Quotations page 5

"Americans cannot escape a certain responsibility for what is done in our name around the world. In a democracy, even one as corrupted as ours, ultimate authority rests with the people. We empower the government with our votes, finance it with our taxes, bolster it with our silent acquiescence. If we are passive in the face of America's official actions overseas, we in effect endorse them."

Mark Hertzgaard, author

*****

""The biggest political joke in America is that we have a liberal press. It's a joke taken seriously by a surprisingly large number of people... The myth of the liberal press has served as a political weapon for conservative and right-wing forces eager to discourage critical coverage of government and corporate power."
"Americans now have the worst of both worlds: a press that, at best, parrots the pronouncements of the powerful and, at worst, encourages people to be stupid with pseudo-news that illuminates nothing but the bottom line."

Mark Hertzgaard, author

*****

" The government of the United States does not, in its policies, express the decency of its people. "

Jerry Fresia

*****

" In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli."

Howard Zinn

*****

" Democracy is a wonderful invention by the people of history to defend themselves against wealth. "

Michael Parenti

*****

" The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."

George Orwell

*****

" History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. "

Martin Luther King, Jr.

*****

" Question authority "

author unkown

*****

"The most formidable military machine depends ultimately on the obedience of its soldiers, ... the most powerful corporation becomes helpless when its workers stop working, when its customers refuse to buy its products.

The strike, the boycott, the refusal to serve, the ability to paralyze the functioning of a complex social structure - these remain potent weapons against the most fearsome state or corporate power."

Howard Zinn

*****

" If we who have the time and money to take to the streets don't do so,
then the people are going to think that everything is OK."

Peruvian university student protesting Alberto Fujimori's illegal election victory, April 2000

*****

" The only way to abolish war is to make peace heroic."

John Dewey

*****

" What would have happened if millions of American and British people, struggling with coupons and lines at the gas stations, had learned that in 1942 Standard Oil of New Jersey [part of the Rockefeller empire] managers shipped the enemy's fuel through neutral Switzerland and that the enemy was shipping Allied fuel? Suppose the public had discovered that the Chase Bank in Nazi-occupied Paris after Pearl Harbor was doing millions of dollars' worth of business with the enemy with the full knowledge of the head office in Manhattan [the Rockefeller family among others?] Or that Ford trucks were being built for the German occupation troops in France with authorization from Dearborn, Michigan? Or that Colonel Sosthenes Behn, the head of the international American telephone conglomerate ITT, flew from New York to Madrid to Berne during the war to help improve Hitler's communications systems and improve the robot bombs that devastated London? Or that ITT built the FockeWulfs that dropped bombs on British and American troops? Or that crucial balI bearings were shipped to Nazi-associated customers in Latin America with the collusion of the vice-chairman of the U.S. War Production Board in partnership with Goering's cousin in Philadelphia when American forces were desperately short of them? Or that such arrangements were known about in Washington and either sanctioned or deliberately ignored?"

Charles Higham

*****

"First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win."

Mahatma Gandhi

*****

" Sports plays a societal role in engendering jingoist and chauvinist attitudes. They're designed to organize a community to be committed to their gladiators."

Noam Chomsky

*****

" [Nearly 70% of the military budget] is to provide men and weapons to fight in foreign countries in support of our allies and friends and for offensive operations in Third World countries .. Another big chunk of the defense budget is the 20% allocated for our offensive nuclear force of bombers, missles, and submarines whose job it is to carry nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union... Actual defense of the United States costs about 10% of the military budget and is the least expensive function performed by the Pentagon... "

Rear Admiral Gene LaRoque, U.S. Navy retired

*****

" The dream of capitalism is to co-opt people with higher living standards without redistributing any wealth. Without co-optation, widespread repression is the only guarantor of gross inequality."

Holly Sklar

*****

" I am astonished each time I come to the U.S. by the ignorance of a high percentage of the population, which knows almost nothing about Latin America or about the world. It's quite blind and deaf to anything that may happen outside the frontiers of the U.S..

Eduardo Galeano

*****

" One may well ask: How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others? The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."

Martin Luther King, Jr.

*****

"There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws. These are simply decisions made within institutions that are subject to human will and that must face the test of legitimacy. And if they do not meet the test, they can be replaced by other institutions that are more free and more just, as has happened often in the past."

Noam Chomsky

*****

" It doesn't take a genius to pump up the GNP [of a developing country] by burning down rainforests, using slave labor and social repression to keep things in place. "

Hazel Henderson, economist

*****

" 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 focus on money and power may do wonders in the marketplace, but it creates a tremendous crisis in our society. People who have spent all day learning how to sell themselves and to manipulate others are in no position to form lasting friendships or intimate relationships... Many Americans hunger for a different kind of society -- one based on principles of caring, ethical and spiritual sensitivity, and communal solidarity. Their need for meaning is just as intense as their need for economic security."

Michael Lerner

*****

"Progress is measured in part by the courageous people who put their careers and often their lives at risk by challenging the parameters of what is acceptable in society, even though these parameters may be damaging to the quality of life. Heroes are created from ordinary people who are willing to take risks to their personal security and safety for the benefit of the larger community."

author unknown

*****

" We may not be strong enough to stop wars when the powers that be want them, but at least we are wise and humane enough to take political and moral stands as publicly as possible. This is, after all, the foundation we must build from."

Leslie Cagan

*****

"In the absence of a coherent alternative, the transnational corporations carry on inexorably. Increasingly flagless and stateless, they weave global webs of production, commerce, culture and finance virtually unopposed. They expand, invest and grow, concentrating ever more wealth in a limited number of hands. They work in coalition to influence local, national and international institutions and laws. And together with the governments of their home countries in Europe, North America and Japan, as well as international institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and increasingly, the United Nations, they are molding an international system in which they can trade and invest even more freely--a world where they are less and less accountable to the cultures, communities and nation-states in which they operate. Underpinning this effort is not the historical inevitability of an evolving, enlightened civilization, but rather the unavoidable reality of the overriding corporate purpose: the maximization of profits."

The Corporate Planet

*****

" The U.S. public is depoliticized, poorly informed on foreign affairs ... and strongly patriotic in the face of a struggle with "another Hitler". Even though the public is normally averse to war, even with modest propaganda efforts ... the public can be quickly transformed into enthusiastic supporters of war."

Edward S. Herman

*****

" If an American is concerned only about his nation, he will not be concerned about the peoples of Asia, Africa, or South America. Is this not why nations engage in the madness of war without the slightest sense of penitence? Is this not why the murder of a citizen of your own nation is a crime, but the murder of citizens of another nation in war is an act of heroic virtue? "

Martin Luther King, Jr.

*****

"Campaign finance reform and media reform are directed at the same societal illness--the influence of private corporate money that improperly negates civic need and public choice."

Ben Bagdikian

*****

" The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. "

Edward Bernays, "father" of modern public relations (PR)

*****

" Rollback [the destabilization and overthrow of Third World leftist-populist governments with right-wing governments] as a foreign policy ... causes untold devastation and misery for millions overseas, and hinders any potential positive U.S. influence in world affairs... To the extent the U.S. public backs rollback, this support is rooted in a misguided sense of patriotism. Patriotism itself - love of one's country and one's people - is a natural and reasonable human feeling. But patriotism which measures one's country by military superiority over all rivals regardless of consequence is irrational... There is surely a more rational form of patriotism that searches for excellence in social, economic and moral spheres rather than in weapon systems. "

Thomas Bodenheimer and Robert Gould

*****

" We must teach our children ... to resolve their conflicts with words, not weapons. "

President Clinton [after the Colorado school shootings] urging young people not to resort to violence, while he continued NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, killing thousands of innocent civilians, including children.

*****

"Whoever controls the media, controls the peoples' minds."

author unknown

*****

"War is the biggest business in America."

Jim Garrison

*****

" Can it be believed that the democracy which overthrew the feudal system and vanquished kings will retreat before tradesmen and capitalists."

Alex de Tocqueville

*****

"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it."

Abraham Lincoln

*****

"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."

Barbara Jordan, former U.S. Congresswoman

*****

"Although the privileged of this world can accept the existence of poverty on a massive scale and not be overawed by it, problems begin when the causes of this poverty are pointed out to them. Once causes are determined, then there is talk of 'social injustice,' and the privileged begin to resist. This is especially true when to structural analysis there is added a concrete historical perspective in which personal responsibilities come to light. But it is the consientization and resultant organization of poor sectors that rouse the greatest fears and the strongest resistance."

Gustavo Gutierrez

*****

" The U.S. President has been largely refashioned as a high-level trade representative for the transnationals."

The Nation magazine

*****

"Those in power are blind devotees to private enterprise. They accept that degree of socialism implicit in the vast subsidies to the military-industrial-complex, but not that type of socialism which maintains public projects for the disemployed and the unemployed alike."

William O. Douglas

*****

" Coming to grips with these U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed-and this is a minimum figure. Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola ... and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua. These people would not have died if U.S. tax dollars had not been spent by the CIA to inflame tensions, finance covert political and military activities and destabilize societies.

Certainly, there are other local, regional, national and international factors in many of these operations, but if the CIA were tried fairly in a U.S. court, under U.S. law, the principle of complicity, incitement, riot, and mayhem would clearly apply. In the United States, if you hire someone to commit a murder your sentence may be approximately the same as that of the murderer himself.

Who are these six million people we have killed in the interest of American national security? Conservatives tell us, "It's a dangerous world. Our enemies have to die so we can be safe and secure." Some of them say, "I'm sorry, but that's the way the world is. We have to accept this reality and defend ourselves, to make our nation safe and insure our way of life."

Since 1954, however, we have not parachuted teams into the Soviet Union - our number one enemy - to destabilize that country... Neither do we run these violent operations in England, France, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, or Switzerland. Since the mid-1950s they have all been conducted in Third World countries where governments do not have the power to force the United States to stop its brutal and destabilizing campaigns.

One might call this the "Third World War." It is a war that has been fought by the United States against the Third World. Others call it the Cold War and focus on the anti-Communist and anti-Soviet rationales, but the dead are not Soviets; they are people of the Third World. It might also be called the Forty-Year War, like the Thirty-Year and Hundred-Year Wars in Europe, for this one began when the CIA was founded in 1947 and continues today. Altogether, perhaps twenty million people died in the Cold War. As wars go, it has been the second or third most destructive of human life in all of history, after World War I and World War II.

The six million people the CIA has helped to kill are people of the Mitumba Mountains of the Congo, the jungles of Southeast Asia, and the hills of northern Nicaragua. They are people without ICBMs or armies or navies, incapable of doing physical damage to the United States the 22,000 killed in Nicaragua, for example, are not Russians; they are not Cuban soldiers or advisors; they are not even mostly Sandinistas. A majority are rag-poor peasants, including large numbers of women and children.

Communists? Hardly, since the dead Nicaraguans are predominantly Roman Catholics. Enemies of the United States? That description doesn't fit either, because the thousands of witnesses who have lived in Nicaraguan villages with the people since 1979 testify that the Nicaraguans are the warmest people on the face of the earth, that they love people from the United States, and they simply cannot understand why our leaders would want to spend $1 billion on a contra force designed to murder people and wreck the country."

John Stockwell

*****

" What would have happened if millions of American and British people, struggling with coupons and lines at the gas stations, had learned that in 1942 Standard Oil of New Jersey [part of the Rockefeller empire] managers shipped the enemy's fuel through neutral Switzerland and that the enemy was shipping Allied fuel? Suppose the public had discovered that the Chase Bank in Nazi-occupied Paris after Pearl Harbor was doing millions of dollars' worth of business with the enemy with the full knowledge of the head office in Manhattan [the Rockefeller family among others?] Or that Ford trucks were being built for the German occupation troops in France with authorization from Dearborn, Michigan? Or that Colonel Sosthenes Behn, the head of the international American telephone conglomerate ITT, flew from New York to Madrid to Berne during the war to help improve Hitler's communications systems and improve the robot bombs that devastated London? Or that ITT built the FockeWulfs that dropped bombs on British and American troops? Or that crucial balI bearings were shipped to Nazi-associated customers in Latin America with the collusion of the vice-chairman of the U.S. War Production Board in partnership with Goering's cousin in Philadelphia when American forces were desperately short of them? Or that such arrangements were known about in Washington and either sanctioned or deliberately ignored?"

Charles Higham

*****

" Corporations care very much about maintaining the myth that government is necessarily ineffective, except when it is spending money on the military-industrial complex, building prisons, or providing infrastructural support for the business sector."

Michael Lerner

*****

" If envy were the cause of terrorism, Beverly Hills [and] Fifth Avenue ... would have become targets long ago. "

Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek

*****

"Think for yourselves, do not uncritically accept what you are told, and do what you can to make the world a better place, particularly for those who suffer and are oppressed."

Noam Chomsky

*****

"Those in power are blind devotees to private enterprise. They accept that degree of socialism implicit in the vast subsidies to the military-industrial-complex, but not that type of socialism which maintains public projects for the disemployed and the unemployed alike."

William O. Douglas

*****

"Leaders symbolize what the country stands for. As corruption becomes routine in Washington in both parties, it trickles down as a corrupting influence in everyone's lives... Democracy is the ultimate casualty, and the sapping of democratic life is the most serious contribution of corporate ascendancy to our spiritual decline. As democracy ebbs, Americans retreat into private cocoons, feeling helpless to make a difference... In a democracy, civic participation and the belief in one's ability to contribute to the common good is the most important guarantor of public morality. When that belief fades, so too does the vision of the common good itself."

Charles Derber

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