Michael Parenti
Michael Parenti
Michael John Parentiis an American political scientist, political economist, historian, and cultural critic who writes on scholarly and popular subjects. He has taught at American and international universities and has been a guest lecturer before campus and community audiences...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCritic
CountryUnited States of America
Michael Parenti quotes about
teaching unions firm
Union busting has become a major industry with more than a thousand consulting firms teaching companies how to prevent workers from organizing and how to get rid of existing unions.
government leader accountability
Democracy is not about trust; it is about distrust. It is about accountability, exposure, open debate, critical challenge, and popular input and feedback from the citizenry. It is about responsible government. We have to get our fellow Americans to trust their leaders less and themselves more, trust their own questions and suspicions, and their own desire to know what is going on.
country powerful government
With unfailing consistency, U.S. intervention has been on the side of the rich and powerful of various nations at the expense of the poor and needy. Rather than strengthening democracies, U.S. leaders have overthrown numerous democratically elected governments or other populist regimes in dozens of countries ... whenever these nations give evidence of putting the interests of their people ahead of the interests of multinational corporate interests.
children dirty gun
One finds fortunes built on slave labor, indentured labor, prison labor, immigrant labor, female labor, child labor, and scab labor - backed by the lethal force of gun thugs and militia. 'Old money' is often little more than dirty money laundered by several generations of possession.
peg ifs leashes
You don't know you're wearing a leash if you sit by the peg all day
character years wings
For the last fifty years we've been supporting right-wing governments, and that is a puzzlement to me...I don't understand what there is in the American character...that almost automatically, even when we have a liberal President, we support fascist dictatorships or are tolerant towards them.
dirty poverty causes
The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.
country government way
The American way is to criticize and debate openly, not to accept unthinkingly the doings of government officials of this or any other country.
might facts world
Our fear that communism might someday take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anti- communism already has.
mean people support
It is ironic that people of modest means sometimes become conservative out of a scarcity fear bred by the very capitalist system they support.
dream war land
I dream that someday the United States will be on the side of the peasants in some civil war. I dream that we will be the ones who will help the poor overthrow the rich, who will talk about land reform and education and health facilities for everyone, and that when the Red Cross or Amnesty International comes to count the bodies and take the testimony of women raped, that our side won't be the heavies.
class government sides
The US government is usually on the wrong side against the poor and downtrodden, because the wrong side is the right side, given the class interests upon which the [US] policy is fixed.
home class justice
[The ruling elites] know who their enemies are, and their enemies are the people, the people at home and the people abroad. Their enemies are anybody who wants more social justice, anybody who wants to use the surplus value of society for social needs rather than for individual class greed, that's their enemy.
lying dirty practice
Maintaining silence about a dirty truth is another way of lying, a common practice in high places.