If you want to control a population... give them a God to worship.
Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.
Barack Obama is an opportunist, mostly supported by the financial institutions. He had no positions on anything. He's very intelligent. If you look at his program, almost no substance. Change, hope, what's that? I mean, he had some policies, but it was almost certain that he would give them up instantly, which he did.
Corporations are totalitarian institutions. Board of directors at the top of managers give orders, everyone follows orders..... At the very bottom of command, if you are lucky you can rent yourself to it and get a job , and if you are sufficiently propagandized you may even buy some of the junk they produce and so on.
If you are giving a graduate course you don't try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.
There's an interesting book by the former Brazilian ambassador Celso Amorim. In 2010, he initiated an effort along with Turkey to settle the whole Iran issue. Nobody outside of the United States takes it to be much of an issue. They made a deal with Iran for Iran to essentially give away its low enriched uranium to Turkey for storage, and in return, the Western powers. It was immediately scratched by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. And the main reason was they didn't want anybody else to be involved in it. We were supposed to run things, but we didn't say that.
Free speech has been used by the Supreme Court to give immense power to the wealthiest members of our society.
Descriptive grammar is an attempt to give an account of what the current system is for either a society or an individual, whatever you happen to be studying.
Wikileaks is a democratizing force. Its giving individuals access to decisions and thinking by their representatives and in a democracy that ought to be reflexive.
I'll have 15 letters today from mostly young kids who don't like what's going on and want to do something about it, and [they ask me] if I can give them some advice as to what they should do, or can I tell them what to read or something.
There are historical analogs, which are not exact, of course, but are close enough to be worrisome. This is a whiff of early Nazi Germany. [Adolf] Hitler was appealing to groups with similar grievances, and giving them crazy answers, but at least they were answers; these groups weren't getting them anywhere else. It was the Jews and the Bolsheviks [that were the problem].
Capitalism is based on the principle that everything has to be privately owned; it can't be held in common. There is even a dogma, which is today called, the "tragedy of the commons" which holds that if things are held in common they are going to be destroyed. If they're privatized, like you give them to Bechtel or Monsanto or ExxonMobil, then they'll be preserved because that's the capitalist's religion.
The United States is a special case, and for me, very interesting. It's studied carefully and we know a lot about it. One of the most striking features of the elections is the class-based character of the vote. Now, class is not discussed or even measured in the United States. In fact, the word is almost obscene, except for the term "middle class." And you can't get exact class data; the census doesn't even give class data. But you can sort of see the significance of it just from income figures.
Stephen Colbert's recent comment is apropos: When the Republican legislature of North Carolina responded to a scientific study predicting a threatening rise in sea level by barring state and local agencies from developing regulations or planning documents to address the problem, Colbert responded: "This is a brilliant solution. If your science gives you a result that you don't like, pass a law saying the result is illegal. Problem solved."
CEOs pretty much pick the boards that give them salaries and bonuses. That's one of the reasons why the CEO-to-payment [ratio] has so sharply escalated in this country in contrast to Europe. (They're similar societies and it's bad enough there, but here we're in the stratosphere. ] There's no particular reason for it.
In fact, for the majority of the population, wages and incomes have stagnated and conditions have gotten worse. So they are asking, "what did I do wrong?" And the answer that the talk show host is giving them is convincing, in it's internal logic. It's saying, "what's wrong is the rich liberals own everything, run everything, they don't care about you; therefore, distrust them" and so on.
Blacks have no rights - in fact they were three - fifths human according to the constitution to give slave owners more voting rights. So that's African Americans.
The main selling appeal of NAFTA to US corporations is that it gives them an advantage in the North American market over their European and Japanese competitors.
