Quote of the day

Noam Chomsky recently identified Barack Obama and Mitt Romney as “cowards.” The reason:

With the quadrennial presidential election extravaganza reaching its peak, it’s useful to ask how the political campaigns are dealing with the most crucial issues we face. The simple answer is: badly, or not at all. If so, some important questions arise: why, and what can we do about it?

There are two issues of overwhelming significance, because the fate of the species is at stake: environmental disaster, and nuclear war.

To be sure, neither candidate nor their parties want to take decisive action to resolve these two problems. In fact, both candidates and their respective parties wish to make matters worse. Both support the barely regulated exploitation of the world’s resources and both are civilian militarists who have never committed themselves to ridding the world of nuclear weapons and certain not to fostering a cosmopolitan peace throughout the world. They wish not to learn from recent history. By doing so they will not foster the reappearance of a past disaster or three but will, on the one hand, augment the global rush to a new environmental disaster of global scope and, on the other hand, refuse to retard the use of military means to solve political and social problems.

Chomsky could have added the looming disasters to be created by the global economic system.

Hell awaits us

Related articles

• Noam Chomsky: If I were in a swing state, I’d vote for Obama (rawstory.com)
• An Interview With Noam Chomsky (counterpunch.org)
• Noam Chomsky: Israel is a pretty crazy state. The U.S. is just a rogue state (sabbah.biz)
• Noam Chomsky: Why America and Israel Are the Greatest Threats to Peace (3quarksdaily.com)
• Noam Chomsky: The Emerging World Order: Its Roots, Our Legacy (womensphilanthropy.typepad.com)