Quotes from Sarah Chayes

it is impossible to become a billionaire without bending the rules. Most of the members of that class run their operations and live their lives in ways that injure our communities. Most are trying to rig the system even further. These are not upstanding citizens. They are parasites and freeloaders—however they try to justify themselves. We do not owe them deference.

Grounded in a common experience, nurtured by years of experimentation and self-education, [this culture] produced a party, a platform, a specific new democratic ideology, and a pathbreaking political agenda for the American nation.

That consensus was far from complete. In a region where most, and the poorest, farmers were African American, they were ultimately excluded from the Farmers' Alliance and had to build a separate and terribly unequal version, the Colored Alliance. The Farmers' Alliance forced the Knights of Labor to abandon its rule welcoming members of all races as the price of a merger

The whole thrust of the platform suggests an insight of significance today. The Alliance saw the greatest threat to freedom not in government, but in big business. It looked to government as the only viable counterweight. Among the measures it advocated were an interstate commerce law to regulate railroad freight rates and laws to curb or prohibit financial speculation in railroad stock, agricultural futures, and land, and the strict enforcement of those laws.

Over the following years, the farmers adopted even more daring political proposals, such as the abolition of private interstate banking; the nationalization of railroads, of urban public transport, of the telegraph and the recently invented telephone; a graduated income tax, the secret ballot, and direct election of senators.

The mere fact of holding elections, Americans already knew, was not sufficient to guarantee people's rights. That truth—that an election per se is less important than the architecture within which it takes place—played out in the painful struggles that took place in Arab Spring countries after their revolutions.

Leadership matters. Different leadership pushed the United Kingdom and the United States in a different direction. It might have nurtured egalitarian tendencies in Germany, too.

They were groping for a modern order that allowed citizens to participate in the new economies of scale instead of being subject to them, one that offered more freedom of choice to more members of society. Theirs was a version of modernity based on grassroots cooperation, not zero-sum competition

lavish coverage in the Boston Post gave Kennedy those three key elements of the Gilded Age business model: the appearance of wealth, a supply of other people's money to speculate with, and a dignified reputation.

After fifteen years of trying other solutions, there was no alternative. The logic of Alliance thinking dictated a third party. And that is what emerged. The Populist Party was born on July 4, 1892, in Omaha, Nebraska, with Alliance members and thinking at its heart.

Every kleptocratic network I have examined, from Afghanistan to Honduras to Central Asian or African countries, has included a skein of outright

Workers who campaigned for Populist tickets were blacklisted and could not find jobs. Barriers to voting, such as the poll tax or education requirements, were stiffened. Press aligned with one party or the other "systematically played on racial, sectional, and class fears to alert readers to the Populist menace.

So does the fact that corrupt officials the world over buy art, often anonymously, as a way to launder money. The uber-rich use it to dodge taxes. Warehouses in Geneva and New York are stacked with specially conditioned safes. There, great works are reduced to the equivalent of zeroes in anonymous bank accounts.

In the end, none of our election recommendations was implemented. Afterward I asked ISAF's intelligence chief, General Michael Flynn—among the most sympathetic officers to the anticorruption agenda—if any surveillance satellites had been assigned to monitor turnout. He seemed startled, as though we had never discussed the idea. Oh no, came his answer. They were too busy tracking insurgents.

The generalized disaster of the era for the United States as a whole, however, was the Great Depression. And, though class barriers hardly disappeared, a vivid sense of sociologist Charles Fritz's "survivor community" feeling does emerge from the words of those who endured it.

Subjecting a ruler to the rule of law was the first way a coalition of subordinates successfully slapped down its apex alpha dominator in a modern, complex society. It was the first step humans took to reassert their unique egalitarian ethos after centuries of submitting to apelike hierarchy in kingdoms and empires. The second cornerstone of democracy—the vote—came only later. Kleptocratic networks seek to suborn both.

Curtailed, too, were hopes for a similarly democratic economy, based to any significant degree in joint local action in the interests of participating citizens. And yet, even in "failure," these movements profoundly altered the American system—at least for a time.

Charles I's refusal to plead, back in 1649, casts an instructive light on President Donald Trump's across-the-board rejection of congressional subpoenas. Current Justice Department policy holds that—unlike the precedent English commoners sought to establish back then—a sitting president cannot be prosecuted.

For that is the deal holding the networks together, the same deal that made the strength of the Mafia: protection for lieutenants and foot soldiers in return for a constant flow of spoils up through the ranks.

He wished, he said, to draw his listeners' attention to "the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government." But labor, the rail-splitter-turned-lawyer declared

Disaster on such a scale does more than spur personal generosity. It has effects that are relevant to the large-scale enactment of regulatory and social welfare measures in the 1930s and 1940s. Disaster "provides an unstructured social situation that enables…the possibility of introducing desired innovations

Not a war. Two wars, which unleashed two genocides, mass starvation in Europe, and a pandemic of proportions unseen since the bubonic plague; two wars that debased humanity as no events before them ever had. And a global economic collapse. That's what it took. That was the price the world paid to break the grip of the hydra.

It is this shared experience of disaster, and its psychological and social transformations, that helps explain why the radical reforms of the 1930s and 1940s happened, and finally took hold, when they did.

Even before the coronavirus pandemic hit, prompting a moratorium on most enforcement, EPA investigators across the country had to check with Washington before even requesting information from suspects or ordering laboratory tests that might prove a crime has been committed.