 Debt is such a powerful tool, it is such a useful tool, it's much better than colonialism ever was because you can keep control without having an army, without having a whole administration. |
| What's immediately profitable is the only kind of logic that capitalism understands. |
| It seems to be the thing now that young people are getting back into politics. |
| We're trying to run a 21st century society and economy with 19th century Darwinian, competitive, crude ideas. |
| If the economy becomes disembodied from society it can only lead to disaster. |
| If you cut down a forest, it doesn't matter how many sawmills you have if there are no more trees. |
| Now we are flying off into outer space, there is no clear curb on what can be done in the name of the economy. |
| As the rich consume more and more, they are clearly not going to want to downgrade their own status. |
| There are a lot of people who don't contribute anything to consumption and production. |
| What it missing, I think, is this notion of the common good. |
| Subsidize... or lend. |
| Redistribution of wealth would require enormous amounts of investment. The only time an elite has accepted this has been during crises, such as in America in the 1930s under Roosevelt. |
| There is no degree of human suffering which in and of itself is going to bring about change. Only organisation can change things. |
| I think the market is always going to be around. The goal is not to say, let's get rid of the market, because the market does render a huge number of services, and I don't want to have a fight about the price of something every time I buy a book or a bottle of water. |
| What you need if you want jobs are small and medium sized enterprises, local initiatives, labour intensive work, community development, service providers and the like. |
| The real fight is about what should be in the marketplace and what should not. Should education be a marketable commodity? Should healthcare? |
| Much of what is called investment is actually nothing more than mergers and acquisitions, and of course mergers and acquisitions are generally accompanied by downsizing. |
| Everything has to be done to build some sort of international democracy. We've seen only the tiniest beginnings of that. |
| We have the most crude accounting tools. It's tragic because our accounts and our national arithmetic doesn't tell us the things that we need to know. |
| What I worry about is climate change, because that would have untold effects that we can't even measure yet. |
