Quotes from Sarah Chayes

The phenomenon we confront is the worldwide equivalent of a forest fire, of the Blitz. We must react accordingly—with that same impulsive solidarity. Or, to restate this idea in terms of the other metaphor that has threaded through these pages: the only way to defeat the tiny but powerful coalition of meat hogs that is imperiling our whole community is to join together in a far-reaching egalitarian coalition and confront them in unison.

Lawyers make their living mincing words. Many devote their skill and hard labor to constructing the apparatus of justification.

From the most distant prehistory, masked dancing and dramatic art have woven the fabric of group life. Declaiming and performing myths was a way of reinforcing a common worldview, bringing it to embodied life, imprinting it in members' subconscious. That is what the anarchists were doing.

It was, in the words of the original indictment, the citizens' "right to have the Commonwealth's business and its affairs conducted honestly, impartially, free from corruption, bias, dishonesty, deceit, official misconduct, and fraud.

means ceasing to make excuses for the meat hogs inside our own political or racial or gender or cultural in-group and demanding the same rigor from our own favorites as we do from the others.

With her final poem, "Bless This Land," she declared: "Luminous forests, oceans, and rock cliff sold for the trash glut of gold, uranium, or oil bust rush yet there are new stories to be made, little ones coming up over the horizon." Harjo did this revolutionary thing under the great greened dome of the Library of Congress

Here was the court, back to "only." And here was Americans' right to integrity back to mere money. Only if an official had taken dollars and cents—and only if she had done so by means of one of two narrowly defined crimes—had she violated anyone's right to her good faith in performing her duties.

It was a counterweight, the first I have felt in years. It was a note on a ram's horn, before the walls of Jericho.

We conclude this financial crisis was avoidable," declared, in 2011, the commission charged with investigating the 2007–2008 financial cataclysm. That event caused more people to take their own lives in the United States than the 9/11 terrorist attacks caused casualties. It triggered what would be considered a humanitarian crisis in any African or Middle Eastern country, as millions of Americans, forced out of their homes, became internally displaced people.

Unlike the recorded teachings of Jesus, however, anarchist ideology embraced the considered use of violence. Lucy Parsons avowed that had she been at Haymarket Square when the police arrived, had she seen their behavior and heard what transpired, she would have "flung the bomb [her]self.

The point here is to do something. Not just anything, not waste our time just blowing off steam. Let's all of us pick some part of our exploitative economy that especially galls us, consider our own assets and aptitudes, and change our behavior.

Red scares united Americans against not just the handful of violent anarchists, but against the hundreds of thousands of labor activists who were tarred with the same brush.

Boiled down, the basic principle is this, in Junger's words: "Communities that have been devastated by natural or man-made disasters almost never lapse into chaos and disorder; if anything, they become more just, more egalitarian, and more deliberately fair.

This is the real meaning of the myth of Midas. It wasn't just that the king might starve to death through blind greed. It was that everything he touched lost its incomparable properties and turned into cold, hard cash.

Disaster survivors and their neighbors instantly place whatever food they can collectively hunt and gather in common. There is no class, no race, no political orientation. Such meat sharing lies at the root of humans' remarkable egalitarian tendencies. Those tendencies are reinforced every time the ritual is enacted—especially at moments of vivid intensity

In other words, the U.S. government is creating a vast artificial market, where a handful of repeat offenders can fob off shoddy or defective products on American citizens at ever-increasing prices, without suffering any market consequences. Patriotism keeps us from quibbling. Fear, too: What would you not spend to stay safe? Another powerful pretext for this larceny is jobs. Defense contractors, we are told, employ people.

In 2014—like those Nigerian officers who kept ghost soldiers on their budgets—Military Professional Resources Inc. billed the U.S. government for hours supposedly worked by employees who were actually home on leave.

From the mid-1870s through the mid-1890s, an insurrection swept the backcountry of the nation's South and West. Though disfigured by the white supremacy derived especially from its southern roots, this vast stirring in coveralls and calico, of sod houses and village schools and covered-wagon encampments across thousands of square miles, was the most significant mass democratic uprising the United States has ever seen.

That explains the United States Constitution's hard-and-fast rule against accepting any item of value from a government official or his or her agent.

The initial phase of this revolt was the Farmers' Alliance movement, born on the Texas frontier.

When people receive gifts, no matter how innocent, they feel obligated and try to reciprocate. It is a lovely reflex in everyday life and has furthered community bonding and artistic vocation. But in politics, it leads to corruption. An outright ban on such gifts would protect officials from the unintended worst consequences of their best reflexes—and from the temptations that will inevitably be dangled before them.

Amid the ashes of stratified society, the egalitarian consensus can arise. But for that to happen, Fritz warns, the disaster must be generalized. Crises of more limited scope tend to have the opposite effect.

Indeed, for social solidarity to take widespread hold, it may be especially important that elites—the "rich," the "learned," and the "authorities"—undergo their share of the suffering

The punishing conditions helped birth the protest and reform groups' remarkable solidarity. But those conditions were not experienced by—or even visible to—other classes. And the nation's leadership did everything it could to thwart egalitarian tendencies. Between 1914 and 1945, however, the industrialized world and much of its periphery suffered a series of disasters that were absolutely generalized.