Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

not telling you anything new when I tell you that top editors, top government officials, and major businessmen have meetings together—of course. And not only do they have meetings, they belong to the same golf clubs, they go to the same parties, they went to the same schools, they flow up and back from one position to another in the government and private sector, and so on and so forth. In other words, they represent the same social class: they’d be crazy if they didn’t communicate and plan with each other. So of course the Board of Directors of General Motors plans, the same way the National Security Council plans, and the National Association of Manufacturers’ P.R. agencies plan. I mean, this was a truism to Adam Smith: if you read Adam Smith [classical economist], he says that every time two businessmen get together in a room, you can be sure there’s some plan being cooked up which is going to harm the public. Yeah, how could it be otherwise? And there’s nothing particularly new about this—as Smith pointed out over two hundred years ago, the “masters of mankind,” as he called them, will do what they have to in order to follow “the vile maxim”: “all for ourselves and nothing for anyone else.”