Quote of the day: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

"To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighed, censored, ordered about, by men who have neither the right, nor the knowledge, nor the virtue. ... To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality."

Proudhon: The General Idea of the Revolution(1851).

Quotes of the day: Stéphane Hessel.

The quotes below are all taken from the now famous pamphlet by the French World War II resistance fighter Stéphane Hessel, entitled "Time for Outrage!" ("Indignez Vous!"):

"The worst possible outlook is indifference that says, “I can’t do anything about it; I’ll just get by.” Behaving like that deprives you of one of the essentials of being human: the capacity and the freedom to feel outraged. That freedom is indispensable, as is the political involvement that goes with it."

"We must realize that violence turns its back on hope. We have to choose hope over violence—choose the hope of nonviolence. That is the path we must learn to follow. The oppressors no less than the oppressed have to negotiate to remove the oppression: that is what will eliminate terrorist violence. That is why we cannot let too much hate accumulate."

"The Western obsession with productivity has brought the world to a crisis that we can escape only with a radical break from the headlong rush for “more, always more” in the financial realm as well as in science and technology. It is high time that concerns for ethics, justice and sustainability prevail. For we are threatened by the most serious dangers, which have the power to bring the human experiment to an end by making the planet uninhabitable."

Quotes of the day: Niall Ferguson.

“Last year (2007) the income of the average American (just under $34,000) went up by at most 5 per cent. But the cost of living rose by 4.1 per cent. So in real terms Mr Average actually became just 0.9 per cent better off. Allowing for inflation, the income of the median household in the United States has in fact scarcely changed since 1990, increasing by just 7 per cent in eighteen years. Now compare Mr Average's situation with that of Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive officer at Goldman Sachs, the investment bank. In 2007 he received $68.5 million in salary, bonus and stock awards, an increase of 25 per cent on the previous year, and roughly two thousand times more than Joe Public earned. That same year, Goldman Sachs's net revenues of $46 billion exceeded the entire gross domestic product (GDP) of more than a hundred countries, including Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia; Bolivia, Ecuador and Guatemala; Angola, Syria and Tunisia. The bank's total assets for the first time passed the $ i trillion mark. Yet Lloyd Blankfein is far from being the financial world's highest earner. The veteran hedge fund manager George Soros made $2.9 billion. Ken Griffin of Citadel, like the founders of two other leading hedge funds, took home more than $2 billion. Meanwhile nearly a billion people around the world struggle to get by on just $1 a day.”

“At times, the ascent of money has seemed inexorable. In 2006 the measured economic output of the entire world was around $47 trillion. The total market capitalization of the world's stock markets was $ 51 trillion, 10 per cent larger. The total value of domestic and international bonds was $68 trillion, 50 per cent larger. The amount of derivatives outstanding was $473 trillion, more than ten times larger. Planet Finance is beginning to dwarf Planet Earth. And Planet Finance seems to spin faster too. Every day two trillion dollars change hands on foreign exchange markets. Every month seven trillion dollars change hands on global stock markets. Every minute of every hour of every day of every week, someone, somewhere, is trading. And all the time new financial life forms are evolving.In 2006, for example, the volume of leveraged buyouts (takeovers of firms financed by borrowing) surged to $753 billion. An explosion of 'securitization', whereby individual debts like mortgages are 'tranched' then bundled together and repackaged for sale, pushed the total annual issuance of mortgage backed securities, asset-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations above $3 trillion. The volume of derivatives - contracts derived from securities, such as interest rate swaps or credit default swaps (CDS) – has grown even faster, so that by the end of 2007 the notional value of all 'over-the-counter' derivatives (excluding those traded onpublic exchanges) was just under $600 trillion. Before the 1980s, such things were virtually unknown. New institutions, too, have proliferated. The first hedge fund was set up in the 1940s and, as recently as 1990, there were just 610 of them, with $38 billion under management. There are now over seven thousand, with $1.9 trillion under management. Private equity partnerships have also multiplied, as well as a veritable shadow banking system of 'conduits' and 'structured investment vehicles' (SIVs), designed to keep risky assets off bank balance sheets. If the last four millennia witnessed the ascent of man the thinker, we now seem to be living through the ascent of man the banker.”

Niall Ferguson: The Ascent of Money.

Quotes of the day: Robert Albritton

Capitalism and Democracy:

“Capitalism is only supportive of democracy to a limited extent, for democracy requires a high level of equality, while capitalism generates inequality. To an extent capitalism has supported individual rights, which can be important dimensions of democracy; however, if inequality leaves large numbers in dire need, these rights can be weakened to the point of being almost meaningless. Thus free speech is terribly important, but it can be undermined when inequality creates a situation where de facto it is almost entirely the voices of small elites that are heard. For this reason, the emphasis on individual rights needs to be balanced by an emphasis on social rights and responsibilities that arise from a sense of social connectedness and generosity.”

Corporations:

“The large corporations that we see today are among some of the largest and most centrally planned economic units to ever exist, and as a consequence of their status as private property and legal persons, the public has only very limited and indirect ways of holding corporations publicly accountable. By law, corporations are supposed to maximize profits for stockholders, but this is a very narrow mission for such a powerful institution as the modern corporation. Further, not only is most corporate decision making behind closed doors, but it is relatively authoritarian in the sense that it is mostly top-down, being finalized by small circles of top management. Is it rational for small coteries of private individuals to have so much power over the fate of humanity? I think
not.”

Socializing Costs, Privatizing Profits:

“We must find ways to make corporations more democratically accountable, and to include in their calculations not only short-term profits but also social costs and benefits. For example, in capitalism as it exists, a corporation may contribute to respiratory illness by polluting the air, but it would be irrational for it to install expensive anti-pollution devices if by doing so, its profits would be reduced. Normally under capitalism, it is the taxpayers and consumers who will pay the tab for increased health care costs stemming from air pollution. This is an example of how capitalism privatizes profits and socializes costs. The capitalist imperative to privatize profits and socialize costs becomes particularly problematic when economic activity is generating enormous social costs by running up against the limits of human and environmental health and when it is continually deepening a horrendous inequality.”

Accountability:

“Most mainstream economists believe that by their own impulses markets can rationally price commodities, but when enormous social and environmental costs are not included in market prices, they can scarcely be thought of as rational. It follows that market prices need to be made more representative of real social costs and benefits. The “carbon tax” is one example where this is being advocated. A “sustainability tax” has also been advocated. Such taxes, however, can only be progressive from the point of view of human flourishing, if they are combined with redistributive
measures that make the necessities of life more affordable and not less to those with lower incomes. We can make markets more democratically accountable by treating them instrumentally, and this means being willing to intervene, whenever by doing so human or environmental flourishing are advanced.

Because markets are always embedded in and shaped by power relations, their outcomes are always likely to favour the powerful. Today the mainstream speaks of “market failures”, as though for the most part markets succeed. But what is the measure of their success? It surely cannot be distributive justice unless radical inequality can be made consistent with justice. Nor can it be environmental sustainability or human health.”

Robert Albritton in "Let Them Eat Junk: How Capitalism Creates Hunger and Obesity".

Quote of the day: Rudolf Rocker.

“Only freedom can inspire men to great things and bring about social and political transformations. The art of ruling men has never been the art of educating men and inspiring them to a new shaping of their lives.”

Quote of the day: Robert O. Paxton on Fascism

Fascism, according to Paxton, is "A form of political behaviour marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

Robert O. Paxton: "The Anatomy of Fascism" 2004.