Corporatism Quotes

“Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations that've long since bought and paid for, the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pocket, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and the information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them.”
― George Carlin

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”
― Benito Mussolini

“The major western democracies are moving towards corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies — socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor — and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war. This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food.”
― John Pilger

“It is one of the great ironies of corporate control that the corporate state needs the abilities of intellectuals to maintain power, yet outside of this role it refuses to permit intellectuals to think or function independently.”
― Chris Hedges, The Death of the Liberal Class

“The diseconomies of capitalism are treated as the public's responsibility. Corporate America skims the cream and leaves the bill for us to pay, then boasts about how productive and efficient it is and complains about our wasteful government.”
― Michael Parenti, Against Empire

“To whom is an international corporation answerable? Often they do not employ workers. They outsource manufacturing to places far away. If wages rise in one place, they can, almost instantly, transfer production to somewhere else. If a tax regime in one country becomes burdensome, they can relocate to another. To whom, then, are they accountable? By whom are they controllable? For whom are they responsible? To which group of people other than shareholders do they owe loyalty? The extreme mobility, not only of capital but also of manufacturing and servicing, is in danger of creating institutions that have power without responsibility, as well as a social class, the global elite, that has no organic connection with any group except itself.”
― Jonathan Sacks

“Now listen to the first three aims of the corporatist movement in Germany, Italy and France during the 1920s. These were developed by the people who went on to become part of the Fascist experience:
(1) shift power directly to economic and social interest groups;
(2) push entrepreneurial initiative in areas normally reserved for public bodies;
(3) obliterate the boundaries between public and private interest -- that is, challenge the idea of the public interest.
This sounds like the official program of most contemporary Western governments.”
― John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization

“So nobody must be allowed to think at all. Down with the public schools! Children must be drilled mentally by quarter-educated herdsmen, whose wages would stop at the first sign of disagreement with the bosses. For the rest, deafen the whole world with senseless clamour. Mechanize everything! Give nobody a chance to think. Standardize "amusement." The louder and more cacophonous, the better! Brief intervals between one din and the next can be filled with appeals, repeated 'till hypnotic power gives them the force of orders, to buy this or that product of the "Business men" who are the real power in the State. Men who betray their country as obvious routine.

The history of the past thirty years is eloquent enough, one would think. What these sodden imbeciles never realize is that a living organism must adapt itself intelligently to its environment, or go under at the first serious change of circumstance.”
― Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears

“Designed to leave the world's economic destiny at the mercy of bankers and multinational corporations,
Globalization is a logical extension of imperialism, a victory of empire over republic, international finance capital over democracy.”
― Michael Parenti, Against Empire

“The real question here is how you -- as a reader, eater, and citizen -- can recognize and protect yourself against the onslaught of misleading information and advice that results from food-company manipulation of nutrition research and practice. Everyone eats. Food matters. All of us need and deserve sound nutrition advice aimed at promoting public health -- not corporate commercial interests.”
― Marion Nestle, Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat

“Yet, though all the changes we are observing tend in the direction of a comprehensive central direction of economic activity, the universal struggle against competition promises to produce in the first instance something in many respects even worse, a state of affairs which can satisfy neither planners nor liberals: a sort of syndicalist or "corporative" organization of industry, in which competition is more or less suppressed but planning is left in the hands of the independent monopolies of the separate industries. This is the inevitable first result of a situation in which the people are united in their hostility to competition but agree on little else. By destroying competition in industry after industry, this policy puts the consumer at the mercy of the joint monopolist action of capitalists and workers in the best organized industries.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom

“As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel.

Corporations, which should be the carefully constrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters.”
― Grover Cleveland, State of the Union 1885--1888

“I like that Maersk is a first name. It's like a massive global corporation named Derek.”
― Rose George, Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate

“The heart of the issue is not simply that a group that gets a large portion of its budget from the Walton family fortune is unlikely to be highly critical of Walmart. The 1990s was the key decade when the contours of the climate battle were being drawn—when a collective strategy for rising to the challenge was developed and when the first wave of supposed solutions was presented to the public.

It was also the period when Big Green became most enthusiastically pro-corporate, most committed to a low-friction model of social change in which everything had to be ‘win- win.’ And in the same period many of the corporate partners of groups like the EDF and the Nature Conservancy—Walmart, FedEx, GM—were pushing hard for the global deregulatory framework that has done so much to send emissions soaring.

This alignment of economic interests—combined with the ever powerful desire to be seen as ‘serious’ in circles where seriousness is equated with toeing the pro-market line —fundamentally shaped how these green groups conceived of the climate challenge from the start. Global warming was not defined as a crisis being fueled by overconsumption, or by high emissions industrial agriculture, or by car culture, or by a trade system that insists that vast geographical distances do not matter—root causes that would have demanded changes in how we live, work, eat, and shop. Instead, climate change was presented as a narrow technical problem with no end of profitable solutions within the market system, many of which were available for sale at Walmart.”
― Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

“This first generation of corporate barons left a lasting, if dubious, legacy: they made America more hierarchical, with new divisions between management and labor, between a professional class and everyday workers. They made the economy more centralized, consolidating power into a few mega-companies and their owners; they made it more globalized, keyed to international capital and trade. They diminished the voice of the ordinary citizen in society and politics in favor of educated, professionalized elites. In short, they gave America an entirely new political economy, what some historians have called corporate liberalism.”
― Josh Hawley

“As [President Thomas] Jefferson realized, with no government interference by setting the rules of the game of business and fair taxation, there could be no broad middle class—maybe a sliver of small businesses and artisans, but the vast majority of us would be the working poor under the yolk [sic] of elites.

The Economic Royalists know this, which gets to the root of why they set out to destroy government's involvement in the economy.

After all, in a middle-class economy, they may have to give up some of their power, and some of the higher end of their wealth may even be "redistributed"—horror of horrors—for schools, parks, libraries, and other things that support a healthy middle-class society but are not needed by the rich....

As Jefferson laid out in an 1816 letter...a totally "free" market, where corporations reign supreme just like the oppressive governments of old, could transform America 'until the bulk of the society is reduced to mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia, which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It

“With the help of prominent media outlets, the Royalists, now a political minority, would engage in a scorched-earth strategy to defeat a coming Progressive Revolution, even if it meant crashing the United States as we know it. If they were going down, then the rest of the nation was going down with them.

Which is exactly what happened.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It

“The near future is going to be defined by the outcomes of a battle between those in control of the machines, and those controlled by them. Corporations have become richer and more powerful than countries, but without any form of societal contract or responsibility to citizens or communities. They are not the Quakers of old. Their loyalty to you starts and ends with your worth as a consumer and as a data provider.”
― Sean A. Culey, Transition Point: From Steam to the Singularity

“War is like a vacuum cleaner that sucks tax dollars out of your pocket and funnels the money directly into the pockets of the robber barons who own the weapons factories.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, How to Defeat the Trump Cult: Want to Save Democracy? Share This Book

“So the people--humanity or the family--have up to now, as it seems, played history: no egoistic interest was supposed to arise in these societies, but only universal, national, or popular interests, class interests, family interests, and "universal human interests".”
― Max Stirner, Der Einzige Und Sein Eigentum

“The year Reagan was sworn into office, 1981, the United States was the largest importer of raw materials in the world and the world's largest exporter of finished, manufactured goods. ... Today, things are totally reversed: We are now the world's mining pit, the largest exporter of raw materials, and the world's largest importer of finished, manufactured goods.

This has resulted in an enormous trade imbalance, one that has grown from a modest $15 billion deficit in 1981 to an enormous $539 billion deficit by 2012.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It

“In the 1992 presidential debate, third-party candidate Ross Perot famously warned about a 'giant sucking sound' of American jobs going south of the border to low-wage nations once trade protections were dropped.

Perot was right, but no one in our government listened to him.

Tariffs were ditched, and then Bill Clinton moved into the White House...He continued Reagan's trade policies and committed the United States to so-called free-trade agreements such as GATT, NAFTA, and the WTO, thus removing all the protections that had kept our domestic manufacturing industries safe from foreign corporate predators for two centuries.”
― Thom Hartmann

“Just as layoffs were making a mockery of the team concept, employees were urged to find camaraderie and a sense of collective purpose at the microlevel of the "team". And the less teamlike the overall organization became with the threat of continuous downsizing, the more management insisted on individual devotion to these largely fictional units.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

“Thou shalt have liberty, but no will. - A Corporate Commandment”
― Lamine Pearlheart

“All the imaginaries of breakup are fading. Children finding it impossible to leave their families. It's the same with couples. They no longer split up. Why bother? Things are just the same everywhere else. You just negotiate your mutual indifference. It's the same with the political situation. Whatever the government, no one's keen to change it, since every alternative illusion is dead. Thus the politi cal relationship has got itself into the same conjugal neurosis as the couple or the rising generation. The price to be paid is that of a low intensity, a scaled-down demand, an air-conditioned intelligence which allows us never to cross the threshold of breakup.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“The new monopolies brought bulging profits without all that desperate competitive struggle. The capitalists were certain they had unlocked the secret of the industrial age. This was what the new economy, the new country, required, they decided: enlightened management and control, by persons such as themselves.”
― Josh Hawley

“Publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. The choice of what one eats (or wears or drives) takes the place of significant political choice. Publicity helps to mask and compensate for all that is undemocratic within society. And it also masks what is happening in the rest of the world.”
― John Berger, Ways of Seeing

“In explaining his shift away from Maoist economics, Deng Xiao Ping, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, described his market-oriented changes as "socialism with Chinese characteristics."
Today, American businesses, as well as the media and academic establishments that serve them, increasingly embrace what can best be described as "Chinese capitalism with American characteristics.”
― Joel Kotkin, The Rise of Corporate-State Tyranny

“If I ever wondered why so many people are so hostile to the tangible visible incarnations of the permeating invisible features of postmodern society, I need to look no further: according to populist narratives perpetuated by the media convergence, technology is the domain of experts who, having the wisdom of mini-deities invested with all the power of the corporate state, are not - cannot - be human.”
― Steve Mann, Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer

“In America:
The voters pay politicians to rent their government.
The homeowners pay property taxes to rent their homes.
The workers pay income taxes to rent their jobs.
The debtors pay interest to rent their possessions.
We live as vicarious owners, as the football fan vicariously is "part of the team," though not a single player on that team knows his name. An adult talking about "his team!" It is the grand delusion of ownership that mass collectives precipitate. And when people falsely feel they own something, they are likelier to invest money with the true owner, buying his stadiums, inflating his stock prices, and electing him to office.”
― R.W. Mecklenburg