Peter Joseph QUOTES

21 " People who flaunt extreme status and wealth are, in effect, harming the sense of integrity of others, instigating conflict and insecurity. Wealth signaling and class stratification itself is really a social pollutant, not an inspiration for progress, as is often argued. "

― Peter Joseph , The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression

22 " Charity is the humanitarian mask hiding the face of economic exploitation. "

― Peter Joseph , The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression

23 " Peter Joseph is one of the great visionaries of our time. If there’s a beautiful future—and I think there will be—then his fingerprints will be all over it.” —MARIANNE WILLIAMSON,
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR "

― Peter Joseph , The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression

24 " Hierarchy simply makes people sick. This is also made worse by the nature of our commercial, consumer society once again, where advertising’s functional role is to make people feel inadequate and subordinate. In the words of neuroscientist and stress-health expert Robert Sapolsky, “So it isn’t about being poor, it is about feeling poor. "

― Peter Joseph , The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression

25 " True intelligence is self-awareness—including a sense of just how wrong you likely are most of the time as a result of your biases. "

― Peter Joseph , The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression

26 " Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler, often regarded as the most famous decorated US army officer of the early twentieth century, wrote a book after World War I aptly called War Is a Racket. Upon retirement in the 1930s, he gave speeches around the country to spread his message—a message that sheds light upon the hidden internal dialogue underlying US military history. In 1935, Butler boldly stated: I spent 33 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. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. 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 half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents. "

― Peter Joseph , The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression

27 " Today, species are now going extinct 1,000 times faster than the rate recorded during the previous 65 million years.19 The “sixth great extinction” is upon us. There have been five large extinction events in the past, from the Ordovician-Silurian, some 400 million years ago, to the Cretaceous-Paleogene, some 60 million years ago.20 However, unlike prior events, it appears this one is entirely manmade. "

― Peter Joseph , The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression

28 " It is time the world began to understand and see beyond the mythology of “free markets,” realizing that no matter how idealized theoretical assumptions may be, the structural bigotry and systemic oppression will forever harm the lower-class majority. Please note that I do not see the rise of modern capitalism and neoliberalism as some evil that could have been prevented. Rather, we are dealing with a natural progression of social evolution and at a certain point in time market capitalism was indeed the best method we had. Yet, as can occur with any socially perpetuated phenomenon, we are now stuck in a feedback loop that perversely restricts our ability to take the next evolutionary step as an intelligent species. It is in this stage, a stage philosopher John McMurtry calls “the cancer stage of capitalism,” that a great deal of energy is now needed to deliberately shift the course of civilization. "

― Peter Joseph , The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression

29 " as expressed by Dr. James Gilligan earlier, “[T]he most powerful predictor of the murder rate is the size of the gap in income and wealth between the rich and the poor. And the most powerful predictor of the rate of national or collective violence—war, civil insurrection, and terrorism—is the size of the gap between income and wealth between the rich and poor nations. "

― Peter Joseph , The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression

30 " Martin Luther King put it in his final work, Where Do We Go From Here?: “Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. "

― Peter Joseph , The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression

31 " The total energy consumption of all the countries on the planet is about half a zettajoule (0.55) a year,69 which means thousands of years of planetary power could be harnessed via geothermal sources alone. The MIT report also estimated that there was enough energy in hard rocks 10 kilometers below the US to supply all the world’s current needs for 30,000 years. "

― Peter Joseph , The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression

32 " The United States, which is home to 5 percent of the world’s population, consumes 25 percent of the world’s energy production and 50 percent of the world’s production of raw materials, and produces 40 percent of the world’s waste.5 In fact, only 20 percent of the world’s wealthier population consumes a massive 80 percent of the world’s goods. "

― Peter Joseph , The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression

33 " the market economy is based on cyclical consumption and it really doesn’t matter what is being produced, how it is being produced, or why. If demand or production slows, so too does the movement of money, and when this happens, the economy contracts, systemically reducing the standard of living for many. Ecologically, this means capitalism is structurally oblivious to humanity’s existence on a finite planet. The system wants to produce, not conserve. In fact, if you think about it, you will discover an interesting paradox to market logic: the fact that capitalism is a scarcity-based economic system that actually seeks infinite consumption. In other words, it favors a threshold of goods scarcity to secure competitive profits, theorized as a model to properly manage scarcity, optimizing resource use and distribution. Yet, at the same time, the system demands more and more human dissatisfaction and “want” in order to function and grow. It rewards consumption, with no inherent incentive to conserve anything. "

― Peter Joseph , The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression

34 " The US’s having a federal debt of $19 trillion or $190 trillion is actually only as relevant as its position in the global power hierarchy. The US will never default as long as it remains a global empire, and all major nations buying US bonds know this deep down. The US can just make it up by way of its central bank, the Federal Reserve, which extends to a financial system with great global power, also ensuring the power of the US dollar. If debts are in dollars, the US simply makes more. Although people often argue that the US is in debt to a private banking cartel (its central bank) and that is a problem in itself, it is really irrelevant in the broad view. The whole thing is mostly a sleight-of-hand arrangement that lets the US government borrow endlessly while the banking system gets special political treatment. No one in the US government and its central bank cartel really cares about US government debt because money is made out of thin air. They only care about public regulation and public perception, not government spending or government debt. In the words of former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan: “The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.”51 "

― Peter Joseph , The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression

35 " a 1992 Gallup Poll found that more than 50 percent of American adults volunteered time for social causes at an average of 4.2 hours a week, for a total of 20.5 billion hours a year.68 This was calculated to equate to about $176 billion in value.69 Even in times of recession, average people continue to give and help at high rates. "

― Peter Joseph , The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression

36 " The rise of automation breaks the need for human commodification and dehumanization, assuming we adjust accordingly to remove labor-for-income as a universal economic requirement. In the words of Jeremy Rifkin: A half century from now, our grandchildren are likely to look back at the era of mass employment in the market with the same sense of utter disbelief as we look upon slavery and serfdom in former times. The very idea that a human being’s worth was measured almost exclusively by his or her productive output of goods and services and material wealth will seem primitive, even barbaric, and be regarded as a terrible loss of human value to our progeny living in a highly automated world. "

― Peter Joseph , The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression