Page 67 - Šolsko polje, XXVIII, 2017, no. 3-4: Education and the American Dream, ed. Mitja Sardoč
P. 67
p. mclaren ■ from a city on the hill to the dungheap of history
your neighbors. It doesn’t mean the same as the U.S. concept of the Amer-
ican Dream, i.e., making a lot of money, and getting rich so you can com-
pete with Mr. and Mrs. Jones’s family living next door.
What you think is the essence of the American Dream, i.e. what it
stands for?
Well, we need to see how the concept of the American Dream has griev-
ously dropped in status. The status of the American Dream has been ad-
dressed in the recent Chomsky documentary, Requiem for the American
Dream. In this important commentary, Chomsky warns us about the
deeply embedded and generationally persistent racial inequality and op-
pression at the center of the nation’s economic, legal and criminal justice
systems, its surveillance state run by the media, FBI, NSA and those who
oversee the police and control its educational and media systems as part
of the deep state. The school-to-prison pipeline mainly reserved for Af-
rican Americans and Latinos. He talks about unprecedented inequali-
ty, and asserts that democracy is a professed value that isn’t objectively
real, since the government fails to carry out the will of the people. One of
the country’s so-called founding fathers, James Madison, emphasized the
protection of the “opulent of the minority against the majority”—the im-
portance of keeping the power in the hands of the wealthy, whom he con-
sidered the most capable of making economic and political decisions for
the country. The Constitution of the United States was written to protect
the wealthy land owners. The powerful, whose wealth has been concen-
trated to a fraction of one percent of the world’s population, hate the idea
of democracy. Chomsky quotes Adam Smith’s vile maxim: “all for our-
selves and nothing for anyone else.” Smith hoped that generosity would
prevail among the capitalists. Capitalism has metastasized in a way that
enables more profits to be made through betting with the hedge funds
than with actually producing anything of use value. The financialization
of the economy and the offshoring of production has reconstructed the
system of trade so that the exploited workers are now in competition with
the super-exploited. We live in a world in which we are born old, never
having known youth. Our youth today who are forced to take out loans to
pay for their college tuitions carry the weight of a home mortgage by the
time that they graduate.
Capital can move anywhere it wants in the world, but labor is in-
creasingly immobilized. Chomsky quotes Allan Greenspan, chairman
of the Federal Reserve Board, who in 1997 made the following testimo-
ny:
65
your neighbors. It doesn’t mean the same as the U.S. concept of the Amer-
ican Dream, i.e., making a lot of money, and getting rich so you can com-
pete with Mr. and Mrs. Jones’s family living next door.
What you think is the essence of the American Dream, i.e. what it
stands for?
Well, we need to see how the concept of the American Dream has griev-
ously dropped in status. The status of the American Dream has been ad-
dressed in the recent Chomsky documentary, Requiem for the American
Dream. In this important commentary, Chomsky warns us about the
deeply embedded and generationally persistent racial inequality and op-
pression at the center of the nation’s economic, legal and criminal justice
systems, its surveillance state run by the media, FBI, NSA and those who
oversee the police and control its educational and media systems as part
of the deep state. The school-to-prison pipeline mainly reserved for Af-
rican Americans and Latinos. He talks about unprecedented inequali-
ty, and asserts that democracy is a professed value that isn’t objectively
real, since the government fails to carry out the will of the people. One of
the country’s so-called founding fathers, James Madison, emphasized the
protection of the “opulent of the minority against the majority”—the im-
portance of keeping the power in the hands of the wealthy, whom he con-
sidered the most capable of making economic and political decisions for
the country. The Constitution of the United States was written to protect
the wealthy land owners. The powerful, whose wealth has been concen-
trated to a fraction of one percent of the world’s population, hate the idea
of democracy. Chomsky quotes Adam Smith’s vile maxim: “all for our-
selves and nothing for anyone else.” Smith hoped that generosity would
prevail among the capitalists. Capitalism has metastasized in a way that
enables more profits to be made through betting with the hedge funds
than with actually producing anything of use value. The financialization
of the economy and the offshoring of production has reconstructed the
system of trade so that the exploited workers are now in competition with
the super-exploited. We live in a world in which we are born old, never
having known youth. Our youth today who are forced to take out loans to
pay for their college tuitions carry the weight of a home mortgage by the
time that they graduate.
Capital can move anywhere it wants in the world, but labor is in-
creasingly immobilized. Chomsky quotes Allan Greenspan, chairman
of the Federal Reserve Board, who in 1997 made the following testimo-
ny:
65
