Equal parts – cocaine, Testosterone and body fluids. ibid.
There is no nobility in poverty. ibid.
I want you to overcome your problems by being rich. ibid.
The history of capitalism has been so totally re-written that many people in the rich world do not perceive the historical double standards involved in recommending free trade and free market to developing countries. Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans, Prologue xxiii, 2008
Britain and the US are not the homes of free trade; in fact, for a long time they were the most protectionist countries in the world. Not all countries have succeeded through protection and subsidies, but few have done so without them. For developing countries, free trade has a rarely been a matter of choice; it was often an imposition from outside, sometimes even through military power. Most of them did very poorly under free trade; they did much better when they used protection and subsidies. The best-performing economies have been those that opened up their economies selectively and gradually. Neo-liberal free-trade free-market policy claims to sacrifice equity for growth, but in fact it achieves neither; growth has slowed down in the past two and a half decades when markets were freed and borders opened. ibid. Prologue xxiv
The importance of international trade for economic development cannot be overemphasized. But free trade is not the best path to economic development. Trade helps economic development only when the country employs a mixture of protection and open trade, constantly adjusting it according to its changing needs and capabilities. Trade is simply too important for economic development to be left to free trade economists. ibid. ch3
Far from being the harbingers of anarchy, these groups of men – Afghan veterans, street toughs, martial-arts experts, former KGB officers, and every one of them terrifying – were the indispensable midwives of capitalism. Misha Glenny, McMafia
Businesses willingly handed over 10-30 per cent of their turnover to local thugs, who would ensure in exchange that they could continue trading, free from the violence of gruppirovki working on behalf of their competitors. ‘We are prepared to work with the racket because it charges ten per cent,’ a businessman from Omsk noted at the time. ‘The state takes ninety per cent in taxes and even more in fines.’ ibid.
It took just months for Russia to descend into a surreal anarchic capitalism, the Wild East. ibid.
Russia’s economy became a giant Petri-dish of Chicago-school market economics, but among the cultures they were busy cultivating was a Frankenstein that slipped out through the door of their laboratory almost unnoticed ... The coupling of a privatised foreign-trade mechanism with the retention of rock-bottom subsidized commodity prices gave birth within months to the entirely new species of robber baron – the Russian oligarch. ibid.
The process of enrichment was quite simply the grandest larceny in history and stands no historical comparison ... the biggest single flight of capital the world has ever seen. ibid.
The Soviet bureaucrats who still administered the state did not understand how to monitor, regulate or adjudicate the principles of commercial exchange. ibid.
This simple triangular conspiracy between oligarchs, bureaucrats and organised crime was happily concealed from most by the intense drama being acted out upon the streets of Moscow and other major cities: unbridled sexual activity, outrageous displays of wealth, and impenetrable political intrigues. Above all, it was hidden by the outbreak of violent mob wars. ibid.
The millionaires and billionaires could not make and then hold on to their money without the protection of the rackets, and the gangsters flourished thanks to the oligarchs’ demand for security. ibid.
Despite the murders and the shoot-outs, the Russian mob actually ensured a degree of stability during the economic transition. ibid.
The oligarchs and organised crime bosses started colonising Israel for a number of reasons. It was the ideal place to invest or launder money. Israel's banking system was design to encourage atiyah ... Israel had embraced the zeitgeist of international financial deregulation and considerable eased controls on the import and export of capital ... It had no money-laundering legislation. ibid.
Israeli police estimated that these Russians laundered between $5 and $10 billion through Israeli banks in the fifteen years following the collapse of communism. ibid.
Well, we’re all living in a house called the Money System; and as a result most of us are suffering from a disease called poverty. There’s so much the matter with the present system that it's no good tinkering at it. Everything about it is wrong and there's nothing about it that's right. There’s only one thing to be done with it and that is to smash it up and have a different system altogether. We must get out of it. Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist
But the kind Capitalist told them not to be insolent, and spoke to them about honesty, and said if they were not careful he would have their faces battered in for them by the police, or if necessary he would call out the military and have them shot down like dogs, the same as he had done before at Featherstone and Belfast. ibid.
If all the money were distributed equally amongst all the people tomorrow, it would all be up in heaps again in a very short time. But that only proves that while the present Money System remains, it will be impossible to do away with poverty, for heaps in some places man little or nothing in other places. ibid.
All the evils that I have referred to are only symptoms of the one disease that is sapping the moral, mental and physical life of the nation, and all attempts to cure these symptoms are foredoomed to failure, simply because they are the symptoms and not the disease. ibid.
The hundreds of thousands of pounds that are yearly wasted in well-meant but useless charity accomplish no lasting good, because while charity soothes the symptoms it ignores the disease, which is, the private ownership of the means of producing the necessaries of life, and the restriction of production, by a few selfish individuals for their own profit. ibid.
The gloomy shadows enshrouding the streets, concealing for the time their grey and mournful air of poverty and hidden suffering, and the black masses of cloud gathering so menacingly in the tempestuous sky, seemed typical of the Nemesis which was overtaking the Capitalist System. That atrocious system which, having attained to the fullest measure of detestable injustice and cruelty, was now fast crumbling into ruin, inevitably doomed to be overwhelmed because it was all so wicked and abominable, inevitably doomed to sink under the blight and curse of senseless and unprofitable selfishness out of existence for ever, its memory universally execrated and abhorred. ibid.