Against Empire Quotes

“The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force.”
― Michael Parenti, Against Empire

“Official Washington cannot tell the American people that the real purpose of its gargantuan military expenditures and belligerent interventions is to make the world safe for General Motors, General Electric, General Dynamics, and all the other generals.”
― Michael Parenti, Against Empire

“The diseconomies of capitalism are treated as the public's responsibility. Corporate America skims the cream and leaves the bill for us to pay, then boasts about how productive and efficient it is and complains about our wasteful government.”
― Michael Parenti, Against Empire

“Designed to leave the world's economic destiny at the mercy of bankers and multinational corporations,
Globalization is a logical extension of imperialism, a victory of empire over republic, international finance capital over democracy.”
― Michael Parenti, Against Empire

“We are asked to believe that it always existed, that poor countries are poor because their lands have always been infertile or their people unproductive. In fact, the lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have long produced great treasures of foods, minerals, and other natural resources. That is why Europeans went through so much trouble to steal and plunder them. One does not go to poor places for self-enrichment. The Third World is rich. Only its people are poor—and it is because of the pillage they have endured.”
― Michael Parenti, Against Empire

“In sum, the myth of a self-reliant, free-market, trickle-down economy is just that, a myth. In almost every enterprise, government provides business with supports, protections, and opportunities for private gain at public expense.”
― Michael Parenti, Against Empire

“British imperialism did two things: first, it ended India’s development, then it forcibly underdeveloped that country.”
― Michael Parenti, Against Empire

“In fact, the lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have long produced great treasures of foods, minerals, and other natural resources. That is why Europeans went through so much trouble to steal and plunder them. One does not go to poor places for self-enrichment. The Third World is rich. Only its people are poor—and it is because of the pillage they have endured.”
― Michael Parenti, Against Empire

“We are asked to believe that it always existed, that poor countries are poor because their lands have always been infertile or their people unproductive.”
― Michael Parenti, Against Empire

“Such “multiple sourcing” enables GM to ride out strikes in one country by stepping up production in another, playing workers of various nations against one other in order to discourage wage and benefit demands and undermine labor union strategies.”
― Michael Parenti, Against Empire

“Because of low wages, low taxes, nonexistent work benefits, weak labor unions, and nonexistent occupational and environmental protections, U.S. corporate profit rates in the Third World are 50 percent greater than in developed countries.”
― Michael Parenti, Against Empire

“North American and European corporations have acquired control of more than three-fourths of the known mineral resources of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But the pursuit of natural resources is not the only reason for capitalist overseas expansion. There is the additional need to cut production costs and maximize profits by investing in countries with a plentiful supply of cheap labor.”
― Michael Parenti, Against Empire

“The expansionists destroy whole societies. Self-sufficient peoples are forcibly transformed into disfranchised wage workers. Indigenous communities and folk cultures are replaced by mass-market, mass-media, consumer societies. Cooperative lands are supplanted by agribusiness factory farms, villages by desolate shanty towns, autonomous regions by centralized autocracies.”
― Michael Parenti, Against Empire

“Capitalist imperialism differs from these earlier forms in the way it systematically accumulates capital through the organized exploitation of labor and the penetration of overseas markets. Capitalist imperialism invests in other countries, dominating their economies, cultures, and political life, and integrating their productive structures into an international system of capital accumulation.”
― Michael Parenti, Against Empire

“imperialism” I mean the process whereby the dominant politico-economic interests of one nation expropriate for their own enrichment the land, labor, raw materials, and markets of another people.”
― Michael Parenti, Against Empire

“By “imperialism” I mean the process whereby the dominant politico-economic interests of one nation expropriate for their own enrichment the land, labor, raw materials, and markets of another people.”
― Michael Parenti, Against Empire

“On the contrary, to lay down the sword and use our labor and national treasure for the peaceful reconstruction so desperately needed at home and abroad is not to become a weak nation but a truly great one.”
― Michael Parenti, Against Empire