"I'm a radical reformist, because between where we are and where I want to go there's a great deal of work, and I won't see the end of this." -- Susan George
Susan George (born 29 June 1934) is a well-known political scientist and writer on global social justice, Third World poverty, underdevelopment and debt. She is a fellow and president of the board of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. She is a fierce critic of the present policies of the IMF, World Bank (IBRD) and what she calls their 'maldevelopment model'. She similarly criticizes the structural reform policies of the Washington Consensus on Third World development. She is of U.S. birth but now resides in France, and has dual citizenship.
"As the rich consume more and more, they are clearly not going to want to downgrade their own status.""Cost recovery is the polite way of saying, make families pay to educate their children.""Debt is such a powerful tool, it is such a useful tool, it's much better than colonialism ever was because you can keep control without having an army, without having a whole administration.""Everything has to be done to build some sort of international democracy. We've seen only the tiniest beginnings of that.""Having enough to eat, being able to educate your children, have reasonably stable employment, and being able to live in a society which isn't collapsing around you-all of these things have been generally eroded.""How do we get democracy at the international level? That's our problem. and it's essentially the same problem people faced in the 18th Century when they tried to get democracy nationally. Now we need it internationally.""I think the market is always going to be around. The goal is not to say, let's get rid of the market, because the market does render a huge number of services, and I don't want to have a fight about the price of something every time I buy a book or a bottle of water.""I used to work a lot on food issues and every time somebody predicted that production would be inadequate they got egg on their face a year or two later.""I was recently looking at what they can actually do to reduce consumption of petrol. It would be quite possible to build automobiles out of carbon fibre that would be just as strong, weigh 10 times less and consume 10 times less petrol.""If the economy becomes disembodied from society it can only lead to disaster.""If we wait for the U.S. to do something, we will be waiting for a very long time. It's Europe, it's Australia, it's the other developed and middle developing countries that have got to do the job.""If you cut down a forest, it doesn't matter how many sawmills you have if there are no more trees.""It seems to be the thing now that young people are getting back into politics.""Markets can't think about anything beyond about three months. This is very long-term for markets, which is why the important things in life have got to be taken outside of the marketplace.""Much of what is called investment is actually nothing more than mergers and acquisitions, and of course mergers and acquisitions are generally accompanied by downsizing.""Now we are flying off into outer space, there is no clear curb on what can be done in the name of the economy.""Only around 2% of the earth's surface is cultivatable land.""Redistribution of wealth would require enormous amounts of investment. The only time an elite has accepted this has been during crises, such as in America in the 1930s under Roosevelt.""Subsidize... or lend.""The natural capital is not income, but we spend our natural capital as if it were revenue, as if it were going to come back next year without any problems, whereas these renewals in nature can take hundreds of years.""The question is not only what is grown but what it's used for. There's not going to be a mass transformation of dietary habits in rich countries-on the contrary, the first thing people do when they become more prosperous is to buy more meat.""The real fight is about what should be in the marketplace and what should not. Should education be a marketable commodity? Should healthcare?""The Sierra Club in the United States has now really come out for population control and reduction.""The World Bank is now the biggest culprit in the debt crisis.""The World Development Movement, to take just one example, is doing good work. Some political parties are, too.""There are a lot of people who don't contribute anything to consumption and production.""There is no degree of human suffering which in and of itself is going to bring about change. Only organisation can change things.""There's people coming in who've never done any politics at all, who've never been in a trade union, they've never been in a political party, they've never done anything, but they do feel a kind of urgency.""This erosion of the middle class is happening all over the place. The opening of a wider gap between rich and poor is always accompanied by such a process.""We have the most crude accounting tools. It's tragic because our accounts and our national arithmetic doesn't tell us the things that we need to know.""We're trying to run a 21st century society and economy with 19th century Darwinian, competitive, crude ideas.""What I worry about is climate change, because that would have untold effects that we can't even measure yet.""What is not fair now is that corporations pay less and less tax, which means that you and I pay more because we're rooted somewhere, they've got our address, right?""What it missing, I think, is this notion of the common good.""What you need if you want jobs are small and medium sized enterprises, local initiatives, labour intensive work, community development, service providers and the like.""What's immediately profitable is the only kind of logic that capitalism understands."
She is honorary president of ATTAC France Transactions to Aid Citizens). In January 2007 she received an honorary doctorate from Newcastle University in the UK and in early March the International Studies Association at its congress in Chicago presented her with its first award to an Outstanding Public Scholar.
Susan George was a prominent and eloquent champion of the international civil-society campaign against the OECD's proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in the 1990s, and the ill-fated "Millennium Round" objectives of the WTO at Seattle in 1999. From 1990 to 1995 she served on the board of Greenpeace International as well as that of Greenpeace France. She has acted as a consultant to various United Nations specialised agencies and is a frequent public speaker, particularly for ATTAC groups, trade unions, and environment/development non-governmental organisations in many countries.
The Real Reasons for World Hunger (Penguin) 1976. Reprinted 1986, 1991 ISBN 0-14-013569-3 (An analysis of the real reasons for world hunger.)
Ill Fares the Land (Penguin) 1984. Revised and expanded 1990 ISBN 0-14-012790-9 (Essays on food, hunger and power.)
A Fate Worse Than Debt (Penguin) 1988 ISBN 0-14-022789-X (An analysis of the reasons for Third World debt.)
The Debt Boomerang (Pluto Press) 1992 ISBN 0-7453-0594-6 (Continuing the theme of Third World debt and its harmful effects.)
Faith and Credit: The World Bank's Secular Empire (with Fabrizio Sabelli) (Westview Press) 1994 ISBN 9780813326078
The Lugano Report: On Preserving Capitalism in the 21st Century 1999 ISBN 0-7453-1532-1
Another World Is Possible If (Verso Books) 2004 ISBN 1844675106
Hijacking America: How the Secular and Religious Right Changed What Americans Think 2008 ISBN 9780745644615 (On the take-over of America by the religious and secular right with the aim of destroying enlightenment and civilization)
