“The major western democracies are moving towards corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies — socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor — and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war. This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food.”
John Pilger, Sydney Peace Prize address http://johnpilger.com/articles/breaking-the-great-australian-silence, Sydney Opera House, 5 November 2009
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John Pilger 22
Australian journalist 1939Related quotes

The Exception to the Rulers written with David Goodman

The consumers are the sovereign people. The capitalists, the entrepreneurs, and the farmers are the people’s mandatories. If they do not obey, if they fail to produce, at the lowest possible cost, what the consumers are asking for, they lose their office. Their task is service to the consumer. Profit and loss are the instruments by means of which the consumers keep a tight rein on all business activities.
Source: Bureaucracy (1944), Chapter I: Profit Management, § 1: The Operation of The Market Mechanism

Shri K. R. Narayanan President of India in Conversation with N. Ram on Doordarshan and All India Radio

“Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.”
The Need of an Industrial Education in an Industrial Democracy (1916)
Misc. Quotes
Context: It is no accident that all democracies have put a high estimate upon education; that schooling has been their first care and enduring charge. Only through education can equality of opportunity be anything more than a phrase. Accidental inequalities of birth, wealth, and learning are always tending to restrict the opportunities of some as compared with those of others. Only free and continued education can counteract those forces which are always at work to restore, in however changed a form, feudal oligarchy. Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.

“It is not Socialism that subverts democracy, but democracy that subverts capitalism.”
Source: Democracy for the Few (2010 [1974]), sixth edition, Chapter 17, p. 320

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Democratic Presidential Debate in Miami (March 9, 2016)

2010s, 2017, Speech at "Spirit of Liberty: At Home, In the World" event (2017)