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 be 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?

Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

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.

"The question to me is not do you foreclose or do you not foreclose. The question is when and with what philosophy you foreclose," the man on the bank restructuring team said. "If you want to reduce the amount of leveraged homeowners you have, you need to ultimately kick them out of their homes." A colleague walked up: His recommendation was to burn houses. "It would lower the supply."

That's from a new article about Wall Street in the New York Observer, the newspaper for Manhattan's richest people....

Millions of people are getting kicked out of their homes who need a place to live, millions of homes are sitting empty and their value decaying along with their neighborhoods, and all this banker can say -- with a straight face, I presume -- is to burn down the houses? Isn't that insane?

It is -- because capitalism is insane. It doesn't matter that we have a giant oversupply of something, and a giant number of people who desperately need that specific thing. The only thing that matters is: can this something be sold at a profit? If not, the obvious solution is to reduce supply by setting it on fire.

Significantly, Johnson's paper on the subject was published in the journal Nature ("Financial systems: Ecology and economics" Neil Johnson & Thomas Lux, Nature 469, 302-303 (20 January 2011) doi:10.1038/469302a) and describes the stock market in terms of "an abrupt system-wide transition from a mixed human-machine phase to a new all-machine phase characterised by frequent black swan [ie highly unusual] events with ultrafast durations". A scenario complicated, according to the science historian George Dyson, by the fact that some companies are now allowing the algos to learn - "just letting the black box try different things, with small amounts of money, and if it works, reinforce those rules. We know that's been done. Then you actually have rules where nobody knows what the rules are: the algorithms create their own rules - you let them evolve the same way nature evolves organisms."

Is he [a New York stocks trader] motivated by greed? "Definitely. Do I have any existential or moral issues with that? I don't. We're not seeking to improve the state of technology -- we push the envelope to seek profit. The way I redeem it is seeing the benefit it has for my child and my wife."

I believe that ... neither I nor my father, nor his father, have ever felt anything but contempt for you -- or for your predecessors in whatever pathetic, evanescent fiefdom you purport to control. Half of you behave like infants, the other half like crotchety old men. Fortunately for my family, you all enjoy having toys that ... that make very loud noises and/or cause a great deal of destruction.

We will thrive as long as you, our valued customers -- and yes, we value you, despite your repellence, for you are the providers of grandeur and ease, you are the brandy-drowned ortolans whose bones gloriously lacerate our gums, you are the soft yielding flesh beneath our thrusting hips -- as long as you value power and profits and political gamesmanship over the search for love and serenity, over the lives and the dignity of all (including and especially those who are not you and are not known to you), over calm acceptance of your place as one -- just one! -- tiny and finite arrangement of molecules in a vast universe.

We will thrive for as long as you choose extraction over creation, as long as you mistake commerce for art and destruction for progress, as long as you remain drunk on the juice that issues from the crush of a thing or place or person. We will thrive as long as you conflate power with influence, primacy with honor, goal with purpose, duty with responsibility, for thus is our business ... perpetuated ... thus does it hum with ever great velocity. Our fondest hope is to continue to exploit your toxic dreams and to do so limitlessly, for thus may we claim our prenegotiated percentage of your -- and in many cases, your adversary's -- personal infinity.

It is a miracle, what we do.

The slogan "Leave it to the market" has become a cliche of those who have a naive belief that one thereby avoids the need for political decisions. On the contrary, a market is not something that happens by itself. It is something crafted by laws; without them it cannot exist.

[I]f the financial underpinning of a communication system leads to difficulties for scientists, what should be changed? The answer is simple, and it is a question of simple priorities: the communication system of science and its objectives trump business plans, not the reverse.

Cass [Emily Rose] And that whole heat, every ride, it was beautiful to see.
Mitch Yost [Bruce Greenwood]: What was beautiful, watching him milk a closed-out section to impress a bunch of fuckin' judges? That's not surfing. You know that's flapping your fins for an audience. That's letting dipshits define you by a number, so other dipshits can compare you with other numbers so the other dipshits know who to pay to wear their sunglasses, so the dipshits in the malls know which ones to buy.

The whole scientific revolution, which was a product of the Enlightenment, is threatened when you commercialize science.

We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.

[Y]ou're encouraged to gravitate toward the music that everyone else is listening to. This is what happens all across the corporatized Internet: to quote the old adage of Adorno and Horkheimer, you have the "freedom to choose what is always the same."

Consistent in its denial of human reality, growth capitalism thinks only in the present tense, ignores the past, and limits its future to the current quarter.