Mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence ... The electoral process is a facade. ibid.
A third of the American workforce earn less than $12 an hour and most of them do not have access to employer-sponsored health insurance. ibid.
Empires in decay embrace an almost wilful suicide. Blinded by their hubris and unable to face the reality of their diminishing power, they retreat into a fantasy world where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude. They replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with unilateralism, bombastic threats and the blunt instrument of war. ibid.
An aggressive criminalisation of the poor … The poor are thrown into prison and must forfeit all their property for being caught with small amounts of the same drugs. ibid.
The self-destructive pathologies that plague the United States: opioid addiction, morbid obesity, gambling, suicide, sexual sadism … hates groups and mass shootings, rise out of this anomie. ibid.
Capitalism: you don’t want this greed to dominate society. ibid.
Unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it consumes itself. Chris Hedges
The political, cultural and judicial system in a capitalist state is centered around the protection of property rights. And, as Adam Smith pointed out, when civil government ‘is instituted for the security of property, [it] is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.’ The capitalist system is gamed from the start. And this makes Luxembourg extremely relevant as corporate capital, now freed from all constraints, reconfigures our global economy, including the United States’, into a ruthless form of neofeudalism. Chris Hedges, Reform or Revolution, 2016
Democracy, in this late stage of capitalism, has been replaced with a system of legalized bribery. All branches of government, including the courts, along with the systems of entertainment and news, are wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporate state. Electoral politics are elaborate puppet shows. ibid.
Marx warned that capitalism has built within it the seeds of its own destruction … Unable to expand and generate profits at past levels, the capitalist system would begin to consume the structures that sustained it. It would prey upon, in the name of austerity, the working class and the poor, driving them ever deeper into debt and poverty … Politics would become subordinate to economics, leading to political parties hollowed out of any real political content and subservient to corporations … Capitalist oligarchs hoard huge sums of wealth, $7.6 trillion stashed in overseas tax havens … In the end corporate monopolies obliterate free market competition … Corporations feast on taxpayer money. The government is committed to spending $348 billion over the next decade to modernize nuclear weapons … We spend $100 billion a year on intelligence, surveillance, and 70% goes to private contractors … Department of Education spends $68 billion a year. Wall Street and hedge funds behind the charter school industry view public education as one more source of revenue … Public lands, prisons, schools, water and power utilities, parking, sewers, garbage collection and health services are being sold off or privatized by desperate towns, cities and states. None of these seizures of basic services by for-profit corporations makes them more efficient or reduces costs. That is not the point. It is about extracting money from the carcass of the state. Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour pp6-9, 2018
The opioid crisis, the mass shootings, the rising rates of suicide, especially among middle-age white males, the morbid obesity … magical thinking … the Christian Right … They have risen from a decayed world where opportunity which confers status, self-esteem and dignity has dried up for most Americans … A decline in status and power, an inability to advance, a lack of education and health care and a loss of hope are crippling … Humiliation fuels loneliness, frustration, anger and feelings of worthlessness. When you are marginalized and rejected by society, life often has little meaning. ibid. pp40-41
The Corporate State has cast many aside, but especially the young. It has thwarted their dreams and condemned them to a life where the best many can hope for is a low-wage mind-numbing job in the service industry … The despair, the stress, the sense of failure and loss of self-esteem, the constant anxiety of being laid off, the pressure of debt repayment, often from medical bills, is amplified in a society splintered and atomized to render real relationships and community difficult and often impossible. Many people, especially the young, sit far too long in front of screens seeking friendship, romance, affirmation, hope and emotional support. This futile attempt to achieve a human connection electronically, vital to our emotional well-being especially in a society that condemns so many to the margins, exacerbates the alienation, loneliness and despair that make opioids attractive. ibid. pp82-82
The message of the consumer society, pumped out over flat screens … is shrill and unrelenting: You are a failure. Pop culture celebrates those who wallow in power, wealth and self-obsession, and perpetuates the lie that if you work hard and are clever, you can become a ‘success’ … The disparity between the glittering world that people watch and the bleak world they inhabit creates a collective schizophrenia. It manifests in diseases of despair, suicides, addictions, mass shootings, hate crimes and depression. We are to blame for our own misfortune … Noam Chomsky suggests, ‘If you care about other people, you might try to organize or undermine power. That’s not going to happen if you care only about yourself. Maybe you can become rich; you don’t care whether other people’s kids can go to school or afford food. In the USA that’s called ‘libertarian’ for some wild reason. I mean it’s actually highly authoritarian, but that doctrine is extremely important as a way of atomizing and undermining the public.’ ibid. pp232-233
Unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself. Chris Hedges, The Death of the Liberal Class
22 July 2014: Bill Ackman, CEO Pershing Square Capital Management: ‘This will be the most important presentation that I have made in my career … You’re going to learn why Herbalife is going to collapse … This is the largest fraud.’ Betting on Zero, Netflix 2016
This is about Bill Ackman’s business model; this is about blatant market manipulation. ibid. CEO Herbalife
An organisation is deemed to be a pyramid scheme if the participants obtain their monetary benefits primarily from recruitment rather than the sale of goods and services to consumers. ibid. Peter Vander Nat, senior economist Federal Trade Commission
For two years hedge fund CEO Bill Ackman has been managing a massive short position in Herbalife, betting the company will fail. ibid.
You pay $55/100 to get a starter kit. ibid. Ackman
This is an ingenious fraud. ibid.
Up at the top we have the Central Bank. And what do they do? Money Printer Go Brrrrr! Keiser Report 3rd September 2020
In one of the most overt criticisms of the Fed we have read to date, Marey write that ‘while the Fed’s step to make the inflation target more symmetric may benefit the average American somewhere beyond 2022, it does not really address the deeper problem with the role the Fed is playing in the US economy. It could be argued that the Fed’s policies have become part of the problem, instead of the solution’. ibid. Zerohedge online
The much deeper problem for the US economy is the asymmetric impact of the Fed policies on households and businesses. The Fed’s monetary and regulatory policies have contributed to a form of capitalism where the rewards are going to the 1% and risks are borne by the 99%. The current crisis response has made it painfully clear again that the Fed’s policies benefit high income individuals and large corporations, while small businesses and low income individuals bear the burden. While the Fed likes to see itself as part of the solution to America’s problems, it should ask itself whether it is also part of these problems. ibid. Zerohedge
We’re just sending this country to its death, but we don’t know what to do otherwise we’ve got to save face, right? ibid. Stacy
In the 1950s Britain was dominated by a small group of men – the captains of industry. They were eminent industrialists and bankers who met together at the court of the Bank of England. Men like these were powerful because of the vast industrial empire they controlled. They worked in partnership with the politicians to shape the future of the nation. What these men did not realise was that within fifteen years their whole world would be destroyed. Their power would be taken away from them and their factories torn down and sold off. And the man who began their destruction was a suburban accountant called Jim Slater. To do it Slater awoke a force that had been dormant since before the war: the Stock Market. And as he grew powerful, Slater became an ally of politicians, but what neither he nor they realised was that the force he had awoken would overwhelm all of them. Adam Curtis, The Mayfair Set II: Entrepreneur Spelt S.P.I.V ***** BBC 1999
The stock market was something that frightened both the politicians and industrialists because it was unpredictable and threatened their control over the economy. Both lived with the terrible memory of the crash of 1929 and the unemployment it had caused. And as the boom continued to grow and excite the public interest, the Bank of England became worried. ibid.
He [Jim Slater] decided to try and work out a way of predicting which shares would go up and which would go down. ibid.
In 1964 Slater formed a company with a young Tory MP called Peter Walker. Slater-Walker was an investment company, and as the market continued to boom, Slater became rich managing other people’s money. ibid.
Jim Slater had discovered that the Coote family no longer had a majority shareholding [Cork Manufacturing]. And he decided to try and take the company over. He [Slater] made a hostile takeover. ibid.
He [Slater] immediately sold off large parts of the land the factories: they were demolished for property development. Slater had invented a formula which he now repeated. The sales of assets from each takeaway were then used to fund the next and bigger one. ibid.