July 26, 2020
Millions of people in the U.S. are losing their jobs and facing possible evictions due to the economic crisis caused by the pandemic. Meanwhile, the wealth of 1% of the country’s population has increased dramatically. Among the beneficiaries is Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and the richest person in the world, who has just increased his wealth by an estimated thirteen billion dollars net in a single day.
Noam Chomsky talked about this and other issues with Amy Goodman, on Democracy Now and said that the windfall profit of companies is further proof that the United States is run “essentially by the business sector” for its own profits. “They’re simply getting out of control.”
Chomsky details that “the U.S. is a country run essentially by the corporate sector, which has an overwhelming influence on government and which is represented by the richest man in the world: Jeff Bezos, who made $13 billion in a single day.
“They’re going crazy, using Trump and his administration or using the pandemic coverage to enrich the very rich and the corporate sector that, of course, are eating it up. They love him,” says the intellectual.
The linguist also states that “the military industry is another example of this. It is a last effort to try to impose the maximum rule of extreme wealth and corporate power that runs parallel to Mitch McConnell-Trump’s campaign to pack the judiciary from top to bottom with young right-wing lawyers from the Federalist Society who will be able to make sure that it doesn’t matter what the public wants, as long as their ultra-reactionary policies are implemented for at least a generation.”
“They try to maintain what they have achieved to a large extent through the neoliberal period, the last 40 years: a huge concentration of wealth, concentration of political power, a stagnant, declining general population, even to the point where there is an increase in mortality in recent years among people of working age, white men and women of working age. None of this happens in functioning developed societies,” says Chomsky.
“The country has basically been for a long time a one-party state, the business party,” he says.
Source: Contraformacion, translated by Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau