Trades Vs Quotes

I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.

Right now I'm thinking a good deal about emancipation. One of our sins was slavery, another was emancipation. It's a paradox. In theory, emancipation was one of the glories of our democracy - and it was. But the way it was done led to tragedy, turning four million people loose with no jobs or trades or learning. And then in 1877 for a few electoral votes, just abandoning them entirely. A huge amount of pain and trouble resulted. Everybody in America is still paying for it.

To allow arcane trade law, which has been negotiated with scant public scrutiny, to have this kind of power over an issue so critical to humanity’s future is a special kind of madness. As Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz puts it, “Should you let a group of foolish lawyers, who put together something before they understood these issues, interfere with saving the planet?

I found myself drawn to biology, with all its frustrating yet fascinating complexities. When I was twelve, I remember reading about axolotls, which are basically a species of salamander that has evolved to remain permanently in the aquatic larval stage. They manage to keep their gills (rather than trading them in for lungs, like salamanders or frogs) by shutting down metamorphosis and becoming sexually mature in the water. I was completely flabbergasted when I read that by simply giving these creatures the “metamorphosis hormone” (thyroid extract) you could make the axolotl revert back into the extinct, land-dwelling, gill-less adult ancestor that it had evolved from. You could go back in time, resurrecting a prehistoric animal that no longer exists anywhere on Earth. I also knew that for some mysterious reason adult salamanders don’t regenerate amputated legs but the tadpoles do. My curiosity took me one step further, to the question of whether an axolotl—which is, after all, an “adult tadpole”—would retain its ability to regenerate a lost leg just as a modern frog tadpole does. And how many other axolotl-like beings exist on Earth, I wondered, that could be restored to their ancestral forms by simply giving them hormones? Could humans—who are after all apes that have evolved to retain many juvenile qualities—be made to revert to an ancestral form, perhaps something resembling Homo erectus, using the appropriate cocktail of hormones? My mind reeled out a stream of questions and speculations, and I was hooked on biology forever. I found mysteries and possibilities everywhere.

For example, trading in S&P 500-linked futures totaled more than $60 trillion(!) in 2011, five times the S&P 500 Index total market capitalization of $12.5 trillion. We also have credit default swaps, which are essentially bets on whether a corporation can meet the interest payments on its bonds. These credit default swaps alone had a notional value of $33 trillion. Add to this total a slew of other derivatives, whose notional value as 2012 began totaled a cool $708 trillion. By contrast, for what it’s worth, the aggregate capitalization of the world’s stock and bond markets is about $150 trillion, less than one-fourth as much. Is this a great financial system . . . or what!

they pale by comparison to the trading volumes of hedge funds, to say nothing of the levels of trading in exotic securities such as interest rate swaps, collateralized debt obligations, derivatives such as futures on commodities, stock indexes, stocks, and even bets on whether a given company will go into bankruptcy (credit default swaps). The aggregate nominal value of these instruments, as I noted in Chapter 1, now exceeds $700 trillion.

There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world today. Of course not all of them are radicals. The majority of them are peaceful people. The radicals are estimated to be between 15-25%, according to all intelligence services around the world. That leaves 75% of them - peaceful people. But when you look at 15-25% of the world Muslim population, you're looking at 180 million to 300 million people dedicated to the destruction of Western civilization. That is as big as the United States. So why should we worry about the radical 15-25%? Because it is the radicals that kill. Because it is the radicals that behead and massacre. When you look throughout history, when you look at all the lessons of history, most Germans were peaceful. Yet the Nazis drove the agenda. And as a result, 60 million people died, almost 14 million in concentration camps. 6 million were Jews. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. When you look at Russia, most Russians were peaceful as well. Yet the Russians were able to kill 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. When you look at China for example, most Chinese were peaceful as well. Yet the Chinese were able to kill 70 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. When you look at Japan prior to World War II, most Japanese were peaceful as well. Yet, Japan was able to butcher its way across Southeast Asia, killing 12 million people, mostly killed by bayonets and shovels. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. On September 11th in the United States we had 2.3 million Arab Muslims living in the United States. It took 19 hijackers - 19 radicals - to bring America down to its knees, destroy the World Trade Center, attack the Pentagon and kill almost 3000 Americans that day. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. So for all our power of reason, and for all us talking about moderate and peaceful Muslims, I'm glad you're here. But where are the others speaking out? And since you are the only Muslim representative in here, you took the limelight instead of speaking about why our government - I assume you're an American (the Muslim says yes) - As an American citizen, you sat in this room, and instead of standing up and saying a question, or asking something about our four Americans that died and what our government is doing to correct the problem, you stood there to make a point about peaceful, moderate Muslims. I wish you had brought ten with you to question about how we could hold our government responsible. It is time we take political correctness and throw it in the garbage where it belongs.” - Brigette Gabriel (transcript from Benghazi Accountability Coalition - Heritage Foundation)

But after all the horse trading between Democrats and Republicans—and reformers, bankers, and lobbyists—I fear that its complex, obtuse regulations (some 170 separate rules are still being developed) involved in limiting proprietary trading by banks makes me wish we’d taken the simple step of restoring the separation of deposit taking banks from investment banks. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 worked well until it was gradually eroded and finally repealed in 1999.

In recent years, annual trading in stocks—necessarily creating, by reason of the transaction costs involved, negative value for traders—averaged some $33 trillion. But capital formation—that is, directing fresh investment capital to its highest and best uses, such as new businesses, new technology, medical breakthroughs, and modern plant and equipment for existing business—averaged some $250 billion. Put another way, speculation represented about 99.2 percent of the activities of our equity market system, with capital formation accounting for 0.8 percent.

Happiness is not just a mindset You trade it with silent penance, Sometimes in your violent cries with a grin to disguise. The toil makes you stoic yet crowns you strong. In the timidest moment of apprehensions you are made to nod to fake comprehension. Assimilate risks vs rewards, still nothing might seem to pay off, It is achieved when you elude capital punishment for uncommitted crimes. You can embrace it when you persist to elicit obscured fears, Yeah, happiness is not a mindset instead you mindfully harvest Happiness is to strategise circumstances for mental alacrity, social satisfaction, a sense of accomplishment and personal fulfilment to develop holistic aspects of wellbeing

It was always about using these sweeping deals, as well as a range of other tools, to lock in a global policy framework that provided maximum freedom to multinational corporations to produce their goods as cheaply as possible and sell them with as few regulations as possible—while paying as little in taxes as possible. Granting this corporate wishlist, we were told, would fuel economic growth, which would trickle down to the rest of us, eventually. The trade deals mattered only in so far as they stood in for, and plainly articulated, this far broader agenda. The three policy pillars of this new era are familiar to us all: privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts to public spending.

The heart of the issue is not simply that a group that gets a large portion of its budget from the Walton family fortune is unlikely to be highly critical of Walmart. The 1990s was the key decade when the contours of the climate battle were being drawn—when a collective strategy for rising to the challenge was developed and when the first wave of supposed solutions was presented to the public. It was also the period when Big Green became most enthusiastically pro-corporate, most committed to a low-friction model of social change in which everything had to be ‘win- win.’ And in the same period many of the corporate partners of groups like the EDF and the Nature Conservancy—Walmart, FedEx, GM—were pushing hard for the global deregulatory framework that has done so much to send emissions soaring. This alignment of economic interests—combined with the ever powerful desire to be seen as ‘serious’ in circles where seriousness is equated with toeing the pro-market line —fundamentally shaped how these green groups conceived of the climate challenge from the start. Global warming was not defined as a crisis being fueled by overconsumption, or by high emissions industrial agriculture, or by car culture, or by a trade system that insists that vast geographical distances do not matter—root causes that would have demanded changes in how we live, work, eat, and shop. Instead, climate change was presented as a narrow technical problem with no end of profitable solutions within the market system, many of which were available for sale at Walmart.

There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world today. Of course not all of them are radicals. The majority of them are peaceful people. The radicals are estimated to be between 15-25%, according to all intelligence services around the world. That leaves 75% of them - peaceful people. But when you look at 15-25% of the world Muslim population, you're looking at 180 million to 300 million people dedicated to the destruction of Western civilization. That is as big as the United States. So why should we worry about the radical 15-25%? Because it is the radicals that kill. Because it is the radicals that behead and massacre. When you look throughout history, when you look at all the lessons of history, most Germans were peaceful. Yet the Nazis drove the agenda. And as a result, 60 million people died, almost 14 million in concentration camps. 6 million were Jews. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. When you look at Russia, most Russians were peaceful as well. Yet the Russians were able to kill 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. When you look at China for example, most Chinese were peaceful as well. Yet the Chinese were able to kill 70 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. When you look at Japan prior to World War II, most Japanese were peaceful as well. Yet, Japan was able to butcher its way across Southeast Asia, killing 12 million people, mostly killed by bayonets and shovels. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. On September 11th in the United States we had 2.3 million Arab Muslims living in the United States. It took 19 hijackers - 19 radicals - to bring America down to its knees, destroy the World Trade Center, attack the Pentagon and kill almost 3000 Americans that day. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. So for all our power of reason, and for all us talking about moderate and peaceful Muslims, I'm glad you're here. But where are the others speaking out? And since you are the only Muslim representative in here, you took the limelight instead of speaking about why our government - I assume you're an American (the Muslim says yes) - As an American citizen, you sat in this room, and instead of standing up and saying a question, or asking something about our four Americans that died and what our government is doing to correct the problem, you stood there to make a point about peaceful, moderate Muslims. I wish you had brought ten with you to question about how we could hold our government responsible. It is time we take political correctness and throw it in the garbage where it belongs.” - Brigette Gabriel (transcript from Benghazi Accountability Coalition - Heritage Foundation)                              

Not an “Issue,” a Frame” “The link between challenging corruption and lowering emissions is just one example of how the climate emergency could—by virtue of its urgency and the fact that it impacts, well, everyone on earth—breathe new life into a political goal for which there is already a great deal of public support. The same holds true for many of the other issues discussed so far—from raising taxes on the rich to blocking harmful new trade deals to reinvesting in the public sphere. But before those kinds of alliances can be built, some very bad habits will need to be abandoned. Environmentalists have a long history of behaving as if no issue is more important than the Big One—why, some wonder (too often out loud), is everyone wasting their time worrying about women’s rights… when it’s blindingly obvious that none of this matters if the planet decides to start ejecting us for poor behavior? When the first Earth Day was declared in 1970, one of the movement’s leaders, Democratic senator Gaylord Nelson, declared that the environmental crisis made “Vietnam, nuclear war, hunger, decaying cities, and all other major problems one could name . . . relatively insignificant by comparison.” Which helps explains why the great radical journalist I. F. Stone described Earth Day as “a gigantic snowjob” that was using “rock and roll, idealism and non-inflammatory social issues to turn the youth off from more urgent concerns which might really threaten our power structure. They were both wrong. The environmental crisis—if conceived sufficiently broadly—neither trumps nor distracts from our most pressing political and economic causes: it supercharges each one of them with existential urgency.

I began to see all kinds of ways that climate change could become a catalyzing force for positive change—how it could be the best argument progressives have ever had to demand the rebuilding and reviving of local economies; to reclaim our democracies from corrosive corporate influence; to block harmful new free trade deals and rewrite old ones; to invest in starving public infrastructure like mass transit and affordable housing; to take back ownership of essential services like energy and water; to remake our sick agricultural system into something much healthier; to open borders to migrants whose displacement is linked to climate impacts; to finally respect Indigenous land rights—all of which would help to end grotesque levels of inequality within our nations and between them.

I had never examined this fear of Trinidad. I had never wished to. In my novels I had only expressed this fear; and it is only now, at the moment of writing, that I am able to attempt to examine it. I knew Trinidad to be unimportant, uncreative, cynical. The only professions were those of law and medicine, because there was no need for any other; and the most successful people were commission agents, bank managers and members of the distributive trades. Power was recognized, but dignity was allowed to no one. Every person of eminence was held to be crooked and contemptible. We lived in a society which denied itself heroes.

las tres leyes del mercado (ley de oferta y demanda, causa y efecto y esfuerzo Vs resultado)

MIDDLE CLASS vs. WORLD CLASS 1. The Middle Class competes — the World Class creates. 2. The Middle Class avoids risk — the World Class manages risk. 3. The Middle Class lives in delusion — the World Class lives in objective reality. 4. The Middle Class loves to be comfortable — the World Class is comfortable being uncomfortable. 5. The Middle Class has a lottery mentality — the World Class has an abundance mentality. 6. The Middle Class hungers for security — the World Class doesn’t believe that security exists. 7. The Middle Class sacrifices growth for safety — the World Class sacrifices safety for growth. 8. The Middle Class operates out of fear and scarcity — the World Class operates from love and abundance. 9. The Middle Class focuses on having — the World Class focuses on being. 10. The Middle Class sees themselves as victims — the World Class sees themselves as responsible. 11. The Middle Class slows down — the World Class calms down. 12. The Middle Class is frustrated — the World Class is grateful. 13. The Middle Class has pipedreams — the World Class has vision. 14. The Middle Class is ego-driven — the World Class is spirit driven. 15. The Middle Class is problem oriented — the World Class is solution oriented. 16. The Middle Class thinks they know enough — the World Class is eager to learn. 17. The Middle Class chooses fear — the World Class chooses growth. 18. The Middle Class is boastful — the World Class is humble. 19. The Middle Class trades time for money — the World Class trades ideas for money. 20. The Middle Class denies their intuition — the World Class embraces their intuition. 21. The Middle Class seeks riches — the World Class seeks wealth. 22. The Middle Class believes their vision only when they see it — the World Class knows they will see their vision when they believe it. 23. The Middle Class coaches through logic — the World Class coaches through emotion. 24. The Middle Class speaks the language of fear — the World Class speaks the language of love. 25. The Middle Class believes problem solving stems from knowledge — the Wold Class believes problem solving stems from will.

all kinds of ways that climate change could become a catalyzing force for positive change—how it could be the best argument progressives have ever had to demand the rebuilding and reviving of local economies; to reclaim our democracies from corrosive corporate influence; to block harmful new free trade deals and rewrite old ones; to invest in starving public infrastructure like mass transit and affordable housing; to take back ownership of essential services like energy and water; to remake our sick agricultural system into something much healthier; to open borders to migrants whose displacement is linked to climate impacts; to finally respect Indigenous land rights—all

Free” is a special price, and there has been all sorts of psychological research showing that people don’t act rationally around it. We overestimate the value of free. We consume more of something than we should when it’s free. We pressure others to consume it. Free warps our normal sense of cost vs. benefit, and people end up trading their personal data for less than its worth.

It is also a profound fact that power protects power. Then and now: A-list religious leaders, media owners and editors, and politicians trade favors. The Penn State sex abuse scandal was riveting in part because it was the story of clergy abuse without the religious baggage. How many times do we have to hear the story of the men who put each other's reputation above the welfare of children?

When historians look back on the past quarter century of international negotiations, two defining processes will stand out. There will be the climate process: struggling, sputtering, failing utterly to achieve its goals. And there will be the corporate globalization process, zooming from victory to victory: from that first free trade deal to the creation of the World Trade Organization to the mass privatization of the former Soviet economies to the transformation of large parts of Asia into sprawling free-trade zones to the “structural adjusting” of Africa.

Imagine, for a moment, if his administration had been willing to invoke its newly minted democratic mandate to build the new economy promised on the campaign trail—to treat the stimulus bill, the broken banks, and the shattered car companies as the building blocks of that green future. Imagine if there had been a powerful social movement—a robust coalition of trade unions, immigrants, students, environmentalists, and everyone else whose dreams were getting crushed by the crashing economic model—demanding that Obama do no less.

The disastrous track record of the past three decades of neoliberal policy is simply too apparent. Each new blast of statistics about how a tiny band of global oligarchs controls half the world’s wealth exposes the policies of privatization and deregulation for the thinly veiled license to steal that they always were. Each new report of factory fires in Bangladesh, soaring pollution in China, and water cut-offs in Detroit reminds us that free trade was exactly the race to the bottom that so many warned it would be. And each news story about an Italian or Greek pensioner who took his or her own life rather than try to survive under another round of austerity is a reminder of how many lives continue to be sacrificed for the few.

Ontario was putting real policies in place to honor that commitment (unlike the Canadian government as a whole, which has allowed emissions to balloon, leading it to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol rather than face international censure). Most importantly, the program was working. How absurd, then, for the WTO to interfere with that success—to let trade trump the planet itself. And yet from a strictly legal standpoint, Japan and the EU were perfectly correct. One of the key provisions in almost all free trade agreements involves something called “national treatment,” which requires governments to make no distinction between goods produced by local companies and goods produced by foreign firms outside their borders. Indeed, favoring local industry constitutes illegal “discrimination.” This was a flashpoint in the free trade wars back in the 1990s, precisely because these restrictions effectively prevent governments from doing what Ontario was trying to do: create jobs by requiring the sourcing of local goods as a condition of government support. This was just one of the many fateful battles that progressives lost in those years.

That’s because one of the primary driving forces of the particular trade system designed in the 1980s and 1990s was always to allow multinationals the freedom to scour the globe in search of the cheapest and most exploitable labor force. It was a journey that passed through Mexico and Central America’s sweatshop maquiladoras and had a long stopover in South Korea. But by the end of the 1990s, virtually all roads led to China, a country where wages were extraordinarily low, trade unions were brutally suppressed, and the state was willing to spend seemingly limitless funds on massive infrastructure projects—modern ports, sprawling highway systems, endless numbers of coal-fired power plants, massive dams—all to ensure that the lights stayed on in the factories and the goods made it from the assembly lines onto the container ships on time. A free trader’s dream, in other words—and a climate nightmare.

1. The Negro Must Learn To Put First Things First. The First Things Are: Education; Development of Character Traits; A Trade and Home Ownership.

Key Elements of Five Year Plan ’77 What follows did not happen overnight. Among the guidelines set in February 1977 (remember, Fair Trade on alcohol was not finally ended until 1978): Emphasize edibles vs. non-edibles. I figured that the supermarkets would raise their prices on foods to make up for the newly reduced margins on milk and alcohol. This would give us all the more room to underprice them. During the next five years we got rid of film, hosiery, light bulbs and hardware, greeting cards, batteries, magazines, all health and beauty aids except those with a “health food” twist. We began to cut back sharply on soaps and cleaners and paper goods. The only non-edibles we emphasized were “tabletop” items like wineglasses, cork pullers, and candles. It was quite clear that we should put more emphasis on food and less on alcohol and milk. Within edibles, drop all ordinary branded products like Best Foods, Folgers, or Weber’s bread. I felt that a dichotomy was developing between “groceries” and “food.” By “groceries,” I mean the highly advertised, highly packaged, “value added” products being emphasized by supermarkets, the kinds that brought slotting allowances and co-op advertising allowances. By embracing these “plastic” products, I felt the supermarkets were abandoning “food” and the product knowledge required to buy and sell it. But this position wasn’t entirely altruistic. The plan of February 20, 1977, declared, “Most independent supermarkets have been driven out of business, because they stupidly tried to compete with the big chains in plastic goods, in which the big chains excel.” Focus on discontinuity of supplies. Be willing to discontinue any product if we are unable to offer the right deal to the customer. Instead of national brands, focus on either Trader Joe’s label products or “no label” products like nuts and dried fruits. This was intended to enable the Trader Joe’s label to pick up momentum in the stores. And it worked.

Each new blast of statistics about how a tiny band of global oligarchs controls half the world’s wealth exposes the policies of privatization and deregulation for the thinly veiled license to steal that they always were. Each new report of factory fires in Bangladesh, soaring pollution in China, and water cut-offs in Detroit reminds us that free trade was exactly the race to the bottom that so many warned it would be. And each news story about an Italian or Greek pensioner who took his or her own life rather than try to survive under another round of austerity is a reminder of how many lives continue to be sacrificed for the few. The failure of deregulated capitalism to deliver on its promises is why, since 2009, public squares around the world have turned into rotating semipermanent encampments of the angry and dispossessed.

army of people paid to “gaslight” the public into thinking they are protected. Chapter 23, page 132. Trick #17 for Farming Humans is using stock markets to launder taxpayer backed, Fed created money to those who control the Fed. Chapter 25, page 136. Trick #18 for Farming Humans is the use of fake information to ensure that society never knows what is true and what is false. Elections, wars, headlines etc. Chapter 26, page 141. Trick #19 for Farming Humans is stimulation and distraction. This emotional hacking of humans is Trick #19 for Farming Humans. See Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking Book by Christopher J. Hadnagy Trick #20 for Farming Humans is the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine and 83 media regulations, including requirement for “honest, equitable and balanced”. Chapter 28, page 153. Trick #21 for Farming Humans is governments as handmaidens to corporations, not people. Chapter 29, page 157. Trick #22 for Farming Humans is in the invisible connections between government, professionals and corporations. Chapter 31, page 162. Laws, lobby groups, lawyers. Trick #23 for Farming Humans is a militarized police used to serve and protect power instead of people. Chapter 32, page 170. World Trade Organization, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, etc. Trick #24 for Farming Humans is virtually zero enforcement of crime above a certain level of money or power. Invisible friends and powerful people cannot be prosecuted. Chapter 33, page 175. Trick #25 for Farming Humans is cooking the financial books. Chapter 34, page 180. Valeant Pharmaceutical, IFRS vs GAP accounting standards, audit numbers rigged. Trick #26 for Farming Humans is printing infinite money to exchange for finite goods…”let me handle that for you.” Chapter 35, page 184. Trick #27 for Farming Humans is public servants spying on the public, and not on the public servants. Chapter 36, page 188.

John didn’t score his first Number One hit until 1974, the fourth Beatle to reach this milestone (Ringo beat him twice), but he got over with “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night,” with a big assist from Elton John. It’s not a famous song anymore, for the understandable reason that the final line is “Don’t need a gun to blow your mind.” After December 1980, “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” dropped off the radio and hasn’t been heard since. But the most shocking thing isn’t the gun line—it’s the lush pop feel. The song it really resembles is the Wings hit “Listen to What the Man Said,” with the same yacht-rock studio sheen. Both serve love-is-the-answer platitudes, though attractively warmhearted ones: “Whatever gets you to the light, ’sall right” vs. “I don’t know but I think love is fine.” Both hit Number One, for just one week. John’s sax solo is Bobby Keys, Paul’s is Tom Scott, though they could have traded places without anyone noticing. Yet I loved both songs as a boy, and still do—Elton, always the kindliest-sounding of rock megastars, sings on John’s hit, and sounds like the guiding spirit of Paul’s, as if he’s a yenta nudging them together.

2015 study conducted by Ball State University found that automation and related factors, not trade, accounted for 88 percent of lost U.S. manufacturing jobs between 2006 and 2013.

The Devil's Chapel by Stewart Stafford Spires writhing in audacity's sky, Laced masonry's Faustian high, The Devil's Chapel invites by lie, Embalmed, a cracked stone altar dry. The golden Madonna rises above all, Lucifer's War, in stained glass, tall, In horned shadow, the angelic fall, Dark kingdom formed of a lightning ball. Bartholomew flayed by sadistic chagrin, Bones laid bare, devotion anchored within, Skin in the game took centuries to win, Gargoyles leer in the paying tourist din. Behind the veil of confession wood, The all-seeing eye drips with blood, Trickster's snare in nightmare's flood, A gift shop trades where sacrifice stood. Pungent echoes in incense crawl, Catacombs beckon entombed gall, To witness ornate veneration's pall, Silent to a martyr's last breath call. Croziers rest in chilled silver's display, As pink-veined marble taints today. © 2025, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.