People From Sydney

"Rather like the Bible is for many Christians, the General Theory is the essential economics reference which few economists have ever read."

"If there was never any difference between the value of commodities someone desired to sell and buy on the market, then no-one would ever desire to accumulate wealth. But an essential feature of capitalism is the existence of a group of agents with precisely that intention."

"The obsession with equilibrium has imposed enormous costs on economics."

"Why do economists persist in modelling the economy with static tools when dynamic ones exist; why do they treat as stationery an entity which is forever changing?"

"Economic theory in general ignores processes which take time to occur, and instead assumes that everything occurs in equilibrium."

"What makes economics different from and inferior to other sciences is the tenacity with which it holds to its core beliefs in the face of either contrary factual evidence or theoretical critiques that establish fundamental inconsistencies in its intellectual apparatus."

"In general then, and contrary to Friedman, abandoning a factually false heuristic asumption will normally lead to a better theory — not a worse one."

"The position I favor is that economics is a science, but a rather pathological one."

"The term 'capital' has two quite different meanings in economics: a sum of money, and a collection of machinery."

"Even economists can't escape the fact that, as commodities go, labour is something out of the ordinary."

"Which comes first — price being set by the intersection of supply and demand, or individual firms equating marginal cost to price?"

"Economics is not the Emperor of the social sciences, but the Humpty Dumpty."

"Not even an economist can make time stand still (though some victims of economics lectures might dispute that!)."

"Thus while diminishing returns do exist when industries are broadly defined, no industry can be considered in isolation from all the others, as supply and demand curve analysis requires."

"Though mainstream economics began by assuming that his hedonistic, individualistic approach to analysing consumer demand was intellectually sound, it ended up proving that it was not."

"With the market so much more in control of the global economy now than fifty years ago, then if economists are right, the world should be a manifestly better place: it should be growing faster, with more stability, and income should go to those who deserve it."

"Every country needs another country to make fun of."

"Mr Pilger certainly looked the part of the crusading journalist – the open-necked shirt, the unobtrusive make-up, the earnest gaze straight at the autocue. But The Truth Game was not an investigation, it was a piece of special pleading – part polemic, part "drama documentary", the journalistic equivalent of soap opera in which the heroes and villains are readily identifiable."

"His trademark has always been to sidestep the accepted version of the facts, a modus operandi that served him well during the Vietnam war, in the apocalyptic post-Pol Pot Cambodia, the killing fields of East Timor and countless other hotspots... becoming an octogenari­an hasn’t mellowed him in the least."

"[A] kind of cult has developed around Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, which cannot believe they could ever be wrong, and produces ever more elaborate conspiracy theories to justify their mistakes."

"Pilger gained prominence in Indochina in the 1970s. ... He saw what he wished to see and ignored the rest. Pilger's documentaries about Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge inspired humanitarian fundraising, yet failed to disclose that Communist Vietnam, having invaded Cambodia and installed a puppet regime, was trying to control which starving people were fed and which were not."

"Oh, Pilger. The thing is, if Pilger wasn't an egomaniac, he wouldn't have done the work he's done. I was keen to talk to him, but he turns out to be a prick. So it goes."

"The ferocity of rightwing criticism of his views indicated the effectiveness of his journalism."

"John Pilger's excoriation of the American performance in Vietnam was likewise unmatched by any similarly sceptical treatment of the North Vietnamese and their frequent resorts to torture and murder."

"John Pilger was once a notable reporter on this newspaper, even if he was the first to say so. [...] Pilger is an Australian descended from German and Irish immigrants. He has never understood Britain. His world is populated by simple Aborigines and sinister capitalists. He espouses the cause of one and enjoys the fruits of the other."

"I suggest in The Dirty War on the NHS we look beyond this virus and ask how our current state of fear and its mass obedience will be exploit­ed in future. Will the workers 'stood down' ever see their jobs again? Will artificial intelligence consume freedoms that have been suspended? As Edward Snowden says, the disease of mass surveillance will outlast this pandemic. Will Julian Assange [the Australian founder of WikiLeaks], persecuted for the crime of truthful journalism, survive?"

"A pandemic has been declared, but not for the 24,600 who die every day from unnecessary starvation, and not for 3,000 children who die every day from preventable malaria, and not for the 10,000 people who die every day because they are denied publicly-funded healthcare, and not for the hundreds of Venezuelans and Iranians who die every day because America's blockade denies them life-saving medicines, and not for the hundreds of mostly children bombed or starved to death every day in Yemen, in a war supplied and kept going, profitably, by America and Britain. Before you panic, consider them."

"On 28 January China said it would welcome international help as it struggled to contain coronavirus. No substantial help has come. Instead of solidarity and defying WHO, the US, Australia, Britain seek to isolate China, returning it to a state of siege and the dangers of the past."

"The persecution of Julian Assange is the conquest of us all: of our independence, our self respect, our intellect, our compassion, our politics, our culture. So stop scrolling. Organise. Occupy. Insist. Persist. Make a noise. Take direct action. Be brave and stay brave. Defy the thought police. War is not peace, freedom is not slavery, ignorance is not strength. If Julian can stand up, so can you: so can all of us."

"Julian [Assange] is a distinguished Australian, who has changed the way many people think about duplicitous governments. For this, he is a political refugee subjected to what the United Nations calls 'arbitrary detention'. The UN says he has the right of free passage to freedom, but this is denied. He has the right to medical treatment without fear of arrest, but this is denied. He has the right to compensation, but this is denied. As founder and editor of WikiLeaks, his crime has been to make sense of dark times. WikiLeaks has an impeccable record of accuracy and authenticity which no newspaper, no TV channel, no radio station, no BBC, no New York Times, no Washington Post, no Guardian can equal."

"Should the CIA stooge Guaido and his white supremacists grab power, it will be the 68th overthrow of a sovereign government by the United States, most of them democracies. A fire sale of Venezuela’s utilities and mineral wealth will surely follow, along with the theft of the country’s oil, as outlined by John Bolton. Under the last Washington-controlled government in Caracas, poverty reached historic proportions. There was no healthcare for those could not pay. There was no universal education; Mavis Mendez, and millions like her, could not read or write."

"In the pages of liberal newspapers in the West, race and class are two words almost never uttered in the mendacious “coverage” of Washington’s latest, most naked attempt to grab the world’s greatest source of oil and reclaim its “backyard”. For all the chavistas’ faults — such as allowing the Venezuelan economy to become hostage to the fortunes of oil and never seriously challenging big capital and corruption — they brought social justice and pride to millions of people and they did it with unprecedented democracy."

"Since Chavez’s death in 2013, his successor Nicolas Maduro has shed his derisory label in the Western press as a 'former bus driver' and become Saddam Hussein incarnate.... As the journalist and film-maker Pablo Navarrete reported this week, Venezuela is not the catastrophe it has been painted. 'There is food everywhere,' he wrote. 'I have filmed lots of videos of food in markets [all over Caracas] … it’s Friday night and the restaurants are full.'"

"When you consider that 100 percent of WikiLeaks leaks are authentic and accurate, you can understand the impact, as well as the fury generated among secretive powerful forces. Julian Assange is a political refugee in London for one reason only: WikiLeaks told the truth about the greatest crimes of the 21st century. He is not forgiven for that, and he should be supported by journalists and by people everywhere."

"WikiLeaks is possibly the most exciting development in journalism in my lifetime... The truth about the Vietnam War was told when Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers. The truth about Iraq and Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia and many other flashpoints was told when WikiLeaks published the revelations of whistle-blowers."

"The single biggest challenge is rescuing journalism from its deferential role as the stenographer of great power. The United States has constitutionally the freest press on earth, yet in practice it has a media obsequious to the formulas and deceptions of power. That is why the US was effectively given media approval to invade Iraq, and Libya, and Syria and dozens of other countries."

"When I began as a journalist, especially as a foreign correspondent, the press in the UK was conservative and owned by powerful establishment forces, as it is now. But the difference compared to today is that there were spaces for independent journalism that dissented from the received 'wisdom' of authority. That space has now all but closed and independent journalists have gone to the internet, or to a metaphoric underground."

"Journalists can help people by telling the truth, or by as much truth as they can find, and acting not as agents of governments, of power, but of people. That is real journalism. The rest is specious and false."

"Obama was one of the most violent U.S. Presidents. He launched or sustained seven wars and left office with none resolved: a record. In his last year as President, 2016, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, he dropped 26,171 bombs. It’s an interesting statistic; it’s three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day, on mostly civilians."

"WikiLeaks has achieved far more than what The New York Times and The Washington Post in their celebrated incarnations did. No newspaper has come close to matching the secrets and lies of power that Assange and Snowden have disclosed. That both men are fugitives is indicative of the retreat of liberal democracies from principles of freedom and justice. Why is WikiLeaks a landmark in journalism? Because its revelations have told us, with 100 per cent accuracy, how and why much of the world is divided and run."

"Donald Trump is a symptom of this, but he is also a maverick. He says the invasion of Iraq was a crime; he doesn't want to go to war with Russia and China. The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton. She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence of a system whose vaunted "exceptionalism" is totalitarian with an occasional liberal face. As presidential election day draws near, Clinton will be hailed as the first female president, regardless of her crimes and lies - just as Barack Obama was lauded as the first black president and liberals swallowed his nonsense about "hope". And the drool goes on."

"In the circus known as the American presidential campaign, Donald Trump is being presented as a lunatic, a fascist. He is certainly odious; but he is also a media hate figure. That alone should arouse our scepticism. Trump's views on migration are grotesque, but no more grotesque than those of David Cameron. It is not Trump who is the Great Deporter from the United States, but the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama. According to one prodigious liberal commentator, Trump is "unleashing the dark forces of violence" in the United States. Unleashing them?"

"Putin is the only leader to condemn the rise of fascism in 21st-century Europe."

"The problem with media-run "conversations" on gender is not merely the almost total absence of male participants, but the suppression of class."

"We journalists... have to be brave enough to defy those who seek our collusion in selling their latest bloody adventure in someone else's country... That means always challenging the official story, however patriotic that story may appear, however seductive and insidious it is. For propaganda relies on us in the media to aim its deceptions not at a far away country but at you at home... In this age of endless imperial war, the lives of countless men, women and children depend on the truth or their blood is on us... Those whose job it is to keep the record straight ought to be the voice of people, not power."

"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."

"We are beckoned to see the world through a one-way mirror, as if we are threatened and innocent and the rest of humanity is threatening, or wretched, or expendable. Our memory is struggling to rescue the truth that human rights were not handed down as privileges from a parliament, or a boardroom, or an institution, but that peace is only possible with justice and with information that gives us the power to act justly."

"[On Barack Obama:] No one knew what the new brand actually stood for. So accomplished was the advertising (a record $75m was spent on television commercials alone) that many Americans actually believed Obama shared their opposition to Bush’s wars. In fact, he had repeatedly backed Bush’s warmongering and its congressional funding. Many Americans also believed he was the heir to Martin Luther King’s legacy of anti-colonialism. Yet if Obama had a theme at all, apart from the vacuous 'Change you can believe in,' it was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully. 'We will be the most powerful,' he often declared."

"In fact, Hamas's real threat is its example as the Arab world's only democratically elected government, drawing its popularity from its resistance to the Palestinians' oppressor and tormentor."

"Barack Obama is a glossy Uncle Tom who would bomb Pakistan. Hillary Clinton, another bomber, is anti-feminist. John McCain's one distinction is that he has personally bombed a country."