Walter Benjamin - Fidel Castro - The Flaw 2011 - Jeff Booth TV - Emma Goldman - Abby Martin & Richard Wolff & Peter Phillips - Abby Martin & Peter Joseph - Spitting Image TV - Joe Crow Ryan - The Corbett Report - Naomi Klein & The Shock Doctrine 2009 - Saving Capitalism 2017 - The China Hustle 2018 - 97% Owned: Economic Truth 2012 - Capitalism is the Crisis 2011 - Chris Hedges - Betting on Zero 2016 - The Keiser Report TV - Adam Curtis TV - System Error: How Will Capitalism End? TV - Mematic online tweet - Second Thought online - Crash: Are We Ready for the Next Crisis? TV - Jean Jaures -
Capitalism is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction. It is the expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation. Walter Benjamin
They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America? Fidel Castro
It is really impressive what a filthy system that capitalism is, that can’t guarantee its own people employment, nor health nor adequate education. Fidel Castro
There’s a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality … I found a flaw … in the model I perceive. The Flaw, Greenspan, 2011
When they start to treat a good as a financial asset, as people started to do with houses in the boom, that’s when you get into a very unstable market. ibid. George Cooper, fund manager
The fatal flaw was the assumption that real estate values would always go up. ibid. Nell Minow, corporate watchdog
The world order, largely intact since the end of the World War II, seems to be breaking down. Capitalism, and its relentless march towards progress, allowed many to win. Although no system is perfect, the rules by which capitalism operated were well regarded and understood. You could expect that if you made a big bet and were wrong, you would be wiped out – but if you were right, your hard work, ingenuity, or risk taking would be rewarded. In game theory, we could call this a dominant cooperative strategy, and it dominated for the better part of the twentieth century. The rise of fiat currencies that could be manipulated domestically and the bailout in 2008 changed that strategy to one where the players whose bad bets caused the crisis, instead of being wiped out, were rewarded handsomely. Capitalism’s long-dominant cooperative strategy was replaced by a non-dominant strategy, crony capitalism, where the cheaters won. Jeff Booth, The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future
Transitioning from an inflationary world to a deflationary world – people should be scared. There is going to be disruption and that disruption is coming no matter what. There is nothing fundamental that governments can do to stop the rate of technology progress. Jeff Booth, interview The Keiser Report, August 2020
You have technology moving at an exponential pace driving prices down, and governments all around the world [are] caught in an inflationary trap that they created themselves our of monetary policy, fighting that force. And I would ask a simple question – isn’t it good when the value of your money goes up, and prices go down? ibid.
The abundance of technology would be broadly distributed. ibid.
It’s not going to go on for ever no matter what … It doesn’t matter until it does. One giant thing they miss that this is they assume a reserve currency goes on for ever, right, and you can just keep printing and people just trust in your currency. ibid.
What if a country, let’s say China, created a currency and decided to keep on printing for ever, and they used the currency and they used it to buy the world? … Would we trust that currency? ibid.
And so you can see from that thought experiment that if you just keep on printing money, people lose faith in your currency, and so you don’t have a reserve currency any more. So there’s a whole bunch of people like I think are like brainwashed in this ‘debt doesn’t matter’, that this can go on for ever. And it’s going to happen gradually … There is nothing that can that stop this. We are going to have deflation for sure. Structurally, technology requires it. The path to get to deflation could end up through hyper-inflation first – currency default, debt default – it could happen a whole bunch of different ways but we are going to have deflation anyhow. ibid.
The concentration of wealth because you’re fighting a natural force – Capitalism can’t work, right, so effectively the Government is the market today. Free market principles don’t work any more. ibid.
Deflation we’ve never seen in our lifetimes. What if next year everything around you got cheaper? All it does is increase the value of your savings, and decrease the value of your assets. ibid.
Why do you think the top five technology companies are at historic heights? ibid.
Everybody knows it. ibid.
More band-aids on a systematic, a structural change that has to take place. And so what they’re really trying to stop is a revolution, right, but they’re making the revolution more likely. ibid.
That cursed society in which one may see a single man spending uselessly enough to feed thousands of families, an infamous society which permits a few individuals to monopolise all the social wealth while there are hundreds of thousands of unfortunates who have not even enough bread that is not refused to dogs, and while entire families are committing suicide for want of the necessities of life. Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays ***** audiobook 6.57.08 part III
From a young age we’re taught fidelity to the system and to the state … In almost every industrialised country in the world socialist parties have huge representations … but in America everyone knows that being called a socialist or a communist carried an immediate negative connotation. Abby Martin: The Empire Files: America’s Unofficial Religion: The War on an Idea, Youtube 2015
In the late 1800s there was an intense battle between organised labour and the country’s industrial capitalists. ibid.
It’s been a real battle with real weapons. ibid.
Repression ... was reinforced by hired gangs and lynch-mobs. ibid.
But with the new law every single union officer was required to sign an affidavit pledging that they did not believe in socialism. If you did not sign, you lost your job. ibid.
Under the Smith Act it was deemed illegal for anyone to be a member of the communist party. ibid.
The old guard will use every weapon in its arsenal. ibid.
In a country that declared the end of socialism a major poll released in January 2016 revealed something unexpected: 43% of people under 30 in the US viewed socialism favourably; compared to only 32% viewed capitalism favourably. Abby Martin, The Empire Files: How Capitalism is Killing Itself with Dr Richard Wolff, Youtube 2016
The problems are systemic. ibid. Wolff
The system has in it problems it is constantly struggling with because they are built into the system. ibid.
They don’t see a way out and I don’t either. ibid.
Here in the United States you see the theatrical buffoonery. ibid.
Democratize the Enterprise. ibid.
Those at the top will buy the political system. ibid.
You [employer/corporation] just ripped people off. ibid.
Our economy is based on consumption, and advertising is the arm of creating artificial demand. Abby Martin, The Empire Files: Abolishing Capitalism with Peter Joseph, 2017, Joseph
Where is the sympathy? Where is the actual binding purpose of an economy which is to provide for everyone ideally? The sickness is becoming increasingly more palpable. ibid.
83% of all stocks are owned by 1% of the population. ibid.
It’s a cancerous disease. ibid.
Wall Street: there is nothing positive that this institution does. ibid.
So you have today about $200 trillion in debt in the world and about $80 trillion in currency. ibid.
Every time there’s a bust … creates cheap labour. ibid.
The waste is insane. ibid.
The medical industry is the best example of artificial scarcity … The biggest fraud industry out there. ibid.
We live in a world of over-abundance yet the gap between the rich and the poor continues to dramatically deepen. The 26 richest people on the planet now hold the same wealth as the 3.8 billion poorest. The Empire Files: Giants: Who Really Rules the World? Abby Martin online 2019
200 people control $50 trillion … a lot of those decisions aren’t favourable to most people … One of the problem with capital and capitalism is that it needs to continue to grow … They run out of places to invest … Literally privatise the world … everything is privatised, so the public domain is bought up … ibid. Professor Peter Phillips
You know, Thora, whatever one says about the limitations of a capitalist society it has achieved a remarkable diversity of sweet-tea biscuit. Spitting Image s8e4, Alan Bennett, ITV 1990