Swarthout’s Reviews > Never Ending Nightmare: The Neoliberal Assault on Democracy > Status Update

"Kant made it a secret article of his considerations on government: ‘The possession of power inevitably corrupts the free judgement of reason'"

"This deliberate policy contributed significantly to state debt, with governments borrowing on the financial markets the sums they stopped raising in taxes. This was a doubly profitable stroke for owners of finance capital: the sums they were no longer paying in taxes yielded them interest payments."

"This is also the error of Stiglitz, Krugman or Piketty, who stride onto the historical stage armed with the majestic scientific truth which they believe invincible. Faced with the iron system of oligarchic interests, neither good faith nor the power of rational argument carries much weight"

"Above all, however, a population must deliberately be put ‘under stress’, in a situation of acute crisis, so that it ends up accepting, albeit with a heavy heart, the erosion of its political gains and social rights."

'They [lenders] are in a position to speculate via derivative products on the ability to repay debts, causing interest rates to fluctuate in line with "market opinion" about government policy.'

"'The trick is to keep doing outrageous things. There’s no point in passing some scandalous piece of legislation and then giving everyone time to get worked up about it. You have got to get in there and top it with something even worse, before the public have had a chance to work out what’s hit them'"

The political and economic oligarchies have imposed a solution to the crisis: getting the great mass of wage-earners and pensioners to reimburse the sums injected to save the financial system from collapse and restart capital accumulation. Populations are thus plundered on a gigantic scale to repay a debt they never contracted.