"The great multinationals are unwilling to face the moral and economic contradictions of their own behavior - producing in low-wage dictatorships and selling to high-wage democracies. Indeed, the striking quality about global enterprises is how easily free-market capitalism puts aside its supposed values in order to do business. The conditions of human freedom do not matter to them so long as the market demand is robust. The absence of freedom, if anything, lends order and efficiency to their operations.
Democracy is held captive, not just by money, but by ideas — the ideas that money buys. Americans cannot teach democracy to the world until they restore their own."
William Greider, Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy, 1992
“The downfall of every civilization comes, not from the moral corruption of the common man, but rather from the moral complacency of common men in high places.”
E. Digby Baltzell, The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America, 1966
"Throughout the world financial interests have taken control of government and used neoliberal policies to promote their own gain-seeking – financial gains without industrialization or agricultural self-sufficiency. Betting against one’s own currency is more remunerative than making the effort to invest in capital equipment and develop markets for new output. So unemployment and domestic budget deficits are soaring.
The neoliberal failure to distinguish between productive and merely extractive or speculative forms of gain seeking has created a travesty of the kind of wealth creation that Adam Smith described in The Wealth of Nations. The financialization of economies has been decoupled from tangible capital investment to expand employment and productive powers.
Central to any discussion of financialization is the fact that credit creation has been monopolized in the United States and Britain for their own national gain."
Michael Hudson, The Collapse of the Neoliberal Model, May 2009
"Narcissus so himself, himself forsook,
And died to kiss his shadow in the brook."
William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis
Stock did usual thing today, falling in the morning and then coming back to unchanged and even a little green.
Perhaps the report will not be so negative, so the wiseguys are doing their usual scams early.
Biden and crew seem to be bent on going out of their way to pick fights with most of the world that is not us.
This is probably inadvisable strategically.
But considering the people involved in the decision making these days, it's not all that surprising.
"When chaos has become the supreme law, then the time for the empire of lawlessness will have come."
Friedrich Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse
As a dog returns to its vomit, so fools return to their follies.
Have a pleasant evening.
