Michael Parenti Quotes

The mass media are class media.

Profits are what you make when not working.

The trick is to steal big.

The few remaining communist governments, such as North Korea and Cuba, were no longer por­trayed as instruments of Moscow, but as evils in their own right.

The “global economy” is another name for imperialism, and imperialism is a transnational form of capitalism. The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead, gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, televi­sion, and armed force.

One mechanism of repression is the grand jury.

Some writers stress the "irrational" features of fascism. By doing so, they overlook the rational politico-economic functions that fascism performed. Much of politics is the rational manipulation of irrational symbols. Certainly, this is true of fascist ideology, whose emotive appeals have served a class-control function.

Countries with ostensibly democratic governments often mani­fest a markedly undemocratic state power.

After years of encirclement and repeated rebuffs from Washington, years of threat, isolation, and demonization, the Pyongyang leaders are convinced that the best way to resist superpower attack and domination is by developing a nuclear arsenal. It does not really sound so crazy. As already mentioned, the United States does not invade countries that are armed with long-range nuclear missiles (at least not thus far). Having been pushed to the brink for so long, the North Koreans are now taking a gamble, upping the ante, pursuing an arguably “sane” deterrence policy in the otherwise insane world configured by an overweening and voracious empire.

The efficacy of a label is that it propagates an evocative but undefined image lacking a specific content that can be held up to the test of evidence.

The withholding of labor by workers is called a strike, but not the withholding of capital by employers. The latter is never treated as a controversial disruption of the production process.

Whether a leader is acting with admirable “firmness” or “aggressive rigidity” in a situation will often depend on the political values and views of the observer.

In contrast, orthodoxy can rest on its own unstated axioms and mystifications, remaining heedless of marginalized critics who are denied a means of reaching mass audiences. Orthodoxy promotes its views through the unexamined repetition that comes with monopoly control of the major communication and educational systems.

Having never understood the role that existing communist powers played in tempering the worst impulses of Western capitalism and imperialism, and having perceived communism as nothing but an unmitigated evil, the anti-communists did not anticipate the losses that were to come. Some of them still don't get it.

The Federalists also used bribes, intimidation, and fraud against opponents of the Constitution.