You’d be hard-pressed to name a public intellectual as incisive as Chomsky.  Here’s a new interview where he discusses the future of labor in the US.

Some sample quotes, this one on power:

First of all, don’t believe anything you hear from power systems. So if Obama or the boss or the newspapers or anyone else tells you they’re doing this, that, or the other thing, dismiss it or assume the opposite is true, which it often is.

On right-wing radio:

If you look at those people and listen to them on talk radio, these are people with real grievances. I listen to talk radio a lot and it’s kind of interesting. If you can sort of suspend your knowledge of the world and just enter into the world of the people who are calling in, you can understand them. I’ve never seen a study, but my sense is that these are people who feel really aggrieved. These people think, “I’ve done everything right all my life, I’m a god-fearing Christian, I’m white, I’m male, I’ve worked hard, and I carry a gun. I do everything I’m supposed to do. And I’m getting shafted.” And in fact they are getting shafted

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/23178

Change we can believe in.  That’s what most of the country was sold on.  Sold on “hope”.  What a great drug.

Of course, nothing at all like the messages offered in 1992.  Here’s Bill Clinton offering his promise of change:

What’s there to say? It’s not enough to say Obama’s doing all he can. The short answer is that he’s answering to his most powerful critics — the banks, the elite, the people with money. The long answer is that everyone else doesn’t care enough to hold him and Congress accountable to what’s going on in this country: namely, the gradual impoverishment of many for the benefit of the few.

Let’s put it this way: jobs are impossible to find, more Americans are going hungry than ever before, and now Obama is talking about a “double-dip” recession.

And on the Republican side, all we hear about is Sarah Palin.  This is democracy — the educated but captive soldier of the banks on the one side; and the clown on the other.

Change we can believe in:  a motto for something very different.  Something local, something powerful, something really meaningful.  Whatever it’s shape, it will need to be positive.  There is too much greed running the country into the ground as it is.