Chaye Quotes

So how big is this thing anyway?” Desideria asked Chayden made a sound of irritation. “You know, that’s not really a question I want to hear my younger sister ask a man, especially not one I consider a friend, while he’s lying bare-assed on my floor.” Hauk and Fain laughed. Desideria was less than amused. “Remember, brother, I’m currently the only one holding a weapon.” Caillen glared at him. “Really, Chay, why don’t you concentrate on the people trying to kill us right now? ’Preciate it, pun’kin.” He turned his attention to her. “About the size of your smallest fingernail.” Fain laughed again. “Damn, I should have been taping that response and using it for playback at every party from here until I die.

You amaze me," he said then, reaching out to lay the toy on her pillow. That wasn't where he had gotten it from. "You bring a toy to do a man's job, knowing the man is more than willing to provide the service. Where does that make sense, Chay?

My name is Nick Gautier and this is the story of my life. First off, get the name right. It’s pronounced Go-shay not Go-tee-ay or Goat-chay (that has an extra H in it and as my mom says we’re so poor we couldn’t afford the extra letter). I’m not some fancy French fashion designer. I’m just a regular kid… well as regular as someone with a stripper for a mother and a career felon for a father can be.

I have no idea what Paloma looks like-what she'll be like. I have no idea what to expect. I should've asked more questions. I should've used the last ten hours to grill Chay until he broke-until he confided every dark and dirty secret Paloma is hiding. Instead,I chose to eat.And read.And dream about some phantom boy with smooth brown skin,icy-blue eyes, and long glossy black hair-a boy I've never even met in real life. Lot of good it did me.

Can you do this?” “So long as we don’t get hit by a blast.” He cut a meaningful glare to their pilot. “Hold it steady, Chay.” “I make no promises and bear no liability for your lunacy, her clumsiness or any injury my unfortunate luck, uncharacteristic ineptitude or continual stupidity may cause.” Nice legal disclosure. Rotten bastard.

Be careful. They’re here for you,” he murmured over his shoulder before slipping into the classroom. ~Chay

Corruption, it made plain, was not solely a humanitarian affair, an issue touching on principles or values alone. It was a matter of national security—Afghan national security and, by extension, that of the United States. And if corruption was driving people to violent revolt in Afghanistan, it was probably doing likewise in other places. Acute government corruption may in fact lie at the root of some of the world’s most dangerous and disruptive security challenges—among them the spread of violent extremism. That basic fact, elusive to this day, is what this book seeks to demonstrate.

What happened?" he asks,voice laced with concern. "I..." I merged with a cockroach-caught a ride next to your twin's Calvin Klein underwear label-and after I watched him play with a demon coyote and snack on bloodied bits that could've been either animal or human, he fed glowing, white orbs to the walking dead-then crushed me under the hell of his boot... "I'm not sure," I say,willing my head to feel better,to stop spinning, and a moment later it does. "I guess I passed out,or something..." I cringe,hating the lie but knowing there's no way I could ever present him the truth. I start to stand,pretending not to notice when he offers a hand. "I need to call my ride." I fumble for my phone, reluctant to bother Paloma and Chay at this hour,but they're pretty much my only real option. "Don't be silly.I'll drive you." Dace follows me out of the stall,watching as I call Paloma's number,then Chay's-face scrunching in confusion when they both fail to answer.It doesn't make any sense. "Daire-why won't you let me help you?" he says.My name on his lips sounding just like ti did in the dream. Our eyes meeting in the mirror,mine astonished, his chagrined,when he adds, "Yeah,I asked around.Uncovered your real name. So shoot me." And when he smiles,when he smiles and runs a nervous hand through his glossy,dark hair-well,I'm tempted to shake my head and refuse him again. Maybe he goes by the name of Whitefeather, but technically,he's still a Richter.A good Richter-a kind Richter-still,I need to do what I can to avoid him.To ignore that irresistible stream of kindness and warmth that swarms all around him. Need to cleanse myself of those dreams once and for all.We are not bound.Nor are we fated.I'm a Seeker-he's the spawn of a Richter-and my only destiny is to stop his brother from...whatever it is that he's doing. But,more immediately,I need to get home.And there's no denying I could do a lot worse than catching a ride with gorgeous Dace Whitefeather.

Some see the glass as half full, others see it as half empty, and then there are those who see it as a glass of water. Open your eyes and your mind to see beyond the obvious. " ~

The phenomenon we confront is the worldwide equivalent of a forest fire, of the Blitz. We must react accordingly—with that same impulsive solidarity. Or, to restate this idea in terms of the other metaphor that has threaded through these pages: the only way to defeat the tiny but powerful coalition of meat hogs that is imperiling our whole community is to join together in a far-reaching egalitarian coalition and confront them in unison.

Some nine years before, Mr. Tan Chay Yan, scion of a well-known Peranakan Chinese family of Malacca, had converted his pepper garden into a rubber plantation. In 1897 this had seemed like a mad thing to do. Everyone had advised against it: rubber was known to be a risk. Mr. Ridley, the curator of the Singapore Botanical Gardens, had been trying for years to interest British planters in giving rubber a try. The imperial authorities in London had spent a fortune in arranging to have seed stocks stolen from Brazil.

Criticizing the “corrupt, questionable, and unqualified leaders [placed] into key positions,” the argument rested on the principle of command responsibility: “The international community has enabled and encouraged bad governance through agreement and silence, and often active partnership.” Moving the issue away from the humanitarian terrain where it often resides, we made corruption relevant to war fighters by explaining its centrality to prospects of victory. “Afghans’ acute disappointment with the quality of governance . . . has contributed to permissiveness toward, or collusion with,” the Taliban, we wrote, laboring to stultify our language with a credible amount of jargon. In plain English: why would a farmer stick out his neck to keep Taliban out of his village if the government was just as bad? If, because of corruption, an ex-policeman like Nurallah was threatening to turn a blind eye to a man planting an IED, others were going further. Corruption, in army-speak, was a force multiplier for the enemy. “This condition is a key factor feeding negative security trends and it undermines the ability of development efforts to reverse these trends,” our draft read.

Có một em bé ở nhà quê lên bán bánh. Người cô không cho em ở vì em không có tên trong tờ khai gia đình. Em ngủ ngoài nghĩa địa. Sợ ma. Một bữa nọ Tú Bà lại nói: 'Nếu con chịu ngủ với người ta thì con sẽ có nhiều tiền. Con được một trăm thì cô chỉ giữ lại hai chục để trả tiền nhà, tiền nước.' Nhà chứa không chánh thức; an ninh địa phương biết, nhưng được lo lót thì cũng để cho yên. Một sư cô thấy em bé nhỏ xíu, mới mười sáu tuổi mà đứng ngoài đường kiếm khách. Sư cô kêu em lại hỏi chuyện. 'Thôi, Tú Bà biết liều không sợ chứa chấp con thì cô cũng liều. Thay vì ở nhà Tú Bà thì con về ở chùa đi.' Cô cho em ở đậu và giúp em bày một xe bán bánh mì. Sư cô này hiện đang sống ở Sài Gòn, đã và đang làm những việc như vậy. Đừng nói rằng những chuyện đó là những chuyện quá khứ, những chuyện mình không làm được. Đó là một trong những chuyện đang xảy ra. Nếu sư cô nọ có thể giúp em bé kia thì sư cô cũng đã có thể giúp những em bé khác. Ngoài sư cô cũng còn biết bao nhiêu những sư cô khác đang làm được chuyện này. Đây không phải là chuyện lý thuyết. Sự thật ở Sài Gòn bây giờ có những sư cô buổi sáng mở cửa chùa cho trẻ con đường phố vô học. Các cô nói: 'Nếu các con chịu khó học được bốn tiếng đồng hồ thì trưa nay sẽ được ăn cơm chay.' Giữ con nít ở trong chùa để các em khỏi ra đường làm du đãng hay đào bới trong những đống rác. Ăn trưa xong các em có thể nằm lăn ra ngủ. Ở lại học buổi chiều từ ba đến sáu giờ thì các em lại được ăn cơm chiều. Nhìn bề ngoài thấy giống như trẻ em mỗi ngày được cung cấp mấy giờ học và hai bữa cơm. Kỳ thực kết quả lớn lắm! Các cô đã giữ được cho các em khỏi sa vào những ổ nhện và khỏi trở thành những trẻ em du đãng. Cho một em ăn trưa chỉ tốn 25 cents thôi. Ở Tây phương, 25 cents thì mua gì được! Nhưng vào tay sư cô, 25 cents là một bữa ăn cho một em bé. Bao nhiêu công việc như vậy. Rất đẹp, rất hay. Đạo Bụt là như thế, không phải là đạo nói trên trời dưới biển. Thúy Kiều bây giờ nhiều lắm. Có khắp nơi. Chỉ thương hại cho cô Thúy Kiều của cụ Nguyễn Du không thôi thì rất bất công. Cô này đã có người thương rồi, đã có một sư cô tên Giác Duyên lo cho rồi. Còn biết bao nhiều Thúy Kiều nhỏ tuổi, dại dột hơn Thúy Kiều này đang ở khắp nơi trên quê hương mình. Đọc Truyện Kiều với cái thấy này thì Truyện Kiều trở thành ra Kinh. Ích lợi như đọc Kinh. trang 118, 119 - 'Thả một bè lau - Truyện Kiều dưới cái nhìn Thiền quán' - Thích Nhất Hạnh

...decision makers should realize that even with rational models and established parameters, situations will arise that may compel the United States to participate in peace operations. Humanitarian issues may seem compelling; domestic political pressures and pressures from allies may develop; and a range of foreign and domestic policy issues may require response, even if important U.S. security interests are not at stake directly. Military strategist and planners should be aware, also, that in a democratic society and an interdependent world, sometime decisions will be made outside established parameters for interventions. That makes the development of a strategy and the establishment of criteria all the more important, although planning for such events is necessarily less predictable and necessarily of lower priority. The systematic ability to analyze both the significance for national security and the immediate rationale for involvement may permit policy makers to withstand pressures if the consequences might be negative, or set limits that reduce potential harm. The...debate...about U.S. involvement in the former Yugoslavia is a microcosm of the varied and conflicting pressures that may arise. Some combination of assessment of national interest weighed against risk has militated against any commitment of ground troops while hostilities continue. Yet the importance of protecting allies may cause the policy to bend somewhat before the war ends, and the United States may become involved in an operation on a scale that may have been unnecessary if a strategy and the organization of national assets to support it had been available to prevent the crisis in the first place. Traditionally, peace operations, especially peacekeeping, were viewed as operations that came at the tail end of conflict. There will continue to be a need for peace operations to assist in bringing about and guaranteeing peace. However, the value of peace operations in dealing with precursor instabilities - to prevent, contain, or ameliorate incipient conflicts -- must be considered also. In this sense, peace operations are investments. Properly conducted by forces that have planned, prepared and trained for them within the proper strategic framework, peace operations may well preclude the need to deploy larger forces at substantial costs in both blood and treasure later.

Khi Ðạo Phật tới, thì chọn lấy chỗ nào hay, còn chỗ nào không thích thì cứ việc bỏ đi. Sau này, đạo Thiên chúa truyền vào, thì những chỗ "vui nhộn", "bảnh bao" cũng đều được gạn lọc lấy. Chẳng hạn, chỉ có tiệc liên hoan Nôen, lễ cưới ở nhà thờ đã được chọn lấy. Chứ ma chay thì vẫn làm ở chùa, lễ Vu lan thì múa Bon Odori[13], tết nhất thì đi lễ đền. Vừa ngồi "tham thiền nhập định" lại cũng đi "rước kiệu". Tất cả những cái này người Nhật đều thực hành thoải mái không hề cảm thấy một mảy may mâu thuẫn nào hết.

Mong đợi cuộc đời đối xử tốt với bạn vì bạn là một người tốt cũng giống như mong rằng con bò đực đang nổi giận sẽ không tấn công bạn chỉ vì bạn là người ăn chay

But what if the Afghan government wasn’t really trying to govern? What if it was focused on another objective altogether? What if corruption was central to that objective and therefore to the government’s mode of operation? Perhaps GIRoA could best be understood not as a government at all but as a vertically integrated criminal organization—or a few such loosely structured organizations, allies but rivals, coexisting uneasily—whose core activity was not in fact exercising the functions of a state but rather extracting resources for personal gain.

In Afghanistan, faced with such moral and material depravity, a brutal and tenacious insurgency was serving up its idea of an antidote: a narrow reading of religious devotion. Many Afghans were swayed by the argument that government integrity could be achieved only through religious rectitude. Some appreciated the outlet that militancy provided for their anger. Still others just laid low, unwilling to take risks on behalf of a government that treated them almost as badly as the Taliban did. And it was all U.S. troops could do to keep that insurgency at bay.

Laboratory experiments over the past several decades have demonstrated humans’ apparently irrational revolt against such unjust bargains. The experiments, known as “ultimatum games,” allocate a sum of money to one player, with instructions to divide it with another. If the recipient accepts the offer, the deal goes through. If she rejects it, both players get nothing. Economists had presumed that a recipient, acting rationally, would accept any amount greater than zero. In fact, in experiment after experiment—even with stakes as high as a month’s salary—roughly half of recipients rejected offers lower than 20 percent of the total sum.7

Militant political religion as the only alternative to corruption. That was just the nexus I had seen in the Taliban’s appeal in Afghanistan, and in the frequent presence of extremist insurgencies in other acutely corrupt countries. Public integrity, the proposition seemed to be, could only emerge through the rigid purity of religious practice—imposed by law if need be, or savage violence.

money was stolen.” The fishmonger’s complaint highlights the role that international loans and subsidies often play, in Tunisia as elsewhere, in actively feeding kleptocracy. Moroccans complain about an unnecessary high-speed rail line linking their capital to the commercial hub, Casablanca. Their criticisms, like that of the fishmonger, illustrate that it is not just humanitarian aid in crisis or postconflict environments that gets captured as a “rent” by kleptocratic networks. Infrastructure grants—or worse, loans—supposedly provided after unhurried deliberation, serve the same purpose in acutely corrupt countries.

over the 1982–84 period, taxes actually increased for all those making less than $30,000 a year….For those making over $200,000 a year, however, the Reagan cuts brought an average reduction of…15 percent.” Thus was perpetrated, say two other analysts, “what may well have been the most accelerated upwards redistribution of income in the nation’s history.

The whole thing was a lavishly funded laboratory experiment in the Reagan-era unfettered pro-business principles that the Clinton administration was validating. Harvard, with its liberal reputation, added to the validation. Simultaneously across Asia and Latin America, similar experiments were being launched. Unfortunately, the grotesque virus that resulted did not stay sealed inside the post-Soviet laboratory.

Systemic corruption, leaving no means of redress or civic appeal, drives citizens to extremes.

divides over cultural and identity-group issues often mask—in fact may be deliberately used to mask—unanimity at the top of the system when it comes to condoning or participating in corruption.

In the United States, serious and damaging public corruption is not getting punished. That means, by default, that we deem it to be just fine.

Don’t you know?” the two elders shot back, almost together. “Olokun gives money to people he hates. It destroys them.

To cement the solidarity of their hunting parties, says Boehm, so all members would keep participating in the arduous and risky expeditions, members shared equally whatever meat they bagged—no matter who had delivered the death blow that day, or who had fashioned the spearpoint.

The individual ego is therefore both nurtured and submerged. A man’s skills are praised, his food is eaten, his pride is reinforced.” Sharing, not hogging or hoarding, is rewarded, and the meat taken with reverence, and shared, is sacred. Each such meal is a Eucharist.

The sharing out of meat, in other words—and the egalitarianism it engendered—is part of what turned us from apes to human beings. It remained the pillar of our social organization for about 180,000 years.

A set of values defined Greek aristocracy—even if many members failed to meet them. Those values included excellence in every endeavor, be it physical strength, making music from the strings of a lyre, fine weaving, craftiness or courage in battle, or the sacred responsibility for the people that a political leader was expected to shoulder upon ascending to high rank. To win a matchless gift, one was expected to behave in ways that made one worthy of it. Money is the opposite of unique. The whole point of its regular size and weight, the instantly recognizable stamp, is that a dime is a dime. No matter who spends it and the exact metallic content of the coin, a dime is a dime.

This is the real meaning of the myth of Midas. It wasn’t just that the king might starve to death through blind greed. It was that everything he touched lost its incomparable properties and turned into cold, hard cash.

For example, executives and HR departments should not offer the vice president of Enron a string of government jobs in the public-private international development and infrastructure industries after his company’s debacle.

A ratchet-up would be to expel violators like him from powerful jobs they currently hold if the wrongdoing continues or their contracts come up for renewal. The next notch would be to take their freedom—that is, to investigate, prosecute, and send them to jail. That option terrifies the dominator coalition. Why else would it have worked so hard for thirty years to eliminate it?

With her final poem, “Bless This Land,” she declared: “Luminous forests, oceans, and rock cliff sold for the trash glut of gold, uranium, or oil bust rush yet there are new stories to be made, little ones coming up over the horizon.” Harjo did this revolutionary thing under the great greened dome of the Library of Congress,

It was a counterweight, the first I have felt in years. It was a note on a ram’s horn, before the walls of Jericho.

That explains the United States Constitution’s hard-and-fast rule against accepting any item of value from a government official or his or her agent.

When people receive gifts, no matter how innocent, they feel obligated and try to reciprocate. It is a lovely reflex in everyday life and has furthered community bonding and artistic vocation. But in politics, it leads to corruption. An outright ban on such gifts would protect officials from the unintended worst consequences of their best reflexes—and from the temptations that will inevitably be dangled before them.

It is time to restore other values to primacy. That means honoring them, not just with words, but in ways that matter. For culture does not just happen. It must be nurtured. We do so by honoring people who build their lives around other priorities—ensuring they can earn a dignified living, even if we must pay more taxes ourselves to raise salaries for public servants. We do so by buying something handmade or hand grown when we possibly can, instead of at Walmart, or spending our own time and money on beauty and its creators. We do so by reducing our tolerance for ugliness.

it is impossible to become a billionaire without bending the rules. Most of the members of that class run their operations and live their lives in ways that injure our communities. Most are trying to rig the system even further. These are not upstanding citizens. They are parasites and freeloaders—however they try to justify themselves. We do not owe them deference.

There is no magic formula, no step-by-step method for bringing the hydras that are laying waste to our societies under control.

A Nigerian friend once told me that an Islamic precept is not to punish a wrongdoer in a material he has in abundance. That is, a rich person should not be fined; it won’t trouble him. The trick then is to discover what is dearer to today’s kleptocrats than money—even in this era of full-blown Midas disease. Two such precious substances might be the prestige their money buys and the freedom—the “What the fuck” freedom to do anything they want with the people and the world around them.

A third principle comes not from ancient Greece, but from the Farmers’ Alliance. It is the importance of ideas, the need for independent analysis, developed and transmitted in a constant exchange with and among neighbors, and the need to teach it actively. Too much dogma, unquestioned across the political spectrum—such as that unlimited growth is a sign of health—serves to reinforce the business model of the kleptocrats, or to distract us from it.

means ceasing to make excuses for the meat hogs inside our own political or racial or gender or cultural in-group and demanding the same rigor from our own favorites as we do from the others.

The point here is to do something. Not just anything, not waste our time just blowing off steam. Let’s all of us pick some part of our exploitative economy that especially galls us, consider our own assets and aptitudes, and change our behavior.

That means our places of worship, of course. It means our schools and universities, and our health-care facilities, the provision of our fundamental necessities, such as water and electricity and garbage collection, our food, and our natural surroundings. We must resist efforts to privatize these crucial functions. That means charter schools. It means public infrastructure such as railroads and ports and broadband. It means the fighting of our wars. Let us be adamant: money does not equal speech, that singularly human gift.

But leading lights of the Democratic Party and the businesses affiliated with them quickly embraced the new plutocratic ethos.

Lawyers make their living mincing words. Many devote their skill and hard labor to constructing the apparatus of justification.

It was, in the words of the original indictment, the citizens’ “right to have the Commonwealth’s business and its affairs conducted honestly, impartially, free from corruption, bias, dishonesty, deceit, official misconduct, and fraud.

This time, the Supreme Court did not rule unanimously in favor of the corrupt politicians, not quite. The vote overturning their convictions was 7–2.*1 “The words ‘to defraud,’ ” the justices opined, “commonly refer to wronging one in his property rights by dishonest methods.” Then they minced “commonly” into “only.” “Defraud,” they decreed, could only mean “obtain money or property” by fraud, nothing other. The American people were stripped of their actionable right to the basic integrity of their public servants.

Here was the court, back to “only.” And here was Americans’ right to integrity back to mere money. Only if an official had taken dollars and cents—and only if she had done so by means of one of two narrowly defined crimes—had she violated anyone’s right to her good faith in performing her duties.

So does the fact that corrupt officials the world over buy art, often anonymously, as a way to launder money. The uber-rich use it to dodge taxes. Warehouses in Geneva and New York are stacked with specially conditioned safes. There, great works are reduced to the equivalent of zeroes in anonymous bank accounts.

Subjecting a ruler to the rule of law was the first way a coalition of subordinates successfully slapped down its apex alpha dominator in a modern, complex society. It was the first step humans took to reassert their unique egalitarian ethos after centuries of submitting to apelike hierarchy in kingdoms and empires. The second cornerstone of democracy—the vote—came only later. Kleptocratic networks seek to suborn both.

Charles I’s refusal to plead, back in 1649, casts an instructive light on President Donald Trump’s across-the-board rejection of congressional subpoenas. Current Justice Department policy holds that—unlike the precedent English commoners sought to establish back then—a sitting president cannot be prosecuted.

For that is the deal holding the networks together, the same deal that made the strength of the Mafia: protection for lieutenants and foot soldiers in return for a constant flow of spoils up through the ranks.

Even before the coronavirus pandemic hit, prompting a moratorium on most enforcement, EPA investigators across the country had to check with Washington before even requesting information from suspects or ordering laboratory tests that might prove a crime has been committed.

In the first two years of the Trump administration the numbers just collapsed—compared to the Obama and George W. Bush administrations alike. At the Department of Agriculture, to take just one other example, fines levied on meat and processed food conglomerates for cheating contract farmers and other violations plummeted by 2018 to a tenth of 2013 levels.

A December 2018 study found that the EPA had cleared about half as many cases nationwide as it had just the previous year, FY 2017. So enfeebled, what do the enforcers still enforce? With limited resources, they go for smaller fry. My neighbors out fishing are more likely to get a citation for a leaky outboard than the insulation factory a few towns over is for swilling gallons of formaldehyde into a river.

They are moral choices. And they are being made by a self-dealing network whose private-sector members have been handed control of the public trust to a degree unprecedented in the United States, even in the Gilded Age.

The five chairs of the power committees,” for example, “must contribute $500,000 [each] and raise an additional $1 million” for congressional campaign funds. Big donors thus get to choose not just who runs for office, but who, once elected, leads.

Every kleptocratic network I have examined, from Afghanistan to Honduras to Central Asian or African countries, has included a skein of outright

A Nigerian once answered a question about the social significance of money with an enigma: “People use money to intimidate people,” he stated. I knew what he meant, but I made polite conversation: “Really? How?” “By giving it to them.” That was not the answer I expected. I waited. “Then they can tell them what to do.” Afghans said the same, I remembered: “When someone eats your food, he should obey you. You don’t obey him.

Under neither the George W. Bush nor the Obama administrations were conditions attached to the taxpayer-funded assistance banks were handed. No one leveraged the collapse of the banks’ moral authority. The U.S. government chose not to use our money to intimidate the banks.

President Obama’s regulators could have imposed some decency. They could have rewired the incentive structure that had turned young traders into improvised explosives. They did not.

But to stave off threats that extreme, kleptocratic networks deftly execute other maneuvers. They disguise their members and activities, for example. They distract and disorganize potential grassroots opposition. In an examination of seven anticorruption insurrections on five continents, the tactic I found to be most common—and most effective—was to deliberately enflame identity-based divisions that could pit groups of the population against one another. This is how a vastly outnumbered dominator coalition defeats the rest of us.

That is a wonderful state of affairs for kleptocrats. Waving a red or blue flag, they hold on to camps of ardent loyalists while betraying them to serve the network instead. Most Americans disapprove of policies that benefit the superrich at everyone else’s expense. Both parties pursue such policies. We find reasons to vote our colors anyway, or opt out of the conversation.

When the hydra manipulates our loyalties, let’s recognize the tactic. We might explore how the networks of a previous era, bent on personal enrichment, deliberately invented and kept enflaming the same identity categories we fixate on today. We might explore how those outside our camp, and their ancestors, were mauled too.

In its most extravagant form,” writes Belgian anthropologist and art historian Anne-Marie Bouttiaux, “the ideal secret is one that consists in nothing. Initiates alone know that what they must cloak in silence doesn’t exist.” This paradox, a bit of which I experienced in the Pentagon, points to a deep purpose of secrets: to protect knowledge, perhaps, but also to shut people out of a group. And being shut out of a group inflicts on humans an acute variety of emotional pain.

Members of today’s kleptocratic networks who incorporate companies under fictitious or borrowed names are using a modern screening allegory on law enforcement and the public. Only initiates learn where the money comes from, how much there really is, and how much is being stolen from fellow citizens in the form of unpaid taxes. One entity has been particularly effective in its use of secrecy: the Koch network.

If these men wished to influence ideas and public policies, why the secrecy? Isn’t that what people do in a democracy? In a 1997 speech, Charles Koch provided an answer: “We are greatly outnumbered.” Meaning, most Americans don’t want what they want. Democracy can’t work for them.

The group within the cloak of secrecy is superior to the rest. Those not eligible for initiation are at best inferiors. They may be the enemy.

Like a drug, money can make its addicts betray almost anyone.

the history of the Gilded Age delivers one certainty, it is this: there is no way to access infinite wealth without rigging the system. No one becomes a billionaire honestly.

lavish coverage in the Boston Post gave Kennedy those three key elements of the Gilded Age business model: the appearance of wealth, a supply of other people’s money to speculate with, and a dignified reputation.

Trump has taken mafia government to heights unrivaled in this country’s history. His swiftness to trade U.S. policy concessions for personal advancement will be the most shameful legacy of his presidency.

Consider the implications. Last time humanity was locked onto this course, it led to the collapse of the global economy and two world wars—and genocide, starvation, plague, and the detonation of nuclear bombs that wiped some 200,000 human beings off the earth and gave us the power to end our species. What manner of calamity lies ahead of us now?

In my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million,” wrote Sam Polk in the New York Times, “and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was addicted.” Polk

But now, interviewees agreed, any kind of money wins more respect than the qualities their people used to value: truthfulness, objectivity, considering the good of others, hard work, education or the wisdom of old age, humility, and open hearted generosity.

I was struck by the date Norwegians placed on this change in attitude. The clear consensus: it was around 1980. For Nigerians, too: “When money became everything was in 1985.” Egyptians I interviewed identified a similar shift in the 1980s.

That idea, that God signaled his “election” of a person by showering him or her with money, followed the Dutch and English Protestants to the New World and became a central strand in America’s own mythology. Still, over the course of history and around the world, the intensity of people’s obsession with money has not been constant over time. It waxes and wanes. The 1980s marks a waxing phase.

Brains and talent were sucked onto Wall Street, while other things that contribute to a country’s greatness were starved of air. That’s called an “opportunity cost,” and it was huge.

But the more isolated people are—the less sense of community and responsibility for one another they feel—the more they turn to money for their comfort and survival.

Multiple experiments have demonstrated that—above a certain amount for comfort—more money does not make those who have it happier. Instead, it often leaves them feeling unfulfilled and ratchets up their stress.

Economic growth has become a mark of countries’ virtue. And what goes for countries goes for people. It’s not enough to have high net worth anymore. What matters is the rate of increase—that is, “ever growing wealth.

This race among the superrich—for zeroes in their bank accounts—means a race to transform items of inestimable value into cold, hard cash. The land, what’s on and under the land—all that vibrant life—human effort and creativity, our friendships, our health and the “statistical value” of our very lives, all are being converted into money. We have even equated speech—that unique human gift—with money.

The euphoria lasted only days. Chicago’s elites had been beefing up public and private security forces for years. On May 3, police shot strikers at the gates to the McCormick harvester factory.

But the massive crackdown and Red scare that followed the Haymarket bombing broke the wave of labor defiance of the mid-1880s. Until Lucy Parsons’s death in 1942 at nearly ninety, she kept it up, galvanizing people to fight the “wage slavery” she found little better than the “chattel slavery” she had witnessed as a child, inspiring them to seek autonomy and human development as individuals, while joining together in new inclusive structures that made decisions democratically and shared ownership of key resources.

When once free from the restrictions of extraneous authority,” hoped New York–based anarchist leaders Johann Most and Emma Goldman in 1896, men will enter into free relations; spontaneous organizations will spring up in all parts of the world, and every one will contribute to his and the common welfare as much labor as he or she is capable of, and consume according to their needs. All modern technical inventions and discoveries will be employed to make work easy and pleasant, and science, culture, and art will be freely used to perfect and elevate the human race, while woman will be coequal with man.

From the most distant prehistory, masked dancing and dramatic art have woven the fabric of group life. Declaiming and performing myths was a way of reinforcing a common worldview, bringing it to embodied life, imprinting it in members’ subconscious. That is what the anarchists were doing.

Unlike the recorded teachings of Jesus, however, anarchist ideology embraced the considered use of violence. Lucy Parsons avowed that had she been at Haymarket Square when the police arrived, had she seen their behavior and heard what transpired, she would have “flung the bomb [her]self.

Red scares united Americans against not just the handful of violent anarchists, but against the hundreds of thousands of labor activists who were tarred with the same brush.

From the mid-1870s through the mid-1890s, an insurrection swept the backcountry of the nation’s South and West. Though disfigured by the white supremacy derived especially from its southern roots, this vast stirring in coveralls and calico, of sod houses and village schools and covered-wagon encampments across thousands of square miles, was the most significant mass democratic uprising the United States has ever seen.

The initial phase of this revolt was the Farmers’ Alliance movement, born on the Texas frontier.

Grounded in a common experience, nurtured by years of experimentation and self-education, [this culture] produced a party, a platform, a specific new democratic ideology, and a pathbreaking political agenda for the American nation.

That consensus was far from complete. In a region where most, and the poorest, farmers were African American, they were ultimately excluded from the Farmers’ Alliance and had to build a separate and terribly unequal version, the Colored Alliance. The Farmers’ Alliance forced the Knights of Labor to abandon its rule welcoming members of all races as the price of a merger,

Its first battle was to sidestep the furnishing merchant by combining individuals’ supply needs into bulk orders, which an agent for the group could purchase directly at urban wholesalers. Alliance headquarters would pay on credit. The organization would secure that credit—for the total sum, including tenants’ orders—using landowning members’ holdings and current crop liens as collateral. Then everyone’s harvest, also combined in bulk, would be sorted and graded in a common warehouse. Farmers with surplus could store it there to gain higher prices out of season. The crop would be offered for sale directly to bulk purchasers in the North, or England or Germany.

The whole thrust of the platform suggests an insight of significance today. The Alliance saw the greatest threat to freedom not in government, but in big business. It looked to government as the only viable counterweight. Among the measures it advocated were an interstate commerce law to regulate railroad freight rates and laws to curb or prohibit financial speculation in railroad stock, agricultural futures, and land, and the strict enforcement of those laws.

Over the following years, the farmers adopted even more daring political proposals, such as the abolition of private interstate banking; the nationalization of railroads, of urban public transport, of the telegraph and the recently invented telephone; a graduated income tax, the secret ballot, and direct election of senators.

They were groping for a modern order that allowed citizens to participate in the new economies of scale instead of being subject to them, one that offered more freedom of choice to more members of society. Theirs was a version of modernity based on grassroots cooperation, not zero-sum competition

After fifteen years of trying other solutions, there was no alternative. The logic of Alliance thinking dictated a third party. And that is what emerged. The Populist Party was born on July 4, 1892, in Omaha, Nebraska, with Alliance members and thinking at its heart.