Democracy, in this late stage of capitalism, has been replaced with a system of legalized bribery. All branches of government, including the courts, … - Chris Hedges

'The wall had come down,' Cohen said of the 1989 collapse of East Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall. 'Germany was reunifying. The question became ‘where would a united Germany be?’ The West wanted Germany in NATO. For Gorbachev, this was an impossible sell. Twenty-seven point five million Soviet citizens had died in the war against Germany in the Second World War on the eastern front.

The irony is that Barack Obama would not even be president if it were not for the courage of persecuted dissidents such as Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, spied upon by their own government. But Obama understands where power lies. It does not lie with the citizen. It lies with Wall Street and our corporate boardrooms, which have carried out a slow motion coup d’état. And a system of mass surveillance is designed to keep these elites in these boardrooms powerful and the rest of us powerless.

Of the past 3,400 years, humans have been entirely at peace for 268 of them, or just 8 percent of recorded history.