Be
a Hero for a Better World ... Every Act of Kindness Makes
a Difference!
ECONOMY
*
If
we get a government that reflects more of what this
country is really about, we can turn the century
-- and the economy -- around.
--
Bella
Abzug
*
What made traditional economies so radically different
and so very fundamentally dangerous to Western economies
were the traditional principles of prosperity of
Creation versus scarcity of resources, of sharing
and distribution versus accumulation and greed,
of kinship usage rights versus individual exclusive
ownership rights, and of sustainability versus growth.
-- Rebecca
Adamson
Economic
development, more than any single issue, is the battle
line between two competing world views. Tribal people's
fundamental value was sustainability, and they conducted
their livelihoods in ways that sustained resources and
limited inequalities in their society. What made traditional
economies so radically different and so very fundamentally
dangerous to Western economies were the traditional principles
of prosperity of Creation versus scarcity of resources,
of sharing and distribution versus accumulation and greed,
of kinship usage rights versus individual exclusive ownership
rights, and of sustainability versus growth. -- Rebecca
Adamson
In
the field of economic development, economists like to
think Western economics is value-neutral, but in truth,
it is not. Success is defined according to production
units or monetary worth. The contrast with successful
indigenous development is stark. For example, since they
understand the environment to be a living being, the Northern
Cheyenne have opposed coal strip mining on their reservation
because it kills the water beings. There are no cost measurements
of pollution, production, or other elements that can capture
this kind of impact. There is an emerging recognition
of the need for a spiritual base, not only in our individual
lives, but also in our work and in our communities.
-- Rebecca
Adamson
For
the economy I want workers and consumers to have control
over their own economic lives. I want everyone to have
fair conditions that fully utilize their talents and potentials.
I want incomes that accord with the efforts people expend
in their labors. I want what is produced, by whom, under
what conditions, and with who consuming the result--all
determined in accord with enhancing human well-being and
development and all decided by the people involved and
affected. I want an end to hierarchies of power and wealth
and to class division with most actors subordinated to
an elite few. To accomplish all these ends I favor the
institutions of participatory economics -- worker and
consumer councils, remuneration for effort and sacrifice,
balanced job complexes, and participatory planning. If
someone should demonstrate that those institutions somehow
fail to accomplish necessary economic functions or have
social or personal by-products that outweigh their benefits
-- I would simply return to the drawing board. Exploitation,
alienation, poverty, disempowerment, fragmenting and debilitating
labor, production for the profit of a few -- much less
harsh homelessness, starvation, and degradation -- are
not like gravity. They arise from institutional relations
established by human beings. New institutions, also established
by human beings, can generate other vastly superior outcomes.
Defining and working to attain those new institutions
ought to be our economic agenda.
-- Michael Albert
*
....the
globalization that characterizes today’s economics
goes beyond or eludes the sovereignty of individual
states, and thus the power of their rulers. It
is not they, but rather financial groups in control
of vast amounts of capital, who decide upon their
vertiginous passage through nations, without taking
into account the serious crises they might generate.
-- Patricio
Aylwin Azócar
The
purpose of economic theory is to make those who are comfortable
FEEL comfortable.
-- Lord Balogh
*
We are committed with our lives to building a different
model and a different future for humanity, the Earth,
and other species. We have envisaged a moral alternative
to economic globalization and we will not rest until
we see it realized.
-- Maude
Barlow
I
think it must be conceded that it is possible to create
a society in which the response to market failure is not
a swing to socialism, but an exacerbation of individual
efforts to stay ahead by making and spending yet more
money. Does the public health service have long waiting
lists and inadequate facilities? Buy private insurance.
Has public transport broken down? Buy a car for each member
of the family above driving age. Has the countryside been
built over or the footpaths eradicated? Buy some elaborate
exercise machinery and work out at home. Is air pollution
intolerable? Buy an air-filtering unit and stay indoors.
Is what comes out of the tap foul to the taste and chock-full
of carcinogens? Buy bottled water. And so on. We know
it can all happen because it has: I have been doing little
more than describing Southern California. Now it is worth
noticing two things about the private substitutes that
I have described. The first is that in the aggregate they
are probably much more expensive than would be the implementation
of the appropriate public policy. The second is that they
are extremely poor replacements for the missing outcomes
of good public policy. Nevertheless, it is plain that
the members of a society can become so alienated from
one another, so mistrustful of any form of collective
action, that they prefer to go it alone.
-- Brian Barry
*
"We Have Got To Bring Corporate America To Its Knees"
-- Harry
Belafonte
People
nowadays interchange gifts and favors out of friendship,
but buying and selling is considered absolutely
inconsistent with the mutual benevolence which should
prevail between citizens and the sense of community
of interest which supports our social system. According
to our ideas, buying and selling is essentially
anti-social in all its tendencies. It is an education
in self-seeking at the expense of others, and no
society whose citizens are trained in such a school
can possibly rise above a very low grade of civilization
-- Edward
Bellamy
*
Changing the structure and rules of the global
economy will require a mass movement based on
messages of compassion, justice, and equality,
as well as collaborative and democratic processes
... If we stay positive, inclusive, and democratic,
we have a truly historic opportunity to build
a global movement for social justice.
-- Medea
Benjamin
"People
would do well to ask themselves how many of their ambitions
and aspirations derive from the type of economic system
they inhabit and the insecurity and exhaustion it creates,
and question the sense and purpose of a society where
control of a large portion of life is abdicated under
contract in the labour market, and where immense creativity
and potential is stifled by the need to do difficult and
repetitive tasks in order to earn a wage."
-- Tony Benn
"The
nature of the economic system should be a matter for public
choice, and free market capitalism should not be accepted
without any discussion of the rich variety of alternatives
... Unlike civil laws, economic laws are imposed on people
with all the authority of immutable laws of nature. But
the economy is created by people, supported by government
intervention, regulation, statute and subsidy, and implemented
in such a way that it gives substantial wealth and power
to a privileged few, while the majority face a life of
relentless work, stress and periodic financial insecurity."
-- Tony Benn
It
is no longer a single historical world--as it has been
from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards.
Nor is it any longer ours. We, in our culture of commodities,
are living our crisis; the rest of the world are living
theirs. Our crisis is that we no longer believe in a future.
Their crisis is us. The most we want is to hang on to
what we've got. They want the means to live. That is why
our principal preoccupations have become private and our
public discourse is compounded of spite. The historical
and cultural space for public speech, for public hopes
and action, has been dismantled. We live and have our
being today in private coverts.
-- John Berger
*
We do need a 'new economy,' but one that is founded
on thrift and care, on saving and conserving, not
on excess and waste. An economy based on waste is
inherently and hopelessly violent, and war is its
inevitable by-product. We need a peaceable economy."
~ Wendell
Berry
We
choose forward. We choose inclusion. We choose growing
together. We choose American economic might and
muscle, standing strong on the bedrock of the American
ideal: a strong, empowered and ever-growing middle
class. ~ Sen.
Cory Booker
We
also must pull from our highest ideals of justice and
protect against those ills that destabilized our economy
- like predatory lending, over-leveraged financial institutions
and the unchecked avarice of the past that trumped fairness
and common sense. Our platform calls for significant cuts
in federal spending. ~ Sen.
Cory Booker
Why
are we so zealous, then, about the private sector? We
persist in designating a large part of the economy as
private so that we can disavow public responsibility for
its evils and claim individual merit for its blessings.
As a civic body, we are reluctant to countenance and cure
the deprivations of the poor, the damage to the environment,
and the trivialization of culture that are the depressing
concomitants of our advanced industrial economy. At the
same time applauding the rich and powerful who claim their
privileges as the fruits of their rugged and individual
efforts, we sanction our positions and our aspirations
-- Albert Borgmann
*
The consumption society has made us feel that happiness
lies in having things, and has failed to teach us
the happiness of not having things.
--
Elise
Boulding
*
Economics
has been incurably growth-oriented and addicted
to everybody growing richer, even at the cost of
exhaustion of resources and pollution of the environment.
--
Kenneth
Boulding
*
With laissez-faire and price atomic,
Ecology's Uneconomic,
But with another kind of logic
Economy's Unecologic.
~ Kenneth
E. Boulding
When
everything is worth money, then money is worth nothing.
-- David Byrne
*
"If
the corporations have their way, the Earth will
be killed, and that's in your lifetime. It's revolting
to me that students are being trained to work
in corporations. It's obscene to me that the corporations
are running the world. We've got to get cross.
Anger is an appropriate emotion."
-- Helen
Caldicott
*
I think there are a lot of strong leaders around
the world who have made very convincing arguments
about the weakness of corporate-led globalization
and the compelling nature of alternatives.
-- John
Cavanagh
We
have created not a Brave New World, but a vulgar marketplace,
where human attributes come with a price tag.
-- Linda Chavez
*
What
is called 'capitalism'is basically a system of corporate
mercantilism, with huge and largely unaccountable
private tyrannies exercising vast control over the
economy, political systems, and social and cultural
life...
-- Noam
Chomsky
Why
should workers agree to be slaves in a basically authoritarian
structure? They should have control over it themselves.
Why shouldn't communities have a dominant voice in running
the institutions that affect their lives?
-- Noam
Chomsky
The
real world of American society is one which it is very
misleading to call simply a democracy. Of course, it is
in a sense a democracy, but it is one in which there are
enormous inequities in the distribution of power and force.
For example, the entire commercial and industrial system
is in principle excluded from the democratic process,
including everything that goes on within it
-- Noam
Chomsky
Representative
democracy, as in, say, the United States or Great Britain,
would be criticized by an anarchist of this school on
two grounds. First of all because there is a monopoly
of power centralized in the State, and secondly -and critically
- because representative democracy is limited to the political
sphere and in no serious way encroaches on the economic
sphere. Anarchists of this tradition have always held
that democratic control of one?s productive life is at
the core of any serious human liberation, or, for that
matter, of any significant democratic practice. That is,
as long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves
on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as
long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary
tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and
oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if
even meaningful.
-- Noam
Chomsky
All
public resources go to the rich. The poor, if they can
survive in the labor market, fine. Otherwise, they die.
That's economics in a nutshell.
-- Noam
Chomsky
In
a country well governed poverty is something to be ashamed
of. In a country badly governed wealth is something to
be ashamed of.
-- Confucius
The
superior person understands rightness; the inferior person
understands profit
-- Confucius
*
There's
two globalizations... The elite globalization represents
minority forces. The elite globalization is about
make money... The people's globalization, the democratic
mass globalization is about life values.
-- Kevin
Danaher
*
The
global economy works for about twenty percent of
the world, for about eighty percent it doesn't.
-- Kevin
Danaher
*
We
have a global economy that is not structured around
democratizing and including people in the decision-making.
It's operated in secret.
-- Kevin
Danaher
I believe there’s an emerging American majority
for progressive economic change.
-- Bill
de Blasio
*
We
want a system in which the worker shall get what
he produces and the capitalist shall produce what
he gets.
-- Eugene
V. Debs
The
economic owning class is always the political ruling
class.
-- Eugene
V. Debs
*
The
ultimate aim of production is not production of goods
but the production of free human beings associated
with one another on terms of equality.
-- John
Dewey
"This
crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil
of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers
from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude
is inculcated into the student, who is trained to
worship acquisitive success as a preparation for
his future. I am convinced there is only one way
to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the
establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied
by an educational system which would be oriented
toward social goals."
-- Albert
Einstein
There
is a need for financial reform along ethical lines
that would produce in its turn an economic reform
to benefit everyone. This would nevertheless require
a courageous change of attitude on the part of political
leaders.
-- Pope
Francis
Viewed
as a means to the end of political freedom, economic arrangements
are important because of their effect on the concentration
or dispersion of power. The kind of economic organization
that provides economic freedom directly, namely, competitive
capitalism, also promotes political freedom because it
separates economic power from political power and in this
way enables the one to offset the other
-- Milton Friedman
The
accepted ideas of any period are singularly those that
serve the dominant economic interest...What economists
believe and teach, whether in the United States or in
the Soviet Union, is rarely hostile to the institutions
-- the private business enterprise, the Communist Party
-- that reflect the dominant economic power. Not to notice
this takes effort, although many succeed.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
From the point of view of the economy, the sale of
weapons is indistinguishable from the sale of food.
When a building collapses or a plane crashes, it?s
rather inconvenient from the point of view of those
inside, but it?s altogether convenient for the growth
of the gross national product, which sometimes ought
to be called the "gross criminal product."
-- Eduardo
Galeano
*
There's
enough on this planet for everyone's needs but not
for everyone's greed.
~ Mohandas
Gandhi
*
There's
enough on this planet for everyone's needs but not
for everyone's greed.
~ Mohandas
Gandhi
So
long as all the increased wealth which modern progress
brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase
luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House
of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and
cannot be permanent.
-- Henry George
*
"I feel more confident than ever that the power
to save the planet rests with the individual consumer."
~ Denis
Hayes
I
think our main foreign policy is economic policy
but to think that economic policy is not environmental
policy is to sort of, miss the point. You know you
can't have economic development without impact on
the biosphere.
~ Randy
Hayes
*
Economic policy turns out to be the most important
environmental policy.
~ Randy
Hayes
If
we assume that the purpose of the economy is to serve
and improve the welfare of the entire body of citizens,
the U.S. model has clearly been a major failure. It has
served a minority, and the majority have not only failed
to share in the income gains yielded by the model, they
have suffered from reduced benefits, greater job instability
and stress, and a diminution of expectations and sense
of hope for the future.
-- Edward S. Herman
American
consumerism is about buying things we don't need, with
money we don't have, to impress friends we don't have
time for.
-- Leo Horrigan
"Every
act of every man is a moral act, to be tested by moral,
and not by economic criteria."
-- Robert
Maynard Hutchins
"I
sincerely believe...that banking establishments
are more dangerous that standing armies."
-- Thomas
Jefferson
*
Concern
for the public good must become the animating
force of our economic order.”
-- Marjorie
Kelly
“We
have words for racism and sexism, but wealth discrimination
isn’t fully recognized. It is a bias in favor
of the wealthy and against labor, the environment,
and the community. Concern for the public good
must become the animating force of our economic
order.”
-- Marjorie
Kelly
The
gross national product includes air pollution and
advertising for cigarettes, and ambulances to clear
our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for
our doors, and jails for the people who break them
... It does not allow for the health of our families,
the quality of thier education, or the joy of their
play.
-- Robert
F. Kennedy
The
love of money as a possession--as distinguished from the
love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities
of life--will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat
disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological
propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the
specialists in mental disease
-- John Maynard Keynes
*
We
must recognize that we can't solve our problems
now until there is a radical redistribution of economic
and political power....[What is required is] a radical
restructuring of the architecture of American society.
--
Martin
Luther King, Jr
*
When
the institutions of money rule the world, it is
perhaps inevitable that the interests of money will
take precedence over the interests of people. What
we are experiencing might best be described as a
case of money colonizing life. To accept this absurd
distortion of human institutions and purpose should
be considered nothing less than an act of collective,
suicidal insanity."
-- David
Korten
"But
once we concede that people do care about status,
it necessarily follows that the status competition
that makes people buy expensive consumer goods in
order to impress other people constitutes a failure
of the market economy - a failure as real as traffic
congestion, or pollution, or any other activity
in which the individual pursuit of self-interest
leads to a collectively bad outcome. Suppose that
we could somehow agree to stop competing over who
has the fanciest car; everyone could then work a
bit less, spend more time with their families, and
raise the sum total of human happiness. Or to put
it a bit differently, Americans (or at least the
top few percent of the income distribution) have
gotten into a sort of arms race of conspicuous consumption
that, like most arms races, consumes huge quantities
of resources yet in the end changes little. "
~ Paul
Krugman
*
"It's
a measure of the depth of our consumer trance that
the death of the planet is not sufficient to break
it."
-- Kalle
Lasn
*
Many
Americans hunger for a different kind of society
-- one based on principles of caring, ethical and
spiritual sensitivity, and communal solidarity.
Their need for meaning is just as intense as their
need for economic security."
-- Michael
Lerner
*
"This
focus on money and power may do wonders in the marketplace,
but it creates a tremendous crisis in our society. People
who have spent all day learning how to sell themselves
and to manipulate others are in no position to form lasting
friendships or intimate relationships... Many Americans
hunger for a different kind of society -- one based on
principles of caring, ethical and spiritual sensitivity,
and communal solidarity. Their need for meaning is just
as intense as their need for economic security."
-- Michael
Lerner
*
The
role of globalization is to homogenize all cultures,
and to turn them into commodified markets, and therefore,
to make them easier for global corporations to control.
Global corporations are even now trying to commodify
all remaining aspects of national cultures, not to
mention indigenous cultures. -- Jerry
Mander
*
The
political system is not for the people. The people
are secondary to the economy. It's about what generates
money, not about what benefits the people.
-- Ziggy
Marley
*
...
the aim of development must be neither producerism
not consumerism, but the satisfaction of fundamental
human needs, which are not only needs of humanity...
-- Manfred
Max-Neef
No
matter how hostile the environment in which we are working
is, we must never cease to insist that development is
about people and not about objects. That the aim of development
must be neither producerism not consumerism, but the satisfaction
of fundamental human needs, which are not only needs of
humanity, but needs of being as well. We will never deny
that subsistence is a fundamental human need which must
be satisfied through adequate income, nutrition, housing
and work for all. But we will also insist that protection,
affection, understanding, participation, leisure, creation,
identity and freedom are extremely fundamental human needs
as well.
-- Manfred
Max-Neef
I
confess that I am not charmed with the ideal of
life held out by those who think that the normal
state of human beings is that of struggling to get
on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and
treading on each other's heels, which form the existing
type of social life, are the most desirable lot
of human beings
-- John
Stuart Mill
Economics
is not about things and tangible material objects; it
is about men, their meanings and actions.
-- Ludwig von Mises
*
These
temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism,
seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and,
instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the
mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.
~ John
Muir
*
The
essence of globalization is a subordination of human
rights, of labor rights, consumer, environmental rights,
democracy rights, to the imperatives of global trade
and investment.
-- Ralph
Nader
*
"We live in such a corporate world where
everyone is passing the buck, it seems to me.
Therefore I like stories where the individual
takes responsibility for BEING the individual,
and not just for himself, but for his comrades,
his society and ultimately for his country. Ultimately,
we can all learn a lesson from that and not be
browbeaten by the corporate world which is taking
over."
-- Liam
Neeson
*
We could dramatically accelerate innovations in
sustainability and social justice just by making
choices to use our money for positive solutions.
-- Carol
Newell
I
think those of us who have extraordinary wealth
have an opportunity to leverage that wealth to stimulate
a just and sustainable economy. I know it goes against
the grain but I know it's possible. It's just about
deciding what kind of choices we want to make.
-- Carol
Newell
*
we've got a lot of work to do economically in this
country to bring about a more just and fair economy.
-- Barack
Obama
Instead
of having a set of policies that are equipping people
for the globalization of the economy, we have policies
that are accelerating the most destructive trends
of the global economy.
-- Barack
Obama
Anyway
that's a large part of what economics is -- people arbitrarily,
or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to
non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't
just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is
like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves
to justify the current power structure, and so it has
a lot of fervent believers among the powerful
-- Kim Stanley Robinson
*
Too many people spend money they haven't earned,
to buy things they don't want, to impress people
they don't like.
-- Will
Rogers
The
first man who, having fenced off a plot of land, thought
of saying, 'This is mine' and found people simple enough
to believe him was the real founder of civil society.
How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and
horrors might the human race had been spared by the one
who, upon pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch,
had shouted to his fellow men: 'Beware of listening to
this imposter; you are lost if you forget the fruits of
the earth belong to all and that the earth belongs to
no one.
Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1755
But while they prate of economic laws, men and women
are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic
laws are not made by nature. They are made by human
beings.
-- Franklin
D. Roosevelt
Advocates
of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred
principles of liberty, which are embodied in one
maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the
exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate -- Bertrand
Russell
*
"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
The
global economy is a runaway train that is causing
more and more suffering in the world. The current
'profit before people' system is causing the gap
between the very rich and the very poor to grow
larger each year. In
order to transform the global economy into a true
global community, we need to create a Better World
Economy - an economic system that gives value to
other commodities besides money. Then we can create
more sustainable local, national and global communities.
-- Robert
Alan Silverstein
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
"The
trickle-down experiment that began in the Reagan
years failed America's middle class. Sure, the rich
are doing great. Giant corporations are doing great.
Lobbyists are doing great. But we need an economy
where everyone else who works hard gets a shot at
doing great!"
~ Elizabeth
Warren
Facebook.com/runwarrenrun2016
"For
tens of millions of working families who are the
backbone of this country, this economy isn't working.
These families are working harder than ever, but
they can't get ahead. Opportunity is slipping away.
Many feel like the game is rigged against them -
and they are right. The game is rigged against them."
~ Elizabeth
Warren
Facebook.com/ReadyForWarren
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
