Noam Chomsky Slams America’s Selfish Ayn Randian Elites

Chomsky explains how elites’ obsession with short-term personal gain threatens humanity.

In an interview broadcast on Al Jazeera English, Noam Chomsky argues that people who have the most privilege owe the most to society. “The more privilege you have the more responsibility you have,” says Chomsky, “It’s elementary.”

Asked why the opposite seems to be true in America, where many wealthy people refuse to give up their time or money to help those in need, Chomsky replies that the lack of public responsibility among many elites makes sense; after all, if you’ve devoted your life to enriching yourself and wealth is what you value the most, you don’t care as much about other people. But it goes beyond that, argues Chomsky. “It’s also institutional. In its more pathological form, it’s Ayn Rand ideology: ‘I just don’t care about anyone else. I’m only interested in benefiting myself. That’s good and noble.”

Imran Khan – hollow hoopla and the Evil Quad

VIEW: Imran’s inane ideas – By Elf Habib

Excerpt;

….. His elixir to cure the police, patwari (land record officer) and court cultures was equally naive. Representative sheriffs could mean even more mistrust and vengeance among the local clans. In our society, the lack of tolerance and a dignified deference to the rights and authority of a winner through a democratic election are vividly exemplified not only by Imran’s own continuous and cantankerous confrontation but also by the excessively inflated Sharifs. The local government system has not yet effectively evolved even at the district level and extending it to the thanas (police stations) would further erode their impartiality at the initial routine cognizance and investigation steps. The patwari culture is already being phased out through computerisation while his assertions to stop the ‘sale of justice’ in the courts was contradictory to the claims of an independent judiciary as the responsibility of inefficiency and corruption in the lower judicial tiers evidently rests with its higher tiers. The rest of his address was merely a volley of threats to stir further discord and disturbance, including a movement of civil disobedience. Imran Khan’s speech failed to present any vision or viable new option that the masses, mauled by inflation, inadequate income and amenities, so anxiously yearned for. There is of course an evident new option to save Pakistan by making the people the real pivot of state policies, shedding the decades-old obsession to match the military might of a far larger neighbour, seeking strategic depth in alien lands through proxy demons and neutering all shades of terrorism through a sincere and active coordination with the international fraternity. It involves an extensive and symbiotic interaction with the advanced world to acquire excellence in engineering, science, technology, manufacturing, marketing and social welfare imperatives. But leaders like Imran Khan, invariably perceived to have been propped up by the establishment to keep the PPP and the PML-N players in proper allegiance, would perhaps never strive for this option.

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Baluchistan is a colony as East Pakistan was!

– Callous indifference – by Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur

The states in general are obsessed with their sham ideologies or at times enticed by multi-nationals and lending bodies forget that the people are of primary importance. This obsession is so strong that even parties ideologically committed to peoples’ rights and welfare become anti-people

The Pakistani state’s ‘abduct and dump’ policy in Balochistan continues as viciously as ever and the recent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) report was a lot of water off duck’s back. Those who put no premium on human lives exhibit callous indifference and care not a whit for reports. This newspaper reported on the July 5 that bodies Zubair Baloch and Hafeez Baloch abducted a few months back were recovered and one Khalid Haji Hatim abducted by security personnel. On the July 7, it reported that bodies found from Turbat, Khuzdar and Gwadar included that of Hanif Baloch, a former president of BSO-Azad (Pasni zone), kidnapped from Hub two days before, and Azam, Rahim and Qadir Baloch. …

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