Hopes and Prospects Quotes

“The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy.”
― Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects

“Among the many reasons for regarding the fabled American exceptionalism with some skepticism is that the doctrine appears to be close to a historical universal, including the worst monsters: Hitler, Stalin, the conquistadors; it is hard to find an exception. Aggression and terror are almost invariably portrayed as self-defense and dedication to inspiring visions.”
― Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects

“Control of Latin America was the earliest goal of US foreign policy and remains a central one partly for resources and markets but also for broader ideological reasons. If the United States could not control Latin America it could not expect to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world”
― Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects

“In theory, inherent market inefficiencies and perverse incentives could be overcome by efficient regulation. But the same deep-seated tendencies that concentrate wealth and power in private tyrannies reduce the likelihood of such steps. In late 2009 there seemed to be one faint hope that Congress might institute some meaningful regulation: proposals by Senator Christopher Dodd, chair of the Senate Banking Committee. But Dodd succumbed to Wall Street pressure and abandoned his proposal in December 2009. One of its components was a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency intended to “crack down on abusive and risky lending practices that helped fuel last year’s financial crisis,” Michael Kranish commented in a rare press report. “Banks and other financial institutions have fought hard to kill the proposal,” he adds. And succeeded. He quotes Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard Law professor who originated the idea for the agency: “When all the dust settles, the real question for the history books will be whether Congress was able to create an independent consumer agency with the tools necessary to end abusive practices and to prevent future crises.” The answer appears to be a loud no, in our business-run democracy.”
― Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects

“After the bursting of the housing bubble in 2007, Fed chairman Alan Greenspan was criticized because he hadn’t followed through on his brief warning about “irrational exuberance” at the height of the late ’90s tech bubble. But that is the wrong criticism: it was quite rational exuberance, when the taxpayer is there to bail you out under the operative principles of state capitalism. The doctrine has been observed with precision by Obama and his advisers—selected from the leading figures who were largely responsible for creating the crisis, while excluding those, among them Nobel laureates, who had been issuing warnings about it. And the doctrine appears to have worked very well. The big financial institutions that were the immediate culprits have been making out like bandits, bigger than ever, reporting great profits and paying huge bonuses to the culprits, enjoying even a more lavish government insurance policy, and therefore encouraged to set the stage for the next and worse crisis. That is recognized, but the managers who play by the rules cannot really be criticized. These are institutional decisions. Managers either play the game, or someone else replaces them who will.”
― Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects

“For the world, there are many very serious crises, such as the food crisis, already mentioned, or the environmental crisis, which threatens real catastrophe for everyone. But for the West in 2008–9, the phrase “the crisis” refers unambiguously to the financial crisis that has its deeper roots in inherent market inefficiencies, neoliberal doctrines about the alleged value of financial liberalization, dogmas about “efficient markets” and “rational expectations,” deregulation, exotic financial instruments that yielded profits beyond the dreams of avarice for a few—all brought to a head by an $8 trillion housing bubble that somehow regulators and economists did not perceive, portending ultimate disaster, as a few warned all along, notably economist Dean Baker.”
― Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects

“The best guide I know of is political economist Thomas Ferguson’s “investment theory of politics,” mentioned above, the thesis that to a good first approximation, we can understand elections to be occasions in which groups of investors coalesce to control the state, a very good predictor of policy over a long period, as he shows. For 2008, we would therefore anticipate that the interests of the financial industries, the major funders (who preferred Obama to McCain), would be “most peculiarly attended to” by government policy, in accord with Adam Smith’s maxim. And so we find.”
― Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects

“When crises hit the South, the masters of the international economy turn to the IMF solution. The costs are transferred to the public, which had nothing to do with the risky choices but is now compelled to pay the costs: the poor countries are instructed to raise interest rates, slow the economy, pay their debts (to the rich), privatize (so that the Western corporations can buy their assets), and suffer. The instructions for the rich are virtually the opposite: lower interest rates, stimulate the economy, forget about debts, consume, have the government take over (but don’t “nationalize”—the takeover is a temporary measure to hand it back to the owners in better shape). And the public has almost no voice in determining these outcomes, any more than poor peasants have a voice in being subjected to cruel structural adjustment programs.”
― Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects

“After the predicted disaster occurred, an “emerging consensus” developed among economists “on the need for macroprudential supervision” of financial markets, that is, “paying attention to the stability of the financial system as a whole and not just its individual parts.” Two prominent international economists added that “there is growing recognition that our financial system is running a doomsday cycle. Whenever it fails, we rely on lax money and fiscal policies to bail it out. This response teaches the financial sector: take large gambles to get paid handsomely, and don’t worry about the costs—they will be paid by taxpayers” through bailouts and lost jobs, and the financial system “is thus resurrected to gamble again—and to fail again.” The system is a “doom loop,” in the words of the official of the Bank of England responsible for financial stability.”
― Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects

“In general, markets have well-known inefficiencies. One is that transactions do not take into account the effect on others who are not party to them. These so-called externalities can be huge. That is particularly so in the case of financial institutions. Their task is to take risks, and if well managed, to ensure that potential losses to themselves will be covered. To themselves. Under capitalist rules, it is not their business to consider the cost to others. Risk is underpriced, because systemic risk is not priced into decisions. That leads to repeated crisis, naturally. This inherent deficiency of markets is well known.”
― Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects

“The designers of the international economy sternly demand that the poor accept market discipline, but they ensure that they themselves are protected from its ravages, a useful arrangement that goes back to the origins of modern industrial capitalism and played a large role in dividing the world into rich and poor societies, the first and third worlds.”
― Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects

“Under the rules of the Western-run international economy, investors make loans to third world tyrannies, and since the loans carry considerable risk, make high profits. Suppose the borrower defaults. In a capitalist economy, the lenders would incur the loss. But existing capitalism really functions quite differently. If the borrowers cannot pay the debts, then the IMF steps in to guarantee that lenders and investors are protected. The debt is transferred to the poor population of the debtor country, who never borrowed the money in the first place and gained little if anything from it. The method is called “structural adjustment.” And taxpayers in the rich country, who also gained nothing from the loans, sustain the IMF through their taxes. These doctrines do not derive from economic theory; they merely reflect the distribution of decision-making power.”
― Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects

“A more general conclusion is that markets may more or less work for a while, but unless sharply constrained they almost necessarily lead to disaster. And constraints are unlikely when major media are often adjuncts of business, the government is largely in its pocket, and the general public is marginalized in one way or another, and susceptible to manipulation.”
― Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects

“James Madison framed the constitutional order so that power would be in the hands of the Senate, which represents “the wealth of the nation,” the “more capable sett of men,” who have respect for property owners and their rights and understand the need for government “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority”—though it was not long before he came to deplore “the daring depravity of the times,” as the “stockjobbers will become the pretorian band of the government—at once its tools and its tyrant; bribed by its largesses, and overawing it by clamors and combinations” (1792).”
― Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects

“[...] torture has been routine practice from the early days of the conquest of the national territory, and then beyond, as the imperial ventures of the infant empire—as George Washington called the new Republic—extended to the Philippines, Haiti, and elsewhere. Furthermore, torture was the least of the many crimes of aggression, terror, subversion, and economic strangulation that have darkened US history, much as in the case of other great powers. Accordingly, it is surprising to see the reactions even by some of the most eloquent and forthright critics of Bush malfeasance: for example, that we used to be a nation of moral ideals and never before Bush have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. To say the least, that common view reflects a rather slanted version of history.”
― Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects

“Colombia has had by far the worst human rights record in the hemisphere since the Central American wars of the 1980's wound down. The correlation between US aid and human rights violations has long been noted by scholarship.”
― Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects