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Feedback from September 2 and Beyond

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High and Dry
Climate change seems to have made the climate much less predictable. If precipitation in the Western United States over the next three years is 60% of normal, what will the consequences be? How about 40%, or 15%, of normal? Can't happen? We don't know that.

Why are people moving to St George and Las Vegas (or Salt Lake!) when there is no water? If you turn the tap and nothing comes out, you might be compelled to tie a mattress atop your car and head back east, abandoning your now-worthless house.

What if 40 million people do this? Is anyone examining these possibilities? If not, why not?
JOHN BURTON
Magna

Sham Government?
Linguist Noam Chomsky is known for mincing no words about the corruptions of political power. Yet when asked whether "government of the people, by the people, for the people is just a sham" at the end of an interview by John Roberts for CounterPunch (Aug. 27), Chomsky insists that it is only "if we let it be," and that Americans could instead "choose to exercise" their ability to turn their nation into a "cooperative commonwealth."

This is at odds with Chomsky's preceding replies, which detail how the United States wages war in ways that not only contradict popular opinion but violate its own laws. Chomsky's 1973 book For Reasons of State took its title from a passage by Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin about how "the State is the organized authority, domination and power of the possessing classes over the masses."

Chomsky holding out hope in 2021 that the people can and should "take the reins of government into their own hands" likewise ignores Bakunin's observation that the state's use of force necessarily "shatters the universal solidarity of all men on the earth, and brings some of them into association only for the purpose of destroying, conquering and enslaving all the rest."

Chomsky himself documented in Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship how the "organs of power and administration remained separate from the central Republican government" in the social movements fighting the fascist seizure of power during the Spanish Civil War, yet he reinforces what Larry Gambone calls "the myth of socialism as statism," the very conflation of popular and political power for which Chomsky famously took mainstream historians to task.

Modern-day popular movements seeking an end to social warfare could do well to rediscover the forms of voluntary socialist organization noted by Chomsky and Gambone. They should also revive Bakunin's vigilance against the "bold plunder" and "shabby betrayal that [is] daily being perpetrated by the representatives of the states."
JOEL SCHLOSBERG
The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism

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