Consider the following:
General Motors CEO, “Engine” Charlie Wilson [1948]: “The working people did not make that inflation. They only want to catch up with it in order to pay their grocery bills.. We should say the ‘price-wage spiral.” For it is not primarily wages that push up prices, it is primarily prices that pull up wages.” [Wartzman: “The End of Loyalty’]
Robert Wood, Sears CEO: “The four parties to any business, in order of importance”: customers, employees, community, stockholders. [Wartzman]
Lawrence Lebowitz, Cohen & Grisby Vice President: “our goal is..not to find a qualified and interested U.S. worker.”
Roberts: “How the Economy Was Lost”]
Lord Nicholas Stern, former World Bank chief economist: Climate change was “the greatest and most wide-ranging market failure ever.” [Oreskes & Conway: “The Big Myth’}
Judge Richard Posner, in “A failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the descent into Depression” [2009]: the 2008 Crash should have hit “economic libertarians in their solar plexus,” because it was the result of underregulation, a consequence of the “innate limitations of the free market.” [Oreskes & Conway]
John Bogle: estimated top executives earned $1 trillion when they sold shares during the late 1990s bull market. Fees and commissions earned another $1.275 trillion. “Who lost all the money? The losers of course were those who bought the stocks and who paid the fees..the great American public.” [Madrick: “Age of Greed’]
“..Reagan’s budget director David Stockman confessed..supply-side economics “was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top {tax] rate.” [December, 1981] [Ehrenberg: “$ervants of Wealth”]
The heart of Adam Smith’s Book Iv argument: mercantilism, by intimidating the legislature into favoring the carrying trade, has distorted the economy of Britain and undermined the nation’s progress. {Hanley, ed.: “Adam Smith’}
“..Smith never said there was a “magical” or “miraculous”. ‘invisible hand’ in market exchanges benignly guiding them to a ‘best of all possible worlds'”. {Hanley]
Joe Stiglitz: “American inequality didn’t just happen. It was created…Much of the inequality that exists today is a result of government policy, both what the government does and what it does not do.” “The Price of Inequality”]
Patricia Sexton: ‘..in almost all other democracies…and many third world nations – parties of the democratic left have flourished and often exercised dominant power..Above all, these parties insist..a government belongs to its citizens, not o an oligarchy of wealth and power.” [“The War on Labor and the Left”]
1969 tobacco industry executive’s memo: “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public.” [“Merchants of Doubt”]
With Justice For All 