Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

WOMAN: Then is the basic goal of the United States when it intervenes in Third World countries to destroy left-wing governments in order to keep them from power? No, the primary concern is to prevent independence, regardless of the ideology. Remember, we’re the global power, so we have to make sure that all the various parts of the world continue serving their assigned functions in our global system. And the assigned functions of Third World countries are to be markets for American business, sources of resources for American business, to provide cheap labor for American business, and so on. I mean, there’s no big secret about that—the media won’t tell you and scholarship won’t tell you, but all you have to do is look at declassified government documents and this is all explained very frankly and explicitly.