| 
|
“We have
words for racism and sexism, but wealth discrimination isn’t fully recognized.
It is a bias in favor of the wealthy and against labor, the environment, and the
community. Concern for the public good must become the animating force of our
economic order.”
-- Marjorie
Kelly |
The gross national
product includes air pollution and advertising for cigarettes, and ambulances
to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors, and jails
for the people who break them ... It does not allow for the health of our families,
the quality of thier education, or the joy of their play.
-- Robert
F. Kennedy |  |
The
love of money as a possession--as distinguished from the love of money as a means
to the enjoyments and realities of life--will be recognized for what it is, a
somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities
which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease
-- John Maynard Keynes
| We must recognize
that we can't solve our problems now until there is a radical redistribution of
economic and political power....[What is required is] a radical restructuring
of the architecture of American society.
--
Martin Luther King, Jr
|  |
But once we concede
that people do care about status, it necessarily follows that the status competition
that makes people buy expensive consumer goods in order to impress other people
constitutes a failure of the market economy - a failure as real as traffic congestion,
or pollution, or any other activity in which the individual pursuit of self-interest
leads to a collectively bad outcome. Suppose that we could somehow agree to stop
competing over who has the fanciest car; everyone could then work a bit less,
spend more time with their families, and raise the sum total of human happiness.
Or to put it a bit differently, Americans (or at least the top few percent of
the income distribution) have gotten into a sort of arms race of conspicuous consumption
that, like most arms races, consumes huge quantities of resources yet in the end
changes little.
--Paul Krugman
| 
|
"It's a measure of the depth
of our consumer trance that the death of the planet is not sufficient to break
it."
-- Kalle Lasn |
| *
"This
focus on money and power may do wonders in the marketplace, but it creates a tremendous
crisis in our society. People who have spent all day learning how to sell themselves
and to manipulate others are in no position to form lasting friendships or intimate
relationships... Many Americans hunger for a different kind of society -- one
based on principles of caring, ethical and spiritual sensitivity, and communal
solidarity. Their need for meaning is just as intense as their need for economic
security."
-- Michael
Lerner | 
|
Workers
Day
- May 1
Fair
Trade Day - 2nd Sat in May
End
Poverty Day - October 17
Buy
Nothing Day - 4th Fri in November
