Mahathir Mohamad Quotes

The developing countries are scared out of their wits now, because they don’t understand what they’re being forced to sign. The agreements are going way outside the trade issues and involve a helluva lot of things like your access to oil, your access to intellectual property and capital controls…. When I looked through the investment agreements, it was worse than reading my insurance policy for the fine print. I couldn’t make anything out of it, and I’m a reasonably informed person, a pretty smart economist as they go.

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.

In the field of economy, for instance, we … members of the developing world follow the currents of globalization, with conditions set by the rich countries, and at a speed dictated without our slightest input.

Americans today are blaming globalization for change itself and the pace of change, much of which has little to do with globalization.

We must combat the over-riding interest of organizations such as The World Bank, The International Monetary fund … They work in collaboration of the most reactionary elements of Argentina.

The capitalist free market is a marvelous servant but a disastrous master. In one of the greatest achievements of the second half of this [the 20th] century, a few favored societies learned to convert it from master to servant. The danger now is that a smug and vainglorious capitalism will not remember the lesson.

The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy.

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

If it is, in reality, capitalism that is the motor force behind the destructive forms of globalization, then it must be in their capacity to neutralize or transform this particular mode of exploitation that one can best test these various forms of resistance to the West.

By adopting the 'free trade,' or British, system, we place ourselves side by side with the men who have ruined Ireland and India, and are now poisoning and enslaving the Chinese people.

Globalization creates economic policies where the transnationals lord over us, and the result is misery and unemployment.

Governments have been ceding power to big multinational corporations in the market. We see the manifest in a variety of ways. Where governments are giving up power to big international institutions like the World Trade Organization or NAFTA, which are disabling governments' ability to protect the rights of their own people.

Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an objectively defined 'free market' is the first step towards understanding capitalism.

Capitalism has only hurt Latin America.

Capitalism was reasonably content under Hitler, happy under Mussolini, very happy under Franco and delirious under General Pinochet

The countries of the Middle East have been losers in the age of globalization, out of step in an age of free markets, free trade, and democratic politics.

Modern industry and the opening of the world market made the struggle universal and at the same time gave it unheard-of virulence. Advantages in natural or artificial conditions of production now decide the existence or non-existence of individual capitalists as well as of whole industries and countries. He that falls is remorselessly cast aside.

The hour of capitalism’s greatest triumph is its greatest danger.

Many will see [globalization] as little more than a mask used by certain economic elites for taking away the voice of the individual citizen.

Freedom" is a grand word, but under the banner of Free Trade the most predatory wars were conducted; under the banner of "free labor" the toilers were robbed.

People are dying because we in the West are unwilling to change and to actually live by the free market rhetoric we often spout.

The profit-grinding system is maintained by competition, or veiled war, not only between the conflicting classes, but also within the classes themselves: there is always war among the workers for bare subsistence, and among their masters, the employers and middle-men, for the share of the profit wrung out of the workers; lastly, there is competition always, and sometimes open war, among the nations of the civilised world for their share of the world-market.

The unfettered free market has been the most radically disruptive force in American life in the last generation.

Trade will no longer lie at the mercy of ignorant and reckless politicians, or at the mercy, no less to be deprecated, of a few purse-proud, domineering, dictatorial bank directors, who care not what mischief they do if they can but perpetuate their own exclusive privileges.

The Bretton Woods agreement will enthrone a world dictatorship of private finance more complete and terrible than an Hitlerite dream. It offers no solution of world problems, but quite blatantly sets up controls which will reduce the smaller nations to vassal states and make every government the mouthpiece and tool of International Finance. It will undermine and destroy the democratic institutions.