Quotes

The standard ‘trickle-down’ argument against redistribution (through progressive taxation etc) is that instead of making the poor richer, it makes the rich poorer. However, this apparently anti-interventionist attitude actually contains an argument for the current state intervention: although we all want the poor to get better, it is counter-productive to help them directly, since they are not the dynamic and productive element; the only intervention needed is to help the rich get richer, and then the profits will automatically spread down to the poor. Throw enough money at Wall Street, and it will eventually trickle down to Main Street. If you want people to have money to build, don’t give it to them directly, help those who are lending it to them.

Keynes compared the stock market to a competition in which the participants have to pick several pretty girls from a hundred photographs: ‘It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgement, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligence to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.‘ We are forced to make choices without having the knowledge that would enable us to make them; or, as John Gray has put it: ‘We are forced to live as if we were free.’

If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm ... If the present overshoot of this target CO2 is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects.

Brussels sprouts grown in Norfolk are harvested by machines with incredible wastage and efficiency, taken by lorry to a packing department in the Midlands, sent to a factory where they are washed, cleaned, sorted by size, packaged or frozen and finally sent back again to Norfolk to appear in the supermarkets, wrapped in cellophane or a dinky little net bag... A study conducted by the SAFE alliance in 1995 showed that food was travelling 50% further before it reached the supermarket than it did in the late 1970s.

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TOTAL DEATHS SINCE SEPT 2000:

Israeli children: 123
Palestinian children: 1050

TOTALS FOR 2000:

Israeli children: 0
Palestinian children: 91

The total of loans, mortgages, overdrafts and credit card purchases is massive and in Britain stands at some £780 billion, £500 of which is born by ordinary people. The Americans, supposedly the richest citizens ever to walk the face of the planet, are the most heavily indebted people of the world, carrying morgage debts that currently total $4.2 trillion.

The US $600 billion coughed out in just one week could have completely eradicated hunger (the 854 million people estimated by the FAO to go to bed hungry each night) from the face of the planet. The additional US $900 billion that the US has spent in the past one year could have lifted the world's estimated 2 billion poor people from poverty, and that too on a long-term sustainable basis. The one trillion dollar bailout package that George Bush is promising could have wiped out the last traces of poverty, hunger, malnutrition and squalor from the face of the Earth.

...if the whole world wished to consume at the level of the United States - a consumption pattern which has been fuelled, incidentally, by the credit binge which led to the current economic crisis - we would need, conservatively, over 5 planets like earth to support them. But, under the current pattern of unequally distributed benefits from growth, to lift everyone in the world onto a modest $3 per day, would require the resources of around 15 planets like ours. Where, you might ask, will the other 14 come from?

The social consequences of structural adjustment [imposed by the WTO] cum agricultural dumping were predictable. According to Oxfam, the number of Africans living on less than a dollar a day more than doubled to 313 million people between 1981 and 2001 – or 46% of the whole continent. The role of structural adjustment in creating poverty, as well as severely weakening the continent’s agricultural base and consolidating import dependency, was hard to deny. As the World Bank’s chief economist for Africa admitted, “We did not think that the human costs of these programs could be so great, and the economic gains would be so slow in coming.”