Quotes by Carne Ross

“The Saddam regime was sustained by illegal smuggling that amounted to some $11 billion. The U.N. Security Council , including the U.S. and Britain, did very little to stop that.”

“An awful lot of countries were making an awful lot of money while people were suffering in Iraq. These countries should be ashamed of themselves.”

“What was striking was that when he became prime minister, he seemed to grow into the role immediately.”

if people do not have responsibility, do not expect them to behave responsibly.

In neo-classical economic theory, it is claimed without evidence that people are basically self-seeking, that they want above all the satisfaction of their material desires: what economists call maximising utility. The ultimate objective of mankind is economic growth, and that is maximized only through raw, and lightly regulated, competition. If the rewards of this system are spread unevenly, that is a necessary price. Others on the planet are to be regarded as either customers, competitors or factors of production. Effects upon the planet itself are mere externalities to the model, with no reckoning of the cost - at least for now. Nowhere in this analysis appears factors such as human cooperation, love, trust, compassion or hatred, curiosity or beauty. Nowhere appears the concept of meaning. What cannot be measured is ignored. But the trouble is that once our basic needs for shelter and food have been met, these factors may be the most important of all.

Life is about means not ends. There is no utopia to be gained, there is no end-state that is static and eternal, once accomplished. This was one of the great lies of communism. Likewise, capitalism offers the great deception that thanks to its machinations everyone will be richer in the future, thus justifying gross inequality and humiliation today.