QUOTES
...corporate
personhood is a real scandal...
...the
meaning of the 14th Amendment was expanded so that 'person' included
corporations, and over the years corporations have gotten rights
that are way beyond those of persons of flesh and blood...
...there's
plenty of anti-corporate feeling in the country but it's unfocused...
...a
constitutional amendment would be a great idea...
...there
has to be a lot of organizing and educational work to build up
a major groundwell of support which will call for restoring the
14th Amendment to what the words say...
...the
idea that a corporation should be given personal rights is a major
attack on classical liberal doctrines which held that rights inhere
in 'persons' - persons of flesh and blood, not collectivist legal
entities established by state power...
"It
is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and
expose lies."
"…jingoism,
racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people
if you're trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really
intended to crush them."
All
over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant
pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can
have is to ratify decisions and to consume.
Personally,
I'm in favor of democracy, which means that the central institutions of society
have to be under popular control. Now, under capitalism, we can't have democracy
by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society
are in principle under autocratic control.
The
more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and
aliens, the more you control all the people.
The
United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the
system of ideological control - "indoctrination," we might say - exercised through
the mass media.
"The
'corporatization of America' during the past century [has been] an attack on democracy."
There
is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or
to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws. These
are simply decisions made within institutions that are subject to human will and
that must face the test of legitimacy. And if they do not meet the test, they
can be replaced by other institutions that are more free and more just, as has
happened often in the past.
We
can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without
war or there won't be a world - at least, a world inhabited by creatures other
than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.
You
never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.
States are
not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.
Any
dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.
