Democracy
in America
Military Commissions Act 2006/habeas corpus/torture
"America will never be
destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln
Books
"Our politics, religion,
news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed
into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest
or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people
on the verge of amusing ourselves to death."
Neil Postman
"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 a culture dominated
by print, public discourse tends to be characterized by a coherent,
orderly arrangement of facts and ideas. The public for whom it
is intended is generally competent to manage such discourse. In
a print culture, writers make mistakes when they lie, contradict
themselves, fail to support their generalizations, try to enforce
illogical connections. In a print culture, readers make mistakes
when they don't notice, or even worse, don't care."
Neil Postman
"Books ... are an excellent
container for the accumulation, quiet scrutiny and organized analysis
of information and ideas. It takes time to write a book, and to
read one; time to discuss its contents and to make judgments about
their merit, including the form of their presentation. A book
is an attempt to make thought permanent and to contribute to the
great conversation conducted by authors of the past."
Neil Postman
"The Patriot Act wipes
out the rights I enjoyed."
Daniel Ellsberg, whose release
of the Pentagon paper's helped end the Vietnam War
"Most [Western democracies]
have not achieved the U.S. system of one political party, with
two factions controlled by shifting segments of the business community."
Noam Chomsky
Articles
" The cost of being presented
as a " responsible and serious candidate" by the media
[is] usually to show fundamental agreement with the existing distribution
of wealth and power. "
Michael Lerner, philosopher, psychologist,
author
*****
"Poor people living in
third-world countries are not the only victims of the so-called
new world order. At the heart of this "new" order is
a troubling paradox: Poor people within the United States, and
the country as a whole, are getting poorer at the same time as
the rich within the United States are getting richer."
Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer - Brave
New World Order
"We must mark [Martin
Luther King, Jr.] now, if we have not before, as the most dangerous
Negro in the future of this Nation..."
Assistant Director of the FBI,
Wiliam C. Sullivan, 1963
"We pretend not to understand
the linkages between our comfortable standard of living and the
dictatorships we impose and protect through an international military
presence."
Jerry Fresia, author of Toward
an American Revolution
" We believe that the
government and the police have embarked on a strategy of repression
to stop, crush or marginalize the burgeoning progressive movement
that gained world attention in the protest against the WTO in
Seattle last year."
International Action Center attorneys
announcing the filing of a class-action lawsuit on behalf of protestors
at the WTO Ministerial meeting in Seattle, Washington, April 1999
... "the United States
is slipping into a category of countries - among them Brazil,
Britain, and Guatemala - where the gap [between rich and poor]
is the worst around the globe."
United Nations' Human Development
Report
*****
"The modern susceptibility
to conformity and obedience to authority indicates that the truth
endorsed by authority is likely to be accepted as such by a majority
of people, who are innately obedient to authority. This obedience-truth
will then become a consensus-truth accepted by many individuals
unable to stand alone against the majority. In this way, the truth
promulgated by the propaganda system - however irrational - stands
a good chance of becoming the consensus, and may come to seem
self-evident common sense."
David Edwards, author of Burning
All Illusions
"Around the world, the
message received is that, whoever wins [the U.S. election], expect
only more of the same - national narcissism disguised as altruism,
corporate appeasement, and the arbitrary use of U.S. military
and economic might."
Greg Guma, Toward Freedom magazine
"They that can give up
essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve
neither liberty nor safety."
Benjamin Franklin, 1759
" The liberty of a democracy
is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power
to the point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state
itself. That in its essence is fascism - ownership of government
by an individual, by a group or any controlling private power.
"
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt -
on the threat to democracy by corporate power
"All the emphasis on crime
and drugs and pornography used to justify the suppression of the
Internet is really aimed at suppressing knowledge of the radical
political alternatives that are now available."
Tony Benn, British Labour Party
Member of Parliament
"The media serve the interests
of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing
their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established
privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly."
Noam Chomsky, American linguist
and US media and foreign policy critic
" We are willing to accept
lies if they make our lives easier. "
Producer from the TV series "People's
Century", opining on why Americans tolerate unjust and inhumane
U.S. government policies, at home and abroad
"No matter how cynical
you get, it's almost impossible to keep up."
Lily Tomlin
"There are buried truths
in our history which continue to insist themselves back into the
light, perhaps, because they hold within them the nearly dead
embers of what we were once intended to be as a nation."
from a fund-raising letter by
Rev. James M. Lawson and actor Mike Farrell seeking support for
a fuller investigation of the assassination of Martin Luther King,
Jr.
"Big corporations and
billionaires fund 90 percent to 98 percent of the Democratic and
Republican Party budgets."
Howard Zinn
"Societies characterized
by enduring deep divisions of income and wealth, such as most
third-world societies, are wounded societies with little sense
of the common good... As America drifts in this direction, ending
poverty and redistributing income should be at the top of the
national agenda."
Charles Derber, Corporation Nation
COINTELPRO
"No other democratic country
in the world denies as many people - in absolute or proportional
terms - the right to vote because of felony convictions."
Human Rights Watch - "World
Report 1999, United States"
"More than I00 countries
have now abolished the death penalty in law or practice ... Against
the global trend towards abolition, however, the U.S.A. has relentlessly
increased its rate of executions and the number of crimes punishable
by death."
Amnesty International "United
States of America- Rights for All," October 1998
" The USA has been quick
to voice its condemnation of human rights violations in some other
countries and to stress, by contrast, the wealth of civil and
political rights which it guarantees within its borders . . .
however, it has failed to deliver these rights to many of its
people and there are signs that, unless urgent steps are taken,
these rights will be further eroded . "
Amnesty International
"There are buried truths
in our history which continue to insist themselves back into the
light, perhaps, because they hold within them the nearly dead
embers of what we were once intended to be as a nation."
from a fund-raising letter by
Rev. James M. Lawson and actor Mike Farrell seeking support for
a fuller investigation of the assassination of Martin Luther King,
Jr.
Website pages
"Four sorrows ... are
certain to be visited on the United States. Their cumulative effect
guarantees that the U.S. will cease to resemble the country outlined
in the Constitution of 1787. First, there will be a state of perpetual
war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they
may be and a spreading reliance on nuclear weapons among smaller
nations as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut. Second
is a loss of democracy and Constitutional rights as the presidency
eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from a co-equal 'executive
branch' of government into a military junta. Third is the replacement
of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification
of war, power, and the military legions. Lastly, there is bankruptcy,
as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more
grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health,
and safety of its citizens."
Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire
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