Political Authors From The United States

"I was surprised to see that there was indeed religiously sanctioned violence in it, as well as some others things which I found disturbing. But it was all intriguing, because I was entranced by the shorter, poetic chapters. I thought it very striking that this beauty could co-exist with clear mandates for warfare and violence against unbelievers."

"I have never said that the terrorists' interpretation of Islam is the accurate or correct one. But I have pointed out that the terrorists portray themselves quite successfully among Muslims as the exponents of true and pure Islam, and moderates have mounted no successful response as yet."

"Reality, after all, is what civilization attempts to mitigate."

"We love to boast that we are a nation of immigrants — and we are. But there's a different sense of America among those who trace their bloodlines back through generations of sacrifice."

"But more overt sexual aggression may be the product of something few will acknowledge, at least on the record: Resentment. Off the record, in dozens of interviews over a period of years, male soldiers and officers have confided that many men resent women because they've been forced to pretend that women are equals, and men know they're not."

"An emerging market is a country where politics matters at least as much as economics to the market."

"The developed world should neither shelter nor militarily destabilize authoritarian regimes—unless those regimes represent an imminent threat to the national security of other states. Developed states should instead work to create the conditions most favorable for a closed regime’s safe passage through the least stable segment of the J curve—however and whenever the slide toward instability comes. And developed states should minimize the risk these states pose the rest of the world as their transition toward modernity begins."

"India and China offer intriguing mirror images. Modern India has long been open politically and, until recently, closed economically. Modern China has opened economically, but remains politically closed. The comparison reveals that, while politics and economics can never fully be separated, political openness is a better guarantor of long-term stability than economic openness."

"New York used to be the financial capital of the world. It's no longer even the financial capital of the U.S. For the moment, Washington is."

"The free market tide has now receded. In its place has come state capitalism, a system in which the state functions as the leading economic actor and uses markets primarily for political gain."

"The great thing about the U.S. economy right now is that we are the smart kids in the stupid-kid class. America has fiscal problems and gridlock issues and polarity and partisanship in Congress -- and yet, compared to Japan and Europe, the U.S. looks great."

"State capitalism is about more than emergency government spending, implementation of more intelligent regulation, or a stronger social safety net. It’s about state dominance of economic activity for political gain."

"When you're leaving your teenage kids alone, probably a good idea to let them know you're going to be checking in on them occasionally. I suspect Greenspan missed that part."

"In the last 21 months, if you've learnt anything, it's that the state is back. If the free market fails, it's not because it's been defeated by state capitalism; the only people that can defeat the free market is us, we're the only ones who can destroy it."

"It's not a third way between state capitalism and free markets, it is the free market way. Multi-national corporations should be the principal actors, but they should be properly regulated."

"Everyone's talked about Bank of America and Citigroup and the rest being too big to fail, but no, no, no. The most important point...is that the US must be perceived to be too big to fail."

"I believe that if you go and ask a chief executive of a Goldman Sachs or a BP, and they answer you honestly...they want monopolies, they want government subsidies, they want preferences – they're not interested in free markets.""

"It's very clear to me–you do not want corporations captured by states. Equally you do not want states captured by corporations."

"Authoritarian governments are now trying to ensure that the increasingly free flow of ideas and information through cyberspace fuels their economies without threatening their political power."

"Up until now Washington has worried that terrorists will become hackers. Perhaps we all should worry that hackers will become terrorists."

"The G-Zero isn't aspirational, it's analytic. Unfortunately, it's also where we are."

"Money talks: financing the periphery buys Berlin a leading role recasting the eurozone governance framework. The recent ‘six pack’ of legislative reforms hints at what’s to come: institutionalized fiscal discipline and an excessive imbalances procedure that protects against future moral hazard. The whole eurozone will tilt toward the German surplus model as we get more fiscal integration and more German leverage."

"In China, the state controls the corporations, whereas in the United States, the corporations control the state."

"The great thing about partisanship is you don't have to spend time understanding the issues to know what side you're on."

"Political scientists don't work at banks—which is a problem. As political issues become more important for the markets, analysts at banks are asked all sorts of questions they don't have the ability to answer. And if you're getting paid to answer questions—as analysts at banks are—you never want to be in the position of saying you don't know."

"The source of the terror in Lebanon as in Iraq is to be found in the Koran and in the despotisms of the Arab Middle East."

"In Brazil, it goes like this: communists only read communist authors, (economic) liberals only read liberal authors and so on. Each one is afraid of tarnishing their little soul with sinful thoughts. In order for someone to speak with some propriety about the communist movement, they must have previously studied the following things:"

"I'm an agnostic, but I understand that a book like the Bible that has been around as long as it has, because there is wisdom in it. People don't read over two thousand years, four thousand years, a book that doesn't have wisdom. Think of the story of Genesis. Adam and Eve were given paradise. It's better than anything that Nanci Pelosi promises, the garden of Eden, they didn't have to work, there was no pain, they lived forever, plucked fruit from the trees, but, there was one rule, which was: "Do not eat of the tree of Knowledge of good and evil", don't eat from that tree. Well, our foreparents were too ornery to obey that law and so they were expelled from the garden, and God put an angel with a flaming sword in the entrance to Eden. This is a very important parable for understanding where we are. An angel with a flaming sword to prevent human beings from returning to Eden, only by a divine hand, could we return. The whole agenda of the left, is to return us to Eden."

"I have written a book with Jacob Laksin about universities called One Party Classroom. Among other things, the title highlights the fact that so-called liberals have purged American faculties of conservative voices. It has been the most successful witch-hunt in American history."

"We are divided not only about political facts and social values, but also about what the Constitution itself means. The crusaders on this issue choose to ignore these problems and are proposing to deny the will of 64 million voters by appealing to five Supreme Court Justices (since no one is delusional enough to think that the four liberal justices are going to take the presidency away from Obama). What kind of conservatism is this?"

"Until the arrival of Arafat and the Palestinian terrorists, Lebanon was a Christian democracy. But Islamic radicalism could not tolerate either Christianity or democracy. This — not the presence of tiny Israel (one hundred times smaller than its current antagonists) is the root cause of the violence in the Middle East. The cause is Arab intolerance and Islamic hate. One Jewish state among 22 Arab states was one too many. Six million Jews among 300 million Arabs was too much to bear. A sliver of land, less than one percent of the Arab land mass, which belonged to first to the Turks and then to the British was an imperialist outrage."

"Politics is about winning. If you don’t win, you don’t get to put your principles into practice. Therefore, find a way to win, or sit the battle out."

"Baghdad is liberated. In the days to come let us not forget that if it was not for one man, and one man alone — George Bush — the people of Iraq would not be celebrating in the streets and pulling down Saddam's statues today... We have entered the era of a new civil war between the forces of freedom and the powers of Islamo-fascist and communist darkness, and once again the left is clearly determined to take its stand on the other side. The good news is that America is back. Our military has performed superlatively. Our leadership has stood tall. We ourselves can celebrate over this and look confidently towards what lies ahead."

"They are radical groups who identify with the violent jihad of Islamacist terror organizations like al-Qaeda, Hizbollah, Islamic Jihad and Hamas. And they have the support of a radical culture that regards America as the Great Satan, and Muslims and Arabs as the people whom America oppresses."

"On campuses across this country, embedded in the leadership of every radical "anti-war" protest group, are organizations that promote the culture of Islamic terrorism and its anti-Western, anti-Israeli and anti-American agendas. One that will serve as an example for the others is the radical Muslim Student Association (MSA). The Muslim Student Association is an organization financed by the Saudis and also by student funds at every university where it operates. The ideas and enthusiasms that it promotes among impressionable college students should give every American cause for concern."

"The black middle-class in America is a prosperous community that is now larger in absolute terms than the black underclass. Does its existence not suggest that economic adversity is the result of failures of individual character rather than the lingering after-effects of racial discrimination and a slave system that ceased to exist well over a century ago?"

"Blacks who lack a proper killing rage are merely victims of the genocidal campaign that white America is waging against them."

"In the sociology of the left, including the NAACP, there cannot be a wound the black community inflicts on itself that is not ultimately the responsibility of malicious whites."

"If blacks are oppressed in America, why isn't there a black exodus?"

"For the continuing worldwide oppression of class, nation and race, the incalculable waste and untold misery, the unending destruction and preparation for destruction and the permanent threat to democratic order that characterize the rule of capitalism in this, its most technically advanced, most "enlightened" and most materially wealthy era now threaten human survival itself. In the age of atomic weapons and intercontinental missiles, the predatory system of imperialist rivalry and global exploitation, of military intervention and counterrevolutionary war, faces mankind with the prospect of the ultimate barbarism."

"More than ever before, for humanity to live under capitalism, is to live on borrowed time."

"Liberation is no longer, and can be no longer, merely a national concern. The dimension of the struggle, as Lenin and the Bolsheviks so clearly saw, is international: its road is the socialist revolution."

"Immaterial labor has become hegemonic in qualitative terms and has imposed a tendency on other forms of labor and society itself. Immaterial labor, in other words, is today in the same position that industrial labor was 150 years ago, when it accounted for only a small fraction of global production and was concentrated in a small part of the world but nonetheless exerted hegemony over all other forms of production. Just as in that phase all forms of labor and society itself had to industrialize, today, labor and society have to informationalize, become intelligent, become communicative, become affective. (109)"

"Marxism ... has supplied many aspiring bureaucrats and true dictators with a reservoir of pre-made phrases with which to justify their power. And it has supplied just as many social democrats with a smoke-screen with which to please anyone who is satisfied that capitulation in practice is connected to radicality in style. The important thing was and is to assume the attitude of one who knows what he/she is talking about with scientific precision.Antonio Negri’s texts play the same role today."

"Just sit back and listen to some of the clamorous grievances against the contemporary global system. Our list does not pretend to be comprehensive, and the partiality of its selections will undoubtedly reveal our own blindnesses, but it should nonetheless give a sense of the range and depth of today's grievances."

"Our claim is that a common political project is possible. This possibility of course will have to be verified and realized in practice. … We are capable of democracy. The challange is to organize it politically."

"Every identity, such (third) critics say, even the multitude, must be defined by its remained, those outside of it, call them excluded, the abject, or the subaltern. … There can certainly be points or nodes outside a network but none are necessarily outside. Its boundaries are indefinite and open. … None is necessarily excluded but this inclusion is not guaranteed: the expansion of the common is a practical, political manner. (226)"

"A second part of criticisms [of our concept, Multitude], which relate closely to the first, focus on the economic conception of the multitude. … "You are really against the workers!" … Industrial labor has been displaced from its hegemonic position over other forms of labor by immaterial labor, which now tends to transform all sectors of production and society itself in line with its qualities. Industrial workers remain important, then, but within the context of this new paradigm. Here arises, then, but within the second criticism of this pair, that our argument of hegemony of immaterial labor replaces the old vanguard of industrial workers with a new vanguard of immaterial workers - Microsoft programmers leading us on the shining path. "You are just postmodern Leninist in sheep's clothing!" they cry. No, the hegemonic position of a form of production in the economy should not imply any political hegemony. Our argument about the hegemony of immaterial labor and the becoming common of all forms of labor is aimed instead at establishing that contemporary conditions tending to form a general communication and collaboration of labor that can be the basis of the multitude."

"The capitalist call workers to the factory, for example, directing them to collaborate and communicate in production and giving them the means to do so. In the paradigm of immaterial production, in contrast, labor itself tends to produce the means of interaction, communication, and cooperation for production directly. Affective labor always directly constructs a relationship. (147)"

"Material production - the production, for example, or cars, televisions, clothing, and food - creates the means of social life. … Immaterial production, by contrast, including the production of ideas, knowledges, communication, cooperation, and affective relations, tends to create not the means of social life but social life itself."