Corporations barely pay taxes. The corporate tax rate is already very low, but corporations have worked out an array of complicated techniques so they often don’t have to pay taxes at all... The scale of sheer robbery by corporate power is enormous.
If you’re independent-minded in school, you’re probably going to get in trouble very early on. That’s not the trait that’s being preferred or cultivated.
If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to sell themselves in order to survive. Now, you can say, “they rent themselves freely, it’s a free contract” – but that’s a joke. If your choice is, “do what I tell you or starve”, that’s not a choice – it’s infact what was commonly referred to as ‘wage slavery’ in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Our philosophy is to rob everything as much as possible and forget about tomorrow... But it makes a certain sense if the sole human value is making as much wealth as you can tomorrow. You don’t care what happens down the road and you don’t care what happens to anybody else. It makes perfect sense. If it destroys the world, well, it’s not my problem.
The Clinton doctrine was encapsulated in the slogan “multilateral when we can, unilateral when we must.” In congressional testimony, the phrase “when we must” was explained more fully: the United States is entitled to resort to the “unilateral use of military power” to ensure “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources.
One of the functions that things like professional sports play, in our society and others, is to offer an area to deflect people’s attention from things that matter, so that the people in power can do what matters without public interference.
In fact, most of what they’re calling crime is a kid caught with a joint in his pocket. Why do people think of that as the problem?
The debt is being cynically exploited by the far right, with collusion of the Democrat establishment, to undermine what remains of social programs, public education, unions, and, in general, remaining barriers to corporate tyranny.
I’m quoting, so pardon the sexist language, but somewhere or other he said: socialism is an effort to try to solve man’s animal problems, and after having solved the animal problems, then we can face the human problems – but it’s not a part of socialism to solve the human problems; socialism is an effort to get you to the point where you can face the human problems.
I don’t think we’re smart enough to design, in any detail what a perfectly just and free society would be like. I think we can give some guidelines and more significant, we can ask how we can progress in that direction.
Victors do not investigate their own crimes, so that little is known about them...
We’re supposed to believe that the press is liberal, dangerous, adversarial, out-of-control. That itself is an extremely good example of corporate propaganda.
And when you look, most of the time these authority structures have no justification: they have no moral justification, they have no justification in the interests of the person lower in the hierarchy, or in the interests of other people, or the environment, or the future, or the society, or anything else – they’re just there in order to preserve certain structures of power and domination, and the people at the top. So.
It’s quite standard for those who hold the clubs to say: “Forget about everything that happened and let’s just go on from here.” In other words, “I’ve got what I want, and out forget about what your concerns are. I’ll just take what I want.
The economic consequences of these policies have been the same just about everywhere, and exactly what one would expect: a massive increase in social and economic inequality, a marked increase in severe deprivation for the poorest nations and peoples of the world, a disastrous global environment, an unstable global economy and an unprecedented bonanza for the wealthy.
If we are biological organisms, not angels, then our cognitive faculties are similar to those called “physical capacities” and should be studied much as other systems of the body are.
The health care system in the United States, I’m sure you know, is a total international scandal. It’s twice the per capita cost of comparable countries and one of the worst outcomes, with a huge number of people uninsured altogether. And it’s going to get worse.
When the NSA’s surveillance program was exposed by Edward Snowden’s revelations, high officials claimed that it had prevented fifty-four terrorist acts. On inquiry, that was whittled down to a dozen. A high-level government panel then discovered that there was actually only one case: someone had sent $8,500 to Somalia. That was the total yield of the huge assault on the Constitution and, of course, on others throughout the world.
If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you’re saying, because it’s too hard to believe one thing and say another.
Amnesty International, which was opening its yearlong campaign to protect human rights defenders in Colombia in response to the country’s horrifying record of attacks against human rights and labor activists and mostly the usual victims of state terror: the poor and defenseless.