Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order

by Noam Chomsky

Book Overview

Why is the Atlantic slowly filling with crude petroleum, threatening a millions-of-years-old ecological balance? Why did traders at prominent banks take high-risk gambles with the money entrusted to them by hundreds of thousands of clients around the world, expanding and leveraging their investments to the point that failure led to a global financial crisis that left millions of people jobless and hundreds of cities economically devastated? Why would...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1888363827
• ISBN13: 9781888363821
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Seven Stories Press
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.47 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.2" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

As always, Chomsky is way ahead of the curve.

There is more concentrated political and economic truth in this one slim volume then in any other book that I've ever read. Nowhere is the war against the working class exposed more clearly and accurately. "Free Trade" is the nemesis of true democracy and of the common man. Such a policy only really favors the extremely rich and less than 1000 large global corporations. You won't hear about any of this in the corporate press however, for in the neoliberal democracy all debate is side tracked on trivial issues by two political parties who both basically represent the same corporate masters (kind of like a giant game of good cop/bad cop...) Ever wonder why you and the people around you feel so powerless and alienated in a vast landscape of shopping malls? You didn't think that "just happened" did you? The decades old goal of the powers-that-be has been to atomise American communities into loose conglomerations of "consumers" incapable of organising, or even thinking of organizing. If you want the hard FACTS about corporate rule, then read this book. You see, a corporation isn't merely an "immortal person" under law, they are immortal sociopaths- sociopaths backed and enhanced by state power over and above the interests and votes of the common man. Oh yes, if you want to know how a healthy economy SHOULD function, read _I'll Be Short, Essentials for a Decent Working Society_ by Robert Reich.

Pay Attention or Pay the Price

This book begins with a very fine introduction by Robert McChesney, who defines neoliberalism as an economic paradigm that leaves a small number of private parties in control and able to maximize their profit (at the expense of the people). He goes on to note that a distracted or apathetic or depoliticized public essentially "goes along" with this, resulting in the loss of community and the rise of consumerism.Chomsky himself, over the course of 167 pages, points out the damages of neo-liberalism (public abdicating power to corporations), not just to underdeveloped nations and their peoples, but to the American people themselves, who are suffering, today, from a fifteen year decline in education, health, and increased inequality between the richest and the poorest.Over the course of several chapters, he discusses various U.S. policies, including the U.S. policy of using "security" as a pretext for subsidizing the transfer of taxpayer funds to major arms dealers. The declaration of Cuba as a threat to U.S. national security is one that Mexico could not support--as one of their diplomats explained at the time: "if we publicly declare that Cuba is a threat to our security, forty million Mexicans will die laughing."At the end of it all, Chomsky comes down to the simple matter of protecting both civilization and the civilians from their own governments in cahoots with corporations. His observations on the deaths by disease, starvation, and so on, at the same time that billions are being spent on arms which perpetuate the cycles of violence, are relevant. So also are his observations on the dramatic increase in both the extent and the damages caused by increasingly unregulated financial markets. He singles out the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) as an especially pernicious organization whose machinations are invisible to the public and harmful as well.I note with interest a review of this book that seeks to call Chomsky a liar, uninformed, and a laughingstock among "serious" scholars. I wish to address that point of view kindly. I can understand, when scholarship consists largely of going through the motions, reading a limited number of works, and answering by rote with the prescribed thought, how so many of our allegedly educated people in business and government are simply socially tuned in. I have myself come to the conclusion that Washington runs on 2% of the available international information (and is largely witless about the 75% or so that is in foreign languages), and I also agree with Howard Bloom's observation in "Global Brain,", to wit, that half one's brain cells are killed off by the time one is an adult, due to normal biological adjustments to accommodate the prescribed social, cultural, and intellectual parameters that are demanded if one is to "get along." In that light, I view Chomsky as one of our more important vaccinations against premature stupidity among our loosely-educated adult policymakers. For myself, wit

The best way to participate in democracy is to read Chomsky

A great thing about this book is that one can start anywhere. It's a collection of essays that can be read in any order. What's particularly insightful and chilling is the look at East Timor: we learn the reasons for what's going on in an essay that was written before the conflict became international news.

It'll make you think and it'll make you act

This isn't the type of reporting you want to hear, but it is the type of reporting you must hear if you believe in the democratic ideals this country was founded upon. Some might find something wrong with whistleblowing, but if you don't and you're not afraid to confront some disturbing truths, then grab this book and read it and think about how you can change this world. There must be something seriously disturbing in Chomsky's writing to the right wing to provoke such truth twisting and distortion in order to attempt to discredit Chomsky. If you want to know what they're afraid of, read this book (or any of Dr. Chomsky's other books, for that matter!

The most lucid and compelling Chomsky book to date

Of the nearly dozen books by Noam Chomsky I have read, Profit compelling book to date. It clearly and convincingly destroys most neoliberal arguments with historical and current examples and citations. Chomsky's well developed arguments also plainly point out the absurd hypocrisy of neoliberal and "new" right ideologies that grip much of the English speaking world