeat.
Stack tells us that his desperate final act was an effort to join those who are willing to die for their freedom, in the hope of awakening others from their torpor. It wouldn't surprise me if he had in mind the woman eating cat food, who taught him about the real world when he was a teenager, and her husband's premature death. Her husband didn't literally commit suicide after having been discarded to the trash heap, but it's far from an isolated case, which we can add to the colossal toll of the institutional crimes of state capitalism.
http://www.alternet.org/economy/147056/chomsky%3A_we_don't_want_to_end_up_like_joe_stack,_do_we
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/5/31/noam_chomsky_the_center_cannot_hold
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
