The “liberal establishment “ is certainly not against grass-roots activism/donors, etc.

any more than this so-called liberal establishment are not for progress as a society. The 'establishment' is a word bandied around so much that it loses meaning as well.

Just who have been sending years of small donations we can afford to candidates we like, and then of course voting our choices, taking time out of our workdays and away from our many chores at home and raising our children to do so?

By definition though, WE don't accept "noun, verb, REVOLUTION" as the explanation of how demagogic promises might be transformed into reality. We insist on achievable goals, and on knowing what they are, complete with boring details.

And, of course: defeating ourselves (i.e., the "liberal establishment" aka the Democratic electorate) is never among our goals.

Btw, politically, Chomsky's a profoundly dishonest and incompetent ass who seemingly never regrets that his acting out every election always helps elect Republicans. A compelling pattern that tells truths that hypocrites like him never do.

“The current moment, not just political, is the most grim moment in human history. We are now in a situation where this generation, in fact, in the next few years, is going to have to make a decision of cosmic significance which has never arisen before: Will organized human society survive? And there are two enormous threats. The threat of environmental catastrophe, which at least is getting some attention, not enough. The other is the threat of nuclear war, which is increasing sharply by the Trump administration, in fact. These have to be dealt with quickly. Otherwise, there’s nothing to talk about.

“And notice that the wrecking ball in the White House just doesn’t give a damn. He’s having fun. He’s serving his rich constituency. So what the hell, let’s destroy the world. And it’s not that they don’t know it. Some months ago, maybe a year ago by now, one of the Trump bureaucracies the National Transportation Administration came out with what I think is the most astonishing document in the entire history of the human species. It got almost no attention. It was a long 500-page environmental assessment in which they tried to determine what the environment would be like at the end of the century. And they concluded, by the end of the century, temperatures will have risen seven degrees Fahrenheit, that’s about twice the level that scientists regard as feasible for organized human life. The World Bank describes it as cataclysmic. So what’s their conclusion? Conclusion is we should have no more constraints on automotive emissions. The reasoning is very solid. We’re going off the cliff anyway. So why not have fun? Has anything like that ever appeared in human history? There’s nothing like it.”

Just wow.

Similarly, Trump calls himself a stable genius. Neither of these things are true simply because the person thinks it is. There are other fundamental elements that go into what these things are, and none of them apply to my niece, the president, or sanders. Regardless of how many times they have claimed it. Oh, and North Korea calls themselves a democracy! I'm sure that one's gotta be true cause they said so, and labels carry a lot of weight on determining what is true!

to describe his own political beliefs with a two year old, a deranged and mentally unstable narcissist and a dictatorship led by another delusional crackpot?
Bernie isn't my preferred candidate but I'd say I have much more faith in him than you.

Wouldnt you agree? Or is N. Korea a democracy like they say it is?

If not, then I question what else Bernie has said that you believe, since he is such a reliable source of information to you. Do you believe that he is the best person to beat Trump? If you believe he is a socialist just cause he said, surely you can believe all the other things based on his word, right?

as they were rather to the disadvantage of Bernie. I suppose that as the grown man that he was at that time that he believed what he said he believed. NK is a severe case of propaganda and delusion. Can the same be said about Bernie?

"I question what else Bernie has said that you believe"

As long as it's about the topic I consider him to be truthful. I think he has been consistently right for decades about healthcare. I don't know whether his idea to solve it is the right path, just that he always saw the need to improve it and that it's an honest issue of interest for him.

pie-in-the-sky revolution garbage, his lifetime of attacks against the Democratic party, and his complicity in the election of Donald Trump.

for one millisecond on February 29th of every leap year

but jumping on some plazzy binary-thinking bandwagon that tragically tosses deep investigative reporting into a simplistic bin, all in favour of a saccharine soundbite culture that debases American political discourse into a shallow and tawdry mudfight devoid of most all complex thought. I myself to not want to live in such a zeitgeist, as it leads to 'Idiocracy'-style outcomes and lessens humanity's fight to rise up above the brutal, power-scrum as a whole.

But hey, that is just me......


A Republican Conspiracy Theory About a Biden-in-Ukraine Scandal Has Gone Mainstream. But It Is Not True.

https://theintercept.com/2019/05/10/rumors-joe-biden-scandal-ukraine-absolute-nonsense-reformer-says/

VIRAL RUMORS THAT Joe Biden abused his power as vice president to protect his son’s business interests in Ukraine in 2016, which spread last week from the pro-Trump media ecosystem to the New York Times, are “absolute nonsense,” according to Ukraine’s leading anti-corruption activist. That evaluation is backed by foreign correspondents in Kiev and a former official with knowledge of Biden’s outreach to Ukraine after President Viktor Yanukovych was deposed in a popular uprising in 2014.

In an interview with The Intercept, Daria Kaleniuk, an American-educated lawyer who founded Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Action Center, expressed frustration that two recent front-page stories in the New York Times, on how the conspiracy theory is being used to attack Biden, failed to properly debunk the false accusation. According to Kaleniuk, and a former anti-corruption prosecutor, there is simply no truth to the rumor now spreading like wildfire across the internet. The accusation is that Biden blackmailed Ukraine’s new leaders into firing the country’s chief prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, to derail an investigation he was leading into a Ukrainian gas company that the vice president’s son, Hunter, was paid to advise. The truth, Kaleniuk said, is that Shokin was forced from office at Biden’s urging because he had failed to conduct thorough investigations of corruption, and had stifled efforts to investigate embezzlement and misconduct by public officials following the 2014 uprising.

Properly debunking this particular conspiracy theory is easier said than done, though, since it is set in Ukraine, a country with byzantine political intrigue at the best of times, and these are not the best of times. The rivalries between political factions in Kyiv are so intense that even the country’s new anti-corruption agencies are at each other’s throats. There is no question that Biden did, during a visit to Kyiv in late 2015, threaten to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees unless Shokin was dismissed. But the vice president, who was leading the Obama administration’s effort to fight corruption in Ukraine, did the country a favor by hastening Shokin’s departure, Kaleniuk said, since he had failed to properly investigate corrupt officials.

“Shokin was fired because he attacked the reformers within the prosecutor general’s office,” Kaleniuk said, “reformers who tried to investigate corrupt prosecutors.” As Andrew Kramer explained in the New York Times when Shokin was finally dismissed in 2016, Biden had acted as the point man for a coordinated international effort:

The United States and other Western nations had for months called for the ousting of Mr. Shokin, who was widely criticized for turning a blind eye to corrupt practices and for defending the interests of a venal and entrenched elite. He was one of several political figures in Kiev whom reformers and Western diplomats saw as a worrying indicator of a return to past corrupt practices, two years after a revolution that was supposed to put a stop to self-dealing by those in power. As the problems festered, Kiev drew increasingly sharp criticism from Western diplomats and leaders. In a visit in December, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said corruption was eating Ukraine “like a cancer.” Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, which props up Ukraine financially, said last month that progress was so slow in fighting corruption that “it’s hard to see how the I.M.F.-supported program can continue.”

AndI find his observations to ring true in many ways.

Like being an apologist for Pol Pot, Milosevic, and Gaddafi?

Critically assessing flawed us foreign policy is far from being an apologist to genocidal dictators. Thats a new one to me.

dictators.

But that is not what Chomsky does. He overlooks the mass graves of the Khmer Rouge, or the Srebrenica massacre.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/503863-my-quarrel-with-chomsky-goes-back-to-the-balkan-wars

He like many on the far left takes the anti western side. Even if it means siding with the perpetrators of a genocide.

would not disagree. Which would be difficult for him if he was actually an apologist to these people.

or in other words, it's a day ending in 'y'...

This is the part where I remind everyone for the nth time that St. Bern and his people for all their high-minded talk didn't lift a fucking finger to help us in Virginia in 2017 and they're doing fuck-all to help us now. But you won't find that little tidbit on the pages of the Putincept...

P.S.: Minus five points for Noam still using that tired-ass, worn out "ESTABLISHMENT!!" epithet.

I don’t even have to pay attention anymore to follow him.

smh@Chomsky.

...nails it...he speaks the truth...

"...a progressive, New Deal Democrat, whose policies would not be considered out of the ordinary in the 1950s, not even by Republicans..."

...absolutely true...who could argue with that?


"Has Absolutely Infuriated The Liberal Establishment"

...and this is a bad thing?


...think , love and vote Bernie...

...I'm telling ya, we can do it...

something better, you haven't been very effective.

The point of fighting the "Establishment" is not to get rid of an establishment but to ESTABLISH a new way of doing things. If you've spent your whole career railing against the "Establishment" but after all this time, you haven't been successful in replacing with a new, improved way of doing things, it's kind of hard to argue that you should be put in charge to fix things.

I just don't have a lot of patience for people who are still on the outside yelling about what's happening on the inside while criticizing those who DID manage to get on the inside and are trying to push and pull and change things from within, while people who haven;t been very effective at changing anything stand out on the lawn screaming at them about how they're not doing it right.

Sanders is hardly the only one that hasn't been very effective. i'd like to see a new direction.

Thanks for the thread billpolonsky.

Chomsky was a fellow at the Sanders Institute. They should have to put a value on this piece and enter it as a campaign contribution.

If progressive, means attacking Democrats and pushing the Green Party, the no thank you.

http://www.greenpartywatch.org/2012/03/05/noam-chomsky-endorses-jill-stein-in-ma-presidential-primary/

The Jill Stein for President campaign has confirmed on its facebook page that Noam Chomsky, world-famous linguist and political analyst, has endorsed Dr. Stein in the Massachusetts Green-Rainbow Party primary on Tuesday, March 6th. Here is the text of Chomsky’s public statement:

“Dear friends, I hope you’ll take the opportunity of the March 6th Green-Rainbow primary to cast a vote for resurgent democracy. A democracy that thrives outside of the Democratic and Republican Parties that are sponsored by and subservient to corporate America. And I hope you will consider joining me in supporting Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein – both with your vote and with a contribution to her campaign for people, peace and the planet.As you know, popular anger at the political and economic institutions, and the subordination of the former to the latter, has reached historic heights. And for sound reasons. There could hardly be a better time to open up the political debate to the just anger and frustrations of citizens who are watching the country move towards what might be irreversible decline while a tiny sector of concentrated wealth and power implements policies of benefit to them and opposed by the general population, whom they are casting adrift.

Jill Stein’s campaign is unifying the national Green Party, and ensuring that an urgently needed voice for democracy and justice will have a place on the ballot in the November election. Please join me in supporting Jill on March 6, and securing a voice foe a peaceful, just, green future in the presidential race.”

he did later say the only “rational choice” for swing-state voters is to support Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in the general election.

"I once heard the the linguist and political writer Noam Chomsky say that if you want proof that the American people aren't stupid, just turn on any sports talk radio show and listen to the incredible retention of facts. It is amazing -- and it's proof that the American mind is alive and well. It just isn't challenged with anything interesting or exciting. Our challenge, Chomsky said, was to find a way to make politics as gripping and engaging as sports. When we do that, watch how Americans will do nothing but who did what to whom at the WTO."

Well, here we are at politics being gripping and engaging and interesting and exciting. And? Both-sides-blame-Democrats-bullshit.

Is there a secret handshake?

Because I would like to join.