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The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change

por Noam Chomsky

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InThe Precipice, Noam Chomsky sheds light into the phenomenon of Trumpism, exposes the catastrophic nature and impact of Trump's policies on people, the environment, and the planet as a whole, and captures the dynamics of the brutal class warfare launched by the masters of capital to maintain and even enhance the features of a dog-eat-dog society to the unprecedented mobilization of millions of people against neoliberal capitalism, racism, and police violence/… (mais)
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Chomsky, the guru of libertarian socialism, considers the greatest threats facing humanity to be nuclear war, the environment/climate crisis, and the decline of democracy. This book seems to be a collection of his writings during the malevolent and disastrous presidency of the narcissistic buffoon with initials DJT. One thing he does is to clarify through repetition that the DJT regime's subservience to extreme private wealth and corporate power is a hallmark of the 40-year-old era of neoliberalism (unfettered capitalism) launched by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The latter's "Government is the problem not the solution" dictum was deeply mistaken, and his party has become an existential danger to the world.
  fpagan | Dec 26, 2022 |
A disappointing series of off-the-cuff interviews with Chomsky during the Trump years as he reacts to unfolding events...by now, old news. No real depth, only a few Chomsky gems. For die-hard Chomsky fans only.
  Iacobus | Sep 26, 2022 |
I expected much from this book and went into it with much enthusiasm. However, rather than exploring Noam Chomsky's views on neo-liberalism, the interviewer explored his views on Donald Trump. This is what I read from the book.
The book, to me, read like one long diatribe against Donald Trump. This was entertaining for the first 15% of the book, then it became repetitive.
Not one of his best publications. ( )
  RajivC | May 24, 2022 |
My full review is found here.

***

The title for this book is no exaggeration: we are standing at *the* precipice in our time, the tipping point where we decide the fate of humanity.

This book is a collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky, linguist, political dissident, and intellectual extraordinaire. Chomsky has been phenomenally outstanding in each of those fields for decades, and now, in his nineties, he is yet again proving that he is not slowing down in the least.

The most topical subjects discussed in this book are the most urgent ones:

- The climate catastrophe.
- Neoliberalism and Republicans.
- What can be done/optimism.

Chomsky carries so much intellectual heft that he could be regarded as daunting if it weren't for his clear and brief conversation about complex matters. He is expert at unfurling his thoughts by using simply-understood sentences.

One of the most appropriate comments I've seen on Trump's foreign policy appeared in an article in the New Republic written by David Roth, the editor of a sports blog: “The spectacle of expert analysts and thought leaders parsing the actions of a man with no expertise or capacity for analysis is the purest acid satire - but less because of how badly that expert analysis has failed than because of how sincerely misplaced it is...there is nothing here to parse, no hidden meanings or tactical elisions or slow-rolled strategic campaign."


Chomsky's method of answering questions should be a lodestar and template for intellectuals: simple and easily understandable sentences that quickly nail down what the speaker means. True to fashion, Chomsky doesn't simply answer questions but makes matters slightly more contextual by providing history and clarity. There is nobody else that I know of, who does this as expertly as Chomsky. ( )
  pivic | Jun 30, 2021 |
There’s a lot more of Noam Chomsky these days, a lot of which has to do with the Trump regime. But in Precipice, Truthout journalist CJ Polychroniou has stitched together four years of interviews with Chomsky, making the book a huge and definitive Told You So. Chomsky was on the case, and his perceptions, criticisms and cautions were spot on right at the time. From the election to the refusal to leave the White House, Chomsky has insights to offer, as they happened. No hindsight involved.

The book starts at the end of the term, with Trump out of office, and moves backward to end in 2016. It is interesting, because as strident as Chomsky is on the subject today, he seems to have been even more astringent at the very beginning. He had no problem seeing it all for what it was. His usual clear thinking, wide-ranging research and assimilation of the greater picture are very much center stage in this book.

He is more than a little upset. It seems that after 75 years of preaching to ever greater audiences around the world (he is by far the most famous American intellectual in the world. There basically is no other), society is far worse off today than it was when he began, as a teenager in the Second World War era. He is beside himself over Global Warming (no matter what anyone calls it), “the greatest existential threat to mankind,” which has built itself into this monster threat precisely during his lifetime. Readers will feel his frustration in having to talk about anything else, because it will pale in comparison to climate.

He cites a New York Times article showing the “perpetual low ranking among voters, even among Democratic voters” of the environment as an issue. “The article failed to add that this assessment is an incredible indictment of the country and its political, social, economic and media institutions, all of which, so the assessment claims, have sunk to such a level of depravity that the question of whether organized human society can survive in any minimally tolerable form, in the near future, is of little consequence.”

Chomsky is horrified as well by the decline of democracy, worldwide, but particularly in the USA. He says: “If the US were to apply for membership in the European Union today, it would probably be rejected.” He cites things like the” absurd” Senate, where Wyoming, with just half a million residents, has the same representation as California, with 40 million. There’s also the Electoral College farce, and the constant beatings democracy takes from gerrymandering, voting restrictions and way too much money buying influence.

His third fear is nuclear war. Numerous times over the four years of interviews, he cites the Doomsday Clock, now less than two minutes to midnight, and switching from minutes to seconds as it runs out of time. Between Obama spending hundreds of billions to upgrade the nuclear arsenal and Trump cancelling nuclear reduction and inspection treaties with Russia and Iran, he sees a nuclear conflagration as highly possible.

But despite these fears being well worth exploring, the theme here is Donald Trump. Polychroniou asks the questions of the day, and Chomsky fires away: “The very fact that someone could be considered a serious candidate after having killed…hundreds of thousands of Americans through a disastrous response to COIVD-19 is an extraordinary victory for Trump, and a defeat for the country.”

Much earlier, on Trump’s fascism: “Fascism is too sophisticated a doctrine for him to grasp… (His administration) more resembles a tin-pot dictatorship.”

And in summary: “Trump’s dedication to destroy human life for the sake of short-term profit for his constituency is by far the worst of his crimes.”

As usual, Chomsky has dug deeper than anyone. On American healthcare, he found a 2008 study where he says: “Reducing administrative costs of the US healthcare system to Canadian levels would save at least $209 billon (a year) – enough to fund universal healthcare in the USA.

Another study shows Americans with stress levels higher than even Venezuelans. American stress levels are nearly the highest of 143 nations in the study, a good 20 percentage points above average. Deaths of despair run to about 150,000 a year in the country, contributing to a reduction in life expectancy “unprecedented in developed societies,” he says. Early on, in an interview about Trump’s first hundred days in office, he says “All of this resonates with at least parts of a society that has long been the safest and most terrified in the world.”

On China, he sums up the trade issues as: “The US is concerned with Chinese growth and is seeking (pretty openly) to impede it – not a very attractive policy stance.”

There are problems with the book (but nothing to do with Chomsky). Polychroniou has not assigned dates to any of the 37 chapters (or chapter numbers for that matter). You have to figure out that the timeline is going backwards, assuming it is a timeline. You have to guess at about when they took place from clues in the conversation with mentions of names or events (first hundred days, Mulvaney appointment, midterm elections, Mueller investigation, and so on).

And it is sloppy. One interview gets reprinted verbatim a second time later on. That’s bad enough, but which one is in the wrong place in the timeline?

Worst of all to me is the criminal lack of editing. Chomsky has a tendency to employ key phrases and facts repeatedly. This makes sense when you consider how many and how many different ways he has to tell a story in answer to a question. So he has talking points. But if you interview him constantly over four years, the same words, phrases and sentences will appear again and again. They need to be edited down.

I don’t know many times he cites Joseph Stiglitz for calling Trump’s tax reduction The Political Donor Relief Act. Or how many times he cites the study of the healthcare costs in the USA compared to Canada. Or the business of the Doomsday Clock being less than two minutes to midnight. Or Republicans with a platform so extreme they can never run on it. They have to raise side issues instead. That Republicans are so extreme they are now to the right of every right wing party in the world. Or how Europe would reject a US application to join them. Or how as a child, he listened to Hitler live on the radio, and though he couldn’t understand the words, he could tell evil would come of them. Over and over again.

I think there’s more than a dozen of these memes that get replayed endlessly throughout. It is painfully different from say Understanding Power which I reviewed about 15 years ago. That’s a 400 page book with 600 pages of footnotes that tell their own stories, but it was so well edited, it flowed as a constant stream on new and penetrating ideas and facts. And I praised it as much for its editing as anything else. The editing made the book. Not so with Precipice, seemingly devoid of editing altogether.

One of the great things about Chomsky’s analysis is how he sees everything as a puzzle piece. While readers might remember a news item, Chomsky will not only remember it, but place it in a context where he can show it made the subject far worse, or intractable, took it down to a new level, or made it all understandable. For Chomsky, clues hide in plain sight. All you have to do it is look at them differently. Precipice shows this, but readers will have to work for it.

David Wineberg ( )
4 vote DavidWineberg | May 10, 2021 |
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InThe Precipice, Noam Chomsky sheds light into the phenomenon of Trumpism, exposes the catastrophic nature and impact of Trump's policies on people, the environment, and the planet as a whole, and captures the dynamics of the brutal class warfare launched by the masters of capital to maintain and even enhance the features of a dog-eat-dog society to the unprecedented mobilization of millions of people against neoliberal capitalism, racism, and police violence/

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