Sunday Quotes

I call this post "Sunday Quotes" because I usually reserve Sundays for reading. Over the years, I've read some very interesting books and articles, and this has become one place where I collect pieces of writing that appeal to me. (See also here: http://willworkforjustice.blogspot.com/2012/03/interesting-quotes.html) 

1.  "The entire essence of America is the hope to first make money--then make money with money--then make lots of money with lots of money." -- Paul Erdman

2.  Heard on the street: "TARP = affirmative action for white people." [TARP was the name of a federal government program that bailed out the banking sector in the United States around 2008]

3.  On the Henry Louis Gates arrest: "Honestly, it's not the local cops we have to worry about...the local SWAT team that's been drinking the Homeland Security Kool-Aid rampaging through a house on a bad tip is hella more worrisome than a local beat cop." -- Jason K.

4. "Of those who deplore trapping, he [a Maine resident] says, 'When someone decides to take up reformin', they first find somethin' that won't interfere with their style of living, and then 'Brother, can they reform!'" [Nat'l Geographic, pp. 733, June 1977]

5. Chuck Thompson: "If there were a fundamental principle that once separated America from the rest of the world, I'd nominate institutional integrity. More simply, public honesty. I'm not suggesting that dishonesty isn't readily found in every civilization, that a Golden Age of American honor ever existed...Nor am I parading myself as a paragon of virtue. We all lie, to some degree, usually in petty ways, for the sake of discretion or keeping the peace or perhaps on occasion simply because it's the most expedient means available to get what we want. Still, lying and cheating--perhaps other than to avoid hurting someone's feelings--has never been openly accepted or condoned in the United States, much less celebrated as a 'genius' operational tactic (when done with [Karl] Rovian finesse) from the boardroom to the courtroom. At least, not until recently....Worse, Americans seem to be reveling the descent... American society is no accident; it didn't evolve by providential decree; its success wasn't inevitable... Americans have historically understood that to create a country in which half the world aspires to live, the first prerequisite is the integrity of its public and private institutions. That's the foundation upon which the country was assembled and its illustrious future once determined... What's being overlooked in the rush to save the planet, however, is that we're also pissing away a social gift as great as any people in history have been bequeathed. And if we don't resist the seduction of the seemingly inevitable road in front of us, it won't matter how much fossil fuel we stop burning, we'll fail to preserve the part of us that mattered most in the first place." [To HellHoles and Back, pp. 309 et al, paperback, Henry Holt and Company]

6. "Sure, up there [New York City] black and white work side by side. But at night the black goes home to his ghetto and the white to his suburb. Here in the South we've been living together for 250 years, talking to each other every day. That gives you something solid to build on." -- Mayor Johnny L. Ford [National Geographic (October 1975), pp. 569] 

"It struck me as notably ironic that Southerners could despise blacks so bitterly and yet live comfortably alongside them, while in the North people by and large did not mind blacks, even respected them as humans and wished them every success, just so long as they didn't have to mingle with them too freely." -- Bill Bryson [The Lost Continent, paperback, pp. 63 (1989)]

Judge James Robertson: "I considered it to be what I call a 'crash course in racism.' Because racism was on the surface in Mississippi in a way that it was not in the North. You could feel it, smell it, touch it, talk about it—it was right there. But I also thought then—and I think history has borne me out—that the South would, if not solve, at least work on solving its racial difficulties long before the North did. Because in the South, in the deep South like that, black and white people really know each other. They live near each other. They partake of one another's cultures. Their children play together. Sure, they separate at a certain age and they go to separate schools, but they are part of each other's lives in a way that we're not in the North. We're separated here by geography--you know, east of the park and west of the park, and Harlem is up there, Manhattan is down here, and so forth. Black and white people are more strangers in the North than they are in the South." [Interview, 2013 at Columbia University]

7. Graphic titled, "The Middle East: where the oil is." Graphic shows total world [oil] reserves in Middle East as 444 billion barrels [62%] and remainder of world as 272 billion barrels. [National Geographic (October 1975), pp. 500]

As of January 1, 2011, the Middle East had 695.4 billion barrels of oil, which is around 47% of the world's reserves. (U.S. Energy Information Administration) 

8. "[T]he secret of America: a nation of people with the fresh memory of old traditions who dared to explore new frontiers." -- President John F. Kennedy [from National Geographic (January 1975), pp. 109]

9. The fundamental problem with creating jobs in first-world countries--as long as other countries are able to produce similar goods or services--is that capital is mobile while labor is not. Still, trade deficits don't help, and since countries have competing goals, true cooperation is difficult. Though we are all linked, only minimal rather than optimal cooperation appears necessary to maintain the existing [global] system. -- Matthew Rafat (2012)

[Bonus: "It is only a slight exaggeration to say that a free global economy has been understood to be one in which things but not people are free to move. Many have wanted to bestow on capital, the most abstract thing, the same right enjoyed by things under conventional free trade, to cross national frontiers." -- Roberto M. Unger, Free Trade Reimagined (2007), which I read in 2019] 

Rather than create better metrics measuring employee performance, governments are going the other direction--promoting fear or hero worship based on outliers--to maintain and increase employment. Better individual metrics plus due process could mitigate governmental reliance on social engineering or irrelevant issues in hiring, firing, and demanding tax revenue; however, such a paradigm would require transparency and thus less employee privacy to be truly useful. Under the new paradigm, if Inspector A has 10 successful investigations while Inspector B has 2, then the government may easily defend any off-the-job behavior of Inspector A if challenged, including social media postings. However, in a world without individual metrics, Inspector B prevails because the touchstone in hiring becomes non-controversy rather than merit. Voters have sensed a decline in accountability and have opted for political incorrectness because the alternative--control through manipulating social norms--is unacceptable to most thinking people. -- Matthew Rafat (2016)

Rising prices for essential items like healthcare, education, and housing, if disconnected from wage increases or if requiring decades-long debt, change society by elevating not God, not love, not relationships, not honor, not honesty, but money above all things. This phenomenon does not mean essential items should be given for "free." Rather, it means a society will decline and fracture if it cannot use government spending and education to promote sustainable, long term objectives and truly diverse consumer choices while preventing the degradation of the individual. -- Matthew Rafat (2017)

Justice William Brennan, FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U.S. 726 (1978), dissenting: "[I]n our land of cultural pluralism, there are many who think, act, and talk differently from the Members of this Court, and who do not share their fragile sensibilities. It is only an acute ethnocentric myopia that enables the Court to approve the censorship of communications solely because of the words they contain...[T]he Court's decision may be seen for what, in the broader perspective, it really is: another of the dominant culture's inevitable efforts to force those groups who do not share its mores to conform to its way of thinking, acting, and speaking."

George Carlin: Every individual set of eyes you look into gives you something, whether it's a blank wall or an infinite regress of barbershop mirrors... People are wonderful one at a time. Each of them has an entire hologram of the universe somewhere within them. But as soon as individuals begin to clump, as soon as they begin to clot, they change... Groups of three, five, ten, fifteen--suddenly we have special little hats, we have arm bands, we have a marching song, a secret handshake and a list of people we don't agree with...One of my lists once was: "People I Can Do Without." Near the top: "People who say, 'Long live Such-and-such!' and then kill someone to accomplish it.

The ideal grouping for human beings is one. With the occasional sexual visit to the lady in the next group. Temporary twosomes are fine. Once upon a time people might have been good up to ten or twelve, or one hundred or so, whatever the ideal tribal unit was. When everybody took care of everybody else's children, there were no last names, no patriarchy, no patrimony, when property was unheard of. You might have personal stuff: this is my favorite rock, I got an ax I made. But no one owns the tent, everybody belongs in that tent as long as we have our fire. What buffalo there are belong to everybody if we can kill one. Something about that is awfully compelling. But we lost it long ago. 

The larger the group, the more toxic, the more of your beauty as an individual you have to surrender for the sake of group thought. And when you suspend your individual beauty you also give up a lot of your humanity. You will do things in the name of a group that you would never do on your own. Injuring, hurting, killing, drinking, are all part of it, because you've lost your identity, because you now owe your allegiance to this thing that's bigger than you are and that controls you. It happens in police culture. You get talking with with individual cops and they're the greatest f*cking guys in the world. But you know that when they're making a domestic disturbance call in the black section of town, they're going to hit first and ask questions later. And if you happened to be there and called them on it, you'd be the enemy, right or wrong. That great f*cking guy would be gone. It's the same with military men, with corporate *ssholes, the same anywhere on earth. And by the way, America's groups are no better than anyone else's. (Last Words, 2009, hardcover, pps. 283-284)

[FYI: according to anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon's study of the Yanomamö tribes in the Amazon, George Carlin was wrong about tribal units.] 

13. Stephen Pollan and Mark Levine, Die Broke (paperback, HarperBusiness, 1997): For you, retirement is a pyramid scheme you've got no chance of winning. Remember that only one generation in American history has been able to make this dream of "luxurious retirement" come true. They're doing it by drawing on five income streams. The average retiree gets 42 percent of their income from government assistance, 20 percent from their personal wealth, 20 percent from their pensions, 15 percent from current wages, and 3 percent from other sources. 

14. "The heart wants neither coffee nor coffeehouses. The heart wants a friend. Coffee is only the excuse." -- Turkish proverb 

15. "Selling is what they don't teach you at Harvard Business School. Business schools admit that their purpose is to train managers, thereby almost totally overlooking the fact that if there are no sales there is nothing to manage. This escapes a lot of newly minted MBAs, who in their desire to run a company may find sales, the techniques involved, the *art* of selling, beneath them." -- Mark McCormack, pp. 90, What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School (1986)

16. "I am a firm believer that capitalism is the most potent form of foreign assistance. We should consider whether some of the many billions governments now devote to social development projects would be better spent on tax credits to encourage companies to invest in poor countries. Unlike social development projects, business investment has a larger multiplier effect and usually leads to even larger, more profitable companies that follow, literally freeing people from poverty." pp. 141, Inside Coca-Cola (paperback), by Neville Isdell with David Beasley 

"The secret to the Coca-Cola distribution method is that everyone along the way, from start to finish, makes a profit." (Id., pp. 220) 

"Can companies like Coke, with their unequalled distribution systems, help in this [humanitarian] effort? Yes. Could they do it 'free'? Yes, but that is not a sustainable model. One that would work over the long term would be to develop a system that involves a profit for everyone in the chain." (pp. 221) 

"Corporations, therefore, are like any other organism: They have to operate sustainably if they are to last." (Id., pp. 222) 

"China's critics fail to realize that progress is of necessity an evolutionary process. How long did it take for blacks and women to obtain the right to vote in the U.S.? It took generations, a sad commentary on history. It's unrealistic to expect China's transformation to occur overnight, as well. Isolating China won't hasten that transformation." [Id., pp. 206] 

17. "Heroin landed purring at the base of his skull, and wrapped itself darkly around his nervous system, like a black cat curling up on its favorite cushion. It was as soft and rich as the throat of a wood pigeon, or the splash of sealing wax onto a page, or a handful of gems slipping from palm to palm. The way other people felt about love, he felt about heroin, and he felt about love the way other people felt about heroin: that it was a dangerous and incomprehensible waste of time." -- from Some Hope (2003), by Edward St. Aubyn 

18. On corporations issuing debt, which is tax-deductible, thereby lowering their reported taxable income: "As the World's Greatest Investor, Warren Bufffet, has said, 'If you can eliminate the government as a 46 percent partner, the business will be far more valuable.'" (Michael Lewis, pp. 69-70, The Money Culture, paperback, copyright 1991, but paperback published by Norton in 2011) 

Ben Bernanke on corporate debt: "Using high leverage to improve corporate performance is much like encouraging safe driving by putting a dagger, pointed at the driver's chest, in every car's steering wheel; it may improve driving but may lead to disaster during a snowstorm." (Michael Lewis, pp. 101, The Money Culture) 

19. MLK on income inequality: A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. (April 4, 1967, in New York, "Beyond Vietnam") 

"This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists. Our planet teeters on the brink of annihilation; dangerous passions of pride, hatred, and selfishness are enthroned in our lives; and men do reverence before false gods of nationalism and materialism. The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority."

20. Enrico Moretti: "The most important aspect of inequality in America today is not what happens to a few thousand tycoons. The increase in their share of wealth is certainly a problem, but not as consequential as the rapidly growing divide between the 45 million workers with a college education and the 80 million workers without one." [The New Geography of Jobs (2012), hardcover, pp. 223]

A "visa issued to a highly skilled immigrant does not necessarily mean one less job for an American citizen. On the contrary, it could mean more jobs for Americans citizens. While foreign-born workers account for 15 percent of America's labor force, they account for a third of all engineers and half of those with doctorates...immigrants are almost 30 percent more likely than nonimmigrants to start a business, and they account for one-quarter of all venture-backed public companies since 1990 and one-quarter of new high-tech firms with over $1 million in sales." [pp. 242; hardcover (2012)] 

21. From The Breaks of the Game: "[Jack] Scott was a classic radical of the sixties, intense, passionate, sincere and absolutely single-minded, so pure in his convictions and so devoted to them that he always had difficulty believing others could not see what he saw, and seeing it, would not come to the same conclusions that he came to." 

22. Burrough's Barbarians at the Gate (hardcover, 1989), about the 1988 RJR Nabisco takeover: "They could devise a charter for their new company, [Ross] Johnson said. Call it PIK [payment in kind] Associates. And it would include what Johnson dubbed the three rules of Wall Street: "Never play by the rules. Never pay in cash. And never tell the truth." [pp. 489] 

The times: The Roaring Eighties were a new gilded age. Winning was celebrated at all costs in "the casino society," as Felix Rohatyn once dubbed it. The investment bankers were part croupiers, part alchemists. They conjured up wild schemes, pounded out new and more outlandish computer runs to justify them, then twirled their temptations before corporate executives in a devil dance." [pp. 515]

23. "But the ascent of man is not made by lovable people. It's made by people who have two qualities, an immense integrity and at least a little genius." -- Jacob Bronowski (Ascent of Man, "The Hidden Structures," 1972) 

24. From Steve Fraser's Every Man a Speculator (2005), hardcover: "As early as the mid-1960s, mutual funds accounted for one-fourth the value of all transactions on the NYSE. There were 340 mutual funds in 1982. By 1998, there were 3,513. Together with pension funds run by corporations and unions, they helped transform the investment landscape...In 1984, approximately 7.5 million people participated. About 34 million people had 401(k) plans with assets of $1.7 trillion by the year 2000. At the turn of the millennium, union-managed pension funds accounted for $400 billion, and a trillion dollars moved through treasuries of public-employee pension funds... By the year 2000, the biggest institutional investors owned 60% of the country's thousand largest corporations." -- pp. 582-583. 

"Earlier on, when [Senator Robert] Taft lost the Republican presidential nomination to Eisenhower in 1952, he vented his general resentment against these Wall Street internationalists, claiming, 'Every Republican candidate for president since 1936 has been nominated by Chase Bank.'" -- pp. 518 

"When the war [WWII] ended, the United States accounted for two-thirds of the world's industrial output. In 1950, 60 percent of the capital stock of the advanced capitalist world was American. That same year, U.S. corporations accounted for one-third of the world's total GNP." -- pp. 511 

"A DJIA that registered 381 in September 1929 plummeted to 41 by the beginning of 1932. An unemployment rate of 3.2% became a grotesquely bloated 23.6%." -- pp. 415 

The "Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Justice Department stood aside as a mania of corporate mergers excited the Market. During the [Secretary of Treasury Andrew] Mellon era [1921 to 1932], of the 1,268 mergers of seven thousand corporations, only sixty caused even a raised eyebrow and only one was actually blocked by the government. By decade's end sixty thousand families at the top of the income pyramid were worth as much as the 25 million at the bottom." -- pp. 380 

"Lt. General Smedley Butler recalled: "I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service...And during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle-man for big business, for Wall Street, and the bankers...Thus, I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of a half dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street..." -- pp. 358-359 

(Joseph) "Pulitzer hated [President] T.R., and the feeling was mutual." -- pp. 356 (a reminder from when journalists actually served as America's "fourth pillar") 

"As early as the 1880's, [John] Hay delivered his own cold-eyed view of the state of the union: 'This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.'" -- pp. 287 

25. "Life loses momentum and direction for those who cut off the past, shun purpose, evade commitment." -- Ann Hulbert

26. Our current system requires debt (student loans, mortgages, etc.) to enter the middle class, thereby favoring the status quo and the existing affluent. Young adults can more comfortably take on debt, knowing their parents will eventually pay it off: Economist Wolff "estimated that 50 to 70% of the wealth of households under age 50 was inherited." Other prominent economists, Lawrence Summers and Laurence Kotlikoff, "using a variety of simulation techniques, estimated that as much as 80% of personal wealth came from direct inheritance or the income on inherited wealth." -- Doug Henwood, Wall Street (1998), pp. 69 

[My thoughts: The idea that one must enslave oneself to the banking cartel via loans in order to reach the middle class is a new idea. It is facilitated by the establishment, including the government, to make money and to create loyalty. Think of it: you borrow from a bank or the government and transfer money to a school; the school depends on the federal government and the banks to expand through student loans and endowment increases; the government receives interest and taxes from the additional development and uses it to create jobs in schools, which leads to votes. Round and round we go, until someone realizes it's an artificial economic system unless real value or innovation is created. Sadly, about 50% of students don't realize the other half has parents or grandparents paying off their student loans upon graduation, which reinforces the status quo and makes their 10 to 15 years of penury seem outwardly normal. In reality, of course, the system crushes the poor and lower middle class, who lack the benefit of inheritances and property inflation to resolve the debt load.] 

"Individuals may be able to set aside money for the future, but not a society as a whole; a society guarantees its future only by real physical and social investments." -- Doug Henwood, Wall Street (1998), pp. 306 

27. "How do you get that rush again? That's why bad things happen to athletes more often than with other people. They can't reach that high anymore, so they have to get it artificially, or, if they don't succeed, feel empty...That's when I have to remind myself that I really had no one to share those victories with. That's when I remember how cold the top of the mountain was." -- John McEnroe, You Cannot Be Serious (2002), pp. 324

"Aussies, as a rule, don't tend to be especially reverent." -- John McEnroe, You Cannot Be Serious (2002), pp. 135 [FYI: skip McEnroe's book--it's not well-written.]

28. "Under the Constitution, majority rule is not without limit...We often think of equal protection as a guarantee that the government will apply the law in an equal fashion--that it will not intentionally discriminate against minority groups. But equal protection of the laws means more than that; it also secures the right of all citizens to participate meaningfully and equally in the process through which laws are created." -- Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting, Schuette, pp. 30 (572 U.S. __) (2014)

29. "If the UN is right and drugs account for 70 percent of organized criminal activity, then the legalization of drugs would administer by far the deadliest blow possible against transnational organized criminal networks." -- pp. 227, McMafia (2008), Misha Glenny, hardcover 

"The Machine, a corrupt Democratic Party operation similar to the Daley dynasty's fiefdom in Chicago, has always governed Albany [Albany County in New York], and there was one community who had never been granted membership. 'The party appoints the judges; the party appoints the chief of police, the mayors, everyone here--the legislators all come out of the same institution...They'll tell you that they employ a lot of African-Americans in the city. What they don't tell you is that they're all picking up trash!'" -- pp. 238, McMafia (2008) 

"90% of the world's commercial traffic is transported in containers on the high seas." -- McMafia (2008), pp. 339

"No societies are free from organized crime except for severely repressive ones (and although North Korea has undoubtedly very low levels of organized crime, its state budget is decisively dependent on the trading of narcotics to criminal syndicates in neighboring countries." -- pp. 61 

"Corruption and organized crime are intimately linked--the former spawns the latter with a resolute determinism." -- pp. 67 

"The fall of Communism and the deregulation of the international financial markets in the late 1980s triggered a huge injection of cash into the global economy...The sums involved were vast. By the mid-nineties, the foreign exchange markets alone reached a volume of trading that exceeded $1 trillion every day." -- pp. 149

"Globalization needs regulation, but everyone is reluctant to demand it for fear that it may discriminate against them." -- pp. 150 

"'A government of the contractors, by the contractors, for the contractors,' is how Ishola Williams of Transparency International described the notorious rule of General Ibrahim Babangida, known in Nigeria as IBB, from the mid-eighties to the early nineties." -- pp. 170 

30. "The ideal government of all reflective men, from Aristotle to Herbert Spencer, is one which lets the individual alone--one which barely escapes being no government at all." -- H.L. Mencken ("Le Contrat Social," 1922) 

"[I]n very early times, the law gave a remedy only for physical interference with life and property, for trespasses vi et armis. Then the "right to life" served only to protect the subject from battery in its various forms; liberty meant freedom from actual restraint; and the right to property secured to the individual his lands and his cattle. Later, there came a recognition of man's spiritual nature, of his feelings and his intellect. Gradually the scope of these legal rights broadened; and now the right to life has come to mean the right to enjoy life--the right to be let alone..." -- "The Right to Privacy," Harvard Law Review, Warren and Louis Brandeis, 1890 

31. "The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it." -- H.L. Mencken 

32. "There were also investigations by both the SEC and the U.S. attorney's office, but it seems that Enron got lucky once again. The investigations focused on the phony transactions....concocted to shift profits from quarter to quarter, transactions that several Enron executives had encouraged and that several others, including Ken Lay, had condoned after the fact. Yet, for some reason, the government chose not to prosecute the company [in 1987]." -- pp. 24, The Smartest Guys in the Room (2003, hardcover, McLean and Elkind)

"The analysis the accountant came up with showed that [Rebecca] Mark's business was earning a mere 2% return on equity--a pathetic amount...[but] Mark's analysis showed...that the international business had been a success, producing over $1 billion of cash and earnings and making a 12% compound annual return over its history...'Figures lie, liars figure,' says one of the accountants who worked on the analysis... Yet the accountant went on to note an even more astonishing fact: viewed through their respective prisms, they were probably both right." -- The Smartest Guys in the Room (2003), hardcover, pp. 261 [The first analysis evaluated the assets based on cost, current cash flow, and current market value, whereas Mark's analysis included accounting structures designed to book earnings immediately via monetization and/or securitizations.]

33; "I love new things. I love stories. One of the great definers of life is perseverance. Life is hard. Loving people is hard. Learning to know what's important and keeping things simple seems to help me enjoy life and find the beauty in what I see." -- painter Timothy Chambers 

34. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. -- James Madison, Federalist #51 

35. "Let no young man choosing the law for a calling for a moment yield to the vague popular belief that lawyers are necessarily dishonest. Resolve to be honest in all events; and if, in your own judgment, you cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer. Choose some other occupation." -- Abraham Lincoln 

36. On movies: "These guys [movie producers and investors] make all their money on how the movie does around the world. They hope to pay their production costs with the domestic money, and the profit comes internationally. When your movie opens around the world and makes money, then you become viable to Hollywood." -- Samuel L. Jackson, interviewed by Charles Barkley in Who's Afraid of a Large Black Man? (hardcover, 2005, pp. 47)

On K-12 education: "Basically, the deal is, you've got to get a good principal who is well trained and understands that he or she has to create a culture. Kids have to feel like they're on a team. They all have to feel like they're somebody and they can make something of themselves. Whatever the barriers are to running those schools--and there will be some at the local, state, and national levels--they've got to be cleared away." -- Bill Clinton, interviewed by Charles Barkley in Who's Afraid of a Large Black Man (hardcover, 2005, pp. 74) 

"White people don't need to think about race. I told my agent the same thing. He said, 'Do you think I'm a racist?' And I said, 'Absolutely not. But when you needed to hire somebody, you hired your son, then your other son. And I understand that completely. But I've been with you for fifteen years and you've never hired a black person.' I told him that black people don't have the luxury of not thinking about race, but white people do. It doesn't affect them 99% of the time. They've not only got the access to money, but the access to power and authority... As much money as I may have, I still have to go and ask a white guy for a job. That's just the way it is." -- Charles Barkley, Who's Afraid of a Large Black Man? (hardcover, 2005, pp. 93) 

"Like George Lopez, I feel really good about being my own man. I love it when people tell me: 'I don't agree with you all the time, but I respect the fact that you say it.' That's all I want from anyone." -- Charles Barkley, Id. at 102.

"I believe if the conversation doesn't put you a little on edge, you're probably not talking about anything of great substance." Charles Barkley, Id. at 105. 

"You know that tenth plague in Egypt, before pharaoh let the Jews go, was the plague of darkness. And the rabbis asked, well, what was so terrible about the plague of darkness? And the answer they gave is that people didn't recognize one another's faces. In other words, they couldn't see the humanity...and once you get to that point, it's over. When you can't recognize the humanity in another person." -- Rabbi Steven Leder, interviewed by Charles Barkley in Who's Afraid of a Large Black Man? (hardcover, 2005, pp. 123) 

"They don't know if they can trust us; we don't know if we can trust them. The system teaches you not to trust other people. We don't live together, so our images are from television and newspapers. The people--black people, white people, poor people--have to band together and say our enemy is the system. That's the problem." -- Charles Barkley, pp. 159.

On why African-Americans have been so successful in sports: "One, the playing field is even. Whether we're talking about picking cotton, prize fighting, shooting a basketball, or hitting .300 on a baseball diamond, whenever there is one set of rules, we can be champions no matter what the odds against us are. Two, the rules are public. And three, the criteria are clear. That football field is 55 yards wide, 100 yards long, 10 yards for all first downs. On a basketball court, when you shoot and that ball goes through that hoop, everybody knows it went through. Now, choosing the next president of University of Iowa or University of Michigan, that is a closed-door decision. A directorship or executive position at the county hospital, the physicians have a meeting and say, 'Let's discuss this.' The rules certainly aren't public. There might not even be any rules. We cannot win when decisions are subjective, when they're made behind closed doors. Sometimes the criteria seems to shift." -- Jesse Jackson, interviewed by Charles Barkley in Who's Afraid of a Large Black Man? (hardcover, 2005, pp. 175)

"There is a part of me that understands very clearly that the playing field is not level, and something should be done about that institutionally. Just as race was set up as a barrier, it [affirmative action] should be should be set up as a way to level the playing field. I feel that in all but one part of me. The other part of me says, 'Don't give me anything. Just don't make it [race] stand in my way.'" -- Morgan Freeman, interviewed by Mike Wilbon, in Who's Afraid of a Large Black Man? (hardcover, 2005, pp. 211)

"If you encourage people to venture beyond their natural environment and get them to interact with people they believe are different, they'll find that we have a lot more in common than we think. But silence isn't going to get it done. Ignoring the problem isn't going to get it done. Clinging to old stereotypes isn't going to get it done. Dialogue is the best place to start. Hell, it's the only place to start." -- Charles Barkley, Who's Afraid of a Large Black Man? (hardcover, 2005, pp. 236) 

37."Government exists for man, not man for government... The individual needs protection from the government itself--from the executive branch, from the legislative branch, and even from the tyranny of judges." -- Justice William O. Douglas, The Right of the People (1958), Pyramid Books, pp. 57 

"Efforts have been made to place restrictions on the amount which certain groups could expend for editorializing their views, announcing them in broadcasts...The argument has been...'undue' influence...But that is only an indirect way of silencing speakers...Radio and television time should of course be apportioned so that no one group dominates the air. But apart from this, no control of utterances through control of expenditures would seem permissible." -- Id. at 19 

"The only time suppression [of speech] is constitutionally justified is when speech is so closely brigaded with action that it is in essence a part of an overt act. It is not enough that the words excite people or cause unrest or disturbance." -- Id. at 34 

"When the totality of an employer's course of conduct operates to coerce his employees, the fact that this conduct is evidenced in part by speech does not immunize it from regulation or prohibition. Then the employer's speech is brigaded with conduct--coercion of his employees--which the legislature has the power to prohibit." -- Id. at 35

"If there is a constitutional basis for punishing the publication of obscene literature, it must be because it is clear that the obscene publication causes anti-social conduct, not among psychopaths, but among the average of the group to which it is addressed." -- Id. at 40 

"Secrecy may be a necessary handmaiden of security to a degree. Yet no nation that faces unlimited destruction can afford to be uninformed." -- Id. at 51 

"We were largely the victims of the tyranny of a few who were beating the drums of fear. There is no protection against that tyranny which the law can provide. Charles W. Eliot of Harvard called it the pressure of a 'concentrated multitudinous public opinion.' ... Each generation must deal with it. The only protection is an enlightened public opinion forged by men who will stand against the mob. The antidote is more freedom of expression rather than less. The remedy is in making public opinion everybody's business and in encouraging debate and discourse on public issues. To regain the values 'of the age of debate,' as Dr. [Robert] Hutchins put it, is one of the great problems of this generation. To return to Pericles and his funeral oration, 'We alone regard a man who takes no interest in public affairs, not as a harmless but as a useless character.'" -- Id. at 54-55. 

"Unorthodoxy in the field of political and social ideas is no business of government. When government respects that principle, the right of the people to be let alone in their opinions and beliefs is secure." -- Id. at 73 

"For acts which add up to no more than treason, he should be tried, not by the military, but by the civil courts, where he will receive the benefit of a jury trial and the special procedural safeguards erected around all trials for treason." -- Id. at 124 

38. "The power to tax the exercise of a privilege is the power to control or suppress its enjoyment." -- Murdock v. Pennsylvania, 319 U.S. 105 (1943) at 112. 

"Judges are supposed to be men of fortitude, able to thrive in a hardy climate." -- Craig v. Harney, 331 U.S. 367 (1947) at 376. 

39. Uneven but excellent book in terms of advocating free markets and differentiating free markets from mercantilism: "Mercantilism can be defined as the supply and demand for monopoly rights by means of laws, regulations, subsidies, taxes, and licenses. The fallout of these privileges creates a wall of legal barriers that exclude the poor." -- The Other Path (1989), by Hernando de Soto, paperback, "Preface," xx.

"Further research told us that one of the primary functions of terrorists in the Third World -- what buys them acceptance -- is protecting the possessions of the poor, which are typically outside the law. In other words, if government does not protect the assets of the poor, it surrenders this function to the terrorists, who then can use it to win the allegiance of the excluded." -- "Preface," xxiv.

"People are at least 9 times more prepared to invest when they are given some measure of protection by the formal legal system." -- Id. at 25. 

"The process of development we have been discussing shows that people are capable of violating a system which does not accept them, not so that they can live in anarchy but so that they can build a different system which respects a minimum of essential rights." -- Id. at 55. 

"[A] law is 'good' if it guarantees and promotes economic efficiency and 'bad' if it impedes or disrupts it. The unnecessary costs of formality derives fundamentally from a bad law; the costs of informality result from the absence of a good law." -- Id. at 132. 

"It is a well-known economic principle that any noncorrective tax is inefficient in some way. A tax on wages, for instance, may encourage people to work fewer hours. A tax on property makes property less desirable and encourages some businesses to use less land and invest in fewer buildings of their own. Taxes distort economic choices, which is why one goal of the tax system should be to minimize these distortions, taking particular account of the costs of collecting and administering taxes. One way to do this is to keep taxes low...[too high taxes drive activity underground and] creates a vicious cycle: increased informality, reduced formality, maintenance of the level of public spending, need to increase taxes on formal activity, greater incentives to operate informally, and so on." -- Id. at 175.

"Contrary to the belief widespread in Latin America, the economic importance of property rights is not that they provide assets which benefit their holders exclusively, but that they give their owners sufficient incentive to add value to their resources by investing, innovating, or pooling them productively for the prosperity and progress of the entire community...It is the owner's profit motive which leads to the conservation and, this the maximization of the value of the [property/asset]." -- Id. at 178

"Since innovation is the riskiest investment, if a government cannot give it citizens secure property rights and efficient means of organizing and transferring them--namely, contracts--it is denying them one of the main incentives for modernizing and developing their operations. This is precisely what happens to the informals [in the underground economy]." -- Id. at 179.

"It is not enough that a good law be neutral and not encourage people to operate informally. It must also do at least two other things: it must create incentives for people to seize the economic and social opportunities offered by the country; secondly, it must facilitate the specialization and interdependence of individuals and resources." -- Id. at 182. 

On rationing and price controls: "Each time the government grants a privilege or tax exemption, reduces prices, gives a certain type of worker permanent protection from dismissal, or grants an exclusive concession to a certain kind of business, it automatically creates costs and benefits which deprive others of incentives and opportunities. For instance, if the state controls the price of bread and decides to fix its price at a level which allows a smaller profit margin than is available through other activities, it may bring about an immediate redistribution of money from producers to consumers, but it will also have created a disincentive for baking bread, causing many to desert the industry for a more profitable one. In addition to its overall economic impact, however, the redistributive tradition has created in Peru a society where almost all of the country's vital forces have organized in political and economic groups, one of whose main aims is to influence government in order to obtain a redistribution which favors them or their members." Id. at 190.

"A legal system whose sole purpose is redistribution thus benefits neither rich nor poor, but only those best organized to establish close ties with the people in power. It ensures that the businesses that remain in the market are those which are most efficient politically, not economically...Thus, redistributive laws ultimately politicize all sectors of the population, which try to organize in order to live at other's expense." Id. at 191-192.

Left vs. Right: "The romanticism of the left wing makes it generally praise and even venerate ordinary people, provided that they confine themselves to a strictly dependent role and possess neither ideas nor the ability to organize with others. It sees such people as passive objects in need of assistance programs similar to those required by the disabled and unemployed. It is as though left-wingers appreciate workers only when they lack the ability to get ahead on their own. This attitude is little different from the paternalism of right-wingers, who also sympathize with people of popular extraction as long as they confine their activities to loyal servitude, handicrafts, or folklore, but reject them as soon as they open their own businesses and charge for their services, negotiating their prices according to the dictates of the market. Then, the reaction is to say that their prices are 'exorbitant' and that the enterprising worker is a 'thief' or 'rascal.' Both right- and left-wingers acknowledge the right of mestizos from the high plateaus to live among us only as long as they need us to organize or employ them.

Competitive business people, whether formal or informal, are in fact a new breed. They have rejected the dependence proposed by the politicians. They may be neither likable nor polite--remember what many people say about minibus drivers and street vendors--but they provide a sounder basis for development than skeptical bureaucracies and traffickers in privileges. They have demonstrated their initiative by migrating, breaking with the past without any prospect of a secure future, they have learned how to identify and satisfy others' needs, and their confidence in their abilities is greater than their fear of competition. When they start something, they know there is always a risk of failure. Every day they face dilemmas: what and how are they going to produce? What are they going to make it with? At what prices will they buy and sell? Will they manage to find long-term customers? Behind every product offered or manufactured, behind all the apparent disorder or relative illegality, are their sophisticated calculations and difficult decisions..." -- The Other Path (1989), by Hernando de Soto, paperback, pp. 242-243.

"[W]ealth is simply the product of combining interchangeable resources and productive labor. Wealth is achieved essentially by one's own efforts. It is earned, little by little, in an active market where goods, services, and ideas are exchanged and people are constantly learning and adjusting to others' needs. Wealth comes from knowing how to use resources, not from owning them." -- Id. at 243.

"In practice, deregulation would...remove from the state's hands the power to restrict or confer access to production. This would reduce the state's power to decide who can produce and who cannot... Deregulation would mean freeing public resources so that the state could use them to ensure that strict, efficient rules of the game were imposed and that the freedom that individuals would then enjoy did not have adverse effects." -- The Other Path (1989), by Hernando de Soto, paperback, pp. 250. 

"It is perfectly valid to want a state's many functions to include redistribution. The crucial thing is that resources be redistributed to the needy in ways which do not discourage production, labor, and saving. If redistribution remains a pretext to go on damaging property rights or imposing excessive requirements for their enjoyment and use, or for undermining the security of contracts, we [Peru] will remain underdeveloped..." -- Id. at 251.

"Redistribution should therefore take forms which do not distort economic incentives, as does the transfer of money though taxation, so that the understandable zeal for redistributive justice does not hamper productive justice." -- Id. at 252.

"[T]he aim of deregulation is the same as mercantilists claim to pursue, including land, labor, credit, education, transport, safety and assistance to those who have the least. The difference lies in the fact that a deregulated state achieves these objectives by facilitating and controlling the functioning of the market, not by replacing it... In short, all of us, formals and informals, need to be governed by just, efficient laws instead of by the arbitrary authority of the state." -- Id. at 252.

40. Why accounting is so hard to do ethically: "You and your neighbor buy identical new cars on the same day. You take good care of your car, regularly changing its oil and putting it in garages instead of parking it on the street... Your neighbor is much less conscientious. Three years later you have spent $1,000 more maintaining your car than your neighbor. But you figure that your car is worth $2,000 more than your neighbor's, because it is in better shape. The way you see it, you've saved $1,000. Your neighbor disagrees. He thinks the cars are worth the same. He thinks you've wasted $1,000 on unnecessary maintenance. Who's right? You may not be able to tell until the cars are sold. But if you were a public company, you would have to estimate your car's value every three months--and so would your neighbor... Now, imagine that instead of owning one car, you own thousands of garbage trucks. If you underestimate how quickly those assets are losing value, either accidentally or deliberately, you will wind up overestimating your earnings [because of incorrect depreciation]. And it will be essentially impossible, until you actually sell the used trucks, for anyone to know what you've done." -- The Number (2004 paperback) by Alex Berenson, from "Introduction," pp. xxx. [Reminds me of Marks vs. Skilling in Enron's heydays--see #32, above.]

"Essentially, mark-to-market accounting enabled Enron to estimate what its future profits would be every time it signed a deal or made a trade--and then book those profits right away, without having to see whether its estimates were right. It was as if McDonald's reported ten years of profits every time it signed a lease for a new restaurant." -- Id. at 198. 

"Most economists now believe the [October 29, 1929] crash did not cause the Depression. A far more important factor was President Herbert Hoover's stubborn refusal to increase federal spending as demand elsewhere in the economy collapsed." -- Id. at 17. 

"Coke owned Paramount, the movie studio. Mobil [the oil company] inexplicably bought Montgomery Ward, the retailer, in 1976." -- Id. at pp. 75. 

"[I]n 1980, commissions accounted for 35 percent of the industry's [Wall Street's] overall revenue, more than any other single source...By 1990 commissions provided only 16 percent of Wall Street's revenues, while fees for mergers and acquisition work made up 32 percent, up from 13 percent in 1980." -- The Number (2004 paperback) by Alex Berenson, pp. 87-88.

"The exercise of options transfers value from a company's investors to the employees who exercise them. Like inflation, options are a hidden tax." -- The Number (2004 paperback) by Alex Berenson, pp. 101. 

"[T]he vast majority of options have always gone to executives and senior managers, especially outside Silicon Valley. The National Center for Employee Ownership, a nonprofit group that supports options, estimated that no more than 3 million Americans received grants in 1999." -- Id. at 105. 

'[President] Bill Clinton could have stood up for the commission [S.E.C.]. But the S.E.C. had no natural constituency in the Democratic Party. It had no pork to dole out, and what did unions, environmentalists, or trial lawyers care about the stock market?" -- Id. at 140.

"The grand total of prison sentences that resulted from a decade of S.E.C. referrals was 87... By 2002, only about one thousand white-collar criminals were in federal prison, less than 1 percent of the total federal prison population." -- Id. at 145. "In fact, the shorts probably discovered more bad accounting between 1995 and 2002 than the entire S.E.C." Id. at 149.

41. "It stands to reason that if the written law is in conflict with the laws citizens live by, discontent, corruption, poverty, and violence are sure to follow." -- Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital (2000), pp. 92. 

"[Without formal legal structures,] How could physical objects, like timber in Oregon, secure an industrial investment in Chicago? How could insurance companies find and contract customers who will pay their bills? ... Many title systems in developing nations fail to produce capital because they do not acknowledge that property can go way beyond ownership... Properly understood and designed, a property system creates a network through which people can assemble their assets into more valuable combinations." -- Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital (2000), paperback pp. 60-61.

"By transforming people with property interests into accountable individuals, formal property created individuals from masses. People no longer needed to rely on neighborhood relationships or make local arrangements to protect their right to assets...But there was a price to pay: Once inside a formal property system, owners lost their anonymity...individual accountability has been reinforced... Thus the formal property systems of the West have bestowed mixed blessings. Although they provided hundreds of millions of citizens with a stake in the capitalist game, what made this stake meaningful was that it could be lost." -- Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital (2000), paperback pp. 54-55.

"The single most important source of funds for new businesses in the U.S. is a mortgage on the entrepreneur's house. These assets can also provide a link to the owner's credit history, an accountable address for the collection of debts and taxes, the basis for the creation of reliable and universal public utilities, and a foundation for the creation of securities (like mortgage-backed bonds) that can then be rediscounted and sold in secondary markets. By this process the West injects life into assets and makes them generate capital. The enterprises of the poor are very much like corporations that cannot issue shares or bonds to obtain new investment and finance. Without representations, their assets are dead capital." -- Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital (2000), pp. 6. 

"Contrary to popular wisdom, operating in the underground is hardly cost-free... Because they are not incorporated, extralegal entrepreneurs cannot lure investors...they cannot secure low-interest formal credit...They cannot reduce risks by declaring limited liability or obtaining insurance coverage... With one eye always on the lookout for police, underground entrepreneurs cannot openly advertise... What determines whether you remain outside [the formal structure] is the relative cost of being legal." -- Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital, paperback, pp. 155. 

"What the government had not taken into account was that when people finally acquire property, they have their own ideas about how to use and exchange it. If the legal system does not facilitate the people's needs and ambitions, they will move out of the system in droves... What characterizes the enemies of property and capital formation in developing and former communist countries is not whether they are leftists or rightists, but whether they are the friends of the status quo." -- Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital, paperback, pp. 169. 

"By comparing the extralegal to the legal codes, government leaders can see how both have to adjusted to fit each other and then build a regulatory framework for property--a common bedrock of law for all citizens--that is genuinely legitimate and self-enforceable... That is the way for developing and former communist nations to meet the legal challenge, and that was basically how Western law was built: by gradually discarding what was not useful and enforceable and absorbing what worked." -- Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital, paperback, pp. 187. 

"Civil society in market economies is not simply due to greater prosperity. The right to property also engenders respect for the law [and thus order]." -- Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital, paperback, pp. 196. 

"Lawyers are the professionals most involved in the day-to-day business of property. They sit in key government offices where the can suppress major decisions. No group--aside from terrorists--is better positioned to sabotage capitalist expansion. And unlike terrorists, the lawyers know how to do it legally! The difficulty is that few lawyers understand the economic consequences of their work, and their knee-jerk to extralegal behavior and to large-scale change is generally hostile. All the reformers I have met working to make property more accessible to the poor operate with the presumption that the legal profession is their natural enemy." -- Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital, pp. 198-199. 

42. "The Bush administration countered that the Clean Air Act did not give the EPA authority to regulate CO2 and that Massachusetts had no legal standing to be bringing the case b/c climate change was a global issue and MA was only one of 50 states... On April 2, 2007, the Supreme Court delivered what has been called 'the most important environmental ruling of all times.' In a 5-4 decision, the Court declared that MA had standing...because of the costly storms and the loss of coastal shore that would result from climate change. The 'risk of harm' to MA was 'both actual and imminent.'" -- Daniel Yergin, The Quest (2011, 2012), paperback, Penguin Books, pp. 507. 

"But energy has remained low when measured against the energy and security challenges and the need for innovation. For instance, the total energy spending in 2008 was equivalent to two weeks' spending on the Iraq War." -- Yergin, The Quest (2011, 2012), paperback, pp. 557 (Citing "Task Force on Strategic Energy: Shaping Our Nation's Future in a Competitive World" (Washington, D.C.: GPO 1995), p. 1 ("deficit"); Kelly Gallagher, Ambuj Sagar, Diane Segal, Paul de Sa, and John P. Holdren)

In Palm Springs, "residents were outraged by the wind machines that were crowding in on their vistas. [The] mayor, the entertainer Sonny Bono, went on the attack against proposed new wind turbines that would tower above...in the San Gorgonio Pass. He announced he would fly to Washington, D.C., 'to do battle as Don Quixote did against windmills.' However, when a budget crunch hit Palm Springs, he changed his mind and instead went to war against neighboring Desert Hot Springs, battling over which city would get to annex nearby wind farm sites in order to augment ailing property tax revenues." -- Daniel Yergin, The Quest (2011, 2012), pp. 605. [At the end of the day, economic concerns trump ideology.]

"The question of externalities--undesirable side effects or consequences--is something with which economists have long struggled... Arthur Pigou had argued...that the way to deal with externalities, which are not reflected in the price of a good, was for the government to intervene and...tax...the externality. Think of it as a sort of sin tax. A $1 tax per pack of cigarettes [to combat lung cancer] or a 50 cent carbon tax on gasoline would be examples...But [Ronald] Coase was sure that Pigou...was placing far too much faith in the wisdom of government and that he failed to understand the role of property." -- Daniel Yergin, The Quest (2011, 2012), paperback, pp. 477. 

"[Thomas] Edison was largely self-taught; he had only a couple of years of formal schooling, plus six years as an itinerant telegrapher, making such achievements even more remarkable. His partial deafness made him somewhat isolated and self-centered, but also gave him an unusual capacity for concentration and creativity." -- Daniel Yergin, The Quest (2012), paperback, pp. 349. 

"The difference in the balance between discoveries [of oil fields] and revisions and additions is dramatic. According to one study by the USGS, 86% of oil reserves in the United States are the result not of what is estimated at the time of discovery but of the revisions and additions that come with further development." -- Daniel Yergin, The Quest (2012), paperback, pp. 241. 

On "peak oil" throughout the years: "By the end of the 1920s, instead of permanent shortage, the market was beginning to swim in oil. The discovery of the East Texas oil field in 1931 turned the surplus into an enormous glut: oil plunged temporarily to as little as ten cents a barrel; during the Great Depression some gasoline stations gave away whole chickens as premiums to lure in customers." -- Daniel Yergin, The Quest (2012), paperback, pp. 233. 

The "word 'speculator' is confused with 'manipulator.' But 'speculation' is...a technical term with rather precise meaning. The 'speculator' is a 'non-commercial' player--a market maker, a serious investor, or a trader acting on technical analysis. The speculator plays a crucial role. If there is no speculator, there is no liquidity, no futures market, no one on the other side of the trade, no way for a hedger [e.g., airline, oil producer, farmer] to buy some insurance in the form of futures against the vagaries of price and fortune." -- Daniel Yergin, The Quest (2012), paperback, pp. 170. 

43. From a Shanghai government official in 2006: "Outsiders think of everything about China multiplied by 1.3 billion...[but] We have to think of everything as divided by 1.3 billion." -- James Fallows, China Airborne (2012), pp. 10. 

44. "In 1912, the government derived 45% of its revenue from duties imposed on imported goods, and another 42% from excise taxes on alcohol and tobacco. There was no income tax. So tariffs and these two excise taxes accounted for 87% of government receipts. They were a kind of national sales tax, though no one called them that." -- Donald Bartlett & James Steele, The Great American Tax Dodge (2000), hardcover, pp. 6. 

"In the 1980s, the NBA and referees' union incorporated certain travel benefits into their contracts. Under the terms, the NBA paid its referees the cost of a first-class airline ticket for flights lasting longer than 2 hours and a full-fare coach ticket for travel under 2 hours. The referees, in turn, were permitted to exchange the tickets for cheaper seats and to keep the difference... The referees did not declare [the difference] as income... The practice was clearly improper." -- Donald Bartlett & James Steele, The Great American Tax Dodge (2000), hardcover, pp. 180. 

"But beginning in the 1960s, and then continuing through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, a succession of Congresses and presidents slashed rates and amended and revised the tax code interminably, rendering it deformed and unintelligible, most noteworthy for its exceptions and exclusions. In other words, the real problem is not the tax code. It's Congress and the White House..." -- Donald Bartlett & James Steele, The Great American Tax Dodge (2000), hardcover, pp. 233. 

On lawyers and ethics: "When he [Webster Hubbell] was indicted on charges of income tax evasion growing out of the overbilling of clients in his Arkansas practice, Hubbell--a onetime chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court--claimed the real beneficiaries were his law partners... [His wife asked] 'You didn't actually do that, did you, mark up time for the client, did you?' [He replied] 'Yes, I did...So does every lawyer in the country.'" -- Donald Bartlett & James Steele, The Great American Tax Dodge (2000), hardcover, pp. 219. 

45. "Our low effective corporate tax rates have led to calls...for corporations to pay higher taxes, but it is important to remember that companies are not real people. If they did pay higher taxes, it is hard to identify how that burden would be spread across employees (as lower wages), shareholders (as lower profits), or other capital owners (as lower rates of return)." -- White House Burning (2012), by S. Johnson & James Kwak, hardcover, pp. 121.

Congress can dictate how much Medicare will pay doctors for a given Medicare procedure, but Congress cannot force doctors to accept Medicare patients; so for Medicare to be a viable health insurance plan, it must pay something reasonably close to the market price...In 1985 health care spending accounted for 1/10 of the national economy; in 2009, it was about 1/6; and by 2035, it is likely to be more than 1/4. That means Americans will have to devote a larger and larger share of their incomes to paying for health care." -- White House Burning (2012), by S. Johnson & J. Kwak, hardcover, pp. 132. 

"[M]ost government policies can be accomplished at least three different ways: spending, tax credits (provisions that let you reduce your taxes), and regulation. For example, let's say politicians...want to help poor people afford rental housing...they can build and manage public housing projects; they can give tax credits to developers who build affordable housing; or they can write a regulation saying that a certain percentage of all new housing units must be rented at affordable rates." -- White House Burning (2012), by S. Johnson & J. Kwak, hardcover, pp. 116. [The point is that some of these options are more palatable to voters than others. For example, the third option in the example above may seem more intrusive than the other two--one person called it "theft, pure and simple." In reality, however, all three methods accomplish the same goal, and all three methods expand government influence.] 

"In 2010...Social Security, Medicare, and interest on the debt cost over $1.3 trillion, while tax revenues were less than $2.2 trillion [i.e., over half of federal taxes are automatically transferred to these programs, leaving other programs to battle for remaining revenue]. Balancing the budget at that level of taxes would have required cutting all other federal spending--national defense, immigration control, federal courts and the federal prison system, Medicaid, food stamps, student loans, everything--by over 60%." -- White House Burning (2012), by S. Johnson & J. Kwak, hardcover, pp. 113. 

"A majority of Americans say Medicaid is important to their families, which may seem surprising for a program dedicated to the poor--until you realize that it served 68 million people in 2010. This is in part because Medicaid, unlike Medicare, pays for long-term care (although beneficiaries must first exhaust all of their assets)--relieving many middle-class, working-age people from having to pay for their parents' care." -- White House Burning (2012), by Simon Johnson & James Kwak, hardcover, pp. 108. 

"In 1962, Kennedy began campaigning for a major, deficit-increasing tax cut as a way to increase demand and economic growth... For the first time in American history, a president was arguing that deficits could be a good thing, not an unfortunately necessary response to a military or economic emergency. Kennedy's VP and successor, Lyndon Johnson, also found that some things were more important than a balanced budget: faced with the choice between guns and butter, he chose both." -- White House Burning (2012), by Simon Johnson & James Kwak, hardcover, pp. 60. 

46. On management styles: "[Gary] D'Addario was a rare breed of supervisor for a para-military organization. He had learned long ago to suppress the first impulse of command that calls for a supervisor to humiliate his men, charting their movement and riding them...that sort of behavior usually resulted from a new supervisor's primitive conclusion that the best way to avoid being perceived as weak was to behave as a petty tyrant... Supervisors like that either grew into their jobs or their best men ducked and covered long enough to transfer to another sector." -- David Simon, Homicide (1991, 2006), paperback, pp. 39-40. 

"Typically, a detective will hold back [from the media] the caliber of the weapon used, or the exact location of the wounds, or the presence of an unusual object at the scene. If the murder occurred inside a house rather than on a street where a crowd can gather, the investigator might withhold a description of the clothes worn by the victim or the exact location of the victim's body in the house." -- David Simon, Homicide (1991, 2006), paperback, pp. 75. 

The greatest challenge in gov hiring and promotion is to create objective AND useful tests: "Moreover, the test results--though they implied a quantitative approach--had always been subject to politics: an applicant's score on his oral exam was usually only as good as his departmental connections. Then, in the early 1980s, testing was discontinued and appointment to detective became purely political... In a decade of affirmative action, it helped to be black; it also helped to have a lieutenant colonel or deputy commissioner as a mentor." -- David Simon, Homicide (1991, 2006), pp. 97. 

On police coverups and self-policing: "But it was [reformer Donald] Pomerleau himself who successfully fought a prolonged battle against the creation of a civilian review board, assuring that in cases of alleged [police] brutality the Baltimore department would continue to monitor itself. As a result, the [police]men on the street in the late 60s and early 70s understood that a bad shooting could be made to look good and a good shooting could be made to look better." -- David Simon, Homicide (2006), pp. 110. 

"The question [when an officer mistakenly shoots an innocent civilian] was whether the department was going to sacrifice its own rather than confront one of the most unavoidable truths about police work: the institutionalized conceit that says in every given circumstance, a good cop will give you a good shooting." -- pp. 113. 

"Among cops, some vague taint has always been attached to the title of lawyer, some grounded ethic that believes even the best and most devoted attorneys to be little more than well-paid monkeys wrenches hurled into the criminal justice machine. Despite his training, [Terrence] McLarney [with his J.D.] adhered to that ethic: He was a cop, not a lawyer." -- David Simon, Homicide (1991, 2006), pp. 144. 

"The Baltimore unit has maintained its rate both through good, solid police work and through a gentle manipulation of the clearance rate itself. Whoever declared that there are lies, damn lies, and statistics could just as easily have granted law enforcement data a category unto itself. Anyone who ever spent more than a week in a police department's planning and research section can tell you that a burglary clearance doesn't mean that anyone was actually arrested, and that a posted increase in the crime rate can have less to do with criminal proclivity than with the department's desire for a budget increase." -- Id. at pp. 195. 

During a police interrogation, those "few with heart enough to ask whether they are under arrest are often answered with a question: 'Why? Do you want to be?' 'No.' 'Then sit the f**k down." -- David Simon, Homicide (2006), pp. 210. 

47. "Martin Buber once said, 'The lie is the spirit committing treason against itself.' Our acceptance of lies becomes a cultural cancer that eventually shrouds and reorders reality until moral garbage becomes as invisible to us as water is to a fish. How much do we tolerate before we become sick and tired of being sick and tired?" -- Stephanie Ericsson, from "The Ways We Lie," a must-read essay. 

48. "One may well ask: 'How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?' The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all.'" -- Martin Luther King Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail," applicable to the concept of jury nullification. 

49. Change and tolerance come from getting used to each other, not logic nor arguments, according to Kwame Anthony Appiah: "I am urging that we should learn about people in other places, take an interest in their civilizations, their arguments, their errors, their achievements, not because that will bring us to agreement but because it will help us get used to one another--something we have a powerful need to do in this globalized era. If that is the aim, then the fact that we have all these opportunities for disagreement about values need not put us off. Understanding one another may be hard; it can certainly be interesting. But it doesn't require that we come to agreement." 

50. "My job is to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed." -- Unknown, though it could be my life's unofficial guiding principle. 

51. It is in vain to hope to please all alike. Let a man stand with his face in what direction he will, he must necessarily turn his back on one half of the world. -- George Dennison Prentice

52. Always hold your head up, but be careful to keep your nose at a friendly level. -- Max L. Forman 

53. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmild teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. -- Ray Bradbury, "Coda" 

I wasn't worried about freedom, I was worried about people being turned into morons by TV. See, we've never had censorship in this country, we've never burned books.... Fahrenheit's not about censorship, it's about the moronic influence of popular culture through local TV news, and the proliferation of giant screens, and the bombardment of "factoids." -- Ray Bradbury

54. We must travel across lonely and rugged terrain, through isolation and silence, to reach the magic zone where we can dance an awkward dance and sing a melancholy song. -- Pablo Neruda 

55. "A liberal plants feet firmly in the heavens and proselytizes nonbelievers by rejecting pessimism through calm discourse and common sense. A liberal recognizes bright stars in feeble bodies eager to shine." -- a very young and idealistic Matthew Rafat (See Justice John Paul Stevens quote in #56 below) 

56. Justice John Paul Stevens: Ahrens v Clark, 335 US 188 (1948): "At stake is nothing less than the essence of a free society... Unconstrained Executive detention for the purpose of investigating and preventing subversive activity is the hallmark of the Star Chamber... For if this nation is to remain true to the ideals symbolized by its flag, it must not wield the tools of tyrants even to resist an assault by the forces of tyranny." 

55. For W. E. B Dubois, the foundation of African-American culture is, in his famous formulation in The Souls of Black Folk, "double-consciousness," a conception strikingly parallel to the idea of the wavering hero--or, rather, a striking instantiation of it. For Dubois, "the American Negro... ever feels his twoness--an American, A Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." Furthermore, "the history of the American Negro is the history of this strife--this longing to attain a self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this he wishes neither of his older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the door of Opportunity closed roughly in his face." -- Playthell Benjamin and Stanley Crouch, Reconsidering the Souls of Black Folk (2002), pp. 364-65 

56. "In a world where deficits don't matter, a post-factual society cannot be far behind." -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat

"Trying to empathize with a minority group by spending a short time in their shoes or clothing is a misguided effort. First, the temporary nature of the exercise defeats the purpose. Second, the inability to magically gain the entire background of the minority you seek to emulate also functions as an a priori defeat. Minorities are just like you: individuals different in their own ways. 

To gain empathy for minorities in general, you must become one genuinely and travel outside your comfort zone, where you do not speak the language or know the culture or religion. To gain empathy for a particular group, you must spend time with a member of that group for at least 21 consecutive days. Then you shall learn though we are all individually different, in the end, we all share the same basic similarities with the environment into which we are placed." -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat

Many people blame religion for America's problems rather than the tax exemption. Remember: any advantage tends to multiply, especially if based on fiat. A fiat-based advantage isn't a "plus one"--it's a "plus two" because the exemption/advantage harms the competitiveness of opposition groups and outsiders at the same time it promotes certain interests. To summarize, some fiat-based advantages primarily encourage conformity rather than their intended goals. Economic models and theory don't account for this hidden "plus one," a severe deficiency. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat 

A truly diverse and open society need not trumpet its accomplishments in law, print, or fact; the day-to-day absence of racial and religious fear speaks for itself. Even perfectly safe waters may tremble and diverge, but no one on them seeks to leave. For these passengers, siren songs of exclusion and envy, whether shrill or pleasant, hold little attraction. The passengers know better than to be distracted from the hard work of ensuring the boat's continued passage, not just for themselves, but for all deserving the journey. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2018)

Bravery in uniform imposing conformity by strength destroys culture, leads to occupation or genocide, and makes cowards of us all. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2019) 

[“Every empire... tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate." -- Edward Said] 

57. "I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. I know that sounds completely nuts, but since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition." -- Google founder Larry Page (2009) 

58. "When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable, and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow of Nature. The wild-wood covers the virgin mould, and the same soil is good for the men and for trees. A man's health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck... A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it. A township where one primitive forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below--such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey." -- Henry David Thoreau 

59.  To say mass-produced art isn't truly art seems problematic, like arguing a tree falling in the forest and heard by all shouldn't make a sound. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat 

60. The West's argument has been that safety in an age of mobile, technologically-advanced weapons requires security to be the world's primary policy objective rather than economics or cohesiveness. Were it possible to satisfy a security-first approach in a cost-effective manner, the West might have succeeded; however, we are seeing that a unilateral approach does not work because cooperation and communication are necessary for true safety, not continuous technological advancements. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2018)

In the hierarchy of Constitutional rights, do Americans realize if there's no true right to privacy, guns will be useless against a technologically-advanced surveillance state that lacks tolerance for differing political opinions? -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat, on the Second Amendment (2018) 

Countries with unchecked military spending are bound to fail; were perpetual victory even possible, creativity and following orders rarely overlap. Meanwhile, secrecy and integrity are unusual bedfellows, as are transparency and the business of murder. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2018) 

As of 2018, the United States has lost the war on poverty; the war on drugs; and the war on illegal immigration. Along the way, it won the war on privacy. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat 

Many Christians who've joined the cult of positivity forget the most pleasant sounds and words in the Bible came from the snake. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2018) 

A government that can tax by force begins with a competitive disadvantage against the private sector; a government that taxes without the presumption of integrity will automatically injury-default to competitors. -- Matthew Rafat (2018) 

61. "The [Singaporean] system works regardless of your race, language or religion because otherwise we'd have divisions. We are pragmatists. We don't stick to any ideology. Does it work? Let's try it and if it does work, fine, let's continue it. If it doesn't work, toss it out, try another one. We are not enamored with any ideology." -- Lee Kuan Yew 

62. "As long as police unions interfere with the removal of dishonorable officers, no minority will ever trust the government. A country that allows advanced technology in the hands of even a single unaccountable employee has signaled it prefers its own advancement over justice or mercy. Complicating matters further is the outsourcing of both surveillance and law enforcement to private firms. Regardless of its form, however, even a single drop of corruption has the effect of blood on apparel--the rest of the piece might be perfectly clean, but no one will wear it if other options exist." -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2018) 

63. Published in 1929, before the Oct '29 stock market crash, which led to America's Great Depression from '29 to '39: "Our national wealth increased by more than 35% in the last decade... We have no unemployment worth mentioning." (From In Behalf of Advertising: A series of essays published in national periodicals from 1919 to 1928; published in 1929)

64. "In the first half of the 19th century, the largest single industry in the United States, measured in terms of both market capital and employment, was the enslavement (and the breeding for enslavement) of human beings... Over the course of the period, the industry became concentrated to the point where fewer than 4,000 families (roughly 0.1% of the nation's households) owned about 1/4 of this 'human capital,' and another 390,000 (call it the 9.9%) owned all of the rest." -- Matthew Stewart 

65. "Painting is literature in colors. Literature is painting in language." -- Pramoedya Ananta Toer, This Earth of Mankind (1980) 

66. "Can't wrap your brain around the whole damn universe. The way things work, it's just a mystery on purpose." -- NBA star Allen Iverson 

67. "If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants." -- Friedrich von Hayek (1974)

68. "Life teaches you really how to live it, if you would live long enough." -- singer Tony Bennett, on suicide prevention and the advice he'd have given Amy Winehouse

69. "Humanity can become more unified only by seeking to develop in different directions... [so as] to establish a machine for the creation of collective difference [that supports] alternatives by making the world safer for them." -- Roberto M. Unger

70. "If you want to be slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let the bankers control money and control credit.” — Sir Josiah Stamp, Director, Bank of England, 1940

71. "Some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, and over these ideals they dispute, but they all worship money." — Mark Twain

72. "No greater nor no better Law, say I, than to love God above all, and all our Fellow-Creatures as ourselves; these two contain Law, Prophets and Gospel, do to all as we would be done by." -- Quaker Benjamin Lay

73. "Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness, and his chambers by wrong; that useth his neighbour's service without wages, and giveth him not for his work." -- Jeremiah 22:13

74. And what does the Lord require of you? Only to act justly, to love tenderly, and to walk humbly with your God. -- Micah 6:8

75. It’s good to leave each day behind, like flowing water, free of sadness. Yesterday is gone and its tale told. Today new seeds are growing. -- Jalaluddin Rumi

76. Good is not that your possessions, wealth and power... increase, but good is that your knowledge increases and your insight grows more powerful, and that the people are proud to serve God. For when you do good, you praise God. -- Imam Ali

77. Man has three friends on whose company he relies. First, wealth which goes with him only while good fortune lasts. Second, his relatives [but] they go only as far as the grave, [and] leave him there. The third friend, his good deeds, go with him beyond the grave. -- the Talmud

78. "Schools are quick to blame everyone and everything but themselves for the failures of American education. To them, every bad teacher is the exception and every bad parent is the rule." -- Thomas Sowell

79. "With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but with tyrants, I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost." -- William Lloyd Garrison

80. "Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficial. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasions of their liberty--by evil-minded rulers. The greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning. but without understanding." -- USA Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis 

81. “It’s only publishers and some journalists who believe that people want simple things. People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.” — Umberto Eco

82. “We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some specialty or other, for instance, computers.” — Doris Lessing (2007)

83. “He is still there, quite startled, not knowing whether he is dreaming or fully awake, whether what is happening is for real or a lie, whether what is occurring is life or literature, because the border that separates the two seems to have totally vanished.” — Mario Vargas Llosa (2010) 

84. Modern Western politics is in its current miserable state because everyone from Diego Rivera to the Workington Man has realized Western liberal values were mere covers for theft and supplanting of local institutions abroad rather than a sincere attempt to bring Enlightenment to all. -- Matthew Rafat (2019, after Britain's general election)

85. “We still have tender feelings for such outmoded notions as truth, respect for others, personal honor, justice, equitable sharing. We still hope for a happy ending. We still believe that we can save ourselves and our damaged earth—an indescribably difficult task as we discover that the web of life is far more mysteriously complex than we thought and subtly entangled with factors that we cannot even recognize. But we keep on trying, because there’s nothing else to do.” — author Annie Proulx (2017)

86. “It's important to give a better country to your children, but it is more important to give better children to your country.” — Carlos Slim

87. Art is always a good hiding-place, not for dynamite, but for intellectual explosives and social time bombs. Why would there otherwise have been the various Indices? And precisely in their despised and often even despicable beauty and lack of transparency lies the best hiding-place for the barb that brings about the sudden jerk or the sudden recognition.” — Heinrich Boll

88. "To a greater extent than ethnicity, which was actively discouraged under the New Order, religious experience had been growing steadily more orthodox also in middle-class circles... The uncertainties of reformasi [in Indonesia] made the family-like security of a faith community seem more attractive. Democracy also offered the opportunity to recharge politics with authentic moral values, an antidote to the amoral technocracy of the New Order." -- Gerry van Klinken, Communal Violence (2007)

89. If we're being honest, America's obituary will read that soldiers in WWII died to make Germany and Japan great; in Vietnam to make China and Singapore great; and in Iraq to make Iran and Saudi Arabia better. -- Matthew Rafat (2020)

90. You spend youth trying to parse everything into smaller bits to better understand them, and to cut each piece of cake as thinly as possible to imagine infinite sweetness. But as you become older, you understand the key isn't the atoms but the whole, and your thoughts, once complicated and profound, become simple and earthbound. -- Matthew Rafat (2020)

91. I am a cynic because I understand human nature, and I am an optimist because I understand children. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2020)

92. "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last [Catholic] priest." -- Denis Diderot 

93. First rule of governance: the lower the population and the smaller the land mass, the easier it is to govern. Second rule of governance: the more diverse the population and the larger the land mass, the harder it is to govern. Third rule of governance: the less diverse the population and the smaller the land mass, the harder it is to retain talent, to foster creativity, and to accept and learn from challenges. Fourth rule of governance: a politician's task is finding the right balance between the first, second, and third rules--and being able and ready to change the formula when needed. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2020)

94. Centralized entities that influence local legal structures and international commerce create the same problems assumed about "double citizenship"; yet, voters are more swayed by individuals with divided loyalties than entities able to homogenize entire cultures. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2020)  

95. People who complain political parties are the same should re-evaluate their analytical model. After all, if most people are fundamentally similar, why wouldn't their representatives follow? Unless, of course, they have subconsciously swallowed the seeds of every empire's destruction: an ahistorical emphasis on exceptionalism, which plants Hydrangea Hubris. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2020) 

96. Standardization in the analog world can always be complementary due to inherent physical restrictions; however, standardizing in the digital realm leads to self-destruction because of the absence of theoretical limits within an inherently vulnerable foundation. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2020)

97. All of humanity's problems can, in one form or another, be traced back to short-term thinking and visual dependence. --  Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2020) 

98. Like it or not, much of what we believe is not organic or original; instead, our beliefs often generate in opposition to the past, a person, or an ideology. Choose your enemies wisely, for they will be your greatest inspiration. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2020) 

99. Too many national flags in a developed country indicate a declining empire, where people have accepted military propaganda in lieu of substance; meanwhile, in a developing country, a surfeit of national memorabilia means people prefer the past to the present and perhaps even the future. In the former, historians have failed; in the latter, economists have failed. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2020) 

100. Mankind today, torn apart by ideologies, discontented amid the conditions of prosperity, is looking feverishly and with yearning to ever-new technical recipes for solutions... Never before have accumulations of power been given the opportunity to assert themselves as has been the case in this century. Yet the result--as far as convincing people--is the exact opposite, as should be clear by now. -- Jan Patočka (1977) 

101. One of economics' most difficult truths is that not everything valuable can be commercially viable. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2020) 

102. The United States increasingly stands for debt, destruction, delusion, demagoguery, divorce, deficits, and death. Without discussion, diversity, de-escalation, democracy, and self-doubt, the status quo will continue. -- Matthew Rafat (2020) 

103. When people ask, "What good is a writer?" tell them this: only the writer can defeat the invisible barriers and borders that inevitably separate residents in their hometowns from each other, regardless of distance; and only the writer can minimize spaces between ourselves that reveal the next step towards a common humanity. Absent the sincere writer and the competent journalist, things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and rough edges sharpen into knives of our own neglect. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2020) 

104. The United States in 2020 has spent so much time studying the art of capturing attention, it has yet to reach the part about substance or context. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2020) 

105. Catholicism has made a mockery of democracy by employing nepotism in all areas of government, especially American police departments.  The result is a tragedy rendering religion the handmaiden of zero-sum political movements both at home and abroad. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2020) 

106. One reason America is so resistant to change is that minorities have been its loudest critics. When minorities are the most vociferous about domestic problems, it means they and the majority have failed. This is counterintuitive only until you realize the majority is required for political and thus meaningful change. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2020) 

107. It is no coincidence all falling empires devolve into distraction. When problems become entrenched, politicians can sacrifice and compromise, or they can borrow to maintain the status quo. Stagflation is the latter; success is the former. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2020)

108. A country that peddles propaganda is admitting it can no longer solve problems. If propaganda is the marriage of efficacy and pablum, then whether a country chooses the tactics of George Orwell's scapegoating or Aldous Huxley's unjustified optimism matters less than if breakaway political movements can divorce without bankruptcy or murder. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2020) 

109. The world would be a saner place if we called advertising and recruiting budgets by their true name: propaganda. But then whither military adventurism and the perception of political choice? -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2020) 

110. The only verifiable religious phenomenon I've witnessed is the Holy Trinity of Stupidity: white, American-born, and Catholic. I suppose it is that way everywhere the majority uses politics as a jobs program and minorities as visual props. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2020) 

111. Mainstream American Christianity lacks cultural structure and binds adherents through entertainment and showmanship. The result is a collection of storytellers able to weave tales any which way except a direction favoring genuinely shared experience. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2020) 

112. Debt-based democracy is an oxymoron. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2021) 

113. The dirty secret of 20th and 21st century large-scale Western democracy is not only that it requires segregation, but that it promotes it in all forms--at least if diversity is a component. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2021) 

114. "I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man's pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, under-dogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on top." -- William James, USA philosopher (1899)

115. Most people, especially lawyers, misunderstand the purpose of laws, which is to promote integrity, accountability, and priorities. After a certain threshold, however, laws become useless because they weigh down, rather than advance, compliance. Since no one knows the magic number where procedure trumps utility, laws tend to multiply until a backlash occurs, dividing the citizenry. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2021)

116. The difference between Congress and Parliament is that an American politician need not be wise or intelligent to succeed, whereas a British politician need not be wise. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2021)

117. When you start to see politics not as a battle between good and evil but the sustainable and the unsustainable, you are on the right path. -- Matthew Rafat (2021) 

118. A society under tax-driven governance requires politicians to listen to individuals, some more than others; a society under debt-driven governance requires politicians to listen to bankers more than everyone. -- Matthew Rafat (2021) 

119. Government's role is simple yet complex: creating fairer alternatives to the mafia at reasonable and comparable costs. -- Matthew Rafat (2021) 

120. Instead of Communism and capitalism, think of the 20th century as the first period of an experiment involving different levels of private ownership and debt within changing levels of demographics and available land. -- Matthew Rafat (2021) 

121. Competition between debt-fueled, decentralized systems led by lawyers and financial institutions against post-colonial, centralized systems led by executives and technocrats will characterize the first half of the 21st century. In theory, the former should be less corrupt; in practice, the latter has been more successful because of efficiency gains arising from a single technological standard. -- Matthew Rafat (2021) 

122. Working class revolutions often occur when elites--including teachers and lawyers--co-opt protections meant for physically-demanding jobs. Physical danger and tangible output impose palpable limits. In their absence, some professions are more likely than others to devolve into extremism. Progressives would do well to remember out-of-touch mine workers do not exist. -- Matthew Rafat (2021) 

123. Most people who admire Martin Luther King, Jr. and Joe Louis fail to realize they would not have been possible without Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. Inspiration requires inspiration, and our heroes are often reflections of others in reverse. -- Matthew Rafat (2021)

124. If the Americans aren't careful, a billion Chinese and a billion Muslims are going to rewrite American history--just by telling the truth. -- Matthew Rafat (2021) 

125. "Poetry has to do with the reality of the spirit, of faith and hope and sometimes even charity. It is a point of view. A poet is a theologian. Arts councils and the like love to believe in the poet as a simple singer piping down the valleys wild. When [Percy Bysshe] Shelley said that poets were the real legislators of the world he was right, although he may not have fully understood his rightness. A poet is an original who inspires millions of copies. That’s all education consists of - the copying of a good model." -- Patrick Kavanaugh (1962) 

126. Wisdom is weaving together facts and context while being inclusive. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2021)

127. A significant problem in the 20th and 21st centuries was the military's unchecked spending, which supported its marketing. The business of killing ought to be distinct from the business of selling things, lest people become things as business becomes inhuman. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2021)

128. Segregation has been favored throughout history because we tend to be more at ease with persons who look or dress like us, thus signaling similar codes of conduct. More diversity equals more complexity, and under Western governance, more laws, more dishonest lawyers, and more unequal enforcement are inevitable. As long as the overall economy is growing, complexity can be tolerated by majorities as well as minorities; however, once the economy slows, simplicity becomes the calling card of every reformer, whether benign or malevolent. Western civilization thrived from 1511 to 2001 because its military prowess allowed debt to be issued during the best of times and forgiven during the worst of times, a cycle that papered over severe deficiencies. In 2021, Americans who desire a simple society will one day realize they should have pursued a sustainable one. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2021) 

129. Citing cultural exports to argue one country's success over another may mean nothing more than this: the side claiming creativity has become the world's entertainer while others do more substantive work in the shadows. Moreover, the absence of cultural exports may be due to licensing and import restrictions rather than a dearth of talent. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2022) 

130. If supra-national technology companies have perfected surveillance, is competent oversight feasible without allowing governments the ability to participate? If not, should we accept diminished privacy as a cost of progress and shift attention to improving both private and public sector integrity? -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2022)

131. A philosopher is a puzzlemaster always working with incomplete pieces, and always aware failure is guaranteed. Yet, if s/he does not do the work, time will expand the board until it is futile to bother trying. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2022) 

132. A journalist must avoid ego and hatred. Both vices prevent empathy, then understanding all points of view. Until linguistic translations are seamless and historical facts uniform, a journalist's job is to tell stories with context, opening doors to the truth. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2022) 

133. Being the best sociopolitical writer when everyone is soaked in social media is like being the best horseman at a Ford Motor Car factory: the disadvantages are obvious, and the advantages few. Perhaps only the most curious will care, but the analog writer need not accept a digital medium. He or she may wait for technology to revert to conduit status rather than kingmaker and feel secure knowing that well-cared for horses are more beloved by their owners than mass-produced cars. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2022) 

134. Political speechwriters have wider reach than sociopolitical writers, but I cannot identify a single authentic and admirable politician in my adult lifetime, so I am content with limited returns. Good writers, like good people, eschew inauthenticity, and I always wonder how many writers have not yet been discovered because they are part-misanthrope and therefore more accepting of their loneliness. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2022)

135. After antagonizing 1 billion Muslims (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, etc.), the United States decided to malign 1 billion Chinese--understanding neither but remaining overconfident. -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2022)

136. Why do conservatives who associate legal or illegal drug sales with corrupt police departments suddenly suffer blindness when investigating similar connections between militaries and oil and gas? -- Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2023) 

Tests from Harvard

Most of us believe we harbor no prejudices against others. Harvard University has devised several tests to see if we make implicit associations about certain groups. Here is the link:

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/takeatest.html

Have fun.

World's Fastest People?

Rich People, Free Links

Two great links:

1. Warren Buffett's financial advice:

http://www.billshrink.com/blog/lessons-wealth-warren-buffet

“Live your life as simply as possible.”

2. Worst financial gurus:

http://www.billshrink.com/blog/worst-financial-gurus

I really, really dislike the book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I am ecstatic that someone finally called out Kiyosaki.

Random Thoughts: American Express, Kraft, and MGM

1. American Express (AXP) CEO Kenneth Chenault had these sobering words to say (from American Express's 2008 Annual Report):

The experience of the past year reinforces the principle that people should not spend more than they have the capacity to earn and pay back. And financial services companies should not encourage people to get over their heads in debt. Healthier consumer behavior is better for everyone in the long run. (Shareholder letter, page 9)

You might say Mr. Chenault deserves an obviousness award, except that millions of Americans are currently swimming in mortgage and credit card debt.

The upside is that American Express has plenty of room to grow: "Today, cash is used for about two-thirds of global personal consumption." Every time someone uses a credit card instead of cash, American Express receives a transaction fee. If American Express continues to successfully expand, it will make plenty of money.

On a side note, I don't understand why American Express isn't issuing credit cards with embedded chips here in the States. Almost all American credit card companies are still using the old magnetic strip technology, which is lovely--if you're into identity theft.

Magnetic strip technology makes stealing your credit card information very easy. The Europeans have figured this out and have mostly switched to embedded chip technology. American Express's Blue card used to offer embedded chip technology, but that's apparently been replaced by an ExpressPay system. If you have information about whether the ExpressPay system is more secure than the embedded chip technology, please post a comment.

2.I just realized that all of my lunch items, except for the bread, are Kraft-branded (KFT). This wasn't intentional--I don't care about brand names and usually focus on price. As a result, I was surprised when I peeked in my sandwich drawer and saw a) Kraft cheese (I love Kraft's extra sharp cheddar); b) Kraft mayo (with olive oil); and c) Oscar-Mayer lunch meats. (Kraft owns Oscar Mayer.) As more Americans brown-bag their lunches to save money, Kraft stands to benefit.

Also, Kraft recently provided me with good customer service, which is an important marketplace differentiator. In an era of increasing generic and store-branded competition, customer service matters more than ever. My issue related to Oscar-Mayer lunch meats. I complained that a package of turkey slices went bad too early. Nothing else in the same fridge drawer went bad, not even the other lunch meats. I asked Kraft to double-check their packaging on that particular item. I received a letter from a Kim M that acknowledged my issue, along with a coupon for a replacement pack. Now that's excellent customer service. Kudos to Kraft and Kim M.

3. Some interesting tidbits from MGM Mirage's (MGM) annual report:

Wasn't 2008 Supposed to Be the Bottom?: "Our current expectations for 2009 indicate that operating cash flow will be lower than in 2008." (page 3)

Yield Premiums Gone Wild: MGM issued $850 million of 11.125% senior secured notes due 2017 (page 4). Treasuries currently offer around a 3% yield. When a company has to offer 11%+ secured notes to attract financing, that's scary, isn't it?

Someone Benefited from Hurricane Katrina?: MGM received "insurance recoveries of $635 million which exceeded the $265 million of net book value of damaged assets and post-storm costs incurred...[MGM] recognized $284 million of insurance recoveries in income." (page 8)

I have little sympathy for MGM. During its 2008 annual shareholder meeting, I asked (former) CEO Terrence Lanni how he planned to adjust to the changing economic environment. I suggested he should lower prices and stop charging for basic items like internet access. He disagreed and seemed to mock my concerns. Other than licensing the MGM name, I didn't see any new streams of revenue. I left that meeting stunned that MGM's management didn't seem to feel the need for major changes. And so it goes.

Disclosure: I may own an insignificant number of shares in AXP, MGM, and KFT. The ownership of shares, if any, has not influenced any opinions expressed above.