Noam Chomsky and the Manufacturing of American Dissent: 2 videos

[Paul Rigby]

Peter Schweizer is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has served as a consultant to NBC News and as a member of the Ultra Terrorism Study Group at the U.S. Government's Sandia National Laboratory. He and his wife, Rochelle Schweizer, wrote The Bushes: Profile of a Dynasty, which theNew York Times called "the best" of the books on the Bush family. His other books include Do as I Say (Not as I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy and Reagan's War: The Epic Story of His Forty-Year Struggle and Final Triumph over Communism.

And who does Schweizer speak for, Paul?

The same people as Chomsky, Jan:

Chomsky, for all of his moral dudgeon against American corporations, finds that they make a pretty good investment. When he made investment decisions for his retirement plan at MIT, he chose not to go with a money market fund or even a government bond fund. Instead, he threw the money into blue chips and invested in the TIAA-CREF stock fund. A look at the stock fund portfolio quickly reveals that it invests in all sorts of businesses that Chomsky says he finds abhorrent: oil companies, military contractors, pharmaceuticals, you name it.

When I asked Chomsky about his investment portfolio he reverted to a “what else can I do?” defense: “Should I live in a cabin in Montana?” he asked. It was a clever rhetorical dodge. Chomsky was declaring that there is simply no way to avoid getting involved in the stock market short of complete withdrawal from the capitalist system. He certainly knows better. There are many alternative funds these days that allow you to invest your money in “green” or “socially responsible” enterprises. They just don’t yield the maximum available return.

The warfare state and related industries. Or are we to believe our canny MIT investor is intent upon doing real damage to his own carefully deliberated investments?

Chief among the many sinister motives I had for introducing Schweizer’s Hoover piece on the sainted Gnome was this one, unquestionably irrational and deeply unfair as it is – to compare the positions adopted by said Gnome in attacking Kennedy in Rethinking Camelot with the interests represented by his (Gnome’s) share portfolio. Shall we begin with the oil lobby?

Pages devoted by Chomsky to the oil industry role in supporting the US invasion of Vietnam: 0

Fact: John McCone, director of CIA on November 22, 1963, was a stock-holder in Standard Oil of California at the time.

For a brilliant analysis of the pressure for escalation from US Big Oil, see Peter Dale Scott, “The Vietnam War and the CIA-Financial Establishment,” pp.125-130 in particular, within Mark Selden (Ed.) Re-making Asia: Essays on the American uses of Power (NY: Pantheon Books, 1974):

“It is worth recalling that when Ngo Dinh Diem visited America in 1957 he began with a luncheon given in his honor by John D. Rockefeller…and ended with a demonstration of oil production in Los Angeles at the plant of General Petroleum, a Socony Mobil subsidiary,” (p.128).

In short, then, there appears to be a direct correlation between the Gnome’s suppression of the oil industry's role in the US invasion of Vietnam, and the interests of his share portfolio.