Josh

“The president operates effectively as head of the national security state as long as he stays within the parameters of its primary dedication—which is to advance the interests of corporate investors and protect the overall global capital accumulation process.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“During the years of Stalin’s reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women’s rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that “socialism doesn’t work” is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists.”
― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

“Capitalism is not just an economic system but an entire social order. Once it takes hold, it is not voted out of existence by electing socialists or communists.”
― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

“Marx believed that as wealth becomes more concentrated, poverty will become more widespread and the plight of working people evermore desperate. According to his critics, this prediction has proven wrong. They point out that he wrote during a time of raw industrialism, an era of robber barons and the fourteen-hour work day. Through persistent struggle, the working class improved its life conditions from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Today, mainstream spokespersons portray the United States as a prosperous middle-class society. Yet one might wonder. During the Reagan-Bush-Clinton era, from 1981 to 1996, the share of the national income that went to those who work for a living shrank by over 12 percent. The share that went to those who live off investments increased almost 35 percent. Less than 1 percent of the population owns almost 50 percent of the nation’s wealth. The richest families are hundreds of times wealthier than the average household in the lower 90 percent of the population. The gap between America’s rich and poor is greater than it has been in more than half a century and is getting ever-greater. Thus, between 1977 and 1989, the top 1 percent saw their earnings grow by over 100 percent, while the three lowest quintiles averaged a 3 to 10 percent drop in real income.”
― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism