| |
*
"The Globalization of humanity is a natural, biological, evolutionary process.
Yet we face an enormous crisis because the most central and important aspect of
globalization-its economy-is currently being organized in a manner that so gravely
violates the fundamental principles by which healthy living systems are organized
that it threatens the demise of our whole civilization.
-- Elisabet
Sahtouris We
are capable of regaining our reverence for life, of replacing the drive to conquer
with the will to cooperate, of remaking our engineered institutions, including
our corporations, into living systems.
-- Elisabet
Sahtouris
|
Our
civilization is locked in the grip of an ideology - corporatism. An ideology that
denies and undermines the legitimacy of individuals as the citizen in a democracy.
The particular imbalance of this ideology leads to a worship of self-interest
and a denial of the public good. The practical effects on the individual are passivity
and conformism in the areas that matter, and non-conformism in the areas that
don't
-- John Ralston Saul
The
acceptance of corporatism causes us to deny and undermine the legitimacy of the
individual as citizen in a democracy. The result of such a denial is a growing
imbalance which leads to our adoration of self-interest and our denial of the
public good.
-- John Ralston Saul
| |
*
Infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility.
~ E.
F. Schumacher |
In
the current vocabulary of condemnation there are few words as final and conclusive
as the word "uneconomic." If an activity has been branded as uneconomic, its right
to existence is not merely questioned but energetically denied. Anything that
is found to be an impediment to economic growth is a shameful thing, and if people
cling to it, they are thought of as either saboteurs or fools. Call a thing immoral
or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the
world or to the well-being of future generations; as long as you have not shown
it to be "uneconomic" you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow,
and prosper.
~ E.
F. Schumacher
Economic
policies absorb almost the entire attention of government, and at the same time
become ever more impotent. The simplest things, which only fifty years ago one
could do without difficulty, cannot get done any more. The richer a society, the
more impossible it become to do worthwhile things without immediate payoff.
~ E. F. Schumacher
| The
only way in which a nation can make itself wealthy and prosperous is by good housekeeping:
that is, by providing for its wants in the order of their importance, and allowing
no money to be wasted on whims and luxuries until necessities have been thoroughly
served.
-- George Bernard
Shaw | 
|
Capitalism drives the
employers to do their worst to the employed, and the employed to do the least
for them. And it boasts all the time of the incentive it provides to both to do
their best! . . . The reason the Capitalist system has worked so far without jamming
for more than a few months at a time, and then only in places, is that it has
not yet succeeded in making a conquest of human nature so complete that everybody
acts on strictly business principles.
-- George
Bernard Shaw
Hear
me, people: We have now to deal with another race- small and feeble when our fathers
first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind
to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people
have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their
tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule.
--
Chief Sitting Bull
Civil
government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality
instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have
some property against those who have none at all.
--Adam Smith
All
for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world,
to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.
-- Adam Smith
What
is economics? A science invented by the upper class in order to acquire the fruits
of the labor of the underclass
-- August Strindberg
Sell
a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Did not
the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?
-- Tecumseh
Democracy and capitalism have very different beliefs about the proper distribution
of power. One believes in a completely equal distribution of political power,
'one man, one vote', while the other believes that it is the duty of the economically
fit to drive the unfit out of business and into economic extinction. 'Survival
of the fittest' and inequalities in purchasing power is what capitalist efficiency
is all about. Individuals and firms become efficient to be rich. To put it in
its starkest form, capitalism is perfectly compatible with slavery. The American
South had such a system for more than two centuries. Democracy is not comparable
with slavery.
-- Lester Thurow
 | *
The essence of all slavery consists in taking the product of another's labor by
force. It is immaterial whether this force be founded upon ownership of the slave
or ownership of the money that he must get to live.
-- Leo
Tolstoy |
| *
Markets and money must again become the servants and not the masters of our vision
and values.
-- Jakob
von Uexkull |  |
 |
*
It is absolutely sure that if globalization is not founded on moral values not
only will fail but will bring about global calamities.
-- George
Vithoulkas |
| What a country
calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens
to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Petrol is more likely than
wheat to be a cause of international conflict.
-- Simone
Weil |  |
In
war the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the
poor. We must work to live, and they give us such mean wages that we die. We toil
for them all day long, and they heap up gold in their coffers, and our children
fade away before their time, and the faces of those we love become hard and evil.
We tread out the grapes, and another drinks the wine. We sow the corn, and our
own board is empty. We have chains, though no eyes behold them; and are slaves,
though men call us free.
-- Oscar Wilde
| *
The strike, the boycott, the refusal to serve, the ability to paralyze the functioning
of a complex social structure-these remain potent weapons against the most fearsome
state or corporate power.
-- Howard
Zinn |  |
Workers
Day
- May 1
Fair
Trade Day - 2nd Sat in May
End
Poverty Day - October 17
Buy
Nothing Day - 4th Fri in November
