There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.
–Bertrand Russel
“Capitalism is a vehicle that helped bring the banksters to absolute power, but they have no more loyalty to that system than they have to place, or to anything or anyone…they think on a global scale, with nations and populations as pawns. They define what money is and they issue it, just like the banker in a game of Monopoly. They can also make up a new game with a new kind of money. They have long outgrown any need to rely on any particular system in order to maintain their power. Capitalism was handy in an era of rapid growth. For an era of non-growth, a different game is being prepared.”
–Richard K. Moore, Thunder Road Report, Dec 19, 2011
At a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
–George Orwell
Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge
–Alfred North Whitehead
Corruptissima republica, plurimae leges (The more corrupt the state, the more laws)
–Tacitus
“There is no means of avoiding a final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.”
–Ludwig Von Mises
The US has been led down a dark alley and strangled in what history may recognize as a financial coup d’etat, and a campaign of economic war against the common people.
–Jesse, at Cafe Americain
The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it.
–John Kenneth Galbraith
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
–George Orwell
“Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other.”
–Oscar Ameringer
When the people lose faith and don’t know what to believe in, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.
–Eric Janszen
Some ideas are so stupid only an intellectual can believe them
–George Orwell
Some people say that Americans are ignorant and apathetic. But I don’t know and I don’t care.
–joke, provenance unknown
The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who remain neutral in time of great moral crisis.
–Dante Alighieri
A constant in the history of money is that every remedy is reliably a source of new abuse
–John Kenneth Galbraith
Economic forecasting was invented to make astrology look respectable
–John Kenneth Galbraith
The only time a nation destroys itself is when it becomes efficient in enforcing mediocrity.
–Lyndon Larouche
The policy of the Status Quo since 2008 boils down to this assumption: if we prop up an artificial economy long enough, it will magically become real.This is an extraordinary assumption: that the process of artifice will result in artifice becoming real. This is the equivalent of a dysfunctional family presenting an artificial facade of happiness to the external world and expecting that fraud to conjure up real happiness. We all know it doesn’t work that way; rather, the dysfunctional family that expends its resources supporting a phoney facade is living a lie that only increases its instability.
–Charles Hugh Smith from Of Two Minds, October 2, 2012, excerpt article, “If You Prop Up An Artificial Economy Long Enough, Does It Become Real?”
The financialization of America was a conscious decision by the oligarchs. They controlled the issuance of credit. They controlled the currency and level of inflation inflicted upon the masses. They controlled the corporations selling consumer goods on credit. They controlled the Congress, courts, and government agencies with their deep pocket lobbying and buying of influence. Lastly, they controlled the media messages and molded the opinions and tastes of the masses through their Bernaysian propaganda techniques perfected over the decades. In one of the boldest and most blatant acts of audacity in world history, the Wall Street/K Street oligarchs wrecked the world economy in their insatiable thirst for profits, shifted their worthless debt onto the backs of taxpayers and unborn generations, threw senior citizens and savers under the bus by stealing $400 billion per year of interest from them, and enriched themselves with bubble level profits and bonus payouts. Meanwhile, median household income continues to fall, real GDP is stagnant, true unemployment exceeds 22%, and 47 million people are living on food stamps.
–Jim Quinn of The Burning Platform blog, Oct 8, 2012, excerpt (brilliant) article, “Decline, decay, denial, delusion, and despair”
What will collapse really be like? I expect the event will be spectacular in some ways, but subdued and subversive in many other ways. Triggers may be swift and startling, but the reactions of the populace slow, uncertain, and presumptive. There will be fissures in our foundation, but the complete extent of the danger may take a few more years to become evident. While the public continues to maintain its fixation on some Mad Max nightmare scenario, the real collapse will be taking place right under their noses in the form of 25%-50% increases in food and fuel, tightened job availability with pensions swallowed by austerity, food lines hidden by food stamps until the government finally defaults and pulls the rug out from under entitlement programs, etc. For a time, it will look and feel like a slightly darker version of today, and not the cinematic melodrama that we have come to envision. The worst of times that we often find extolled in the pages of history books come at the cost of years of almost equal disparity, and usually, the lead up is far more difficult to handle than the finale…
–Brandon Smith from Alt-Market, August 6, 2012, excerpt article, “Has the perfect moment to kill the dollar arrived?”