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"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
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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
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Infinite growth of material consumption in a
finite world is an impossibility.
~
E. F. Schumacher
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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
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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
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*
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
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Markets and money must again become the servants
and not the masters of our vision and values.
-- Jakob
von Uexkull
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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
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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
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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
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