Category

US Politics

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and on-one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agenda or knowledgeably question those in authority; when clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

Carl Sagan [1995]
August 11, 2019

If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.

David Frum
May 22, 2019

If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.

David Frum
December 20, 2018

The blame the poor for subsisting on welfare has no justice unless we are also willing to judge every rich member of society by how productive he or she is. Taken individual by individual, it is likely that there’s more idleness and abuse of government favours among the economically privileged than among the ranks of the disadvantaged.

Norman Mailer
November 2, 2018

When they have got over the delirium of the television, when they realise that their new homes that they have been put into are mortgaged to the hilt, when they realise that the moneylender has been elevated to the highest position in the land, when they realise that [this] is a vulgar society of which no decent person could be proud and that this society is unable to exploit the resources of their scientists because they are prevented by the greed of their capitalism from doing so, they will find that the challenge of modern society can only be met by socialism – that, in fact, we represent the future.

Nye Bevan
September 30, 2018

There’s no question about it: the corporate conservatives and their allies in the political and religious right are achieving a vast transformation of American life that only they understand because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries, in creating the greatest economic inequality in the advanced world. They have saddled our nation, our states, and our cities and counties with structural deficits that will last until our children’s children are ready for retirement and they are systematically stripping government of all its functions except rewarding the rich and waging war.

Bill Moyers
September 13, 2018

The United States Congress, the avatar of the democratically elected national legislatures in the modern world, is now incapable of passing laws without permission from the corporate lobbies and other special interests that control their campaign finances.

Al Gore
July 15, 2018