Predatory Capitalism Quotes

“No ordinary person in history has willingly gone to war on behalf of the rich elite. It has been said that no one would ever fight in the name of capitalism. There are no martyrs for capitalism, no fiery, inspiring speeches, no people pledging to fight for it to their last breath. Who would go to the stake for the credo “Greed is good”? Capitalism never stirs the blood. It makes no contact with people’s souls. It has no heart. It’s all about the Profit Principle. It’s about private wealth and public exploitation. People would fight against capitalism, never for it. So, capitalism cunningly rebranded itself as “Freedom and Democracy”, and those are things for which people would and do fight. Whenever you hear the rhetoric of freedom and democracy, you can be sure you are listening to the propaganda of a cabal of superrich capitalists, manipulating you to fight on their behalf, in defence of their extortionate profits. Dumbocracy – A political system in which stupid people think they have power when, in fact, all decisions are taken by the rich. Freedumb and Dumbocracy – only the most stupid people on earth would fall for the lies of the rich. Freedom for what – to go shopping for capitalist goods? Democracy – freedom to vote for whomever the rich elite put on your ballot paper. Wake up!”
― Adam Weishaupt, OWO

“People are crazy. The values of the world are crazy. What does predatory free-market capitalism care about sanity and values? Capitalism will do anything for a profit. If madness sells – which it does – capitalism will not hesitate to pander to it. Reason, logic and mathematics don’t sell, so capitalism and mainstream culture avoid them like the plague. Reason and logic are the antidote to insanity, but they are the things most rejected by an insane culture. Catch-22. That’s why the Insanity Wars can end in only one way: Cataclysm. The Dumbocalypse is almost upon us. The Dumbageddon conspiracy is going into overdrive. But from the ashes of old humanity, new humanity shall arise like the phoenix. The dawn of the HyperHuman lies on the far side of the eclipse of the dunce.”
― Joe Dixon, The Insanity Wars: Why People Are Crazier Than Ever

“Capitalism needs an enemy. If a real one doesn’t exist, it simply creates one … “Marxism.” Since there is no political and economic Marxism in America, the American right have invented cultural Marxism to perform the role of ultimate “other”, the thing to be hated, feared and resisted. What they call cultural Marxism is in fact what sane people call liberal cultural capitalism, i.e. the culture associated with liberal capitalists rather than conservative capitalists. Of course, in the demented minds of the far right, liberalism is Marxism, which is why Barack Obama was routinely branded a Marxist by the far right, despite never espousing a Marxist sentiment in his entire life. Liberal views, multiculturalism, and political correctness are not Marxist. They are liberal. Why would anyone call them Marxist except to demonize them? No honest person would ever refer to them as anything other than liberal, but since when have the American far right ever been honest? Their game is always the same: to generate maximum hatred of anything that is not conservative, libertarian, Confederate, racist, white Supremacist, and Nazi. Marxism is quintessentially about class struggle, about the workers versus the owners, and the aim of producing a classless society where the people are fully in charge of their own lives, and are never the slaves of the masters. Liberalism, by contrast, does not focus on class struggle but on values, identities and “rights”, especially of minorities. Right wingers have confused liberal capitalism with Marxism. Of course, they have done this deliberately to demonize liberal capitalism in order to convert all capitalists to conservative capitalism. They only want to see conservative (right wing) capitalism, or libertarian (far right) capitalism. Everything else is to be routinely denounced as “Marxist.” It’s just the good old McCarthyite tactic – tried and tested over the decades – that right wingers love so much.”
― Joe Dixon, The Ownership Wars: Who Owns You?

“If corporations are persons, they're psychopaths.

They only care about their own self-interest and have neither a conscience nor empathy.

They'll walk over dead bodies to make a profit.

They pretend to be woke or care about you or the environment only if it serves them and increases profits.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, Inside The Mind of an Introvert

“Capitalism sells you “happiness”. It wants to convert you into “happiness machines”. It also sells you anxiety. If you don’t buy what they are selling, you will ipso facto be unhappy, they claim. Capitalism is all about the Engineering of Consent. You are seduced into submitting to capitalist hegemony, to accepting cultural capitalism. You have an entirely false consciousness manufactured for you by capitalism, to serve capitalist interests, which are always those of the elite 1% that run the capitalist world. Wake up!”
― Joe Dixon, The Ownership Wars: Who Owns You?

“When crises hit the South, the masters of the international economy turn to the IMF solution. The costs are transferred to the public, which had nothing to do with the risky choices but is now compelled to pay the costs: the poor countries are instructed to raise interest rates, slow the economy, pay their debts (to the rich), privatize (so that the Western corporations can buy their assets), and suffer. The instructions for the rich are virtually the opposite: lower interest rates, stimulate the economy, forget about debts, consume, have the government take over (but don’t “nationalize”—the takeover is a temporary measure to hand it back to the owners in better shape). And the public has almost no voice in determining these outcomes, any more than poor peasants have a voice in being subjected to cruel structural adjustment programs.”
― Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects

“The best guide I know of is political economist Thomas Ferguson’s “investment theory of politics,” mentioned above, the thesis that to a good first approximation, we can understand elections to be occasions in which groups of investors coalesce to control the state, a very good predictor of policy over a long period, as he shows. For 2008, we would therefore anticipate that the interests of the financial industries, the major funders (who preferred Obama to McCain), would be “most peculiarly attended to” by government policy, in accord with Adam Smith’s maxim. And so we find.”
― Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects

“For the world, there are many very serious crises, such as the food crisis, already mentioned, or the environmental crisis, which threatens real catastrophe for everyone. But for the West in 2008–9, the phrase “the crisis” refers unambiguously to the financial crisis that has its deeper roots in inherent market inefficiencies, neoliberal doctrines about the alleged value of financial liberalization, dogmas about “efficient markets” and “rational expectations,” deregulation, exotic financial instruments that yielded profits beyond the dreams of avarice for a few—all brought to a head by an $8 trillion housing bubble that somehow regulators and economists did not perceive, portending ultimate disaster, as a few warned all along, notably economist Dean Baker.”
― Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects

“After the bursting of the housing bubble in 2007, Fed chairman Alan Greenspan was criticized because he hadn’t followed through on his brief warning about “irrational exuberance” at the height of the late ’90s tech bubble. But that is the wrong criticism: it was quite rational exuberance, when the taxpayer is there to bail you out under the operative principles of state capitalism. The doctrine has been observed with precision by Obama and his advisers—selected from the leading figures who were largely responsible for creating the crisis, while excluding those, among them Nobel laureates, who had been issuing warnings about it. And the doctrine appears to have worked very well. The big financial institutions that were the immediate culprits have been making out like bandits, bigger than ever, reporting great profits and paying huge bonuses to the culprits, enjoying even a more lavish government insurance policy, and therefore encouraged to set the stage for the next and worse crisis. That is recognized, but the managers who play by the rules cannot really be criticized. These are institutional decisions. Managers either play the game, or someone else replaces them who will.”
― Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects