| |
*
If
we get a government that reflects more of what this country is really about, we
can turn the century -- and the economy -- around.
-- Bella
Abzug
|
| *
What made traditional economies so radically different and so very fundamentally
dangerous to Western economies were the traditional principles of prosperity of
Creation versus scarcity of resources, of sharing and distribution versus accumulation
and greed, of kinship usage rights versus individual exclusive ownership rights,
and of sustainability versus growth.
-- Rebecca
Adamson |  |
Economic
development, more than any single issue, is the battle line between two competing
world views. Tribal people's fundamental value was sustainability, and they conducted
their livelihoods in ways that sustained resources and limited inequalities in
their society. What made traditional economies so radically different and so very
fundamentally dangerous to Western economies were the traditional principles of
prosperity of Creation versus scarcity of resources, of sharing and distribution
versus accumulation and greed, of kinship usage rights versus individual exclusive
ownership rights, and of sustainability versus growth. -- Rebecca
Adamson
In
the field of economic development, economists like to think Western economics
is value-neutral, but in truth, it is not. Success is defined according to production
units or monetary worth. The contrast with successful indigenous development is
stark. For example, since they understand the environment to be a living being,
the Northern Cheyenne have opposed coal strip mining on their reservation because
it kills the water beings. There are no cost measurements of pollution, production,
or other elements that can capture this kind of impact. There is an emerging recognition
of the need for a spiritual base, not only in our individual lives, but also in
our work and in our communities.
-- Rebecca
Adamson
| The global economy
is a runaway train that is causing more and more suffering in the world. The current
'profit before people' system is causing the gap between the very rich and the
very poor to grow larger each year. In
order to transform the global economy into a true global community, we need to
create a Better World Economy - an economic system that gives value to other commodities
besides money. Then we can create more sustainable local, national and global
communities.
-- Robert Alan Silverstein
|  |
For
the economy I want workers and consumers to have control over their own economic
lives. I want everyone to have fair conditions that fully utilize their talents
and potentials. I want incomes that accord with the efforts people expend in their
labors. I want what is produced, by whom, under what conditions, and with who
consuming the result--all determined in accord with enhancing human well-being
and development and all decided by the people involved and affected. I want an
end to hierarchies of power and wealth and to class division with most actors
subordinated to an elite few. To accomplish all these ends I favor the institutions
of participatory economics -- worker and consumer councils, remuneration for effort
and sacrifice, balanced job complexes, and participatory planning. If someone
should demonstrate that those institutions somehow fail to accomplish necessary
economic functions or have social or personal by-products that outweigh their
benefits -- I would simply return to the drawing board. Exploitation, alienation,
poverty, disempowerment, fragmenting and debilitating labor, production for the
profit of a few -- much less harsh homelessness, starvation, and degradation --
are not like gravity. They arise from institutional relations established by human
beings. New institutions, also established by human beings, can generate other
vastly superior outcomes. Defining and working to attain those new institutions
ought to be our economic agenda.
-- Michael Albert
*
....the
globalization that characterizes today’s economics goes beyond or eludes the sovereignty
of individual states, and thus the power of their rulers. It is not they, but
rather financial groups in control of vast amounts of capital, who decide upon
their vertiginous passage through nations, without taking into account the serious
crises they might generate.
-- Patricio
Aylwin Azócar | 
|
The
purpose of economic theory is to make those who are comfortable FEEL comfortable.
-- Lord Balogh
| |
*
We are committed with our lives to building a different model and a different
future for humanity, the Earth, and other species. We have envisaged a moral alternative
to economic globalization and we will not rest until we see it realized.
-- Maude Barlow |
I
think it must be conceded that it is possible to create a society in which the
response to market failure is not a swing to socialism, but an exacerbation of
individual efforts to stay ahead by making and spending yet more money. Does the
public health service have long waiting lists and inadequate facilities? Buy private
insurance. Has public transport broken down? Buy a car for each member of the
family above driving age. Has the countryside been built over or the footpaths
eradicated? Buy some elaborate exercise machinery and work out at home. Is air
pollution intolerable? Buy an air-filtering unit and stay indoors. Is what comes
out of the tap foul to the taste and chock-full of carcinogens? Buy bottled water.
And so on. We know it can all happen because it has: I have been doing little
more than describing Southern California. Now it is worth noticing two things
about the private substitutes that I have described. The first is that in the
aggregate they are probably much more expensive than would be the implementation
of the appropriate public policy. The second is that they are extremely poor replacements
for the missing outcomes of good public policy. Nevertheless, it is plain that
the members of a society can become so alienated from one another, so mistrustful
of any form of collective action, that they prefer to go it alone.
-- Brian
Barry
| People nowadays
interchange gifts and favors out of friendship, but buying and selling is considered
absolutely inconsistent with the mutual benevolence which should prevail between
citizens and the sense of community of interest which supports our social system.
According to our ideas, buying and selling is essentially anti-social in all its
tendencies. It is an education in self-seeking at the expense of others, and no
society whose citizens are trained in such a school can possibly rise above a
very low grade of civilization
-- Edward
Bellamy | 
|
*
Changing the structure and rules of the global economy will require a mass movement
based on messages of compassion, justice, and equality, as well as collaborative
and democratic processes ... If we stay positive, inclusive, and democratic, we
have a truly historic opportunity to build a global movement for social justice.
-- Medea
Benjamin |
|
"People
would do well to ask themselves how many of their ambitions and aspirations derive
from the type of economic system they inhabit and the insecurity and exhaustion
it creates, and question the sense and purpose of a society where control of a
large portion of life is abdicated under contract in the labour market, and where
immense creativity and potential is stifled by the need to do difficult and repetitive
tasks in order to earn a wage."
-- Tony Benn
"The
nature of the economic system should be a matter for public choice, and free market
capitalism should not be accepted without any discussion of the rich variety of
alternatives ... Unlike civil laws, economic laws are imposed on people with all
the authority of immutable laws of nature. But the economy is created by people,
supported by government intervention, regulation, statute and subsidy, and implemented
in such a way that it gives substantial wealth and power to a privileged few,
while the majority face a life of relentless work, stress and periodic financial
insecurity."
-- Tony Benn
It
is no longer a single historical world--as it has been from the beginning of the
nineteenth century onwards. Nor is it any longer ours. We, in our culture of commodities,
are living our crisis; the rest of the world are living theirs. Our crisis is
that we no longer believe in a future. Their crisis is us. The most we want is
to hang on to what we've got. They want the means to live. That is why our principal
preoccupations have become private and our public discourse is compounded of spite.
The historical and cultural space for public speech, for public hopes and action,
has been dismantled. We live and have our being today in private coverts.
-- John Berger
| |
*
We do need a 'new economy,' but one that is founded on thrift and care, on saving
and conserving, not on excess and waste. An economy based on waste is inherently
and hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a peaceable
economy."
~ Wendell
Berry |
Why
are we so zealous, then, about the private sector? We persist in designating a
large part of the economy as private so that we can disavow public responsibility
for its evils and claim individual merit for its blessings. As a civic body, we
are reluctant to countenance and cure the deprivations of the poor, the damage
to the environment, and the trivialization of culture that are the depressing
concomitants of our advanced industrial economy. At the same time applauding the
rich and powerful who claim their privileges as the fruits of their rugged and
individual efforts, we sanction our positions and our aspirations
-- Albert
Borgmann
| *
The consumption society has made us feel that happiness lies in having things,
and has failed to teach us the happiness of not having things.
--
Elise Boulding
|  |
| |
*
Economics
has been incurably growth-oriented and addicted to everybody growing richer, even
at the cost of exhaustion of resources and pollution of the environment.
--
Kenneth Boulding *
With laissez-faire and price atomic,
Ecology's Uneconomic,
But with
another kind of logic
Economy's Unecologic.
~ Kenneth
E. Boulding |
When
everything is worth money, then money is worth nothing.
-- David Byrne
*
"If the corporations
have their way, the Earth will be killed, and that's in your lifetime. It's revolting
to me that students are being trained to work in corporations. It's obscene to
me that the corporations are running the world. We've got to get cross. Anger
is an appropriate emotion."
-- Helen
Caldicott | 
|
| |
*
I think there are a lot of strong leaders around the world who have made very
convincing arguments about the weakness of corporate-led globalization and the
compelling nature of alternatives.
-- John
Cavanagh |
We
have created not a Brave New World, but a vulgar marketplace, where human attributes
come with a price tag.
-- Linda Chavez
| 
|
*
What
is called 'capitalism'is basically a system of corporate mercantilism, with huge
and largely unaccountable private tyrannies exercising vast control over the economy,
political systems, and social and cultural life...
-- Noam
Chomsky |
Why
should workers agree to be slaves in a basically authoritarian structure? They
should have control over it themselves. Why shouldn't communities have a dominant
voice in running the institutions that affect their lives?
-- Noam
Chomsky
The
real world of American society is one which it is very misleading to call simply
a democracy. Of course, it is in a sense a democracy, but it is one in which there
are enormous inequities in the distribution of power and force. For example, the
entire commercial and industrial system is in principle excluded from the democratic
process, including everything that goes on within it
-- Noam
Chomsky
Representative
democracy, as in, say, the United States or Great Britain, would be criticized
by an anarchist of this school on two grounds. First of all because there is a
monopoly of power centralized in the State, and secondly -and critically - because
representative democracy is limited to the political sphere and in no serious
way encroaches on the economic sphere. Anarchists of this tradition have always
held that democratic control of one?s productive life is at the core of any serious
human liberation, or, for that matter, of any significant democratic practice.
That is, as long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market
to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is
simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and
oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if even meaningful.
-- Noam Chomsky
All
public resources go to the rich. The poor, if they can survive in the labor market,
fine. Otherwise, they die. That's economics in a nutshell.
-- Noam
Chomsky
In
a country well governed poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly
governed wealth is something to be ashamed of.
-- Confucius
The
superior person understands rightness; the inferior person understands profit
-- Confucius
Workers
Day
- May 1
Fair
Trade Day - 2nd Sat in May
End
Poverty Day - October 17
Buy
Nothing Day - 4th Fri in November
