Daily Inspiration Quote by Susan George

George is quietly detonating a feel-good word: "investment". In policy speeches and corporate press releases, investment connotes building - new factories, new ideas, more jobs. She flips that halo into a harsher light by insisting that much of the action branded as investment is really financial choreography: firms buying firms, consolidating power, and re-labeling the reshuffle as productive growth. The sentence is engineered like a trapdoor. You step onto "investment" expecting uplift; you fall into "mergers and acquisitions", the cold technical phrase that reveals where the energy actually goes.

Her subtext is a moral audit of capitalism's PR. M&A is not neutral; it is a strategy that often rewards shareholders and executives while treating labor as the adjustable variable. "Of course" does heavy rhetorical work here: it signals that downsizing isn't an unfortunate side effect but a predictable feature. The quote reads as an indictment of a system that celebrates "efficiency" while outsourcing the costs to workers and communities.

Context matters. George, as an activist critic of globalization and corporate power, is speaking into decades of neoliberal policy where governments chase "investment" through deregulation, tax incentives, and weakened labor protections. Her line warns that if a country measures success by inbound capital flows without asking what kind, it may end up subsidizing its own layoffs. The sting is that the market can look busy, even prosperous, while quietly shrinking the social world that prosperity is supposed to support.