50. 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."
51. 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]
52. "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)
53. 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
54. "Life loses momentum and direction for those who cut off the past, shun purpose, evade commitment." -- Ann Hulbert
55. 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.
56. “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.]
57. "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, 572 U.S. 291 (2014)
58. “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
59. "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)
"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
60. "[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
61. "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.]
62. “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
63. 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
64. "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
65. 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)
66. 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
67. "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.