They rally round the family with a pocket full of shells

Finally finished Original Zinn yesterday, which I highly recommend. Wanted to save this quote before I throw it on the bookshelf and forget it:

What has been really one of the terrible consequences of the militarization of the country is the starving of the public sector, the starving of education, of libraries, of health, of housing, and instead, of course, the pouring of money into activities that are enormously profitable for corporations.

This is why people become socialists. People become socialists in the way that I became a socialist when I read Upton Sinclair, and when I read Karl Marx, just to make it a little more dangerous. And that is the understanding that when you have a society where the production of things is based on their profitability, then the things that are not profitable will not be produced.

[snip]

It’s not profitable to build housing for poor people. It is profitable to build nuclear weapons, profitable to build aircraft carriers and submarines. It is not profitable to build libraries or to build health care centers.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *