Last month, Noam Chomsky participated in a talk, presented at Harvard-Epworth Church, Cambridge, MA. Chomsky addressed the fundamentals of the American economy and the Pentagon’s key role.

“The best place to look clearly is what happened when it ended,” Chomsky said. “We expanded NATO [under the Bush Administration]. [H.W.] Bush came out with a new national security strategy, [and] said, pretty much, ‘Everything will go on as before’ but with new pretexts. But, because of the technological sophistication of third world powers, that why we have to have a huge military system, not to defend ourselves against the Russians, but to defend ourselves against the technological sophistication of third world powers. They said we have to maintain what they call the defense industrial base. That’s a euphemism for the high tech economy, which is funded by the taxpayer, in what’s called a market system.”

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Alexandra Rosenmann is an AlterNet associate editor. Follow her @alexpreditor.