A People’s History of the United States: 1492 – Present by Howard Zinn.

4/5 rating. 688 pages.

Book #9 of 2021. Read January 26, 2021.

History is written by the victors. This is almost always true. But lucky enough for us, Howard has cleared away the view from these “winners” of history and looked at history through a fresh perspective: that of the underclass, the poor, the oppressed.

America has been a country that in words has strived for equality, and “the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness”. Unfortunately, this promise has continually been broken since our inception. America has failed the vast majority of its people: as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note…”

But, while there are swaths of the public who believe it is antithetical and unpatriotic to look at our dark history, it is only by shining the light on these horrible acts of our past (and present) that we have a chance of righting wrongs. Howard, unlike any other author I have ever read, does that beautifully and completely.

This book charts the course of America from the first landing of Europeans up until 2000. It does not sugarcoat our history. You will see the illegal, unconstitutional, and horrendous acts perpetrated continually by our government and police. We may talk of peace and democracy, but we have been strident enemies of both throughout the world and at home. The important thing to remember is that we can only control our path forward. Understanding our past will hopefully open us up to a better future.

This book is certainly an undertaking, as it’s around 700 pages, but you HAVE to read this if you want to understand how we have arrived at 2021, and in order to see the way for a future where we finally meet the high ideals set forth by our forefathers.

Quotes:

“These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.”

“In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.”

“Indians were taken as slave labor…[t]hey were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred.”

“Endless testimonies…prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives…But our work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy; small wonder, then, if they tried to kill one of us now and then.” – Bartolomé de las Casas

“Total control led to total cruelty. The Spaniards ‘thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades.’ Las Casas tells how ‘two of these so-called Christians met two Indian boys one day, each carrying a parrot; they took the parrots and for fun beheaded the boys.’”

“When we read the history books given to children in the United States, it all starts with heroic adventure – there is no bloodshed – and Columbus Day is a celebration.”

“To state the facts, however, and then to bury them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it’s not that important – it should weigh very little in our final judgements; it should affect very little what we do in the world.”

“To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to deemphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity, but an ideological choice. It serves – unwittingly – to justify what was done.”

“The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks) – the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress – is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders.”

“The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don’t listen to it, you will never know what justice is.”

“Why will you take by force what you may have quietly by love?” – Chief Powhatan

“[A thirst for land and ‘great vanities] is one of the gods of New England, which the living and most high Eternal will destroy and famish.” – Roger Williams

“Was Morison right in burying the story of genocide inside a more important story of human progress? Perhaps a persuasive argument can be made…But how can the judgment be made if the benefits and losses cannot be balanced because the losses are either unmentioned or mentioned quickly?”

“Was [black] culture inferior – and so subject to easy destruction? Inferior in military capability, yes – vulnerable to whites with guns and ships. But in no other way – except that cultures that are different are often taken as inferior, especially when such a judgment is practical and profitable.”

“Slavery existed in the African states, and it was sometimes used by Europeans to justify their own slave trade. But, as Davidson points out, the ‘slaves’ of Africa were more like the serfs of Europe – in other words, like most of the population of Europe. It was a harsh servitude, but they had rights which slaves brought to America did not have, and they were ‘altogether different from the human cattle of the slave ships and the American plantations.”

“African slavery lacked two elements that made America slavery the most cruel form of slavery in history: the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture; the reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use of racial hatred, with that relentless clarity based on color, where white was master, black was slave.”

“To one observer a slave-deck was ‘so covered with blood and mucus that it resembled a slaughter house.’”

“By 1800, 10 to 15 million blacks had been transported as slaves to the Americas, representing perhaps one-third of those originally seized in Africa. It is roughly estimated that Africa lost 50 million human beings to death and slavery in those centuries we call the beginning of modern Western civilization, at the hands of slave traders and plantation owners in Western Europe and America, the countries deemed the most advanced in the world.”

“Black and white worked together, fraternized together. The very fact that laws had to be passed after a while to forbid such relations indicates the strength of that tendency.”

“One fact disturbed: whites would run off to join Indian tribes, or would be captured in battle and brought up among the Indians, and when this happened the whites, given a chance to leave, chose to stay in the Indian culture. Indians, having the choice, almost never decided to join the whites.”

“No people go down until their women are weak and dishonored…” – Sioux puberty ceremony

“If you look through high school textbooks and elementary school textbooks in American history you will find [Andrew] Jackson the frontiersman, soldier, democrat, man of the people – not Jackson the slaveholder, land speculator, executioner of dissident soldiers, exterminator of Indians.”

“Under Jackson, and the man he chose to succeed him, Martin Van Buren, seventy thousand Indians east of the Mississippi were forced westward.”

“We have crowded the tribes upon a few miserable acres on our southern frontier; it is all that is left to them of their once boundless forest: and still, like the horse-leech, our insatiated cupidity cries, give! give!…Sir…Do the obligations of justice change with the color of the skin?” – Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen

“The promise was not kept. The Creek families were attacked by land-hungry white marauders – robbed, driven from their homes, women raped. Then the army, claiming it was for their safety, removed them from Creek country to a concentration camp on Mobile Bay. Hundreds died there from lack of food and from sickness.”

“It affords sincere pleasure to apprise the Congress of the entire removal of the Cherokee Nation of Indians to their new homes west of the Mississippi. The measures authorized by Congress at its last session have had the happiest effects.” – President Van Buren to Congress about the deaths and removal of thousands of Indians

“Violence leads to violence, and if this movement of ours does not lead to others and to bloodshed, I am much mistaken.” – Colonel Ethan Allen Hitchcock about on taking up a position in Mexican territory in 1845

“I have said from the first that the United States are the aggressors….We have not one particle of right to be here.” – Colonel Hitchcock

“What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.” – Frederick Douglass 1852 Independence Day address

“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reforms. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of struggle….If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” – Frederick Douglass

“Two hundred thousand blacks were in the [Union] army and navy, and 38,000 were killed. Historian James McPherson says: ‘Without their help, the North could not have won the war as soon as it did, and perhaps it could not have won at all.”

“In early 1865, General William T. Sherman held a conference in Savannah, Georgia, with twenty Negro ministers and church officials, mostly former slaves, at which one of them expressed their need: ‘The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and till it by our labor….’ Four days later Sherman issued ‘Special Field Order No. 15,’ designating the entire southern coastline 30 miles inland for exclusive Negro settlement. Freedmen could settle there, taking no more than 40 acres per family. By June 1865, forty thousand freedmen had moved onto new farms in this area. But President Andrew Johnson, in August of 1865, restored this land to the Confederate owners, and the freedmen were forced off, some at bayonet point.” 

“The great question, sir is this: Am I a man? If I am such, I claim the rights of a man….

Why, sir, though we are not white, we have accomplished much. We have pioneered civilization here; we have built up your country; we have worked in your fields, and garnered your harvests, for two hundred and fifty years! And what do we ask of you in return? Do we ask you for compensation for the sweat our fathers bore for you – for the tears you have caused, and the hearts you have broken, and the lives you have curtailed, and the blood you have spilled? Do we ask retaliation? We ask it not. We are willing to let the dead past bury its dead; but we ask you now for our RIGHTS.” – Black Legislature member Henry MacNeal Turner, 1868

“For Kentucky alone, between 1867 and 1871, the National Archives lists 116 acts of violence.”

“The North, it must be recalled, did not have to undergo a revolution in its thinking to accept the subordination of the Negro. When the Civil War ended, nineteen of the twenty-four northern states did not allow blacks to vote. By 1900, all the southern states, in new constitutions and new statutes, had written into law the disenfranchisement and segregation of Negroes, and a New York Times editorial said: ‘Northern men…no longer denounce the suppression of the Negro vote….The necessity of it under the supreme law of self-preservation is candidly recognized.’”

“If we are not striving for equality, in heaven’s name for what are we living? I regard it as cowardly and dishonest for any of our colored men to tell white people or colored people that we are not struggling for equality.”

“What we must do is bring nonhuman animals within our sphere of moral concern and cease to treat their lives as expendable for whatever trivial purposes we may have.”

“In the schoolbooks, those years are filled with the controversy over slavery, but on the eve of the Civil War it was money and profit, not the movement against slavery, that was uppermost in the priorities of the men who ran the country.”

“We’re coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more/

We leave our homes and firesides with bleeding hearts and sore/

Since poverty has been our crime, we bow to thy decree;/

We are the poor and have no wealth to purchase liberty.” – 1863 “Song of the Conscripts” in New York

“The Horatio Alger stories of ‘rags to riches’ were true for a few men, but mostly a myth, and a useful myth for control.”

“And so it went, in industry after industry – shrewd, efficient businessmen building empires, choking out competition, maintaining high prices, keeping wages low, using government subsidies. These industries were the first beneficiaries of the ‘welfare state.’”

“Meanwhile, the government of the United States was behaving almost exactly as Karl Marx described a capitalist state: pretending neutrality to maintain order, but serving the interests of the rich.”

“In 1887, with a huge surplus in the treasury, [Grover] Cleveland vetoed a bill appropriating $100,000 to give relief to Texas farmers to help them buy seed grain during a drought. He said: ‘Federal aid in such cases…encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character.’ But that same year, Cleveland used his gold surplus to pay off wealthy bondholders at $28 above the $100 value of each bond – a gift of $45 million.”

“Supposedly, the Amendment had been passed to protect Negro rights, but of the Fourteenth Amendment cases brought before the Supreme Court between 1890 and 1910, nineteen dealt with the Negro, 288 dealt with corporations.”

“And so, the schools, the churches, the popular literature taught that to be rich was a sign of superiority, to be poor a sign of personal failure, and that the only way upward for a poor person was to climb into the ranks of the rich by extraordinary effort and extraordinary luck.”

“Let me say here clearly…ninety-eight out of one hundred of the rich men of America are honest. That is why they are rich. That is why they are trusted with money.” – Sermon by Russell Conwell

“I sympathize with the poor, but the number of poor who are to be sympathized with is very small. To sympathize with a man whom God has punished for his sins…is to do wrong…let us remember there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings…”

“You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars both.” – Tom Watson, Georgia Populist

“It is a terrible thing to think that the poor workers of this country should be sent to kill and wound the poor workers of Spain merely because a few leaders may incite them to do so.”

“It was a time of intense racism in the United States. In the years between 1889 and 1903, on the average, every week, two Negroes were lynched by mobs – hanged, burned, mutilated.”

“But when the smoke was over, the dead buried, and the cost of the war came back to the people in an increase in the price of commodities and rent – that is, when we sobered up from our patriotic spree – it suddenly dawned on us that the cause of the Spanish-American war was the price of sugar…that the lives, blood, and money of the American people were used to protect the interests of the American capitalists.” – Emma Goldman

“In the face of the facts that modern man lives more wretchedly than the cave-man, and that his producing power is a thousand times greater than that of the cave-man, no other conclusion is possible than that the capitalist class has mismanaged… criminally and selfishly mismanaged.” – ‘The Iron Heel’ by Jack London

“There were more fires. And accidents. And sickness. In the year 1904, 27,000 workers were killed on the job, in manufacturing, transport, and agriculture. In one year, 50,000 accidents took place in New York factories alone.”

“He told a great truth when he lied, for if he had searched the innermost recesses of my mind he could have found that thought, never expressed by me before, but which I express now, ‘To hell with your courts, I know what justice is,’ for I have sat in your court room day after day and have seen members of my class pass before this, the so-called bar of justice. I have seen you, Judge Sloane, and others of your kind, send them to prison because they dared to infringe upon the sacred rights of property. You have become blind and deaf to the rights of man to pursue life and happiness, and you have crushed those rights so that the sacred right of property shall be preserved.” – WWI member in court after his arrest

“Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize.” – Joe Hill

“There was an idea in the air, becoming clearer and stronger, an idea not just in theories of Karl Marx but in the dreams of writers and artists through the ages: that people might cooperatively use the treasures of the earth to make life better for everyone, not just a few.”

“Ten million were to die on the battlefield; 20 million were to die of hunger and disease related to the war. And no one since that day has been able to show that the war brought any gain for humanity that would be worth one human life.”

“In the municipal elections of 1917, against the tide of propaganda and patriotism, the Socialists made remarkable gains….In Chicago, the party vote went from 3.6 percent in 1915 to 34.7 percent in 1917.”

“But its double-talk concealed a singleness of purpose. The Espionage Act was used to imprison Americans who spoke or wrote against the war.”

“Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder….And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles….” – Eugene Debs

“Your honor, years ago I recognized 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; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” – Eugene Debs

“A few months later [the New York Times] quoted [Elihu Root, former secretary of war] again that ‘there are men walking about the streets of this city tonight who ought to be taken out at sunrise tomorrow and shot for treason.’”

“The New York Times in the summer of 1917 carried an editorial: ‘It is the duty of every good citizen to communicate to proper authorities any evidence of sedition that comes to his notice.’”

“But remember always, Dante, in the play of happiness, don’t you use all for yourself only….help the persecuted and the victim because they are your better friends….In this struggle of life you will find more and love and you will be loved.” – Nicola Sacco

“The New Deal had succeeded only in reducing unemployment from 13 million to 9 million. It was the war that put almost everyone to work, and the war did something else: patriotism, the push for unity of all classes against enemies overseas, made it harder to mobilize anger against the corporations.”

“It was not Hitler’s attacks on the Jews that brought the United States into World War II, any more than the enslavement of 4 million blacks brought Civil War in 1861.”

“In August 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill met off the coast of Newfoundland and released to the world the Atlantic Charter, setting forth noble goals for the postwar world, saying their countries ‘seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other,’ and that they respected ‘the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.’”

“Of every six men in federal prison [during WWII], one was there as a [conscientious objector].”

“The Smith Act also made it a crime to advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence, or to join any group that advocated this, or to publish anything with such ideas.”

“Based on a detailed investigation of the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certain prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” – report in 1944 by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey

“If only the Americans had not insisted on unconditional surrender – that is, if they were willing to accept one condition to the surrender, that the Emperor, a holy figure to the Japanese, remain in place – the Japanese would have agreed to stop the war.”

“Between the launching of [Truman’s] security program in March 1947 and December 1952, some 6.6 million persons were investigated. Not a single case of espionage was uncovered, though about 500 persons were dismissed in dubious cases of ‘questionable loyalty.’ All of this was conducted with secret evidence, secret and often paid informers, and neither judge nor jury.”

“From 1952 on, foreign aid was more and more obviously designed to build up military power in non-Communist countries. In the next ten years, of the $50 billion in aid granted by the United States to ninety countries, only $5 billion was for nonmilitary economic development.”

“But we stand in life at midnight, we are always on the threshold of a new dawn.” – MLK

“We are spending all of this money for death and destruction, and not nearly enough money for life and constructive development…when the guns of war become a national obsession, social needs inevitably suffer.” – MLK

“King now became a chief target of the FBI, which tapped his private phone conversations, sent him fake letters, threatened him, blackmailed him, and even suggested once in an anonymous letter that he commit suicide.”

“The CIA in Vietnam, in a program called ‘Operation Phoenix,’ secretly, without trial, executed at least twenty thousand civilians in South Vietnam who were suspected of being members of the Communist underground.”

“By the end of the Vietnam war, 7 million tons of bombs had been dropped on Vietnam, more than twice the total bombs dropped on Europe and Asia in World War II – almost one 500-pound bomb for every human being in Vietnam.”

“Sometimes to be Silent is to Lie.” – Miguel Unamuno

“The time is past when good men can remain silent, when obedience can segregate men from public risk, when the poor can die without defense.” – Dan Berrigan

“Perhaps a third of the women having illegal abortions – mostly poor people – had to be hospitalized for complications. How many thousands died as a result of these illegal abortions no one really knows. But the illegalization of abortion clearly worked against the poor, for the rich could manage either to have their baby or to have their abortion under safe conditions.”

“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” – Dostoevski

“In 1969, there were 502 convictions for tax fraud. Such cases, called ‘white-collar crimes,’ usually involve people with a good deal of money. Of those convicted, 20 percent ended up in jail. The fraud averaged $190,000 per case; their sentences averaged seven months. That same year, for burglary and auto theft (crimes of the poor) 60 percent ended up in prison. The auto thefts averaged $992; the sentences averaged eighteen months. The burglaries averaged $321; the sentences averaged thirty-three months.”

“National Guardsmen, prison guards, and local police went in[to Attica prison in 1971] with automatic rifles, carbines, and submachine guns in a full-scale assault on the prisoners, who had no firearms. Thirty-one prisoners were killed. The first stories given the press by prison authorities said that nine guards held hostage had their throats slashed by the prisoners during the attack. The official autopsies almost immediately showed this to be false: the nine guards died in the same hail of bullets that killed the prisoners.”

“The United States government had signed more than four hundred treaties with Indians and violated every single one.”

“A Navajo house shabby and small?

It is Not!

Inside there’s love,

Good laughter,

And Big Talk.

But best –

it’s home

With an open door

And room for all

A Castle could have no more.” – ‘It is Not!’

“In 1971 ITT planned to take over the $1 1/2 billion Hartford Fire Insurance Company – the largest merger in corporate history. The antitrust division of the Justice Department moved to prosecute ITT for violating the antitrust laws. However, the prosecution did not take place and ITT was allowed to merge with Hartford. It was all settled out of court, in a secret arrangement in which ITT agreed to donate $400,000 to the Republican party.”

“In the sixties, Huntington wrote, there was a huge growth of citizen participation ‘in the forms of marches, demonstrations, protest movements, and “cause” organizations.’ There were also ‘markedly higher levels of self-consciousness on the part of blacks, Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students and women, all of whom became mobilized and organized in new ways….’ There was a ‘marked expansion of white-collar unionism,’ and all this added up to ‘a reassertion of equality as a goal in social, economic, and political life.’”

“Under Carter, the United States continued to support, all over the world, regimes that engaged in imprisonment of dissenters, torture, and mass murder: in the Philippines, in Iran, in Nicaragua, and in Indonesia, where the inhabitants of East Timor were being annihilated in a campaign bordering on genocide.”

“Today, the dramatic threat of ecological breakdown is teaching us the extent to which greed and selfishness, both individual and collective, are contrary to the order of creation.” – Pope John Paul II about the ecological crises around 1990

“Yet the Reagan and Bush administrations made deep cuts (under Reagan, a 90 percent cut) in research into renewable energy possibilities.”

“Much of the public did not know, and were not informed by either political leaders or the media, that welfare took a tiny part of the taxes, and military spending took a huge chunk of it.”

“When government policy enriched the already rich, it was not called welfare. This was not as obvious as the monthly checks to the poor; it most often took the form of generous changes in the tax system.”

“The crime rate among blacks, instead of being seen as a crying demand for the elimination of poverty, was used by politicians to call for the building of more prisons.”

“We were told that the only way to defeat the Sandinistas was to use the tactics the agency [the CIA] attributed to Communist insurgencies elsewhere: kill, kidnap, rob, and torture….Many civilians were killed in cold blood. Many others were tortured, mutilated, raped, robbed, or otherwise abused….When I agreed to join…I had hoped that it would be an organization of Nicaraguans….[It] turned out to be an instrument of the U.S. government….”

“How are the president and his staff permitted to support a terrorist group in Central America to overthrow a government that, whatever its faults, is welcomed by its own people as a great improvement over the terrible governments the U.S. has supported there for years? What does the scandal tell us about democracy, about freedom of expression, about an open society?”

“Understanding that blacks would not vote for him, Reagan tried, unsuccessfully, to get Congress to eliminate a crucial section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which had been very effective in safeguarding the right of blacks to vote in Southern states.”

“While the Democrats would give more help to the poor than the Republicans, they were not capable (indeed, not really desirous) of seriously tampering with an economic system in which corporate profit comes before human need.”

“The U.S. can destroy Iraq’s highways, but not build its own; create the conditions for epidemic in Iraq, but not offer health care to millions of Americans. It can excoriate Iraqi treatment of the Kurdish minority, but not deal with domestic race relations; create homelessness abroad, but not solve it here; keep a half million troops drug free as part of a war, but refuse to fund the treatment of millions of drug addicts at home…” – Marilyn Young

“They teach us that the supreme act of citizenship is to choose among saviors, by going into a voting booth every four years to choose between two white and well-off Anglo-Saxon males of inoffensive personality and orthodox opinions.”

“One percent of the nation owns a third of the wealth. The rest of the wealth is distributed in such a way as to turn those in the 99 percent against one another: small property owners against the propertyless, black against white, native-born against foreign-born, intellectuals and professionals against the uneducated and unskilled. These groups have resented one another and warred against one another with such vehemence and violence as to obscure their common position as sharers of leftovers in a very wealthy country.”

“Now alienation has spread upward into families above the poverty line. These are white workers, neither rich nor poor, but angry over economic insecurity, unhappy with their work, worried about their neighborhoods, hostile to government – combining elements of racism with elements of class consciousness, contempt for the lower classes along with distrust for the elite, and thus open to solutions from any direction, right or left.”

“If God had intended us to vote, he would have given us candidates.”

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” – H. L. Mencken

“In 1996, on the television program 60 Minutes, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright was asked about the report that ‘a half million children have died as a result of sanctions against Iraq….That is more children than died in Hiroshima….Is the price worth it?’ Albright replied: ‘I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.’”

“But it seemed that the Clinton administration, like so many before it (Truman in Korea, Johnson in Vietnam, Bush in the Gulf War) chose military solutions when diplomatic ones were possible.”

“The child of a lawyer, though rating no higher on mental tests than the child of a janitor, was four times as likely to go to college, 12 times as likely to finish college, and 27 times as likely to end up in the top 10 percent of American incomes.”

“Instead of giving out contracts for jet bombers and nuclear submarines, contracts could be offered to nonprofit corporations to hire people to build homes, construct public transport systems, clean up the rivers and lakes, turn our cities into decent places to live.”

“For instance, it was estimated by the World Health Organization that a small portion of the American military budget, if given to the treatment of tuberculosis in the world, could save millions of lives.”

“We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to us in the form of terrorism…. Instead of sending our sons and daughters around the world to kill Arabs so we can have the oil under their sand, we should send them to rebuild their infrastructure, supply clean water, and feed starving children….In short, we should do good instead of evil. Who would try to stop us? Who would hate us? Who would want to bomb us? That is the truth the American people need to hear.” – Robert Bowman, National Catholic Reporter

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