Donald Sassoon Quotes

Politicians make the claim that our government has helped multinationals globalize and that businesses that globalize are somehow 'crony capitalists.' This is hogwash.

The selfish spirit of commerce which knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain.

Are we really going to let the world become a global market without any laws except those of the jungle?

Democracy and capitalism have both been hacked.

Political economy came into being as a natural result of the expansion of trade, and with its appearance elementary, unscientific huckstering was replaced by a developed system of licensed fraud, an entire science of enrichment.

Theodore Roosevelt understood that unregulated monopoly could pose an even greater threat than unrestrained government.

Because of my politics, I don't necessarily think that the independent capitalist is that much better than the multinational capitalist; it's just that the independent capitalist hasn't grown as big yet.

Politics is just a function of business now, just a tributary of the great entrepreneurial capitalist system.

President Roosevelt's leadership put the world on notice that the United States of America - with the freest, most dynamic economy the world had ever seen - was open for business.

Is Wall Street the rightful master of our economic fate? Or should we choose a broader form of sovereignty?

Public protests against globalization - protests that occur by and large in the prosperous West - denounce free trade and the mobility of capital as instruments of exploitation and oppression.

Combinations [large corporate conglomerates], governed entirely by the law of greed … threaten the integrity of our institutions.

We are for Free Trade, because by Free Trade all economical laws, with their most astounding contradictions, will act upon a larger scale, upon the territory of the whole earth; and because from the uniting of all these contradictions in a single group, where they will stand face to face, will result the struggle which will itself eventuate in the emancipation of the proletariat.

The two greatest enemies of free enterprise in the United States, in my opinion, have been, on the one hand, my fellow intellectuals and, on the other hand, the business corporations of this country. They are enemies for opposite reasons.

Free trade would place our farmers and workers in competition with peasant and sweated labor products.

Nine-tenths of the socialistic and semi-socialistic, and sentimental or ethical, suggestions by which we are overwhelmed come from failure to understand the phenomena of the industrial organization and its expansion. It controls us all because we are all in it. It creates the conditions of our existence, sets the limits of our social activity, regulates the bonds of our social relations, determines our conceptions of good and evil, suggests our life-philosophy, molds our inherited political institutions, and reforms the oldest and toughest customs…

We are in a global competitive world. And in the future it will be even more, and more, and more global.

The agencies of production, of manufacture, distribution, and of finance: all the parts of the capitalist system, have only one purpose and that is to work for the welfare of the people. And when any of those instruments in any way fails, it is the plain duty of a government which represents the people to remove the cause of the failure.

One aspect of modern life which has gone far to stifle men is the rapid growth of tremendous corporations ... The disappearance of free enterprise has led to a submergence of the individual in the impersonal corporation.

Globalization tends to turn all friends and enemies into competitors.

There are two forces in this and in every other nation of the world today. One force is the taker and the other force is the maker.

… a union of power in the same hands over industry, commerce and finance, with a resulting power over public affairs.

In 1947 American corporations thought of themselves as national with offices abroad. Today, they see themselves as global corporations with headquarters in the United States.

Prediction of whether or not the capitalist order will survive is, in part, a matter of terminology.

Globalization today is a globalization of markets, not a globalization of democracy.