The Republican Party today has a catechism. If you want to be a candidate, with very rare exceptions, you have to repeat the catechism in lockstep uniformity: global warming isn’t happening, no taxes on the rich. There are about ten things that you have to repeat, whether you believe them or not. Anybody who departs from them is in trouble.
The people who call themselves conservatives say, ‘We have to maintain family values by preventing women from having a choice as to whether they will have children, and then by not giving them any support when they have to take care of their children. That’s how we preserve family values.’ The internal contradictions are amazing.
Since 1949, the United States has passed to Israel more than $100 billion in grants and $10 billion in special loans.36 Other bodies not part of the administration annually transfer to Israel $1 billion. This is larger than the amount of money transferred by the United States to North Africa, South America, and the Caribbean put together.
Take Ron Paul. He appeals to a lot of progressives. He said on Fox, ‘The greatest hoax I think that has been around for many, many years if not hundreds of years has been this hoax on the environment and global warming.’ He doesn’t provide any argument or evidence as to why he disregards the scientific consensus – just, I say so, period. With that attitude, you really are approaching the edge.
Rand Paul... said national health insurance is slavery. He said, I’m a physician, and if there’s national health insurance, the government is forcing me to take care of somebody who is ill. Why should I be a slave to the state? Here we’re getting capitalist pathology in its most extreme, lunatic form. It is the opposite of solidarity, mutual support, mutual help.
There’s a very simple point about arithmetic – if you happen to be in a swing state, a state where the outcome is indefinite, and you don’t vote for, say, Clinton, that’s equivalent to voting for Trump. That’s arithmetic.
If you give up every time you don’t achieve the immediate gain you want, you’re just guaranteeing that the worst is going to happen... You can’t expect an easy victory after one protest march.
By now, less than 7 percent of private sector workers have unions, and it’s not because workers don’t want unions – polls show that, overwhelmingly, they want to unionize – but they can’t.
Thats the danger of democracy: If organizations can develop, if people are no longer just glued to the tube, you may have all these funny thoughts arising in their heads, like sickly inhibitions against the use of military force. That has to be overcome, but it hasn’t been overcome.
I don’t have a whole lot of choice,” said Dr. Anderson, a pediatrician for many poor families in Cherokee County, north of Atlanta. “We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid.
There is oppression that shouldn’t exist. There is a struggle for freedom all the time. There are very serious dangers: the species may be heading toward extinction. I can’t see how anybody can fail to have an interest in trying to help people become more engaged in thinking about these problems and doing something about them.
The rise of multinational corporations that know neither patriotism nor morality but only self-interest, has made accountability almost non-existent. At virtually every level, I discern a demand by business for docile government and unrestrained corporate individualism. Where industry once yearned for subservient unions, it now wants no unions at all.
He wants to focus on what he calls ‘cultural issues.’ That makes sense, because when you’re going to rob people blind you don’t want to have them focus their attention on economic issues.
Workers aren’t free to move, labor can’t move, but capital can.
So if a person produces an object on command, Humboldt wrote, we may admire what he did but we will despise what he is, not a true human being who acts in his own impulses and desires.
In this case, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s orders were being carried out – “anything that flies on anything that moves,” an open call for genocide that is rare in the historical record.
Destroying hope is a critically important project. And when it is achieved, formal democracy is allowed – even preferred, if only for public relation purposes. In more honest circles, much of this is conceded. Of course, it is understood much more profoundly by beasts in men’s shapes who endure the consequences of challenging the imperatives of stability and order.
There is tons of work to be done, and lots of people who would like to do the work. It’s just that the economic system is such a grotesque catastrophe that it can’t even put together idle hands and needed work, which would be satisfying to the people and which would be beneficial to all of us. That’s just the mark of a failed system. The most dramatic mark of it.
In Greece, British troops entered after the Nazis had withdrawn. They imposed a corrupt regime that evoked renewed resistance, and Britain, in its postwar decline, was unable to maintain control. In 1947, the United States moved in, supporting a murderous war that resulted in about 160,000 deaths.
There’s no point in reading a book if you let it pass before your eyes and then forget about it ten minutes later. Reading a book is an intellectual exercise, which stimulates thought, questions, imagination.