Per Wikipedia, Paulson was raised as a Christian Scientist and worked in the Nixon admin. as assistant to John Ehrlichman during the events of the Watergate scandal, for which Ehrlichman was convicted to a prison sentence. Paulson joined Goldman Sachs in 1974 and eventually became its chief executive. The company was under investigation for fraud by Elliott Spitzer during Paulson's leadership. (As of 10-2-08, the Wikipedia entry on Paulson mentioned this, but the entry's been scrubbed since my previous post on the topic. Spitzer himself has, of course, been conveniently neutralized.)
Paulson is the person whose job it is to restore our confidence in the markets.
I'm gonna be Paulson for Halloween -- a decent candidate for the new scariest person on Earth.
UPDATE:Here's more from Spitzer on Paulson and the bailout.
Progressive Dems have proposed an alternative to Paulson's bail-out plan; full Scoop here. (Thanks, ingin!)
Meanwhile, what looks to me in a YouTube video like at least a thousand protestors have been demonstrating on Wall St.: "You broke it, you bought it, no bail-out!"
Vintage Jon Stewart, with Maher while he was still coloring his hair. Second half not quite as funny (but the commercials at the beginning aren't bad).
We may or may not now face economic catastrophe -- is anyone here besides me old enough to have had a grandparent driven to crime by the Great Depression? -- but what kind of bailout we now do definitely IS in the same ballpark as the decision whether to invade Iraq.
The devil IS in the details -- or, as usual lately, in the LACK of them.
I think it's very important that we let Congress know what WE want -- if we don't, you can be sure someone else will GET what THEY want. (Sorry for all the caps and ital, but I'm really kinda concerned as to whether everyone gets how crucial this juncture is, not because we're about to melt down, 'cause I'm not so much convinced we are, as because we're on the verge of enabling big money to bring about the destruction of economic democracy.)
That said, here's what I just sent to my gov'l rep (you can reach your own rep(s) here -- feel free to use or modify my text -- and you can always reach that url through the link in the sidebar at left (if you'd like more info re- the bases & background for my letter below, pls see my previous posts with the label, "it's the economy". My own rep., by the way, is a pretty good Dem but voted FOR the bailout):
I have some acquaintance with debt "workouts" involving pretty big borrowers persuading pretty big institutions to settle for cents on the dollar. Generally, the bigger the money, the MORE accountability is demanded.
Lenders -- let alone equity investors -- LET ALONE DONORS, which is what this last bailout bill would have made us -- do NOT extend credit, invest, or GIVE money away, unless the people asking for the money OPEN their books and disclose exactly what their assets and liabilities are, what their finances looked like last year, what they plan to do with the money, etc.
Can you imagine a bankruptcy case in which the debtor asked his or her creditors to help cover his/her debts but refused to open his/her books or disclose what their liabilities were?
Ok, in any workout, you expect some spinning, jockying, etc., BUT NOTHING like the ultimatum now thrust at us: GIVE US YOUR MONEY OR DIE!
The proponents of this bill can't or won't even tell us where they got the number.
If this were really an emergency, or at least if they really cared about it, they would have presented something a reasonable lender/investor/donor might conceivably accept. They'd be able to tell us how they came up with $700 billion, and they certainly wouldn't have demanded absolute unaccountability as to what they do with it.
Either it's not really an emergency, or they care more about the looting opportunity than about bailing out the economy.
EITHER WAY, IT'S IMPERATIVE THAT THE DEMS WRITE THEIR OWN BILL -- FAST.
Nature abhors a vacuum. Unless we've got Plan B ready, we'll be stuck with some version of Plan A.
To my mind, NO bailout should afford the kind of power and immunity to any member of the executive branch that even the "compromised" bailout bill would have done (given the virtually total lack of any meaningful enforcement even for Constitutional violations).
Apart from that, a reasonable precondition for a sane bailout would be the un-repealing of Glass-Steagall, plus extending it to cover new kinds of institutions.
P.S.: In case you didn't know, the plan presented by Paulson is known to have been sitting on the shelf for months -- so it's not like they didn't have time to work out something more reasonable, if they thought they might need to get something passed quickly.
UPDATE: After I sent this letter, I came across these notes taken from a telephone conference between Treasury and ca. 800 Wallstreeters.
Few have had time or whatever to actually read the proposed bailout bill that was just (for now) defeated. From one who did, the bill would have provided:
1. That Sec. of Treasury Paulson can violate all statutes with impunity, and no one can sue.
2. That even if you prove a Constitutional violation in court, any order in your favor is STAYED (put on hold) until Paulson is done appealing.
3. So after you litigate for months or years in appellate courts, and assuming you finally win (again) in the trial court AND the final court of appeal, all you get is an equitable order for the Secretary to (finally) stop violating your Constitutional rights -- WITHOUT any enforcement remedy if he fails to do so (i.e., any penalty to him or compensation to you).
4. And, even then, he can keep on violating your statutory rights, forever.
Here's Pelosi on the bill (and if you don't get what she says, I suspect you could benefit from diversifying your news sources).
Here's The New York Times re- the plunderers' machinations in connection with the bailout bill:
"Even as policy makers worked on details of a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it.
"Financial firms were lobbying to have all manner of troubled investments covered, not just those related to mortgages.
"At the same time, investment firms were jockeying to oversee all the assets that Treasury plans to take off the books of financial institutions, a role that could earn them hundreds of millions of dollars a year in fees."
. . . this from Lucy Lawless (who plays the "Warrior Princess"): "[s]omeone asked me today if I knew that Sarah Palin's supporters are calling her 'Xena.' I had to ask, 'Oh, is Sarah Palin a lesbian too?!' I don't see it on her bio anywhere . . . nope, not there. Curiously, in her earlier life, Xena traded motherhood for a career as an evil warlord. Hmmmm . . . "
"Gene Hathorn, a convict on death row in Texas, has agreed to give his body to the Danish-based artist Marco Evaristti, should [Hathorn's] final appeal against execution fail. Evaristti plans to turn Hathorn’s body into a work of art. 'My aim is to . . . make fish food out of [Hathorn's body]. Visitors to my exhibition will be able to feed goldfish with it . . . .'
"Hathorn, 47, has been on death row since 1985, after being found guilty for the murder of his father, step-mother and step-brother. At an earlier trial Hathorn’s friend, James Lee Beathard, was also convicted for the murders after Hathorn testified against him. . . . Hathorn later recanted his testimony but Beathard, who protested his innocence to the end, was executed by lethal injection in 1999 because of a Texas law which prevents the presentation of new evidence after 30 days have passed from the original trial."
"Evaristti came to international attention in 2000 when he placed goldfish in electric blenders filled with water. Visitors to the exhibition at Denmark’s Trapholt Art Museum could choose to press a button, turn on the blenders and kill the fish."
. . . the SHContemporary. Wim Delvoye's work comprised a pen with several pigs tattooed with Walt Disney Co. characters and LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA motifs.
Per Delvoye, the sole reason for the banning was that the tattooed pigs were deemed "not art." "We have collectors who've traveled to China all the way from Europe to see the pigs. They're very disappointed." More here.
Fortunately, Delvoye has also tattooed a human, Tim Steiner; this work, which included the rights to require Steiner to exhibit himself and to receive the tattooed skin after his death, was sold to a collector for nearly $215,000 (b.t.w., Steiner got a cut, so to speak.)
Steiner is being substituted for the pigs; apparently, a tattooed human IS art. More here.
In case you missed it, the artists were held for 17 hours in Denver during the Democratic National Convention on charges of putting up unauthorized posters. More details here; Fairey's website here.
(You can stop watching the first video at about 1:35 min., when it moves on to the subject of McCain's competency w.r.t. Iraq):
I'm so glad McCain's "suspended" his campaign and is trying to back out of the first debate so he can help cope with the crisis! Phil Gramm was key in pushing through the deregulation that led to the current financial meltdown. If my life savings weren't at stake, McCain & Co. would be hilarious.
Here's Barbara Boxer on his years of "experience" in dealing with our financial system (she gets to that subject after about the first minute in):
The Wall Street Journal reports, "Sen. Chris Dodd, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, said Thursday that [the] bipartisan meeting with President Bush at the White House on the mortgage rescue plan was nothing short of a disaster. . . . 'I am not going to sign on to something I just saw this afternoon,' Dodd said . . . . [t]he whole meeting 'looked like a rescue plan for John McCain . . . .'"
Here's my solution. We don't have to enact any new legislation that no one's had a chance to review. We simply repeal the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the law enacted after the crash of 1929 that was carefully designed to protect against exactly this kind of meltdown and that worked just fine until the Republicons repealed it, and make it apply to all kinds of depositaries without exception.
P.S.: If you were somewhat surprised by the revelation that the Bush Admin had a financial "Patriot Act" all ready just sitting on the shelf waiting for an opportune meltdown, see this and this.
Previous message | Go to Next message | Back to Messages Mark as Unread | Print Tuesday, September 23, 2008 5:11 AM From: XXXXX To: XXXXX Dear XXXXX:
I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.
I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of [XXX] billion USD. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.
I am working with Mr. Phil Gramm, lobbyist for UBS, who (God willing) will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a former U.S. congressional leader and the architect of the PALIN / McCain Financial Doctrine, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. As such, you can be assured that this transaction is 100% safe.
This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.
Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.
P.S.: Did you catch (from The Washington Post), "The White House budget office said yesterday that it has decided not to incorporate mortgage-finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into the federal budget, citing the temporary nature of the Treasury Department's takeover and 'the level of federal ownership' of the firms."
If you're going to Marfa for Open House this year, keep your eye out for my friend Adam Bork, video artist and alt-rock musician, and for his Food Shark, which serves the best falafel in town. Somebody told me he's getting famous.
Per Democracy Now (citing Army Times), "[b]eginning in October, the Army plans to station an active unit inside the United States for the first time to serve as an on-call federal response in times of emergency. The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent thirty-five of the last sixty months in Iraq, but now the unit is training for domestic operations. The unit will soon be under the day-to-day control of US Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command. The Army Times reports this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to Northern Command. The paper says the Army unit may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control. The soldiers are learning to use so-called nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals and crowds."
"Figure out one thing you can do every single day to be a part of the solution, concentrating on swing states. Money, walking precincts, registering voters, whatever. This is the only way miracles ever happen -- left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe. Right foot, left foot, right foot, breathe. The great novelist E.L. Doctorow once said that writing a novel is like driving at night with the headlights on: You can only see a little ways in front of you, but you can make the whole journey this way. It is the truest of all things; the only way to write a book, raise a child, save the world.
"As my anonymous pal Krinkle Bearcat once wrote: Laughter is carbonated holiness. It is chemo. So do whatever it takes to keep your sense of humor. . . .
"Reread everything Molly Ivins and Jim Hightower ever wrote. Write down that great line of Molly's, that 'Freedom fighters don't always win, but they're always right.' Tape it next to your phone."
If you have credible support re- any inaccuracies in Frank's factual statements regarding the candidate's respective resumes, pls let me know (preferably with citation(s)).
"Democratic voters in at least two Wisconsin communities have received absentee voter forms from the McCain campaign that -- if used -- could cause their votes to be ignored.
* * * * * "[One] report comes from Jennifer Jackson, a Kenosha County supervisor. She says a friend in Middleton received . . . McCain literature [together with] an application for an absentee ballot. The return address was wrong. Instead of the Middleton address for her clerk's office, it was a Madison clerk's office address. Had she filled this out and sent it back, 'her vote would never have been counted,' according to Jackson.
"Jackson -- full disclosure requires us to note that she's a Democratic Party activist -- said: 'My friend is very involved with the Obama Campaign in Middleton. She called many of her friends and found they had the same thing. They debated whether or not to send them in at McCain expense, then they realized the return address was not Middleton but in fact a Madison address.'
"Jackson . . . asks, 'Why mail to established Democrats who have no intention of voting for McCain? Why did everyone with a Middleton address have the same mistake of a return to the Madison Clerk's office? It is clear,' she adds, 'that, not trusting E-voting, many Democrats are absentee voting this year. Did the McCain camp think by mis-routing these applications their votes would not be counted? It is true, they would not have been.'
"The Corpus Clock has been invented and designed by Dr. John Taylor [and] will be unveiled [this week] by Prof. Stephen Hawking, cosmologist and author of the global bestseller, A Brief History of Time.
* * * * *
"'One of my heroes is John Harrison,' [Taylor] says.
"'Of Harrison's many innovations, he came up with the "grasshopper escapement,"' explained Dr Taylor, referring to the device used by Harrison to turn rotational motion into a pendulum motion for timekeeping.
* * * * *
He calls the new version of the escapement a 'Chronophage' (time-eater) – 'a fearsome beast which drives the clock, literally "eating away time".'"
Hands are not among the clock's features; instead, time is marked by light.
More here; but John Harrison's 1776 masterpiece, the Late Regulator, is possibly even more interesting; more on that here.
" . . . to focus national attention on the revelations of whistle-blower Stephen Spoonamore, who's lately been revealing all we need to know about the Bush regime's conspiracy to rig the vote from 2000 to the present. Spoonamore knows all the principals in this conspiracy, has been dealing with them for some time, and has a trove of emails, etc., to back up what he says.
"There have been several other whistle-blowers on this front, but none is as compelling as [Spoonamore] is--not just because he knows about the whole plot overall, but also because he is (a) a Republican, (b) an erstwhile member of the McCain campaign (he quit some months ago, when he discovered what they have planned) and (c) a prominent and well-respected expert on computer fraud. Detection of such fraud is, in fact, his specialty.
"Spoonamore has named the man who was Karl Rove's IT guru from 2000 until some time last year: Mike Connell, a pro-life zealot who told Spoonamore that he had helped the Bush regime subvert elections "to save the babies." (The actual nuts and bolts of the election fraud machinery are largely in the hands of Christianist fanatics, who have done whatever Karl Rove asked them to.) Connell's fingerprints are thick on every dubious election of the last eight years."
An in-depth interview with Spoonamore appears on YouTube in eight short segments; here's the first one. If you haven't yet absorbed all the technological details, here's your chance to catch up:
Great interview here of Michael Hudson, a former Wall Street economist specializing in the balance of payments and real estate at Chase Manhattan Bank, Arthur Anderson, and later at the Hudson Institute (no relation), Dennis Kucinich’s Chief Economic Advisor in the recent Democratic primary presidential campaign, and currently a prof at University of Missouri, Kansas City.
In 2000, I wrote (here), "[w]e've already begun incorporating computers into ourselves, and it’s hard not to believe that one day, computers themselves will qualify as a life-form. We may already have commenced our greatest creation, the species that will succeed us and carry on."
. . . . and (here), "[p]erhaps the key characteristics of a living system can be summed up as having to do with the regulation and processing of material passing in and out of the system so as to maintain itself as a recognizable identity or form. The article my friend gave me on general systems theory pointed out that boundary and identity maintenance are key functions of any living system. The boundaries or skin of any living system should be neither too yielding or permeable, on the one hand, nor too rigid or impenetrable, on the other hand. If the boundaries are too rigid or impenetrable, interaction between the entity and its environment will be overly restricted and the entity will likely starve, explode, stagnate, or be unable to respond or adapt as necessary to changing external conditions or events. An individual or group can be destroyed through failing to take in resources or new information quickly enough. On the other hand, if the boundaries are too soft or permeable, the entity may be too vulnerable to deformation or invasion by outside pressures or attack, or to being depleted, or otherwise destabilized or overwhelmed to the point that it either disintegrates or is changed beyond recognition.
* * * * *
"My theory also suggests there may be optimal velocities or rates at which various functions might be performed, i.e., rates of change that balance the need for growth and the need for stability, given the exigencies of the environment in which the system exists. For a system to be healthy in the sense of surviving in identifiable form, it seems a balance is needed between softness and hardness, openness and closedness, and between rapid and slow rates of change."
As Paul Rothemund says, "To create complex forms, life performs computations."
(Thanks, garybeck!) For info on how to register to vote in Texas or confirm your registration is still good, click here. For other states, try your Secretary of State's website.
"Intrade Chief Executive John Delaney . . . . [said] prediction markets [are] more accurate than public opinion polls and [that] Intrade forecast President George W. Bush's reelection in 2004 while correctly indicating the results in all 50 states.
"The market gives Democratic U.S. Sen. Barack Obama a 61.6 percent chance of a November win, with McCain at 38.6 percent."
Twin Cities police were praised by Mayor Chris Coleman for their "heroic" restraint today -- but among other things, they managed to arrest Amy Goodman (an investigative journalist acclaimed for her exposés of human rights violations in East Timor and Nigeria and the principal host of Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now! program, carried on over 700 stations around the U.S.).
And then there's Sarah Palin . . .
Meanwhile, I understand Bristol Palin's 17-year-old husband-to-be states on his myspace page, "'I don't want kids.'"
UPDATE: Video of our arrest of a premier journalist (uh, bringing democracy to where, again?); don't forget to go rate it up:
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For posts explaining why It's the Derivatives, Stupid (before Planet Money was talking about them), see hereand here; and if you'd like still more, click on the label at the bottom of one of those posts, "follow the money."
Note: I revise my posts. Revisions are made to add info or improve accuracy or allure. If you're interested in my not-best, the Wayback Machine may have preserved earlier versions, or you can e-mail me and I'll see what I've got. If you'd like to quote me, please check back for the most recent version.
You can see a larger version of most of the images on this blog by clicking on them.
"Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works." – John Stuart Mill, before the Manchester Statistical Society, December 11, 1867, as quoted in "Financial Crises and Periods of Industrial and Commercial Depression," T.E. Burton (1902). ["Unproductive works": wars, credit derivatives, etc.]
"The most popular tulip species were scarce and demanded huge prices, peaking with the 'Semper Augustus', which was worth 5,000 Dutch Florins, the same price as a canal-side house in Amsterdam."
Re- this blog:
I mostly do this when I should probably be doing something else, so it's hit-and-miss. Please don't think anything of it if I don't cover your exhibition or issue.
I welcome corrections and comments but reserve the right not to publish those that threaten bodily harm, that consist mainly in name-calling or personal attacks, that dispute well-supported facts without offering credible substantiation, or that appear to be spam or designed to drive traffic to other URL's.
Coalition military deaths in Iraq since March, 2003: 4,766(as of April 22, 2011; click here to update). At least 467 contractors have also died, based on only partial information. Total U.S. military wounded as of as of January 14, 2010: 31,882.
Coalition military deaths in Afghanistan since October, 2001: 2,416 (as of April 22, 2011; click here to update.
Thoughts for the year or whatever, in no particular order:
What a huge debt this nation owes to its “troublemakers.” From Thomas Paine to Martin Luther King, Jr., they have forced us to focus on problems we would prefer to downplay or ignore. Yet it is often only with hindsight that we can distinguish those troublemakers who brought us to our senses from those who were simply troublemakers. Prudence, and respect for the constitutional rights to free speech and free association, therefore dictate that the legal system cut all non-violent protesters a fair amount of slack. – Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Papineau v. Parmley, 465 F.3d 46 (2d Cir. 2006).
I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half. – Jason "Jay" Gould, per Philip Sheldon Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States Vol. 2: From the Founding of the A. F. of L. to the Emergence of American Imperialism, P. 51 (1998, 2d ed.).
On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. – Stewart Brand to Steve Wozniak, at the first Hacker's Conference in 1984, per Roger Clarke.
A modern economic system demands mass production of students who are not educated and have been rendered incapable of thinking. – U.N.E.F. Strasbourg, On the Poverty of Student Life (1966).
A balance of power requires a balance of knowledge. – moi (pre- 2000).
. . . Napoleon . . . said that it wasn't necessary to completely suppress the news; it was sufficient to delay the news until it no longer mattered. – attributed by PRWatch to Martin A. Lee & Norman Solomon, Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1991), p. xvii.
The infowar is the new class war; and information is the new wealth. – moi (2010).
Nothing is inevitable, except defeat for those who give up without a fight. – "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" (1961), script by Irwin Allen & Charles Bennett.
Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? . . . But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. . . . All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. – Hermann Goering, per Nuremberg Diary (Farrar, Straus & Co 1947), by Gustave Gilbert
The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continuous. – George Orwell, 1984.
Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders . . . . and millions have been killed because of this obedience . . . . – Howard Zinn, Failure to Quit (South End Press, 2002; originally published 1993).
Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love. – Julian Assange, IQ.ORG, "Witnessing," Wed 03 Jan 2007.
I used to be concerned about this mass audience thing . . . not anymore. There are overlapping circles of activity and . . . . It doesn't matter what the volume is . . . These circles are not sealed off from each other, they affect each other. – Yvonne Rainer, in an interview by Lyn Blumenthal for "Women with a Past," Program Six from the series, What Does She Want (VHS 1987, Video Data Bank).
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.' – John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (1919).
In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. – James Madison, Independent Journal, Wednesday, February 6, 1788, The Federalist.
[W]e forgot that the question is NOT, how do we get good people into power. The question is, how do we limit the damage the powerful can do to us? – Chris Hedges, "The Failure of the Liberal Class in the United States," address to the Poverty Scholars Program, April 10, 2010.
They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. – Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1977).
In all history, there is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. – Sun Tzu, The Art of War, ca. 500 B.C.
The opposite of good is not evil; it's apathy. – Cindy Sheehan in her speech to the Veterans for Peace on August 5, 2005, just before she began her first vigil outside of Pres. G.W. Bush's ranch in Crawford, TX; see vimeo; see also HuffPo.
One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail. One beats and beats for that which one believes. That's what one wants to get near. Could it after all Be merely oneself, as superior as the ear To a crow's voice? – Wallace Stevens, The Man on the Dump(1923). It's class warfare, [and] my class is winning, but they shouldn't be. – Warren Buffet, CNN Interview, May 25 2005, suggesting we need to raise taxes on the rich. The past is never dead. It's not even past. – William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, Act I, scene iii (1951). Cui bono (To whose benefit)? – attributed by Marcus Tullius Ciceroto Lucius Cassius Longina Ravilla, ca. 125 B.C.
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it. – Economic sophisms, 2nd series (1848), ch. 1 "Physiology of Plunder."
The higher the buildings, the lower the morals. – Noel Coward (1899-1973) (numerous sites attribute this to Coward, but I've found none that provides a more precise citation).
Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity. – attributed to Marshall McLuhan, http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/poster.html. "Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing."
– Joseph Heller, Catch 22, Ch. 39, P. 407 (Simon & Schuster, 50th Anniversary Ed., 2011).
They'd rather some people die for your mistake, than that they lived, but that they lacked a leader.
It was too late to prevent the great Fall, but it was still possible, at least, to cut short the intermediate period of chaos. – Isaac Asimov, Second Foundation, P. 87 (ed. Bantam June, 2004; first published 1953). You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. – Abraham Lincoln (1805-1865). My heart rouses thinking to bring you news of something that concerns you and concerns many men. Look at what passes for the new. You will not find it there but in despised poems. It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. – William Carlos Williams, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" (1883-1963) (I don't own this and find no online source that mentions where it was published; pls help if you can). All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. – Edmund Burke (1729-1797; see link re- variants and possible misattribution).
I consider it completely unimportant who . . . will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this: who will count the votes, and how. – Joseph Stalin (1878-1953), per the Memoirs of Stalin's Secretary.
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.
HECATE: And you all know, security Is mortals' chiefest enemy. – W. Shakespeare, Macbeth(ca. 1606), Act II, scene v, MIT's Moby Ed.
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. – Frederick Douglass, “West India Emancipation" speech, Aug. 3, 1857.
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. – Margaret Mead (1901-1978).
The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall. – Che Guevara, Intercontinental Press (Vol. 3 January - April 1965); also in Che Guevara speaks: Selected Speeches and Writings (1967). The United States is the only nation in history to go from barbarism to decadence without any civilization in between. – Norman O. Brown, Closing Time (described as a graffito in Paris, May 1968; p. 29, ed. Vintage Books, 1974).
Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything; That's how the light gets in. – Leonard Cohen, "Anthem" (1997?)
Let’s do something, while we have the chance! It’s not every day that we are needed. . . . Let us make the most of it before it is too late! – Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1949).
If, one day, a people desires to live, then fate will answer their call. And their night will then begin to fade, and their chains break and fall. For he who is not embraced by a passion for life will dissipate into thin air,
* * * * * Then it was earth I questioned: “Mother, do you hate mankind?” And Earth responded: “I bless ambitious and aspiring souls, Who do not flinch at danger. I condemn those out of step with time, People content to live like stone." – “If the People Wanted Life One Day,” Abou-Al-kacem El-chebbi (also spelled other ways, such as Abu Al-Qasim Ash-Shabi), known as the "poet of the Tunisian Revolution." Hatred never ceases by hatred; But by love alone is healed. This is an ancient and eternal law. -- "Dhammapada," Ch. 1. theTwin Verses5, as quoted by Maha Ghosananda.
There is no responsibility, without freedom; No freedom, without power; No power, without knowledge; No knowledge, without love.
– moi (1976).
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias. – Oscar Wilde (1997). Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis, p. 1051, Wordsworth Editions.
. . . and in the morn I'll bring you to your ship and so to Naples, Where I have hope to see the nuptial Of these our dear-beloved solemnized; And thence retire me to my Milan, where Every third thought shall be my grave. – W. Shakespeare, The Tempest (ca. 1611), Act V, scene i, MIT's Moby Ed.
I knew Paulson reminded me of someone.
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