Life Inc. Quotes

“Mortgages were less about getting people into property than getting them into debt. Someone had to absorb the surplus supply of credit.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back

“Corporations [gained] direct access to what we may think of as our humanity, emotions, and agency but, in this context, are really just buttons.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back

“Step by step, place became property, property became a mortgage, and
mortgages became derivative investments.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back

“We were taking out mortgages we couldn’t afford because they were camouflaged to look as if we had a reasonable chance of paying them back. Banks then changed the bankruptcy laws so that we could not get out of our obligations once the rates changed. Lastly, they sold us back our own mortgages, shifting back to us any of the risk through our money-market accounts and pension funds.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back

“Goldman Sachs and other investment banks understood the ensuing problem so well that they began betting against the very mortgage-backed securities they were underwriting!”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back

“The plague did not lead to Europe’s economic collapse. Rather, Europe’s currency-driven economic collapse led to the plague.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back

“Engaged in a new form of serfdom---only bound now to banks and mortgage lenders instead of to lords---her more highly leveraged neighbors pore over the business section of the newspaper each day looking for some sign that the government will soon step in to “freeze” their mortgage rates where they are before a scheduled adjustment hits.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back

“Home ownership,and the vast consumption of materials and energy it requires, forces some pretty exploitative foreign policy manoeuvres. This makes people in those resource-rich places as mad as natives were at the practices of the colonial empires exploiting them two hundred years ago.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back

“businesses from the Northeast, with promises of corporate tax breaks, lax environmental standards, and a compliant, union-free workforce. The county finally won the privilege of hosting a Proctor Silex plant by floating a $5.5 million bond to finance water and sewer services for the facility—even though many residents in the region were themselves living without running water or basic services. Predictably, in 1990 the company moved to Mexico, which was offering more competitive terms. Moore County was left with toxic waste, eight hundred unemployed workers, and tremendous public debt for having subsidized the company’s plant.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back

“Consider the strategy of any typical early chartered corporation. In 1602, the Dutch Crown sanctioned the United East India Company to conquer territory and exploit resources in the Pacific. The Company’s scheme was to acquire lands in Indonesia by lending money to cultivators and then dispossessing them when they failed to make payments. This was made easier by trade policies that guaranteed the farmers’ failure. The Company got the Dutch to prohibit cultivation of the most profitable export crops—like cloves—on land not already under Dutch ownership. Loans failed, and more collateral in the form of land passed into Company hands. Indonesians lost access to the most fertile land, and were ultimately forced to buy their rice from United East India at the artificially inflated, monopoly-supported prices. The local economy was devastated as more land and labor were surrendered to the corporation. As”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back

“The meeting established the International Monetary Fund, set up the World Bank, and laid the foundations for an international trade pact that was finally implemented fifty years later by George Herbert Walker Bush and Bill Clinton as the World Trade Organization.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back

“Foreseeing the need for a postcolonial world order, the Allied nations sent delegates to a meeting at a hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944 to figure out a new global monetary system. The U.S. was in a position to leverage its authority as Europe’s military savior and the only surviving industrial economy to promote its own fiscal agenda: free markets and monetary leadership. Everyone else’s currencies would be pegged to the dollar, and the world would enjoy open markets, which benefited the U.S., as the economy poised to grow the most.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back

“It was these seventeenth-and eighteenth-century equivalents of no-bid contracts to Halliburton that led Adam Smith to write Wealth of Nations. While celebrated today by corporate libertarians as philosophical justification for free-trade policies, the book was meant as an attack on the scale and effects of chartered monopoly”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back

“This was not economic efficiency, but economic exploitation.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back

“After all, it was Greenspan who refused to rein in the predatory-lending industry, under the rationale that exercising any regulatory pressure would put the Fed in the improper role of protecting people rather than the economy.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back