Quotations page 9

" They have pillaged the world. When the land has nothing left for men who ravage everything, they scour the sea. If an enemy is rich, they are greedy; if he is poor, they crave glory. Neither East nor West can sate their appetite. They are the only people on earth to covet wealth and poverty with equal craving. They plunder, they butcher, they ravish, and call it by the lying name of "empire." They make a desert and call it "peace"."

Roman historian Tacitus

*****

"Held to be a crime when committed by individuals, homicide is called a virtue when committed by the state."

St. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, 3rd century AD - Epistulae

*****

"There are no competitive elections for president, for prime minister, nor for any kind of legislative body that can initiate and pass meaningful laws or make real policy in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, or other autocratic governments in that region supported with American military and economic aid. Indeed, the majority of governments supported by the United States in the Middle East and Central Asia are even less democratic than Iran."

Stephen Zunes

*****

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed ..."

H. L. Mencken

*****

"Throughout much of its history, the AFL-CIO and other U.S. labor organizations have worked with CIA and multi-national corporations to overthrow democratically-elected governments, collaborated with dictators against progressive labor movements, supported reactionary labor movements against progressive governments, worked with corporate America to organize racist and protectionist campaigns against foreign countries, and encouraged racist campaigns against immigrant workers."

Lee Siu Hin

*****

"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth is revolutionary."

George Orwell

*****

"Reagan ... was most definitely a global empire builder, a servant of the corporatocracy. At the time of his election, I found it fitting that he was a Hollywood actor, a man who had followed orders passed down from moguls, who knew how to take direction. That would be his signature. He would cater to the men who shuttled back and forth from corporate CEO offices to bank boards and into the halls of government. He would serve the men who appeared to serve him but who in fact ran the government - men like Vice President George H. W. Bush, Secretary of State George Shultz, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Richard Cheney, Richard Helms, and Robert McNamara. He would advocate what those men wanted: an America that controlled the world and all its resources, a world that answered to the commands of that America, a U.S. military that would enforce the rules as they were written by America, and an international trade and banking system that supported America as CEO of the global empire."

John Perkins

*****

"What happened was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to be governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security ...

To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, regretted.'

Believe me this is true. Each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow.

Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we did nothing) ... You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair. "

A German professor after World War II describing the rise of Nazism

*****

"It is projected that of the more than $100 billion of the [George W. Bush] tax cuts set to take effect in 2005, 73 percent will go to the top 20 percent of tax payers... Those with incomes over $1 million a year in 2005 will receive a tax cut of $135,000 a year. All those with incomes less than $76,400 will get about $350 on average... The Brookings and Urban Institute's Tax Policy Center estimates the annual transfer in income to the rich and super rich flowing from the Bush 2001-2003 tax cuts is $113 billion a year."

Jack Rasmus

*****

"Selective Service has been registering young men for over 20 years and at any moment the president can go to Congress and ask them to reauthorize conscription for a male combat draft for ages 18-25. All that is needed is a short, "trigger" resolution and the draft for men 18 to 25 is back."


from blatanttruth.org

*****

"We live in a nation hated abroad and frightened at home. A place in which we can reasonably refer to the American Republic in the past tense. A country that has moved into a post-constitutional era, no longer a nation of laws but an autotocracy run by law breakers, law evaders and law ignorers. A nation governed by a culture of impunity, a term from Latin America where they know it well - a culture in which corruption is no longer a form of deviance but the norm. We all live in a Mafia neighborhood now."


Sam Smith's Progressive Review

*****

"Iraq was the target because neoconservatives wanted to remake the governments of the Middle East, to secure long-term US. access to oil, to open the economies to American investment and to protect Israel through installation of governments friendly to the United States."

David Moberg

*****

"Maybe this time the voters chose what they actually want: Nationalism, pre-emptive war, order not justice, "safety" through torture, backlash against women and gays, a gulf between haves and have-nots, government largesse for their churches and a my-way-or-the-highway President."

Katha Pollitt

*****

"With each newly minted crisis, US leaders roll out the same time-tested scenario. They start demonizing a foreign leader ... charging them with being communistic or otherwise dictatorial, dangerously aggressive, power hungry, genocidal, given to terrorism or drug trafficking, ready to deny us access to vital resources, harboring weapons of mass destruction, or just inexplicably "anti-American" and "anti-West." Lacking any information to the contrary, the frightened public ... are swept along."

Michael Parenti

*****

"Democracy is not about trust; it is about distrust. It is about accountability, exposure, open debate, critical challenge, and popular input and feedback from the citizenry. It is about responsible government. We have to get our fellow Americans to trust their leaders less and themselves more, trust their own questions and suspicions, and their own desire to know what is going on."

Michael Parenti

*****

"While vast sums of money are being siphoned off into hidden [military] coffers, Americas schools, hospitals and public services are facing cutbacks and closures."

Representative Henry Waxman

*****

"If the test of patriotism comes only by reflexively falling into lockstep behind the leader whenever the flag is waved, then what we have is a formula for dictatorship, - not democracy... But the American way is to criticize and debate openly, not to accept unthinkingly the doings of government officials of this or any other country."

Michael Parenti

*****

"The era of manufacturing consent has given way to the era of manufacturing news. Soon media newsrooms will drop the pretense, and start hiring theater directors instead of journalists."

Arundhati Roy

*****

[Neo-liberal capitalists] have mastered the technique of infiltrating the instruments of democracy-the "independent" judiciary, the "free" press, the parliament-and molding them to their purpose... Free elections, a free press, and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities on sale to the highest bidder.

Arundhati Roy

****

"To discredit the single-payer idea, insurers, HMOs, for-profit hospitals and other private interests play on Americans' long-standing fears of Big Government. In truth, it is the private market that has created a massive bureaucracy, one that dwarfs the size and costs of Medicare, the most efficiently run health insurance program in the U.S. in terms of administrative costs. Medicare's overhead averages about 2% a year."

Donald Barlett and James Steele

*****

"Americans tend to believe they have the best health care in the world, but in truth it is a second-rate system and destined to get a lot worse and much more expensive."

Donald Barlett and James Steele

*****

" The political leadership of this country, as exemplified by the campaign positions of Bush and Kerry, has become so obsessed with our own security fears and so convinced of our own virtue that it has very little to offer in the way of positive socioeconomic development initiatives. To most of the people of Latin America, Africa and Asia, the United States has largely become irrelevant to their hopes for a better future -- except as a potential market for some of their goods or as a source of outsourced jobs."

Sherle Schewenninger

*****

"This is not about oil, and anyone who thinks that is badly misunderstanding the situation."

US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld

*****

"[U.S.] domestic policy ... has focused on creating a massive welfare state for corporations even as the minimal welfare state benefiting the majority of the people was dismantled."

Lawrence Shoup

*****

"The United States is the world's largest consumer of oil .... Much of the world's oil lies beneath Iraq and its Gulf neighbors... experts say oil played a significant role in the decision to confront Iraq."

Council on Foreign Relations

*****

"We're not in the business of providing news and information, We're simply in the business of selling our customers' products. "

Clear Channel CEO Lowry Mays

*****

"NPR and PBS at a national level tend to provide a bland variant of mainstream and conventional journalism, comparable to what's on the commercial networks, especially on highly sensitive matters such as the economy and the U.S. role in the world. Public broadcasting is so obsessed with conservative criticism, even more than commercial news media journalists are, that it bends over backwards to appease the Right and appear "balanced."

Robert McChesney

*****

"The United States is a society in which people not only can get by without knowing much about the wider world but are systematically encouraged not to think independently or critically and instead to accept the mythology of the United States as a benevolent, misunderstood giant as it lumbers around the world trying to do good."

Robert Jensen, Citizens of Empire

*****

"The United States is the greatest threat to world peace, and has been for a long time, and not merely because it is the world's only superpower. Equally important, the United States is also far more disposed to use its power than any other powerful nation currently is. Though Americans are culturally and emotionally blind to the fact, the mere intrusion of US power is, in and of itself, destabilizing."

T.D. Allman, Rogue State

*****

"When a republic's most venerable institutions no longer operate as they were intended, it becomes possible for small cabals to usurp power, and, while keeping the forms, corrupt the function of those institutions for their own ends. Looking at things that way, the George W. Bush presidency has been both result and symptom of the decadence of America's constitutional mechanisms."

T.D. Allman, Rogue State

*****

"An alternative [U.S. foreign] policy offering real security would require ending the support of oppressive rulers in the Middle East and elsewhere, pursuing a more balanced approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, changing our oil-dependent energy policy, and replacing the drive for overwhelming global military dominance with policies for the peaceful prevention of atrocities and deadly conflict."

Friends Committee on National Legislation - Washington newsletter

*****

"Cheap labor has always been at the heart of U.S. - Haitian relations, ever since the Haitian Revolution in 1804. It was actually a slave rebellion, the first and still the only successful one in modern history. The U.S. sided with French colonialism as the U.S. economy was based on slavery at the time and Haiti represented the first "dangerous example."

Ricky Baldwin

*****

"The communists had Pravda. Republicans have Fox."

MoveOn.org ad

*****

"This is an impressive crowd. The "haves" and the "have-mores". Some people call you the "elite". I call you my base."

George W. Bush during 2000 camapign

*****

"The U.S. policy toward Cuba [U.S.-sponsored sabotage, espionage, terrorism, hijackings, trade sanctions, embargo, and outright invasion] has been consistent with its longstanding policy of trying to subvert any country that pursues an alternative path in the use of its land, labor, capital, markets, and natural resources. Any nation or political movement that emphasizes self-development, egalitarian human services, and public ownership is condemned as an enemy and targeted for sanctions or other forms of attack. In contrast, the countries deemed "friendly toward America" and "pro-West" are those that leave themselves at the disposal of large U.S. investors on terms that are totally favorable to the moneyed corporate interests."

Michael Parenti

*****

"Cuba has also been condemned for not allowing its people to flee the island. That so many want to leave Cuba is treated as proof that Cuban socialism is a harshly repressive system, rather than that the U.S. embargo has made life difficult in Cuba. That so many millions more want to leave capitalist countries like Mexico, Nigeria, Poland, El Salvador, Philippines, South Korea, Macedonia, and others too numerous to list is never treated as grounds for questioning the free-market system that inflicts such misery on the Third World."

Michael Parenti

*****

" Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. "

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) English author and social critic

*****

"It's really not a number I'm terribly interested in."

General Colin Powell commenting on the number of dead Iraqis in Operation Desert Storm (1991)

*****

"I want to be the bully on the block. There is no future [for other countries] in trying to challenge the armed forces of the United States."

General Colin Powell to House Armed Services Committee, 1992

*****

"The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist - McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas ..."

Thomas Friedman, New York Times

*****

" Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible. "

Milton Friedman

*****

"This [the Constitution] is likely to be administered for a course of years and then end in despotism... when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other."

Benjamin Franklin

*****

"The armed insurrection which contributed to unseating President Aristide on February 29, 2004, was the result of a carefully staged military-intelligence operation. The rebel paramilitary army crossed the border from the Dominican Republic in early February. It constitutes a well armed, trained, and equipped paramilitary unit integrated by former members of FRAPH, the "plain clothes" death squadrons, involved in mass killings of civilians and political assassinations during the CIA-sponsored 1991 military coup, which led to the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Aristide. During the military government (1991-1994), FRAPH was (unofficially) under the jurisdiction of the Armed Forces. According to a 1996 U.N. Human Rights Commission report, FRAPH had been supported by the CIA."

Michael Chossudovsky

*****

"It's an obscene comparison, but there was a time in South Africa when people would put flaming tires around people's necks if they dissented. In some ways, the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. It's that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions and to continue to bore in on the tough questions so often. again."

CBS anchor Dan Rather about George W. Bush's Iraq War

*****

"The U.S. is a signatory to nine multilateral treaties that it has either blatantly violated or gradually subverted. The Bush Administration is now outright rejecting a number of those treaties, and in doing so, places global security in jeopardy, as other nations feel entitled to do the same. The rejected treaties include: The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the Treaty Banning Antipersonnel Mines, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), a protocol to create a compliance regime for the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM). The U.S. is also not complying with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the Chemical Weapons Commission (CWC), the BWC, and the U.N. framework Convention on Climate Change."

Project Censored 2005

*****

"As of July 2002, the average life expectancy for the people of Afghanistan is 46 years. The average yearly income per capita is $280. As for the children, 90 percent are not in school. More than one out of every four children in Afghanistan will die before the age of five. A UNICEF study found that the majority of children are highly traumatized and expect to die before reaching adulthood. "

Project Censored 2005

*****

"A 2003 Gallup survey found 31 percent of respondents receiving their news every day or several times a week from talk radio... The largest personality-centered shows are all conservative: Rush Limbaugh has 14.5 million regular listeners, followed by Sean Hannity (11.8 million), and Michael Savage (7 million) (De la Vina 2004)... By the mid-1990s, regular talk radio listeners constituted around 20 percent of U.S. voting adults (Barker and Knight 2000)."

Jose Padin and Shelley Smith

*****

"The moment war is declared... the mass of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed themselves. They then, with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the Government's disapprobation...

The State is the organization of the herd to act offensively or defensively against another herd similarly organized...

War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense...

But in general, the nation in wartime attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values culminating at the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be produced through any other agency than war. Loyalty-or mystic devotion to the State-becomes the major imagined human value...

In a nation at war, every citizen identifies himself with the whole, and feels immensely strengthened in that identification. The purpose and desire of the collective community live in each person who throws himself wholeheartedly into the cause of war...

It cannot be too firmly realized that war is a function of States and not of nations, indeed that it is the chief function of States...

War is the health of the State. Only when the State is at war does the modern society function with that unity of sentiment, simple uncritical patriotic devotion, cooperation of services, which have always been the ideal of the State lover..."

Randolph Bourne, "The State", 1918


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