NeoFascism
- From: Neo <theONE@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 10 Sep 2005 18:00:32 -0400
"The offspring of riches: Pride, vanity, ostentation, arrogance, tyranny." – Mark Twain, 1835-1910
"The global economy, in terms of wages and benefits, has not improved life for the average American. The health care crisis is growing, Social Security is under massive assault and 22 percent of children live in poverty. Meanwhile, the richest one American -- Bill Gates -- owns more wealth than the bottom 100 million Americans." – Rep. Bernie Sanders (Independent-Vermont), 1999
"If we made an income pyramid out of a child's blocks, with each layer portraying $1,000 of income, the peak would be far higher than the Eiffel Tower, but almost all of us would be within a yard of the ground." – Paul Samuelson of MIT
"The freest government cannot long endure when the tendency of the law is to create a rapid accumulation of property in the hands of a few, and to render the masses poor and dependent." – Daniel Webster, 1782-1852
"Of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of plutocracy." – J. Pierpont Morgan, American financier, 1837-1913
"If you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars." – John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937)
"Behind every great fortune is a crime." – Honore de Balzac, French novelist (1799-185
"If our civilization is destroyed, it will not be by barbarians from below. Our barbarians come from above." – Henry Demarest Lloyd, American journalist (1847-1903)
"The man of great wealth owes a peculiar obligation to the state because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government." – Theodore Roosevelt
"We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." – Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
"A State divided into a small number of rich and a large number of poor will always develop a government manipulated by the rich to protect the amenities represented by their property." – Harold Laski, English political commentator (1930)
"The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly. The rich have always objected to being governed at all." – G. K. Chesterton, English essayist (1874-1936
"This troubled planet is a place of the most violent contrasts. Those that receive the rewards are totally separate from those who shoulder the burdens. It is not a wise leadership." – Mr. Spock of "Star Trek" (describing Ardana, where the rulers live in luxury in a cloud city above miners working in misery)
"There's no more central theme in the Bible than the immorality of inequality. Jesus speaks more about the gap between rich and poor than he does about heaven and hell." – Jim Wallis, editor, Sojourners magazine (1999)
"You have the pilots at your throat about vacation, that their wife is pregnant, why can't they have New Years Eve off? It's on and on and on." – Arnold Schwarzenegger, discussing the trials of owning your own Gulfstream jet. (Now he just leases.)
"I can't stand the pompous among us who complain about welfare. The biggest welfare recipients in the United States are the richest people." – CNN's Larry King (1995)
"If all the Forbes billionaires agreed to limit themselves to their basic billion and handed over the excess to Uncle Sam, Uncle Sam would end up with some $90 billion without one member of the club having to give up a single necessity or, for that matter, a single luxury . . . not a house, not a car, not a boat, not nothing." – Don Hewitt, 60 Minutes executive producer (1995)
"At some point, CEO pay is going to rub up against the gross national product, and I've been told by some economists that will put a cap on their salaries." – Graef Crystal, compensation analyst, April 20, 2000
"It was a very good plan. I have never seen three people work harder." – Willem F.P. de Vogel, chair, Computer Associates compensation committee, justifying the pay plan that last May awarded the company's top three executives 20 million shares worth $1.1 billion, Wall Street Journal, April 8, 1999.
"Republicans seem to think there is an inspiring quality in giving more money to the top one percent. When I hear this, I think of the `Horse and Sparrow' theory of economics that if you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows." -John Kenneth Galbraith
"A few people at the top are getting just enormous, enormous benefits," says economist and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, astounded at the 2003 Bush tax cut proposals. "You don’t need a Nobel prize to figure this out ....give money to people who will spend it. Link tax cuts to expenditure. For instance, expanded unemployment benefits, aid to states and localities, money to low wage workers, investment tax credits, in particular incremental tax credits, will direct money in areas where it will be spent."
"We're becoming an oligarchic society, with an extreme concentration of wealth. This concentration of wealth is protected through a political process that's making it difficult for anyone but the monied class to have a voice." – Economist Edward Wolff, New York University, Too Much, winter 1999
"Whether measured by wages, income or wealth, for 25 years the share of the privileged has increased, and everyone else (a roughly 80 percent majority) has become relatively worse off. We are truly in a second Gilded Age." – Juliet Schor, Harvard University, Shifting Fortunes (1999)
"If the richest one percent of the population were receiving the same share of after-tax income in 1999 as it did in 1977, it would be receiving an estimated $271 billion less in income this year -- $226,000 less per household." – Isaac Shapiro and Robert Greenstein, Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, September 4, 1999
"Since 1975, practically all the gains in household income have gone to the top 20% of households." -- Central Intelligence Agency World Factbook 2001, from the entry on the USA.
"This war is about economics. Let me give you an example: would I like it if someone put an oil rig in Jamaica Bay? Would I like it if all the oil went to someone else? Would I like it if all the money went to someone else? No. In the Middle East, they're mad." -- Retired NYC police investigator Frank O'Rourke. November, 2001. Quoted in The New Yorker magazine
"I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I've earned. If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you'll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kids of soil." – Warren Buffet
"Today, the reduction of economic inequality is the issue that dares not speak its name. Indeed, one measure of the degraded quality of American political language is the virtual disappearance of the word 'equality.'" – Todd Gitlin, American Prospect, 1996
"The rich have decided that, since they don't use public services any more, they shouldn't have to pay for them." – Ed Finn, Vancouver (British Columbia) Sun, May 16, 1996
"No one who works for a living should live in poverty." -- Senator Edward Kennedy
"The growing divide between wealth and poverty, between opportunity and misery, is both a challenge to our compassion and a source of instability. We must confront it." -- George W. Bush in Monterrey, Mexico, March 2002
"If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich." – John F. Kennedy
"We used to think of Great Britain, with its castles and peerages, as being the epitome of a class-based society. Today, we far surpass Britain in the disparity of income. That is economically disastrous and morally wrong." – Rep. David Obey (D-Wisconsin), March 11, 1996
"It's eating truffles at the public trough." – Maryland Senator Paul Pinsky, March 6, 1999, opposing a legislative proposal that would save the state's 700 richest taxpayers $100 million on their taxes.
"Perhaps I am too cynical, but I believe there is a separate class of people in this country called Too Rich to Go to Prison." – Molly Ivins
"It is not enough to tell me that you worked hard to get your gold. So does the devil work hard." – Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
"It should be no surprise that when rich men take control of the government, they pass laws that are favorable to themselves. The surprise is that those who are not rich vote for such people, even though they should know from bitter experience that the rich will continue to rip off the rest of us. Perhaps the reason is that rich men are very clever at covering up what they do." – Andrew Greeley, novelist and columnist, Chicago Sun-Times, February 18, 2001
"Can a democracy, owned and operated by CEOs and the inherited rich, who have little materially in common with the great majority, happily reflect the people's will over an extended period of time? Or is this the dry underbrush of an uncontrollable class warfare somewhere down the road?" – Nicholas Von Hoffman, New York Observer, May 29, 2000
"Globally, the growing gap between rich and poor is downright scandalous. The wealthiest 400 Americans are now collectively worth over $1 trillion, which is more than the collective net worth of 1.2 billion Chinese." – Merrill Goozner, Salon, October 4, 1999
"Together the 400 richest Americans are worth more than $1 trillion. Just 400 people -- they could all stay at New York's Plaza Hotel at the same time -- are worth nearly one-eighth of the total gross domestic product of the United States, the world's richest economy." – Holly Sklar, Houston Chronicle, October 4, 1999
"The culture of Wall Street pushes many into a never-never land of no time and unlimited cash. They hire others to do their cooking, cleaning, laundry, child care, gift buying, party planning and dog walking. One told a therapist that there was no time to wash, so he simply bought enough underwear for a month." – Sharon Walsh and Blaine Harden, Washington Post, January 31, 1998
"It's the European mentality. The enrichment of an individual on the backs of the workers is considered exploitation." – Joerg Pluta, executive director, the German Shareholder Protection Association, explaining his opposition to the idea of paying German executives at U.S. executive rates.
"You can easily find people who are ten times as rich at sixty as they were at twenty; but not one of them will tell you that they are ten times as happy." – George Bernard Shaw, 1928
"If you gain fame, power, or wealth, you won't have any trouble finding lovers, but they will be people who love fame, power, or wealth." – Philip Slater, Wealth Addiction (1980)
"It doesn't take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." --Bob Dylan .
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