Reclaiming the Commons......Quote by Quote

[marmar]

We have learned to say that the good must be extended to all of society before it can be held secure by any one person or any one class. But we have not yet learned to add to that statement, that unless all (people) and all classes contribute to a good, we cannot even be sure that it is worth having.
-- Jane Addams

......

"Democracy" is one of the most important principles for a better world. In its truest sense, a democracy is a community in which all members have an equal say in the running of that community. Unfortunately in reality, democratic societies have fallen short of this ideal. Nevertheless, because of its very nature, once a democracy is established, its citizens can work together to make their society more and more democratic, if they choose to do so.
-- Robert Alan

......

"Education is a human right with immense power to transform. On its foundation rest the cornerstones of freedom, democracy and sustainable human development."
-- Kofi Annan

......

At the heart of the WTO is an assault on everything left standing in the commons, in the public realm. Everything is now for sale. Even those areas of life that we once considered sacred like health and education, food and water and air and seeds and genes and a heritage. It is all now for sale. Economic freedom -- not democracy, and not ecological stewardship -- is the defining metaphor of the WTO and its central goal is humanity's mastery of the natural world through its total commodification.
-- Maude Barlow

......

"We can have a democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both."
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis

......

There can be no real growth without healthy populations. No sustainable development without tackling disease and malnutrition. No international security without assisting crisis-ridden countries. And no hope for the spread of freedom, democracy and human dignity unless we treat health as a basic human right.
-- Gro Brundtland

......

... 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, Australian social scientist

......

....under capitalism, we can't have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control.
-- Noam Chomsky

......

Representative democracy, as in, say, the United States or Great Britain, would be criticized by an anarchist of this school on two grounds. First of all because there is a monopoly of power centralized in the State, and secondly -and critically - because representative democracy is limited to the political sphere and in no serious way encroaches on the economic sphere. Anarchists of this tradition have always held that democratic control of one?s productive life is at the core of any serious human liberation, or, for that matter, of any significant democratic practice. That is, as long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if even meaningful.
-- Noam Chomsky

.....

"Democracy is just a word. You have to give it meaning. The US is not a democracy. Most Americans do not vote. We haven't had a real choice for a long, long time now. Wealth rules. Corporations rule. The US is a plutocracy -- government by wealthy people. Certain people control multinational corporations. You couldn't get elected in the US without lots of money."
-- Ramsey Clark

......

We have a global economy that is not structured around democratizing and including people in the decision-making. It's operated in secret.
-- Kevin Danaher

......

Democracy is about two things. First, it is about purpose. In the political realm, it's about an overriding concern for the common good. In the economic realm, it's about having the common good trump the narrow self-interest of the financial elite. It's about broadening corporate purpose from serving shareholders to serving stakeholders, and releasing executives from the destructive mandate to maximize shareholder gain at any cost. Second, democracy is about structures that bring this purpose to life. It's not about separating good corporations from bad, but about shaping the system forces that act on all corporations. It's about consciously crafting new democratic system structures, structures of voice, structures of decision making, structures of conflict resolution, structures of accountability.
-- Marjorie Kelly

......

The proper goal of an economic democracy agenda is to replace the global suicide economy ruled by rapacious and unaccountable global corporations with a planetary system of local living economies comprised of human-scale enterprise rooted in the communities they serve and locally owned by the people whose wellbeing depends on them.
-- David Korten

......

We must construct a new set of values and attitudes to replace the culture of war which, for centuries, has been influencing the course of civilization. Winning peace means the triumph of our pledge to establish, on a democratic basis, a new social framework of tolerance and generosity from which no one will feel excluded.
-- Federico Mayor

......

"A community is democratic only when the humblest and weakest person can enjoy the highest civil, economic, and social rights that the biggest and most powerful possess."
-- A. Philip Randolph

......

“The motivating force of the theory of a Democratic way of life is still a belief that as individuals we live cooperatively, and, to the best of our ability, serve the community in which we live..."
-- Eleanor Roosevelt

......

Our civilization is locked in the grip of an ideology - corporatism. An ideology that denies and undermines the legitimacy of individuals as the citizen in a democracy. The particular imbalance of this ideology leads to a worship of self-interest and a denial of the public good. The practical effects on the individual are passivity and conformism in the areas that matter, and non-conformism in the areas that don't
-- John Ralston Saul

......

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through.
-- Alexis De Tocqueville