Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research

Green Army: Research and Development

Developers can still get rich, politicians can still get payoffs, megaprojects can still be funded, but it needs to be in the context of strengthening defenses against environmental change, not weakening them — because once they get too weak, no one is going to be making money anymore.
In a time of environemntal change, limiting loss will be just as important as promoting growth.

— Cleo Paskal, Global Warring, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p 245.


Caroline Ash, Elizabeth Culotta, Julia Fahrenkamp-Uppenbrink, David Malakoff, Jesse Smith, Andrew Sugden and Sacha Vignieri:
Anthropogenic climate change is now a part of our reality.
Even the most optimistic estimates of the effects of contemporary fossil fuel use suggest that mean global temperature will rise by a minimum of 2°C before the end of this century and that CO2 emissions will affect climate for tens of thousands of years. …
[Terrestrial ecosystems] will face rates of change unprecedented in the past 65 million years.
(Science, Vol 314, AAAS, 2 August 2013, p 473)

IPCC AR5 Working Group I:
The globally averaged combined land and ocean surface temperature data as calculated by a linear trend, show a warming of 0.85 [0.65 to 1.06] °C [3], over the period 1880–2012, when multiple independently produced datasets exist.
(Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis — Summary for Policymakers, 27 September 2013, p 4)

Alan Austin:
In [the fourth biennual] Global Green Economy Index released yesterday [by Dual Citizen, Australia fell 27 places to] 37th out of 60 countries on clean energy performance [and ranked] last on global leadership.
(Abbott takes Australia to last place on global climate change leadership, Independent Australia, 21 October 2014, emphasis added)

Robert Nicholls & Jason Lowe:
[The] loss of the Greenland Ice Sheet and the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Shelf could raise global-mean sea levels by up to 10 m or more over the next 1,000 years.
(Climate Stabilisation and Impacts of Sea-Level Rise, Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change, Hans Schellnhuber, Editor in Chief, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p 202)

Stairway to Heaven — Escalator to Hell

(Skeptical Science)

World Bank: Rising Global Mean Temperature

[Observational data corrected for sources of short-term variability (El Nino/Southern Oscillation, volcanic aerosols and solar variability) reveals the underlying trend.]
(Foster & Rahmstorf, Global temperature evolution 1979–2010, Environmental Research Letters, 6(4), 2011)

(Boden, T A , G Marland, and R J Andres, Global, Regional, and National Fossil-Fuel CO2 Emissions, Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, US Department of Energy, 2017)

Robert Putnam

Green Army: Persons of Interest

Poverty amongst riches is the most grievous form of want.

— Lucius Seneca (~4 BCE – 65 CE), Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, LXXIV, 4, adapted.


No society can be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of members are poor and miserable.

— Adam Smith (1723 – 90)


We got to keep these here people down or they'll take the country. …
Outlanders.
Foreigners.
Sure, they talk the same language, but they ain't the same.
Look how they live. …
Why, Jesus, they're as dangerous as niggers in the South!
If they ever get together there ain't nothin' that'll stop 'em.

— John Steinbeck (1902 – 68), The Grapes of Wrath, 1939, p 250.


John Kennedy (1917 – 63):
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.
(Chris Matthews, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, Simon & Schuster, 2011, Reader's Digest, 2013,
p 129)

Abraham Lincoln (1809 – 65):
Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. …
The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. …
The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. …
In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free. …
We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
(Message to Congress, 1 December 1892)

Clement Vallandigham ( 1820 – 71) [Leader, Peace Democrats, 14 January 1863]:
I see more of barbarism and sin, a thousand times, in the continuance of this war … and the enslavement of the white race by debt and taxes and arbitrary power [than in Negro slavery.]
In considering terms of settlement [with the South, we should] look only to welfare, peace, and safety of the white race, without reference to the effect that settlement may have on the African.
(James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 2nd Edition, Oxford University Press, 2003, p 513)

George Gilder (1939):
In order to succeed … the poor need, most of all, the spur of their poverty.
(Wealth and Poverty, 1981)

Robert Putnam (1941):
Over the four decades between 1974 and 2014, inflation-adjusted annual market income

• fell $320 for households at the 10th percentile (the bottom tenth),
• rose $388 for those at the 20th percentile (the bottom fifth),
• rose $5,232 for those at the national median,
• rose $75,053 for households in the top 5 percent,
• rose $929,108 for those in the top 1 percent, and
• rose $4,846,718 for those in the top 0.1 percent. …

If today’s income were distributed in the same way that 1970 income was distributed, it is estimated,

• the bottom 99 percent would get roughly $1 trillion more annually, and
• the top 1 percent would get roughly $1 trillion less.

(The Upswing, 2020)

Would you like to know more?

Mark Blyth (1967):
72% of the working population [in the US live from] paycheck to paycheck, have few if any savings, and would have trouble raising $2000 on short notice.
(Austerity, Oxford University Press, 2013, p 48)

Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826):
All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man.
The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs; nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.
(Letter to Roger C Weightman, 24 June 1826)

Kim Robinson (1952):
There were of course very powerful forces on Earth adamantly opposed to … creating full employment …
Full employment, if enacted, would remove “wage pressure” — which phrase had always meant fear struck into the hearts of the poor, also into the hearts of anyone who feared becoming poor, which meant almost everyone on Earth.
This fear was a major tool of social control, indeed the prop that held up the current order despite its obvious failures.
Even though it was a system so bad that everyone in it lived in fear, either of starvation or the guillotine, still they clutched to it harder than ever.
(2312, Orbit, 2012, p 373-4)

Ridley Scott (1937):
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it?
That's what it is to be a slave.
(Blade Runner, 1982)

American Political Science Association Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy:
Today, the voices of American citizens are raised and heard unequally.
The privileged participate more than others and are increasingly well organized to press their demands on government.
Public officials, in turn, are much more responsive to the privileged than to average citizens and the least affluent.
Citizens with lower or moderate incomes speak with a whisper that is lost on the ears of inattentive government officials, while the advantaged roar with a clarity and consistency that policy-makers readily hear and routinely follow.
(American Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality, Perspectives on Politics, December 2004, p 651)

Don Watson (1949):
[The US minimum wage has fallen by a third since 1968.]
More than 20% of children in the United States live in poverty, more than twice the rate of any European country.
[The Australian child poverty rate is 17.4%.]
With a quarter of totalitarian China's population, democratic America has about the same number of people in jail.
(Enemy Within: American Politics in the Time of Trump, Issue 63, 2016, p 34)

Sean Reardon [Sociologist, Stanford University]:
The achievement gap [in education] between children from high- and low-income families is roughly 30–40% larger among children born in 2001 than among those born 25 years earlier.
(The Widening Academic Achievement Gap Between the Rich and the Poor: New Evidence and Possible Explanations, in Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances, Greg Duncan & Richard Murnane, Editors, Russell Sage Foundation, 2011)

Andrew Cherlin:
The wages of men without college degrees have fallen since the early 1970s, and the wages of women without college degrees have failed to grow.
(Demographic Trends in the United States: A Review of Research in the 2000s, Journal of Marriage and Family, 72, June 2010, p 404)

Milton Friedman (1912 – 2006):
[In] a free choice [educational] system, you would have more heterogeneous schools [and] far less segregation by social and economic class than you now have. …
I went to a state school, Rutger's university.
I went on a state scholarship.
The poor suckers in the state of New Jersey paid for my going to college.
I personally think that was a good thing. ….
[And] I don't see any reason whatsoever, why I shouldn't have been required to pay back that money.
(What's Wrong With Our Schools, Free to Choose, Episode 6, PBS, 1980)

Robert Putnam (1941)

A World Without Trust

I've told you about my granddaughter, Miriam …
Mary Sue and Miriam are exactly the same age.
They are both granddaughters of Port Clinton [Ohio] in the 1950s. …
I'm just going to read to you, the field notes from [our meeting with Mary Sue:]

Mary Sue tells a harrowing tale of loneliness, distrust and isolation.
Her parents split up when she was 5.
And her mother turned to stripping and left her alone and hungry for days.
Her dad hooked up with another woman who hit her, refused to feed her, and confined her to room with baby-gates.
Caught trafficking marihuana at 16, Mary Sue … spent several months in a juvenile detention center, failed out of high school and got a "diploma" online.

[Mary Sue's] experiences have left her with a deep seated mistrust of anyone and everyone embodied in the scars on her arms (which we saw) where her boyfriend had burned her in the middle of the night, just a few days earlier.
Mary Sue wistfully recalls her stillborn baby, born when she was 13.
Since breaking up with the baby's dad, who left her for someone else, and with a second fiance who cheated on her after his release from prison, Mary Sue is currently dating an older man with two infants born two months apart to two other women.
And to Mary Sue this feels like the best that she can hope for. …

Mary Sue posted on facebook, not long ago, that she'd figured out her problems.
Her problem, she said, is that no one in the world loves her — which is probably true …
And, she's figured out how to solve that problem.
Mary Sue's going to have baby, because the baby will love her.
And if you think Mary Sue is in a pickle, imagine Mary Sue's baby …

[The] most important feature of the life of a poor kid in America today, bar none, is that poor kids are isolated and alone.
And they don't trust anyone.
They don't trust their parents …
They don't trust schools.
They don't trust anybody.

Mary Sue recently posted on facebook:

Love hurts.
Trust kills.

Think what it means to grow up in a society in which you cannot trust anyone.

(Closing the Opportunity Gap, RSA, 6 October 2015)

Ministry of Plenty

Live Long and Prosper

What would become of business without a market of fools?

— Chuang Tzu, 4th century BCE.

John Adams (1735 – 1826) [2nd President of the United States]:
The envy and rancor of the multitude against the rich is universal and restrained only by fear or necessity.
A beggar can never comprehend the reason why another should ride in a coach while he has no bread.
(Zoltan Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress, Harvard, 1952, p 205)

Alexander Hamilton (1756 – 1804):
Why has government been instituted at all?
Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.
(Federalist No 15 Papers, 17 September 1787)

Peter Singer (1974):
For all the claims that “big government” can never match the private sector, [the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency] is the ultimate rebuttal.
The Internet … e-mail, cell phones, computer graphics, weather satellites, fuel cells, lasers, night vision, and the Saturn V rockets [that first took man to the moon] all originated at DARPA. …
DARPA works by investing money in research ideas years before any other agency, university, or venture capitalists on Wall Street think they are fruitful enough to fund.
DARPA doesn’t focus on running its own secret labs, but instead spends 90% of its (official) budget of $3.1 billion on university and industry researchers …
(Wired for War, Penguin, 2009, p 140)

Mayer Rothschild (1744 – 1812):
If you can't make yourself loved, make yourself feared.
(p 89)

Niall Ferguson (1964):
The first era of financial globalization took at least a generation to achieve.
But it was blown apart in a matter of days.
And it would take more than two generations to repair the damage done by the guns of August 1914.
(The Ascent of Money, Penguin, 2008, p 304)

Andrew Carnegie (1835 – 1919):

• Individualism,
• Private Property,
• the Law of Accumulation of Wealth, and
• the Law of Competition

[are] the highest results of human experience [—] the best and most valuable of all that humanity has yet accomplished.

Arthur Pigou (1877 – 1959):
[All] the best business men want to get money, but many of them do not care about it much for its own sake; they want it chiefly as the most convincing proof to themselves and others that they have succeeded.
(Memorials of Alfred Marshall, 1956, p 282)

Simone Campbell (1945) [Catholic Nun]:
[We were] doing business roundtables [with] some entrepreneur, CEO types. …
A report had just come out that that the average CEO … got $10 million in salary a year, and [that] they were going for $11 million.
I got to ask them:

Is it that you're not getting by on $10 million that you need $11 million?
I don't get it.

And this one guy said: …

Oh, no Sister Simone. …
It's not about the money. …
It's that we want to win.
And money just happens to be the current measure of winning.

(Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise, Corsair, 2016, p 129)

PBS Frontline:
There was a phrase — "ripping someone's face off" — that was used on the trading floor to describe when you sold something to a client who didn't understand it and you were able to extract a massive fee because they didn't understand it.
[This was seen as] a good thing because [you were] making more money for the bank.
[That] sort of spirit, of [acting against the best interests of] your client … took on significant life on Wall Street.
(Money, Power and Wall Street, 2012)

Kid Power Conference, Disney World:
Kids love advertising: it's a gift — it's something they want.
There's something to said … about getting there first, and about branding children and owning them in that way. …
In boy's advertising, it is an aggressive pattern [—] antisocial behavior in pursuit of a product is a good thing.

Tim Hammonds [President & CEO, Food Marketing Institute]:
The interchange fee a supermarket pays when a customer pays with plastic is more than the money that flows to the retailer’s bottom line; it’s often double. …
The service provider using a computerized payment network is getting more dollars from the transaction than the net profit for the merchant who provides

• the labor,
• the land,
• the fixtures,
• the light and the heat, and
• the store that stocks the products.

(FMI Midwinter Executive Conference, 14 January 2006)

Eryk Bagshaw:
Former AMP chief executive Craig Meller has resigned as a financial services adviser to the Turnbull government. …
Mr Meller stepped down in the wake of revelations at the banking royal commission that AMP had spent a decade deliberately and repeatedly lying to the federal government's regulator over charging customers fees for no service. …
Ms O'Dwyer convened the [Financial Sector Advisory Council] in 2016 to provide advice to Mr Morrison "on potential areas for regulatory reform" …
(Ex-AMP CEO Craig Meller resigns as a Turnbull government adviser, Sydney Morning Herald, 30 April 2018)

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 – 59):
The people may always be mentally divided into three distinct classes.

• The first of these classes consists of the wealthy;
• the second, of those who are in easy circumstances; and
• the third is composed of those who have little or no property, and who subsist more especially by the work which they perform for the two superior orders.

(Democracy in America, 1835, Bantam, 2011, p 246)

Tom Switzer

Blue Army: Persons of Interest

Real Inequality

Tom Switzer (1971) [Director, Centre for Independent Studies]:
[Australia] is not like the US where we have seen real income inequality …
[According to the Productivity Commission:]

Sustained growth has delivered significantly increased living standards for the average Australian in every income group …
[Economic] mobility is high [and] movements in inequality indexes are slight rather than serious.

(Tim Soutphommasane on the 'political narcissism of minor differences', ABC Between The Lines, 9 May 2019)

Robert Carling:
[Redistributive tax policies] have strong disincentive effects …
Economic inequality is not intrinsically bad, and equality does not equate to fairness.
(Whatever happened to incentive?, Centre for Independent Studies, 28 July 2017)

Daniel Wild & Andrew Bushnell:
The best available evidence demonstrates that income inequality is low and declining in Australia.
(Understanding Inequality in Australia, Institute of Public Affairs, November 2017)

Henry Ergas:
Most measures suggest income inequality [in Australia] has now stabilised or diminished …
(Shorten’s fix for imaginary inequality issue is to tax the rich, The Australian, 29 July 2017)

peaceandlonglife:
Average equivalised household disposable income in Australia has grown by 2.1% per year (from $30,942 to $53,711) for the last 27 years (1989-16).
This includes a 4 year period of falling incomes (2012-15) following the mining boom.

(Rising inequality? A stocktake of the evidence, Productivity Commission, 2018, p 13)

peaceandlonglife:
Over for the last 27 years, in absolute terms, the incomes of the top 10% have been growing, on average, 7 times faster than those of the bottom 10%.
In percentage terms, the income of the top 10% (2.4%) has been growing 29% faster than the bottom 90% (1.9%).

(Rising inequality? A stocktake of the evidence, Productivity Commission, 2018, p 44)

peaceandlonglife:
In Australia in 1989, the income ratio of the top 10% ($68,495) to the bottom 10% ($9,562) was 7.2 to 1.
By 2016 the income ratio of the top 10% ($131,560) to the bottom 10% ($16,495) had increased to 8.0 to 1.

(Rising inequality? A stocktake of the evidence, Productivity Commission, 2018)

Ratio of average income of the richest 20% to the poorest 20%.
(Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level, 2009)

Productivity Commission

[In the 2 years to 2014,] the income share held by the top 1% of households rose [by 12.5%:] from 4.8% [to] 5.4% …
Australians aged 25-34 have had declining incomes since 2009-10. …

[In 2015-16, children] under the age of 15 [had] the highest levels of both:

• income poverty (11.5%, or about 530 000 children), and
• consumption poverty (12.9%, or a little under 600 000) …

Private consumption poverty has risen in every survey interval since 1993-94. …
[Relative] income poverty [has not declined] despite 27 years of uninterrupted growth …
About half of Australians experienced income poverty at some point between 2001 and 2016. …
About [700,000 Australians] have been in income poverty continuously for at least the last 4 years. …

Among 28 OECD countries [Australia ranks:]

• 3rd in median household wealth, [but]
• [8th in equality of] wealth distribution …

[All] wealth deciles except the bottom one saw real increases in average wealth since the early 2000s.
The top half of the wealth distribution experienced particularly strong growth …
[The] wealth of the top decile increased by about $620,000 to reach $2.2 million, which is … about 7 times as much as the median person.
[By contrast, the] average wealth of the bottom decile actually fell … from about $10,000 to $8,000. …

Wealth inequality [in Australia] increased over the [12 years to 2015‑16] by 7%. …
The Gini coefficient for wealth (at about 0.6) is close to double the Gini coefficient for income (at about 0.3) …
[A] person at the 90th percentile of the wealth distribution has almost 40 times as much wealth as [a] person at the 10th percentile; for income, they have 4 times as much. …

[There] is less wealth mobility than income mobility, and more ‘stickiness’ at the top and bottom of the wealth distribution. …
If a father’s lifetime earnings are 10% above average for his generation, we would expect his son’s lifetime earnings to be 2–4% above average for his generation.
[Intergenerational earnings elasticity: 0.22 to 0.41]

peaceandlonglife:
An intergenerational earnings elasticity of 0.3 with a paternal income ratio of 8:1, confers an 87% income advantage to the sons of the richest 10% over the sons of the poorest 10%.

(Rising inequality? A stocktake of the evidence, August 2018)

(M Corak, Income inequality, equality of opportunity, and intergenerational mobility,
Journal of Economic Perspectives, 27:3, pp 79–102, 2013)

Mark Blyth

Green Army: Persons of Interest

• Democracy is Asset Insurance for the Rich
• Redistribution and Debt is Reinsurance for Democracy
• Austerity is Anorexia for the Economy

— Mark Blyth (1967)


The day of democracy is past …
Today is the day of wealth.
Wealth now is power as it never was power before —
     it commands earth and sea and sky.
All power is for those who can handle wealth.

— Herbert Wells (1866 – 1946), When the Sleeper Wakes, Chapter 19, The Graphic, 1898-9.


It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!

— Upton Sinclair (1878 – 68), I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked, 1935.


The easiest thing in the world is self-deceit; for every man believes what he wishes, though the reality is often different.

— Demosthenes (384 – 22 BCE), Third Olynthiac, Section 19, 349 BCE.

(Terry Hillman, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Economics, Penguin, 2014, p 265)

Francis Fukuyama

Blue Army: Persons of Interest

Francis Fukuyama (1952):
From the days of Aristotle … thinkers have believed that stable democracy rests on a broad middle class and that societies with extremes of wealth and poverty are susceptible either to

• oligarchic domination or
• populist revolution.

(Foreign Affairs)

Today leaders of democracies do not lead their countries to war for other than serious national causes, and must hesitate before taking such grave decisions for they know their polities will not permit them to behave recklessly.
When they do … they are severely punished.
((The End of History, 2006, p 261 )

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 – 59):
Democracy, carried to its furthest limits, is … prejudicial to the art of government; and for this reason it is better adapted to a people already versed in the conduct of administration than to a nation which is uninitiated in public affairs.
(Democracy in America, 1835, Bantam, 2011, p 256)

Alexis de Tocqueville

Blue Army: Persons of Interest

Thomas Piketty (1971):
The abolition of slavery posed difficult ideological problems to nineteenth-century proprietarian societies, which feared that abolition without compensation of slaveowners would ultimately undermine the whole proprietarian order and system of private property. …
Tocqueville … proposed in 1843 that half the indemnity be paid to slaveholders in the form of government annuities (hence by increasing the public debt, to be repaid by the taxpayers) and the other half by the slaves themselves, who would work for the state for ten years at low wages, allowing the wage differential to be used to reimburse their former owners.
In that way, he argued, the solution would be “fair to all participating parties,” since the former slaveowners would, after ten years, be obliged to pay “the increased price of labor” due to emancipation. …
[He also] proposed that former slaves be deprived of property rights for a long period of time, from ten to twenty years, to give them time to acquire a taste for work and effort; this lesson might be lost if they were to discover the comforts of property too quickly (and “unnaturally”).
(Capital and Ideology, 2019, emphasis added)

Alexis Clérel (1805 – 59)

[All] the particular circumstances which tend to make the state of a democratic community agitated and precarious … lead private persons more and more to sacrifice their rights to their tranquillity.
(p 842)

The nations of our day cannot prevent conditions of equality from spreading in their midst.
But it depends on themselves whether equality is to lead to

• servitude or freedom,
• knowledge or barbarism,
• prosperity or wretchedness. …

In the United States the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own. …
The fact that the political laws of Americans are such that the majority rules the community with sovereign sway, materially increases the power which the majority naturally exercises over the mind [of the individual.]
For nothing is more customary in man than to recognize superior wisdom in the person of his oppressor.
(p 520

In the United States, where the poor rule, the rich have always some reason to dread the abuses of their power.
(p 288, emphasis added)

[It] is easy to perceive that the wealthy members of the community entertain a hearty distaste to the democratic institutions of their country.
The populace is at once the object

• of their scorn and
• of their fears.

(p 207)

I know of no country … where the love of money has taken a stronger hold on the affections of men, and where the profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property.
(p 57)

In no country in the world do the citizens make such exertions for the common weal; and I am acquainted with no people which has established

• schools as numerous and as efficacious,
• places of public worship better suited to the wants of the inhabitants, or
• roads kept in better repair.

(p 102)

In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States.
Whilst the English seem disposed carefully to retain the bloody traces of the dark ages in the penal legislation, the Americans have almost expunged capital punishment from their codes.
(p 694)

The safeguard of morality is religion, and morality is the best security of law and the surest pledge of freedom.
(p 48)

[However, religions] ought to confine themselves within their own precincts; for in seeking to extend their power beyond religious matters, they incur a risk of not being believed at all.
The circle within which they seek to bound the human intellect ought therefore to be carefully traced, and beyond its verge the mind should be left in entire freedom to its own guidance.
(p 532)

[Patriotism] and religion are the only two motives in the world which can permanently direct the whole of a body politic to one end.
(p 104)

The English … rarely abuse the right of association [through resort to violence,] because they have long been accustomed to exercise it.
In France the passion for war is so intense that there is no undertaking so mad, or so injurious to the welfare of the State, that a man does not consider himself honored in defending it, at the risk of his life.
(p 226)

It is in the general and permanent interest of mankind that men should not kill each other: but it may happen to be the peculiar and temporary interest of a people or a class to justify, or even to honor, homicide.
(p 765)

Franklin Roosevelt

PBS American Experience

Franklin Roosevelt (1882 – 1945):
[The] only thing we have to fear is fear itself …

[There] must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. …

[In] our progress toward a resumption of work we require two safeguards against a return of the evils of the old order:

• there must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments, so that there will be an end to speculation with other people's money; and
• there must be provision for an adequate but sound currency. …

[We] now realize as we have never realized before, our interdependence on each other …
[That] we cannot merely take but we must give as well …
(First Inauguration Address, 4 March 1933)

Henry Fletcher (1873 – 1959) [Chairman, Republican National Committee, 1934-6]:
The New Deal is government from above.
It is based on the proposition that the people cannot manage their own affairs and that a government bureaucracy must manage for them.
(David Grubin, FDR, PBS American Experience, WGBH, 1994)

Franklin Roosevelt (1882 – 1945):
The time may be coming when the Germans and the Japs will do some fool thing that will put us in [the war].
That's the only real danger of our getting in.
(1940)