Quotes from Sarah Chayes

In the first two years of the Trump administration the numbers just collapsed—compared to the Obama and George W. Bush administrations alike. At the Department of Agriculture, to take just one other example, fines levied on meat and processed food conglomerates for cheating contract farmers and other violations plummeted by 2018 to a tenth of 2013 levels.

A December 2018 study found that the EPA had cleared about half as many cases nationwide as it had just the previous year, FY 2017. So enfeebled, what do the enforcers still enforce? With limited resources, they go for smaller fry. My neighbors out fishing are more likely to get a citation for a leaky outboard than the insulation factory a few towns over is for swilling gallons of formaldehyde into a river.

They are moral choices. And they are being made by a self-dealing network whose private-sector members have been handed control of the public trust to a degree unprecedented in the United States, even in the Gilded Age.

The five chairs of the power committees," for example, "must contribute $500,000 [each] and raise an additional $1 million" for congressional campaign funds. Big donors thus get to choose not just who runs for office, but who, once elected, leads.

Systemic corruption, leaving no means of redress or civic appeal, drives citizens to extremes.

divides over cultural and identity-group issues often mask—in fact may be deliberately used to mask—unanimity at the top of the system when it comes to condoning or participating in corruption.

In my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million," wrote Sam Polk in the New York Times, "and I was angry because it wasn't big enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was addicted." Polk

But now, interviewees agreed, any kind of money wins more respect than the qualities their people used to value: truthfulness, objectivity, considering the good of others, hard work, education or the wisdom of old age, humility, and open hearted generosity.

In the United States, serious and damaging public corruption is not getting punished. That means, by default, that we deem it to be just fine.

I was struck by the date Norwegians placed on this change in attitude. The clear consensus: it was around 1980. For Nigerians, too: "When money became everything was in 1985." Egyptians I interviewed identified a similar shift in the 1980s.

That idea, that God signaled his "election" of a person by showering him or her with money, followed the Dutch and English Protestants to the New World and became a central strand in America's own mythology. Still, over the course of history and around the world, the intensity of people's obsession with money has not been constant over time. It waxes and wanes. The 1980s marks a waxing phase.

Brains and talent were sucked onto Wall Street, while other things that contribute to a country's greatness were starved of air. That's called an "opportunity cost," and it was huge.

But the more isolated people are—the less sense of community and responsibility for one another they feel—the more they turn to money for their comfort and survival.

Multiple experiments have demonstrated that—above a certain amount for comfort—more money does not make those who have it happier. Instead, it often leaves them feeling unfulfilled and ratchets up their stress.

Economic growth has become a mark of countries' virtue. And what goes for countries goes for people. It's not enough to have high net worth anymore. What matters is the rate of increase—that is, "ever growing wealth.

A Nigerian once answered a question about the social significance of money with an enigma: "People use money to intimidate people," he stated. I knew what he meant, but I made polite conversation: "Really? How?" "By giving it to them." That was not the answer I expected. I waited. "Then they can tell them what to do." Afghans said the same, I remembered: "When someone eats your food, he should obey you. You don't obey him.

over the 1982–84 period, taxes actually increased for all those making less than $30,000 a year….For those making over $200,000 a year, however, the Reagan cuts brought an average reduction of…15 percent." Thus was perpetrated, say two other analysts, "what may well have been the most accelerated upwards redistribution of income in the nation's history.

This race among the superrich—for zeroes in their bank accounts—means a race to transform items of inestimable value into cold, hard cash. The land, what's on and under the land—all that vibrant life—human effort and creativity, our friendships, our health and the "statistical value" of our very lives, all are being converted into money. We have even equated speech—that unique human gift—with money.

Under neither the George W. Bush nor the Obama administrations were conditions attached to the taxpayer-funded assistance banks were handed. No one leveraged the collapse of the banks' moral authority. The U.S. government chose not to use our money to intimidate the banks.

the history of the Gilded Age delivers one certainty, it is this: there is no way to access infinite wealth without rigging the system. No one becomes a billionaire honestly.

President Obama's regulators could have imposed some decency. They could have rewired the incentive structure that had turned young traders into improvised explosives. They did not.

But leading lights of the Democratic Party and the businesses affiliated with them quickly embraced the new plutocratic ethos.

Don't you know?" the two elders shot back, almost together. "Olokun gives money to people he hates. It destroys them.

The recent alarming development and aggression of aggregated wealth, which, unless checked, will inevitably lead to the pauperization and hopeless degradation of the toiling masses, render it imperative, if we desire to enjoy the blessings of life, that a check should be placed upon its power and upon unjust accumulation