A lot of people think that the "In God We Trust" has been on our currency since the 1770's, which is usually their argument to keep it on there. Then I tell them it was done in the 50's to seperate ourselves from the Communists (they don't believe me at first) and their view on it seems to change.

It's falling...
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/james_k_galbraith/2006/12/the_dollar_melts_as_iraq_burns.html

Reich weighs in on the value of the dollar and how it will impact the 2008 election.

Boy, I love getting paid in Euros.

instead of HELOCs, which shows people are still spending more money than they earn and credit cards are sooo easy to get into trouble with in terms of personal debt.

http://money.cnn.com/2006/12/07/news/economy/consumer_credit.reut/index.htm?postversion=2006120717

adding to Africa and other developing countries. Then there's the debt the US owes. The IMF and World Bank have competition.

moving to Euros, Sterling and such...

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/277471c2-8889-11db-b485-0000779e2340.html

Tricky times for the dollar at the moment.

http://www.nationmaster.com/index.php

http://www.demos.org/inequality/quotes.cfm 

Inequality Quotes

Sense – and some nonsense – uttered through the ages by saints, sinners, Star Trek's Mr. Spock and others. Compiled by Sam Pizzigati with James Lardner and Sheila Kinney.

ANCIENTS

Chinese saying: "Inequality, rather than want, is the cause of trouble."

Lucretius (Roman poet): "The greatest wealth is to live content with little, for there is never want where the mind is satisfied."

Plutarch: "An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics."

Plato (427-347 B.C.): "Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another." (The Republic)

Plato (427-347 B.C.): "The form of law which I propose would be as follows: In a state which is desirous of being saved from the greatest of all plagues -- not faction, but rather distraction -- there should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty nor, again, excessive wealth, for both are productive of great evil . . . Now the legislator should determine what is to be the limit of poverty or of wealth."

AUTHORS AND POETS

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888): "Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class."

Honore de Balzac (1799-1850): "Behind every great fortune is a crime."

Miguel Cevantes: "There are only two families in the world, as my grandmother used to say: the haves and the have-nots." (Sancho Panza)

G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936): "All but the hard hearted man must be torn with pity for this pathetic dilemma of the rich man, who has to keep the poor man just stout enough to do the work and just thin enough to have to do it."

G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936): "Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home; because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be a usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution."

Andrew Greeley (Chicago Sun-Times, February 18, 2001): "It should be no surprise that when rich men take control of the government, they pass laws that are favorable to themselves. The surprise is that those who are not rich vote for such people, even though they should know from bitter experience that the rich will continue to rip off the rest of us. Perhaps the reason is that rich men are very clever at covering up what they do."

Oscar Hammerstein (1943): “I don’t say I’m better than anybody else, but I’ll be damned if I ain’t just as good.” (Aunt Eller in Oklahoma)

William Dean Howells (1837-1920): "The different sorts of equality are finally inseparable, but up to a certain point they are sufficiently distinguishable, and one may speak of political equality, equality before the laws, and economic equality. Without the last, the first and second exist only measurably, and they tend to disappear as it shrinks."

Lorenz Hart: "The rich are a lot of crumbs held together by their own dough."

Fran Lebowitz: "To us the world is a museum; to them it's a store."

John Milton (1608-1674): "If every just man that now pines with want Had but a moderate and beseeming share Of that which lewdly-pampered luxury Now heaps upon some few with vast excess, Nature’s full blessings would be well-dispensed In unsuperfluous even proportion."

George Bernard Shaw (1928): "Perhaps you know some well-off families who do not seem to suffer from their riches. They do not overeat themselves; they find occupations to keep themselves in health; they do not worry about their position; they put their money into safe investments and are content with a low rate of interest; and they bring up their children to live simply and do useful work. But this means that they do not live like rich people at all, and might therefore just as well have ordinary incomes."

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862):"It is not enough to tell me that you worked hard to get your gold. So does the devil work hard."

Mark Twain (1835-1910): "The offspring of riches: Pride, vanity, ostentation, arrogance, tyranny."

Gore Vidal: "The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes."

Walt Whitman (1819-1892): "The greatest country, the richest country, is not that which has the most capitalists, monopolists, immense grabbings, vast fortunes, with its sad, sad soil of extreme, degrading, damning poverty, but the land in which there are the most homesteads, freeholds-where wealth does not show such contrasts high and low, where all men have enough-a modest living-and no man is made possessor beyond the sane and beautiful necessities."

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900):"Nothing succeeds like excess."

CEOS AND BUSINESS LEADERS (PAST)

Andrew Carnegie (1868): "To continue much longer, with most of my thoughts wholly upon the way to make more money in the shortest possible time, must degrade me beyond hopes of permanent recovery."

Andrew Carnegie (The Gospel of Wealth, 1889): "Looking at the usual result of enormous sums conferred upon legatees, the thoughtful man must shortly say, 'I would as soon leave to my son a curse as the almighty dollar,' and admit that it is not the welfare of the children, but family pride, which inspires these legacies."

Andrew Carnegie: "The man who dies rich thus dies disgraced."

Frederick Gates (John D. Rockefeller's philanthropic advisor): "Your fortune is rolling up, rolling up like an avalanche. You must keep up with it! You must distribute it faster than it grows! If you do not, it will crush you and your children and your children's children."

Armand Hammer (1898-1990): "Money is my first, last, and only love."

Joseph Hirshhorn: "The money doesn't matter - not after the first million. How could it? You can't wear more than two shirts in a day, or eat more than three meals."

J. Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913): "Of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of plutocracy."

John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937): "If you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars."

John D. Rockefeller: "When a man has accumulated a sum of money within the law, that is to say, in the legally correct way, the people no longer have any right to share in the earnings resulting from the accumulation."

CEOS AND BUSINESS LEADERS (PRESENT)

Ivan Boesky (junk bond pioneer and convicted felon, 1986): "You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself."

Edgar Bronfman: "To turn $100 into $110 is work. To turn $100 million into $110 million is inevitable."

Warren Buffett: "I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I've earned. If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you'll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kinds of soil."

William Gates Sr. (Senate testimony, March 16, 2001): "I believe, with Theodore Roosevelt, Louis Brandeis, Herbert Hoover and scores of other wise observers in the early 1900s that it is not in the interest of this country to have large fortunes passed from generation to generation forming ever larger pools of money and accretion of power."

Bill Gates (at the World Economic Forum, Feb. 2001): "We need a discussion about whether the rich world is giving back what it should in the developing world. I think there is a legitimate question whether we are."

Gregory F.A. Pierce (co-founder, Business Executives for Social Justice, 2001): "From a spiritual point of view, it cannot be true that the work of the CEOs of some companies is worth a thousand times that of some other of their employees, just as it cannot be true that because you can get people to work full time for minimum wage they are justly compensated."

Robert W. Lear (former CEO of F&M Schaefer, 1998): "You have to pay your CEO above average or you're admitting you have a below-average CEO."

Julian Robertson (Wall Street investment manager who made over $500 million in 1997): "Everybody here is overpaid, knows they are overpaid and is determined to continue to be overpaid."

T.J. Rodgers, chief executive of Cypress Semiconductors (2000): "I don't mean to disagree with anyone's religion, but my own view is that money is the root of all good."

ECONOMISTS AND SOCIAL SCIENTISTS (PAST)

Walter Bagehot: "Poverty is an anomaly to rich people. It is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell."

Henry George (1890): "There are in the United States some few people richer than it is wholesome for people to be."

F.A. Hayek, Austrian-born British economist (1899-1992): "Equality of the general rules of law and conduct, however, is the only kind of equality conducive to liberty and the only equality which we can secure without destroying liberty. Not only has liberty nothing to do with any other sort of equality, but it is even bound to produce inequality in many respects. This is the necessary result and part of the justification of individual liberty: if the result of individual liberty did not demonstrate that some manners of living are more successful than others, much of the case for it would vanish."

John Maynard Keynes (1936): "The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes."

Harold Laski (1930): "A State divided into a small number of rich and a large number of poor will always develop a government manipulated by the rich to protect the amenities represented by their property."

Adam Smith (in The Wealth of Nations, 1776): "All for ourselves and nothing for other people seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind."

R.H. Tawney (Equality, 1938): "One of the regrettable, if diverting, effects of extreme inequality is its tendency to weaken the capacity for impartial judgment. It pads the lives of its beneficiaries with a soft down of consideration, while relieving them of the vulgar necessity of justifying their pretensions, and secures that, if they fall, they fall on cushions."

R.H. Tawney "[I]njustices survive, not merely because the rich exploit the poor, but because, in their hearts, too many of the poor admire the rich."

ECONOMISTS AND SOCIAL SCIENTISTS (PRESENT)

George A. Akerlof (2003 interview with Der Spiegel): "What we have here is a form of looting... The rich don't need the money and are a lot less likely to spend it - they will primarily increase their savings. Remember that wealthier families have done extremely well in the US in the past twenty years, whereas poorer ones have done quite badly. So the redistributive effects of this administration's tax policy are going in the exactly wrong direction...I think this is the worst government the US has ever had."

Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison (in Growing Prosperity, 2000): "If you pour enough wealth into the funnel at the top, those at the bottom eventually receive a little of the benefits themselves. One might ask, what kind of decent society requires making the rich that much richer to prevent everyone else from getting poorer?"

Graef Crystal (compensation expert, 1998):"Plato told Aristotle no one should make more than five times the pay of the lowest member of society. J.P. Morgan said 20 times. Jesus advocated a negative differential - that's why they killed him."

Graef Crystal (2000): "At some point, CEO pay is going to rub up against the gross national product, and I've been told by some economists that will put a cap on their salaries."

Herbert Gans (More Equality, 1973): "Only in a more egalitarian society is it possible to develop policies that are truly in the public interest, for only in such a society do enough citizens share enough interests so that these can be considered public interests."

Herman Daly and Robert Goodland (1993): "Sustainability can be approached by 'lowering the top' more than by 'raising the bottom.' The strategy of 'raising the bottom' must be supplemented by 'lowering the top.' "

Herman Daly (in Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development, 1996): "Unlimited inequality is inconsistent with community, no matter how well-off the poorest are. Even relative poverty breeds resentment, and riches insulate and harden the heart. Conviviality, solidarity, and brotherhood weaken with economic distance."

J. Richard Finlay (of Canada’s Center for Corporate and Public Governance, 2002): “Excessive CEO pay is the mad-cow disease of American boardrooms. It moves from company to company, rendering directors incapable of applying common sense."

James K. Galbraith (in Created Unequal: The Crisis in American Pay, 1998): "The haves are on the march. With growing inequality, so grows their power. And so also diminish the voices of solidarity and mutual reinforcement, the voices of civil society, the voices of a democratic and egalitarian middle class."

John Kenneth Galbraith: ”As the economy develops as it has in the United States, you move more people into brackets where self-satisfaction is in some measure, normal, and where people are more and more inclined to the oldest tendency of the affluent, which is to say, ‘I made it, and so can anybody else,’ and to say that government and public health stand in the way of progress, to develop all sorts of theories which reward them and their well-being and, effectively, deny it to those who are still in need.”

John Kenneth Galbraith: “In a rich society, no one should be allowed to suffer from deprivation such as homelessness, starvation and illness. This ideal is essential, not simply as a matter of human good, but as the price we pay for a measure of domestic tranquillity.”

John Kenneth Galbraith: ”Some economists think that if we have a growing economy, the problem of poverty will take care of itself. It doesn't. People always fall through the cracks.”

Paul Krugman (1998): "Americans (or at least the top few percent of the income distribution) have gotten into a sort of arms race of conspicuous consumption that, like most arms races, consumes huge quantities of resources, yet in the end changes little."

William McDonough (chairman, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 1998): "Issues of equity and social cohesion (are) issues that affect the very temperament of the country. We are forced to face the question of whether we will be able to go forward together as a unified society with a confident outlook or as a society of diverse economic groups suspicious of both the future and each other."

Paul Samuelson: "If we made an income pyramid out of a child's blocks, with each layer portraying $1,000 of income, the peak would be far higher than the Eiffel Tower, but almost all of us would be within a yard of the ground."

Juliet Schor (Shifting Fortunes, 1999): "Whether measured by wages, income or wealth, for 25 years the share of the privileged has increased, and everyone else (a roughly 80 percent majority) has become relatively worse off. We are truly in a second Gilded Age."

Juliet Schor (1999): "Humans are social. We judge our own situations very much in comparison to others around us. It is not surprising that people experience less stress, more peace of mind, and feel happier in an environment with more social cohesion and more equality."

Robert Reich (Locked in the Cabinet, 1997): "Unlike the problem of racial inequality, which pierced the nation's consciousness in the 1960s, the problem of widening economic inequality has not engendered a movement or produced leaders able to focus the public's attention on its moral consequences and its political solutions. Therein lies the real danger."

Stephen Roach (chief economist, Morgan Stanley): "I am hard-pressed to believe that this is a period where we've got a rising tide that has lifted all boats. There are millions of workers who have never seen the harbor, let alone even know what a boat looks like."

Joseph Stiglitz (in astonishment at the 2003 Bush tax cut proposals): "A few people at the top are getting just enormous, enormous benefits," says economist and Nobel laureate "You don’t need a Nobel prize to figure this out ...give money to people who will spend it. Link tax cuts to expenditure. For instance, expanded unemployment benefits, aid to states and localities, money to low wage workers, investment tax credits, in particular incremental tax credits, will direct money in areas where it will be spent."

Lester Thurow (1995): "Historically, some very successful societies have existed for millenia with enormous inequalities of wealth and income -- ancient Egypt, imperial Rome, classical China, the Incas, the Aztecs. But all these societies had political and social ideologies that fit this economic reality. None believed in equality in any sense -- not theoretically, not politically, not socially, not economically. Democracies have a problem with rising economic inequality precisely because they believe in political equality -- 'one person, one vote.'"

Lester Thurow (Shifting Fortunes, 1999): "How does one put together a democracy based on the concept of equality while running an economy with ever greater degrees of economic inequality?"

Paul L. Wachtel (The Poverty of Affluence, 1989): "What many people are beginning to realize is that now time is more precious than goods, that indeed we hardly have time to consume what we can already afford."

Edward Wolff (1999): "We're becoming an oligarchic society, with an extreme concentration of wealth. This concentration of wealth is protected through a political process that's making it difficult for anyone but the monied class to have a voice."

HEALTH EXPERTS

British Medical Journal (1996 editorial): "(I)ncreasing income inequality is bad for the economy, bad for crime rates, bad for people's working lives, bad for infrastructural development, and bad for health -- in both the short and long term."
Larry Brown (after Congress cut $30 billion from nutritional programs, 1997): "A line of Army convoy trucks filled with food, stretching to the moon and back. This is food taken from the poor by the wealthiest nation in the world."

Stephen Golbart (Money, Meaning and Choices Institute, 2000): "Money used to be called the root of evil; now it's the root of stress and confusion."

JOURNALISTS, PUNDITS AND POLITICAL ACTIVISTS

Raymond Baker and Jennifer Nordin (International Herald Tribune, February 5, 1999): "A billion people living in dire poverty alongside a billion in widening splendor on a planet growing ever smaller and more integrated is not a sustainable scenario. Whether it is the rich who must pause or the poor who must catch up is likely to be a defining issue in the future."

Steve Blow (Dallas Morning News, March 4, 2001): "In Appalachia, children were stunted by poverty. In Affluencia, children are stunted by wealth."

John Cassidy (in the New Yorker, April 21, 1997): "[W]hen a working stiff demands a pay raise, it causes inflation and threatens the nation's prosperity; when a C.E.O. gets a raise ten thousand times as large, it rewards enterprise and assures all our futures. The two phenomena, obviously, are totally separate. Only a fool or a journalist could confuse them."

John Cassidy (1999): "The key point about most current options packages is that they grant their owners the right to buy vast numbers of shares at fixed prices. As long as the stock market continues to go up, C.E.O.s are lavishly rewarded simply for drawing breath."

William Davis (1983): "Men who have built up fortunes are often much harder on their offspring than is generally realized. Many do not care at all for the idea that their children should be allowed to dissipate the assets they have built up so painstakingly over the years." - The Rich: A Study of the Species

Gary Duncan (Scotsman, February 15, 1999): "And make no mistake, even for the best-off in society, profound inequality has a heavy economic price. It fuels the crime that is a burden on everyone, while the dependency and deprivation it creates limits the economy's potential."

Martin Eakes (founder of the Center for Community Self Help, Durham, N.C.): "Talent is widely distributed but wealth and privilege are concentrated. We must remedy this mismatch."

Ed Finn (Vancouver, B.C., Sun, May 16, 1996): “The rich have decided that, since they don't use public services any more, they shouldn't have to pay for them."

Thomas Frank (2000): "There is no social theory on earth short of the divine right of kings that can justify a five-hundred-fold gap between management and labor, that can explain away the concentration of a decade of gain in the bank accounts of a tiny minority." - One Market Under God

Todd Gitlin (American Prospect, May-June, 1996): "Today, the reduction of economic inequality is the issue that dares not speak its name. Indeed, one measure of the degraded quality of American political language is the virtual disappearance of the word 'equality.' "

William Greider (Rolling Stone, November 2, 1995): "Sooner or later this country's politics will get back to the core issue: economic inequality. I hope this happens in my lifetime. Actually, I think the subject is bearing down on the politicians faster than they imagine."

William Greider (Who Will Tell the People? 1992): "If democratic expression is reduced to a question of money, then those with money will always have more."

Jim Hightower (1997): "America's top executives are giving a whole new meaning to the phrase: gross compensation."

Jennifer Hochschild (What's Fair? 1981): "Unchecked, economic values lead to an unmitigated meritocracy in which the rich are seen as successes and good, and the poor as failures and bad. The devastating effects for both rich and poor are obvious. People refrain from activities with no market value; they blame themselves excessively for poverty and praise themselves excessively for wealth."

Molly Ivins: "Perhaps I am too cynical, but I believe there is a separate class of people in this country called Too Rich to Go to Prison."

Anatole Kaletsky (London Times February 4, 1999): "History has shown that large inequalities of wealth, power and knowledge are a natural part of all human civilisations. But so are the resentments and rebellions that develop when these inequalities become too great."

Robert Kuttner (Everything for Sale, 1997): "A company with temporary, above-average returns can enjoy a big stock run-up and windfall yields for its founders or owners. Some of this is due to skill, diligence, or foresight; some of it simply to luck -- the people who decided to invest early in Xerox or IBM rather than Studebaker; the people who had their savings in housing in the 1970s and in the stock market in the 1990s rather than vice versa."

Robert Kuttner (Boston Globe, Nov 5, 1990): "A century ago, America in the robber-baron age was far more unequal than it is today. But things changed -- and they can change again. All it takes is political imagination."

Lewis Lapham (Money and Class in America, 1988): "No matter what their income, a depressing number of Americans believe that if only they had twice as much, they would inherit the estate of happiness promised them by the Declaration of Independence."

Michael Lewis (NY Times, November 19, 1995): "The speed with which wealth is now amassed gives it a magical, rabbit-from-the-hat quality. The rich man has performed a wonderful trick. We applaud him so loudly he wants to do it again."

Manning Marable: "Race, as powerful as it is, is ultimately secondary to a fundamental contradiction – that of inequality and the incomplete character of democracy."

Herman P. Miller (Rich Man, Poor Man, 1964)"So long as there are people who have more, others will 'need' more' If this is indeed the basis for human behavior, then obviously the gap between the rich and the poor cannot be ignored, however high the minimum levels of living may be raised."

David Moberg (In These Times, August 7, 2000): "Greatly disproportionate wealth leads to greatly disproportionate political influence."

P.J. O'Rourke: "The poor of the world cannot be made rich by redistribution of wealth. Poverty can't be eliminated by punishing people who've escaped poverty, taking their money and giving it as a reward to people who have failed to escape."

Kevin Phillips: "Either democracy must be renewed, with politics brought back to life, or wealth is likely to cement a new and less democratic regime — plutocracy by some other name."

Holly Sklar (1999): "Together the 400 richest Americans are worth more than $1 trillion. Just 400 people -- they could all stay at New York's Plaza Hotel at the same time -- are worth nearly one-eighth of the total gross domestic product of the United States, the world's richest economy."

L. P. Smith: "To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave the way the rich behave, is like saying that we could drink all day and stay sober."

Richard Todd (Worth magazine, September 1997): "The entrepreneurial virtues dominate our culture, and it is hard to resist them, hard even to see sometimes how completely they have permeated life. Indeed, even those most cosseted of people, CEOs, perhaps the most secure people in the history of the world, like to style themselves as 'risk takers' and justify their pay accordingly."

Nicholas Von Hoffman (New York Observer, May 29, 2000): "Can a democracy, owned and operated by CEOs and the inherited rich, who have little materially in common with the great majority, happily reflect the people's will over an extended period of time? Or is this the dry underbrush of an uncontrollable class warfare somewhere down the road?"

LABOR LEADERS

Miguel Contreras (describing the city of Los Angeles, 2001): "The people in the inner city feel like they're being left out. And the people who live in the gated communities want higher gates."

Karl Doval (1883): "Suppose the difference between the highest and lowest wages will be as one to ten -- that will perhaps be the most that will occur – would not that be better than it is now?"

Edward Fire (Electronic Workers President, noting reports that G.E.'s Jack Welch made about $50,000 an hour or 2,500 times the typical G.E. worker's wage, 1998): "No human being is worth that much money."

Ed Garvey (former executive director, NFL Players Association, 2001): "What boggles the mind is the finding that the chief executives of the S&P 500 companies received, on average, more than $20 million last year. Assuming that people earning that much would not take a vacation and would work 2,080 hours like the normal worker, that is $9,615 per hour. I suspect without knowing that these executives believe they are worth every penny."

John Sweeney (1995): "I think it is a national crisis to have the income disparity we have in this country. It is wider than in any other industrialized nation in the world. There must be a national policy to address the widening gap between wages of workers and the enormous incomes of the wealthy. I think the greedy corporate owners have to be confronted with the fact that they are ignoring their most powerful resource -- their workers."

Jeff Vogel (1996): "To do good, blood must circulate. Money must circulate, too. Money must be distributed throughout the body politic, not be concentrated in the pockets of a few... In the natural order, all life mist exist within limits. Human society, as part of the natural order, must live within limits as well. A maximum wage linked to a decent minimum wage would help every family and every community live healthy lives – and restore balance to a nation ravaged by unbridled greed."

PHILOSOPHERS AND SAGES

Francis Bacon (1561-1626): "Money is like muck, not good except that it be spread."

Isaiah Berlin: "The liberty of the strong, whether their strength is physical or economic, must be restrained."

Louis Brandeis: "We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."

G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936): "The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly. The rich have always objected to being governed at all."

Erasmus (Dutch scholar, 1465-1536): "The prince should try to prevent too great an inequality of wealth."

Henry Demarest Lloyd (1847-1903): "If our civilization is destroyed, it will not be by barbarians from below. Our barbarians come from above."

Tom Paine (1796): "The contrast of affluence and wretchedness, continually meeting and offending the eye, is like the dead and living bodies, chained together."

John Ruskin (1819-1900): "The persons who remain poor are the entirely foolish, the entirely wise, the idle, the reckless, the humble, the thoughtful, the dull, the imaginative, the sensitive, the well-informed, the improvident, the irregularly and impulsively wicked, the clumsy knave, the open thief, and the entirely merciful, just, and godly person."

E. F. Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful, 1973): "Excessive wealth, like power, tends to corrupt. Even if the rich are not 'idle rich,' even when they work harder than anyone else, they work differently, apply different standards, and are set apart from common humanity. They corrupt themselves by practicing greed, and they corrupt the rest of society by provoking envy."

Henry David Thoreau (1854): "Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only." (Walden)

Alexis De Tocqueville (1831): "Amongst the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions." (, "Democracy in America”)

Sidney and Beatrice Webb (1923): "Nature still obstinately refuses to co-operate by making the rich people innately superior to the poor people."

POLITICIANS (PAST)

Calvin Coolidge: "Wealth is the product of industry, ambition, character and untiring effort. In all experience, the accumulation of wealth means the multiplication of schools, the increase of knowledge, the dissemination of intelligence, the encouragement of science, the broadening of outlook, the expansion of liberty, the widening of culture."

Calvin Coolidge: "Our country is an exceedingly good example of the fact that if production be encouraged and increased, then distribution fairly well takes care of itself. Other countries, by their actions in stopping production, in penalizing industry and economy, and rewarding indolence and extravagance, have been able to bring about a very general and equal distribution of misery, but no other country ever approached ours in the equal and general distribution of prosperity."

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953): "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." (See www.costofwar.com for the numbers.)

Andrew Jackson (vetoing the Second Bank charter extension, 1832): "Many of our rich men have not been content with equal protection and equal benefits, but have besought us to make them richer by act of Congress."

Thomas Jefferson (in his last letter, 1826): "The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favoured few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God."

Thomas Jefferson: "I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind. Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on."

John F. Kennedy: "If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich."

Wesley Lloyd (Democratic congressman explaining a proposal to limit annual incomes to $1 million, 1933): “There is no thinking man in our Nation but who knows that the only reason there is widespread poverty is that wealth and the ownership of wealth has become centralized -- the only reason men are too poor is because a few men are too rich. I propose in the main to bring up the poor and bring down the rich into the class of the average man, where all may find real happiness and where we may know a widespread national prosperity.".

Huey P. Long (1893-1935): "Unless you redistribute the wealth of a country into the hands of the people every fifty years, your country's got to go to ruination. Too many men running things that think they're smarter than the Lord."

James Madison (listing ways to combat "the evil of parties"): "1. By establishing a political equality among all. 2. By withholding unnecessary opportunities from a few, to increase the inequality of property, by an immoderate, and especially an unmerited, accumulation of riches. 3. By the silent operation of laws, which, without violating the rights of property, reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigence towards a state of comfort."

Andrew Mellon (Treasury Secretary, 1921-1932): "The properity of the lower and middle classes depends upon the good fortune and light taxes of the rich."

Maryland Senator Paul Pinsky (speaking against a legislative proposal that would have saved the state's 700 richest taxpayers $100 million, 1999): "It's eating truffles at the public trough."

Ronald Reagan: "What I want to see above all is that this remains a country where someone can always get rich."

Theodore Roosevelt ("New Nationalism" speech, 1910): "I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective-a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion and increasing rapidly with the size of the estate."

Franklin D. Roosevelt: "We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. 'Necessitous men are not free men.' . . . In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all -- regardless of station, race or creed. . . . We must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being."

Franklin D. Roosevelt (second inaugural address, 1937): "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."

Franklin D. Roosevelt: "The transmission from generation to generation of vast fortunes by will, inheritance, or gift is not consistent with the ideals of the American people."

Theodore Roosevelt: "The man of great wealth owes a peculiar obligation to the state because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government."

John Sherman (Senator, explaining his opposition to an 1894 income tax proposal): "In a republic like ours, where all men are equal, this attempt to array the rich against the poor or the poor against the rich is socialism, communism, devilism."

Daniel Webster (1782-1852): "The freest government cannot long endure when the tendency of the law is to create a rapid accumulation of property in the hands of a few, and to render the masses poor and dependent."

Woodrow Wilson: "The circumstances of privilege and private advantage have interlaced their subtle threads throughout almost every part of the framework of our present laws."

Woodrow Wilson (1912): "We have been dreading all along the time when the combined power of high finance would be greater that the power of the government. Have we come to a time when the President of the United States or any man who wishes to be President, must doff his cap in the presence of this high finance, and say 'you are our inevitable master, but we will see how we can make the best of it'?”

POLITICIANS (PRESENT)

George W. Bush (in Monterrey, Mexico, March 2002): "The growing divide between wealth and poverty, between opportunity and misery, is both a challenge to our compassion and a source of instability. We must confront it."

Richard Gephardt (1996): "If we cannot find a way to share and spread prosperity, we invite the hatred of those who would punish, pillory, and pigeon-hole -- seeking scapegoats instead of solutions."

Ed Gillespie (political consultant discussing the aborted presidential campaign of Ohio Congressman John R. Kasich, 1999): "We're turning the nominating process of both parties into lifestyles of the rich and famous."

Phil Gramm (former Texas Senator, July 14, 2000): "What's wrong with being rich in America?"

Alan Greenspan (1994): "The vast majority of things which human beings can do everyone can do, and the difference between those basic skills relative to what the base is, is really very small."

Don Nickles (calling for repeal of the estate tax, 2000): "I thought government was supposed to protect our property, not confiscate it, not penalize someone because they've been successful."

David Obey (1996):"We used to think of Great Britain, with its castles and peerages, as being the epitome of a class-based society. Today, we far surpass Britain in the disparity of income. That is economically disastrous and morally wrong."

Paul O'Neill (Treasury Secretary, 2001): "I think it is really corrosive to have this argument about the rich and the poor. It's not worthy of where we are in the development of our country."

SCIENTISTS

Patrick M.S. Blackett (physicist, 1948): "The uneven division of power and wealth, the wide differences of health and comfort among nations of mankind, are the sources of discord in the modern world, its major challenge and, unrelieved, its moral doom."

SCRIPTURE AND THEOLOGIANS

Leviticus 25:16: "And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof; it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family."

Mark 10:25: "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.".

Talmud: "He who increases wealth increases worry."

"Not all who increase their wealth are wise." – Hillel, first-century Talmudic scholar

Saint John Chrysostom (347?-407): "Wealth is by its very nature ad extra - it is meant to go out from you, like a light that dispels darkness. Once wealth is locked up within the walls of your own spirit, it becomes evil."

Thomas Schmidt, The Midas Trap (1990): "Every time Jesus offers an opinion about riches, it is negative. Every time he teaches about the use of wealth, he counsels disciples to give it away."

Jim Wallis (1999): "There's no more central theme in the Bible than the immorality of inequality. Jesus speaks more about the gap between rich and poor than he does about heaven and hell." –

Jim Wallis (in Sojourners magazine, March-April 1999): "The widening gap between the top and bottom of American society is now the 900-pound gorilla lurking in the background of every political discussion. It's just sitting there, but nobody is talking about it. It's time we started talking about it. Our moral integrity demands it. And the common good requires it."

STARS AND CELEBS

Arnold Schwarzenegger (discussing the trials of owning your own Gulfstream jet, after deciding to lease nstead.): "You have the pilots at your throat about vacation, that their wife is pregnant, why can't they have New Years Eve off? It's on and on and on."

Andy Warhol (serving at a church soup kitchen in Manhattan, Thanksgiving 1986): "If there's this many hungry people there's really something wrong."

Don Hewitt, 60 Minutes executive producer (1995): "If all the Forbes billionaires agreed to limit themselves to their basic billion and handed over the excess to Uncle Sam, Uncle Sam would end up with some $90 billion without one member of the club having to give up a single necessity or, for that matter, a single luxury . . . not a house, not a car, not a boat, not nothing."

Larry King (1995):"I can't stand the pompous among us who complain about welfare. The biggest welfare recipients in the United States are the richest people."

Mr. Spock of "Star Trek" (describing Ardana, where the rulers live in luxury in a cloud city above miners working in misery): "This troubled planet is a place of the most violent contrasts. Those that receive the rewards are totally separate from those who shoulder the burdens. It is not a wise leadership."

http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/sgw_feature.asp?id=7 Leonardo DiCaprio - Feature

http://nymag.com/news/imperialcity/26014/index.html

In our winner-take-all casino economy, the middle class is getting royally screwed. A call to arms for populism, before it’s too late.
By Kurt Andersen

EXCERPT

A month ago, I was ragging on CNN for presenting Lou Dobbs’s hour of pissed-off populism as if it were a traditional nightly news show, and I still think it has a serious truth-in-packaging problem. But (like Dickens’s Mr. Gradgrind, with his epiphany about the poor in Hard Times) I now get Dobbs’s and his followers’ anger and disgust about the ongoing breaches of the social contract, an American economic system that seems more and more rigged in favor of the extremely fortunate.

I know capitalism is all about creative destruction, that the pain of globalization must be endured and flexible labor markets are good; inequality is endemic; life is uncertain and unfair, sure, yeah, of course. We’re all Reaganites now—or at least no longer socialists by instinct. But during the past two decades we’ve not only let economic uncertainty and unfairness grow to grotesque extremes, we’ve also inured ourselves to the spectacle. As America has become a lot more like Pottersville than Bedford Falls, those of us closer to the top of the heap have shrugged and moved on.

The asymmetry between the Goldman boss’s compensation and that of his average employee—85 times as big—is virtually Ben-and-Jerry’s-like these days: An average CEO now gets paid several hundred times the salary of his average worker, a gap that’s an order of magnitude larger than it was in the seventies. In Japan, the ratio is just 11-to-1, and in Britain 22-to-1.

This is not the America in which we grew up.

Tech writer's data is corrupted 'cause the index skips the check your situation's hopeless your system's gonna crash if the label on the cable on the table at your house says the network is connected to the button on your mouse.

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.cfr.org/content/publications/images/iraqi-watching-tv-after-cab_2.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.cfr.org/issue/420/democracy_promotion.html&h=75&w=60&sz=8&hl=en&start=24&tbnid=ojAdxgGM1U9oNM:&tbnh=71&tbnw=57&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dwatching%2Btelevision%2Bin%2Biraq%26start%3D18%26ndsp%3D18%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26sa%3DN
    Digital gold and a flawed global order

Author: Benn Steil, Senior Fellow and Director of International Economics

January 5, 2007
Financial Times

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This op-ed was written for the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies research project.

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It is remarkable how the world’s short history of floating exchange rates has affected popular thinking about what is eternally normal and proper in the economic system. Recently, China-bashing US Senators Charles Schumer and Lindsey Graham wrote matter-of-factly that: “One of the fundamental tenets of free trade is that currencies should float.”

Such a “tenet” would have been considered monstrous by most of the economics profession up until the last three decades of the 20th century, prior to which money accepted across borders had generally been gold, or claims on gold, for about 2,500 years. Even John Maynard Keynes, the arch-slayer of the last remnants of commodity money, was an adamant supporter of fixed exchange rates.

Floating exchange rates have proved a source of tremendous periodic instability, yielding repeated currency crises in countries whose currencies are not acceptable for international transactions, but which build up imbalances in their national balance sheets through their imports of dollar capital. The fundamental difference between capital flows under indelibly fixed and flexible exchange rates was well known generations ago, decades before the modern era of globalisation. As Friedrich Hayek noted in a 1937 lecture, under fixed rates “the effect of short-term capital movements will be on the whole to reduce the amplitude of the actual fluctuations...If exchanges, however, are variable, the capital movements will tend to work in the same direction as the original cause and thereby to intensify it.” This logic was mirrored precisely by the radical change in capital flow behaviour that accompanied the crumbling of a credible international monetary anchor, gold, between the first and second world wars.

Monetary nationalists, who believe it natural that every country should have its own paper currency and not waste resources hoarding gold or hard currency reserves, must eventually demand capital controls—as the most noted economist critic of globalization, Joseph Stiglitz, has done—in order to stop the people from disturbing the government’s control of national credit conditions. But the government cannot stop there, Hayek reasoned, as “exchange control designed to prevent effectively the outflow of capital would really have to involve a complete control of foreign trade, since of course any variation in the terms of credit on exports or imports means an international capital movement”.

Indeed, this is precisely the path the Argentine government has been following since abandoning its dollar currency board in 2002. Since writing off $80bn worth, or 75 percent in nominal terms, of its debts, the government has been resorting to ever-more intrusive means in order to counteract the ability of its citizens to protect what remains of their savings and to buy from or sell to foreigners.

In 2003, the Argentine government introduced capital and domestic price controls, the aim being to keep the exchange rate down while simultaneously containing the inflation that policy was giving rise to. In 2004, energy sector controls were extended to include export taxes and partial export bans on oil and gas. In 2005, rules were imposed forcing companies to convert most foreign proceeds into pesos and limiting the amount of foreign currency that individuals could acquire to invest abroad. In 2006, in an effort to stop the rise of inflation beyond 1 percent per month, President Nestor Kirchner demanded “voluntary” price freezes on about 300 products, targeting component products of the official consumer price index, and extended export bans to beef and other products.

Argentina could not be a more fitting fulfilment of Hayek’s fears, that the spread of monetary nationalism could only lead to ever greater international economic and political conflict. Since the 2002 devaluation, the Argentine government has been in continuous conflict with its European counterparts over the expropriations imposed on the latter’s bondholders and corporate direct investors; and the population has turned viscerally anti-American, anti-International Monetary Fund and anti-globalisation.

It was well understood before the Bretton Woods era that monetary nationalism would fundamentally change the way capital flows naturally operate, making of a benign economic force one that would necessarily wreak havoc with flexible exchange rates. The global monetary order that has emerged since the 1970s is now globalisation’s greatest source of vulnerability.

What is to be done? Realistically, sauve qui peut must be the message for nations whose currencies are not wanted by foreigners. Dollarization—abandonment of parochial currencies in favor of the dollar, euro or other internationally accepted money—is, in a world of fiat currencies, unsupported by gold or silver, the only way to globalize safely.

Of course, the status of internationally accepted money is not heaven-bestowed and there is no way effectively to insure against the unwinding of “global imbalances” should China, with nearly $1,000bn (€755bn) of reserves, and other reserve-rich central banks come to fear the unbearable lightness of their fiat holdings. Digitized commodity money may then be in store for us. Gold banks already exist that allow clients to make and receive digital gold payments—a form of electronic money, backed by gold in storage—around the globe. The business has grown significantly in recent years, in tandem with the dollar’s decline.

As radical and implausible as it may sound, digitizing the earth’s 2,500-year experiment with commodity money may ultimately prove far more sustainable than our recent 35-year experiment with monetary sovereignty.

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