Quotations page 7

"Democracy is a state of grace attained only by those countries that have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it. "

Norman Mailer

*****

"This war [Iraq}, should it come, is intended to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire, seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary policeman. It would be the culmination of a plan 10 years or more in the making, carried out by those who believe the United States must seize the opportunity for global domination, even if it means becoming the "American imperialists" that our enemies always claimed we were."

columnist Jay Bookman of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 29, 2002

*****

"[Patriotism] in America is as if we're playing musical chairs, and you shouldn't get caught without a flag or you're out of the game."

"The fact that we've been a great democracy doesn't mean we will automatically keep being one if we keep waving the flag."

Norman Mailer

*****

"U.S. health expenditures are by far the highest of any country in the world at 15 percent of GDP. No other country spends even 11 percent of GDP. The U.S. also spends much more in absolute dollars. U.S. citizens pay $5,440 on average for health coverage while Canadians, the fourth biggest spenders, shell out $2,927.

In the U.S., 75 million are without insurance at some point every two years while in Canada, government spending provides health coverage for everyone.

According to the International Journal of Health Services, "the average ranking for the United States on 16 health indicators in a 1998 comparative study of 13 countries by Starfield was 12th, second from the bottom.

Insurance companies, for-profit hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and doctors-the historical linchpin of corporate medicine-oppose universal health insurance. They are powerful political players. According to Acumen Journal, "since late 1999 [U.S.] health care lobbying spending has consistently passed that of any other industry. In 2002, that amounted to expenditures of $264 million...the health care industry as a whole accounted for 15 percent of the $1.8 billion in lobbying spending for 2002."

Yves Engler

*****

"The United States has 745 bases in 120 countries."

Tony Benn, former British MP

*****

"Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves free education, free medical care, free whatever? It comes from Moscow, from Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell."

Texas State Representative Debbie Riddle of Houston

*****

"Just as the United States trained Latin American military and police in methods of fighting against "populism" in their countries, by this means helping to produce a "favorable climate of investment" by bringing into power National Security States, so a large, well-trained, and ruthless police is needed in the home country as it pushes a right-wing agenda that is contrary to the interests of a vast majority. "

Edward S. Herman

*****

"For the most part, Israel is the subcontractor for American arms to the 'Third World.' There is no terrible regime-Colombia, Guatemala, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile during the time of the colonels, Burma, Taiwan, Zaire, Liberia, Congo, Sierra Leone-there is not one that does not have a major military connection to Israel.... So this is the missing piece... Israel is a key member of the empire."

Jeff Halper, Israeli activist and analyst

*****

"The men and women who enlist in this country's military [should] be told the truth that they are not protecting the United States, they are and always have been protecting corporate interests."

Chante Wolf, Veterans for Peace activist

*****

"What good fortune for governments that the people do not think."

Adolf Hitler

*****

"Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all."

John Maynard Keynes

*****

"We will export death and violence to the four corners of the Earth in defense of our great nation."

George W. Bush, 2001

*****

"25% of the people of Texas had no health insurance in the year 2000."

Steve Brouwer

*****

"The corporations don't have to lobby the government any more. They are the government."

Jim Hightower, former Secretary of Agriculture for the state of Texas

*****

"Political discussion in the United States is usually restricted to the moderate to conservative range that precludes discussion of class conflict. If "class warfare" is mentioned, it is because a conservative wants to suggest that certain matters should be kept off-limits in American political discussion"

Steve Brouwer

*****

"Only the grand scale and technocratic impersonality of the crimes conceived and directed by the ruling elite acting under cover of state authority distinguish them from garden variety killers."

Darrell Hamamoto

*****

"Evenhanded use of the "terrorist" label would mean sometimes affixing it directly on the U.S. government. During the past decade, from Iraq to Sudan to Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan, Pentagon missiles have destroyed the lives of civilians just as innocent as those who perished on September 11, 2001. If journalists dare not call that "terrorism," then maybe the word should be retired from the media lexicon."

Norman Solomon

*****

"For the American public ... warfare visited upon other countries has become an entertaining spectacle."

Carl Boggs

*****

"The U.S. record of war crimes has been, from the nineteenth century to the present, a largely invisible one with no government, no political leaders, no military officials, no lower-level operatives held accountable for criminal actions. A culture of militarism has saturated the public sphere, including academia, endowing all U.S. interventions abroad with a patina of patriotic goodness and democratic sensibilities beyond genuine interrogation. Anyone challenging this mythology is quickly marginalized, branded a traitor or Communist or terrorist or simply a lunatic beyond the pale of reasonable discussion."

Carl Boggs

*****

"Were [Thomas] Paine still within reach of the federal authorities, Attorney General John Ashcroft undoubtedly would prosecute him for blasphemy under a technologically enhanced version of the Alien and Sedition Acts."

Lewis Lapham

*****

"In the old totalitarian culture of the Big Lie, the truth is hidden. In the new totalitarianism, there is no line between truth and falsehood. The truth is what people can be conditioned to believe."

John McMurtry

*****

"If the U.S. really believes that supporting terrorists makes you as guilty as the terrorists themselves, then it would have to put on trial most of its military and political leadership over the last handful of administrations, and more."

Peter McClaren

*****

" The boys of capital, they ... chortle in their martinis about the death of socialism. The word has been banned from polite conversation. And they hope that no one will notice that every socialist experiment of any significance in the twentieth century-without exception-has either been crushed, overthrown, or invaded, or corrupted, perverted, subverted, or destabilized, or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the United States. Not one socialist government or movement-from the Russian Revolution to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from Communist China to the EMLN in [El] Salvador-not one was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merits; not one was left secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and freely and fully relax control at home."

William Blum

*****

" ... the U.S. should bomb the Afghan infrastructure to rubble-the airport, the power plants, their water facilities and the roads. This is a very primitive country. And taking out their ability to exist day to day will not be hard. Remember, the people of any country are ultimately responsible for the government they have. The Germans were responsible for Hitler. The Afghans are responsible for the Taliban. We should not target civilians. But if they don't rise up against this criminal government, they starve, period."

Bill O'Reilly

*****

"If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see farther into the future."

U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, defending the use of cruise missiles against Iraq, February 1998

*****

"I say, bomb the hell out of them [Iraqis]. If there's collateral damage, so be it."

U.S. Senator Zell Miller, D-GA - on the day after the September 11 attack

*****

"It is firm and continuing policy that [the democratically elected government of] Allende be overthrown by a coup.... We are to continue to generate maximum pressure toward this end utilizing every appropriate resource. It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG [United States Government] and American hands be well hidden."

October 1970 cable to CIA operatives in Chile from Henry Kissinger's "Track Two" group

*****

"U.S. Ieaders have striven with much success to repress (1) the emergence of competing forms of production (socialist, collectivist, communitarian); and (2) competing capital formations (prosperous autonomous capitalist economies, or mixed ones, in emerging nations, and with FTAA and GATS, all public sector services except police and military in all capitalist countries. The goal is the Third Worldization of the entire world, including Europe and North America, a world in which capital rules supreme with no public sector services; no labor unions to speak of; no prosperous, literate, effectively organized working class with rising expectations; no pension funds or environmental, consumer, and occupational protections, or medical plans, or any of the other insufferable things that cut into profit rates."

Michael Parenti

*****

"The Bush elites appear more openly and arrogantly dedicated to the aims of U.S. economic, political, and military domination of the world than any previous U.S. administration."

Carl Boggs

*****

"The Gulf War ... was made popular by an immense propaganda barrage unleashed by the Pentagon, the media, and government, creating an ideological milieu in which 45 percent of the population said it would be prepared to use nuclear weapons against Iraq. Military actions were, transformed into a grotesque national spectacle, a great celebration of war-making."

Carl Boggs

*****

"The American social infrastructure deteriorates as the Pentagon's sphere of control widens. Today we find an inverse relationship between growth of the U.S. empire and various measures of domestic well-being.

Carl Boggs

*****

"Whereas international conflict was until recently governed by political and ideological considerations, the wars of the future will largely be fought over the possession and control of vital economic goods-especially resources needed for the functioning of modern industrial societies.

Michael Klare

*****

"The U.S. has a special role in the world and should not adhere to every international agreement and convention that someone thinks to propose."

Secretary of State Colin Powell

*****

"America, under Bush, is a danger to the world ... Bush feels that on September 11th he was anointed by God. He's leading the U.S. and the world toward a vicious circle of escalating violence."

George Soros

*****

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945

*****

"American capitalism, based as it is on exploitation of the poor, with its fundamental motivation in personal greed, simply cannot survive without force."

Philip Agee, CIA Diary

*****

"Political will is the ultimate determinant of spending priorities. There's always money available for war and corporate bailouts; there's rarely money available for social programs."

Adolph L. Reed, Jr.

*****

*****

"Somebody's paying the corporations that destroyed Iraq and the corporations that are rebuilding it. They're getting paid by the American taxpayer in both cases. So we pay them to destroy the country, and then we pay them to rebuild it. Those are gifts from U.S. taxpayer to U.S. corporations.."

Noam Chomsky

*****

"What keeps most Americans from being shocked by the shredding of the Bill of Rights is that they have yet to feel the consequences, either personally or through someone close to them. It would appear, however, that they only have to wait."

William Blum, Rogue State

*****

"No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine."

William Blum, Rogue State

*****

"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force."

William Blum, Rogue State

*****

"Those who choose our wars don't care much about liberating people from oppressive regimes - if they did, we'd be kicking the shit out of half the world."

Michael Moore

*****

"Taking advantage of our grief, and our fear that "it" may happen again, an appointed president uses the dead of 9/11 as a convenient cover, a justification, for permanently altering our American way of life. Is that why they died, so that George W. Bush can turn the country into Texas?"

Michael Moore

*****

"What you will encounter in the conservative mind is fear. . Fear of crime. Fear of enemies. Fear of change. Fear of people not exactly like them. And, of course, fear of losing any money on anything."

Michael Moore

*****

"The only true value your life has to the wealthy is that they need your vote every election day in order to get the politicians they've funded into office."

Michael Moore

*****

"Only after we smash every atom bomb into depleted uranium ploughshares will we have the right to tell North Korea, India, Pakistan, Israel, and the rest that they don't need such weapons. "

Michael Moore

*****

"The singular goal [of Corporate America] is to take enough control over our lives so that, in the end, we'll be pledging allegiance, not to a flag or some airy notions of freedom and democracy, but to the dictates of Citigroup, Exxon, Nike, GE, GM, PG&E, and Philip Morris."

Michael Moore

*****

"The only true security comes from ensuring that all people, here and around the globe, are able to meet their basic needs and dream of a better life. At the very least, we have to make damn sure we are not the ones robbing them of that dream."

Michael Moore

*****

"A tiny portion of the population controls the lion's share of the wealth and most of the command positions of state, manufacturing, banking, investment, publishing, higher education, philanthropy, and media... these individuals exercise a preponderant influence over what is passed off as public information and democratic discourse.

The ruling class is the politically active component of the owning class, the top captains of finance and policy who set the standards for investment and concentration of capital at home and abroad... Their overall economic domination and their campaign contributions, media monopoly, high-paid lobbyists, and public relations experts regularly predetermine who will be treated as major political candidates and which policy parameters will prevail... Though relatively few in number they get the most of what there is to get. Their wealth serves their power, and their power serves their wealth."

Michael Parenti

*****

"Along with Sri Lanka, the United States is one of only two countries in the world that do not give politicians free broadcast time."

Peter Levine, The New Progressive Era

*****

"President Bush asked for $87 billion more to pay for the American occupation and reconstruction of Iraq. New reports already reveal the comparative costs and sacrifices of this enormous expenditure: The entire proposed fiscal-year budget for the Department of Health and Human Services is $66 billion; for the Department of Education, $53 billion. The total amount for all 50 states to meet their projected budget shortfalls this year is $78 billion."

Jim Wallis, In These Times magazine

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