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Each of the following statements should provide the
stimulus for some good discussion. We will continue to add to the list and welcome
any suggestions for additional quotes. Just send them to Richard Robbins.
A really good education makes kids subversive. That’s
why so little really good education goes on.
Chris Satullo
I have read in E.P. Thompson’s "The
Making of the English Working Class" that the first man who attempted to establish a
labor union in England at the end of the 18th century was arrested, tried for
sedition, found guilty, drawn and quartered in a public square by attaching draft horses
to each of his arms and legs and pulling him apart. He was then disemboweled and his guts
were burned. Then they hanged what was left of him. One gathers from this that the
propertied classes were slow to accept the idea of organized labor.
SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER, B-2,
Wednesday, September 8, 1999
THE POET’S CHOICE ROBERT HASS
Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is
only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed.
Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much of higher consideration.
Abraham Lincoln
"At this point, I would like to emphasize that our
emergency planning {for a nuclear attack by the soviets} is predicated on the idea that it
is possible for our nation to survive, recover, and win and that our way of life,
including free enterprise, the oil industry, and Socony Mobil Oil Company, can survive,
recover, and win with it.
-- Maxwell McKnight, Mobil, 1963
"For globalism to work, American can’t be afraid to act like the almighty
superpower that it is....The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden
fist McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15.
And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is
called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."
-- "What the World Needs Now," Thomas Friedman, New York Times, March 28,
1999
Personally, I’m in favor of democracy, which means that the central institutions
of society have to be under popular control. Now, under capitalism, we can’t have
democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of
society are in principle under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is,
if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at
the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level—there’s little
bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly
straightforward. Just as I’m opposed to political fascism, I’m opposed to
economic fascism. I think that until the major institutions of society are under the
popular control of participants and communities, it’s pointless to talk about
democracy.
from Noam Chomsky Language and Politics (1988) p.162.
Let us not forget the entertainment value of democracy. It keeps the masses amused.
What would you rather have: misery and corruption in a circus setting or misery and
corruption under the leaden grey of an authoritarian sky? Give me the circus any time.
-- Azaz Amir (a popular Pakistani journalist commenting on
the current state of affairs in Pakistan...)
Covert action is nothing more than "a semantic
disguise for murder, coercion, blackmail, bribery, the spreading of lies, whatever is
deemed useful to bending other countries to our will."
--Former Senator Frank Church, 1982
"We still maintain a republican form of government,
but who has control of the primaries that nominate the candidate? The corporations have.
Who control the conventions? The corporations. Who control the machinery of elections? The
corporations. Who own the bosses and the elected officials? The corporations. Are they
representatives of the people or of the corporations? Let any fair-minded man answer that
question truthfully."
"If the corporations do all this—and they surely do—can we any longer
maintain that this is a government by the people? It is a government by a distinct class,
but not a government for the greatest good of the greatest number but for the special
advantage of that class. Laws are passed for the benefit of the corporations, and such
laws as are not to the advantage of the corporations are ignored. The people are neglected
because they have ceased to be important as a factor in the government."
-- William Randolph Hearst (qtd. in _Forerunners of American
Fascism_ by Raymond Gram Swing. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969; page
139-140.)
"A scientifically ordered society has little room for democracy because
rationality is inevitably totalitarian."
Mary Dixon 1812 quoted in The maze of Ingenuity; ideas and idealism in the development
of technology by Arnold Pacey MIT Press 1993
"In the United States, elections are basically debates
between the haves, among the haves, about how best to keep the have-nots from having
anything."
--Michael Albert, editor of *Z Magazine*, in an
interview with KPFK’s Frank Stoltz, Thu 15 Feb 96.
"There are people in the world so hungry that God
cannot appear to them except in the form of bread."
-- Mahatma Gandhi
Source: *Unitarian Church of Orange County Newsletter*, vol. 40, no. 13 (July 17,
1998), p. 1.
"All the evidence suggests that we have consistently
exaggerated the contributions of technological genius and underestimated the contributions
of natural resources. We need [...] something we lost in our haste to remake the world: a
sense of limits, an awareness of the importance of earth’s resources."
-- Stewart Udall
"Nor do piecemeal steps however well intended, even partially resolve problems
that have reached a universal, global and catastrophic Character. If anything, partial
‘solutions’ serve merely as cosmetics to conceal the deep seated nature of the
ecological crisis. They thereby deflect public attention and theoretical insight from an
adequate understanding of the depth and scope of the necessary changes."
Murray Bookchin, In The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto: Cheshire Books, 1982) pg. 3
"People who respond most favorably to such statements are older, less-educated
males from larger households, who are not typically active information-seekers... another
possibile target is younger, lower-income women [who are] likely to soften their support
for federal legislation after hearing new information on global warming. These women are
good targets for magazine advertisements."
-- Leaked document from the National Coal Association,
on targetting strategy for a campaign to convince Americans that global warming is not
a problem. Cited by Senator Gore in his book _Earth in the Balance_.
"Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and
inhumane."—Martin Luther King
- from Physicians for a National Health Program
In 1991, the Centers for Disease Control published a study showing that the
nation’s taxpayers would save $60 billion in health-care and special-education costs
by spending $32 billion to eradicate lead from inner city homes.[9] Congress has never
been willing to adopt this cost-effective prevention strategy, evidently preferring to
produce generation after generation of black inner city children with diminished
intellectual capacity and a propensity toward violence.
Children, can you spell R-A-C-I-S-M?
Peter Montague, Rachel’s Environmental and Health Weekly (rachel@rachel.org)
Excerpts from letters to Amnesty International:
"When the first two hundred letters came, the guards gave me back my clothes. Then
the next two hundred letters came, and the prison director came to see me. When the next
pile of letters arrived, the director got in touch with his superior. The letters kept
coming and coming: three thousand of them. The President was informed. The letters still
kept arriving, and the President called the prison and told them to let me go."
- A released prisoner from the Dominican Republic
"We could always tell when international protests were taking place... the food
rations increased and the beating s were fewer. Letters from abroad were translated and
passed round from cell to cell, but when the letters stopped, the dirty food and
repression started again."
A released prisoner of conscience from Vietnam
"For years I was held in a tiny cell. My only human contact was with my
torturers... My only company were the cockroaches and mice... On Christmas Eve the door to
my cell opened and the guard tossed in a crumpled piece of paper. It said, ‘Take
heart. The world knows you’re alive. We’re with you. Regards, Monica, Amnesty
International.’ That letter saved my life."
- A released prisoner of conscience from Paraguay
"Amnesty International has concluded that the Salvadoran ‘death squads’
are simply used to shield the government from accountability for the torture,
‘disappearance’ and extrajudicial executions committed in their name. The squads
are made up of *regular army and police agents*, acting in uniform or plain clothes,
*under the orders of superior officers*." [emphasis added] [Who Runs the "Death
Squads"", pp. 8-9]
--Amnesty International, _El Salvador: "Death Squads"—AGovernment
Strategy_
"It is organized violence on the top which creates individual violence at the
bottom"
-Emma Goldman
"What can I tell you? Cubans always speak of defending The Revolution. I speak of
defending ourselves from the grief and hearbreak of being accomplices to evil acts done in
our name and with our hardearned cash. I speak of defending our right not to be murderers.
If I would rather die myself than run over a child in the street, how can I possibly
accept squashing a million children from forty-five thousand feet? And to celebrate such a
feat, I assure you, is quite impossible. To see the anti-abortion forces, including Bush,
rage against poor and scared women, some of them homeless, who refuse to give life to a
child they cannot support, while not even planting symbolic crosses for the actual
children bombed to death in Iraq, is to witness cynicism in its most unconscionable form.
I speak of defending our right to praise and uphold what is good about any other
people’s way of life, even as we recognise and criticize what is bad. ...
"I speak of defending the Earth, our Mother God. I speak of defending and loving
the Earth’s children: All of us."
(From "The Story of Why I America Here: or A Woman Connects Oppressions" by
Alice Walker, published in the Monthly Review, June 1994. Originally a speech delivered at
a Peace for Cuba Rally on February 1, 1992)
"The simple presence of subversion can never be a lasting remedy for it fails to
take into account of the cause of subversion. Most of the causes reside in our situations
of institutional violence. Thus radical changes for subversion is the radical suppression
of social inequality."
-Declaration of International metting of Latin American Bishops
"That God is on the side of the poor and that the Scriptures are uncompromising in
their demand for economic and social justice is much more clear biblically than most of
the issues over which churches have divided. The Scriptures claim that to know God is to
do justice and to plead the cause of the oppressed. Yet this central biblical imperative
is one of the first to be purged from a church that has conformed and made accommodations
to the established order."
-Jim Wallis "Agenda for Biblical People"
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