Chris > Chris's Quotes

“protected businesses never, never become competitive ... Halliburton, Bechtel, Parsons, KPMG, RTI, Blackwater and all other U.S. corporations that were in Iraq to take advantage of the reconstruction were part of a vast protectionist racket whereby the U.S. government had created their markets with war, barred their competitors from even entering the race, then paid them to do the work, while guaranteeing them a profit to boot - all at taxpayer expense.”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“A UN passport is the most beautiful thing that humanity has ever conceived. No colour, no affiliation, no religion, one planet, one world...In the document, only my name, date of birth and job appeared. Nothing else. Not the colour of my hair, or my country of origin. From now on my country was called Earth. I was a citizen of the world.”
― Marc Vachon, Rebel Without Borders: Frontline Missions in Africa and the Gulf

“But the average Kabuli was prepared to sacrifice some liberty for greater security and a measure of dignity. That's what the Taliban promised. It's only afterwards that they went off the rails. It's when they went too far that they became unpopular, held in contempt.”
― Marc Vachon, Rebel Without Borders: Frontline Missions in Africa and the Gulf

“The misery is what should concern us: the death, rage and distress of others always comes back to haunt us. Especially when the tragedies are partially due to our own actions, policies and erroneous vision of the planet. September 11 happens and we are surprised to learn that there are people who hate us. Even then ,we mourn the 3,000 deaths without a thought for the victims our government has left all over the world because of our evil and immoral politics.”
― Marc Vachon, Rebel Without Borders: Frontline Missions in Africa and the Gulf

“Today humanitarianism is in search of an identity, especially after the war in Iraq. In a perfect world, humanitarianism would not exist. People wouldn't die of thirst or starvation. So humanitarian activity is in itself an admission of failure.”
― Marc Vachon, Rebel Without Borders: Frontline Missions in Africa and the Gulf

“Republicans always play the same game. They are for big business and money interests...We know from long experience that the people are better served by Democratic public officials, and we are letting the people down when we permit factional fighting to put Republicans in office.”
― Marc Sandalow, Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi's Life, Times, and Rise to Power

“There obviously has been a brainwashing in this country of what power should look like.”
― Marc Sandalow, Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi's Life, Times, and Rise to Power

“And she made it clear that her position was not based on political calculations, decrying the China policy of her own party's president as "dictated by US businesses."
That's why the president changed his view. Because big business weighed in," she said. " They have enormous resources. They are willing to spend an unlimited amount. And the money not only speaks, the money rules.”
― Marc Sandalow, Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi's Life, Times, and Rise to Power

“People come from all over the world to see what's happening in our area, to see the speed with which our technology is changing and what that means in terms of the economy and education, and that whole entrepreneurial spirit comes over to protecting the environment and dealing with education and other issues - just solving problems.
Then you come back here [Washington D.C.] and you're engaged in debates based on old, stale assumptions. It's practically irrelevant to what is going on in the state...It's a state of mind that exists in our area that has to be represented at the table.”
― Marc Sandalow, Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi's Life, Times, and Rise to Power

“...nothing in my experience would have prepared me for the lengths that [Republicans] will go to undermine opportunity in our country.”
― Marc Sandalow, Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi's Life, Times, and Rise to Power

“The bigger story was competition causing more productive business enterprises to replace less productive ones...However, it provides even more reason to worry about all the people living in economies where protection and distortion of competition allow unproductive enterprises to persist and cause these people to fall further behind, but even more importantly, to remain in poverty.”
― William W. Lewis, The Power of Productivity: Wealth, Poverty, and the Threat to Global Stability

“...education is not the way out of the poverty trap. A high education level is no guarantee of high productivity. The truth of the matter is that regardless of institutional education level, workers around the world can be adequately trained on the job for high productivity.”
― William W. Lewis, The Power of Productivity: Wealth, Poverty, and the Threat to Global Stability

“One of the crucial traits of real leaders in a democracy is the ability to help people become better informed so that society can make better choices.”
― William W. Lewis, The Power of Productivity: Wealth, Poverty, and the Threat to Global Stability

“Even the highest compensation is a tiny fraction of the value created by many business and technical innovations. The problem with executive compensation in the United States is not with this idea. The problem is that in many cases the high compensation levels persist even when innovations do not occur and reactions to the innovations of others are slow.”
― William W. Lewis, The Power of Productivity: Wealth, Poverty, and the Threat to Global Stability

“...the road, rail, and port systems are so bad that poor countries cannot develop the scale of operations necessary to achieve high productivity.”
― William W. Lewis, The Power of Productivity: Wealth, Poverty, and the Threat to Global Stability

“...the special interests are almost everybody. Everybody perceives they stand to lose if the economy is allowed to evolve. They are right if their special-interest favoritism is the only favoritism that is fixed. The result...is that nobody is giving up their favoritism. In these circumstances everybody loses...”
― William W. Lewis, The Power of Productivity: Wealth, Poverty, and the Threat to Global Stability

“The only long-term, high-confidence strategy for the world not to be overwhelmed by terrorism is for economic development to go so well that terrorists have no place to incubate or hide...Perhaps the easy step is for the United States to give recognition to poor countries that make the needed changes by themselves. Thus part of the U.S. strategy for global economic development should be "inclusion", rather than the "preemption" and "intervention" of the fight against terrorism.”
― William W. Lewis, The Power of Productivity: Wealth, Poverty, and the Threat to Global Stability

“People in their right minds never take pride in their talents.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions... but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“The story of the many oppressed peoples of the world is rarely recorded by the few who oppress. We are taught that the truth is objective fact as written down by the conquerors.”
― Dahr Jamail, Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq

“The theory of economic shock therapy relies in part on the roleof expectations on feeding an inflationary process. Reining in inflation requires not only changing monetary policy but also changing the behavior of consumers, employers and workers. The role of a sudden, jarring policy shift is that it quickly alters expectations, signaling to the public that the rules of the game have changed dramatically - prices will not keep rising, nor will wages. ”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“The widespread abuse...is a virtually foolproof indication that politicians are trying to impose a system - whether political , religious or economic - that is rejected by large numbers of the people they are ruling...an indicator of a regime that is engaged in a deeply anti-democratic project, even if that regime happens to have come to power through elections.”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“It (the Chinese move to embrace capitalism in 1989) is a mirror of the corporatist state first pioneered in Chile under Pinochet: a revolving door between corporate and political elites who combine their power to eliminate workers as an organized political force. The creation of today's market society was not the result of a sequence of spontaneous events but rather of state interference and violence.”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“... freedom translates into having a supply of clean water, having electricity on tap; being able to live in a decent home and have a good job; to be able to send your children to school and to have accessible healthcare. I mean what's the point of having made this transition if the quality of life ... is not enhanced and improved? If not, the vote is useless.”
― Desmond Tutu

“What we have been living for three decades is frontier capitalism, with the frontier constantly shifting location from crisis to crisis, moving on as soon as the law catches up. ”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“...while the IMF certainly failed the people of Asia, it did not fail Wall Street - far from it. The hot money may have been spooked by the IMF's drastic measures, but the large investment houses and multinational firms were emboldened...These fun-seeking firms understood that as a result of the IMF's "adjustments," pretty much everything in Asia was now up for sale - and the more the market panicked, the more desperate Asian companies would be to sell, pushing their prices through the floor.”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“By the time the think-tank lifers arrived in Baghdad, the crucial roles in the reconstruction had already been outsourced to Halliburton and KPMG. THeir job as the public servants was simply to administer the petty cash, which in Iraq took the form of handling shrink-wrapped bricks of hundred-dollar bills to contractors. It was a graphic glimpse into the acceptable role of government in a corporatist state - to act as a conveyor belt for getting public money into private hands, a job for which ideological commitment is far more relevant than elaborate field experience.”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“Regardless of the overall state of the economy, there is now a large enough elite made up of new multi-millionaires and billionaires for Wall Street to see the group as "superconsumers," able to carry consumer demand all on their own.”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“We have got to find a a new plan of attacking it. Something that will show clearly not only the magnitude of the industries and commercial developments, and the changes they have brought in various parts of the country, but something which will make clear the great principles by which industrial leaders are combining and controlling these resources. ”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“Oil men, like producers of other raw materials, could not continue to sell their products below cost...For prices to be raised, production had to be controlled, and to bring production under control, Ickes began with an all-out campaign against the "hot oiler,"...This bootleg oil was secretly siphoned off from pipelines, hidden in camouflaged tanks that were covered with weeds, moved about both in an intrcate network of secret pipelines and by trucks, and then smuggled across state borders at night.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power