Austerity Quotes

“We love being mentally strong, but we hate situations that allow us to put our mental strength to good use.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Seriousness is too boring to the playful human condition. A heart of stone that has a long face can never express love.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Book of Maxims, Poems and Anecdotes

“If the surprise outcome of the recent UK referendum - on whether to leave or remain in the European Union - teaches us anything, it is that supposedly worthy displays of democracy in action can actually do more harm than good. Witness a nation now more divided; an intergenerational schism in the making; both a governing and opposition party torn to shreds from the inside; infinitely more complex issues raised than satisfactory solutions provided. It begs the question 'Was it really all worth it' ?”
― Alex Morritt, Impromptu Scribe

“The majority of people who are in prison are there because society has failed them.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle

“A lot of people measure a man by what he's got. I've decided to measure myself by what I can give up.”
― Geoff Nicholson, Hunters and Gatherers

“In the large sense, I have to disagree with Bakunin, one thing austerity rhetoric has suggested is that when the people are being beaten with a stick, they are much happier if the media call it the People’s Democratic Stick.”
― Bruno De Oliveira

“Forcing new loans upon the bankrupt on condition that they shrink their income is nothing short of cruel and unusual punishment. Greece was never bailed out. With their ‘rescue’ loan and their troika of bailiffs enthusiastically slashing incomes, the EU and IMF effectively condemned Greece to a modern version of the Dickensian debtors’ prison and then threw away the key.

Debtors’ prisons were ultimately abandoned because, despite their cruelty, they neither deterred the accumulation of new bad debts nor helped creditors get their money back. For capitalism to advance in the nineteenth century, the absurd notion that all debts are sacred had to be ditched and replaced with the notion of limited liability. After all, if all debts are guaranteed, why should lenders lend responsibly? And why should some debts carry a higher interest rate than other debts, reflecting the higher risk of going bad? Bankruptcy and debt write-downs became for capitalism what hell had always been for Christian dogma – unpleasant yet essential – but curiously bankruptcy-denial was revived in the twenty-first century to deal with the Greek state’s insolvency. Why? Did the EU and the IMF not realize what they were doing?

They knew exactly what they were doing. Despite their meticulous propaganda, in which they insisted that they were trying to save Greece, to grant the Greek people a second chance, to help reform Greece’s chronically crooked state and so on, the world’s most powerful institutions and governments were under no illusions. […]

Banks restructure the debt of stressed corporations every day, not out of philanthropy but out of enlightened self-interest. But the problem was that, now that we had accepted the EU–IMF bailout, we were no longer dealing with banks but with politicians who had lied to their parliaments to convince them to relieve the banks of Greece’s debt and take it on themselves. A debt restructuring would require them to go back to their parliaments and confess their earlier sin, something they would never do voluntarily, fearful of the repercussions. The only alternative was to continue the pretence by giving the Greek government another wad of money with which to pretend to meet its debt repayments to the EU and the IMF: a second bailout.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe's Deep Establishment

“It appears - because it has been the case for twenty years - that every problem is solvable...that no matter how badly the world economy slumps there is a pain-free way out of it. Once the realization dawns that there is not, and that the pain will be severe, the question is posed that has not really been posed for twenty years: who should feel it?”
― Paul Mason, Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed

“Is this a holy thing to see,
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduced to misery,
Feed with cold and usurous hand?

Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!

And their sun does never shine,
And their fields are bleak & bare,
And their ways are fill'd with thorns;
It is eternal winter there.

For where-e'er the sun does shine,
And where-e'er the rain does fall,
Babe can never hunger there,
Nor poverty the mind appall.”
― William Blake, Songs of Experience

“Hardship bred a bitter, quickfire humour and resilience to all but the most terminal of life's tragedies.”
― Ian Rankin, The Black Book

“She wipes her forehead with her wrist
She's just back from a double shift
Esther's a carer
doing nights

Behind her
on the kitchen wall
is a black and white picture
of swallows in flight

Her eyes are sore
her muscles ache
she cracks a beer
and swigs it

She holds it
to her thirsty lips
and necks it
till it's finished.

It's 4:18 a.m. again.
Her brain is full
of all she's done that day
She knows
that she won't sleep a wink
before the sun
is on it's way.

She's worried about the world tonight.

She's worried all the time.
She don't know how
she's supposed
to put it

from her mind . . .

- Europe is Lost”
― Kate Tempest, Let Them Eat Chaos

“The Way of heaven takes away where there's abundance
and restores where there's want,
but the Way of humankind isn't like that:
it takes away where there's want
and gives where there's abundance.

Verse 77
(Hinton translation)”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“There was another reason why the dollar's hegemony grew: the intentional impoverishment of America's working class.

A cynic will tell you quite accurately that large quantities of money are attracted to countries where the profit rate is higher. For Wall Street to exercise fully its magnetic powers over foreign capital, profit margins in the United States had to catch up with profit rates in Germany and Japan.

A quick and dirty way to do this was to suppress American wages. Cheaper labour makes for lower costs, makes for larger margins. It is no coincidence that, to this day, American working class earnings languish below their 1974 level. It is also no coincidence that union-busting became a thing in the 1970s, culminating in Ronald Reagan's dismissal of every single unionised air traffic controller. A move emulated by Margaret Thatcher in Britain who pulverised whole industries in order to eliminate the trade unions that inhabited them.

And faced with the Minotaur's sucking most of the world's capital into America, the European ruling classes reckoned that they had no alternative but to do the same. Reagan had set the pace. Thatcher had shown the way.

But it was in Germany and later across continental Europe that the new class war - you might call it universal austerity - was waged most effectively.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“...the centrality of competitiveness as the key to growth is a recurrent EU motif. Two decades of EC directives on increasing competition in every area, from telecommunications to power generation to collateralizing wholesale funding markets for banks, all bear the same ordoliberal imprint. Similarly, the consistent focus on the periphery states’ loss of competitiveness and the need for deep wage and cost reductions therein, while the role of surplus countries in generating the crisis is utterly ignored, speaks to a deeply ordoliberal understanding of economic management. Savers, after all, cannot be sinners. Similarly, the most recent German innovation of a constitutional debt brake (Schuldenbremse) for all EU countries regardless of their business cycles or structural positions, coupled with a new rules-based fiscal treaty as the solution to the crisis, is simply an ever-tighter ordo by another name.

If states have broken the rules, the only possible policy is a diet of strict austerity to bring them back into conformity with the rules, plus automatic sanctions for those who cannot stay within the rules. There are no fallacies of composition, only good and bad policies. And since states, from an ordoliberal viewpoint, cannot be relied upon to provide the necessary austerity because they are prone to capture, we must have rules and an independent monetary authority to ensure that states conform to the ordo imperative; hence, the ECB. Then, and only then, will growth return. In the case of Greece and Italy in 2011, if that meant deposing a few democratically elected governments, then so be it.

The most remarkable thing about this ordoliberalization of Europe is how it replicates the same error often attributed to the Anglo-American economies: the insistence that all developing states follow their liberal instruction sheets to get rich, the so-called Washington Consensus approach to development that we shall discuss shortly. The basic objection made by late-developing states, such as the countries of East Asia, to the Washington Consensus/Anglo-American idea “liberalize and then growth follows” was twofold. First, this understanding mistakes the outcomes of growth, stable public finances, low inflation, cost competitiveness, and so on, for the causes of growth. Second, the liberal path to growth only makes sense if you are an early developer, since you have no competitors—pace the United Kingdom in the eighteenth century and the United States in the nineteenth century. Yet in the contemporary world, development is almost always state led.”
― Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea

“At very best there are two problems with ideology. The first is that it does not represent or conform to or even address reality. It is a straight-edge ruler of a fractal universe. And the second is that it inspires in its believers the notion that the fault here lies with miscreant fact, which should therefore be conformed to the requirements of theory by all means necessary. To the ideologue this would amount to putting the world right, ridding it of ambiguity and of those tedious and endless moral and ethical questions that dog us through life, and that those around us so rarely answer to our satisfaction.”
― Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books

“OLYMPAS:
There is one doubt. When souls attain
Such an unimagined gain
Shall not others mark them, wise
Beyond mere mortal destinies?
MARSYAS:
Such are not the perfect saints.
While the imagination faints
Before their truth, they veil it close
As amid the utmost snows
The tallest peaks most straitly hide
With clouds their lofty heads. Divide
The planes! Be ever as you can
A simple honest gentleman!
Body and manners be at ease.
Not bloat with blazoned sanctities!
Who fights as fights the soldier-saint?
And see the artist-adept paint!
Weak are those souls that fear the stress
Of earth upon their holiness!
The fast, they eat fantastic food,
They prate of beans and brotherhood,
Wear sandals, and long hair, and spats,
And think that makes them Arhats!
How shall man still his spirit-storm?
Rational Dress and Food Reform!
OLYMPAS:
I know such saints.
MARSYAS:
                    An easy vice:
So wondrous well they advertise!
O their mean souls are satisfied
With wind of spiritual pride.
They're all negation. "Do not eat;
What poison to the soul is meat!
Drink not; smoke not; deny the will!
Wine and tobacco make us ill."
Magic is life; the Will to Live
Is one supreme Affirmative.
These things that flinch from Life are worth
No more to Heaven than to Earth.
Affirm the everlasting Yes!
OLYMPAS:
Those saints at least score one success:
Perfection of their priggishness!
MARSYAS:
Enough. The soul is subtlier fed
With meditation's wine and bread.
Forget their failings and our own;
Fix all our thoughts on Love alone!”
― Aleister Crowley, Aha!

“The human consequences of Reagan's budget cuts went deep. For instance, Social Security disability benefits were terminated for 350,000 people. A war hero of Vietnam, Roy Benavidez, who had been presented with the Congressional Medal Of Honor by Reagan, 'Was told by Social Security officials that the shrapnel pieces in his heart, arms, and leg did not prevent him from working. Appearing before a congressional committee, he denounced Reagan.”
― Howard Zinn, A People's History Of The United States Sm

“Homelessness in the context of austerity-led welfare reforms involves more than concepts of accommodation and pathways in or out of homelessness. Seen in this way, a homeless person in the contemporary political climate can be understood through reference to the concept of the “Homo Sacer” (the “accused man”) in Roman law. Homo Sacer is a person who is banned from Roman society and may be killed by Roman citizens and slaves, but may not be sacrificed in a religious ritual having been deemed impure for such ends. Therefore, one may argue that homeless people in the context of austerity politics are comparable to the Homo Sacer – i.e. a group who are punished by political practices and silenced from the political arena.”
― Bruno De Oliveira, Constructed To Rot: A Critical Reflection On Homelessness

“The motives of the troika and Greece's domestic oligarchy are obvious. Debt is creditor power, and unsustainable debt gives creditors exorbitant power.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe's Deep Establishment

“Despite claims that these radical policy changes were driven by fiscal conservatism...the reality is that government was not reducing the amount of money devoted to the management of the urban poor. It was radically altering what the funds would be used for....Funding that had once been once used for public housing was being redirected to prison construction.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“Air Marshal Nur Khan, a war hero and former Pakistan air force chief, had once likened Pakistan’s aid dependency to ‘taking opium’. Speaking to an American diplomat soon after the loss of East Pakistan in December 1971, he said, ‘Instead of using the country’s own resources to solve the country’s problems, the aid craver, like the opium craver, simply kept on begging to foreigners to bail him out of his difficulties.’ Nur Khan proposed ‘a Chinese style austerity programme’ for Pakistan although he doubted if ‘many Pakistanis had the conviction and dedication to put up with the sacrifice that such a programme would entail’.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“Barriers remain in place, disabling us, and denying our full participation in the everyday. The current government wallows in an ideology that crushes us with cuts to social care, to services – and to disabled arts organisations. Immediately after Silent Witness, Ellen Clifford, of Disabled People Against Cuts, was on Newsnight, pointing out that “the United Nations made a finding of grave and systemic violations towards disabled people”.

Who cares? Who’s listening? Unexpectedly Silent Witness seemed to be this week. And with viewing figures averaging 6 million, let’s hope it marks a watershed moment in our understanding and acceptance of disabled people.”
― Penny Pepper

“I am as poor as Victoria's Angels; I can't buy no clothes, no more.”
― Petra Hermans

“Your international financier... has no political convictions. For him there is no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest. He believes in the survival of the fittest and the gospel of tooth and claw because he makes money by seeing that the weak die before they can become strong and that the law of the jungle remains the governing force in the affairs of the world. And he is all about us. Every city in the world knows him. He exists because big business, his master, needs him. International big business may conduct its operations with scraps of paper, but the ink it uses is human blood!”
― Eric Ambler, The Mask of Dimitrios

“facts never disconfirm a good ideology”
― Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea

“The rich never give you anything (dixit A.). Wealth is unrelenting; it always screws you. Those who are rich in intelligence, power and beauty don't give much away either. They make you pay all the more for the fact that their capital is symbolic.
Comparing that unrelenting face of wealth with Countess Bathory who tortured young peasant girls. She at least was tortured herself, walled up in total darkness, in absolute silence and her own excrement, with a hole in the wall for food to be passed through. The bloodbaths she had taken gave her the savage energy to hold out for two years in the dark. Thinking of those happy days while walking around in the backstreets of Rome. Here everything is deeply incestuous, though in a different way from Elisabeth Bathory for whom all those peasant girls were her daughters whose incest was to be sealed with blood. But that was a sadistic and violent incest, whereas the whole Roman culture practises a gentle, spiritual incest. Akin to fetishism: that of the mamma, the sister, the young adolescent, the Virgin and the Saints, all swirling about in the same incestuous spiral. The carnal perfection of the detail, the carnal softness of the marble, the lewd transparency of the fountains - little navels of the squares set deep in the backstreets - and the water which streams down from them. The miracle of a faultless urbanity, a total civility - even the ruins share in this. However far back you go in Italy, there has never been any nature. There has only ever been a baroque figuration.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“South of Larissa the landscape began to change. Jude watched an irrigation machine like a giant stick insect creeping over a field, and a tractor racing across another, raking up a dust cloud behind in a brown jet stream.”
― Paul Alkazraji, The Migrant

“All around the world, the hard realities of a warming world are crashing up against the brutal logic of austerity, revealing just how untenable it is to starve the public sphere at the very moment we need it most.”
― Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

“Arbitrary limits on deficits and debt hinder a nation’s development. Austerity for the sake of balanced budgets or for the sake of preserving fiscal space for the future is counterproductive.”
― L. Randall Wray Yeva Nersisyan

“The real pleasure-seeking is the combination of luxury and austerity in such a way that the luxury can really be felt.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays