James Peck: Thousands of dossiers have been produced describing in meticulous detail the death squads and torture and extrajudicial executions carried out by brutal regimes and pathological dictators around the world. When people with black or yellow or brown skin, with Islamic or Communist or nationalist credentials murder their prisoners or bomb their villagers, they are condemned - often quite selectively, to be sure - by the "civilized" world. And they should be condemned. But the American leaders who ordered the free fire zones in Vietnam and the Phoenix program, or directed the Contras against the Sandinistas, or were complicit in Saddam Hussein's gas warfare against the Kurds, or set up and operated Guantánamo are not taken to court. They face no trials. On any human rights website you will find a growing number of prominent leaders indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Few are American or Western European or Israeli. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8068
John Pilger: Had journalists done their job in 2003, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda about Iraq's WMD, instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children might be alive today; and millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and the infamous Islamic State might not now exist. Most of the public in western countries have little idea of the sheer scale of the crime committed by our governments in Iraq. Even fewer are aware that, in the 12 years before the invasion, the US and British governments set in motion a holocaust by denying the civilian population of Iraq a means to live. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8069
James Peck: Behind the veil of legitimacy and humanitarian concerns can be found the same powerful people and organizations such as the Open Society Institute of George Soros, the Ford Foundation, the United States Institute of Peace, the National Endowment for Democracy and many more, financing and using a maze of well known NGO's such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Crisis Group, etc., as well as more obscure entities. With the help of these various groups it is possible not only to shape but to create the news, the agenda and public opinion to further aims which are, in short, the control of the world, its natural resources and the furtherance of the uniform ideal of a perfect world polity made in America. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8070
John Bolton: It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so because over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrain the United States. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8071
David McGowan: Selling fear to the American people has become a mainstay of the press and of both political parties in this country. Taking a "tough on crime" stance, particularly in a climate of perpetual fear created by the "war on drugs" and the "war on terrorism," is always a politically safe posture... By focusing on crime, attention is effectively directed away from more divisive issues on which a politician might have to take a stand that would cost them votes. Meanwhile, a fearful populace continues to surrender their civil rights and constitutional protections at an alarming rate, so that their government may protect them from the rampant criminality of the masses. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8072
Gloria La Riva: As UN Ambassador and the Secretary of State in the Bill Clinton regime, Madeleine Albright was a fanatical advocate of the genocidal sanctions blockade that killed more than a million women, children and men in Iraq, and of the 1999 U.S./NATO bombing war against Yugoslavia. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8074
Kwame Nkrumah: The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment, under neo-colonialism, increases, rather than decreases, the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world. The struggle against neo-colonialism is not aimed at excluding the capital of the developed world from operating in less developed countries. It is aimed at preventing the financial power of the developed countries being used in such a way as to impoverish the less developed. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8075
Che Guevara: This type of struggle provides us with the opportunity to become revolutionaries, the highest level of the human species. At the same time, it enables us to emerge fully as men. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8076
Jefferson Morley: In El Salvador, the Reagan administration backed an ultra-right faction of the military led by intelligence officer Roberto d'Aubuisson who was trained at the CIA-run International Police Academy in Washington. D'Aubuisson masterminded the assassination of Monsignor Romero in March 1980 and commanded the death squads that liquidated civilians in favor of peaceful change. In Guatemala, the ultra-right celebrated Reagan's elections and stepped up its campaign of kidnapping opponents in the capital and massacring peasants in the countryside. ... In 1993, the UN Truth Commission found that 85 percent of the deaths of civilian non-combatants in El Salvador were attributable to government forces. Only 5 percent could be attributed to the left. In other words, the security forces armed and trained by the United States were 17 times more likely to be responsible for political murders than the anti-U.S. forces. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8077
James Peck: The American Constitution itself does not include economic, social, and cultural rights. It includes no mandate to have the basic needs of people satisfied. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8078
S. Brian Willson: It is estimated that Africa lost fifty to sixty million human beings to death and slavery during the nearly four hundred years of the transatlantic slave trade. It has been calculated that only ten to fifteen million survived the kidnapping process and the subsequent long, forced march of hundreds of miles to the African coast, during which the captives were chained to one another. If that wasn't savage enough, they were forced to endure the transport of six to ten weeks on one of 54,000 separate slave voyages, five thousand miles across the ocean. Called floating coffins, each ship held anywhere from 250 to 600 Africans. The trans-Atlantic slave trade is the largest known forced intercontinental movement of human beings in history. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8079
James Peck: Washington set out after the Vietnam War to craft human rights into a new language of power designed to promote American foreign policy... Washington has shaped idealism into a potent ideological weapon for ends having little to do with human rights - and everything to do with extending America's global reach. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8080
John Kenneth Galbraith: If the state is the executive committee of the great corporation and the planning system, it is partly because neoclassical economics is its instrument for neutralizing the suspicion that this is so. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8082
John Kenneth Galbraith: When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself. To hold otherwise - to deny the political character of the modern corporation - is not merely to avoid the reality. It is to disguise the reality. The victims of that disguise are those we instruct in error. The beneficiaries are the institutions whose power we so disguise. Let there be no question: economics, so long as it is thus taught, becomes, however unconsciously, a part of the arrangement by which the citizen or student is kept from seeing how he or she is, or will be, governed. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8084
John Kenneth Galbraith: No grant of feudal privilege has ever equaled, for effortless return, that of the grandparent who bought and endowed his descendants with a thousand shares of General Motors or General Electric. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8085
Jonathan Cook: Western corporations own the media, and their advertising makes the industry profitable. In this sense, the media cannot fulfil the function of watchdog of power, because in fact it is power. It is the power of the globalised elite to control and limit the ideological and imaginative horizons of the media's readers and viewers. It does so to ensure that imperial interests, which are synonymous with those of the corporations, are not threatened. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8088
Michael Ledeen: Just as it is sometimes necessary temporarily to resort to evil actions to achieve worthy objectives, so a period of dictatorship is sometimes the only hope for freedom. ... Paradoxically, preserving liberty may require the rule of a single leader - a dictator - willing to use those dreaded 'extraordinary measures', which few know how, or are willing, to employ. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8089
Peter Phillips: In Venezuela the corporate media are still owned by the elites. The five major TV networks, and nine of ten of the major newspapers maintain a continuing media effort to undermine Chavez and the socialist revolution. But despite the corporate media and $20 million annual support to the anti-Chavez opposition institutions from USAID and National Endowment for Democracy, two-thirds of the people in Venezuela continue to support President Hugo Chavez and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8090
S. Brian Willson: Cold War propaganda cast a toxic spell on the minds of three generations, including some of the most intelligent people, and its influence continues today. Relentless Cold War rhetoric accomplished a near total indoctrination of our entire US culture. Religious institutions, academic and educational institutions from kindergarten through graduate school, professional associations, political associations from local to national, the scientific community, economic system, entertainment industry from radio and TV to Hollywood and sports, fraternal organizations, boy scouts, etc.-all systematically were complicit in and cooperated to preserve unquestioning belief in the unique nobility of the US American system while instilling rabid, paranoid fear of "enemies"-in our midst as well as "out there"-in order to rationalize otherwise pathologically inexplicable behavior around the world as well as at home. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8091
Dave Johnson: Many people don't understand our country's problem of concentration of income and wealth because they don't see it. People just don't understand how much wealth there is at the top now. The wealth at the top is so extreme that it is beyond most people's ability to comprehend. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8092
Charlie Robinson: There is a shadowy group of Plutocrats running multinational corporations, controlling the media narrative, manipulating the money supply, influencing governments, generating chaos, and provoking wars in order to further their agendas. These people are very real and extremely dangerous. They operate in the shadows, safely out of the light of public scrutiny. They manage by proxy, using cut-outs to do their bidding, never allowing themselves to get their hands dirty? Politicians are used and discarded, giving the illusion that they are the ones in control. The controllers' identities are hidden through a corporate shell game of holding companies and secret banking tax havens, in places like the Cayman Islands and Luxemburg. A thirst for publicity and a lust for the spotlight are liabilities if you want to excel in this endeavor. Better to rule from the shadows where your identity and intentions are unknown. ... The people running the show are mostly driven, professional, sociopaths with no discernible traces of compassion. ... Some of our best-known leaders and public figures are actually psychopaths, and what makes a psychopath most effective is their overall lack of empathy. They simply do not have the ability to imagine or feel someone else's pain, and this frees them up to cross boundaries that the rest of us would never dream of crossing. They can operate without limits, giving them an advantage over everyone else. They are professional liars and damn proud of it. ... You do not make it to the top of the food chain by being nice, honest and fair; you get there by force, deception, and influence. You get there through violence, if necessary. You get there through blackmail and extortion. It takes planning and funding, patience and practice, and a mastery of how to use fear to control other people. Those running the world are playing a much different game than the rest of us, and the way they see it, there are no rules. Or at least the rules do not apply to them. ... Their plan is to change society in every country in a way that provides them a reason to impose a world government. The creation of a world central bank and an electronic world currency, in conjunction with the elimination of cash, would allow them complete control to dictate financial policy around the globe. Their policies would be enforced by their world army, and a micro-chipped population would live in fear of having their electronic currency deleted if they ever crossed the world government. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8093
Andrew Gavin Marshall: A 2005 report from Citigroup coined the term "plutonomy," to describe countries "where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few," and specifically identified the U.K., Canada, Australia, and the United States as four plutonomies. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8095
Lewis H. Lapham: In the late '60s and early '70s, it was still possible to associate the word "public" with the common good - public square, public school, public health and so on. And "private" tended to connote selfish greed. Now, the meanings have been reversed. Public is now a synonym for slum, incompetence, corruption and so forth, and private is the source of all things bright and beautiful - private school, private stream, private plane and so on. And so the impulse has been toward plutocracy, and it's celebrated in all of our news media. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8096
F. William Engdahl: Following a major economic Depression beginning in 1873 ... powerful American industrial and banking families grouped around J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller concentrated the wealth and control of American industry into their own hands. ... The Morgan and Rockefeller interests deployed fraud, deceit, violence, and bribery - and they deliberately manipulated financial panics. Each financial panic, brought about through their calculated control of financial markets and banking credit, allowed them and their closest allies to consolidate ever more power into fewer and fewer hands. It was this concentration of financial power within an elite few wealthy families that created an American plutocracy or, more accurately, an American oligarchy. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8097
William Cormier: The Mainstream News Media (MSM) in the United States is demonstrating they are no better than China, Iran, or Venezuela when it comes down to misleading the public and acting as a government propaganda tool. Vital polls and assessments of the true impact of the Ruling Class War on America is non-existent, and citizens who desire to find real news and an unbiased assessment of the economy have no alternative other than relying on the Internet to glean the real impact of the "recession" on the American economy. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8098
John Pilger: Why are millions of people in Britain persuaded that a collective punishment called "austerity" is necessary? Following the economic crash in 2008, a rotten system was exposed. For a split second the banks were lined up as crooks with obligations to the public they had betrayed. But within a few months - apart from a few stones lobbed over excessive corporate "bonuses" - the message changed. The mugshots of guilty bankers vanished from the tabloids and something called "austerity" became the burden of millions of ordinary people. Was there ever a sleight of hand as brazen? Today, many of the premises of civilised life in Britain are being dismantled in order to pay back a fraudulent debt - the debt of crooks. The "austerity" cuts are said to be £83 billion. That's almost exactly the amount of tax avoided by the same banks and by corporations like Amazon and Murdoch's News UK. Moreover, the crooked banks are given an annual subsidy of £100bn in free insurance and guarantees - a figure that would fund the entire National Health Service. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8099
theglobalelite.org: In the so-called 'third world', particularly in sub-Sahara Africa, the ravages of the Neoliberal Project have been extended by the actions of the IMF and by other means. Governments are encouraged, or forced, to take on debts that they have no ability to repay. When the governments then turn to the IMF for relief, additional loans are granted, but they are encumbered by draconian conditions. Governments are forced to cut social services, and are required to sell off national assets, such as water rights, at bargain basement prices to corporations. It becomes illegal, to give an example of what draconian means, for people to capture rainwater, as that is deemed to be stealing from the corporations that have bought the nation's water rights. By such means poverty has been systematically created wherever the IMF has managed to dig in its claws. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8100
Michael Snyder: The ultra-wealthy own virtually every major bank and every major corporation on the planet. They use a vast network of secret societies, think tanks and charitable organizations to advance their agendas and to keep their members in line. They control how we view the world through their ownership of the media and their dominance over our education system. They fund the campaigns of most of our politicians and they exert a tremendous amount of influence over international organizations such as the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. When you step back and take a look at the big picture, there is little doubt about who runs the world. The ultra-wealthy don't run down and put their money in the local bank like you and I do. Instead, they tend to stash their assets in places where they won't be taxed such as the Cayman Islands... The global elite have up to 32 trillion dollars stashed in offshore banks around the globe. U.S. GDP for 2011 was about 15 trillion dollars, and the U.S. national debt is sitting at about 16 trillion dollars, so you could add them both together and you still wouldn't hit 32 trillion dollars. And of course that does not even count the money that is stashed in other locations, and it does not count all of the wealth that the global elite have in hard assets such as real estate, precious metals, art, yachts, etc. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8101
Michael Parenti: The objective of U.S. world domination is not just power for its own sake but power to insure plutocratic control of the planet, power to privatize and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world, to hoist upon the backs of peoples everywhere - including the people of North America - the blessings of an untrammeled 'free market' corporate capitalism. The struggle is between those who belleve that the land, labor, capital, technology, and markets of the world should be dedicated to maximizing capital accumulation for the few, and those who believe that these things should be used for the communal benefit and socio-economic development of the many. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8102
William Jennings Bryan: Plutocracy is abhorrent to a republic; it is more despotic than monarchy, more heartless than aristocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. It preys upon the nation in time of peace and conspires against it in the hour of its calamity. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8103
Charles Sullivan: The inert masses are mentally and spiritually ill equipped to deal with reality; so they block it out of their minds - aided, of course, by the corporate media and the propaganda apparatus of the government, itself. This is why fantasy is freely substituted for reality; plutocracy is mistaken for democracy, and the majority of the people do not know the difference. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8104
Webster Griffin Tarpley: US society today is neither a tyranny nor a democracy; it is organized from top to bottom according to the principle of oligarchy or plutocracy. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8105
Ramsey Clark: We're not a democracy. It's a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we're a plutocracy, a government by the wealthy. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8106
