A Commonplace Book

That corporate America cheerfully barters the lung tumors of its asbestos workers for profit, exchanges the brain damage of thousands of children from lead poisoning for earnings... and, without adequate testing, feeds carcinogens to an entire nation to secure a possible early market advantage, diminishes the likes of Charles Manson to a prankster at a Sunday school picnic.

Consumption gives us an illusion of autonomy and hence diverts our attention from our lack of control over the goods we produce.

Consumer society channels our needs, desires, and strong emotions into the marketplace.

Democracy and free enterprise go hand in hand are are unfriendly to each other. they go hand in hand and are deadly enemies, for the only freedom business cares about is the freedom to do business. The desire for justice does not count.

Music should be the realm of pure play, but capitalism has corrupted it into another fucking chore, and made us all a bunch of whores.

The reason capitalism is theft has to do with "surplus value" -- the difference between the selling price and the cost of equipment, materials, marketing and labor. All down the line, "profit" is really the result of unpaid labor that creates additional goods without commensurate additional cost. The capitalist claims the profit by virtue of his capital alone, which in most cases is the result of economic, racial and social inheritance, not hard work.

The saddest sight of all is the automobiles parked outside the mills and factories. The automobile stands out in my mind as the very symbol of falsity and illusion. There they are, thousands upon thousands of them, in such profusion that it would seem as if no man were too poor to own one.... They don't realize that when the American worker steps out of his shining tin chariot he delivers himself body and soul to the most stultifying labor a man can perform.

They don't see that the best possible conditions (in American lingo) mean the biggest profits for the boss, the utmost servitude for the worker, the greatest confusion and disillusionment for the public in general.

Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it.

Kekule dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to used. The serpent that announces, "the World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally re-turning," is to be delivered into a a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity--most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life.

Throw away industry and profit,
and there won't be any thieves.

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone

Supermarket psychology, I have learned, is practically a science. It is governed by lab-tested principles and meticulous observation. Consultants churn out papers on such matters as unplanned purchasing and the effectiveness of shopping-cart signage.

The goal of all this effort is not, as one might guess, to improve the American diet. Nor is it to strike an ideal balance between nutrition, convenience and cost. The aim, seasoned observers inform me, is quite simple: It is to get the shopper to spend more money.

Lloyd Dobler [John Cusack ]: I don't want to sell anything, buy anything or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or... process anything sold, bought or processed, or repair anything sold, bought or processed, you know, as a career I don't want to do that.

Anarchists are opposed to violence... The main plank of anarchism is the removal of violence from human relations. It is life based on the freedom of the individual, without the intervention of the police. For this reason we are enemies of capitalism, which depends on the protection of the police to force workers to allow themsleves to be exploited...We are therefore enemies of the State, which is the coercive, violent organization of society.

Work. Consume. Be silent. And die.

Poverty, meanwhile, is "no longer a significant problem in America" [says D'Souza], since the poor here are so much better off than the poor everywhere else in the world, and are also better off than average Americans were 50 years ago (evidence: 98 percent of the poor have refrigerators).

... But what is puzzling is that capitalists who are so ruthless about improving the quality of their companies -- only the paranoid survive, you know -- are so ambivalent about improving the quality of their country. If the successful capitalist is always engaged in the act of making things better, of raising standards, of never accepting the status quo, why then express satisfaction that the poor have refrigerators?

The "remarkable result" of The Prisoners' Dilemma, to quote the economist Roger McCain ["Imperfect competition and game theory." Essential Principles of Economics: a Hypermedia Text, Second revised edition, Chapter 13, 1998] is that "individually rational action results in both persons being made worse off in terms of their own self-interested purposes." The game is a vivid illustration of the nearly overwhelming temptation to pursue private ends in transactions where community interests are at stake. The structure of the game is such that -- unless one changes "rules" to tilt the play in favor of cooperation -- the pressure to defect is irresistible.

Nothing had given a sense of beautiful passage as had the absence of signboards; without them, long stretches of the country appeared to us, if not pristine, then at least no worse the wear for half a millennium of explorers, settlers, descendants. The bullboard boys and others who see landscape only as a means to grab a fast buck without returning anything but ugliness have so degraded the view from so many American highways and so numbed us to the blight that we, especially the young, often silently accept the unslightly as a requisite of our economic lives and do nothing more than turn a blind eye to it.

Roger [Campbell Scott]: You can't sell a product without first making people feel bad.
Nick [Jesse Eisenberg]: Why not?
Roger: Because it's a substitution game. You have to remind them that they're missing something from their lives. Everyone's missing something, right?
Nick: I guess.
Roger: Trust me. And when they're feeling sufficiently incomplete, you convince them your product is the only thing that can fill the void. So instead of taking steps to deal with their lives, instead of working to root out the real reason for their misery, they go out and buy a stupid looking pair of cargo pants.

I went to the market to realize my soul
'cause what i need i just don't have

I'm all lost in the supermarket,
I can no longer shop happily,
I came in here for that special offer
Guaranteed Personality.

Keep in mind, democracy and capitalism are two different things. Democracy is not an economic system. It's a political system. The conservatives actively promote the idea that democracy and capitalism are the same thing, or that capitalism is a political system. Whenever capitalism is used as a political system, it is a tyranny. It's rule by the rich. And that's why it's important to balance capitalism with democracy, which is what Roosevelt did.