Editors From The United States

"Many Indians seem to have the idea that Christianity is a western religion. That is wrong. There were Christian churches in India before America was discovered."

"I want to make sure you keep your eyes on the ball, that is, the two basic missions of a central bank. The first is maintaining macroeconomic stability: maintaining stable growth and keeping inflation low and stable. The principal policy tool for maintaining macroeconomic stability is monetary policy. In normal times, the Fed and other central banks use open market operations—purchases and sales of securities in markets—to move interest rates up or down, and in doing so try to create a more stable macroeconomic environment. The second part of a central bank's mission is maintaining financial stability. Central banks are focused on trying to ensure that the financial system functions properly, and in particular, they want to prevent, if possible, and if not, to mitigate the effects of a financial crisis or a financial panic."

"We did stop the meltdown. We avoided what would have been, I think, a collapse of the global financial system. That was obviously a good thing. But one thing that I was always sure of and the Federal Reserve was always sure of was that a collapse of some of these big financial firms was going to have very serious collateral consequences. There were people arguing even as late as September 2008, “Well, why don't you just let the firms collapse? There is a system that can take care of it: bankruptcy. Why don't you let them fail?” We never thought that was a good option. Particularly, if the whole system had collapsed, we would have had extraordinarily serious consequences."

"It was a global depression, had many causes, the whole story requires you to look at the whole international system. But policy errors in United States, as well as abroad, did play an important role. And in particular as I said, the Federal Reserve failed in this first challenge in both parts of its mission. It did not use monetary policy aggressively to prevent deflation and the collapse in the economy, so it failed in its economic stability function. And it didn't adequately perform its function as lender of last resort allowing many bank failures and a resulting contraction in credit and also with the money supply. So, in that respect, again, the Fed did not fulfill its intended mission."

"Obviously, based on the crisis and what happened and the effects that we're still feeling, it's now clear that maintaining financial stability is just as an important a responsibility as monetary and economic stability. And indeed, this is, you know, very much a return to the—where the Fed came from in the beginning. Remember the reason that Fed was created was to try to reduce the incidents of financial panics, so financial stability was the original goal of creation of the Fed. So now we sort of come full circle."

"House prices have risen by nearly 25 percent over the past two years. Although speculative activity has increased in some areas, at a national level these price increases largely reflect strong economic fundamentals, including robust growth in jobs and incomes, low mortgage rates, steady rates of household formation, and factors that limit the expansion of housing supply in some areas."

"To avoid large and unsustainable budget deficits, the nation will ultimately have to choose among higher taxes, modifications to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, less spending on everything else from education to defense, or some combination of the above."

"For nearly eight years, Ben has led the Fed through some of the most daunting economic challenges of our lifetime. . . . [W]hen faced with a potential global economic meltdown, he has displayed tremendous courage and creativity. He took bold action that was needed to avert another Depression - helping us stop the free fall, stabilize financial markets, shore up our banks, get credit flowing again. And all this has made a profound difference in the lives of millions of Americans. . . . [Now] more families are able to afford their own home; more small businesses are able to get loans to expand and hire workers; more folks can pay their mortgages and their car loans. It’s meant more growth and more jobs."

"Economics is a highly sophisticated field of thought that is superb at explaining to policymakers precisely why the choices they made in the past were wrong. About the future, not so much. However, careful economic analysis does have one important benefit, which is that it can help kill ideas that are completely logically inconsistent or wildly at variance with the data. This insight covers at least 90 percent of proposed economic policies."

"There’s no denying that a collapse in stock prices today would pose serious macroeconomic challenges for the United States. Consumer spending would slow, and the U.S. economy would become less of a magnet for foreign investors. Economic growth, which in any case has recently been at unsustainable levels, would decline somewhat. History proves, however, that a smart central bank can protect the economy and the financial sector from the nastier side effects of a stock market collapse."

"The economic repercussions of a stock market crash depend less on the severity of the crash itself than on the response of economic policymakers, particularly central bankers."

"Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve System. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again."

"The stark truth about Ben Bernanke’s “historic” policy of global liquidity support was that it involved handing trillions of dollars in loans to that coterie of banks, their shareholders and their outrageously remunerated senior staff. Indeed, as we shall see, we can itemize precisely who got what. To compound the embarrassment, though the Fed is a national central bank, at least half the liquidity support it provided went to banks not headquartered in the United States, but located overwhelmingly in Europe. If in intellectual terms the crisis was a crisis of macroeconomics, if in practical terms it was a crisis of the conventional tools of monetary policy, it was by the same token a deep crisis of modern politics. However unprecedented and effective the Fed’s actions might have been, even for those politicians whose support for globalization was unfailing, its practical implications were barely speakable. Though it is hardly a secret that we inhabit a world dominated by business oligopolies, during the crisis and its aftermath this reality and its implications for the priorities of government stood nakedly exposed. It is an unpalatable and explosive truth that democratic politics on both sides of the Atlantic has choked on."

"I love you because You're a sweet little fool!"

"Gather leaves and grasses, Love, to-day; For the Autumn passes Soon away. Chilling winds are blowing. It will soon be snowing."

"Ah, we fondly cherish Faded things That had better perish. Memory clings To each leaf it saves. Chilly winds are blowing. It will soon be snowing On our graves."

"Listen! John A. Logan is the Head Center, the Hub, the King Pin, the Main Spring, Mogul and Mugwump of the final plot by which partisanship was installed in the Commission."

"No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session."

"Life's race well run, Life's work well done, Life's victory won, Now cometh rest."

"The Bill of Rights is a born rebel. It reeks with sedition. In every clause it shakes its fist in the face of constituted authority... it is the one guarantee of human freedom to the American people."

"If the American dream is to come true and to abide with us, it will, at bottom, depend on the people themselves. If we are to achieve a richer and fuller life for all, they have got to know what such an achievement implies. In a modern industrial State, an economic base is essential for all. We point with pride to our "national income," but the nation is only an aggregate of individual men and women, and when we turn from the single figure of total income to the incomes of individuals, we find there was a very marked injustice in its distribution. There is no reason why wealth, which is a social product, should not be more equitably controlled and distributed in the interests of society."

"It may be that without a vision men shall die. It is no less true that, without hard practical sense, they shall also die. Without Jefferson the new nation might have lost its soul. Without Hamilton it would assuredly have been killed in body."

"Throughout our whole history the United States has been facing westward."

"As we look over the list of the early leaders of the republic, Washington, John Adams, Hamilton, and others, we discern that they were all men who insisted upon being themselves and who refused to truckle to the people. With each succeeding generation, the growing demand of the people that its elective officials shall not lead but merely register the popular will has steadily undermined the independence of those who derive their power from popular election. The persistent refusal of the Adamses to sacrifice the integrity of their own intellectual and moral standards and values for the sake of winning public office or popular favor is another of the measuring rods by which we may measure the divergence of American life from its starting point."

"There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live. Surely these should never be confused in the mind of any man who has the slightest inkling of what culture is. For most of us it is essential that we should make a living...In the complications of modern life and with our increased accumulation of knowledge, it doubtless helps greatly to compress some years of experience into far fewer years by studying for a particular trade or profession in an institution; but that fact should not blind us to another—namely, that in so doing we are learning a trade or a profession, but are not getting a liberal education as human beings."

"If, as I have said, the things already listed were all we had had to contribute, America would have made no distinctive and unique gift to mankind. But there has been also the American dream, that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position."

"The American dream that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as a man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class."

"I felt DeLeon understood Marx very well abstractly but knew little about the practical needs of the labor movement. The last time I talked with DeLeon I told him I was moving to Philadelphia and was willing to accept the secretaryship of the S.L.P. local there, which had been offered me, but that I could not go along with their principles wholeheartedly. As a good friend of mine, DeLeon accepted what I said without anger, but would not change his methods."

"(The IWW} was not only the inheritor of many of the traditions of the 1880's but personalities who were identified with the 1880's were present at the early conventions of the IWW. The names may not be known to you unless you are students of labor history but included were such figures as Eugene Debs, Daniel DeLeon and Mrs. Lucy Parsons"

"The Socialist Labor Party (SLP), formed after the collapse of the First International in 1872, decided to organize black workers in order to solve the problem of competition. But SLP leaders believed, as did their predecessors in the First International, that once the socialist revolution came, all race problems would disappear. SLP leader Daniel DeLeon put it succinctly: "There was no such thing as a race or Negro question'... there was only a social, a labor question...so far as the Socialist and labor movements were concerned." It was an odd position to take, especially by the 1890s when lynching increased, racial segregation became law, and African-American citizens who worked so hard for the Republican Party in the days of Reconstruction were suddenly disfranchised. Of course, black people fought back, joining unions of farmers and workers, forming armed self-defense organizations, and building religious, fraternal, educational, and political institutions that ultimately became sources of power and inspiration for the stony road ahead."

"Daniel De Leon, the head of the Socialist Labor Party in the United States, translated Woman Under Socialism into English, and felt compelled in his introduction to disassociate himself from Bebel's more unconventional views of women. In a statement that echoed Engels in its sentiments (but was far more rigid), De Leon argued: “For one, I hold there is as little ground for rejecting monogamy, by reason of the taint that clings to its inception, as there would be ground for rejecting co-operation, by reason of the like taint that accompanied its rise, and also clings to its development. For one, I hold that the monogamous family-bruised and wounded in the cruels rough-and-will have its wounds staunched, its bruises tumble of modern society healed, and, enabled by the slowly acquired moral forces of conjugal paternal, and filial affection, bloom under socialism into a lever of mighty power for the moral and physical elevation of the races." When De Leon repeatedly admonished women that feminism must be subordinated to the (masculine) needs of the working-class revolution, he spoke for the typical American male socialist. He informed women that "the history of Class Rule throws its light before the feet of the Woman's movement; it explains the errors, accounts for them, that the movement slips into; the emotional vagaries with which the movement is often marred; its futile tears; its frequently barren efforts"; and he ridiculed the assumption of feminists "that woman was smitten down because of her sex. She was not." At great pains to point out that women had no special problem related to their femaleness, he constantly reminded them that their true mission lay in assisting working-class men to create the socialist revolution."

"Socialism rejects the premises and the conclusions of anarchy upon the State and upon government. What socialism says is "Away with the economic system that alters the beneficent functions of the central direction authority from an aid to production into a means of oppression." And it proceeds to show that, when the instruments of production shall be owned no longer by the minority, but shall be restored to the Commonwealth; that when, as a results of this, no longer the minority or any portion of the people shall be in poverty and classes, class distinctions and class rule shall, as they necessarily must, have vanished, that then the central directing authority will lose all its repressive functions and is bound to reassume the functions it had in the old communities of our ancestors, become against a necessary aid, and assist in production."

"Our system of production is in the nature of an orchestra. No one man, no one town, no one state, can be said any longer to be independent of the other; the whole people of the United States, every individual therein, is dependent and interdependent upon all the others. The nature of the machinery of production; the subdivision of labor, which aids cooperation and which cooperation fosters, and which is necessary to the plentifulnesss of production that civilization requires, compel a harmonious working together of all departments of labor, and thence complete the establishment of a central directing authority, of an orchestral director, so to speak, of the orchestra of the cooperative commonwealth."

"We Socialists are not reformers; we are revolutionaries. We Socialists do not propose change forms. We care nothing for forms. We want a change of the inside of the mechanism of society, let the form take care of itself."

"As a poodle may have his hair cut long or his hair cut short, as he may be trimmed with pink ribbons or with blue ribbons, yet he remains the same old poodle, so capitalism may be trimmed with factory laws, tenement laws, divorce laws and gambling laws, but it remains the same old capitalism. These “humanitarian parts” are only trimming the poodle. Socialism, one and inseparable with its “antirent and anticapital parts,” means to get rid of the poodle."

"It has become an axiom that, to accomplish results organization is requisite. Nevertheless, there is "organization" and "organization."That this is so appears clearly from the fact that the pure and simmplers have been going about saying to the workers: "Organize! Organize!"and after they have been saying that, and have been organizing"and "organizing" for the past thirty or forty years, we find that they are virtually where they started, if not worse off; that their "organization" parttakes of the nature of the lizard, whose tail destroys what his foreparts build up."

"Socialism knows that revolutionary upheavals and transformations proceed from the rock bed of material needs. With a full appreciation of and veneration for moral impulses that are balanced with scientific knowledge, it eschews, looks with just suspicion upon and gives a wide berth to balloon morality, or be it those malarial fevers that reformers love to dignify with the name of "moral feelings""

"These “directors,” and the capitalist class in general, may perform some “work,” they do perform some “work,” but that “work” is not of a sort that directly or indirectly aids production, any more than the intense mental strain and activity of the “work” done by the pickpocket is directly or indirectly productive."

"Capitalism attacks and destroys all the finer sentiments of the human heart; it ruthlessly sweeps away old traditions and ideas opposed to its progress, and it exploits and corrupts those things once held sacred."

"If a law or an election, distasteful to the ruling class, was forced through; if, for any one of the thousand and one causes, apt to arise whenever actual oligarchic power is draped in the drapery of democratic forms, the Ruling Class of Rome found it prudent to yield in Forum and Senate Hall;-- in such cases the Colleges of Priests would conveniently discover some flaw in the auspices, some defect in the sacrifices. That annulled the election or the law, as "condemned by the gods.""

"Go out into the field and bring in the rest of the workers, that they may be fully equipped for their great mission. We will wrest what we can, step by step, from the capitalists, but with out eye fixed upon the goal; we will press forward, keeping step together with the inspiring music of the new emancipation; and when we have enough of this kind of organization, as Brother DeLeon said so happily the other day, when we are lined up in battle array and the capitalists try to lock us out, we will turn the tables on the gentlemen and lock them out. We can run the mills without them but they cannot run them without us."

"How oft the word which we would gladly speak Might be, unto some darkly groping soul, The key to bid doubt's massive doors unroll, The free winds' breath upon the prisoner's cheek, Or. to the hungry heart, sweet pity's dole! We hurry on, nor know that they are near, As passed Evangeline the one so dear."

"Little scraps of paper, Little crumbs of food, Make a room untidy Everywhere they're strewed."

"How near another's heart we oft may stand, Yet all unknowing what we fain would know Its heights of joy, its depths of bitter woe, As, wrecked upon some desert island's strand, They watch our white sails near and nearer grow; Then we, who for their rescue death would dare, Unheeding pass, and leave them to despair."

"Little deeds of kindness, Little words of love, Make our pleasant earth below Like the heaven above."

"Think gently of the erring: Ye know not of the power With which the dark temptation came In some unguarded hour. Ye may not know how earnestly They struggled, or how well, Until the hour of weakness came, And sadly thus they fell."

"Speak gently to the erring: For is it not enough That innocence and peace have gone, Without thy censure rough?"

"Speak kindly to the erring; Thou yet may'st lead them back, With holy words and tones of love, From misery's thorny track. Forget not thou hast often sinned. And sinful yet must be; Deal gently with the erring one, As God hath dealt with thee."

"Little drops of water, Little grains of sand, Make the mighty ocean And the pleasant land.Thus the little minutes, Humble though they be, Make the mighty ages Of eternity."

"In teaching me the way to live It taught me how to die."