Sonali's Subversive Thoughts for the Day:

Click here for 2005 Current Subversive Thoughts
Click here for 2003 Archived Subversive Thoughts
Click here for 2004 Archived Subversive Thoughts

December 17, 2004
James A. Garfield
Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.

December 16, 2004
Eugene Debs “I'd rather vote for something I want and not get it than vote for something I don't want, and get it”.

December 15, 2004
“Do we have a free press today? Sure we do. It’s free to report all the sex scandals it wants, all the stock market news we can handle, every new health fad that comes down the pike, and every celebrity marriage or divorce that happens. But when it comes to the real down and dirty stuff—stories like Tailwind, the October Surprise, the El Mozote massacre, corporate corruption, or CIA involvement in drug trafficking—that’s where we begin to see the limits of our freedoms”. – Gary Webb.

December 14, 2004
Mother Jones once said, “I know that there are no limits to which the powers of privilege will not go to keep the workers in slavery”

December 13, 2004
"So long as private corporations remain the dominant production institution of society, no matter who is in power, the long-run trend in society will be to promote the corporate interest" - Michael Harrington, The Twilight of Capitalism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976).

December 10, 2004
"The proposed American Constitution is likely to be administered for a course of years and then end in despotism... when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.” - Benjamin Franklin, in a speech prior to ratification

December 9, 2004
“Be nice to whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity”. ~Desmond Tutu

December 8, 2004
Eugene Debs once said, “I'd rather vote for something I want and not get it than vote for something I don't want, and get it”.

December 7, 2004
General Omar Bradley speech to West Point cadets, 1952 said: “Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.”

December 3, 2004
"Man is the only Patriot. He sets himself apart in his own country, under his own flag, and sneers at the other nations, and keeps multitudinous uniformed assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices of other people's countries, and keep them from grabbing slices of his. And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for 'the universal brotherhood of man' with his mouth.” Samuel L. Clemens in The Lowest Animal

December 1, 2004
“The voices of resistance are always under threat and challenge. We live in a country today where a PATRIOT act is passed, where there’s a real danger of a kind of neo-authoritarianism, where voices of dissent are muted, where there’s no effective challenge to the rise of this new right, this far right, that’s in Congress. And, it’s important more than ever before that the voices of resistance, the voices of democracy, the voices of freedom, not from the top-down, but from the bottom-up are clearly and unambiguously heard in this country. And that’s why it’s so important to support Pacifica at this crucial moment in history. And support for the Archives allows us to create an intellectual, political, and moral legacy that challenges structural racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination and inequality”. Manning Marable, Professor of African American Studies at Columbia University.

November 30, 2004
Norman Mailer once said, “A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped”.

November 29, 2004
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi once said “What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether … mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty and democracy?”

November 25, 2004
Writer and cartoonist James Thurber once said, “Humor is a serious thing. I like to think of it as one of our greatest earliest natural resources, which must be preserved at all cost”.

November 24, 2004
Andy Warhol once said, “They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself”.

November 23, 2004
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do”. Samuel P. Huntington

November 22, 2004
H.L. Mencken once said “For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuable and necessary to the common wealth, has no assurance that it will sustain him while he stands ready to practice it, or keep him out of the poorhouse when illness or age makes him idle”.

November 19, 2004
Percy Barnevik President of the ABB Industrial Group, once said "I would define globalization as the freedom for my group of companies to invest where it wants when it wants, to produce what it wants, to buy and sell where it wants, and support the fewest restrictions possible coming from labor laws and social conventions."

November 18, 2004
Allen Ginsberg once said, “Whoever controls the media--the images--controls the culture”.

November 16, 2004
“At issue is whether the public can trust [doctors] not only to be at their side, but on their side… The profession is under siege by big business, and I do not perceive a vigorous effort to rescue it.” – Dr. Jerome Kassirer, former Editor-in-Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, author of On the Take: How Medicine’s Complicity with Big Business can Endanger your Health

November 12, 2004
Samir Amin from Empire of Chaos, once said, “Never have the armies of the North brought peace, prosperity, or democracy to the peoples of Asia, Africa, or Latin America. In the future, as in the past five centuries, they can only bring to these peoples further servitude, the exploitation of their labor, the expropriation of their riches, and the denial of their rights. It is of the utmost importance that the progressive forces of the West understand this”.

November 11, 2004
Adam Smith once said, “Masters are always and every where in a sort of tacit but constant and uniform combination not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is every where a most unpopular action and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbors and equals”.

November 10, 2004
Stephen Hawking says, “The greatest enemy of knowledge isn't the ignorance of knowledge but the illusion of it”.

November 9, 2004
“When I dare to be powerful— to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.” – Audre Lorde

November 8, 2004
Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society. – Howard Zinn, “The Optimism of Uncertainty”.

November 5, 2004
Herbert Butterfield once said, “…the greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness -- each system only too delighted to find that the other is wicked -- each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still deeper hatred and animosity”.

November 4, 2004
Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez once said “The essence of democracy should be participation...that is what we believe, not representation. Representative democracy is an elite trap designed to ensnare the hopes of the people”.

November 3, 2004
Bertrand Russell once said, “Amid the myths and hysterias of opposing hatreds, it is difficult to cause truth to reach the bulk of the people, or to spread the habit of forming opinions on evidence rather than on passion. Yet it is ultimately upon these things, not upon any political panacea, that the hopes of the world must rest”.

November 2, 2004
“Destroying hope is a critically important project. And when it is achieved, formal democracy is allowed – even preferred, if only for public-relations purposes. In more honest circles, much of this is conceded. Of course, it is understood much more profoundly by the beasts in men’s shapes who endure the consequences of challenging the imperatives of stability and order.

These are all matters that the second superpower, world public opinion, should make every effort to understand if it hopes to escape the containment to which it is subjected and to take seriously the ideals of justice and freedom that come easily to the lips but are harder to defend and advance.”

- Noam Chomsky, author of Hegemony or Survival, America’s Quest for Global Dominance.

November 1, 2004
“He who owns oil will own the world – who has oil, has empire” -Henry Berringer, Commisioner General for oil products in France. Opening sentence of latest commentary by Mumia Abu Jamal, heard at http://www.prisonradio.org/audio/mumia/10_17_04oila.mp3.

October 29, 2004
“Groups representing Arab and Muslim-Americans are confused by what appear to be conflicting signals from the Bush administration – which claims to be making serious efforts to "build bridges" to these constituencies, but simultaneously continues to practice discrimination and harassment… According to Human Rights First, a lawyers' advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., "From secret mass arrests, to the 'voluntary' interviews of thousands, to fingerprinting and registration for those legally here, to selective enforcement against those who have been held deportable, Arabs, South Asians, and Muslims – mostly immigrants – have borne the brunt of many of the government's new police powers." – William Fischer.

October 28, 2004
Henry David Thoreau once said, “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison”.

October 27, 2004
If you thought 16 propositions on this year’s ballot is too much, in 1926, Los Angeles voters had to make decisions on 96 measures.

October 26, 2004
George W Bush is touting the wars to “liberate” Afghanistan and Iraq as measures of his success as a president. In fact, they ought to be observed as his worst liabilities, being the most extreme examples of US domination. They are just the latest and worst examples of what neither candidate nor party want to discuss, such as the situations in Palestine, Haiti, Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba, Pakistan, and on and on.

October 25, 2004
Referring to the election pf the Senior Bush Noam Chomsky said: “…People have little specific knowledge of what is happening around them. An academic study that appeared right before the presidential election reports that less than 30 percent of the population was aware of the positions of the candidates on major issues, though 86 percent knew the name of George Bush's dog. The general thrust of propaganda gets through, however. When asked to identify the largest element of the federal budget, less than 1/4 give the correct answer: military spending. Almost half select foreign aid, which barely exists; the second choice is welfare, chosen by 1/3 of the population, who also far overestimate the proportion that goes to Blacks and to child support. ..Another result of the study is that more educated sectors are more ignorant--not surprising, since they are the main targets of indoctrination. Bush supporters, who are the best educated, scored lowest overall.”

October 22, 2004
Uprising raised more than $12,000 on Friday October 22nd, 2004! Thank you for helping us surpass our goal for the Fall Fund drive.

October 21, 2004
“At a time when opportunism is everything, when hope seems lost, when everything boils down to a cynical business deal, we must find the courage to dream. To reclaim romance. The romance of believing in justice, in freedom, and in dignity. For everybody. We have to make common cause, and to do this we need to understand how this big old machine works-who it works for and who it works against. Who pays, who profits”. – Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire.

October 20, 2004
“There are absolute limits in the capacity of cultural imperialism to distract and mystify people beyond which popular rejection sets in. The TV "table of plenty" contrasts with the experience of the empty kitchen; the amorous escapades of media personalities crash against a houseful of crawling, crying hungry children. In the street confrontations, Coca Cola becomes a molotov cocktail. The promise of affluence becomes an affront to those who are perpetually denied. Prolonged impoverishment and widespread decay erode the glamour and appeal of the fantasies of the mass media”. – James Petras.

October 19, 2004
“Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the "war to end all wars." This was the "war to make the world safe for democracy." No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with United States patents. They were just told it was to be a "glorious adventure." Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war, too. So, we gave them the large salary of $30 a month.
All they had to do for this munificent sum was to leave their dear ones behind, give up their jobs, lie in swampy trenches, eat canned willy (when they could get it) and kill and kill and kill...and be killed”.

-- General Smedley Butler

October 18, 2004
“The most serious threat to democracy is the notion that it has already been achieved” – Anonymous.

October 15, 2004
There will be an Immigrants Rights March and Rally in East LA on Saturday, October 16th. The march will coincide with, and commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the great march against Prop-187 in 1994, where over 125,000 people participated, and will follow the historic route to L.A. City Hall. The march will begin at 10 am in East L.A. on the corner of Cesar Chavez & Lorena Cinco Puntos. For more information, visit www.latinoscontralaguerra.org.

October 13, 2004
On July 19th of 2004, Senator John Kerry said, “As President, I will fight a smarter, more effective war on terror. We will deploy every tool in our arsenal: our economic as well as our military might; our principles as well as our firepower… We need to make America once again a beacon in the world. We need to be looked up to and not just feared”. Well, more than 30 years ago, testifying in front of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, John Kerry had a very different message of war, saying, “We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?....We are here in Washington to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying as human beings to communicate to people in this country.”

October 12, 2004
“Despite the pall of gloom that hangs over us today, I'd like to file a cautious plea for hope: in times of war, one wants one's weakest enemy at the helm of his forces. And President George W. Bush is certainly that. Any other even averagely intelligent U.S. President would have probably done the very same things, but would have managed to smoke-up the glass and confuse the opposition. Perhaps even carry the U.N. with him. Bush's tactless imprudence and his brazen belief that he can run the world with his riot squad, has done the opposite. He has achieved what writers, activists and scholars have striven to achieve for decades. He has exposed the ducts. He has placed on full public view the working parts, the nuts and bolts of the apocalyptic apparatus of the American empire.

Now that the blueprint (The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire) has been put into mass circulation, it could be disabled quicker than the pundits predicted.

Bring on the spanners.” – Arundhati Roy, “The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire”.

October 11, 2004
On Friday October 8th, Kerry said during the presidential debate, “The fact is that the Kyoto treaty was flawed. I was in Kyoto, and I was part of that. I know what happened. But this president didn't try to fix it. He just declared it dead, ladies and gentlemen, and we walked away from the work of 160 nations over 10 years. You wonder, Nikki, why it is that people don't like us in some parts of the world. You just say: Hey, we don't agree with you. Goodbye. The president's done nothing to try to fix it. I will”. But on Kerry’s website, is the following line: "John Kerry and John Edwards believe that the Kyoto Protocol is not the answer." According to Patrick Goodenough, writing for CNSnews.com, “Kerry … has reasons for opposing Kyoto. In his "The Kerry-Edwards plan for clean coal" document, two are given -- it requires the U.S. to commit to "infeasible" emission reductions in the short term; and in the long-term the obligations imposed on all countries are too little to solve the problem… The point here isn't so much whether Kerry's views on Kyoto are right or wrong.
It is, rather, the fact that his campaign seems content to allow green-minded voters to think he's onside on Kyoto, when in reality he has some serious concerns about the treaty and likely has little intention -- if elected -- to ratify it. It's enough to make a tree-hugger weep”.




October 10, 2004
On Friday October 8th, Kerry said during the presidential debate, “The fact is that the Kyoto treaty was flawed. I was in Kyoto, and I was part of that. I know what happened. But this president didn't try to fix it. He just declared it dead, ladies and gentlemen, and we walked away from the work of 160 nations over 10 years. You wonder, Nikki, why it is that people don't like us in some parts of the world. You just say: Hey, we don't agree with you. Goodbye. The president's done nothing to try to fix it. I will”. But on Kerry’s website, is the following line: "John Kerry and John Edwards believe that the Kyoto Protocol is not the answer." According to Patrick Goodenough, writing for CNSnews.com, “Kerry … has reasons for opposing Kyoto. In his "The Kerry-Edwards plan for clean coal" document, two are given -- it requires the U.S. to commit to "infeasible" emission reductions in the short term; and in the long-term the obligations imposed on all countries are too little to solve the problem… The point here isn't so much whether Kerry's views on Kyoto are right or wrong.
It is, rather, the fact that his campaign seems content to allow green-minded voters to think he's onside on Kyoto, when in reality he has some serious concerns about the treaty and likely has little intention -- if elected -- to ratify it. It's enough to make a tree-hugger weep”.

October 8, 2004
Thomas Williams is in Soledad State Prison sentenced for buying a stolen bicycle under the Three-Strikes-Law. He says, “My prior serous felony convictions were non-violent burglary offenses from the early 1980's. I have no violence in my background. The most recent offenses were less serious property theft offenses." Thomas is a black man serving 25 years to life under three strikes.

October 7, 2004
Today instead of quoting other experts I want to read a commentary on the Afghan elections for Sonali’s Subversive Thought for the Day. To read the commentary online, visit:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1007-31.htm. This commentary is an excerpt from a paper written by Jim Ingalls and Sonali Kolhatkar.

October 6, 2004
"The human brain now holds the key to our future. We have to recall the image of the planet from outer space: a single entity in which air, water, and continents are interconnected. That is our home." – David Suzuki.

October 5, 2004
“Activism does not rationally convince elites to change their policies. Nor does activism massage their hearts and lead to a moral transformation. Activism wins when it creates conditions within which elites making critical decisions feel they have no choice but to change their behavior. They change when they decide that to pursue their policies and otherwise ignore popular demands, with the risk that this will energize dissent, is a worse course of action for them than not doing so.” – From an article in 2003 called Reject Defeatism...Organize! by Stephen Shalom and Michael Albert.

October 4, 2004
The beauty of hip-hop is that it’s an artform where the poorest of the poor can speak not only to the richest of the rich, but also to their children. And in terms of education in the hood, I think that even though a college education is a beautiful thing, it’s great, it’s important to get ahead…. It’s only one of the tools. People place a lot of emphasis on it because you need it to validate an opinion these days. I could read a lot of things that are false and have a completely skewed view of the way the world is right now and still be a Harvard professor.
September 29, 2004
In a recent statement Attorney General John Ashcroft said, "The U.S. government is committed to tracking down and prosecuting terrorists who prey on innocent Americans in Indonesia and around the world. Terrorists will find they cannot hide from U.S. justice."
But according to a 2002 study by the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, the [Indonesian Military’s] links to groups like Laskar Jihad has made it "a major facilitator of terrorism."

September 28, 2004
Albert Einstein once said, “Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved through understanding.”

September 27, 2004
General Smedley Butler once said: “I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the military profession I never had an original thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service”.



September 24, 2004
"Being an activist means being aware of what's happening around you as well as being in touch with your feelings about it -- your rage, your sadness, your excitement, your curiosity, your feeling of helplessnes, and your refusal to surrender. Being an activist means owning your desire." from "An Activist Love Story" by Paula Allen and Eve Easler

September 23, 2004
Thirty-eight years ago Martin Luther King was booed at a mass meeting in Chicago. Later, as he lay sleepless, he understood why: “For twelve years I, and others like me, had held out radiant promises of progress. I had preached to them about my dream. I had lectured to them about the not too distant day when they would have freedom, “all, here and now.” I urged them to have faith in America and in white society. Their hopes had soared. They were now booing because they felt we were unable to deliver on our promises. They were booing because we had urged them to have faith in people who had too often proved to be unfaithful. They were hostile because they were watching the dream they had so readily accepted turn into a nightmare.”

September 22, 2004
"The belief that we can manage the Earth and improve on Nature is probably the ultimate expression of human conceit.” Rene J. Dubos, (1901-1982), The Wooing of the Earth, 1980.

September 21, 2004
“We live in dark times; laughing is important. We hope you have had some laughs reading about our escapades as WTO spokesmen. Unfortunately, the real-world impact of the policies these clowns are administering is no laughing matter. Fortunately, there are some very smart people doing very smart work to try to turn this situation around. You won’t find them at the WTO, or at the sort of conferences we addressed. You will find them in activist organizations spread around the world, working out of cramped offices for little money and with few resources. They could all use a hand – yours.” – The Yes Men: The True Story of the End of the World Trade Organization.

September 20, 2004
“When a Presidential debate commences, an unnerving sense of vulnerability materializes onstage. The candidates cannot access their advisors, hide behind their reputation, or buy their way out with tens of millions of dollars… But most viewers are soon disappointed. The appearance of vulnerability and spontaneity is just a mirage.” – George Farah, No Debate.

September 17, 2004
“Our Democracy is certainly in a state of horrible disrepair, and the disengagement of so many, along with the flight into superficial forms of entertainment and life satisfaction, is understandable. But the deep love of and commitment to democracy expressed by … great artists and the long tradition of scrutinizing the ravages of our imperialism are strong” – Cornel West, from Democracy Matters, Winning the Fight Against Imperialism.

September 16, 2004
Song by Eric Idle:
Here's a little number I wrote the other day while out duck hunting with a judge.
Fuck you very much the FCC
Fuck you very much for fining me
Five thousand bucks a fuck
So I'm really out of luck
That's more than Heidi Fleiss was charging me
So fuck you very much the FCC
for proving that free speech just isn't free
Clear Channel's a dear channel
So Howard Stern must go
Attorney General Ashcroft doesn't like strong words and so
He's charging twice as much as all the drugs for Rush Limbaugh
So fuck you all so very much
So fuck you very much, Dear Mr. Bush
For heroically sitting on your tush
For Halliburton, Enron, all the companies who fail
Let's send them a clear signal and stick Martha straight in jail
She's an uppity rich bitch
and at least she isn't male
So fuck you all so very much
So fuck you dickhead Mr. Cheney too
Fuck you and fuck everything you do
Your pacemaker must be a fake
You haven't got a heart
As far as I'm concerned you're just a pasty-faced old fart
And as for Condoleeza she's an intellectual tart
So fuck you all so very much
So fuck you very much, the EPA
For giving all Alaska's oil away
It really is a bummer
When I can't fill my hummer
The ozone's a nogozone now that Arnold's here to say:
"The nuclear winter games are going to take place in LA"
So fuck you all so very much
So what the planet fails
Let's save the great white males
And fuck you all so very much

September 15, 2004
Benito Mussolini once said “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.” Source: cited by Lewis Lapham in Harper's, January 2002

September 14, 2004
It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower and come to fruition. - Isaac Asimov

September 13, 2004
American Indian writer, Sherman Alexie once said, “We will find that we will not be able to find and kill the last terrorist, because, well, he is a metaphor. And you can't kill a metaphor, you can only turn it into a cliché”.

September 10, 2004
"Peace is not the product of terror or fear. Peace is not the silence of cemeteries. Peace is not the silent result of violent repression. Peace is the generous, tranquil contribution of all to the good of all. Peace is dynamism. Peace is generosity. It is right and it is duty." --

-- Archbishop Oscar Romero.

September 9, 2004
"We're happy that Ralph Nader's joined the fray. Good. Bring some more on. Maybe Jesse Jackson can run, and Justin Timberlake will get on the ballot. Who knows? Bring in all of them ... because we're solidly united behind George Bush." -- Arkansas Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee.

August 26, 2004
Mickey Z once said, “The primary difference between Democrats and Republicans is that they tell different lies to get elected”.

August 25, 2004
General William Boykin said last year, “George Bush was not elected by a majority of the voters in the US. He was appointed by God”. It seems Boykin was only reflecting Bush’s own sensibility. In 2000, before he was selected, Bush said “I feel like God wants me to run for president… I sense my country is going to need me. Something is going to happen…”.

August 18, 2004
Author Christa Wolf said: "I believe that our culture goes back to the ancient Greeks … [who] developed an increasing competition for material gains, producing societies that became more and more void and empty. I think this is one of the causes of the drive toward self-destruction."

August 16, 2004
Used this before: Aristotle Democracy [is] when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.

August 13, 2004
Edward Said said in the foreward to “Peace Under Fire” about Arabs and Arab Americans about the International Solidarity Movement: “Isn't it astonishing that all the signs of popular solidarity that Palestine and the Arabs receive occur with no comparable sign of solidarity and dignity for ourselves, that others admire and respect us more than we do ourselves? Isn't it time we caught up with our own status and made certain that our representatives here and elsewhere realize, as a first step, that they are fighting for a just and noble cause, and that they have nothing to apologize for or anything to be embarrassed about?

August 12, 2004
Alex Carey once said, “The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.”

August 11, 2004
Jacques Cousteau once said: "A common denominatorin every single nuclear accident -- a nuclear plant or on a nuclear submarine -- is that before the specialists even know what has happened, they rush to the media saying, 'There's no danger to the public.' They do this before they themselves know what has happened because they are terrified that the public might react violently, either by panic or by revolt."

August 10, 2004
Michael Albert once said in a debate with George Monbiot, "It seems to me that movements will only grow sufficiently large and committed to win truly major victories if they are both political and economic.”

August 9, 2004
Albert Camus
“Thinking is learning all over again to see, to be attentive, to focus consciousness; it is turning every idea and every image, in the manner of Proust, into a privileged moment.”

August 6, 2004
Ralph Ellison said “Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.”

August 5, 2004
“In the new era, Apartheid as formal policy is antiquated and unnecessary. International instruments of trade and finance oversee a complex system of multilateral trade laws and financial agreements that keep the poor in their Bantustans anyway. Its whole purpose is to institutionalise inequity”.

Arundhati Roy, Do turkeys enjoy thanksgiving?, The Hindu, January 18, 2004

July 30, 2004
Brigadier-General Smedley Butler said: “Why don't those damn oil companies fly their own flags on their personal property-maybe a flag with a gas pump on it”.

July 29, 2004
Aristotle said: “If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost”.

July 22, 2004
“It may be that illegal immigration will persist as long as the world remains divided into sovereign nation-states and as long as there remains an unequal distribution of wealth among them. Yet, this is not to say that no solutions exist short of open borders on the one hand, or a totalitarian police state on the other. We might consider, instead, strategies aimed at altering the push-and-pull dynamics of migration from the developing world to the United States. Trade and investment policies that strengthen the economies of sending nations would lessen pressures on emigration. Raising the numerical ceiling on legal migration, reestablishing a statute of limitations on deportation, enforcing wage and hour standards, and facilitating collective bargaining for workers in agriculture and low-wage industries would counter the reproduction of undocumented workers as an exploited underclass.” – Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America.

July 21, 2004
"I am a Muslim and . . . my religion makes me be against all forms of racism. It keeps me from judging any man by the color of his skin. It teaches me to judge him by his deeds and his conscious behavior. And it teaches me to be for the rights of all human beings, but especially the Afro-American human being, because my religion is a natural religion, and the first law of nature is self-preservation." ~ Malcolm X (1925-1965)

July 20, 2004
James Petras once said "There are absolute limits in the capacity of cultural imperialism to distract and mystify people beyond which popular rejection sets in. The TV "table of plenty" contrasts with the experience of the empty kitchen; the amorous escapades of media personalities crash against a houseful of crawling, crying hungry children. In the street confrontations, Coca Cola becomes a molotov cocktail. The promise of affluence becomes an affront to those who are perpetually denied. Prolonged impoverishment and widespread decay erode the glamour and appeal of the fantasies of the mass media".

July 19, 2004
Gustavo Gutierrez once said "But the poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. His or her existence is not politically neutral, and it is not ethically innocent. The poor are a by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible. They are marginalized by our social and cultural world. They are the oppressed, exploited proletariat, robbed of the fruit of their labor and despoiled of their humanity. Hence the poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order".

July 16, 2004
Subcomandante Marcos once said, "Only for the powerful is history an upward line, where their today is always the pinnacle. For those below, history is a question which can only be answered by looking backwards and forwards, thus creating new questions".

July 15, 2004
"Haitians, the refined duplicity that the Europeans have tried so long to divide, you are today one family. Keep between you this precious agreement, it is the assurance of your happiness, and your triumph. It is the secret to be invincible..." -- Jean-Jacques Dessalines, one of the main figures in the Haitian Revolution said in 1803

July 14, 2004
"What was utopian has become realism... The only choice left to us is between that perverse dependence in which terrorists determine our lives and that creative dependence in which we strive for more democracy."

Source: Interview with Benjamin Barber "Be Rational, Think Utopian!", available in English translation on www.portland.indymedia.org.

July 13, 2004
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said "We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe".

July 12, 2004
From the Book of Questions:

"Tell me, is the rose naked
or is that her only dress?

Why do trees conceal
the splendor of their roots?

Who hears the regrets
of the thieving automobile?

Is there anything in the world sadder
than a train standing in the rain?"

Pablo Neruda

July 9, 2004
Many people, many countries, including many powerful countries, have called upon us to condemn the suppression of human rights in Cuba. We have reminded them they have a short memory. For when we battled against apartheid, against racial oppression, the same countries were supporting the apartheid regime-- And we fought successfully against that regime with the support of Cuba and other progressive countries. - South Africa president Nelson Mandela in 1995.

July 8, 2004
John Pilger, documentary maker once said, "Blaming the public for its "lack of interest in politics" is the self-deluding excuse of media executives who claim an insight into the popular mood, yet are contemptuous of it. In truth, the public has never been more interested in real politics, which it does not associate with the deceptions and gossip of an elective oligarchy". Source: The New Protest Movement, 11/2/02.

July 6, 2004
Arundhati Roy once said "In the midst of putative peace, a writer can, like I did, be unfortunate enough to stumble on a silent war. The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out".

July 5, 2004
I’d like to end the show with Sonali’s Subversive Thought for the Day, which is a quote by Dennis Banks on the 25th anniversary of Wounded Knee where he said: "We were the prophets, the messengers, the fire starters--. We created a new culture, wiping out old stereotypes. Out of AIM came a new breed of writers, poets, artists, actors and film makers. We no longer need whites to "interpret" our culture-- We have not achieved all that we wanted. W only have made a dent in solving our many problems. We leave much to do for the new generations coming up. But we are Medewin people, the Corn Maiden people, the Sun Dance people. As the FBI and the marshals at Wounded Knee found out, we are still a strong people".

July 2, 2004
Henry Steele Commager once said "Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive".

July 1, 2004
"If we are the most hated nation on the planet (and we are) we must blame the Democrats and the Republicans for seriously endangering our safety here at home and overseas. Kerry and the Democrats madethe monster George Bush! If not, how else could Bush destroy our lives while the Democrats stand and applaud as Bush delivers lie after lie after lie--The disenfranchised millions have given up voting long ago", by Donna Warren, from "I’m Sorry, My Shero is Wrong".

June 30, 2004
Leo Tolstoy once said, "We kill the criminal that society may be rid of him, and we never know whether the criminal of to-day would not have been a changed man to-morrow, and whether our punishment of him is not useless cruelty. We shut up the dangerous--as we think--member of society, but the next day this man might cease to be dangerous and his imprisonment might be for nothing".

June 29, 2004
Meg Greenfield once said "Everybody's for democracy in principle. It's only in practice that the thing gives rise to stiff objections".

June 28, 2004
"It's not exactly Rodney King," said Los Angeles resident Marva Dobbs [about the Stanley Miller beating], "It's like an old wound. If there's a wound there, and something else comes along remotely like it, you relive that history again." -- LA Times, "Police Beating Touches Old Wounds", June 28th 2004.

June 24, 2004
"You can’t separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom." -- "Prospects for Freedom in 1965," speech, Jan. 7 1965, New York City (published in Malcolm X Speaks, ch. 12, 1965).

June 23, 2004
From Stan Goff’s article in Counterpunch magazine, entitled "Bring 'Em On?" about President Bush: "This de facto president is finally seeing his poll numbers fall. Even chauvinist paranoia has a half-life, it seems. His legitimacy is being eroded as even the mainstream press has discovered now that the pretext for the war was a lie. It may have been control over the oil, after all. Anti-war forces are regrouping as an anti-occupation movement. Now, exercising his one true talent--blundering--George W. Bush has begun the improbable process of alienating the very troops upon whom he depends to carry out the neo-con ambition of restructuring the world by arms. Somewhere in Balad, or Fallujah, or Baghdad, there is a soldier telling a new replacement, "We are losing this war.""

June 21, 2004
Josef Stalin said "The people who vote decide nothing. The people who count the vote decide everything".

June 18, 2004
Quotes from GW Bush:
Misunderestimate: To seriously underestimate. Usage: "They misunderestimated me." (Bentonville, Ark., Nov. 6, 2000)
• Embetter: To make better. Usage: "I want to thank the -- people who made the firm and solemn commitment to work hard to embetter themselves." (Washington, D.C., April 18, 2002)
• Resignate: To resonate. Usage: "This issue doesn't seem to resignate with the people." (Portland, Ore., Oct. 31, 2000)
• Foreign-handed: To understand foreign policy. Bush usage: "I will have a foreign-handed foreign policy." (Redwood, Calif., Sept. 27, 2000)
• Analyzation: Analysis. Bush usage: "This case has had full analyzation and has been looked at a lot. I understand the emotionality of death penalty cases." (June 23, 2000)

June 17, 2004
From Confronting Empire, an essay from the new book, "Confronting Capitalism: Dispatches from a Global Movement": "If we look at this conflict [in Iraq] as a straightforward eyeball to eyeball confrontation between "Empire" and those of us who are resisting it, it might seem that we are losing. But there is another way of looking at it. We, all of us gathered here, have, each in our own way, laid siege to "empire". We may not have stopped it in its track -- yet -- but we have stripped it down. We have made it dropped its mask. We have forced it into the open. It now stands before us on the world’s stage in all it’s brutish, iniquitous nakedness-- Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing".

June 16, 2004
From "We Want Freedom" by Mumia Abu Jamal: "For decades, neither scholars nor historians bothered to address the existence of the bPP. If the BPP was a member of the family of black struggle and resistance, it was an unwelcome member -- sort of like a step child. The accolades and bouquets of late 20th century black struggle were awarded to veterans of the civilly rights struggle or advocates of the non-violent teachings of the martyred Rev. Martin Luther King. Jr. Elevated by white and black elites to the heights of social acceptance, Dr. King’s message of Christian forbearance and his "turn the other cheek" doctrine were calming to the white psyche , to Americans bred for comfort -- Dr. King was above all --safe. The BPP was the anti-thesis of Dr. King. The party was not a civil rights group -- it did not believe in turning the other cheek. It was markedly secular. It did not preach nonviolence but practiced the human right of self defense. It was socialist in orientation and advocated the establishment, after a national vote, of a separate revolutionary socialist black nation state. The BPP made white Americans feels many things but safe wasn’t one of them. For late 20th century scholars and historians trained to study safe history, the BPOP represented a kind of anomaly rather than a historical descendant of a long impressive line of black resistance fighters. In fact the history of Africans in the Americas was one of arch resistance, of various attempts at independent black governance, of armed resistance and indeed of pitched battles for freedom from the unrelenting nightmare of American white supremacist democracy. For generations blacks have dreamed of a social reality that can only be termed national independence, or black nationalism. They gave their energies and their strengths to find a place where life could be lived in freedom".

June 15, 2004
An excerpt from Exception to the Rulers, by Amy Goodman and David Goodman:

"People around the world see the United States in two ways:

The sword -- The United States provides so many of the weapons that repressive regimes use to kill their own people. In East Timor, as in Guatemala, Nigeria, El Salvador, Iran, Iraq, and Chile to name a few -- immoral policies of successive U.S. administrations have tragically placed this nation on the wrong side of justice.

-- and the shield. They know we have the power to stop attacks instead of mounting them, and to fight injustice, brutality, and tyranny. On that day of the Santa Cruz massacre in East Timor, they saw the shield bloodied.

Today, millions of people around the world tremble at the might of the greatest superpower on earth. But the true power of this country does not lie in its military, government, or corporations. It lies with individual people struggling every day to better their communities. We must build a trickle-up media that reflects the true character of this country and its people. A democratic media serving a democratic society. We have to make a decision every day: whether to represent the sword or the shield"

June 14, 2004
Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton
"These [mainstream] media not only continue to affirm the status quo but, in the same measure, they fail to raise essential questions about the structure of society. Hence by leading toward conformism and by providing little basis for a critical appraisal of society, the commercially sponsored mass media indirectly but effectively restrain the cogent development of a genuinely critical outlook".

June 11, 2004
"Facts are stupid things." Said Ronald Reagan --at the 1988 Republican National Convention, when attempting to quote John Adams, who said, "Facts are stubborn things."

June 10, 2004
"You're not going to like this. You shouldn't speak ill of the dead. But in this case, someone's got to. Ronald Reagan was a conman. Reagan was a coward. Reagan was a killer" -- Greg Palast, Baltimore Chronicle, June 6th 2004, Editorial entitled "KILLER, COWARD, CON-MAN, GOOD RIDDANCE, GIPPER!"

June 9, 2004
"The Real Green Revolution is about rainwater harvesting.Let us catch water where it falls. Let it transform human lives. Let it change social existence. If this happens, the world will be transformed. The world will merely be an agglomeration of ecological-rainwater harvesting-democracies." - Anil Agarwal, Founder-Director, Centre for Science and Environment

June 7, 2004
The US has quietly contradicted its publicly stated policy with respect to Taliban and released from custody the former Taliban foreign minister as part of a strategy to recruit elements of the former regime into the U.S.- backed government of President Karzai. But in November 2001, Bush said "We fight the terrorists and we fight all of those who give them aid. America has a message for the nations of the world: If you harbor terrorists, you are terrorists. If you train or arm a terrorist, you are a terrorist. If you feed a terrorist or fund a terrorist, you are a terrorist, and you will be held accountable by the United States and our friends". By that logic, what kind of country does that make the US?

June 1, 2004
"...rape is the perfected act of male sexuality in a patriarchal culture-- it is the ultimate metaphor for domination, violence, subjugation, and possession". -- Robin Morgan, feminist writer.

May 27, 2004
"Most people on the left are simply choosing sides [in the conflict in the Middle East] and -- where one side is under occupation and the other has the U.S. military behind it the choice seems clear. But it is possible to criticize Israel while forcefully condemning the rise of anti-Semitism. And it is equally possible to be pro-Palestinian independence without adopting a simplistic "pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel" dichotomy, a mirror image of the good-versus-evil equations so beloved by President George W. Bush". Naomi Klein, "Old Hates Fueled by Fear", April 24 2002.
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May 26, 2004
Mark Twain once said "He who can read but does not read good books has no advantage over the ones who can't read".

May 25, 2004
George Orwell once said "The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them".

May 24, 2004
Mo Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher was thought to have said the following:
"The task of the human-hearted man is to procure benefits for the world and to eliminate its calamities. Now among all the current calamities of the world, which are the greatest? I say that attacks on small states by large ones, disturbances of small houses by large ones, oppression of the weak by the strong, misuse of the few by the many, deception of the simple by the cunning, and disdain toward the humble by the honored: these are the misfortunes of the world."

May 21, 2004
18th Century French Journalist, Nicolas Chamfort once said, "Tyrants hate history, while they are living, but they allow the crimes of their predecessors to be transmitted to posterity, in order to draw attention from the horror they inspire themselves".

May 17, 2004
John Clarke once said, "Democracy can and must be about more than voting every four years on which gang of pirates you want to be robbed by. It must mean the mass of people actually running things and, especially, taking control of the production of society's wealth....While we may have to defend our crust of bread today, we're working for the moment when we take over the bakery".

May 14, 2004
A quote about racism: In a recent interview with a South African magazine, Noam Chomsky said: "Anti-Arab racism in the U.S. is endemic. It is extreme. In fact, in a sense it is the only legitimate kind of racism. Harvard professors can write articles with openly racist condemnations of Arabs which are not noticed. I've sometimes given talks there in which I take those statements and put in "Jew" instead of "Arab," and people say, "My God, this is horrible. How can anyone say this?" You tell them it's just Arab, not Jew, and they relax".

May 13, 2004
"To criticize pornography is not repressive. To speak about what one knows and feels and dreams is, in fact, liberating. We are not free if we aren’t free to talk about our desire for an egalitarian intimacy and sexuality that would reject pain and humiliation" -- Robert Jensen from "A cruel edge: The painful truth about today's pornography -- and what men can do about it".

May 12, 2004
"What would the United States of America look like if the early North American Indians had an Immigration Bureau?" -- Anonymous.

May 11, 2004
"The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones."
-- John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946),

May 10, 2004
"The vilest deeds like poison weed, bloom well in prison air", Oscar Wilde.

May 5, 2004
Robert Frost once said, "Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't and the other half who have nothing to say keep saying it."

May 4, 2004
Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, "Remember, remember always, that all of us... are descended from immigrants and revolutionists".

May 3, 2004
From the USA Today editorial written by Bill Gallegos and Bernardo Rosa: "Cinco de Mayo celebrates a battle in which an army of Mexican peasants defeated the highly trained invading French forces on May 5, 1862, in Puebla, Mexico-- It is the story of the successful underdog and a way to honor a nation's heritage and culture. It is not, despite the best effort of the alcohol industry, a reason to get drunk".


April 30, 2004
For today’s thought, we’ll just hear some statistics: Since September 2000 Palestinian armed groups have killed more than 700 Israelis, including some 90 children. The victims were all killed in deliberate attacks, including suicide bombings. In the same period, some 2000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli Defense Forces, who routinely use F16 fighter jets, helicopter gunships and tanks to bomb and shell densely populated Palestinian residential areas. The victims include some 350 children.

April 29, 2004
Mahmood Mamdani’s last paragraph in "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim": "The lesson of Vietnam was that the battle against nationalism could not be won as a military confrontation: America would need to recognize the legitimacy of nationalism in the era of imperialism and learn to live with it. Just as America learned to distinguish between nationalism and communism in Vietnam, so it will need to learn the difference between nationalism and terrorism in the post 9-11 world. To win the fight against terrorism requires accepting that the world has changed, that the old colonialism is no more and will not return, and that to occupy foreign places will be expensive, in lives and money. America cannot occupy the world. It has to learn to live in it".

April 28, 2004
Paul Blumberg once said "There is hardly a study in the entire literature which fails to demonstrate that satisfaction in work is enhanced or that other generally acknowledged beneficial consequences accrue from a genuine increase in workers' decision-making power. Such consistency of findings, I admit is rare in social research".

April 27, 2004
Eduardo Galeano in his 1973 book, "Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent" said: "Robert McNamara, the World Bank President who was chairman of Ford and then secretary of defense, has called the population explosion the greatest obstacle to progress in Latin America; the World Bank, he says, will give priority in its loans to countries that implement birth control plans. McNamara notes with regret that the brains of the poor do 25 percent less thinking, and the World Bank technocrats (who have already been born) set computers humming to produce labyrinthine abracadabras on the advantages of not being born".

April 26, 2004
In an interview with Z Net, acclaimed native American activist and scholar, Ward Churchill said: "I hear Republicans and Libertarians and so forth talking about property rights, but they stop talking about property rights as soon as the subject of American Indians comes up, because they know fully well, perhaps not in a fully articulated, conscious form, but they know fully well that the basis for the very system of endeavor and enterprise and profitability to which they are committed and devoted accrues on the basis of theft of the resources of someone else. They are in possession of stolen property. They know it. They all know it. It's a dishonest endeavor from day one".

April 23, 2004
Theodore Roosevelt said on May 11th, 1918 in a letter to Cleveland Hoadley Dodge:
". . . the Armenian massacre was the greatest crime of the war, and the failure to act against Turkey is to condone it . . . the failure to deal radically with the Turkish horror means that all talk of guaranteeing the future peace of the world is mischievous nonsense".

April 22, 2004
you can’t rely on the politicians. You have to take action for yourself and from below". -- James Petras.

April 21, 2004
Byron R. White, Deputy Attorney General of the United States, once said, "[Rape] is highly reprehensible, both in a moral sense and in its almost total contempt for the personal integrity and autonomy of the female victim and for the latter's privilege of choosing those with whom intimate relations are to be established".

April 20, 2004
Steven Weinberg, the Nobel prize winning physicist once said, "The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy".

April 19, 2004
Mumia Abu Jamal is a political prisoner and radio commentator whose commentaries can be heard online at www.prisonradio.com. He turns 50 this weekend. Today’s commentary is about the "Illections" in the US.

April 17, 2004
Mumia Abu Jamal is a political prisoner and radio commentator whose commentaries can be heard online at www.prisonradio.com. He turns 50 this weekend. Today’s commentary is about the "Illections" in the US.

April 16, 2004
Commentary by Mumia Abu Jamal on the topic of occupation. Visit www.prisonradio.org for more information.

April 15, 2004
A poem by Sahir Ludhiyanwi, translated from Urdu by Kamla Bhasin: "

If we fail to speak up today
Deadly Silence we will earn

Every home will be on fire
Every dwelling we will see burn

From beyond the silence then
A cry of anguish will return

There’s no one here
No one at all

No one.

April 12, 2004
Edward S. Herman once said, "The beauty of the democratic systems of thought control, as contrasted with their clumsy totalitarian counterparts, is that they operate by subtly establishing on a voluntary basis--aided by the force of nationalism and media control by substantial interests--presuppositions that set the limits of debate, rather than by imposing beliefs with a bludgeon. --Those who do not accept the fundamental principles of state propaganda are simply excluded from the debate".

April 9, 2004
In an interview with Merlin Chowkwanyun, Sherman Austin gave this advice: "Don't be intimidated. Don't let them scare you into not getting politically active. There're more of us than there are of them. They can't come after every single one of us. If we all stand up, and we all take the initiative to take an active role in challenging the system, they won't be able to do anything about it. They don't have the capacity to lock us all up".

April 7, 2004
From "We seek War and Must Change", by Lawrence Velvel: "We believe that we fight only in good causes. We believe we at all times fight only to do God’s work, and that we therefore have to fight or democracy, freedom, and economic affluence will be lost. Since those who put us in war, and those who support them, always think, say and propagandize that we are doing something necessary, something good, for democracy, freedom and human affluence, we do not fight because we are a war loving or a militaristically inclined people. We fight so that humanity will make progress. Or so we believe".

April 6, 2004
S. Brian Willson once said, "If we are to survive the next millenium with dignity (or at all) in a world already comprised of 210 nations and 6 billion people, the U.S. must learn to abide by an ecological politics of justice for all species, for all peoples".

April 5, 2004
Plato said "One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors".

April 2, 2004
Artist Djuna Barnes once said, "A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same.

April 1, 2004
Peter Kropotkin said, "Without equity there is no justice, and without justice there is no morality."

March 31, 2004

Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, "Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason".

March 30, 2004
Justice Robert Jackson, Chief Prosecutor for the United States at the Nuremberg Trials, once said, "[F]reedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order. If there is any fixed star in our constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion".

March 29, 2004
Otto von Bismarck once said, "People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election".

March 26, 2004
The parallel religious fundamentalisms we see across the globe are a dangerous trend. Our own fundamentalist leaders speak of mandates from God: "God told me to strike at Al Qaida and I struck them, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did." -- US President George Bush to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on June 4th, 2003.

March 25, 2004
Arundhati Roy once said, "It's odd how those who dismiss the peace movement as utopian, don't hesitate to proffer the most absurdly dreamy reasons for going to war: to stamp out terrorism, install democracy, eliminate fascism, and most entertainingly, to ‘rid the world of evil-doers’".

March 22, 2004
Pacifica stations covered the nation-wide marches against the occupation of Iraq. In addition to the tens of thousands who marched in LA, our sister stations were in San Francisco, New York, DC and Houston. Whether it is the coup in Haiti or the Global antiwar movement, Pacifica’s coverage is the antidote to the corporate media coverage. In 1953 John Swinton ,a New York Times journalist, toasted his profession at the New York Press Club with the following words:

"If I allowed honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before 24 hours my occupation would be gone. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes".

March 17, 2004
C.P. Fitzgerald
The mental trick of picturing the victim of an attack in the role of the cruel and dangerous assailant is an established mechanism for diminishing a sense of guilt.

March 16, 2004
W.E.B. DuBois, said in 1949, "Drunk with power, we (the U.S.) are leading the world to hell in a new colonialism with the same old human slavery, which once ruined us, to a third world war, which will ruin the world."

March 15, 2004
Today’s Subversive thought is about media democracy in action. I want to give a very brief report from Pacifica National Board Meeting (PNB): I spent the weekend in Berkeley, California, home of our sister station, KPFA, for the first ever meeting of the newly elected PNB. I am serving as staff director on the board and want to share a brief report with listeners. More than 20 directors from the five stations sat on the same table as the out going chair, Leslie Cagan bid us farewell. We elected two affiliate directors, Marty Durlin from KGNU in Colorado, and Vicki Santa from WMNF, Florida. Marty Durlin was elected the new chair of the PNB. The board got reports on Pacifica’s financial health, the Pacifica Radio Archives, as well as 4 of the 5 General Managers. Various committees of the board were also chosen and there were several periods of public comment. By next week the Pacifica National Board email alias will be set up so that you the listener, can communicate directly with all the directors -- the address will be pnb@pacifica.org.

March 11, 2004
Danielle Wolfe once said, "I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war, that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality".

March 10, 2004
An excerpt from a poem by Meena, founder of RAWA, called "I Will Never Return":

Oh compatriot, Oh brother, no longer regard me as weak and incapable
With all my strength I’m with you on the path of my land’s liberation.
My voice has mingled with thousands of arisen women
My fists are clenched with the fists of thousands compatriots
Along with you I’ve stepped up to the path of my nation,
To break all these sufferings all these fetters of slavery,
Oh compatriot, Oh brother, I’m not what I was
I’m the woman who has awoken
I’ve found my path and will never return.

March 9, 2004
Gary Lyle is a member of the UFCW Local 555, in the Bay area, who came down to LA and picketed with his fellow workers. He passed out a hand written note of solidarity, which said, "Critics in our country talk about how our society has gone downhill. People only care about themselves. I have observed that it is just plain untrue. I say that our country has a lot of heros. You only have to look at your left and right at the person carrying the picket sign. The men, women and young people who are on strike are the heroes. You have shown what family values are all about. You have, and you continue, to fight for your families and your children’s future. You must stay strong. You have bent but you have not broken. You have sacrificed and you continue to fight. By walking the picket line with you, you have taught the true meaning of what words like courage, honor, and integrity mean. It has been an honor to get to know you. In solidarity, Gary L Lyle, UFCW Local 555."

March 8, 2004
Lya Sorano, a woman entrepreneur once said, "When we talk about equal pay for equal work, women in the workplace are beginning to catch up. If we keep going at this current rate, we will achieve full equality in about 475 years. I don't know about you, but I can't wait that long."

March 5, 2004
Bertrand Russell once said, "Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own."

March 4, 2004
From the last chapter of "Who Wrote the New Testament? The Making of the Christian Myth" by Burton L. Mack: "My own fantasy is to enter a hall and find high ceilings, lovely chandeliers, walls lined with bookshelves, wines in the alcove, hors d’oeuvres by the windows, and a wide table down the middle of the room with the Bible sitting on it. And there we are, all of us, walking around, sitting at the table, and talking about what we should do with that book. Some rules are in order. Everyone has been invited. Christians have not been excluded, but they are not the ones in charge. All if us are there, and all of our knowledge and expertise is also on the table. There are historians of religion, cultural anthropologists, and political scientists, but also politicians, CEOs, and those who work in foreign affairs. The ethnic communities of Los Angeles County are well represented, as are women, the disenfranchised, the disabled, and all the voiceless who have recently come to speech. Merchants are there, and workers, and the airline pilots. Everyone is present and everyone gets to talk and ask questions. No one has a corner on what the Bible says. We blow our whistles if anyone starts to pout or preach. What we are trying to figure out is why we thought the Bible so important, whether it is so important, how it has influenced our culture, what we think of the story, whether we should laugh or cry at "the ending", how it fits or does not fit our current situation, and whether the story should be revised in keeping with our vision of a just, sustainable, festive, and multicultural world. Wouldn’t that be something?"

March 3, 2004
Eugene Debs once said, "...years ago I recognised my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free..."

March 2, 2004
The electoral system of democracy allows the electorate to pick between options presented to us by those already in power. Real democracy is about participating in drafting the options. Still, a vote un-used, is a vote wasted. If I could vote, I would. To find your polling place, visit http://ss.ca.gov -- click on "elections", and click on "find polling place".

March 1, 2004
Bertolt Brecht once said, "Those who take the most from the table, teach contentment. Those for whom the taxes are destined, demand sacrifice. Those who eat their fill, speak to the hungry, of wonderful times to come. Those who lead the country into the abyss, call ruling difficult, for ordinary folk"

February 27, 2004
Help KPFK raise money and help us make our goal of $10,000 this hour!!! NOTE: Uprising raised $9,100 on Friday the 27th. We thank ALL our listeners for their continued support. Love, respect and solidarity, "The Uprising Crew".

February 25, 2004
We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and for justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.
--Martin Luther King, Jr., "CONSCIENCE AND THE VIETNAM WAR" in The Trumpet of Conscience

February 24, 2004
Political Scientist C. Douglas Lummis said in his book, "Radical Democracy": "Democracy is not the name of any particular arrangement of political or economic institutions. Rather, it is a situation that political or economic institutions may or may not help to bring about. It describes an ideal, not a method for achieving it. It is not a kind of government, but an end of government; not a historically existing institution, but a historical project."

February 23, 2004
Noam Chomsky said in "Hegemony and Survival", "Destroying hope is a critically important project. And when it is achieved, formal democracy is allowed -- even preferred, if only for public-relations purposes. In more honest circles, much of this is conceded. Of course, it is understood much more profoundly by the beasts in men’s shapes who endure the consequences of challenging the imperatives of stability and order.

February 20, 2004
These are all matters that the second superpower, world public opinion, should make every effort to understand if it hopes to escape the containment to which it is subjected and to take seriously the ideals of justice and freedom that come easily to the lips but are harder to defend and advance."

February 19, 2004
Hannah Arendt from The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) said "Although tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people."

February 18, 2004
John C Bonifaz, author of "Warrior King" says: "A king may lie and, using that lie, a king, on how own, has the power to send his kingdom into war. A president may also lie, but a president alone cannot use that lie to start a war."

February 17, 2004
Arundhati Roy said at the World Social Forum, "If there is anything worse than a fascist dictator, it is a fascist democrat grown fat on the approbations of his people".

February 13, 2004
Ernesto "Che" Guevara once said: "Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love.-- Above all, always be capable of feeling any injustice committed against anyone anywhere in the world"

February 12, 2004
Carol C. Gould from her book, "Rethinking Democracy":

"When the concepts of freedom and equality are properly understood, what follows from them is the requirement for the extension of democracy beyond the political sphere to social and economic life--individual freedom is to be understood not only as a capacity for free choice but also as an activity of self-development--the equality of individuals extends to equal rights to the conditions (social and material) for their self-development (that is, what I will call equal positive freedom)--Thus, the values of individual freedom and equality and social cooperation turn out not only to be compatible but also to require each other for their realization.

February 11, 2004
Katherine Graham is the owner and former publisher of The Washington Post. She once said, "We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows."

February 10, 2004
From Kevin Cooper’s essay entitled "My Struggle": "I who am numbered C-65304 and caged in 3-EB-82 find myself struggling for something while being held in one of America's most cherished, most prized, and most financially secure institutions. It's the prison industrial complex, the death row section. What I am struggling for at this point and time in my life is more than just my innocence, more than just my freedom, more than just my life. I am struggling for the truth."

February 9, 2004
Today we’re going to re-air the commentary by another death row inmate, Mumia Abu Jamal, political prisoner and award winning journalist about the case of Kevin Cooper. The commentary can be heard online at http://www.prisonradio.org/maj/maj_1_9_04kcooper.html.

February 6, 2004
From a new book by Francis Adams and Barry Sanders called "Alienable Rights: The Exclusion of African Americans in a White Man’s Land, 1619-2000":

"As the new century begins, it is clear that most Americans no longer view civil rights and the struggle for black equality as pressing issues. Though neither the Civil War nor two attempts at national reconstruction succeeded in establishing a just society, where the two races could live as one, many on both sides of the color line now seem resigned to an uneasy peace -- at least for the time being. For whites this resignation often finds expression in the assertion that prejudice has been overcome and that white people are not responsible for the problems of blacks."

February 5, 2004
Jello Biafra from "I Blow Minds for a Living" spoken word CD:
"How many out there think this country is a Democracy? Or is it more of a one party state masquerading as a two party state? The Democrats are on the inside what the Republicans are on the outside. Each having almost identical financial backers. . . Did you vote for the Pentagon? (NO!) Did you vote for Wall Street? (NO!) Did you vote for a nuclear arms race? (NO!) Did you vote for the CIA? (NO!) Ever try reading the Bill of rights to a cop? (No, LOL.) People didn't vote for star wars, people didn't vote for drug wars, no one voted for acid rain, no one voted for being homeless. Hardly anyone in this country votes at all anymore. Meanwhile people in places like China and South Africa are out there dying just for the right to vote. But in America, people take it for granted and they just pout and stay home, figuring their wishes aren't respected anyway."

February 4, 2004
The singer/song writer Phil Ochs said in an interview in 1969, "Leave the old and dying America and use your creative energies to help form a new America, which would be demilitarized, more humanistic, where the police are less hostile and closer to the community, where the wealthy are not given unleashed power for the exploitation of the people, and mostly because it's now a matter of life and death, reassert an ecological balance with the environment, which means the people in the oil companies and the car companies and the space industry will have to be brought into account, so there will be a new definition of government which has to be closer to the people and less close to special interests which are far more harmful that any revolutionaries."

Albert Einstein once said "Spirituality without science is blind; science without spirituality is lame."

February 3, 2004
My subversive thought for the day is to pick up the phone and call Governor Schwarzenegger at 916-445-2841, and email him at governor@governor.ca.gov and ask him to grant an unconditional pardon to Rosario Munoz and to stay the execution of death row inmate, Kevin Cooper.

February 2, 2004
Quote from Richard Manning’s book, "Against the Grain": "Food is about a great deal more than nutrition. It -- forms the pathway that connects our species to the future. Evolution hinges on survival, which in turn hinges on nutrition, and reproduction. We have other needs, oxygen for instance, but these are automatically met. We must hunt for food-- Somewhere along the line we became so focused and so competent in this hunt that we rigged the outcome. To hunt is to be insecure about the immediate future, to experience the nagging fear of want that has driven us to our worst excesses and finest creations. Agriculture rigged this game by allowing storage and wealth, ensuring future food -- Agriculture dehumanized us by satisfying the most dangerous of human impulses -- the drive to ensure the security of the future. In this way we were tamed.

January 12, 2004
The last lines of American Dynasty with Kevin Phillips says: "Since the events and upheavals of 2000-2001, the United States has had an abundance of unfolding transformations to discuss -- in economics, national security, and even religion. Of these, many can be considered and managed separately. But one is pervasive enough to make its impact felt almost everywhere: the extent to which national governance has, at least temporarily, moved away from the proven tradition of a leader chosen democratically, by a majority or plurality of the electorate, to the succession of a dynastic heir whose unfortunate inheritance is privileged, covert, and globally embroiling."

January 8, 2004
Nikita Kruschev once said "Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even when there is no river."

January 7, 2004
Malcolm X once said: "As the oppressor always points out to the oppressed, "the odds are against you."

January 6, 2004
Wendell Berry once said "There is clearly too narrow a limit on how much money can be made from health, but the profitability of disease--especially disease of spirit or character--has so far, for profiteers, no visible limit." For a vegetarian starter kit, please visit www.goveg.com

January 5, 2004
An editorial in a Texas newspaper in December 2003 said: "A great deal of time, money and classroom angst have been diverted to state and national education "reforms" based what has been called the "Texas Miracle". Texas education officials discovered earlier this year that the Houston system had cooked its books in various ways. Dropouts and under-performing students were omitted from statistics. The numbers of high school graduates going on to college were inflated. In Florida - where Gov. Jeb Bush and state education officials have been known to massage student achievement data in a way that puts the governor's education program in the best possible light - public school students, parents and teachers deserve to know that the disruptive changes they have been asked to make in the name of accountability are based on something more substantial than another state's empty claims."