Vulture Capitalism Quotes

“The greatest barrier to the emergence and spread of these movements is not the overwhelming power of capital. It is the conviction, held by millions of people, that change is impossible. The moment we let go of our collective belief in the inevitability of the current system is the moment we start to build a new one.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“The work of a revolutionary is more like that of a gardener than a builder. The new world will not be brought about overnight - its seeds have to be planted, nurtured, and protected.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“In a truly free-market society, pervasive private power of the kind exposed in the last several chapters should not exist. All capitalist institutions should be-to a greater or lesser extent-subject to the overwhelming power of the market mechanism. Instead, we find a world in which private institutions are able to dominate and control markets, while also dominating and controlling workers and manipulating entire states. Capitalism means rule by capital-not free markets.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“If capitalism is not defined by the presence or absence of markets, but by the domination of society by capital, then socialism is not defined by the presence or absence of planning, but by the democratization of society. Rather than a system of top-down control, true democratic socialism would be a project of collective liberation, which would allow workers to take control over production and citizens to take control over government.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“Estimates suggest that $7.6 trillion of wealth is hidden in tax havens all over the world. The international finance sector acts as a 'circulation system for criminal money acquired through drug trafficking, terrorism, piracy, human trafficking, proliferation and tax evasion.'

When we look at the international financial system, we don't find a free-market paradise. Instead, we find incredibly powerful institutions in both the public and private sector shaping the conditions faced by everyone else. Financial institutions 'dress themselves up in liberal trappings of the market, yet capture the old sovereignty of the state all the better to squeeze the social body to feed their own profits.'

Yet all this power is held without any democratic accountability. Politicians, technocrats, and financiers work together to decide everything from the interest rates we pay on our loans to who gets what when a state files for bankruptcy. If everyone had a say in determining how these rules were made and enforced, rather than just a privileged few, we'd live in a very different world.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“Democracy and decarbonization are often seen as enemies. Democratic processes are slow, and time is running out. But unless we are able to democratize our society, political and economic decision-making processes will continue to be dominated by those who have helped to cause climate breakdown up to now.

We cannot rely on the hope that the powerful will suddenly realize the need to tackle climate breakdown and take appropriate action. Even if they do realize in time, they will seek to protect their interests at the expense of the general interest. It is not hard to envisage a world in which wealthy nations respond to climate breakdown by building walls to keep at bay those displaced by rising temperatures.

Much like the separation between states and markets, the separation between man and nature is a liberal myth. Humanity is a part of nature. The fight against climate breakdown is not a fight to save "the planet"- the planet will continue to exist long after it is rendered uninhabitable for humans. The fight against climate breakdown is a fight to protect human life on earth. And that fight cannot be won by sacrificing millions of lives or the freedoms that make life worth living. But if we continue to allow the response to climate breakdown to be shaped solely by the powerful, this is the kind of "solution" we will get.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“We do not have to live in a society defined by such extreme inequalities of wealth and power. We do not have to spend the rest of our lives dealing with feelings of hopelessness and despair. We do not have to live in a world that is so unfree. We have only to peer through the cracks already emerging within capitalism to catch a glimpse of the real freedom that awaits on the other side.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“The work of a revolutionary is more like that of a gardener than a builder. The new world will not be brought about overnight - its seeds have to be planted, nurtured, and protected.

As we have seen, there already exist plenty of spaces in which people are working to build alternatives to the current system - despite resistance from those who benefit from the status quo. Even though both failed, the Lucas Plan and Project Cybersyn were two of the most ambitious examples of such work. Both took place during a period when it had begun to seem as though capitalist social relations might not last forever - when working people began to realize that the only thing standing between them and self-governance, between them and real freedom, was capital itself.

It is up to us to continue the legacy of those projects, to peer through the fissures that exist within the current system and work together to prize them open, to let the light in. For us, the rewards are less concrete than those won by the early capitalists. They are rewards that accrue to all, not just to a privileged few: the protection of the planet we rely on to survive, an end to the psychic trauma of living in a world marked by such deep and pervasive suffering and alienation, and a world in which every human being has the chance to flourish into their fullest selves.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“But wherever there is power, there is resistance. People always find ways to resist attempts to control their behavior and exercise their autonomy. Time and time again throughout history, people have demonstrated their extraordinary capacities to cooperate in pursuit of a higher purpose. And it is through these examples of resistance and solidarity that we can find the springs of a new world order emerging.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“And indeed, much of the evidence presented in this book so far would appear to confirm this. From the Boeing executives who built faulty planes, to the Goldman Sachs analysts who lied to their clients before being bailed out by the taxpayer, the capitalist class seems to provide the best evidence that society is made up of innately selfish individuals whose cooperative impulses extend, at best, to their immediate family and friends.

But this view is highly one-sided. As we will see in this chapter, people are capable of amazing feats of ingenuity, compassion, and cooperation -even in a social order as brutal and competitive as our own. Capitalism, of course, rewards the opposite behavior: ruthlessness, competitiveness, and self-interest. No wonder these are the behaviors we see most prominently on display at the top of our society.

And those at the top are precisely those who benefit from the belief that everyone is just like them. You don't have to look particularly hard to find the view of humanity as inherently selfish repeated by those in positions of authority. The managers at Lucas Aerospace certainly shared this view. And it is no coincidence that Golding was a schoolmaster -he was probably quite used to being disobeyed by his students, and likely saw this as an indication of man's inherent selfishness.

But disobedience to authority is not an indication of selfishness; it's an assertion of an individual's autonomy. In fact, the willingness to disobey is precisely what separates genuinely civilized societies from barbarous ones. One only has to listen to the testimony at the Nuremberg trials to see what can happen when people unquestionably obey their superiors.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“We have continued to frame our politics in such a self-defeating terms simply because these are the only ones that make sense to us. Capitalism, according to common understanding, means free markets, and socialism means state central planning. If you want more socialism, you have to add more state, and if you want more capitalism, you need to extend markets. Yet the defining feature of capitalism is not the presence or absence of 'free markets', any more than the defining feature of socialism is the centralized planning of the economy. Markets existed long before the emergence of capitalism, and state planning existed long before the emergence of socialism.

Aside from the fact that it's wrong and it doesn't work, there's an even more fundamental reason to avoid pitching leftist politics as one of the state versus market: it's disempowering. There is a big difference between approaching people with an offer of protection and approaching them with an offer of empowerment. The former encourages people to alienate their sense of political agency to a group of unaccountable representatives and bureaucrats who, at best, pay attention to their needs only once every four years. When these electoral promises are broken, people fall into despair and disillusionment, often giving up on politics altogether because 'politicians are all the same.'

But when we frame our political project in terms of collective empowerment, we show that politics can't be reduced to elections -it's something we all do every day. Organizing with your colleagues to demand higher wages is politics, protesting climate breakdown in politics, even fighting alongside your neighbors to keep your local library open is politics. Socialism should not be based on asking people to trust politicians -it should be based on asking people to trust each other.

The significance of the Lucas Plan is that it showed in very concrete terms exactly how people could work together to build a better world. People do not need to surrender their power to state institutions that can control and protect them. Nor do they need to surrender control to a market that is dominated by the powerful. Instead, we can work together to create the kind of world we want to live in. In place of domination, we can build society based on cocreation. In this chapter, we'll look at then real-world examples of attempts to do just this.

Such a perspective might sound naive to those who are convinced that humans are naturally competitive beasts who need to be tamed by authoritarian social institutions. Liberal philosophy stretching all the way back to Hobbes has been grounded on the premise that without an all-powerful sovereign to control their competitive instincts, people would tear each other apart. There's just one problem with this argument: it's demonstrably untrue.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“Where the workers behind the Lucas Plan had laid the foundations for the development of an economy that respected the dignity, creativity, and autonomy of workers, Thatcher used her control over the state to ruthlessly reassert the power of capital over labor. Cloaking her project in the language of freedom and autonomy, she crushed one of the most innovative and ingenious examples of democratic production on the world had ever seen. The success of the neoliberal movement ensured that 'individualized consumerism rather than collective services and a democratized state and economy became the main legacy of working-class struggles during the twentieth century.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“The Lucas Plan was an extraordinarily ambitious document that challenged the foundations of capitalism. In place of an institution designed to generate profits via the domination of labor by capital, the workers at Lucas Aerospace had developed an entirely new model for the firm -one based on the democratic production of socially useful commodities. It was almost as if the workers had never needed managing at all, as though they were creative architects rather than obedient bees.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“Whether through the secretive system of international courts, international institutions that exploit crises to force neoliberal policies on poor states, or a financial system designed to discipline disobedient governments into submission, the international rules-based system restricts and undermines development. This is not a problem for the businesses that profit from the exploitation of poor countries and their people. In fact, were it not for these inequalities between the rich and the poor worlds, global capitalism could not exist.

Empire is, in this sense, about more than formal colonization -it refers to all the ways in which the world's most powerful countries and the international institutions they dominate plan economic activity at the level of the global economy. The international financial system was constructed and designed quite self-consciously by neoliberals who, while claiming to abhor planning of any kind, were quite happy to support planning that protected the interests of capitalists in the rich world.

But maybe the neoliberals were not being completely cynical when they claimed to champion the ideals of freedom and democracy. Maybe they just thought these things should only even be available to people like them.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“The neoliberals have always portrayed their proposals as attempts to embed freedom and liberal democracy. And yet, when people have not chosen the right outcome, neoliberal policies have been forced upon them anyways. The divide between authoritarian statist societies and democratic market ones, which was emphasized by thinkers like Hayek, turns out not to be much of a divide at all. Whether by frustrating democracy, or by supporting authoritarianism, capital tends to find a way to bend the state - and the market- to its will.

In fact, all over the world, neoliberal thinkers have supported authoritarian regimes in the name of 'freedom”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“The strategies used in Indonesia were replicated in socialist states all over the world, with the active or passive support of the United States. From Brazil to Chile, anti-communists began talking openly about their own 'Jakarta plans.' Bevins is clear about what this meant: 'the state-organized extermination of civilians who opposed the construction of capitalist authoritarian regimes loyal to the United States.' The next testing ground for the Jakarta Method would be Latin America, where hundreds of thousands of people would be killed or 'disappeared' in the name of anti-communism over the subsequent decades.

At home, the US government justified these actions -where they were revealed to the public- by claiming that it was acting to protect 'freedom' by ridding the world of the communist threat. The actions taken to promote this 'freedom' often involved literally exterminating communists and socialists who dared resist the power of the world's foremost empire. One historian found that the number of victims of US-backed violence in Latin America 'vastly exceeded' the number of people killed in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc over the same period.

Why did the world's foremost imperial power find it necessary to unleash such extreme violence on some of the poorest people on the planet? To protect the structure of the capitalist world system. had states in the Global South been allowed to band together, resist the power of the rich world, and forge their own development paths, these countries would have been far harder to exploit. The rich world needed the poor countries to remain scattered and underdeveloped global capitalism could not function were they to unite.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“The neoliberal project, at the global level, was about 'encasing the rules that protected capital - even if that meant sacraficing the thing neoliberals claimed to value most: freedom.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“the neoliberal state is not smaller than the Keynesian state; it is simply dominated by the interest of one class.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“In fact, capitalism isn't defined by free markets. It's defined by the domination of society by capital.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“Today, there are plenty of examples of working people coming together to build real democracy from the ground up -often in extraordinarily difficult conditions and facing extremely powerful vested interests. The fact that many of these experiments have succeeded should provide some evidence that we have not exhausted all possible forms of social organization. And the fact that the powerful were so intent upon crushing movements like those led by Salvador Allende should be proof enough that, when undertaken at scale, they have the power to subvert and even uproot capitalism itself.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“We may think the world in which we live is unchangeable, and therefore believe it makes more sense to submit than to fight back. Free-market capitalism might not be the best system in the world, but it's better than all the others we've ever tried.

Such thinking is based on the arrogant and implausible assumption that all possible ways of organizing society have - at this particular point in time- already been put to the test. When you look at the history of the world, it becomes quite clear that the ideals of democracy and socialism -as articulated by liberals and socialists- have never really been put into practice. True political and economic democracy has always and consistently been thwarted by those in charge.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“If, after reading this book, you still believe such a system to be entirely unworkable, it might be worth asking yourself why you are so sure this is the case. Imagine for a moment that you are a medieval peasant working the land of a lord in exchange for a meager subsistence and some vague promises of protection. Your entire worldview is defined by unchanging, divinely sanctioned hierarchies over which you have little control. You were born a serf, and you will die a serf.

You don't waste much time thinking about why the world is the way it is - it just is. If you do bother to consider why you've been assigned such a rough lot in life, you're provided with ample justification for this state of affairs by people who, it seems, know far more than you about the ways of the world. If you just sit down, do as you're told, and work hard, then you'll be rewarded - perhaps not in this life, but certainly in the next.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“Cooley had a view of 'ordinary people' that was diametrically opposed to that of thinkers like both Hayek and Keynes. In fact, he believed he had never met an 'ordinary' person in his life. Everyone he knew, all the people with whom he worked, had 'extraordinary... skills, abilities and talents,' as the Lucas Plan showed. For Cooley, the great crime of capitalism is that 'those talents are never used or developed or encouraged.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“As should be clear from the examples outline in this chapter, the US military is the cornerstone of its power as an imperial planner. US imperialism is fundamentally about protecting the unequal structure of the capitalist world system and preventing the emergence of potential rivals to this system. Private actors also benefit handsomely from America's role as the guardian of global capitalism, and this fusion of public and private interests is what makes the US military-industrial complex so enduring.

But the exercise of imperial power is about more than brute force. As we have seen, the structure of the world economy privileges the interests of capital, concentrated in the core, over workers, concentrated in the periphery. This system does not reproduce itself on its own; it must be protected and upheld by both the force of the US state and the legal and political institutions it promulgates. Where poor countries have not been subjugated to the power of capital by force, as in Guatemala, Indonesia, and Iraq, they have been given little choice other than to submit voluntarily.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“The US government wanted to send a message to poor and downtrodden people around the world: they could not hope to resist the power of American capitalism. Such a show of force was necessary because many were already trying to do so.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“But, with a few carefully chosen exceptions, the US wouldn't let them. If poor states had been allowed to industrialize, they would have been harder to exploit. As a result, when peripheral countries did try to industrialize in the mid-twentieth century, powerful states, corporations, and international institutions worked together to undermine these efforts. As home to the most powerful capitalists in the world, the responsibility for protecting the system fell primarily to the United States, which worked tirelessly over subsequent decades to maintain the hierarchy of global capitalism and its own position at the apex.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“While claiming a grand civilizing mission to end poverty and promote development, rich countries have in fact underdeveloped the rest of the world in order to enrich themselves. In his book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney argues forcefully that the wealth of the rich economies comes through the exploitation of poor ones, through 'trade, colonial domination, and capitalist investment.;' The exploitation of the Global South is a cornerstone of production in the Global North, a relationship that yields great profit for corporations headquartered in countries that used to colonize much of the planet.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“The fusion of economics and politics is a critical part of this model and is something early liberal theorists missed. States consistently seek to protect 'their' capitalists all over the world. Whether in the form of taxation, trade policy, or foreign policy, capitalists always rely on politicians to provide them with opportunities for profit-making abroad. Lenin, who in 1917 wrote that imperialism was the 'highest stage' of capitalism, realized that this fusion of state and corporate power would make it even harder for poor states to catch up with rich ones.

While this fusion of corporate and political power is largely hidden within modern capitalist economies, historically it was understood to be a central component of imperial power. We have already seen how early capitalist states sought to govern the world economy through corporate sovereigns like the East India Company. The Nazi Party also encouraged the creation of 'trusts, combines and cartels' on the basis that doing so would support the German state's imperial power at home and abroad. Unions, and any other threats to corporate power, were destroyed, and a law was passed to 'force industries to form cartels where none existed.' Unchecked corporate power -fused with that of the state- was a key component of Nazism.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“Yet newly independent states were told they would have to adhere to free trade policies if they wanted to 'catch up' with the rest of the world. These countries were fed the lie that Britain and America had grown rich through free trade, and that if they only opened up their markets to international competition, they would too. Instead, these states found their national economies were dominated by corporations that had been protected by imperialist nations now preaching the benefits of the free market. This was the 'imperialism of free trade'.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“Ultimately, the US state took it upon itself to ensure that no part of the world could close its doors to international investment. This desire to keep the world 'open' to capital, rather than overaccumulation or a struggle for resources, is what explains so many of America's imperial escapades in recent decades.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom