Money Quotes - Project World Peace

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Bag of cash graphic
(OpenClipart-
Vectors, Pixabay)

Poor World
woman & baby
(monikawl999, Pixabay)

Safe vault door
(8385, Pixabay)

Gold coins chest
(Tumisu, Pixabay)

Piles of coins
(TheDigitalArtist,
Pixabay)

New way of living?
(PatoLenin, Pixabay)

Earth Day 2035 (Paresh; fair use, educational)

Blue Cancer
(Ju_Joy, Pixabay)

Fire & Floods
(Lavar_Hamil, Pixabay)

African wealth
(Unknown source; fair use, educational)

Pie charts on how rich people get rich
(Unknown source; fair use, educational)

Apocalypse Man
(geralt, Pixabay)

Giving Hands
(Tama66, Pixabay)

Money Quotes

How to rob a continent – and get away with it...
We’re often told that Africa is poor, in need of our help and charity. But the truth is that Africa is rich – in mineral wealth, skilled workers, booming new businesses and biodiversity. Its people should thrive, its economies prosper. Yet many people living in Africa’s 47 countries remain trapped in poverty – and that’s not an accident.
Just like they have for hundreds of years, profiteering businesses in rich countries continue to strip Africa of wealth, resources and power. Through unregulated foreign industry and agribusiness, rampant tax evasion, exploitative trade deals, abusive loan practises, and much more, corporations and governments in the global North continue to profit from Africa’s wealth. The aid we pay to African nations is a tiny fraction of the amount being taken out of the continent every year to enrich corporate interests.
(Global Justice Now 28 May 2019 email)
[PWP comment: Colonialism, exploitation and enslavement carries on under a disguise.]

In a new book, Border & Rule, the scholar and activist Harsha Walia reminds us that Trump’s cruelty sat atop foundations laid by previous presidents. From the 1990s onwards, there was an increasing effort to criminalise unwanted migration and accelerate border security measures. In 2014, writes Walia, under Obama’s presidency – in which Biden, of course, served as vice president – about half of all federal arrests were immigration-related. A similar process has been under way in most advanced economies: Walia makes a persuasive argument that we should see this not as a domestic policy issue, but as part of a global system in which border control, alongside military and economic policy, is a way for wealthy countries to maintain their power.
(Daniel Trilling, The Guardian, posted and accessed 23 February 2021)

The capitalist cosmos imposes a choice on you: adopt its ethic, or accept poverty and scorn. (Jonathan Malesic, The Guardian, posted and accessed 6 January 2022)

You can't have capitalism without racism. (Malcolm X)

Instead of GDP, a society organized around well-being.
Instead of productivity, a society organized around regeneration.
Instead of wealth, a society organized around service.
Instead of white supremacy, a society organized around justice.
(Dr. Elizabeth Sawin, 12 September 2020 tweet)

It's remarkable that we use the word "economy" to describe a system that is organized around generating perpetually rising rates of consumption and extreme excesses for the rich. There is nothing "economic" about this. (Jason Hickel, 10 October 2020 tweet)
[Economy can be defined as the effective or efficient or frugal use of a community’s resources.]

Ethics is not the name of the game [for corporations]. Profit is.
(Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time, p.281) [He says governments are similar, but the name of the game there is Power. But even that is ‘convertible to money’. (p.282)]

Even the law is not designed to deliver justice. The law is not ethical. Instead law becomes the means by which those in power, justly or unjustly, retain power. Law preserves power – money power. Law will nearly always dignify a past evil as precedent rather than create justice by changing an unjust law.
(Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time, p.286)

I suggest a set of strange hypotheses. The more one seeks security the less secure one will be. And further: The more security one appears to acquire, the less security one actually possesses...
No corporation, no government, no bureaucracy, indeed, no employer can provide security. Life is the ultimate insecurity. Death is the ultimate security.
Let us, therefore, not long for security, seek it, lay our lives down for it, deliver up our freedom for it. Let us not love it too much. Let us, instead, sit on the verge of insecurity, let us look over the edge, look into the pit, let us feel the agitation in the belly. Let us, by acknowledging our insecurity, by facing it, embracing it, affirm the courage to be.
The ultimate security in this life is the product of courage. The self is the source of all security. As a worker one will be most secure if one comes to work each morning willing to be fired. What better security exists than the knowledge that one is not trapped, not dependent, not owned, and has not sucked up to the corporate plan that will, at last, reduce one to a mere number?
(Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time, pp.287+289)

Crucially, what is necessary for achieving well-being is the satisfaction of basic needs: not growth in consumption or economic activity. If our focus is the well-being of ourselves and other human beings, we should focus on sufficiency, rather than growth.
(Professor Julia Steinberger, openDemocracy, posted 8 April 2020, accessed 5 October 2020)

Every time you spend money, you're casting a vote for the kind of world you want. (Anna Lappé)

No es más rico el que más tiene, sino el que menos desea. (Spanish saying)
[Richer is not he who has the most, but he who desires the least.]

Man opening his shirt to reveal a chest of gold coins

Attacking the rich is not envy. It is self defence. The hoarding of wealth is the cause of poverty. The rich aren’t just indifferent to poverty; they create it and maintain it. (Unknown, often falsely attributed to Jodie Foster)

When the rich rob the poor it's called business. When the poor fight back it's called violence. (Seen on the internet, e.g. here)

We need to connect dots. The UK establishment asininely braying about attacks on the "free press" because a few Murdoch papers couldn't get out for 1 day represents a wholesale adoption of the extremely anti-democratic and very dangerous equivalence that money = speech. (Professor Julia Steinberger, 8 September 2020 tweet)

Wealth is a form of power in our society. With great power comes great responsibility. If you have too much wealth, ipso facto, you have too much power - therefore you have too much responsibility - and you're a kind of dictator. (Will Self)

...nobody "deserves" extreme wealth. It’s not earned, it’s extracted – from underpaid workers, from nature, from monopoly power, from political capture and so on. We should have a democratic conversation about this: at what point does hoarding become not only socially unnecessary, but actively [e.g. ecologically] destructive? $100m? $10m? $5m? (Jason Hickel, The Correspondent, posted and accessed 9 October 2020)

Graphic of people in silhouette in the background, piles of coins of different heights in the foreground

We do not own the earth. The earth owns us. (Chief Seattle)

At the centre of the climate crisis is the problem of profit-maximising, endless growth.
To deal with it, we need to redistribute wealth and power away from corporations and towards collective and common ownership.
(Global Justice Now, The Case for Climate Change, p.7)

The climate crisis is not a human-induced disaster. It's an economic crime scene. (Professor Julia Steinberger, 25 September 2020 tweet)

From advertising to planned obsolescence, big business has designed the consumer economy to maximise individual consumption, and minimise sharing and collaboration. If instead we used our resources to create collective wellbeing, we might have less material consumption, but actually more of other things we value – social care, health, education, free time and cultural life. (Global Justice Now, The Case for Climate Change, p.7)

We are a depressed, lonely and alienated society because our economic system structurally compels people to exploit each other and the rest of the living world.
(Jason Hickel, 24 September 2020 tweet)
[One reply by Rochelle A. Burgess:]
Don't call it depression my friend. Then they will try to 'treat' it. And we don't need 'treatments' for failed social systems, we need to imagine and build new ways of living.

Mew way of living? (Man gazes at sun from within parted cities)

A new way of living?

How might a lower-consuming society look? Everything is reoriented because people, brands and governments are no longer striving for economic growth. Individuals are more self-sufficient, growing food, mending things and embracing wabi-sabi, the Japanese concept of imperfect aesthetics (think patched-up pockets or chipped ceramics). Brands produce fewer but better-quality goods, while governments ban planned obsolescence (the practice of producing items to only function for a set period of time), stick “durability” labels on items so shoppers can be assured of longevity, and introduce tax subsidies so it’s cheaper to repair something than to bin it and buy a new version.
(Jamie Waters referencing JB MacKinnon, The Guardian, posted and accessed 30 May 2021)

If you look at the history of capitalism, it has always been predatory. Its only mode so far has been to kill Indigenous peoples, kill and enslave Black peoples, use military force to extract wealth from vulnerable nations. And it has always extracted from the living Earth. (Peter Kalmus, 7 November 2020 tweet)

GDP growth is, ultimately, an indicator of the welfare of capitalism. That we have all come to see it as a proxy for the welfare of humans represents an extraordinary ideological coup. (Jason Hickel, 18 November 2020 tweet)

I don't know what word in the English language - I can't find one - applies to people who are willing to sacrifice the literal existence of organized human life so they can put a few more dollars into highly stuffed pockets. The word 'evil' doesn't begin to approach it. (Noam Chomsky)

Cartoon: A billionaire that resembles Rupert Murdoch celebrates Earth Day 2035. He stands in front of a large board that shows a healthy Nature, with trees. The media takes photos and videos of the perfect scene. Meanwhile, everywhere else is a desolate scene, all trees cut down, no animals, flat and burning and void of life. Fossil fuels continue to be burnt. The atmosphere is toxic, grey.

Humans stop dividing up the Earth pretending you "own" it and converting it into profit and death. There are consequences (Peter Kalmus, 19 November 2020 tweet)

Stop believing in good billionaires. Start organizing toward a good society. (Anand Giridharadas)

The wildest thing about off-the-wall [bizarre] conspiracy theorists isn't that there's no conspiracy. There is. It just isn't about population control, or lizards, or whatever the fuck. It's just straight up the rich doing what they've always done: protect themselves, gaslight the poor and maintain their hold on wealth and power.
(@_shelse_, 18 January 2023 adapted tweets)

To survive with some grace, humanity must organize like the other species on Earth. Those other species are effectively ecosocialist: (1) they do not destroy the Earth, and (2) they share energy and resources relatively equitably. (Peter Kalmus, 7 November 2020 tweet)

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. (George Monbiot)

Placing profit above all else isn't just evil, it's the root of all evil. And this is precisely what our society has become. (Peter Kalmus, 5 December 2020 tweet)

Head of a depressed man, one side skull, the other flesh, amid blue smoke

Remorseless and unstoppable growth in the human body is called cancer.
So why, when it is on Earth, do we call it progress?
(Bella Lack, The Guardian, posted and accessed 30 March 2021)

If ever there was a controversial icon from the statistics world, GDP is it. It measures income, but not equality, it measures growth, but not destruction, and it ignores values like social cohesion and the environment. Yet, governments, businesses and probably most people swear by it. (OECD; also see here)

Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature.
(Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)

How many floods, infernos, and dying ecosystems will it take for a critical mass to realize that profit-above-all-else is irreversibly destroying our collective future on Earth?
(Peter Kalmus, 30 March 2021 tweet)

In the background a city's skyscrapers assailed by fire. In the foreground, floods wrack the city, whales tossed around, cargo lost.

Just putting it out there that there is no such thing as "cheap" clothes or bargains or anything like that: just horrendous human exploitation at the other end of the supply chain. Buy less, buy used, buy fair... (Prof Julia Steinberger, 22 December 2020 tweet)

People talk about the North/South divide as "industrialized" vs "non-industrialized" countries. But the South is home to 85% of the world's industrial workforce. It's just that they receive almost none of the value they produce, which is appropriated instead by rich countries. (Jason Hickel, 30 March 2021 tweet)

For every $1 of aid the global South receives, they lose $14 through unequal exchange with the North. Poor countries are developing rich countries, not the other way around. (Jason Hickel, 1 April 2021 tweet)

Perhaps the book’s [The Day the World Stops Shopping by JB MacKinnon] most startling comment comes from Abdullah al Maher, the CEO of a Bangladesh knitwear firm that produces for fast-fashion giants including H&M and Zara. He admits that transitioning to a lower-consuming society would be painful for his country: its 6,000 clothing factories would probably halve. But in this new system, the factories would provide better wages, pollute less and compete on quality instead of speed. “There’ll be no ratrace then,” Maher says, adding: “You know, it wouldn’t be so bad.”
(Jamie Waters, The Guardian, posted and accessed 30 May 2021)

Four African women walk along a road's edge, each carrying huge piles of branches on their shoulders. Caption by George Monbiot: "If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire."

What counts today, the question which is looming on the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity must reply to this question or be shaken to pieces by it. (Frantz Fanon, political philosopher, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961) [Still so true!]

Modern slaves are not in chains, they are in debt. (Seen on the internet)

The corporations that are killing us own our leaders and the media. (Climate Dad)

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.
(Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?)

Two pie charts showing how rich people get rich. The first, according to the rich, has: hard work, gumption, and a can-do attitude. The second, for real has: birth lottery, merciless exploitation of the working class.

The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.
(Victor Hugo, The Man Who Laughs, 1869)

Albert Einstein warned in 1949 that the time would come when the very rich so controlled the means of communication that it would be almost impossible for ordinary people to make informed decisions and so democracy would then be broken.
We live in the time Einstein warned about.
(Tom London, 24 April 2021 tweet; also see here)

The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact. (George Orwell)

When we destroy something created by man, we call it vandalism. When we destroy something created by nature, we call it progress. (Ed Begley Jr.; variations include:-)

- I don't understand why when we destroy something created by man we call it vandalism, but when we destroy something by nature we call it progress.
- Why is it that when we damage property it's called vandalism, but when we damage the environment it's called progress?

On a dark background, the Earth appears to be missing parts and is engulfed in fire. In the foreground a realistic sculpture of a man with a briefcase and whose skin seems to have been burned and stitched up.

Money, which ever since it began to be regarded with respect, has caused the ruin of the true honour of things; we become alternately merchants and merchandise, and we ask, not what a thing truly is, but what it costs. (Seneca, Roman Stoic philosopher)

One of the baleful dimensions of our times is the way that the conversation about what constitutes the good society is framed by the rich and their interests. A conception of the common good withers; instead it is replaced by the existential importance of private wealth, private interests and private ownership to societal health. Nowhere is this more exposed than in the debate over taxation, and in particular the taxation of inherited wealth… (Will Hutton, The Guardian, posted and accessed 17 November 2024)

The only wealth which you will keep forever is the wealth you have given away. (Marcus Aurelius, Roman Stoic philosopher)

A water feature where a flow of water from above lands in sculpted hands. The water then changes direction and flows onwards.

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