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Quote by Nathan Mirts

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Nathan Mirts

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“Pilfering was common in Communist China’s state-owned enterprises, as the Party secretaries were slack in guarding properties that belonged to the government and poorly paid workers felt it fair compensation for their low pay. The practice was so widespread that it was an open secret. The workers joked about it and called it "Communism," which in Chinese translation means "sharing property.”

“In the center of all these transformations is the fugitive slave. Winning her emancipation singly, in groups and en masse, stealing through dark swamps and across busy roads, dodging the slave catchers and outwitting police patrols, she moves unseen on the edges of history, changing it inexorably with her flight. To find herself, she must steal and abolish white property, must abolish herself-as-property. She strikes fear into the heart of white society because she reveals just how flimsy their regimes of property, power, and domination can be in the face of her jailbreak for freedom. This specter of slaves freeing themselves is American history’s first image of Black looters.”

“A psychology of looting and disregard for the rule of law took hold of the ruling coterie in Pakistan early on. The initial gold mine was the allotment of properties abandoned by Hindus and Sikhs in Punjab and, subsequently, also in Sindh. Senior civil bureaucrats in cahoots with prominent Muslim League politicians had the pick of the field but did not fail to pass on some of the lesser goods as favors to those with contacts. Individual citizens with little or no influence had to settle for whatever was left over, which in most cases was very modest.”

“At a street corner meeting in Watts when the riots were over, an unemployed youth of about twenty said to me, "We won." I asked him: "How have you won? Homes have been destroyed, Negroes are lying dead in the streets, the stores from which you buy food and clothes are destroyed, and people are bringing you relief." His reply was significant: "We won because we made the whole world pay attention to us. The police chief never came here before; the mayor always stayed uptown. We made them come." Clearly it was no accident that the riots proceeded along an almost direct path to City Hall.... This is hardly a description of a Negro community that has run amok. The largest number of arrests were for looting—not for arson or shooting. Most of the people involved were not habitual thieves; they were members of a deprived group who seized a chance to possess things that all the dinning affluence of Los Angeles had never given them.”

“To truly understand the US's policies, we need look no further than the US's own post-WW II policy statements, as well-articulated by George Kennan, serving as the State Department's Director of Policy Planning, in 1948: "{W}e have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3 of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security....We need no deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction.... In the face of this situation we would be better off to...cease to talk about vague- and for the Far East- unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better." And the US's "straight power" plays since WW II have succeeded in allowing itself, with only 5% of the world's population, to monopolize about 25% of its resources. In other words, far from advancing the "lofty" and "benign" goals of freedom and democracy, as the New York Times's editorial would have us believe, the US has been waging war around the globe to protect its own unjust share of resources. However, the US has needed the perceived threat of the USSR, or other like enemy, to justify this. Keenan recognized this fact as well, when he said: "Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.".”

“Children who are accustomed to being treated well internalize that treatment and have a permanent sense of well-being. But children whose every need is instantly gratified and who are constantly praised to the skies do not have the same sense of well-being; rather they may feel despair or rage when that gratification is withheld, or when everyone doesn't glorify them in the same way.”