Michael Parenti Quotes

The Federalists also used bribes, intimidation, and fraud against opponents of the Constitution.

The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments.

People may like what third-party candidates say, because often they are the only ones saying anything, but they usually won’t vote for someone who doesn’t have a chance. Since third-party candidates are not in the news, they are considered to be not really in the race; and since they are not in the race, this justifies treating them as if they are not news.

The rich have grown richer, but their tax rate has declined. The poor have grown poorer, but their taxes have increased.

The peculiar danger of executive power is that it executes.

A huge national security state has developed in the United States since World War II. Its function is to buttress anticommunist, procapitalist governments and undermine and destroy popular movements whenever possible.

The US government is usually on the wrong side against the poor and downtrodden, because the wrong side is the right side, given the class interests upon which the [US] policy is fixed.

The first atrocity, the first war crime committed in any war of aggression by the aggressors is against the truth.

Between 1831 and 1891, US armed forces – usually the Marines – invaded Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Panama, Colombia, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Brazil, Haiti, Argentina, and Chile a total of thirty-one times, a fact not many of us are informed about in school. The Marines intermittently occupied Nicaragua form 1909 to 1933, Mexico from 1914 to 1919, and Panama from 1903 to 1914. To ‘restore order’ the Marines occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, killing over two thousand Haitians who resisted ‘pacification.’

Ecology’s implications for capitalism are too momentous for the capitalist to contemplate. The plutocrats are more wedded to their wealth than to the Earth upon which they live, more concerned with the fate of their fortunes than with the fate of humanity. The present ecological crisis has been created by the few at the expense of the many.

Russia became a juicy chunk of the Third World, with immense reserves of cheap labor, a vast treasure of natural resources, and industrial assets to be sold off at giveaway prices.

A nation as such does not give aid to another nation. More precisely, the common citizens of our country, through their taxes, give to the privileged elites of another country. As someone once said: foreign aid is when the poor people of a rich country give money to the rich people of a poor country.