This conversation covers Antony C. Sutton's "Wall Street Trilogy," (https://amzn.to/46lMS0O) argues that American financial interests played a significant, often overlooked, role in supporting and shaping various totalitarian regimes. It contends that Wall Street financiers, like those from J.P. Morgan and General Electric, provided financial and technical assistance to the nascent Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the Italian Fascist state, viewing these regimes as opportunities for economic exploitation and control rather than ideological adversaries. The text further suggests that figures such as Franklin D. Roosevelt were deeply connected to these financial elites, and that his New Deal policies mirrored "corporate socialism," which centralized economic power. It also touches upon attempts by certain American business figures to establish a fascist-style government in the United States, and highlights how information regarding these connections was sometimes suppressed.

The Wall Street Trilogy by Antony Sutton

This discussion covers Noam Chomsky's "Syntactic Structures," including its introduction and various chapters, alongside a modern introduction by David W. Lightfoot to a later edition and a review by Robert Lees. Chomsky's foundational work introduces a new approach to linguistic analysis, proposing that a language's grammar can be understood as a formal system capable of generating all grammatical sentences and none of the ungrammatical ones, challenging earlier models like finite-state Markov processes and simple phrase structure grammars. The book argues for the necessity of transformational rules to account for the complexities and underlying relationships in language, such as active-passive voice and negation, which simplify the overall grammar. While initially focused on formal precision, the subsequent discussions and analyses highlight the profound implications of Chomsky's theories for understanding human cognition and language acquisition, viewed as a biological capacity rather than merely learned behavior. The texts collectively illustrate the evolution of generative grammar from its "snowball" beginnings to its significant influence on the cognitive revolution, emphasizing the autonomy of syntax from semantics and the goal of developing an evaluation procedure for grammars based on simplicity and empirical adequacy.

Syntactic Structures by Noam Chomsky

The Duke Report

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