MICHEL CHOSSUDOVSKY ON THE OWS MOVEMENT & THE LIBYAN WAR |
| by Potent News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fLDkilPSEs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtgM7eLdRRI&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z63jeEusOsU&feature=related (Transcribed from the videos by Tara Carreon, American Buddha Online Librarian) [Potent News] We're here with Michel Chossudovsky, and we're having a little chat. I believe we were talking about, basically, the protests that are happening here that were started up by the Adbusters initially. I've got a couple of questions. Are you encouraged by what you see happening with the protests? [Michel Chossudovsky] Well, I'm encouraged by the fact that people across the United States and Canada are rising up against an economic and political agenda. And they are the victims of the neo-liberal agenda. I'm not encouraged by the way this Occupy Wall Street movement is proceeding, because it was initiated by a couple of organizations: Adbusters, which is a magazine in Vancouver, and the other one was Anonymous, a social media hactivist website, which does not reveal its identity in any way. I think the problem is that these promoters of the Occupy Wall Street movement have been actively planning a whole network of activities across America with social media, websites, and so on, for several months. In fact, the Occupy Wall Street website was launched back in, I think, in July. We don't know who these people are. When we go to their websites, there's no contact information. We don't know who the leaders are. These are shadow leaders. Now what's coming out of the Movement is, "We don't need leaders; we are the leaders." But in effect, any organization that challenges Wall Street, and wants to yield some form of concrete results, has to have a very solid organizational structure. You don't go and fight against Wall Street, because Wall Street is organized. Wall Street is a whole structure: institutions, banks, insurance companies, linked up to intelligence, and then linked up to the U.S. government. So if you want to change the tide, you have to organize, and you have to organize in a very solid way. You have to have a program. You can't just have a program that says, "Please Mr. Bush, or Mr. Obama, or whoever happens to be in power, could you be more gentle, have less wars, could you tax the rich?" You don't demand of a system which is in crisis, and should be replaced and reformed, you don't ask the leaders to act on your behalf. That's rule no. 1. Those leaders have to be unseated because they are the problem. They are not the solution. And it's no use presenting a shopping list of demands, and then submitting it to the U.S. government, or to Wall Street, or to Warren Buffett. Now, what troubles me in this Movement is that there is a covert element with organizations such as Anonymous and Adbusters, as well as the main websites. Who is behind it? Who is financing it? I recall that immediately when the Movement got going, that several prominent personalities came to the support of Occupy Wall Street. And these were people like Warren Buffett, Howard Buffett, Ben Bernanke, and Al Gore. Now these people, from my standpoint, do not constitute the solution to the crisis, they are the cause. They are the actors behind this crisis. Warren Buffet is the third richest man on planet earth, and his sympathy for the Movement should be viewed with some suspicion. That's the way I see it. |
