Quotes About Inequality

If you look at my career, towards the end you will see I was fighting like once a year. I was not part of the Don King top heavyweights, so I was kind of kept out. His guys were getting three to four fights a year and I could only get one.

I have long since thrown in the towel on the Democratic and Republican parties because they are really a front group for the 1%, for predatory banks, fossil fuel giants, and war profiteers.

Pale death, with impartial step, knocks at the hut of the poor and the towers of kings.

Part of the reason people abroad resent the United States is something Americans can do very little about: envy. The richest, most powerful country in the world attracts the jealousy of others in much the same way that the richest, most powerful man in a small town attracts the jealousy of others.

Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees and exploded the conventional wisdom about a shared American prosperity, exposing a group of people so poor they didn't have $50 for a bus ticket out of town. If we want to learn something from this disaster, the lesson ought to be: America's poor deserve better than this.

I remembered the 500 people that lived on a reserve outside my little town, behind a big fence.

You can't very well live in a castle while your kin is on the poor side of town and barely have enough food. Some want you to get to the top and rely on you making it for them, too.

It's very hard for people that live in the small towns to be able to buy a certain kind of clothes because they're not available to them, you know. They only see them in beautiful magazines.

In states where there's one really big city, a lot of outlying counties and smaller towns really don't have very many resources.

Rising inequality is toxic to growth. High levels of inequality exclude people - both as innovators and customers - diminishing both innovation and demand.

Poor people don't drive the toxic form of economic 'growth' that is destroying our environment.

Our crumbling infrastructure disproportionately harms Black, brown, Indigenous, and low-income communities. The negative health impacts arising from fossil fuel use, industrial pollution, and toxic materials in our homes and schools are literally making us sick.

Top 1 Percent progressivism emphasizes the idea of fairness - but it's nevertheless a politics of outrage, animated by at least a trace of envy. It's as if 'millionaires and billionaires' were the principal problem facing America today.

I grew up in Haughton, Louisiana. I go to my white grandparents' house, and then I cross the railroad tracks and hang out with my black grandma. We have English teachers on my white side. My grandpa is a principal. And then you go to the other side, and people have been in jail.

I've always wanted to write about the other side of the tracks, the have-nots, maybe because that's who I was.

Growing up I always felt like I was living on the other side of the tracks. I knew the people on the other side had more resources, more money, happier families.

When citizens believe that the elite care more about those across the ocean than those across the train tracks, insurance has broken down, we divide into factions, and those who are left behind become angry and disillusioned with a politics that no longer serves them.

I went to St. James Methodist Church in Clinton, a segregated church on the other side of the tracks.

Why do tax havens exist? Because rich countries allow them to. If the U.S. came down on tax havens in the same way they come down on countries that trade with Iran and Cuba, we'd have no tax havens in the world.

Trade has helped the economy grow. Simultaneously, a sizable number of Americans haven't shared in that bounty, and if we don't pay attention to their concerns, all the political favor for open markets will dry up.

Free trade will go a long way toward alleviating poverty in Central America. Yet trade alone is not enough.

As it is, the grotesque distortions of the global market mean that for every dollar the West dispatches to Africa in the form of aid, two dollars are clawed back through subsidies and tariff barriers: a monumental rip-off by the rich as they instruct the poor to accept 'free' trade or else.

The top 400 people own more wealth now than the bottom 185 million Americans taken together. That is a medieval structure.

There is grim irony in speaking of the freedom of contract of those who, because of their economic necessities, give their service for less than is needful to keep body and soul together.