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.

Michael Ledeen: Just as it is sometimes necessary temporarily to resort to evil actions to achieve worthy objectives, so a period of dictatorship is sometimes the only hope for freedom. ... Paradoxically, preserving liberty may require the rule of a single leader - a dictator - willing to use those dreaded 'extraordinary measures', which few know how, or are willing, to employ.

Peter Phillips: In Venezuela the corporate media are still owned by the elites. The five major TV networks, and nine of ten of the major newspapers maintain a continuing media effort to undermine Chavez and the socialist revolution. But despite the corporate media and $20 million annual support to the anti-Chavez opposition institutions from USAID and National Endowment for Democracy, two-thirds of the people in Venezuela continue to support President Hugo Chavez and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.

S. Brian Willson: Cold War propaganda cast a toxic spell on the minds of three generations, including some of the most intelligent people, and its influence continues today. Relentless Cold War rhetoric accomplished a near total indoctrination of our entire US culture. Religious institutions, academic and educational institutions from kindergarten through graduate school, professional associations, political associations from local to national, the scientific community, economic system, entertainment industry from radio and TV to Hollywood and sports, fraternal organizations, boy scouts, etc.-all systematically were complicit in and cooperated to preserve unquestioning belief in the unique nobility of the US American system while instilling rabid, paranoid fear of "enemies"-in our midst as well as "out there"-in order to rationalize otherwise pathologically inexplicable behavior around the world as well as at home.

Dave Johnson: Many people don't understand our country's problem of concentration of income and wealth because they don't see it. People just don't understand how much wealth there is at the top now. The wealth at the top is so extreme that it is beyond most people's ability to comprehend.

Charlie Robinson: There is a shadowy group of Plutocrats running multinational corporations, controlling the media narrative, manipulating the money supply, influencing governments, generating chaos, and provoking wars in order to further their agendas. These people are very real and extremely dangerous. They operate in the shadows, safely out of the light of public scrutiny. They manage by proxy, using cut-outs to do their bidding, never allowing themselves to get their hands dirty? Politicians are used and discarded, giving the illusion that they are the ones in control. The controllers' identities are hidden through a corporate shell game of holding companies and secret banking tax havens, in places like the Cayman Islands and Luxemburg. A thirst for publicity and a lust for the spotlight are liabilities if you want to excel in this endeavor. Better to rule from the shadows where your identity and intentions are unknown. ... The people running the show are mostly driven, professional, sociopaths with no discernible traces of compassion. ... Some of our best-known leaders and public figures are actually psychopaths, and what makes a psychopath most effective is their overall lack of empathy. They simply do not have the ability to imagine or feel someone else's pain, and this frees them up to cross boundaries that the rest of us would never dream of crossing. They can operate without limits, giving them an advantage over everyone else. They are professional liars and damn proud of it. ... You do not make it to the top of the food chain by being nice, honest and fair; you get there by force, deception, and influence. You get there through violence, if necessary. You get there through blackmail and extortion. It takes planning and funding, patience and practice, and a mastery of how to use fear to control other people. Those running the world are playing a much different game than the rest of us, and the way they see it, there are no rules. Or at least the rules do not apply to them. ... Their plan is to change society in every country in a way that provides them a reason to impose a world government. The creation of a world central bank and an electronic world currency, in conjunction with the elimination of cash, would allow them complete control to dictate financial policy around the globe. Their policies would be enforced by their world army, and a micro-chipped population would live in fear of having their electronic currency deleted if they ever crossed the world government.

John Jay: Those who own the country ought to govern it.

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.

Lewis H. Lapham: In the late '60s and early '70s, it was still possible to associate the word "public" with the common good - public square, public school, public health and so on. And "private" tended to connote selfish greed. Now, the meanings have been reversed. Public is now a synonym for slum, incompetence, corruption and so forth, and private is the source of all things bright and beautiful - private school, private stream, private plane and so on. And so the impulse has been toward plutocracy, and it's celebrated in all of our news media.

F. William Engdahl: Following a major economic Depression beginning in 1873 ... powerful American industrial and banking families grouped around J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller concentrated the wealth and control of American industry into their own hands. ... The Morgan and Rockefeller interests deployed fraud, deceit, violence, and bribery - and they deliberately manipulated financial panics. Each financial panic, brought about through their calculated control of financial markets and banking credit, allowed them and their closest allies to consolidate ever more power into fewer and fewer hands. It was this concentration of financial power within an elite few wealthy families that created an American plutocracy or, more accurately, an American oligarchy.

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.

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.

Oliver Wendell Holmes: Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.

Michael Snyder: The ultra-wealthy own virtually every major bank and every major corporation on the planet. They use a vast network of secret societies, think tanks and charitable organizations to advance their agendas and to keep their members in line. They control how we view the world through their ownership of the media and their dominance over our education system. They fund the campaigns of most of our politicians and they exert a tremendous amount of influence over international organizations such as the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. When you step back and take a look at the big picture, there is little doubt about who runs the world. The ultra-wealthy don't run down and put their money in the local bank like you and I do. Instead, they tend to stash their assets in places where they won't be taxed such as the Cayman Islands... The global elite have up to 32 trillion dollars stashed in offshore banks around the globe. U.S. GDP for 2011 was about 15 trillion dollars, and the U.S. national debt is sitting at about 16 trillion dollars, so you could add them both together and you still wouldn't hit 32 trillion dollars. And of course that does not even count the money that is stashed in other locations, and it does not count all of the wealth that the global elite have in hard assets such as real estate, precious metals, art, yachts, etc.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

F. William Engdahl: By the end of the 1890's (J.P.) Morgan and (John D.) Rockefeller had become the giants of an increasingly powerful Money Trust controlling American industry and government policy. There was little room for the actual practice of democracy in their world. Power was the commodity of their trade. It was the creation of an American aristocracy of blood and money, every bit as elite and exclusive as the titled nobility of Britain, Germany or France - despite the Constitutional ban on titled nobility in America. It was an oligarchy, a plutocracy in every sense of the word - rule by the wealthiest in their self-interest. Some 60 families - names like Rockefeller, Morgan, Dodge, Mellon, Pratt, Harkness, Whitney, Duke, Harriman, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, DuPont, Guggenheim, Astor, Lehman, Warburg, Taft, Huntington, Baruch and Rosenwald formed a close network of plutocratic wealth that manipulated, bribed, and bullied its way to control the destiny of the United States. At the dawn of the 20th Century, some sixty ultra-rich families, through dynastic intermarriage and corporate, interconnected shareholdings, had gained control of American industry and banking institutions.

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).

James Peck: As far back as the 1850s, Frederick Douglass, looking at the unquestionably vibrant press in the United States, asked how it could coexist with one of the most cruel systems of slavery the world had ever known. Why was a people so moral about some issues able to live face-to-face with such evil? And why did segregation last for another century after slavery? The issue was not the absence of a free press or of the free flow of ideas or of criticism. How and why blatant injustices are accepted and lived with as part of the commonweal is, as the American abolitionist John Brown warned, the key question of human rights.

Peter Phillips: The American people face a serious moral dilemma. Murder and war crimes have been conducted in their name. Yet most Americans have no idea of the magnitude of deaths and tend to believe that they number in the thousands and are primarily Iraqis killing Iraqis. Corporate mainstream media are in large part to blame.

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.

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.

Stalin: The Second World War was itself a product of this crisis. Each of the two capitalist coalitions which locked horns in the war calculated on defeating its adversary and gaining world supremacy. It was in this that they sought a way out of the crisis. The United States of America hoped to put its most dangerous competitors, Germany and Japan, out of action, seize foreign markets and the world's raw material resources, and establish its world supremacy.

Carl Bernstein: (Joseph) Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty-five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services--from simple intelligence-gathering to serving as go-betweens with spies in Communist countries.

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.

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.

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.

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.

William Blum: Can anyone name a single daily newspaper in the United States that is unequivocally opposed to US foreign policy? Can anyone name a single television network in the United States that is unequivocally opposed to US foreign policy? Is there a single daily newspaper or TV network in the entire United States that has earned the label "opposition media"?

Chris Hedges: Neofascism abolishes civil liberties in the name of national security and brands whole groups as traitors and enemies of the people. It is the militarized instrument used by the ruling elites to maintain control, divide and tear apart the society and further accelerate pillage and social inequality. The ruling ideology, no longer credible, is replaced with the jackboot.

Mao Zedong: The present-day capitalist economy in China is a capitalist economy which for the most part is under the control of the People's Government and which is linked with the state-owned socialist economy in various forms and supervised by the workers. It is not an ordinary but a particular kind of capitalist economy, namely, a state-capitalist economy of a new type. It exists not chiefly to make profits for the capitalists but to meet the needs of the people and the state. True, a share of the profits produced by the workers goes to the capitalists, but that is only a small part, about one quarter, of the total. The remaining three quarters are produced for the workers (in the form of the welfare fund), for the state (in the form of income tax) and for expanding productive capacity (a small part of which produces profits for the capitalists). Therefore, this state-capitalist economy of a new type takes on a socialist character to a very great extent and benefits the workers and the state.

Michel Chossudovsky: The "Anglo-American axis" in defense and foreign policy is the driving force behind the military operations in Central Asia and Middle East. This rapprochement between London and Washington is consistent with the integration of British and American business interests in the areas of banking, oil and the defense industry.

Andre Vltchek: Yes, over 100 people died in Paris (November 2015). While thousands are dying in Yemen, every month... While 17,000 already vanished in Iran - victims of West-sponsored terrorism... While hundreds of thousands have been dying in Libya and Syria... While millions have been dying in Somalia and Iraq... While some 10 millions already died in a looted and raped DRC (the Democratic Republic of Congo) ... All of them victims of Western assaults and banditry or of Western-sponsored terrorism directly.

Madeleine Albright: We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that's what they are going to get.

S. Brian Willson: Being at war against sanctioned enemies forms the core of US American identity, driven by a mythological notion of US American exceptionalism.

Paul Craig Roberts: Washington is responsible for the destruction of Yugoslavia and Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and part of Syria. Washington has enabled Saudi Arabia's attack on Yemen, Ukraine's attack on its former Russian provinces, and Israel's destruction of Palestine and the Palestinian people.

John Lennon: Working class people around the world have no innate desire to go to war with each other. They have to be conned into it by the sociopaths who will profit from it.

Malcolm X: If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.

Donald Rumsfeld: Make the American people realize they are surrounded in the world by violent extremists.

Serj Tankian: We first fought in the name of religion, then Communism, and now in the name of drugs and terrorism. Our excuses for global domination always change.

T.J. Petrowski: U.S. and Western imperialism is the root cause of the "refugee crisis". Everyday men, women, and children are killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, U.S. and Western-backed militias in Afghanistan, Syria, and Somalia, European and North American mining and oil conglomerates in Central and Western Africa, or are starved to death in Yemen by the U.S.-backed Arab blockade of the country. Until the genocidal aims of U.S. imperialism, with the support of Canada, Australia, the European Union, and regional allies, are defeated, the "war on terror" will continue to make life too unbearable for working people in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East to remain in their home countries.

Jacques R. Pauwels: The America of wealth and privilege is hooked on war, without regular and ever-stronger doses of war it can no longer function properly, that is, yield the desired profits. The President has already pointed his finger at those whose turn will soon come, namely, the "axis of evil" countries: Iran, Syria, Libya, Somalia, North Korea, and of course that old thorn in the side of America, Cuba. Welcome to the 21st century. Welcome to the brave new era of permanent war.

Philip Giraldi: By one estimate, as many as four million Muslims have died or been killed as a result of the ongoing conflicts that Washington has either initiated or been party to since 2001. There are, in addition, millions of displaced persons who have lost their homes and livelihoods, many of whom are among the human wave currently engulfing Europe. There are currently an estimated 2,590,000 refugees who have fled their homes from Afghanistan, 370,000 from Iraq, 3,880,000 million from Syria, and 1,100,000 from Somalia. The United Nations Refugee Agency is expecting at least 130,000 refugees from Yemen as fighting in that country accelerates. Between 600,000 and one million Libyans are living precariously in neighboring Tunisia. ... Significantly, the countries that have generated most of the refugees are all places where the United States has invaded, overthrown governments, supported insurgencies, or intervened in a civil war.

Douglas Valentine: In the wars in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan and Syria, America has destroyed any significant progress those nations had made in education, healthcare, infrastructure such as water treatment and electricity, postal services, courts. By degrading the standards of living for people in perceived "hostile" nations, America's ruling elite empowers itself, while claiming that it has ensured the safety and prestige of the American people. Sometimes it is even able to convince the public that its criminal actions are "humanitarian" and designed to liberate the people in nations it destroys.

Michael Ledeen: Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.

Guy Debord: The US government has not publicly identified - nor even estimated - the number of Iraqis, Afghanis, Libyans and Syrians it has killed, or caused to be killed, during its invasions, occupations, and CIA-led insurgencies. Neither is anyone in the media publicly counting the number of Muslims the US has killed, crippled, rendered homeless, starved, driven into poverty and despair, and/or condemned to disease and insanity. ... US leaders have sought to keep the ugliness of these wars - the mangled bodies, the burned-off faces, the squalid refugee camps, the abused captives -out of the press and away from the public's consciousness, in order to preserve the pretense of moral superiority that defines American "exceptionalism.

Bertolt Brecht: There are men who struggle for a day and they are good. There are men who struggle for a year and they are better. There are men who struggle many years, and they are better still. But there are those who struggle all their lives: These are the indispensable ones.

Bertolt Brecht: Those who take the meat from the table teach contentment. Those for whom the taxes are destined demand sacrifice. Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry of wonderful times to come. Those who lead the country into the abyss call ruling too difficult for ordinary men.

Karl Marx: With the national debt arose an international credit system, which often conceals one of the sources of primitive accumulation in this or that people. Thus the villainies of the Venetian thieving system formed one of the secret bases of the capital-wealth of Holland to whom Venice in her decadence lent large sums of money. So also was it with Holland and England. By the beginning of the 18th century the Dutch manufactures were far outstripped. Holland had ceased to be the nation preponderant in commerce and industry. One of its main lines of business, therefore, from 1701-1776, is the lending out of enormous amounts of capital, especially to its great rival England. The same thing is going on today between England and the United States. A great deal of capital, which appears today in the United States without any certificate of birth, was yesterday, in England, the capitalised blood of children.

Arnold J. Toynbee: For the world as a whole, the CIA has now become the bogey that communism has been for America. Wherever there is trouble, violence, suffering, tragedy, the rest of us are now quick to suspect the CIA had a hand in it. Our phobia about the CIA is, no doubt, as fantastically excessive as America's phobia about world communism; but in this case, too, there is just enough convincing guidance to make the phobia genuine. In fact, the roles of America and Russia have been reversed in the world's eyes. Today America has become the nightmare.

Bertolt Brecht: He who fights, can lose. He who doesn't fight, has already lost.

Boutros Boutros-Ghali: It would be some time before I fully realized that the United States sees little need for diplomacy. Power is enough. Only the weak rely on diplomacy The Roman Empire had no need for diplomacy. Nor does the United States.

Bertolt Brecht: I discovered that though the rich of this earth find no difficulty in creating misery, they can't bear to see it.

S. Brian Willson: Because the self-image of the United States has been built on collective denial of the painful realities of the dispossession of others - Indigenous inhabitants in the Americas, Africans, and Third World peoples - fantasy politics in the US has become a way of life. Our collective fantasy is consistently reinforced by virtually all our education, entertainment, political discourse, religious sermonizing, sports, etc. Most of us have been emotionally and intellectually programmed in the perpetuation of the heroic myths of our origins, and the consequential feelings of righteousness that have led us into war after war.

Lenin: An extremely important cause of differences among those taking part in the labour movement lies in changes in the tactics of the ruling classes in general and of the bourgeoisie in particular. If the tactics of the bourgeoisie were always uniform, or at least of the same kind, the working class would rapidly learn to reply to them by tactics just as uniform or of the same kind. But, as a matter of fact, in every country the bourgeoisie inevitably devises two systems of rule, two methods of fighting for its interests and of maintaining its domination, and these methods at times succeed each other and at times are interwoven in various combinations. The first of these is the method of force, the method which rejects all concessions to the labour movement, the method of supporting all the old and obsolete institutions, the method of irreconcilably rejecting reforms. Such is the nature of the conservative policy which in Western Europe is becoming less and less a policy of the landowning classes and more and more one of the varieties of bourgeois policy in general. The second is the method of "liberalism", of steps towards the development of political rights, towards reforms, concessions, and so forth. The bourgeoisie passes from one method to the other not because of the malicious intent of individuals, and not accidentally, but owing to the fundamentally contradictory nature of its own position. Normal capitalist society cannot develop successfully without a firmly established representative system and without certain political rights for the population, which is bound to be distinguished by its relatively high "cultural" demands. These demands for a certain minimum of culture are created by the conditions of the capitalist mode of production itself, with its high technique, complexity, flexibility, mobility, rapid development of world competition, and so forth.

Douglas Feith: No country in the world upholds the Geneva Conventions on the laws of armed conflict more steadfastly than does the United States.

Michel Chossudovsky: While securing corporate control over extensive oil reserves and pipeline routes along the Eurasian corridor on behalf of the AngloAmerican oil giants, Washington's ultimate objective is to eventually destabilize and then colonize both China and Russia. This means the takeover of their national financial systems and the control over monetary policy, leading eventually to the imposition of the US dollar as the national currency.

Allen Dulles: By sowing chaos in Russia we imperceptibly replace their values with false ones, which will force them to believe. How? We'll find our accomplices, helpers and allies in Russia herself. In a series of episodes, a tragedy, grandiose in scale, will be played out: the demise of the last unbroken nation on earth, the final irrevocable extinguishment of their national self-consciousness. From art and literature, for example, we'll gradually exterminate the social element. We'll retrain artists, discourage in them the desire to depict the world and examine those processes taking place in the masses of the people. Literature, the theatre and the cinema will all proclaim the basest of human feelings. We shall use all our means to support and promote those so-called creators who will hammer into the people's consciousness the cult of sex, violence, sadism, and betrayal, in a word - immorality.

William Blum: Since the end of world War II the United States has: * endeavored to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically elected;' * grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries * attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders * dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries * attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries. Since 1945, the United States has carried out one or more of the above-listed actions, on one or more occasions, in seventy-one countries (more than one-third of the countries of the world), in the process of which the US has ended the lives of several million people, condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair and has been responsible for the torture of countless thousands.

Jonathan Cook: When the corporate elites trample on other peoples and states to advance their own selfish interests, our dominant media cannot allow its reporting to frame the events honestly. For the western media, our leaders make mistakes, they are naïve or even stupid, but they are never bad or evil. Our media do not call for Bush or Blair to be tried at the Hague as war criminals.

Paul Wolfowitz: Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival... This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power... First the US must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.

S. Brian Willson: The most significant facts and lessons of the US intervention in Vietnam - its utter lawlessness, in committing the Nuremberg crime of unprovoked aggression (considered the ultimate crime against peace); the volume and magnitude of atrocities and war crimes committed on the ground and from the air; the systematic crimes against humanity - will never be mentioned.

Michael Hudson: American foreign policy remains as focused on oil as it was when it invaded Iraq. U.S. policy is to treat Venezuela as an extension of the U.S. economy, running a trade surplus in oil to spend in the United States or transfer its savings to U.S. banks. By imposing sanctions that prevent Venezuela from gaining access to its U.S. bank deposits and the assets of its state-owned Citco, the United States is making it impossible for Venezuela to pay its foreign debt. This is forcing it into default, which U.S. diplomats hope to use as an excuse to foreclose on Venezuela's oil resources and seize its foreign assets. Just as U.S. policy under Kissinger was to make Chile's "economy scream," so the U.S. is following the same path against Venezuela. It is using that country as a "demonstration effect" to warn other countries not to act in their self-interest in any way that prevents their economic surplus from being siphoned off by U.S. investors.

Peter Phillips: The leadership class in the US is dominated by a neo-conservative group of some several hundred people who share a goal of asserting US military power worldwide. This Global Dominance Group (GDM) continues under both Republican and Democratic rule. In cooperation with major military contractors, the corporate media, and conservative foundations, the GDM has become a powerful long-term force in military unilateralism and US political processes.

Richard Perle: No stages. 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.

Tom Engelhardt: Because the United States does not look like a militarized country, it's hard for Americans to grasp that Washington is a war capital, that the United States is a war state, that it garrisons much of the planet, and that the norm for us is to be at war somewhere at any moment.

blacklistednews.com: A feature of U.S. coups is the role of the Western media in publicizing official cover stories and suppressing factual journalism. This role has also been consistent since 1953, but it has evolved as corporate media have consolidated their monopoly power... By only reporting official cover stories, they become unwitting co conspirators in the critical propaganda component of these operations. But the U.S. corporate media have turned vice into virtue, relishing their role in the demonization of America's chosen enemies and cheerleading U.S. efforts to do them in. They brush U.S. responsibility for violence and chaos under the carpet, and sympathetically present U.S. policy as a well-meaning effort to respond to the irrational and dangerous behavior of others.

Paul Waldman: According to the Defense Department's 2007 Base Structure Report, we maintain 823 military facilities in 39 foreign countries, and another 86 facilities in seven U.S. territories.

Paul Edwards: The term 'war' is pathetically applied to any violent rape by the American War Machine of any putative "enemy", regardless of the incommensurate forces involved, often when the victim - not even a legitimate adversary - has no capacity at all to strike back or defend itself. This suits the psychopaths who govern us perfectly, which is no surprise considering what they are. The system of War Capitalism that owns their contemptible, diseased souls can only burgeon and grow fatter by extortion of literally uncountable sums of our money, every dollar diverted from any beneficent use in our society or the least social profit for our people. The tragedy - no surprise, either - is that the American people are so deeply steeped in the pretty poison of Exceptionalism that they are, if not overtly, then tacitly, fully behind the mindless military vandalizing and brutalization of people just like them in all essentials: powerless. So far gone are we as a culture in the adulation, if not worship, of our own state primacy and the infliction of horror and death on which it is based, that even women, creators and nurturers of life, including many prominent ones, betray their higher selves by supporting our indefensible state murder of hundreds of thousands of their distant sisters and helpless children. Four CEOs of the five giant industrial purveyors of death and destruction - Northrup Grumann, General Dynamics, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin - are now women. That Glass Ceiling was apparently shot out, not broken.

Martin Jacques: The West is habituated to the idea that the world is its world; that the international community is its community; that international institutions are its institutions; that the world currency - namely the dollar - is its currency; that universal values are its values; that world history is its history; and that the world's language - namely English - is its language. The assumption has been that the adjective 'Western' naturally and implicitly belongs in front of each important noun. That will no longer be the case.

Michael Ledeen: One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today.

Douglas Valentine: The CIA conducts false flag operations all over the world to enhance public fear of terrorists, even as they arm and train them in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere to overthrow elected governments.

Madeleine Albright: The UN plays a very important role. But if we don't like it, we always have the option of following our own national security interests, which I assure you we will do if we don't like what's going on.

S. Brian Willson: When Columbus invaded the New World, there were as many as eighteen million indigenous inhabitants living north of the Rio Grande, in perhaps six hundred autonomous tribal cultures speaking as many as two thousand languages. 61 Systematic elimination by starvation, disease, murder, and utter hopelessness/ suicide of over ninety-eight percent of the millions of Indigenous inhabitants caused their numbers to plummet to 250 thousand by 1900.

Fred Reed: Washington desperately needs to stop the rollback of American power, stop the erosion of the dollar, block the economic integration of Eurasia and Latin America, keep Russia from trading amicably with Euripe. It will do anything to maintain its grip. All of its remote wars in far-off savage lands, of no importance to America or Americans, are to this purpose. A militarized America threatens Russia, threatens China, threatens Iran, threatens North Korea, threatens Venezuela, expands NATO, on and on. America has been hijacked.

Michael Hudson: Pro-U.S. policies made Venezuela a polarized Latin American oligarchy. Despite being nominally rich in oil revenue, its wealth was concentrated in the hands of a pro-U.S. oligarchy that let its domestic development be steered by the World Bank and IMF. The indigenous population, especially its rural racial minority as well as the urban underclass, was excluded from sharing in the country's oil wealth. The oligarchy's arrogant refusal to share the wealth, or even to make Venezuela self-sufficient in essentials, made the election of Hugo Chavez a natural outcome. ... Chavez sought to restore a mixed economy to Venezuela, using its government revenue - mainly from oil - to develop infrastructure and domestic spending on health care, education, employment to raise living standards and productivity for his electoral constituency. What he was unable to do was to clean up the embezzlement and built-in rake-off of income from the oil sector. And he was unable to stem the capital flight of the oligarchy, taking its wealth and moving it abroad.

Madeleine Albright: What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?

Robert W. McChesney: In the case of U.S. foreign policy, both parties are beholden to an enormous global military complex, and accept the right of the United States, and the United States alone, to invade countries when it suits U.S. interests. In matters of war and foreign policy, journalists who question the basic assumptions and policy objectives and who attempt to raise issues no one in either party wishes to debate are considered 'ideological' and 'unprofessional. This has a powerful disciplinary effect upon journalists.

Paul Wolfowitz: In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region's oil.

S. Brian Willson: There have been overt military interventions by the US into dozens of countries, a staggering 390 since the end of World War II, and thousands of covert interventions since 1947. This reality overwhelms any rhetoric about the United States being committed to equal justice under law, or being a beacon of freedom and democracy for the rest of the world... Millions of people around the globe have been murdered with total impunity as a result of our interventions. Our American Way Of Life (AWOL) is fiercely protected with the use of force and violence when a country or movement chooses to protect the domestic needs of its own members and citizens aspiring for democratization, better living standards, and expansion of human rights and opportunities. Such Indigenous and sovereign goals are perceived as threatening to the US's easy access to the human and material resources required to assure continuation of the insatiably consumptive AWOL.

Martin Berger: US Special Operations Forces are deployed in 132 countries. ... America's empire is built of 800 bases in more than 70 countries and territories. ... More than 73% of the world's dictators are currently being sponsored through the military assistance provided by US taxpayers.

Stalin: The Party possesses all the necessary qualifications for this because, in the first place, it is the rallying centre of the finest elements in the working class, who have direct connections with the non-Party organisations of the proletariat and very frequently lead them; because, secondly, the Party, as the rallying centre of the finest members of the working class, is the best school for training leaders of the working class, capable of directing every form of organisation of their class; because, thirdly, the Party, as the best school for training leaders of the working class, is, by reason of its experience and prestige , the only organisation capable of centralising the leadership of the struggle of the proletariat, thus transforming each and every non-Party organisation of the working class into an auxiliary body and transmission belt linking the Party with the class.

Stalin: The Party is the highest form of class organisation of the proletariat.

Lewis H. Lapham: The shaping of the will of Congress and the choosing of the American president has become a privilege reserved to the 20% of the population that holds 93% of the wealth, the happy few who run the corporations and the banks, own and operate the news and entertainment media, compose the laws and govern the universities, control the philanthropic foundations, the policy institutes, the casinos, and the sports arenas. ... Ronald Reagan's new Morning in America brought with it in the early 1980s the second coming of a gilded age more swinish than the first, and as the country continues to divide ever more obviously into a nation of the rich and a nation of the poor, the fictions of unity and democratic intent lose their capacity to command belief.

Michel Chossudovsky: In theory, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 adopted in the wake of the US civil war, prevents the military from intervening in civilian police and judicial functions. This law has been central to the functioning of constitutional government. While the Posse Comitatus Act is still on the books, in practice the legislation is no longer effective in preventing the militarization of civilian institutions. Both the legislation inherited from the Clinton administration and the post 9/11 PATRIOT Acts I and II have blurred the line between military and civilian roles. They allow the military to intervene in judicial and law enforcement activities even in the absence of an emergency situation.

Nikki Alexander: What is masquerading as government is a crime syndicate with a flag. The US Government is an instrument of organized crime, alternatively described as the Octopus, the Washington Consensus, the Shadow Government, Wall Street, the Round Table (Bilderbergs, Trilaterals, Council on Foreign Relations, Royal Institute of International Affairs), and the New World Order.

Paul Craig Roberts: 9/11 clearly, without any doubt, destroyed American liberty. Even if you are so brainwashed as to believe an obviously false story of the event, even if you believe that a few Saudi Arabians without government or intelligence service support outwitted all 16 US intelligence agencies, the National Security Council, all intelligence agencies of Washington's vassals abroad, outwitted Israel's Mossad, US Air Traffic Control, caused US Airport Security to fail four times in one hour on the same day, and prevented for the first time in history the US Air Force from sending fighters to intercept off course airliners, the fact remains the same: the US government used 9/11 to destroy the constitutional protections of US liberty.

Madeleine Albright: If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see farther into the future.

Dick Cheney: The Plan is for the United States to rule the world. The overt theme is unilateralism, but it is ultimately a story of domination. It calls for the United States to maintain its overwhelming superiority and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge it on the world stage. It calls for dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says not that the United States must be more powerful, or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely powerful.

S. Brian Willson: Two million civilians killed/ murdered in North Viet Nam; 2 million civilians killed/ murdered in South Viet Nam (out of 17 million population in the South, or 12 percent); 1.1 million North Vietnamese fighters killed, plus 223,748 South Vietnamese fighters killed. Total Vietnamese killed: over 5.32 million. Total Southeast Asians killed: 5.32 million Vietnamese, plus 600,000 Cambodians, plus 350,000 Laotians equals 6.27 million.

Federico Pieraccini: Julian Assange's Wikileaks revelations struck at the very foundations on which the edifice of "American exceptionalism" is built, namely, the democracy that is meant to be a light unto the world, and the "just wars" that flow from a missionary zeal to make the world safe for democracy. The media and politicians accordingly crow about the high-tech weaponry that will be employed in the ensuing humanitarian interventions, while omitting to mention that the military-industrial complex that benefits so much from endless wars may be the very donors who fund the warmongering politicians into office, and that the warmongering editorial line of newspapers may be influenced by share portfolios of the editors themselves. Releasing footage of US military personal laughing as they slaughter dozens of clearly unarmed Iraqis civilians from the distant safety of an Apache helicopter is one of the strongest ways of showing how false, artificial and propagandistic the concept of "humanitarian war" and "responsibility to protect" (R2P) is.

Michael Ledeen: We do not want stability in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and even Saudi Arabia; we want things to change. The real issue is not whether, but how to destabilize.

Enver Hoxha: The modern revisionists and reactionaries call us Stalinists, thinking that they insult us and, in fact, that is what they have in mind. But, on the contrary, they glorify us with this epithet; it is an honor for us to be Stalinists for while we maintain such a stand the enemy cannot and will never force us to our knees.

Huey P. Newton: For it was after Stalin that the Russian state began to fall into its present state of decay.

Nelson Mandela: Every Party member must raise his revolutionary qualities in every respect to the same level as those of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin.

Fidel Castro: He (Stalin) established unity in the Soviet Union. He consolidated what Lenin had begun: party unity. He gave the international revolutionary movement a new impetus. The USSR's industrialization was one of Stalin's wisest actions.

Mao Zedong: Stalin is the savior of all the oppressed.