Appendix II: Some Pertinent Quotes
Three things cannot long remain hidden; the sun, the moon, and the truth.
The Buddha
Knowing our Enemy
On his website (www.mcewencaptial.com), Robert R. McEwen, CEO of Lexam Explorations Inc., is shown sitting astride a pile of gold bars stacked like cord wood. His personal emblem is the glove and the lash, symbol of the Roman empire. If you go to his website, click on resources and then quotes, we find some other hints about McEwen’s entrepreneurial business philosophy. The person he quotes most often is Sun Tzu, author of The Art of War. Sun Tzu quotes on McEwen’s website include:
Speed is the essence of war;
Take advantage of the enemy’s unpreparedness;Travel by unexpected routes and strike where he has no precautions.
Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable;
When using our forces, we must seem inactive,
When we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away;
When far away, we must make him believe we are near.If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him.
If he is taking his ease, give him no rest.
If his forces are united, separate him.Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected.
Not listed on McEwen’s site, but certainly implied is Sun Tzu’s most famous dictum:All warfare is based on deception.
McEwen includes several quotes from John D. Rockefeller, Robber Baron extradordinaire, oil cartel monopolist, and most hated man in America during the latter 19th century, who stated:
The way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets.
And he also takes inspiration from one of the world’s great imperialists, Julius Ceasar,
Veni, vidi, vici (I came, I saw, I conquered).
McEwen’s selection of quotes begins with this sage advice from junk bond billionaire and convicted criminal Michael Milken:
You must never count your money. You just have to keep driving yourself to make more.
Milken, of course, was the model for the Michael Douglas’ character, Gordon Gekko, in the movie Wall Street. In addition to quoting Sun Tzu (“All warfare is based on deception”), Gekko also rhapsodized that “Greed is good.”
So here we have pretty good evidence that the men that McEwen most admires are amoral plunderers and Robber Barons who deceive, steal and kill in order to take wealth from others. In short, they fit the classic profile of a “psychopath.”
McEwen’s selected quotes also indicate that to him, we, the American people, are the enemy. We are to be fooled, disabled, conquered, and robbed. Why? Because we have something he wants. U.S. Army Major Doug Rokke notes that, “strategically speaking, all wars are fought to control resources; water, oil, natural gas, food, land.” Warfare by deception and stealth, then, simply becomes the most expedient and safest method of appropriating others’ wealth. Interesting isn’t it, that the wealth of this great nation which up until now, could never be taken by military force, is being now stolen, incrementally, by the forces of international capitalism- and with the full cooperation of our government, it seems.
Of course, this whole process puts us Americans at a certain disadvantage… We tend to be an insulated, naive, and generous people, and most of us regard our Canadian neighbors to the north as good friends. But here, McEwen is telling us otherwise. Let us hope that enough of us can awake from our comfortable delusions to realize that McEwen and others of his ken are working hard to “Rob” us of our national heritage using stealth tactics and treachery. Yes, we are under attack by terrorists. But the real terrorists wear suits and buy and sell our wealth on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
It is particularly unfortunate for us, the American people, that McEwen has some very powerful allies on Wall Street and in Washington, D.C. Indeed, the highest offices of the U.S. government are occupied with like-minded Robber Barons, whose allegiance is to personal acquisition of wealth rather than to serving God or country. To better understand the history and dynamics of the kind of “private-public partnership” alliances that constitute today’s brand of neo-fascism, the following quotes are offered for insight, information, and inspiration.
So for Mr. McEwen and his colleagues, I offer these appropriate quotes:
No one can serve two masters…. You cannot serve both God and Mammon.
Matthew 6:24
My land I’ll defend with my life if need be
My pastures of plenty must always be free.
Woody Guthrie
On Economics
The U.S. government is being run like a franchise by private corporations.
Michael Ruppert
Capitalism boils down to this: Privatization of profits, socialization of losses.
Istvan Meszaros, economist
This a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.
Rutherford B. Hayes, 19th President
There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains.
Theodore Roosevelt
Laws are like cobwebs, strong enough to detain only the weak, and too weak to hold the strong.
Anarcharis, 500 B.C.
The corporations…. Have successfully leveraged economic power into political power that undercuts the Constitution.
Charles Reich
The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.
Alex Carey
I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
President Thomas Jefferson, 1816
These international bankers and Roosevelt-Standard Oil interests control the majority of newspapers, the columns of papers to club into submission or drive out of public office officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government.
Theodore Roosevelt, 1919
We already know that they (the global economic changes) demand that politicians and statesmen accept the unpopular abandonment of sovereignty. I wouldn’t say the nation-state is dead, but the sovereignty has been greatly circumscribed…. even for a country as large as the US.
W. Michael Blumenthal, chairman of Unisys
Free enterprise refers in practice to a system of public subsidy and private profit with massive government intervention in the economy to maintain a welfare state for the rich.
On the domestic front, the Cold war…. gave the U.S. a way to compel its population to subsidize high-tech industry (GE and Boeing, etc., through the Pentagon system). It isn’t easy to sell all that to the domestic populations. The technique used was the old stand-by- fear of a great enemy.
Noam Chomsky, What Uncle Sam Really Wants
There is looming up a new and dark power…. The enterprises of the country are aggregating vast corporate combinations of unexampled capital, boldly marching, not for economical conquests alone, but for political power… The question will arise and in your day, though perhaps not fully in mine, which shall rule- wealth or man; which shall lead- money or the intellect; who shall fill public stations- educated and patriotic freemen, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital…
Chief Justice of Wisconsin Edward G. Ryan, 1873
There is something fundamentally wrong in treating the earth as a business in liquidation.
There is no point of contact between macro-economics and the environment.
Herman Daily, World Bank economistAnyone who thinks you can have indefinite growth on a finite planet is either a madman or an economist.
Kenneth Boulding, economist and former president of American Association for the Advancement of Science
Much of the apparent economic growth may in fact be an illusion based on a failure to account for reduction in natural capital.
Colin Clark
There is enough in the world for man’s need, but not for man’s greed.
Mohandas Ghandi
On Energy
In 1859, the human race discovered a huge treasure chest in its basement. This was oil and gas, a fantastically cheap and easily available source of energy. We did, or at least some of us did, what anybody does who discovers a treasure in the basement- live it up, and we have been spending this treasure with great enjoyment.
Kenneth Boulding, 1978
We’ve embarked on the beginning of the last days of the age of oil.
Mike Bowlin, Chairman and CEO, ARCO (1999)
We need an energy bill that encourages consumption.
George W. Bush, 2002
My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet airplane. His son will ride a camel.
Saudi saying
The resulting estimate gives a peak production year of 2003 and a total eventual oil recovery of 2.12 trillion barrels…. No Caspian Sea exploration, no drilling in the South China Sea, now SUV replacement, no renewable energy projects can be brought on at a sufficient rate to avoid a bidding war for the remaining oil. At least, let’s hope that the war is waged with cash instead of nuclear warheads.
Kenneth S. Deffreyes, The Impending World Oil Shortage, 2001
From an economic perspective, when the world runs completely out of oil is… not directly relevant: what matters is when production begins to taper off. Beyond that point, prices will rise unless demand declines commensurately. Using several different techniques to estimate the current reserves of conventional oil and the amount still left to be recovered, we conclude that the decline will begin before 2010.
Colin Campbell, Scientific American, 1998
The world’s present industrial civilization is handicapped by the coexistence of two universal, overlapping, and incompatible intellectual systems: the accumulated knowledge of the past four centuries of the properties and interrelationships of matter and energy; and the associated monetary culture which has evolved from folkways of prehistoric origin… The monetary system by means of a loose coupling, exercises a general control over the matter-energy system upon which it is superimposed. Despite their inherent incompatibilities, these two systems during the last two centuries have had one fundamental characteristic in common, namely exponential growth, which has made a reasonably stable coexistence possible. But, for various reasons, it is impossible for the matter-energy system to sustain exponential growth for more than a few tens of doublings, and this phase is now almost over. The monetary system has no such constraints, and according to one of its most fundamental rules, it must continue to grow by compound interest.
M. King Hubbert, 1950’s
We are in a crisis in the evolution of human society. It’s unique to both human and geologic history. It has never happened before and it can’t possibly happen again. You can only use oil once. You can only use metals once. Soon all the oil is going to be burned and all the metals mined and scattered.
M. King Hubbert, 1950’s
M.King Hubbert’s solution: If society is to avoid chaos during the energy decline, it must give up its antiquated, debt- and interest-based monetary system and adopt a system of accounts based on matter-energy- an inherently ecological system that would acknowledge the finite nature of essential resources.
Richard Heinberg, The Party’s Over, 2003
Continuing to increase our dependency on petroleum consumption is clearly a suicidal course of action. The only intelligent alternative is to begin reducing energy consumption and finding alternative energy sources for petroleum.
Paul Erlich, 1974
Total energy consumption is projected to increase from 96.1 quadrillion British thermal units (BTUs) to 127.0 quadrillion BTU between 1999 and 2020, an average annual increase of 13 percent.
US Department of Energy, 1999
To avoid deprivation resulting from the exhaustion of nonrenewable resources, humanity must employ conservation and renewable resource substitutes sufficient to match depletion.
Ron Swenson, 2001
We can’t conserve our way to energy independence, nor can we conserve our way to having energy available. So we’ve got to do both.
George W. Bush, 2001
On the Environment
Today, the dramatic threat of ecological breakdown is teaching us the extent to which greed and selfishness- both individual and collective- are contrary to the order of creation, an order which is characterized by mutual interdependence… An education in ecological responsibility is urgent: responsibility for oneself, for others and for the earth. A true education in responsibility entails a genuine conversion in ways of thought and behavior.
Pope John Paul II
The care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasant responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope.
Wendell Berry
The power of science without the control of compassion and admiration for life is too intense to be applied merely for the satisfaction of scientific curiosity.
G. K. Russell
Woe to those who add house to house
And join field to field
Until everywhere belongs to them
And they are the sole inhabitants of the land
Isaiah 5:8
We don’t have just a failure of one law, but a series of laws. Toxic pollution is such a potent issue, we have been able to enact more than one law. By and large, they’ve all been failures.
Curtis Moore, former Republican counsel on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee
In a highly competitive industry, companies cannot afford to spend their resources on environmental protection, however well conceived the rules, unless they perceive that those rules are backed up by credible enforcement policy.
Chemical Week
What we call the “environmental crisis”- the array of critical unsolved problems ranging from local toxic dumps to the disruption of global climate- is a product of the drastic mismatch between the cyclical, conservative, and self-consistent processes of the ecosphere and the linear, innovative, but ecologically disharmonious processes of the technosphere.
Barry Commoner, Making Peace with the Planet
On Freedom, Tyranny, and Imperialism
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Declaration of Independence
The result of the corporate take-over of our country in the 20th century has been five major wars, a crippling national debt where before there was none, crippling taxes where before there were few, loss of constitutional rule, a huge prison population, and creation of a vast bureaucracy.
Corporate control of the federal government must end. Garudas
Tryanny, like hell, is not easily conquered.
Thomas Paine
We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.
Louis Brandeis, US Supreme Court Justice
It is the duty of the people in the event that government is not responsive to the will of the people to overthrow that government.
U.S. Constitution
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on occasion that I wish it to be always alive… What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that its people preserve the spirit of resistance.
We need a revolution every other generation.
Thomas Jefferson
There will never be a free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly… Government is best which governs least.
Henry David Thoreau
We have given you a republic…. if you can keep it.
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
Make yourselves sheep and the wolves will eat you.
Ben Franklin
The only maxim of free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.
John Adams
The rich will strive to establish their dominion and enslave the rest. They always did, they always will. They will have the same effect here as elsewhere if we do not, by the power of government, keep them in their proper spheres.
Governor Morris in a letter to James Madison (1787)
On the Importance of the Press
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be…. The People cannot be safe without information. When the press is free, and every man is able to read, all is safe.
Thomas Jefferson
Those who would trade an essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security.
Ben Franklin
The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
Edmund Burke
The liberty of the press is essential to the security of the state.
John Adams
Freedom of the Press, if anything, means the freedom to criticize and oppose.
George Orwell
Six multinational corporations deliver the majority of all information Americans get from radio, television, newspapers, and the internet.
Thom Hartmann
These international bankers and Roosevelt-Standard Oil interests control the majority of newspapers, the columns of papers to club into submission or drive out of public office officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government.
Former President, Theodore Roosevelt, 1919
The warning of Theodore Roosevelt has much timeliness today, for the real menace of our republic is this invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy length over city, state, and nation. It seizes in its long and powerful tentacles, our executive officers, our legislative bodies, our schools, our courts, our newspapers, and every agency created for the public protection.
To depart from mere generalization, let me say that at the head of this octopus are the Rockefeller-Standard Oil interests and a small group of powerful banking houses generally referred to as the international bankers. This little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own purposes. They practically control both parties, write political platforms, make catpaws of party leaders, use the leading men of private organizations and resort to every device to place in nomination for high public office only such candidates as will be amenable to the dictates of corrupt big business.
These international bankers and Rockefeller-Standard Oil interests control the majority of newspapers and magazines in this country.
John Hylan, Mayor of New York, 1922
Information is the currency of democracy.
The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who read nothing but newspapers. (Or the future man who consumes nothing but TV reality).
Advertisements contain the only truth to be relied upon in the newspaper.
Thomas Jefferson
Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.
Joe (A.J.) Leibling
Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.
Napoleon Bonaparte
The liberty of the press is essential to the security of the state.
John Adams
There is no such thing, at this date of the world’s history, as an independent press. You know it and I know it…. The business of the Journalist is to destroy the truth; to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and/or our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
John Swindon, Editor, New York Times, ca. 1880
Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind… The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory.
George Orwell
The media are far more powerful than the President in creating public awareness and shaping public opinion, for the simple reason that the media always have the last word.
Richard Nixon
ON FASCISM
Fascism should more properly be called “corporatism’, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
Italian (fascist) dictator, Benito Mussolini
We stand for the maintenance of private property…. We shall protect free enterprise as the most expedient, or rather the sole possible economic order.
Adolf Hitler
Whenever you have private business take over the functions of government from the people, this is fascism.
The liberty of democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism- ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any controlling private power.
The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933
As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed.
Abraham Lincoln, 1964
The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, and more selfish than bureaucracy.
Abraham Lincoln
To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but it is morally treasonable to the American public.
Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President
The purpose of Fascism is to defend by violence the private ownership of the means of production, even though our modern civilization has become incompatible with a social system based on private ownership.
Fascism is big business armed with bayonets.
The love of money is the root of all Fascism.
Grant Singleton
Fascism is capitalism plus murder.
Upton Sinclair
Fascism in America will attempt to advance under the banner of Americanism and anti-Fascism.
Georgi Dimitrov
Fascism is capitalism in decay.
V.I. Lenin
Our forefathers would think it is time for a revolution. This is why they revolted in the first place.
Republican Congressman Ron Paul, on “The Patriot Act”, 2001
The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat.
George Soros
458 billionaires possess more wealth than do half of humanity.
Charles Derber
It would be easy for us, if we do not learn to understand the world and appreciate the rights, privileges and duties of all other countries and peoples, to represent in our power the same danger to the world that Fascism did.
Ernest Hemingway
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.
James Baldwin
Ultimately, the “war on terrorism” is about global control by US corporations and the World Trade Organization. It wants to strike down public ownership, social organizations and institutions, and substitute control by the strong and rich over the weak and poor.
Alexander Cockburn, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press
The U.S. harbors more terrorists than any other state.
William Blum
In politics nothing happens by accident, if it happens you can bet it was planned that way.
FDR
The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
Joseph Goebbels. German Minister of Propaganda 1933-1945
Our gross national product now is over 800 billion dollars a year. But that gross national product, if we judge the United States of America by that, counts air pollution, and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic squall. It counts napalm, and it counts nuclear warheads, and armored cars for police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifles and Speck’s knives and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
Yet, the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
Presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, 1968
The powers of international capitalism had a far-reaching plan, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalistic fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences.
The apex of the system was to be the Bank of International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank… sought to dominate its government by its ability to control treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.
Professor Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, 1966
Banking is conceived in iniquity and born in sin. Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money and control credit, and with the flick of a pen they will create enough money to buy it back again. Take this great power away from the bankers and all great fortunes like mine will disappear and they out to disappear for this would be a better and happier world to live in. But if you want to continue the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create money and control credit.
Sir Josiah Stamp, Director of the Bank of England, 1920s
A handful of companies now call the shots. They own Congress. They own us… To keep our jobs we have had to give up decent health care, the 8-hour day and time with our kids, the security that we’ll even have a job next year, and any unwillingness we may have to compete with a 14-year old Indonesian girl who gets a dollar a day.
Michael Moore
On Truth Vs. Lies
In our country the lie has become not just a moral category, but a pillar of the state.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The lie is biblically portrayed as the first and most poisonous source of injustice. Truth-telling is absolutely essential for the life and health of the whole community.
Andre Dumas
The principles of a free Constitution are irrevocably lost when the legislative power is dominated by the executive.
Edward Gibbon
American foreign policy is to bomb Third World countries, set up a client government, and establish military bases to control the flow and profits from oil and illegal drugs.
Paraphrase of William Blum
During the past two centuries when the peoples of the world were gradually winning their political freedom from the dynastic monarchies, the major banking families of Europe and America were actually reversing the trend by setting up new dynasties of political control through the formation of international financial combines.
Alan B. Jones, How the World Really Works, 1996
The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) agreement amounts to “an annexation of Latin America by the United States.”
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, 2002
Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council Study Memorandum 200 recommends that a program of population reduction be aimed at a list of 13 countries that produce raw materials that the U.S. needs. (These include Brazil, India, Egypt, Mexico, Ethiopia, Columbia and others)… The elites wish to reduce the targeted Third World populations to a bare subsistence in order to reduce to a minimum the costs of producing the raw materials on the lands which the elites are presently trying to wrest from those target countries in the name of world environmentalism.
Alan B. Jones