188 quotes found
"This administration is not sympathetic to corporations, it is indentured to corporations."
"The large organization is lord and manor, and most of its employees have been desensitized much as were medieval peasants who never knew they were serfs."
"The 1963 Corvair, which has some remarkable characteristics. It's one of the few cars I know that can do the bossa nova on dry pavement and the watusi on wet."
"Khalil Bendib is an equal-opportunity skewer. The more a subject or victim is ignored by the mass media, the more he infuriates, informs, and intensifies the reader's attention. Cartoons need to jolt. Bendib obliges page after page."
"The hardest thing in life is to face reality when you grow up being educated by myths"
"Hillary Clinton has completed her four-year tenure as Secretary of State to the accolades of both Democratic and Republican Congressional champions of the budget-busting “military-industrial complex,” that President Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address. Behind the public relations sheen, the photo-opportunities with groups of poor people in the developing world, an ever more militarized State Department operated under Clinton’s leadership. A militarized State Department is more than a repudiation of the Department’s basic charter of 1789, for the then-named Department of Foreign Affairs, which envisioned diplomacy as its mission. Secretary Clinton reveled in tough, belligerent talk and action on her many trips to more than a hundred countries. She would warn or threaten “consequences” on a regular basis... As reported in the Wall Street Journal on December 10, 2011, “In place of the military, the State Department will assume a new role of unprecedented scale, overseeing a massive diplomatic mission through a network of fortified, self-sufficient installations.” To call this a diplomatic mission is a stretch. The State Department has hired thousands of private security contractors for armed details and transportation of personnel. Simply guarding the huge U.S. embassy in Iraq and its personnel costs more than $650 million a year – larger than the entire budget of the Occupational Health and Safety Agency (OSHA), which is responsible for reducing the yearly loss of about 58,000 lives in workplace-related traumas and sickness."
"... the only difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush is the velocity with which their knees hit the floor when corporations knock on their door."
"Politics does not bother corporate power. Whoever wins, they win. Both parties represent Wall Street over Main Street. Wall Street is embedded in the federal government."
"This could be the most serious event in American political history. Because you're no longer dealing with a rural government where most of the workers were postmen, like in the nineteenth century. You're dealing with an unstable personality who takes everything personally in terms of a bruised ego, has stated again and again that he'll lash back even if he has to get up at 3 A.M. and twitter about an overweight former Miss Universe ... and he's got his finger on the nuclear trigger, or on drones, or on, you know, aircraft carriers."
"Many Senate Democrats are throwing in the towel on the nomination of William Barr for Trump’s attorney general. One would think that Senate Democrats would be appalled at Barr’s long-time unyielding conduct and writings asserting that the President can start any wars he wants even if Congress votes against it! An example of this is the constitutionally undeclared criminal invasion of Iraq by George W. Bush. Barr was also George H.W. Bush’s Attorney General and has been a long-time defender of executive branch lawlessness. One would think that Barr’s insupportable drive for more corporate prisons and more mass incarceration would upset these Senators... Expect the further decay of a Department of Injustice, shielding a chronically lawless President and turning the rule of law on its head."
"“This is clearly the most dangerous political movement since the Civil War, the GOP under the corporate fascist Trump’s thumb. He spread a whole breed of mini-Trumpsters who are getting far too much publicity compared to their opponents. Everything we fought for, for over 50 years, is at stake here...This is an order of magnitude we have never seen before. We have never seen a party literally trying to repress the vote, miscount the vote, purge the vote, intimidate precinct worker volunteers and steal elections. They have actually basically said, ‘Any election we lose is because it has been stolen from us.’ That is the word of a dictatorship party.”"
"[These leaders]... chose higher ethical behavior, declining to avail themselves of the routine excuses about duty to shareholders, competitive riskiness, government regulation or other pretexts most executives employ (...) Each of the CEOs profiled here displayed forthright candor, competence, and a recognition of the complexities of society that shape the bottom line. Most of the CEOs I’ve met ... are afraid to share their views candidly. These twelve spoke out. They endorsed politicians. They spoke out against injustice in a variety of ways, sometimes to their own detriment. They held controversial views. They were not going to leave their conscience at home when they went to work. Part of their vision was to be complete human beings. These CEOs were willing to admit their mistakes in public. They provided a climate of self-correction. This is something most big CEOs never do, under advice of their corporate law firms.(...) The more you look into them, the more they reveal what successful CEOs should be about within the norms and standards of a civilized society."
"...the Democratic and Republican parties, two apparently distinct political entities feeding at the same corporate trough."
"Up against the corporate government, voters find themselves asked to choose between look-alike candidates from two parties vying to see who takes the marching orders from their campaign paymasters and their future employers. The money of vested interest nullifies genuine voter choice and trust."
"The "democracy gap" in our politics and elections spells a deep sense of powerlessness by people who drop out, do not vote, or listlessly vote for the “least worst” every four years and then wonder why after every cycle the “least worst” gets worse."
"Like knowing hostages, the AFL-CIO and its unions march in tandem to endorse the Democratic presidential nominees early in the primary season. They have given up their capacity for negotiation, so frightened are they of the Republicans. Meanwhile, the rank-and-file workers suffer their dwindling status in silence."
"...organized labor...rushes to support the party without demanding a turn away from corporatism toward workers’ needs. This is the logic of the lesser of two evils. It tethers labor to a relentless slide deeper into the corporate power pits year after year."
"...the Democrats know that no matter how many GATTs, NAFTAs, empty OSHAs, and other betrayals...they heap on those labor leaders, they can be had because, once again, the Republicans are deemed worse."
"The tired whine of 'But the Republicans are worse' will fall flat as more young Americans take charge of their future and move, with their reenergized elders, toward the Green Party and parallel civic and political movements."
"We must strive to become good ancestors."
"The shortcomings of America's political leaders do not stop at our borders."
"Unlike members of Congress, Big Business knew what the WTO agreements contained. That's because corporate lobbyists helped draft them."
"Half of democracy is about just showing up."
"[T]he concentration of power in the hands of the few is common to all cultures... When a small group of people rules a society the political system is considered an oligarchy; when only money and wealth determine how a society is controlled, the political system is a plutocracy. From the standpoint of a democratic society, both oligarchy and plutocracy are inherently unjust and corrupt. ...In many ways, the majority of Americans live in a democracy of minimums, while the privileged few enjoy a plutocracy of maximums. ...[T]he dominating influence of the One Percent..."
"[F]amily functions have been outsourced to business... everything is for sale, and money is power... Our elections and our governments should be... commercial-free zones; our environment, air, and water should never fall under the control of corporations or private owners. Children should not be programmed by a huckstering economy..."
"[W]henever there have been periods when enough of the country organizes and resists, we see movements of people and communities breaking through power. Progress is made. Rights are won. Education and literacy increase. Oppression is diminished."
"Concentrated power in the hands of the few really... matter[s]... if you are denied full-time employment or paid poverty wages and there are no unions to defend your interests... if you are denied affordable health care... if you are gouged by the drug industry... lack of public transit or packed highways... if you or your children... breath dirtier air and drink polluted water... if your children are receiving substandard education... are being taught to obey rather than question, think and imagine, especially when it comes to the nature of power."
"In addition to stimulating the economy, creating more jobs, and establishing less need for public welfare assistance, the movement for a... living wage... teaches how little it... takes to change the balance of power... especially when there is overwhelming public opinion... These lessons... should be, applied to winning the myriad of public interest, ecological, and civil rights struggles that the ultra-rich and their commercial interests obstruct... increasing wages... decreasing militarism and crushing... military spending... decent and affordable housing and healthcare, reducing... carbon emissions... to prevent catastrophic climate change... enabling democracy at all levels."
"America's Founding Fathers wrote a Constitution that never once uses the words "corporation," "company," or "political parties." Their use of language reflected their antipathy toward the domineering influence of empire and big business... If "We the People" are the sole subjects of the Constitution, why is it that we are ruled by large corporations and their largely indentured servants—the Republican and Democratic Parties... "We the People" have allowed these plutocratic forces to slowly siphon away our power."
"Before and after the American Revolution, there has been a continuing daily tension between contending private commercial pursuits and common civic values. ...[T]he obsessive drive for gold, money, and profit is a formidable deviation from other more important spiritual practices that strive to center community on non-market values... love, generosity, kindness, cooperation, and non-violence."
"America's business leaders said NO to the idea of revolting against the British monarchy. ...In later decades, commercialists... consistently said NO to efforts to end child labor... to starting labor unions... to the regulation of railroad and banking abuses... to the 40-hour work week and progressive taxation... to antitrust laws and the regulatory agencies... to a woman's right to vote (they feared the women's vote against exploiting child labor and cheating consumers), and NO to the minimum wage, Social Security, universal healthcare, and to... protect the environment, empower consumers, reduce government secrecy, protect ethical whistleblowers, and... to reduce commercial fraud on the government as with Medicare and military contracts."
"[P]ublic interest groups, consumer protection organizations, and... social networks have worked relentlessly to break through the battalions of lobbyists paid by corporate interests..."
"Exxon/Mobile, Pfizer, Citigroup, General Motors, Lockheed/Martin, Proctor & Gamble, United Health Care, Comcast/NBC Universal, Apple, and many other giants garner revenues as large as numerous nation states... Most are global... but there is no public global government holding them accountable... [T]here are dictatorial trade agreements that corporatists conjure up to subordinate the general population's labor, consumer, and environmental protections—a stunning end-run around our courts and legislatures. These protections are seen as "non-tariff trade barriers"... [T]hese... entities have a clear and obsessive unity of purpose—money for bosses... for shareholders, money to buy lawyers and politicians to take down laws and whatever else slows the pace of hoarding wealth."
"Paradoxically, we are in a golden age of books, documentaries, and films that... expose the abuses, crimes and authoritarian essence of corporate commercialism. ...[N]ever ...have they had less impact for change."
"One of my all-time favorite "shake 'em up books," which is almost impossible to describe briefly, is Sam Smith's Great American Political Repair Manual."
"Here we are in corporate occupied territory, otherwise known as Washington D.C. ...I've seen it ...become a very sophisticated expression of the plutocracy ...[Y]ou have the plutocracy ruled by a few wealthy, developing an ever more penetrating oligarchy ruled by a few politicos, indentured to the super-wealthy. ...With their corporate attorneys they have developed one of the most sophisticated controls of a formerly democratic society... turning the very institutions, Congress, the courts, the executive branch, against the people... What they do is simply keep the myths alive, like "We have Democratic elections." We do not."
"Democratic elections require that votes are supreme, not big-money. They require contested candidacies, not a two-party duopoly that increasingly reflects the same commercial interests."
"They say we have a free press, but we do not. We have a press that is indentured to advertising revenue, and they themselves are now conglomerate corporations... and five big ones control most of the circulation and viewership..."
"They say we have a free... independent judiciary, but... on the big questions of abuses of power, like going to war without congressional declaration... which is a requirement under out Constitution (and we have not had a declaration of war since 1941...) The courts have a very convenient doctrine. It's called, "This is a political question, invading Iraq, and we don't deal with political questions. This is to be decided between the Congress, which abdicates its duty, and the Presidency"... When citizens say "We don't believe in that. We're going to go to court," and go all the way to the Supreme Court to challenge this illegal war of criminal aggression against Iraq, they have another convenient doctrine... "You have no standing to sue." So all the American People have no standing to sue..? Well, who has a standing to sue... dealing with a criminal war of aggression... with all... who have died? Well, who has standing to sue? Only one person. The Attorney General, and guess who his boss is, the President."
"[W]e have all these myths... about a Democratic society... [W]e have been disintegrating our Democratic institutions for over 40 years."
"[A] phony standard... from Medieval England... says that you are thrown out of court if you don't have a specific interest... that usually now means an economic interest... a corporation that might lose sales, for example."
"It only takes one percent or less of The People... mobilized in every Congressional District... say three or four thousand [out of an average Congressional District population]... [A]s long as they represent a majority opinion... they can control the Congress against any vested interest. We used to do it on far less... regulating the auto industry, getting through the Freedom of Information Act, which was opposed by... almost every corporate trade association, because they didn't want government information on them available to the public."
"We don't need huge numbers of people. We need about one percent... spending three to five hundred hours a year, connecting with each other, opening full-time offices in every Congressional District, and focusing on just five-hundred and... thirty-five people... in the U.S. Congress... the branch that has the most power under our Constitution."
"We have 206 law schools in the country. You would think they are the first responders to challenge the criminal injustice system, conditions in the prison, violation of civil rights, crushing consumer rights, and the government being taken over by corporations. It's not happening. It's like they're training technicians... lawyers to serve the powerful interests."
"Mike Pompeo is Secretary of State, a total warmonger, and... bigot against Arabs and Muslims, based on his own assertions when he was a member of Congress, and after that."
"Lawlessness by the rich and powerful is the norm... Either they violate the law with impunity, or they make sure the law provides loopholes for them with their influence in Congress. ...They are extremists... [T]hey... have no conscience, no soul. The corporate entity is an artificial being driven maniacally by profit..."
"You really have to educate your [law] students about lawlessness, otherwise they're going to graduate and just tinker with the law... The law students are so clueless, in fact, deprived about what's going on in this country in terms of the concentration and the abuse of power... [W]e have a real crisis in the legal educational institutions that breed the next generation of lawyers."
"[T]he lawyers are the architects of corporate power. They're the architects of grinding responsible government into the ground and turning it into an accounts receivable, corporate welfare, ... giving these corporations immunities and privileges which we would never have as real individuals. ...They are artificial... they cannot be morally accountable like real individuals... unshielded by the corporate structure."
"A judicial coup in 1886... determined that corporations were persons, for the purpose of the Constitution. ...[T]he Constitution doesn't even have the word company, corporate, or political party in it. So why are we ruled by them? You see the distortion? The only persons recognized in the Constitution are real people. It starts... with "We the People" not "we the corporations.""
"It first starts with an intrepid rat... that goes up to the toilet bowl of the Speaker, just as he's sitting down to do his business... Some readers who couldn't get past the first few pages... called it disgusting and upsetting, and I said, "Well, you're describing the behavior of Congress...""
"The rats then... follow each other. Ten rats signal to other rats, and there's a rat infestation in the House of Representatives, and then in the Senate... [T]here's an overreaction by the members, the leaders. They don't want this to get out, that they can't even control the rats, much less the Wall Street lobbyists."
"[O]ne reporter... is intrepidly meticulous and he blows the story... [A]ll the cable shows, everybody goes wild with derision as the story unfolds... [T]he overreaction is massive slaughter of the rats. They keep coming. They keep breeding... working overtime... and that is what gets people's attention about Congress."
"Congress comes in, in the poles, under 15% or 12%... or even 9% now... about the lowest of any category, even the proverbial used car dealer."
"People have such a low opinion of Congress that they keep sending bad members... to Washington, but [the people] withdraw... they become cynical... instead of becoming angry and moving to take control of Congress. After all, it's the sovereign power of the people... that is misused and turned against the people on behalf of Wall Street and other corporate supremacists."
"Because of the massive media, you have massive public attention, the comedians, the late night talk shows, have a field day... The activists say... "This is what we've been waiting for"... [politicians] fumbling and grumbling and tripping over themselves trying to deal with the rat infestation, asking for the national security people... on orders of the White House... like... a foreign invasion."
"They would surround part of the Congress with bull horns and shout, "Resign! Resign! Resign!" ...Some of the incumbents ...just ran out of the Congress and joined the crowd."
"One of the themes of the book is don't wait around... [with] steady mobilization. It doesn't work that way. It gives the corporation lobbies too much time to game the system. Look at the health care. It was proposed by Harry Truman in the 1940s, universal health care, and look where we're still at. ...Speed was of the essence."
"In some... legislator's minds... like Mick Mulvaney... he really is mean, and he has no qualms of conscience. But I have met members of Congress... conservative Republicans, who do have qualms... John Boehner... the fictional character is Reginald Blamer, he came from a poor family of 11 children... so I have seen... people who have a public personae of ferocious oligarchy and plutocracy, but deep inside they know they're harming innocent people."
"In the early 60s I wanted to get auto safety bills through the Congress, so I had to go to... ... [people said he was] totally in the pocket of the business lobbyists... Because of the rumble from the people... out of Seattle and other parts of the country, Warren Magnuson put his finger to the wind. ...He became the greatest champion of consumer legislation in the Congress in American history."
"When Reginald Blamer, in the book, went on "Meet the Press" and was questioned by Woodcock Toad, known as "Woody..." [Blamer] revealed his better self. He basically became a more humane person from this jolting experience, and he feared that the majority of Republicans were going to vote him out... some have a soft core... and their better angels [are] revealed under different kinds of stress and pressure."
"In the book, the appeal is to their fear glands... the fear of not getting re-elected. The fear of being challenged in a primary inside their own party... The greed glands were approached by the lobbyists, who tried to turn this mass movement of the people of our country to take control of Congress... They poured campaign money into their stalwarts..."
"American politicians over the past 25 years have learned to quietly dismiss big rallies, demonstrations, and even temporary occupations, because they have gone nowhere."
"I've been part of these mass protests... almost invariably on a Saturday, when the members of Congress are gone. ...The [organizers] ...are so exhausted that they don't... have the energy left to pass the funding buckets around... where they could raise hundreds of thousands of dollars and on Monday morning open an office with full-time lobbyists... Members of Congress have very good antennae... [they can sense that] there's no stamina... not a lot of follow-through."
"[I]n this book... the rallies... are different... they build from day to day... and... it's led by people who are full-time... and they open offices in Washington. ...Three enlightened billionaires come to town and they say... "Hey, let's fund this"... and a brain trust."
"Democracy requires work. ...The more they feel they've got the members Congress on the run, the more energized they become."
"On the back of the book, I have the indictment of Congress. People... have no idea the damage... that Congress has inflicted. Its abandonment of its Constitutional powers as the most powerful branch of government. Its selling of elections for money and campaigns. Its closing out, even the people... I've seen Congress degrade to levels I've never believed possible. It's impossible to get through to some members'... offices even now, unless you're a campaign contributor. You might get the switchboard, if it isn't on voice-mail. Can you imagine..?"
"To show you how much of a straight-arm the majorities in Congress are giving the people back home. They had a tax bill... for the rich, and the powerful, and the corporate, increasing the deficit, starving the public works investment and all the rest, and they didn't even have public hearings in the committee level, that's unheard of. Then they had five bills to destroy people's rights to have their day in court, if they're wrongfully injured. They got it through the House of Representatives, blocked in the Senate by the Democrats. They didn't even have public hearings in the House Judiciary. Then they tried to get rid of Obamacare, and they lost by one or two votes in the Senate, and they didn't even have public hearings."
"Congress... has become a secret tyrannical bastion of Wall Street, and that outrages people..."
"My hope is that... I will open Democrats' and other progressives' eyes to the many values shared by the Left and Right... like the desire to end corporate welfare and convert to a renewable energy (solar) economy. ...the way to defeat Trump... is to embrace (not marginalize) issues such as raising the minimum wage. ...It is a question of do or just further fade away."
"If the minimum wage of fifty years ago—$1.60 per hour—were adjusted for inflation, today it would amount to about $11 per hour. A long-overdue minimum wage hike would... end a decades-long windfall for employers... while [they were also] receiving many tax breaks and subsidies."
"People are being pushed around, disrespected, defrauded, injured, and given the runaround by arrogant corporate bureaucrats using nameless, robotic, and tyrannical "fine print" contract barricades."
"[E]stablish a public national complaint-handling system using the Internet to help consumers, taxpayers, and workers... It will also be a good way for policy makers to detect patterns. Patterns lead to deterrence..."
"the legendary consumer advocate"
"Ralph Nader's Breaking Through Power is a brilliant analysis of corporate power and the popular mechanisms that can be used to wrest back our democracy"
"I agree with Ralph Nader that we need to repeal NAFTA and all of those so-called free trade agreements, but they are — they don’t constitute fair trade. And with respect to Colombia, I can say that not only have I been to Colombia, I have seen the devastation of the militarization of our policy, particularly with Colombia, and the displacement particularly of the Afro-Colombian communities across that country."
"I've always been with the one who rebels against false values. My heroes now are Ralph Nader and Daniel Ellsberg."
"I'm voting for Ralph Nader -- even though I think he's an asshole on abortion and issues of sexual politics generally -- in the hope that the Green Party will get 5 percent of the vote...We have to break through the current end-of-history, "no real change can ever happen" mentality on every front, and the best way to do that on Tuesday is to vote for Ralph Nader."
"Imagine how the last presidential campaign would have turned out if instead of the marketing circus that we were treated to, we were just given a weekly round table discussion between Bush, Gore, and Nader for a couple months running up to the election. No staged rallies, no TV images with flags flowing in the sunset, no pollsters. No marketing. Bush would have been luck to get two percent."
"There was a third-party candidate, Ralph Nader, whose national reputation came from decades of persistent criticism of corporate control of the economy. His program was sharply different from the two major candidates, emphasizing health care, education, and the environment. But he was shut out of the nationally televised debates during the campaign, and, without the support of big business, he had to raise money from the small contributions of people who believed in his program."
"The Senate needs to protect the interests of the American people and the world community, not provide political cover to President Bush. It's not enough to call Saddam Hussein evil incarnate."
"If Abu Musab Zarqawi's camps in Iraq are connected to al-Qaeda, why didn't the U.S. already attack them as part of the War on Terrorism after September 11, 2001? It's as if the U.S. preserved Ansar al-Islam for later use for leverage over Iraq and an excuse for an invasion."
"Bush's intention all along was an invasion, which is why neither the U.N. inspections nor Saddam's compliance and destruction of weapons were ever satisfactory, and U.N. support is a disposable formality. At no point did Bush ever allow the possibility of containment under an internationally cooperative plan. Even if Iraq falls quickly, it will bring neither peace nor security, and we'll see terrorist retaliation against American civilians and military personnel. Furthermore, the White House has made it clear that it wants to topple other governments, beginning with Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria."
"The best approach is one that maintains the good will of the Iranian people, rather than theatening them with attacks by the U.S. or by Israel as a U.S. surrogate. Any effort to dissuade Iran from pursuing nuclear power will seem utterly hypocritical if the Bush Administration continues to violate the Non-Proliferation Treaty, ignore Israel's nuclear capability, and aid the nuclear ambitions of India in violation of the treaty. Our Iran policy must be part of a greater policy that seeks global nuclear disarmament and an end to dependence on fossil and nuclear energy."
"Pope Francis has offered to mediate talks between #Venezuela's President Maduro & US-backed opposition Guaido - if both sides are willing to talk. Maduro says yes, but Guaido says no. If Guaido is such a champion of democracy, why does he refuse to hold peaceful dialogue? 🤔"
"The Red Cross has refused to participate in the US-led effort to deliver humanitarian aid to Juan Guaido in #Venezuela, saying that using humanitarian aid to serve a political agenda would violate its "fundamental principles of impartiality, neutrality & independence.""
"It’s time to move past lesser evil & fight for the greater good like our lives depend on it, because they DO. We can create an America & a world that works for all of us, & puts people, planet & peace over profit. The power to create that world is in our hands. Let’s get to work!"
"Chickenhawks like John Bolton are saying the quiet part out loud on why the ruling class should support the Venezuela coup: “It will make a big difference to the US economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in & produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.""
"When you think back to the lead-up to the Iraq War, do you wish we had fought harder to stop the slaughter? Now's our chance to do that as Trump's gang pushes Venezuela towards a bloodbath. Expose & resist these warmongers NOW! #NoMoreWar"
"They lied to you about Vietnam. They lied to you about Iraq. They lied to you about Syria. They lied to you about Honduras. They lied to you about Libya. So why would you believe what they're saying about Venezuela?"
"Almost 60% of US are sick of the 2 parties of war & Wall Street... but anyone who runs - or even votes - outside the 2-party box is attacked as a "spoiler" by the political/media establishment. The solution? Ranked Choice Voting, which frees you to vote for what you really want."
"After New Knowledge was caught running a false-flag operation to plant fake stories about Russian trolls in the media, their CEO & 4 co-conspirators were kicked off Facebook & Sen. Doug Jones called for a federal investigation into the firm for possible election crimes."
"The New Knowledge report on alleged Russian social media interference doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. It uses cherry-picked facts to prop up a deceptive, wildly exaggerated narrative. The authors have been discredited & their methodology is hopelessly flawed."
"The same blowhard politicians talking about "bringing democracy" to Venezuela have aided & abetted the Saudi dictators executing dissidents, murdering journalists & starving millions of kids in Yemen. They don't give a damn about democracy or poor people's lives. It's about OIL."
"US has backed right-wing coups up and down Latin America for 100+ years. Not one was about democracy. All have been to enrich the global elite. But we’re supposed to believe this time in Venezuela - which has the world’s largest oil reserves - is different?"
"Deep gratitude to all who fearlessly speak truth to power in these times of widespread deceit. If war can be started by lies, maybe peace can be started by truth. Keep using your voice to make sure the truth gets out."
"The Pentagon takes over half the US federal discretionary budget. If we spend billions on a Green New Deal instead of wasting trillions on weapons & war, we'll make wars for oil obsolete - and make the world a safer place for all future generations of life on Earth. #GreenNewDeal"
"After the election of George McGovern in 1972 as a peace candidate—I should say his election to the nomination of the Democratic Party, the party changed the rules to steeply tilt that playing field, creating superdelegates and Super Tuesdays that make it very hard for a grassroots campaign to prevail. And over the years, the party has allowed principled candidates to be seen and heard, but has, at the end of the day, sabotaged them in one way or the other, often through fear campaigns and smear campaigns, in the same way that Bernie is being called a spoiler now and has been for some weeks. Dennis Kucinich was redistricted and basically, you know, taken off the political map. We saw Jesse Jackson the victim of a smear campaign. People remember the Dean scream that was used against Howard Dean as a peace candidate who was doing well. So, in many ways, the Democratic Party creates campaigns that fake left while it moves right and becomes more corporatist, more militarist, more imperialist. This is why we say it’s hard to have a revolutionary campaign inside of a counterrevolutionary party. That’s why we’re here as the Green Party to build a place where a revolutionary movement can truly grow with a political voice."
"We don't support bombing other people's kids, unlike the other woman in the race."
"People are told over and over, "Don't vote your values. Vote your fears." But what we got was everything we were afraid of."
"It's time to stop a foreign policy which is essentially a marketing strategy for the weapons industry."
"Very few people will clamor to have their taxes raised. … But if you ask the same people if they like their public university system, if they like health services, if they like clean water and go down the list of what government does, they'll say they want that...There is a disconnect. They think that in some magic way, government should be able to deliver all these things without providing the revenue."
"I really love getting into the nuts and bolts of policy, ... The citizens need to become policy wonks. They need to start doing their homework."
"I will argue that native societies' knowledge surpasses the scientific and social knowledge of the dominant society in its ability to provide information and a management style for environmental planning. Frankly, these native societies have existed as the only example of sustainable living in North America for more than 300 years."
""Minobimaatisiiwin," or the "good life," is the basic objective of the Anishinaabeg and Cree³ people who have historically, and to this day, occupied a great portion of the north-central region of the North American continent. An alternative interpretation of the word is "continuous rebirth." This is how we traditionally understand the world and how indigenous societies have come to live within natural law. Two tenets are essential to this paradigm: cyclical thinking and reciprocal relations and responsibilities to the Earth and creation."
"Rarely is there money in the federal bureaucracy for the cultural and environmental needs of the Natives. I find it ironic however, that federal monies always miraculously appear to study and develop coal strip miners, uranium mines and nuclear waste dumps on Reservations."
"The Earth is our Mother. From her we get our life, and our ability to live. It is our responsibility to care for our Mother, and in caring for our Mother, we care for ourselves."
"What gives corporations like Conoco, Shell, Exxon, Daishowa, ITT, Rio Tinto Zinc, and the World Bank the right which supersedes or is superior to my human right to live on my land, or that of my family, my community, my nation, our nations, and to us as women? What law gives that right to them? Not any law of the Creator or of Mother Earth. Is that right contained within their wealth? Is that right contained within their wealth, which was historically acquired immorally, unethically through colonialism and imperialism and paid for with the lives of millions of people, species of plants, and entire ecosystems? They should have no such right. And we clearly, as women and as indigenous peoples, demand and will recover that right-the right of self-determination, to determine our own destiny and that of our future generations."
"Today, on a worldwide scale, we remain in the same situation as one hundred years ago, only with less land and fewer people."
"Simply stated, if we can no longer nurse our children, if we can no longer bear children, and if our bodies are wracked with poisons, we will have accomplished little in the way of determining our destiny or improving our conditions."
"Consumption causes the commodification of the sacred, the natural world, cultures, children, and women. And unless we speak and take meaningful action to address the high levels of consumption, we will never have any security for our individual human rights as women."
"This is not a struggle for women of the dominant society in so-called "first world" countries to have equal pay and equal status if that pay and status continues to be based on a consumption model that is unsustainable. It is a struggle to recover our status as Daughters of the Earth."
"The framers of the U.S. Constitution envisioned life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in that document, but had little idea of what was to come. Since that time we've seen the land of the continent change dramatically-culturally, politically, ecologically, and economically. Today, the social and technological foundation of the society has, in fact, outstripped the law itself. It's time to amend the Constitution to preserve "the commons" for all of us. It's time for a Common Property, or Seventh Generation, Amendment to the U.S. Constitution."
"The preamble to the U.S. Constitution declares as one of its purposes, to "secure the blessings of liberty, to ourselves and our posterity." Should not those blessings include air fit to breathe, water decent enough to drink, and land which is as beautiful for our descendants as it was for our ancestors?"
"American public policy has come to reflect short-term interests, fiscal years, "deficit reduction" programs, and is increasingly absent of any intergenerational perspective. That long-term perspective is crucial to our well-being and a valuable role for democratic government."
"Public policy is lagging behind our ability to destroy ourselves."
"If private property has found safe haven in the Fifth Amendment, where is common property equally protected?"
"The rights of the people to use and enjoy air, water, and sunlight are essential to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These most basic human rights have been impaired by those who discharge toxic substances into the air or water, thereby taking life, liberty, and the ability to pursue happiness. These rights are also damaged by those who cause a crash of our fish or destroy our oceans. Such "taking" must be recognized as a fundamental wrong in our system of laws, just as a taking of private property is a fundamental wrong."
"It's hard to imagine those who framed the U.S. Constitution could have imagined the U.S. at the millennium. It's harder yet to imagine what we'll pass on, if we don't think of the seventh generation from now."
"There is a peculiar kind of hatred in the northwoods, a hatred born of living with with three generations of complicity in the theft of lives and land. What is worse is that each day, those who hold this position of privilege must come face to face with those whom they have dispossessed. To others who rightfully should share in the complicity and the guilt, Indians are far away and long ago. But in reservation border towns, Indians are ever-present."
"the poverty of dispossession is almost overwhelming. So is the poverty of complicity and guilt. That shame combined with guilt and a feeling of powerlessness, creates an atmosphere in which hatred buds, blossoms and flourishes. The hatred passes from father to son and from mother to daughter. Each generation feels the hatred and it penetrates deeper to justify a myth. Norman Grist suffered from Indian Hating Disease. He had it bad, knotted tightly and pungently in his gut"
"Native American teachings describe the relations all around-animals, fish, trees, and rocks as our brothers, sisters, uncles, and grandpas. Our relations to each other, our prayers whispered across generations to our relatives, are what bind our cultures together."
"There is a direct relationship between the loss of cultural diversity and the loss of biodiversity. Wherever Indigenous peoples still remain, there is also a corresponding enclave of biodiversity."
"While Native peoples have been massacred and fought, cheated, and robbed of their historical lands, today their lands are subject to some of the most invasive industrial interventions imaginable."
"In the final analysis, the survival of Native America is fundamentally about the collective survival of all human beings. The question of who gets to determine the destiny of the land, and of the people who live on it-those with the money or those who pray on the land-is a question that is alive throughout society."
"The preamble to the U.S. Constitution declares its intent to be to "secure the blessings of liberty, to ourselves, and our posterity." In reality, U.S. laws have been transformed by corporate interests to cater to elite interests in society."
"The challenge at the cusp of the millennium is to transform human laws to match natural laws, not vice versa. And to correspondingly transform wasteful production and voracious consumption. America and industrial society must move from a society based on conquest to one steeped in the practice of survival. In order to do that, we must close the circle. The linear nature of industrial production itself, in which labor and technology turn natural wealth into consumer products and wastes, must be transformed into a cyclical system."
"There is, in many Indigenous teachings, a great optimism for the potential to make positive change. Change will come. As always, it is just a matter of who determines what that change will be."
"The rights of the people to use and enjoy air, water, and sunlight are essential to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These basic human rights have been impaired by those who discharge toxic substances into the air, water, and land. Contaminating the commons must be recognized as a fundamental wrong in our system of laws, just as defacing private property is wrong. On that basis, the Seventh Generation Amendment to the Constitution of the United States declares, "The right of citizens of the U.S. to enjoy and use air, water, sunlight, and other renewable resources determined by the Congress to be common property shall not be impaired, nor shall such use impair their availability for use by the future generations.""
"I always greet people in my language because I believe that cultural diversity is as beautiful as biodiversity, and that is reflected in language."
"I am fully aware of how little an American education teaches you about Native people."
"While I was introduced as an activist, I consider myself more a concerned parent. To be a mother in this day and age, you have to be concerned with a wide array of issues."
"I haven't seen anyone improve on the tepee-you can have a fire inside it, and you can love it."
"A house is more than a shelter: It is home, it is something that reflects you."
"In Minnesota, they say we made nice about it a long time ago. They say, "You Indians should get over it." Well that's really nice to say when you are holding all the assets. Why are Indian people the poorest people in this country in every economic or social statistic at the bottom or the top of where you don't want to be? Is that because we're stupid? No. It's because we have structural poverty enforced by intergenerational appropriation of our wealth. That's the reality."
"Forests are worth more standing than cut."
"I spend a lot of time fighting with county commissioners because they look at my reservation and refer to it as timber resources; I call it a forest. It's a very different way of thinking. I do not look out there and see timber resources; I see a forest. That does not mean that I'm opposed to logging. It does mean that I'm opposed to lazy logging, which is what I call clear-cutting. You can selectively cut in a beautiful manner, and leave a forest standing."
"Just because the coal exists, do they have to strip mine it? Just because the water flows, does that mean they have to dam it? Just because the trees are there, does that mean they have to cut them? At what point do we restrain ourselves in this society so that something is left because it has value on its own?"
"Sometimes when you ask people to consume less, to not use it and toss it, there's this puzzled look like, "That sounds painful. That sounds like I'm not going to really get what I want, and I have a right to it." That's what we have to deconstruct."
"There should be beauty in "process," whether it is harvesting with intelligence, whether it is the use of recycled materials, or whether it is observing energy efficiency."
"We have a lot of teachings and language about how a people can live a thousand years in the same place and not destroy things. The phrase anishinaabe akiing, for example, means the land to which the people belong. It’s not the same thing as private property or even common property. It has to do with a relationship that a people has to a place—a relationship that reaffirms the sacredness of that place…"
"And in our covenant with the Creator, we understand that it is not about managing their behavior—it’s about managing ours, because we’re the ones who cause extinction of species. We’re the youngest species, and we don’t necessarily have the most smarts. We’ve bungled up along the way, and we acknowledge these mistakes in our stories and in our history as Indian people. The question is whether you have the humility and the commitment to get some learning out of these experiences."
"The first 100 days of the Bush Administration have been an unbelievable nightmare."
"George W Bush is definitely the worse of two evils, to use the vernacular of the Green Party. Few of us thought it possible for him to be in office today, and we are still stunned."
"The largest party in America: the more than 50% of the American electorate who don't vote"
"It's hard to tell people to vote when their votes don't seem to count."
"I pledge myself to raise my voice, raise my vote, raise every ounce of strength I have to keep up our struggle and to continue it all-demand that votes get counted, struggle for a set of systems that work, and work to protect Mother Earth."
""Akiing" is the word for land in our language, and in the indigenous concept of land ownership or the Anishinaabeg concept of land ownership, it is much more a concept that we belong to that land than the land belongs to us."
"There was a view at that time which is, to a great extent, maintained today: that only those Christian nations had rights to the land. That only those who were in the folds of the church and were in the folds of Christ had rights to the land, and the rest of the vast majority of the world, who were not Christians, did not have rights to land on par with those who were Christians. That is why the church became a "handmaiden to colonialism.""
"The Catholic Church was one of the architects of colonialism as we have come to know it today, because it provided the philosophical and religious underpinnings through which colonialism could continue and be justified in the eyes of God."
"How come there are so many mountains named after small men? Who were these guys? Why did they get these mountains named after them? You go out there and these little puny men have mountains named after them, and some of these men were really, really bad guys."
"In this day and age, are we going to name towns after Hitler? Probably not but, you know, you have a number of towns, cities, and colleges, named after guys who were basically mass murderers. And it is really offensive as indigenous people, but it is also offensive humanitarians to consider that we continue to aggrandize individuals whose crimes are crimes against humanity."
"There is this saying in Indian country that I think is true, which is that, a long time ago, when the white people came, the Indians had the land and the white people had the Bibles. And now the Indians have the Bibles and the white people have the land."
"The reality is that there is a direct relationship between the "development" of the United States and the "underdevelopment" of Native America. Just as much as there is a direct relationship between the development of Europe and the underdevelopment of Africa; and the development of the United States and the underdevelopment of Africa. Some get rich and some get poor. Some take other's land, natural resources, and people, and some are left to deal with the consequences of it. Which is the history."
"The reality is that the founding fathers were land speculators. The fact is that you couldn't vote in this country if you did not own land, and that basically you had to be a white man who owned land. Now how did they get that land? They basically had to steal it from someone, and that would probably be the Indians."
"I have heard that a number of times in my life. "You guys should get over it, it happened a long time ago." You cannot get over it if you are still in the same circumstance as a consequence of what happened a hundred years ago. You cannot get over it if you are still in exactly the same relationship as you were a hundred years ago. Some try to keep their trees and some try to take them."
"The white man, or the American government, has a way of saying they are sorry, which is to pay you. That's pretty much their approach. Now what our elders have said in our reservation and in Indian country in general is that actually the only compensation for land is land. That you cannot pay us with money that you took, that you made off of our land. That's kind of the analysis that goes behind that. Because the only thing that is actually of value to our community is the land itself. It is not the compensation."
"Within a decade of the completion of the La Grande Complex, signs of environmental disasters have become obvious. Massive flooding had once again leached methyl Mercury from the soil, changing an inorganic Mercury compound in the water into organic mercury."
"Winona LaDuke became involved in Native American issues after meeting Jimmy Durham, a well known Cherokee activist, while she was attending Harvard University. At the age of 18, she spoke in front of the United Nations regarding Native American rights and has remained one of the most prominent voices for American Indian economic and environmental concerns."
"A Navajo woman said to me, “In our old mythologies and stories, they talked of monster slayers.” She says we need a new generation of monster slayers. I think that’s such a powerful analogy, and it’s so true. It’s a David and Goliath moment, and we’ve got to hang in there because they are weakening…"
"It’s so ironic and so tragic, this dichotomy between the large oil corporations and the people who have always stood for their land. To all of us it was a Selma moment, that’s how I look at it. And if you contextualize it in the history of American movements and social movements, Standing Rock is a Selma moment when we all woke up, we all woke up and said, “This is what it looks like on the front lines.”…"
"I’m looking down the barrel of a very big pipeline, which is a $7 billion boondoggle of stranded assets. We’ll talk about that later. But I’m looking down the pipeline, you know, at the barrel of this pipeline, and I’m looking: What could $7 billion do in Minnesota? What could it do to make a New Green Deal?"
"I didn’t really like this economy too much. Didn’t work out too well for my people, you know."
"So the next economy has to be something that reaffirms our relationship to the Earth and gives us a shot. That, to me, looks like a lot of local food, organic food."
"You know, you don’t need some guys to put something in the sky to keep the carbon out of the sky. You need to put it in the soil. And so you need organic agriculture. That’s what we’re doing in my community."
"What I want to do is to rebuild the hemp industry in Indian country. And I want us at the table, not on the menu. I want us to be in the leadership of this next economy, because we have a lot of territory upon which you can grow hemp. And we can rebuild the light manufacturing industry in this country."
"To the Native community, (Trump)’s kind of like the new incarnation of Andrew Jackson: you know, bad president for Indian people, bad president for everybody. But, you know, to us, and to be super honest, I mean, we don’t have a lot of experience with great presidents. You know, what we have experience with is that we’re going to fight this out, and we’re going to make the next economy. We’re going to make our future. That’s what self-determination is about."
"Standing Rock was an example of regulatory capture, when your whole system is controlled by corporations"
"Social movements and lawyers are who stop pipelines. Social movements and lawyers."
"Lakes that you can still drink from. That's where I live. And that’s what this battle is about. It’s about, you know: Can we protect that?"
"What we need is a New Deal that builds infrastructure for people, not for oil companies. As I said, $7 billion that is for an oil company pipeline, that could be spent much better."
"There’s a price to destroying boreal forest."
"The tar sands is a boreal forest. You know, and you turn something that is the oxygen of the North—I mean, the boreal forest of northern Canada—of Canada is the equivalent of the lungs. It’s the Amazon of the North. It’s the Amazon of the North. And that is what is being destroyed by the tar sands. Wetland—this is just going through our wetlands. The value of a wetland—you know, I’m an economist by training, but how do you value a wetland for what it does for Mother Earth and for the planet and for your water and for insects and for where the wild things are?"
"As I look out there, this is the time of, you know, catastrophes of biblical proportions, if we are going to call it that. You know, to the south, you have the great floods. To the west, the entire West Coast is on fire. To the north, the ice is melting, and polar bears are eating each other."
"One time I was sitting in Sitka, Alaska—did you ever get a chance to go there? Beautiful. Like sometimes you just go someplace. I was at a writers’ workshop. I was in Sitka, Alaska, and I was watching—you know, the eagles were capturing the salmon that had come in. And so there was like eagles diving down into the ocean, and, you know, the salmon. And there were bears. And I looked out there, and I saw this cruise ship coming into the left of my vision. And it came in, and I was like, “Oh, I don’t like that.” The cruise ship came in, and then I watched that cruise ship turn a 180 and go exactly back out. And that’s basically what we’ve got to do. You know, we have to make the next economy, and that next economy is going to be green. That next economy is going to have people like me making decisions. I’d like to be an architect for the next economy. I didn’t like the last one."
"Indian people know how to take care of this land."
"The public lands and the Native lands should be protected for the public and the Natives, not necessarily some mining corporations."
"Deb (Haaland)’s history here with a vision that she and other leaders have had in Washington with a just transition and the Green New Deal is exactly what we need in this country. We don’t need any more fossil fuels. We’re done. We’re done. What we need is the vision and a just transition."
"I think that we should be done with appointing corporate heads to run parts of our government. They have enough influence already."
"Enbridge was 28% of DAPL. And when the federal court ordered them to close down the pipe, they said no. When the state of Michigan ordered them to close down a pipe this last May, they said no. So they’re just trying to continue their egregious behavior."
"It’s so tragic that, you know, on one hand, the Biden administration is like, “We are going to have Indigenous Peoples’ Day, but we’re still going to smash you in northern Minnesota and smash the rest of the country.” Same thing, you know, Klobuchar and Smith, the two Minnesota senators, shameful their lack of courage, not only for Indigenous people but for the planet"
"Enbridge and the Walz administration are climate criminals."
"The Biden administration needs to stand up. You know, on one hand, I’m looking at Joe Biden, and I’m so grateful. Like, Bears Ears, that was the right thing to do, you know, to get back and to be the people that are supporting Indigenous people and Land Back...You know, 80 million acres of national parks stolen from Indian people, let’s start returning those, too, along with creating new national parks. We could just start returning land that was stolen. That would be a great step."
"No sane person supports this pipeline. Only people who want to take oil money from Canadian multinationals support this pipeline."
"If you appoint Indian people, don’t just make them pretty Indian people that sit in your administration. Let them do their job. Indigenous thinking is what we need in the colonial administration. That’s when change happens."
"Seventy-five percent of the world’s mining corporations are Canadian, and all through Latin America there’s human rights violations."
"In her book The Militarization of Indian Country, Anishinaabe activist and writer Winona LaDuke analyzes the continuing negative effects of the military on Native Americans, considering the consequences wrought on Native economy, land, future, and people, especially Native combat veterans and their families. Indigenous territories in New Mexico bristle with nuclear weapons storage, and Shoshone and Paiute territories in Nevada are scarred by decades of aboveground and underground nuclear weapons testing. The Navajo Nation and some New Mexico Pueblos have experienced decades of uranium strip mining, the pollution of water, and subsequent deadly health effects. "I am awed by the impact of the military on the world and on Native America," LaDuke writes. "It is pervasive.""
"There is no Indigenous group in the US whose relationships to ancestral foods has not been severely impacted, if not completely disrupted. Some of these are well known, having been extensively documented, and no one has written more powerfully or prolifically on the issue than Winona LaDuke. LaDuke is the quintessential Indigenous eco-warrior, making her mark in larger Indigenous environmental justice conversation not only as a researcher but also as an activist who has worked tirelessly for decades in her own White Earth reservation community to protect Ojibwe access to wild rice, known to them as manoomin...Another high-profile issue LaDuke has written about is the disruption of the Klamath nation's relationship with salmon and sucker fish."
"We ended up having a long, wide-ranging conversation about the difference between an extractivist mind-set (which Leanne Simpson describes bluntly as "stealing" and taking things "out of relationship") and a regenerative one. She described Anishinaabe systems as "a way of living designed to generate life, not just human life but the life of all living things." This is a concept of balance, or harmony, common to many Indigenous cultures and is often translated to mean "the good life." But Simpson told me that she preferred the translation "continuous rebirth," which she first heard from fellow Anishinaabe writer and activist Winona LaDuke."