The power of banks

Does not strike you as preposterous that an institution that produces nothing more than figures in books, can acquire the ownership of assets more vast than our greatest industries which emply thosuands of people in all states, and upon whose physical production the entire economy of Australia depends?

Australian Institute for Economic Democracy, cited in The Grip of Death, p.35

Manufacturing Money - Lord Josiah Stamp

The modern banking system creates money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in iniquity and born in sin. Bankers own the earth; take it away from them, but leave them with the power to create credit, and with the stroke of a pen they will create enough money to buy it back again ... If yo want to be slaves of the bankers, and pay the costs of your own slavery, then let the banks create money.

Lord Josiah Stamp, former Director Bank of England, cited in The Grip of Death, p.35

The power to issue money - Thomas Jefferson

If the American people ever allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and the corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all properties until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied. The issuing power of money should be taken from the banks and restored to Congress and the people to whom it belongs. I sincerely believe the banking institutions having the issuing power of money are more dangerous to liberty than standing armies.

Thomas Jefferson, cited in The Grip of Death, p.35

Fractional reserve as a growth bias - Herman Daly

As a result of fractional reserve banking, over 90% of our money supply is loaned into existence by commercial banks and thus must grow by enough to at least pay the interest on the loan by which it was created. This gives a basic growth bias to the economy.

Herman E. Daly, comment on The Grip of Death, by Michael Rowbotham

Economists as priesthood - Robert H. Nelson

The economics profession is the priesthood of a powerful secular religion - or, more accurately of a set of secular religions, as they have been developed in the theories of leading schools of economics of the modern age.

Beneath the surface of their formal economic theorizing, economists are engaged in an act of delivering religious messages. Correctly undesrtood, these messages are seen to be promises of the true path to salvation in this world - to a new heaven on earth.

Because this path follows along a route of economic progress, and because economists are the ones - or so it is believed by many people - with the technical understanding to show the way, it falls to the members of the economics profession (assisted by other social scientists) to assume the traditional role of the priesthood.

Robert H. Nelson, Economics as Religion, p.xx

Two traditions in Economics as Religion - Robert H. Nelson

The major theories of economics as they developed in the intellectual history of the West can best be understood in terms of another of the great contrasting traditions of theology: Roman Caholic and Protestant, each dealing with the most profound issues of existence.

One view involves a developmental, rational optimism about human abilities - morally, spiritually and socially - to improve the common condition, and offers an institutionalized set of mediating procedures to make that possible. We find this view in Aristotle, Aquinas and much of Anglicanism, but also in more secular forms in Claude Saint-Simon and John Maynard Keynes.

The second tradition is more pessimistic and radical, sometimes even apocalyptic, for it presumes that a dramatic intervention must occur within persons in the society as a whole and bring about an alleviation of pervasive evil. Otherwise, very little can be changed; improvements are modest and marginal, and real life often involves only a choice for the lessers of evils. Philosophical parallels can be found in Plato, Augustine, Luther, Calvin and the Puritans. This stream splits in the modern age, into several branches, and it can go toward Marxism, toward Social Darwinism, or toward modern theories of economic alienation.

Economics as Religion - Max L. Stackhouse

Many of the classical founders of the field of economics not only were guided by theological assumptions but also viewed the field in messianic terms. They presumed that the primary reason for human pain, suffering, and death is that we are in a state of scarcity.

We can only be delivered from this perilous existence by the overcoming of material deprivation - a prospect that can only come from rightly formulated, rightly believed, and rightly lived principles and policies.

Economics can deliver us, bring about a redeemed state of affairs on earth, and lead us to abundant living - the materially incarnate form of salvation.

Max L. Stackhouse, Princenton Theological Seminar
Foreword to Economics as Religion, Robert H. Nelson, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001

Confucius

The superior man concerns himself with what is right; the lesser man with what pays.

Self-improvement - Mao-Tse-Tung

War is ten percent fighting, ten percent waiting, and eighty percent self-improvement.

Conocimiento científico y racionalidad - Karl Popper

El conocimiento científico es, a pesar de su falibilidad, uno de los mayores logros de la racionalidad humana y mediante el uso libre de nuestra razón siempre falible, podemos comprender, no obstante, algo acerca del mundo y, tal vez, incluso cambiarlo para mejor.

El mito del marco común, Karl Popper, p.12

Ciencia, modas y especialidades - Karl Popper

Lo que hace posible la ciencia es precisamente la libertad respecto de modas y de especialidades.

El mito del marco común, Karl Popper, p.11

Saints and Communists - Helder Camara

If you feed the poor, you are called a saint. When you ask why he doesn't have food, you are called a communist.

Beign what you might have been - George Elliot

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

Legitimacy of Institutions - Noam Chomsky

There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws. Decisions made within institutions are subject to human will and must face the test of legitimacy. And if they do not meet the test, they can be replaced by other institutions that are more free and more just, as has happened often in the past.

Rather die than think - Bertrand Russell

Many people would rather die than think, and some, in fact, do.

Unexamined life - Socrates

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Democracy and Public Opinion - Edward Bernays

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic societies. We are governed, our minds are molded, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is the logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. They govern us by the qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure.

Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928

Believing what is convenient - Julius Caesar

Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt.

Men tend to believe what is convenient to them.

Julius Caesar, Comentarii de Bello Gallico

Conforting Convictions - Bertrand Russell

Every man, wherever he goes is encompassed by a cloud of conforting convictions which move with him like flies on a summer day.

Bretrand Russell, Skeptical Essays

Opinions and Informed Opinions - John Chaffee

Opinions are easy to come by; informed opinions are much more difficult to find.

To express an informed opinion means that you have explored the subject, examined differents points of view, evaluated the supporting reasons and evidence, and synthesized your analysis into a cogent and compelling conclusion.

John Chaffee, The Thinker's Way.

Difficult things - Seneca

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.

Wise man, common man - Confucius

A common man marvels at uncommon things; a wise man marvels at the commonplace.

How we become individuals: Plasticity Hipothesis - Santiago Ramón y Cajal

Chemical synapses often have a remarkable capacity for short-term physiological changes (lasting hours) that increase or decrease the efectiveness of the synapse. Long-term changes (lasting days) can give rise to further physiological changes that lead to anatomical changes, including prunning of preexisting connections, and even growth of new connections.
...

Chemical synapses can be modified functionally and anatomically during development and regeneration, and, most importantly, through experience and and learning.
...

It is this potential for plasticity of the relatively stereotyped units of the nervous system that endows each of us with our individuality.

From neurons to brain - Eric Kandel

As far as we kown, no complex human behavior is initiated by a single neuron ... each behavior is generated by the action of many cells.
...

What makes the brain a remarkable information processing machine is not the complexity of its neurons, but rather its many elements and, in particular, the complexity of connections between them.
...

Specific types of information are processed in particular regions ... information from each of our senses is mapped to distinct brain regions ... These maps are the first stage in creating a representations of the outside world in our brain.
...

Connections between motor, sensory and interneuronal maps are established as the brain develops and determine the behavior of individual cells.
...

The logical operations of a mental representation can be understood only by defining the flow of information through connections between maps.
...

What makes the brain a remarkable information processing machine is not the complexity of its neurons, but rather its many elements and, in particular, the complexity of connections between them.

Principles of Neural Science, p. 33-34

The functional organization of the nervous system is simple - Eric Kandel

Although the anatomy of the brain and the pattern of its interconnections appear complex, the functional organization of the nervous system is governed by a relatively simple set of principles that make the many details of brain anatomy comprensible.

Principles of Neural Science, p. 319

What is Cognition? - Ulrich Neisser

Whatever we know about reality has been mediated not only by the organs of sense but by complex systems which interpret and reinterpret sensory information ... The term "cognition" refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered and used.

Ulrich Neisser, 1967

Cellular aproach to cognition not enough - Eric Kandel

To understand how people tink, behave, feel and act, a cellular approach is necessary but not sufficient. It is also essential to understand how the integrative action of the brain - the simultaneous activity of discrete sets of neurons - produces cognition ... Peception is a constructive process that depends not only of the information inherent in a stimulus but also on the mental structure of the perceiver ... Cognitive psycology is concerned not simply with specifying the input-output for a particular behaviour, but also analyzing the process by which sensory information es transformed into perception and action, i.e. how a stimulus leads to a particular behavioral response.

The brain produces an integrated perception because nerve cells are wired together in precise and orderly ways according to a general plan that does not vary greatly among individuals ... connections can be altered by activity and by learning. We remenber specific events because the strucutre and function of the connections between nerve cell are modified by those events.

Principles of Neural Science, p. 382

Behaviourism - Eric Kandel

Behaviorists, notably J. B. Watson and B. F. Skinner, argued that behaviour could be studied with the same precision achieved in the physical sciences but only if students of behaviour abandoned speculation about what goes on in the mind (the brain) and focused instead on observable aspects of behaviour.

For behaviorists, unobservable mental processes, specially anything as abstract as conscious awareness was deemed inaccessible to scientific study ... Their early successes in rigorously studying simple forms of behaviour and learning encouraged them to consider irrelevant to a scientific study of behavior the processes that intervene between stimulus and behavior.

Cognitive Neural Science - Eric Kandel

The study of normal mental activity was a subfield of philosophy until the end of the XIX century. Cognitive neural science is an integrative approach to the study of mental activity that emerged from five major technical and conceptual developments after 1960-70:

1. Study of the activity of single cells in primates.
2. Cellular studies in monkeys correlating patterns of firing of individual cells in specific brain regions to higher cognitive processes.
3. Behavioral analysis of patients with lesions of the brain that interface with mental functioning.
4. New radiological imaging techniques, PET (Positron emission tomography) and RMI (Magnetic Ressonance).
5. Computers have made it possible to model the activity of large populations of neurons and to begin to test ideas of the role of specific components of the brain in particular behaviors.

Primary Causes - Joseph Fourier

Primary causes are unknown to us; but are subject to simple and constant laws, which may be discovered by observation, the subject of them beign the object of natural philosophy.

The Analytical Theory of Heat

Patriotism - George Bernard Shaw

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.

Ambiguedad y Coherencia - Guillermo de la Dehesa

El comunicado del G7 es ambiguo pero coherente.

Ambiguo: Se aplica a lo que puede admitir más de una interpretación y por tanto carece de precisión.

Coherente: Cosas o partes que se relacionan unas con otras de modo que constituyen un conjunto con unidad y sin contradicciones.

Callarse en una reunión - Groucho Marx

En una reunión es mejor quedarse callado y parecer tonto que abrir la boca y despejar las dudas.

Democracy as a slogan - Zbigniev Brezezinski

Democracy riaght now is a slogan. Probably worse than that, it is a deceptive device to justify post-ponement of the peace process. And that will have damaging consequences to our position in Iraq and with the arab world.

Zbigniev Brezezinski, 22 Feb. 2004

Tres grandes objetivos geoestratégicos - Brezezinski

Nuestros tres grandes objetivos geoestratégicos son: evitar colisiones entre vasallos y mantener a éstos en estado de dependencia, cultivar la docilidad de los súbditos objeto de protección, e impedir que los bárbaros configuren alianzas ofensivas.

Paying for Gulf Wars - Robert C. Byrd

In sharp contrast to the 1991 Persian Gulf war, where our allies contributed $54 billion of te $61 billion cost of that war, the American taxpayer is virtually alone in bearing the burden for the staggering cost of this most recent war in Iraq.

Senator Robert C. Byrd

Authorizing a powerful State - Noam Chomsky

A powerful state does not want authorization because that weakens its power. If you have to have authorization form someone you are not powerful enough to do anything you choose. The same reason why the Mafia Don doesn't want a court order.

Distorted Morality, Q&A, DVD

No scarcity of oil supplies before 2025 - Shell 2001

A scarcity of oil supplies - including unconventional sources and NGLs - is very unlikely before 2025. This could be extended to 2040 by adopting known measures to increase vehicle efficiency and focusing oil demand on this sector.

Technology improvements are likely to outpace rising depletion costs for at least the next decade, keeping new supplies below 20$ per barrel. The cost of biofuels and gas to liquids should both fall well below 20$ per barrel of oil equivalent over the next two decades, constraining oil prices.

Shell International, Energy Needs, Choices and Possibilities, Scenarios 2050, written in 2001

Precautionary Principle - United Nations

Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.

Safe until proven harmful and harmful until proven safe have significantly different implications in the face of inconclusive data.

Vivre Simplement - Mahatma Gandhi

Vivre simplement, pour que simplement d'autre puissent vivre.

Saddam Hussein Ambition - Dick Cheney

Should all [of Hussein's WMD] ambitions be realized, the implications would be enormous for the Middle East and the US. Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror and a seat atop 10% of the world's oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world's energy supply, directly threaten America's friends throught the region, and subject the US or any other antion to nuclear blackmail.

Specch to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, August 2002

Objective in the Middle East - Paul Wolfowitz

In the Middle East and Southwest Asia our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve US and western access to the region's oil.

Defense Planning Guidance for Fiscal 1994-99, writen Feb. 1992

Economists Role in Society - Jay Janson

The economists serve no funtion in society, except to protect the ruling elites from public scrutiny while they loot the planet.

You Win - Gandhi

First they ignore you, then they laught at you, then they fight you. Then you win.

Ivory Tower - Gustave Flaubert

I have always tried to live in an ivory tower but a tide of shit is beating its walls, threatening to undermine it.

Oil and Foreign Policy - Bill Richardson

Oil has literally made foreign and security policy for decades. Just since the turn of this century, it has provoked the division of the Middle East after World War I ; aroused Germany and Japan to extend their tentacles beyond their borders; the Arab oil embargo; Iran versus Iraq; the Gulf War. This is all clear.

Bill Richardson, Secretary of Energy, Dec. 9, 1999

The Bubble of American Supremacy - George Soros

"The great struggles of the twentieth centurt between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom - and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy and free enterprise".

2002 National Security Startegy USA

The assumptions behind this statement are false on two counts. First, there is no single sustainable model for national success. Second, the American model, which has indeed been succesful, is not available to others, because our success depends greatly on our dominant position at the center of the global capitalist system, and we are not willing to yield it.

The Bubble of American Supremacy, The Athlantic Monthly, Dec. 2003

Energy as a Precondition - Jay Hanson

Although economists treat energy like any other resource, it's not like any other resource. Available energy is the precondition for all resources - including more available energy.

Jay Hanson

La Mitología del Crecimiento - José Manuel Naredo

Las reglas del juego económico habitual, acordes con el universalismo capitalista que nos invade, consideran los costes de extracción de los recursos naturales, pero no los de reposición, y cifran el progreso en términos de crecimiento de la población y los consumos. Este enfoque, además de alimentar la mitología del crecimiento, provilegia la extracción frente al reciclaje y la energia fósil frente a la renovable, provocando así el deterioro planetario a base de forzar la escasez de recursos y el exceso de residuos.

Tal modelo sólo seria viable si contara con recursos y sumideros infinitos, de ahí que sus beneficiarios y propagandistas sean poco proclives a hablar de límites. Y de ahí que baste recordar la finitud del territorio planetario y de los recursos que alberga, para concluir que dicho modelo provoca una degradación progresiva que lo hace inviable a largo plazo.

Prólogo a Gente que no quiere viajar a Marte, Jorge Reichmann

La libertad de los liberales - José Manuel Naredo

Una ideología justificatoria del status quo que promete a los fuertes libertad en el ejercicio de su fuerza y a los débiles la posibilidad de hacerse fuertes, o al menos de emular a través del consumo los patrones de vida de éstos.

Prólogo a Gente que no quiere viajar a Marte, Jorge Reichmann

Truth and Victory - Adolf Hitler

The vistor will not be asked, later on, whether he told the truth or not in starting and waging a war. It is not right that matters but victory. Have no pity.

The Arrogance of Humanism - David Ehrenfeld

• All problems are soluble by people
• Many problems are soluble by technology
• Those problems that are not soluble by technology alone, have solutions in the social world (politics, economics)
• When the chips are down, we will apply ourselves and work together for a solution before it is too late
• Some resources are infinite; all finite or limited resources have substitutes
• Human civilization will survive

The Arrogance of Humanism, Oxford University Press, 1982

A World of My Own - Lewis Carroll

Alice: If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrariwise, what it is, it wouldn’t be, and what it wouldn’t be, it would.

Lewis Carroll, Alice Adventures in Wonderland, 1866

Trained dogs - George Orwell

Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks the whip. But the really well-trained dog is the one that turns somersaults when there is no whip.

State and Public Opinion - Joseph Goebbels

It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.
....

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.
....

The lie can be mantained only for such time as the State can shield the people form the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

Truths and Blasphemies - George Bernard Shaw

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

George Bernard Shaw

Globalization as Ideology - Clive Hamilton

At its heart, globalization is not so much about the deepening of global economic and financial networks or the extension of the international reach of corporations; it is about the restless spread of the ideology of growth and consumer capitalism. The instrumental processes of globalization—the opening up of trade, the emergent power of financial markets, the transnationalisation of corporations, and international economic coordination—are the mechanisms by which a historically and culturally specific ideology, constituted as an independent force, has spread and colonised the world, including the “communist” world. While the motive force is the accumulation of wealth through profit seeking, the ideology draws its legitimacy from the core belief that human well beign is advanced above all else by increasing the quantity and quality of goods and services consumed by individuals.

Paralell with this formal set of beliefs are cultural forms of behaviour that place enormous emphasis on consumption as the foundation of lifestyle. This is why there has been so little resistance to globalisation: people from Beijing to Berlin, Boston to Beirut, have been persuaded by the ideology of consumer capitalism, that economic growth is the path to happiness and that unfettered markets will maximise that growth.

In other words, globalisation has succeded because people are besotted by consumption.

Clive Hamilton, Growth Fetish, Pluto Press, 2004, p. 119

The Environment in the Ideology of Growth and Consumption - Clive Hamilton

Belief in the power of growth and consumption is buttressed by an instrumentalist attitude to the natural world, an attitude in which the environment is characterised as providing “resources” that have value only because, and to the extent that, they contribute to human welfare as measured through market activity. This ideology conceives of the natural world as a more or less infinite source of material inputs into the production process and a more or less infinite sink for absorbing wastes, so that exploitation of it is not only a right but almost a duty.
This reflects an approach to Nature whose genesis lie deep in the cultural roots of Western Society, streching back at least as far as the foundations of Christianity.

Clive Hamilton, Grothw Fetish, Pluto Press, 2004, p.120

Politics as Marketing - Clive Hamilton

Faced with the increasingly untenable nature of socialism and state ownership in the post-war period, and the absence of any coherent alternative (...) many of the most influential social democrats just surrendered (...) Blair’s New Labor [was] Thatcher’s greatest triumph ...
The gap between the conservative and social democratic parties became one of product diferentiation rather than ideology and, just as product differentiation and brand loyalty are marketing concepts, so political parties began to hire marketing specialists to help them sell their messages. In the same way that clever marketing is required to persuade sceptical consumers that one brand of soap powder is radically different from other virtually identical brands, so political parties now hire experts to persuade sceptical voters that one party is radically different from its oponent.

Clive Hamilton, Growth Fetish, Pluto Press, 2004, p. 131-2

Believing Untruths - George Orwell

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

George Orwell, In Front of Your Nose, 1946

The Ideology of Development - C. Douglas Lummis

The ideology of development has been immensely succesful, not in actually raising the poor people of the world to the level of “ultimate prosperity” but in convincing milions that this is what capitalist activities in the Third World are intended to do. Under this ideology was launched the most massive systematic project of human exploitation, and the most massive assault on culture and nature which history has ever known. It was the extraordinary achievement of the development ideology to render the imperialism of the countries and corporations carrying out this project an arguable question. It has enabled development economists to write about all of this without using any of the old vocabulary of colonialism and imperialism, as if they not only no longer exist but never did, or if they did, didn’t matter.

C. Douglas Lummis, Radical Democracy, Cornell University Press, 1996, p.60

First Reference to Undervelopment - Harry Truman

We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.

Harry S. Truman, 20/1/1949

Zero Growth Economy - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Society must cease to look upon “progress” as something desirable. “Eternal Progress” is a non-sensical myth. What must be implemented is not a “steadily expanding economy”, but a zero growth economy, a stable economy. Economic growth is not only unnecessary but ruinous.

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, 1974

Mathematics and Economics - Norbert Wiener

The success of mathematical physics led the social scientists to be jealous of its power without quite understanding the intellectual attitudes that had contributed to this power. The use of mathematical formulae had accompanied the development of the natural sciences and become the mode in the social sciences. Just as primitive people adopt Western modes of denationalized clothing and of parlamentarism out of a vague feeling that these magic rites and vestments will at once put them abreast of modern culture and technique, so the economists have developed the habit of dressing up their rather imprecise ideas in the language of the infinitesimal calculus ... To assign what purpots to be precise values to such essentially vague quantities is neither useful nor honest, and any pretense of applying precise formulae to those loosely defined quantities is a sham and a waste of time.

Norbert Wiener, God&Golem, 1964, p.89

On Malthus's Theory and Prejudices - Daniel Raymond

Although his [Malthus’s] theory is founded upon the principles of nature, and although it is impossible to discover any flaws in his reasoning, yet the mind instinctively revolts at the conclusions to which he conducts us, and we are disposed to reject the theory, even though we could give no reason.

Daniel Raymond, Thoughts on Political Economy, 1820 cited by H.E. Daly in Steady State Economics, Preface 2nd ed., Island Press, 1991

Post-This-or-That - Noam Chomsky

Quite regularly, “my eyes glaze over” when I read polysyllabic discourse on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernism; what I understand is largely truism or error, but that is only a fraction of the total word count. True, there are lots of other things I don’t understand: math and physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the later case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want. In contrast, no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error or gibberish, and I do not know how to proceed. Perhaps the explanation lies in some personal inadequacy, like tone-deafness. Or they may be other reasons.

Noam Chomsky, Racionality/Science and Post-This-or That, 1992 Included in Chomsky on Democracy and Education, p.93

The Capacity for Understanding - Noam Chomsky

The capacity for understanding in the “profoundest sciences” and “high feeling” are a common human attribute, and those who lack the opportunity to exercise the capacity to inquire, create, and understand are missing out on some of life’s most wonderful experiences.

Noam Chomsky, Racionality/Science and Post-This-or That, 1992 Included in Chomsky on Democracy and Education, 2003, p.93

Stopping a Powerful State - Noam Chomsky

The only place where a powerful state can be stopped is within.

Noam Chomsky, Distorted Morality, DVD, 2003

War for $20 a Barrell of Oil - Rupert Murdoch

The greatest thing to come out of this [war on Iraq] for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be a $20 a barrell of oil.

Rupert Murdoch cited by Paul Krugman, The Oil Crunch, NYT, May 7, 2004

"Given the choice, it's better to be viewed as a foot soldier for Bush than a spokeswoman for al-Qaeda." Said Murdoch of the war, "The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil. That's bigger than any tax cut in any country."

Informed Content, Juan Cole, October 24, 2005

Marx on Development - Karl Marx

The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.

Karl Marx, Preface to Capital

The Satisfied Nations of the World - Winston Churchill

The government of the world must be entrusted to satisfied nations, who wished nothing more for themselves than what they had. If the world government were in the hands of hungry nations, there would always be danger. But none of us had any reason to seek for anything more. The peace would be kept by people who lived in their own way and were not ambitious. Our power placed us above the rest. We were like rich men dwelling at peace within their habitations.

Winston Churchill, The Second World War, 1951, vol 5, p.382

Oil and the Arabs - Henry Kissinger

Oil is too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the arabs.

Henry Kissinger, US Secretary of State under Nixon and Ford

And human life is too important to be left in the hands of the americans.

George Shrub

Our Declared Objective: to Overthrow Saddam - Henry Kissinger

We need to rebuild confidence in our purposes and capabilities in the Gulf. We must define a policy toward Iraq that relates our declared objective of overthrowing Saddam to our equally explicit commitment to the territorial integrity of the country. We must relate our policy of isolating Iran to our European allies’ reluctance to follow such a course.

Henry Kissinger, New York Post, 10/9/96

Facts are Facts - Aldous Huxley

Facts do not cease to be facts simply because they are ignored.

Aldous Huxley

Growth & Economists - Kenneth Boulding

Anybody who believes that exponential growth can go on forever is either a mad man or an economist.

Kenneth Boulding

Money and Energy - Howard Odum

Even a child can understand that machines do not run on money ... they run on energy, and available energy is a prerrequisite for producing more energy.

Howard T. Odum, Environmental Accounting

Economy and Politics - Hazel Henderson

The problem is, of course, that not only is economics bankrupt but it has always been nothing more than politics in disguise ... economics is a form of brain damage.

Hazel Henderson

Oil and Gas are not Essential - Samuelson&Nordhaus

Should we be taking steps to limit the use of these most precious stocks of society’s capital so that they will still be available for our grand children? ... Economists ask, would future generations benefit more from larger stocks of natural capital such as oil, gas and coal, or from more produced capital such as additional scientists, better laboratories and libraries linked together by information highways? ... In the long run, oil and gas are not essential.

Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus