Voices of Reason

Voices of reason speak out.

On leadership...

Never before in our country's history have both the president and Congress been so out of touch with most Americans. Never before have so few of our elected officials and corporate leaders been less willing to commit to the national interest. And never before has our nation's largest constituent group -- some 200 million middle-class Americans -- been without representation in our nation's capital.
Lou Dobbs, CNN

On Iraq...

The [Iraq] war, and the failure to establish order that led to the barbarism that's driving Iraqis away, can't be laid solely on the neocons' doorstep, of course. These second-generation neos needed a trio of arrogant, onetime CEOs -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld -- to actualize their vision. But actualize it they did, and the ideologues whose forebears once argued that the drugged-out Bronx was a monument to liberal folly have now made blood-drenched and depopulating Baghdad the monument to their own neocon obsessions.
Harold Meyerson, Washington Post

On the media...

More important than profit is the mainstream media ownership's interest in preserving the dominance of the corporation over the individual. Starting in the 1950's, post World War II America entered into a period of mass consumption and consumerism that has moved us into a dark period of unparallelled avarice and obsession with materialism. The corporate owners of mass media utilize both mainstream news, and its accompanying advertising, to entice Americans to buy things they do not need and to create an image of who a person "should be" if they want to attain success (i.e. thin, straight, tough, beautiful, young, wealthy). Through the medium of television, corporations have a captive audience to mass market their goods and services to people who neither want or need them, but buy them because they are psychologically manipulated into doing so (think Saturday morning cartoons and toy commercials). Reaching millions of receptive minds at once, the corporate puppeteers have learned to perpetuate the paradigm of white male patriarchy and blind patriotism. The power of television, print and advertising enables the wealthy elite to perpetually employ a variety of propaganda tactics to maintain their hold on most of the wealth and power in our society.
Jason Miller, ZNet

An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only on partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda, is less inclined to put up a fight, to ask questions and be skeptical. That kind of orthodoxy can kill a democracy — or worse.
Bill Moyers, Free Press

On energy...

If we want to do something about gas prices, we should demand greatly reduced welfare and military spending, a balanced budget, and fewer regulations that interfere with the market development of alternative fuels. All subsidies and special benefits to energy companies should be ended. We also should demand a return to a sound commodity monetary system.
Ron Paul, Congressman, US Representative

On CIA war crimes...

European Parliament investigator Giovanni Fava and his committee come to Washington this month. He has some additional questions for Bush administration officials, members of Congress, and human rights groups here about the renditions around Europe. Also among those inquiries are other possible CIA crimes, including torture, in the CIA's secret prisons.

My suggestion to Tim Russert of Meet the Press and others who preside over Sunday morning programs that profess to get inside the news is that they invite Giovanni Fava—either in person or from wherever he is in Europe—to present his documented evidence on CIA renditions in a debate with obstructionist senator Pat Roberts, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who keeps blocking any investigations of those who have been tortured with the complicity of the CIA and, at the top of the command, the president.
Nat Hentoff, Village Voice

On Zionism and the danger to Israel...

The ugly reality is that 'Jewish lobby groups' are much more accurately described as 'Zionist lobby groups', and Zionism today poses the biggest existential threat to Jews since Nazi Germany.
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The really alarming aspect all of this is that these 'Zionists' seem to realize, but not care, that needlessly igniting a war with 80 million Iranians and hundreds of millions more sympathetic Arabs in the Middle East is very obviously the real existential threat to Jews in Israel. All of which leads us inexorably to the conclusion that Zionist collaboration with the Nazis during WW II was the first phase of a decades-long two-part plan to shepherd the Jewish people into a position where Hitler's final solution could finally be accomplished. If Zionist entities masquerading as Jewish groups are permitted to continue to spread lies and propaganda that seem destined to turn the Middle East into a glass parking lot, while at the same time urging the world's Jews to migrate to Israel, the day of the "final solution to the Jewish problem" will continue to draw ominously every closer.
Joe Quinn, Sign of the Times

Tagged: Current Affairs, News, News and Politics, Opinion, Politics.