“Yeah, it's a bum rap, basically―it's like referring to Soviet-style bureaucracy as "socialism," or any other term of discourse that's been given a second meaning for the purpose of ideological warfare. I mean, "chaos" is a meaning of the word, but it's not a meaning that has any relevance to social thought. Anarchy as a social philosophy has never meant "chaos"―in fact, anarchists have typically believed in a highly organized society, just one that's organized democratically from below.”
“Unfortunately, you can’t vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place. The corporate executives and the corporation lawyers and so on who overwhelmingly staff the executive, assisted increasingly by a university based mandarin class, remain in power no matter whom you elect.”
“In fact, what’s been happening is that there’s been a flow of investor funds to the United States, to Treasury securities, which are regarded as a safe haven now, which has a mixed effect for the United States.3 It tends over time to raise the value of the dollar and harm exports. So it’s not good for a healthy economy.”
“Both parties have moved to the right during the neoliberal period of the past generation. Mainstream Democrats are now pretty much what used to be called “moderate Republicans.” Meanwhile, the Republican Party has largely drifted off the spectrum, becoming what respected conservative political analyst Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein call a “radical insurgency” that has virtually abandoned normal parliamentary politics. With”
“In the modern period, similar ideas are reiterated, for example, by an important political thinker who described what he called “a definite trend in the historic development of mankind,” which strives for “the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life.” The author was Rudolf Rocker, a leading twentieth-century anarchist thinker and activist.3 He was outlining an anarchist tradition culminating in his view in anarcho-syndicalism—in European terms, a variety of “libertarian socialism.” These”
“If you read British Foreign Office records from the 1940s, it’s clear they recognised that their day in the sun was over and that Britain would have to be the “junior partner” of the United States, and sometimes treated in a humiliating way. A striking example of this was in 1962, the time of the Cuban missile crisis. The Kennedy planners were making some very dangerous choices and pursuing policies which they thought had a good chance of leading to nuclear war, and they knew that Britain would be wiped out. The US wouldn’t, because Russia’s missiles couldn’t reach there, but Britain would be wiped out.”
“See, whether you have seditious libel is sort of at the core of whether it's a free society or not: if you're not allowed to criticize the government, if you can be punished for assaulting the government with words, even if that's in the background somewhere, the society is not really free. And truth is no defense to this kind of libel charge, keep in mind-in fact, traditionally truth makes the crime worse, because if what you're saying is true, then the undermining of state authority is even worse.”
“The studies of Larry Bartels and other political scientists show that working people and the poor tend to do somewhat better under Democratic than Republican administrations. But that just means that the Republicans are deeper in the pockets of the corporate system than the Democrats are. They're both nuzzled there quite happily.”