Quotes About Influence

The United States can be held to lead the international community only if that community is defined as the United States and whoever happens to go along with it, often through intimidation, as is sometimes tacitly conceded. Critics

W]e have a democracy that uses free elections to put in place known obstructionists, and a media that disproportionately gives a forum to economically driven ideology over sound science.

Governments are bigger than ever, but under neoliberalism they have far less pretense to being concerned with addressing non-corporate interests. And

There is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment.

an advertising-based system will tend to drive out of existence or into marginality the media companies and types that depend on revenue from sales alone. With advertising, the free market does not yield a neutral system in which final buyer choice decides. The advertisers' choices influence media prosperity and survival.

Beware of the people of power, and avarice, and wealth. Because the more intelligent they are, the better they'll be at distorting reality and convincing us that what's good for them is good for the world when it's just the opposite.

The choice is ours, the choice is yours.

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome." ? Noam Chomsky

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.

Neoliberalism works best when there is formal electoral democracy, but when the population is diverted from the information, access, and public forums necessary for meaningful participation in decision making.

So you have to  ask, "Is it better to help the worse candidate to be elected?" You can make a case for doing that. In fact, there was an old Communist Party principle back in the  early 1930s: "the worse, the better." If you get the worse candidate in, it's going to be better, because then there will be more support for a revolution.

See, one of the serious illusions we live under in the United States, which is a major part of the whole system of indoctrination, is the idea that the government is the power?and the government's not the power, the government is one segment of power. Real power is in the hands of the people who own the society; the state-managers are usually just servants.

At Harvard they teach people how to rule the world and at MIT they teach them how to make the world work. This is for the elite schools. For the rest, turn them into servants.

Anybody who wants to be President, you should right away say, I don't want to hear that guy anymore. WOMAN: I'm sorry? You should say, I don't want to listen to that person anymore. Anybody who wants to become your leader, you should say, I don't want to follow. That's like a rule of thumb which almost never fails.

You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption.

Pandangan monolitik media-media besar yang tampil secara konsisten harus dicurigai sebagai upaya untuk mempertahankan status quo yang ada.

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If you've ever turned on your television set, you know that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent to try to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices—that's what advertising is.

Any dictator would admire the obedience and uniformity of the U.S media.

States of course have complex internal structures, and the choices and decisions of the political leadership are heavily influenced by internal concentrations of power, while the general population is often marginalized. That is true even for the more democratic societies, and obviously for others.

Well, we happen to have a huge rabid raccoon running around—it's called corporations. And there is nothing in the society right now that can protect people from that tyranny, except the federal government. Now, it doesn't protect them very well, because mostly it's run by the corporations, but still it does have some limited effect—it can enforce regulatory measures

In the background was the conclusion of Nixon's National Security Council that if the United States could not control Latin America, it could not expect "to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world.

the ones who are running the world economy have protected themselves very strongly from market discipline. the neo-liberal system is an attack, in my view, both on the market, and on democracy.

We will also learn that our own actions, or passive acquiescence, contribute quite substantially to misery and oppression, and perhaps eventual global destruction.