Straight Talk From Chomsky

Democracy Now! has transcript of a speech from leading US dissdent Noam Chomsky: "U.S. Might Face Ultimate Nightmare in Middle East Where Shiites Control Most of World's Oil".

I recommend you read the whole talk (audio and video also available). Here are some key points:

"Old Europe, bad guys, were the country as where the governments took the same position as the large majority of their population. New Europe were the countries like Spain where the government overruled even larger majorities of their population -- huge ones in the case of Spain and Italy -- and followed orders from Crawford, Texas...

What followed were really serious outright war crimes. We have just seen one in the last few months: the invasion of Fallujah. In this case, the crimes were not concealed, which may be worse than passing them over in silence. They were openly reported, and then, in fact, proudly reported. You could see on the front page of the New York Times a big picture of the first victory in the conquest of Fallujah. The first target was the Fallujah General Hospital, and the Times featured a big picture on the front page of a soldier standing guard over people lying on the floor in hospital gowns with their hands tied behind their backs. The story explained that the American forces that went in forced patients from their beds, forced them to lie on the floor, and manacled them with their hands behind their backs. The story went on to say that this had had to be done because the Fallujah General Hospital was serving as a propaganda weapon for the insurgents by releasing casualty figures...

Clinton's policy was control of space for military purposes. The new announced policy was ownership of space for military purposes. Meaning, as they said, the possibility of instant engagement anywhere, with highly lethal offensive weapons, which can strike anywhere on earth without warning. The whole world is under surveillance by sophisticated satellite and other systems. Sophisticated enough that they can tell if a truck is crossing a street in Damascus or any other place that you pick. So, the world is at constant risk of instant destruction. That's ownership of space, and that's a natural spelling out of the national security strategy. This also was, as far as I know, not reported at all. Certainly not much. The -- a lot of this is called missile defense, but as everyone knows on every side, missile defense is not a defensive system, it's a first strike weapon...

... recently, though it wasn't reported here, there were negotiations with Australia to establish what's called a free trade agreement. Nothing to do with free trade and certainly not an agreement, but that’s what those things are called. But the negotiations were held up for some time because the United States was objecting to Australia's highly efficient health care system, maybe the most efficient in the world. The prices of drugs are a fraction of what they are in the United States. Very same drug produced by the same corporation, which makes a ton of money in Australia, but makes maybe ten times that much for the same drug here. Why was the U.S. objecting to the Australian system? Well, because the Australian system is evidence-based. It's the phrase that was used. That means if a pharmaceutical corporation wants to advertise, you know, by showing sports heroes saying, you know, ask your doctor if this drug is good for you, it's good for me, or something like that, often not even telling you what it is, they're not allowed to do that. They have to provide evidence that the drug actually does something, that it is better than some cheaper thing that's already on the market. That evidence-based approach, the U.S. negotiators argued, is interference with free markets, because corporations must have the right to deceive. "