Noam Chomsky – US ‘War on Drugs’ in Latin America

Professor Noam Chomsky PhD talks about the real purpose of the US ‘war on drugs’ in Latin America.
Filmed by Paul Hubbard at Massachusetts Institute of Technology on 12-15-09

Addicted to Nonsense

Will Tiger Woods finally talk to the police? Who will replace Oprah? (Not that Oprah can ever be replaced, of course.) And will Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the couple who crashed President Barack Obama’s first state dinner, command the hundreds of thousands of dollars they want for an exclusive television interview? Can Levi Johnston, father of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s grandson, get his wish to be a contestant on “Dancing With the Stars”?

The chatter that passes for news, the gossip that is peddled by the windbags on the airwaves, the noise that drowns out rational discourse, and the timidity and cowardice of what is left of the newspaper industry reflect our flight into collective insanity. We stand on the cusp of one of the most seismic and disturbing dislocations in human history, one that is radically reconfiguring our economy as it is the environment, and our obsessions revolve around the trivial and the absurd.

What really matters in our lives-the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the steady deterioration of the dollar, the mounting foreclosures, the climbing unemployment, the melting of the polar ice caps and the awful reality that once the billions in stimulus money run out next year we will be bereft and broke-doesn’t fit into the cheerful happy talk that we mainline into our brains. We are enraptured by the revels of a dying civilization. Once reality shatters the airy edifice, we will scream and yell like petulant children to be rescued, saved and restored to comfort and complacency. There will be no shortage of demagogues, including buffoons like Sarah Palin, who will oblige. We will either wake up to face our stark new limitations, to retreat from imperial projects and discover a new simplicity, as well as a new humility, or we will stumble blindly toward catastrophe and neofeudalism.

Chavez may end patents on medicine in Venezuela

CARACAS, June 21 (Reuters) – President Hugo Chavez has vowed to shake up the rules governing intellectual property rights on medicines and other products in Venezuela, the socialist’s latest move against the private sector.

“A song is intellectual property, but an invention or a scientific discovery should be knowledge for the world, especially medicine,” Chavez said late on Saturday.

“That a laboratory does not allow us to make a medicine because they have the patent, no, no, no,” Chavez said.

Chavez, who has nationalized many Venezuela industries and is critical of the private sector, ordered his trade minister to analyze the patent rules in the OPEC nation.

“Patents have become a barrier to production, and we cannot allow them to be barriers to medicine, to life, to agriculture,” said the minister, Eduardo Saman, who previously headed Venezuela’s patent agency.

“We are revising all the doctrines and laws related to patents, which should be compatible with the international treaties that we have signed and respect and honor.”

Chavez recently criticized Swedish packaging maker Tetra Pak, saying its patents on cartons were limiting production in Venezuela.

(Reporting by Frank Jack Daniel, editing by Vicki Allen)

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/bondsNews/idUSN2148323120090621?rpc=401&

“The Future of Classical Music lies in Venezuela”

Excerpt from documentary ‘Mata Tigre” 2006

Placido Domingo cried when he saw the Venezuelan Youth Orchestra perform. The world-renowned opera singer confessed that the concert evoked the strongest emotions he had ever felt.

Sir Simon Rattle, director of the Berlin Philharmonic, swore that the country’s youth orchestras were doing the most important work in classical music anywhere in the world.

And former Berlin Philharmonic director Claudio Abbado only needed to see one performance by the orchestra to invite the Venezuelans to play in Germany.