Prosperity Bowl Quotes

We are glad to visit your beautiful country. It is prosperous—you all live far from the struggle. Nobody destroys your towns, cities, fields. Nobody kills your citizens, your sisters and mothers, your fathers and brothers. I come from a place where bombs pound villages into ash, where Russian blood oils the treads of German tanks, where innocent civilians die every day.” She caught herself up, exhaled slowly as she marshaled her next words. No one moved, least of all the marksman. “An accurate bullet fired by a sniper like me, Mrs. Roosevelt, is no more than a response to an enemy. My husband lost his life at Sevastopol before my eyes. He died in my arms. As far as I am concerned, any Hitlerite I see through my telescopic sights is the one who killed him.” A frozen silence fell over the room. Only the marksman’s eyes moved as he looked around the table, cataloging responses. The Soviet delegation leader sat clutching his butter knife, looking like he wanted to saw off her head and bowl it through the window into the White House gardens. The smart Washington women in their frills and pearls looked appalled. The First Lady looked . . . Embarrassed? the marksman wondered. Did that horsey presidential bitch look embarrassed? “I’m sorry, Lyudmila dear,” she said quietly, laying down her napkin. “I had no wish to offend you. This conversation is important, and we will continue it in a more suitable setting. But now, unfortunately, it is time to disperse. My duties are calling, and I understand

As Yasu popped open a giant Kirin- the champagne of Japanese beers- Tomiko placed bowls of special buckwheat noodle soup at everyone's place, since the noodles represent long life. They are also said to bring prosperity, because in the past silversmiths and goldsmiths used to pick up the scraps of metal in their workshops with soba noodle dough. A salty seafood vapor wafted up from my soup bowl, holding a wobbly poached egg in a nest of gray noodles. A pink wheat gluten flower and sprig of Japanese chervil lay submerged in the hot dashi broth, along with two round slices of kamaboko, the springy sweet fish paste eaten all over Japan.

The flourishing Indo-Mediterranean trade brought great prosperity to the Indian coast. The annual arrival of fleets of Roman merchants with considerable sums of gold and silver to exchange for the luxuries available at the ports transformed the economies of this region. A single hoard recently found in a sand dune at Kottayam in Kerala, for example, consisted of a large brass bowl containing 8,000 gold aurei, worth some 800,000 sesterces of imperial money – a considerable fortune.

Amalendu's crime, Kalpana's crime, is the crime of all those who cannot remain unmoved and inactive in an India where a child crawls in the dust with a begging bowl; where a poor girl can be sold as a rich man's plaything; where an old woman must half-starve herself in order to buy social acceptance from the powers-that-be in her village; where countless people die of sheer neglect; where many are hungry while food is hoarded for profit; where usurers and tricksters extort the fruits of labour from those who do the work; where the honest suffer whilst the villainous prosper; where justice is the exception and injustice the rule; and where the total physical and mental energy of millions of people is spent on the struggle for mere survival.

But why ‘summer pudding’ I wondered. My guess was that prosperous Victorians or Edwardians, or their cooks, faced with an unprecedented abundance of home-grown berries, and new exotic berries and fruits from the empire, but unfamiliar with the delights (or benefits) of eating them raw, straight from tree or vine, were compelled to turn them into something they could recognise. And as they had always called the course after the main course ‘pudding’, and as it was always stodgy and cooked in a round pudding bowl, they did to that fresh summer fruit the only thing they knew: they put it into a pudding bowl, shaped it into a pudding shape, and called it a pudding. A summer pudding.

The Party adopted unwritten rules to ensure that no one outstayed their welcome, limiting top leaders to two five-year terms and setting a retirement age. Even misdemeanours were handled in line with an unofficial code: members of the politburo might be purged for corruption, but the most senior figures of all – the Politburo Standing Committee – were untouchable, as were their families. You survived and thrived by cultivating patrons and your wider networks. The Party became safer, stabler, calmer and duller. For years, it worked. China prospered. People who might have eaten meat once a year dropped unctuous pork into their bowls each week. People who might never have left their county journeyed to Shanghai, Bangkok or Paris for shopping and sightseeing. They got their hair permed, wore bright sweaters and Nikes, tried red wine and McDonald’s, took up hobbies. It was attractive enough for foreigners to speak of the ‘Beijing model’. But there was a price. Corruption was endemic. To get your child into a decent school, or pass your driving test, or push through a business deal, or dodge prosecution, took cash: a few thousand yuan to a teacher, tens of millions to a senior leader. In cities such as Chongqing, gangs flourished, sheltered by officials they had bought off. Inequality was soaring. The more the economy grew and mutated, the more static politics seemed.

Out of New York came a governor from the moneyed class, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he drove Murray to fits—being from that hated family. (FDR’s cousin, Teddy, had forced Murray to remove a white supremacist plank from the Oklahoma constitution before he would allow it to join the union.) At first, Franklin Roosevelt was dismissed as a man without heft, a dilettante running on one of the nation’s great names. Then he took up the cause of the “forgotten man”—the broken farmer on the plains, the apple vendor in the city, the factory hand now hitting the rails. And though he spoke with an accent that sounded funny to anyone outside the mid-Atlantic states, and he seemed a bit jaunty with that cigarette holder, Roosevelt roused people with a blend of hope and outrage. He knew hardship and the kind of emotional panic that comes when your world collapses. He had been felled by double pneumonia in 1918, which nearly killed him, and polio in 1921, which left him partially paralyzed. He had been told time and again in the prime of his young adulthood that he had no future, that he would not walk again, that he might not live much longer. “If you spent two years in bed trying to wiggle your toe, after that anything would seem easy,” he said. Hoover believed the cure for the Depression was to prime the pump at the producer end, helping factories and business owners get up and running again. Goods would roll off the lines, prosperity would follow. Roosevelt said it made no sense to gin up the machines of production if people could not afford to buy what came out the factory door. “These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized, the indispensable units of economic powers,” FDR said on April 7, 1932, in a radio speech that defined the central theme of his campaign. He called for faith “in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” That forgotten man was likely to be a person with prairie dirt under the fingernails. “How much do the shallow thinkers realize that approximately one half of our population, fifty or sixty million people, earn their living by farming or in small towns where existence immediately depends on farms?

CONCLUSION: THE CENTRAL BANKER AS JUDGE This breakdown of the Ulysses/punch-bowl function of the Federal Reserve doesn’t mean that separating some of the Fed’s functions from the day-to-day of electoral politics is unnecessary in the face of deflationary, rather than inflationary, pressures. In fact, the very opposite could be true: if there is a partisan movement in favor of economic policies that could result in a deflationary spiral, we would face the Great Depression redux. Keeping the power to trigger such a consequence away from partisan politics seems like a desirable goal for the institutional design of central banks. But it also requires a different theoretical frame. It may be that the frame for independence is one that we already widely accept in society: judicial independence. The U.S. Constitution gives the federal judiciary life tenure and effective budgetary independence (that is, while they can’t print their own money or raise it independent of congressional appropriations, the Congress cannot constitutionally lower judicial salaries). The reason is so that, to the fullest extent possible, any determinations that favor politicians occur either because the law compels it or because the judge and the politician share the same worldview. The idea that the judge is currying favor with the politician in hopes of further appointment or out of fear of getting her salary removed are taken off the table. It’s not a perfect system, but it is one that most recognize as an important balance between democratic values (the politician gets to appoint the judges from the polity) and some degree technocratic, objective judgment (the judges decide the cases, not the politicians).26 The crisis and the reactions to unconventional monetary policy suggest that the Fed is often performing a delicate adjudicative function, not a simply technocratic one. The problem with the technocratic, Ulysses-contract view of central banking are the two fractured constituencies mentioned above. While most economists have endorsed the Fed’s approach to postcrisis monetary policy, the “technocratic” view has been far from uniform. And, again, the populists aren’t clearly clamoring for prosperity by way of inflation, contra that Ulysses/punch-bowl view. At least in a crisis, and arguably in other times as well, the central bank isn’t

After I steamed four giant clams over a skillet of sake, Stephen ripped out the meat and hacked it into chunks. With cupped hands, he scooped up the chewy bits and threw them in a bowl. Then he stirred in spicy red-and-white radish wedges and a warm dressing of wasabi, sugar, and sweet white miso that I had stirred in a small saucepan over a low flame until it became thick and shiny. Following his directions, I spooned the golden clams back into their shells. Stephen garnished them with a pink-and-white "congratulatory" flower of spongy wheat gluten. "Precious," he said, winking at me. Next, we made sea urchin- egg balls, first blending creamy lobes of sea urchin with raw egg yolk and a little dashi. Stephen cooked the mixture until it formed a stiff paste and then pressed it through a sieve. I plopped a golden dollop in a clean damp cloth and flattened it into a disc. In the center I put three crescents of lily bulb tenderized in salt water. "Try one," urged Stephen, handing me a wedge of lily bulb. It was mealy and sweet, kind of like a boiled cashew. Stephen brought together the four corners of the damp cloth and twisted it gently to create a bubble of eggy sea urchin paste stuffed with lily bulb. When unveiled, it looked like a Rainier cherry. I twisted out nineteen more balls, which we later arranged on fresh green leaves draped across black lacquer trays. Next, we impaled several fat shrimp on two metal skewers, sending one rod through the head and the other through the tail. We grilled the grayish pink bodies until they became rosy on one side and then flipped them over until they turned opaque. Stephen painted golden egg yolk for prosperity over the juicy crustaceans and returned them to the grill until they smoldered and charred.