Quotes from Hedrick Smith

Television's compelling power is its immediacy . .. this immediacy feeds the politics of emotions, gut reactions and impressions rather than the politics of logic, facts and reason; it emphasizes personality rather than issues.

Journalists cover words and delude themselves into thinking they have committed journalism.

We are literally Two Americas, remarkably out of touch with each other— the fortunate living the American Dream but lacking any practical comprehension of how the other half are suffering, month in and month out, unaware of the enervating toll of economic despair on the unfortunate half, many of whom just two or three years before had counted themselves among the fortunate.

In a political system where nearly every adult may vote but where knowledge, wealth, social position, access to officials, and other resources are unequally distributed, who actually governs? —ROBERT A. DAHL, Who Governs?

The only sure way to alter today's patently unequal democracy is for average Americans to mobilize politically—to break out of their political inertia and to move forcefully back into the political arena.

In the 1950s, U.S. employees nationwide paid collectively about 11 percent of their retirement costs. By the mid-2000s, they were paying 51 percent. Hundreds of billions of dollars in safety net costs were shifted from companies to employees without any offsetting real increase in the typical worker's pay. For ordinary Americans, the consequences were acute.

Two trends are primarily responsible for today's hyperconcentration of wealth inAmerica— the collective decisions over time by America's corporate power elite to take a far bigger share of business earnings for themselves, and the increasingly pro-rich, pro-business policy tilt in Washington since the late 1970s.

sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.… —THOMAS JEFFERSON, letter to a friend, 1816

Five long centuries of absolutism -from Ivan the Terrible to the Soviet seventies- had left the Russian massed submissive. In their personal lives, I found them ingenious in beating the numbing inefficiency of the state economy. Their black market was so vast that it operated as a countereconomy, even to the extent of producing underground millionaires. But in the sphere of political action, grass-roots initative was moribund.