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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John Kenneth Galbraith: Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Always be on the alert against Trotskyism, reformism and revisionism / Soyez toujours en alerte contre le trotskysme, le réformisme et le révisionnisme / Seid immer wachsam gegen Trotzkismus, Reformismus und Revisionismus
John Kenneth Galbraith: Any country that has Milton Friedman as an adviser has nothing to fear from a few million Arabs. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Madeleine Albright: I think this a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it (about US sanctions killing more than 500,000 Iraqi children). wordsmith.social/protestation/…
James Peck: There is a current of human rights that judges a society by how well it treats the poor and the weak. It challenges power by asking why, in large areas of the world where civil liberties and the rule of law do hold sway, so little is done to meet the most basic economic, medical, and educational needs of the population. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lewis Mumford: The West has ravaged the world for five hundred years, under the flag of master-slave theory which in our finest hour of hypocrisy was called 'the white man's burden' What sets the West apart is its persistence to stop at nothing. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
The funny part is that the (not actually a) crossposter I'm using for Fedi/ATProto stuff is that it natively has quote posts. Friendica has had quoteposts forever, I suspect other AP software has had quoteposts forever, yet Mastodon refuses to implement them.
Joe Emersberger: What would it take for the NYT editors to become deeply embarrassed by their own governments' human rights record? The number of countries the Obama administration has bombed in gross violation of international law now approaches double digits. This is clearly not an embarrassment to the NYTimes. They do not call for a "global response" to terminate the never ending rush to war of the USA and its allies, who've rarely taken a break from bombing Iraq over the last twenty four years (and probably caused 1-2 million Iraqi deaths since 1990). Rational people will call the big Imperial States, not the "Islamic State", a threat that requires a "global response". Point to an editorial board of a corporate newspaper willing to say that and you'll be pointing to an ex-editorial board. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Stalin: You speak of your "devotion" to me. Perhaps it was just a chance phrase. Perhaps. . . . But if the phrase was not accidental I would advise you to discard the "principle" of devotion to persons. It is not the Bolshevik way. Be devoted to the working class, its Party, its state. That is a fine and useful thing. But do not confuse it with devotion to persons, this vain and useless bauble of weak-minded intellectuals. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
William Blum: America is the most destructive nation in history. We have overthrown more than 50 foreign governments, we have attempted to assassinate or have assassinated more than 50 foreign leaders, we have bombed more than 35 countries, we have interfered in the elections of dozens of countries. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
James Peck: Beijing believes the United States enjoys more rights because of its wealth, power, and history - not because of its greater virtue, empathy, or understanding of others. It argues that an individualizing of human rights pervades the Western human rights stance largely because of such affluence; that basic subsistence, national independence, economic and cultural transformation are often simply taken for granted. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
