posted 12-16-2003 09:34 AM
Memorable Quotes"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
*****
"No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine."
William Blum
"The point of public relations slogans like "Support our troops" is that they don't mean anything... That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That's the one you're not allowed to talk about."
Noam Chomsky
*****
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."
Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945
*****
"Only the grand scale and technocratic impersonality of the crimes conceived and directed by the [U.S.] ruling elite acting under cover of state authority distinguish them from garden variety killers."
Darrell Hamamoto
"The biggest political joke in America is that we have a liberal press. It's a joke taken seriously by a surprisingly large number of people...
The myth of the liberal press has served as a political weapon for conservative and right-wing forces eager to discourage critical coverage of government and corporate power ... Americans now have the worst of both worlds: a press that, at best, parrots the pronouncements of the powerful and, at worst, encourages people to be stupid with pseudo-news that illuminates nothing but the bottom line."
Mark Hertzgaard
*****
"The Gulf War ... was made popular by an immense propaganda barrage unleashed by the Pentagon, the media, and government, creating an ideological milieu in which 45 percent of the population said it would be prepared to use nuclear weapons against Iraq. Military actions were, transformed into a grotesque national spectacle, a great celebration of war-making."
Carl Boggs
*****
"Television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation... Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing."
Neil Postman
"We will export death and violence to the four corners of the Earth in defense of our great nation."
George W. Bush, after September 11, 2001
*****
"24.9 percent of American children live in poverty, while the proportions in Germany, France and Italy are 8.6, 7.4 and 10.5 percent. And once born on the wrong side of the tracks, Americans are more likely to stay there than their counterparts in Europe. Those born to better-off families are more likely to stay better off. America is developing an aristocracy of the rich and a serfdom of the poor - the inevitable result of a twenty-year erosion of its social contract."
Will Hutton
*****
"To oppose the policies of a government does not mean you are against the country or the people that the government supposedly represents. Such opposition should be called what it really is: democracy, or democratic dissent, or having a critical perspective about what your leaders are doing. Either we have the right to democratic dissent and criticism of these policies or we all lie down and let the leader, the Fuhrer, do what is best, while we follow uncritically, and obey whatever he commands. That's just what the Germans did with Hitler, and look where it got them."
Michael Parenti
"Americans cannot escape a certain responsibility for what is done in our name around the world. In a democracy, even one as corrupted as ours, ultimate authority rests with the people. We empower the government with our votes, finance it with our taxes, bolster it with our silent acquiescence. If we are passive in the face of America's official actions overseas, we in effect endorse them."
Mark Hertzgaard
*****
"Media criticism does exist in America. But by and large, it is not citizen-based criticism designed to make media a better source of information in a democracy. Instead, it is a cynical manipulation of the discourse designed to silence even the mildest dissent from the conservative, militantly pro-corporate dogma that has come to pass for news in an era when "reporters" brag about the size of their American-flag lapel pins."
Robert McChesney and John Nichols
*****
"We have become so accustomed to [TV news] discontinuities that we are no longer struck dumb, as any sane person would be, by a newscaster who having just reported that a nuclear war is inevitable goes on to say that he will be right back after this word from Burger King ..."
Neil Postman
"What made the [new] Gilded Age was not the individual scandals of the Reagan, Bush, or Clinton years... The new crux was the vast, relentless takeover of U.S. politics and policymaking by large donors to federal campaigns and propaganda organs. The S&L scandals showed the corruption in both parties ... Indeed, the eighties saw the financial sector take the lead in Washington lobbying outlays and in dollars provided to federal election campaigns. Both cemented a fast-returning relationship: politics was finance, and finance was politics, just as the men with diamond stickpins had said a century earlier."
Kevin Phillips
*****
"[As a result of U.S. sanctions] Iraq's children were hardest hit, dying of malnutrition and easily preventable diseases at the rate of 5000 a month - the equivalent of a 9/11 disaster every 30 days."
Mark Zepezauer
*****
"There is no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists. If we lived in a country where the police were allowed to search your home at any time for any reason; if we lived in a country where the government is entitled to open your mail, eavesdrop on your phone conversations, or intercept your e-mail communications; if we lived in a country where people could be held indefinitely based ... on mere suspicion that they are up to no good, the government would probably discover and arrest more terrorists, or would-be terrorists.... But that wouldn't be a country in which we would want to live."
Senator Russ Feingold
"If the U.S. really believes that supporting terrorists makes you as guilty as the terrorists themselves, then it would have to put on trial most of its military and political leadership over the last handful of administrations, and more."
Peter McClaren
*****
"Political discussion in the United States is usually restricted to the moderate to conservative range that precludes discussion of class conflict. If "class warfare" is mentioned, it is because a conservative wants to suggest that certain matters should be kept off-limits in American political discussion"
Steve Brouwer
*****
"War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and the press ... have turned war into a vast video arcade game. Its very essence - death - is hidden from public view."
Chris Hedges, war correspondent for New York Times
"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
*****
"The more you watch Fox News, the stupider you are."
Al Franken
*****
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force."
William Blum
"For the American public ... warfare visited upon other countries has become an entertaining spectacle."
Carl Boggs
*****
"The job of the President is to set the agenda and the job of the press is to follow the agenda that the leadership sets."
Lawrence Grossman - longtime head of PBS and NBC News
*****
"The corporations don't have to lobby the government any more. They are the government."
Jim Hightower, former Secretary of Agriculture for the state of Texas
"A tiny portion of the population controls the lion's share of the wealth and most of the command positions of state, manufacturing, banking, investment, publishing, higher education, philanthropy, and media... these individuals exercise a preponderant influence over what is passed off as public information and democratic discourse.
The ruling class is the politically active component of the owning class, the top captains of finance and policy who set the standards for investment and concentration of capital at home and abroad... Their overall economic domination and their campaign contributions, media monopoly, high-paid lobbyists, and public relations experts regularly predetermine who will be treated as major political candidates and which policy parameters will prevail... Though relatively few in number they get the most of what there is to get. Their wealth serves their power, and their power serves their wealth."
Michael Parenti
*****
"What keeps most Americans from being shocked by the shredding of the Bill of Rights is that they have yet to feel the consequences, either personally or through someone close to them. It would appear, however, that they only have to wait."
William Blum
*****
"Media manipulation in the U.S. today is more efficient than it was in Nazi Germany, because here we have the pretense that we are getting all the information we want. That misconception prevents people from even looking for the truth."
Mark Crispin Miller
"Somebody's paying the corporations that destroyed Iraq and the corporations that are rebuilding it. They're getting paid by the American taxpayer in both cases. So we pay them to destroy the country, and then we pay them to rebuild it. Those are gifts from U.S. taxpayer to U.S. corporations..."
Noam Chomsky
*****
"Taking advantage of our grief, and our fear that "it" may happen again, an appointed president uses the dead of 9/11 as a convenient cover, a justification, for permanently altering our American way of life. Is that why they died, so that George W. Bush can turn the country into Texas?"
Michael Moore
*****
"History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period ... was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people."
Martin Luther King, Jr.
"For the media owners, allegations of a liberal bias make it easier for them to impose the conservative bias they prefer. For the pseudoliberals who work in the media system, confessing to a liberal bias is far more comfortable than admitting that they've sold out their beliefs for a nice salary. It's only because the mainstream media is so conservative that all these right-wing pundits can make accusations of liberal bias without opposition."
John K . Wilson
*****
"President Bush asked for $87 billion more to pay for the American occupation and reconstruction of Iraq. New reports already reveal the comparative costs and sacrifices of this enormous expenditure: The entire proposed fiscal-year budget for the Department of Health and Human Services is $66 billion; for the Department of Education, $53 billion. The total amount for all 50 states to meet their projected budget shortfalls this year is $78 billion."
Jim Wallis
*****
"This country is in the grip of a President who was not elected, who has surrounded himself with thugs in suits who care nothing about human life abroad or here, who care nothing about freedom abroad or here, who care nothing about what happens to the earth... The so-called war on terrorism is not only a war on innocent people in other countries, but it is also a war on the people of the United States: a war on our liberties, a war on our standard of living. The wealth of the country is being stolen from the people and handed over to the superrich. The lives of our young are being stolen. And the thieves are in the White House."
Howard Zinn
"When Time magazine conducted a poll in Europe in March [2003] asking which of three - North Korea, Iraq, or the United States - was the biggest threat to world peace, a whopping 86.9% answered the United States."
Immanuel Wallerstein
*****
"The only true security comes from ensuring that all people, here and around the globe, are able to meet their basic needs and dream of a better life. At the very least, we have to make damn sure we are not the ones robbing them of that dream."
Michael Moore
*****
"This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq, then we take a look around and see how things stand. This is entirely the wrong way to go about it... If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war . . . our children will sing great songs about us years from now."
Richard Perle - about the U.S. "war on terrorism"
"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
*****
"The U.S. record of war crimes has been, from the nineteenth century to the present, a largely invisible one, with no government, no political leaders, no military officials, no lower-level operatives held accountable for criminal actions. A culture of militarism has saturated the public sphere, including academia, endowing all U.S. interventions abroad with a patina of patriotic goodness and democratic sensibilities beyond genuine interrogation. Anyone challenging this mythology is quickly marginalized, branded a traitor or Communist or terrorist or simply a lunatic beyond the pale of reasonable discussion."
Carl Boggs
Chemtrail Central Forum
UBBFriend: Email This Page to Someone! 
posted 12-16-2003 09:34 AM
posted 12-16-2003 11:14 AM
posted 12-16-2003 08:22 PM
posted 12-17-2003 12:13 PM
