"In the case of England, the Glorious Revolution was an important step on the road to democracy. But it was only a step, for it claimed sovereignty on behalf of the wealthy alone, not on behalf of all. Over time this did change as the voting franchise was extended. but what's curious is that today, more than three hundred years later, corporate governance has not yet made that change. Public corporations are still governed in the name of the propertied class alone.

At root, what really governs corporations is an idea that is the intellectual descendent of the great chain of being: the notion that only those who possess wealth matter. Implicitly, they are a higher class of persons who alone are considered real members of corporate society; hence only they have a vote."

Marjorie Kelly, The Divine Right of Capital: Dethroning the Corporate Aristocracy, 2001

"If democracy is justified in governing the state,then it must also be justified in governing economic enterprises, and to say that it is not justified in governing economic enterprises is to imply that it is not justified in governing the state."

Robert A, Dahl, A Preface to Economic Democracy, p.111

“The democratic process on which this nation was founded should not be restricted to the political process, but should be applied to the industrial operation as well.”

Albert Gallatin - Secretary of the Treasury, Jefferson Administration, 1797

Young: "During every election you read these heart¬rending editorials about why it's so important to vote for whatever office happens to be on the ballot. Yet no one ever asks the question of why, if it's such a great idea to vote for your senator, it would not be an even greater idea to vote for your boss."

Chomsky: ["No, that's out. A crucial part of the ideology is that you're allowed to criticize Congress, the president, local politicians. You're allowed to say they're all crooks. But you're not allowed to say that the corporate system is at the heart of it all. In fact, you're not allowed to even see that. No, the idea of voting for your boss is just off the agenda.]
"But if you really believed in eighteenth century libertarian doctrine, the doctrine of the Founding Fathers, that's just what you'd be asking. They were not just opposed to a powerful state. They were opposed to concentrations of power. It happened back in their day that the concentrations of power that were visible were the state and the feudal system and the church, so that's what they were against.
“ In the nineteenth century a new concentration of power came along that they hadn't paid a lot of attention to, namely corporate power, that had a degree of Influence and domination over our lives well beyond what the Founding Fathers could have foreseen. Yet their principles would lead you to ask exactly that question: Why should we be subordinated to the boss? Why should investment decisions be in private hands? Why should private power determine what is produced and what is consumed and what are working conditions? Why should you follow orders? Why shouldn't everybody participate democratically and decide what is to be done?"

Noam Chomsky, interviewed by Charles M. Young, Rolling Stone, May 28th, 1992

"It is possible to see slavery and serfdom merely as extreme early forms of autocratic management, in which employees had no voice whatsoever in the work process and were viewed not as human beings but as alienated forms of individual wealth. Slavery, in this sense, did not die; it continues in modern dress in contemporary organizations wherever managers exercise autocratic power, unequal status, or arbitrary privileges, no matter how scientific the terminology or postmodern the image" (29-30).

Kenneth Cloke and Joan Goldsmith – The End of Management and the Rise of Organizational Democracy (2002):

The late “Great Debate between Capitalism and Socialism” was misframed from the viewpoint of those who advocate an economic democracy. An economic democracy is a private property market economy where the contract to rent people (the employment relation) is abolished, where the democratic principle is applied to the workplace so that the legal members of each firm are the people who work in it, and where the assets and liabilities produced in the firms are thus privately appropriated by the people who create them in accordance with the standard principle of imputing legal responsibility in accordance with de facto responsibility (i.e., the modern treatment of the labor theory of property) [see Ellerman 1992].

From the viewpoint of economic democracy, the capitalism-socialism debate was a debate between private and state capitalism (i.e., the private or public employment system), and the debate was as misframed as would be a debate between the private or public ownership of slaves.

David Ellerman

From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man – the function of his reasoning mind.

Ayn Rand

Long but profound:

"I spent 33 years in the Marines. Most of my time being a high-classed muscle man for Big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street...."

Smedley D. Butler -Major General U.S. Marine Corps

"Democracy hides the fact that we live in a bourgeois dictatorship where the bourgeoisie holds the means of material production and controls the state, a state which will suddenly drop all pretense of democratic rights and resort to violence whenever its power is threatened. Democracy under capitalism is an ideology rather than a fact, and it is an ideology used against the working class time and again."

Allan Greene

8. You shall not steal

10. You shal not covet they neighbors
house

GOD

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.~

Sir Winston Churchill

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) British logician and philosopher (http://en.proverbia.net/citastema.asp?tematica=156)

Bertrand Russel

"This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments."
Adam Smith
Theory of Moral Sentiments, I, III, iii.

Adam Smith

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

winston churchill

“The last and most painful irony is that the two longtime rival armies in the securitization market – the investment banks and the GSEs – would end up magnifying each other’s sins rather than keeping each other in check.”

Bethany McClean and Joe Nocera in ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE

If we want the whole world to be rich, we need to start loving wealth. In the difference between poverty and plenty, the problem is the pverty, not the difference. Wealth is good.

P.J. O'Rourke in EAT THE RICH

From an article by Milton Friedman about corporate social responsibility:

"there is one and only one social responsibility of
business--to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits
so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and
free competition without deception or fraud."

Milton Friedman

Making money isn’t the main point of business. Money is a by-product…. A new product has been found, something of use to the world. A new industry moves into an undeveloped area. Factories go up, machines go in and you’re in business. It’s coincidental that people who’ve never seen a dime now have a dollar and barefooted kids wear shoes and have their faces washed. What’s wrong with an urge that gives people libraries, hospitals, baseball diamonds and movies on a Saturday night?

Humphrey Bogart as Linus Larrabee in Sabrina