Quotes About Inequality

And most of all, it means continually drawing connections among these seemingly disparate struggles—asserting, for instance, that the logic that would cut pensions, food stamps, and health care before increasing taxes on the rich is the same logic that would blast the bedrock of the earth to get the last vapors of gas and the last drops of oil before making the shift to renewable energy.

The fossil fuel companies have known for decades that their core product was warming the planet, and yet they have not only failed to adapt to that reality, they have blocked progress at every turn. Meanwhile, oil and gas companies remain some of the most profitable corporations in history...These companies are rich, quite simply, because they have dumped the cost of cleaning up their mess onto regular people around the world.

In much of the Southern Hemisphere, neo liberalism is frequently spoken of as the second colonial pillage: in the first pillage, the riches were seized from the land, and in the second they were stripped from the state.

According to a 2009 Harvard Medical School study, as many as 45,000 people die annually in the United States because they lack health insurance. As one of the study's coauthors pointed out, this works out to about one death every twelve minutes. It's

significant cause of rising emissions is not the reproductive behavior of the poor but the consumer behaviors of the rich.

In truth, nothing has done more to help build our present corporate dystopia than the persistent and systematic pitting of working-class whites against Blacks, citizens against migrants, and men against women. White supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia have been the elite's most potent defenses against genuine democracy.

The climate science will no longer be denied; what will be denied is the idea that the nations that are the largest historical emitters of carbon owe anything to the black and brown people impacted by that pollution. This will be denied based on the only rationale possible; that those non-white and non-Christian people are lesser than, are the other, are dangerous invaders.

Under the neoliberal worldview, governments exist in order to create the optimal conditions for private interests to maximize their profits and wealth, based on the theory that the profits and economic growth that follow will benefit everyone in the trickle-down from the top - eventually.

The same logic that is willing to work laborers to the bone for pennies a day will burn mountains of dirty coal while spending next to nothing on pollution controls because it's the cheapest way to produce. So

Although climate change will ultimately be an existential threat to all of humanity, in the short term we know that it does discriminate, hitting the poor first and worst

We learn the same lesson over and over again: in highly unequal societies, with deep injustices reliably tracing racial fault lines, disasters don't bring us all together in one fuzzy human family. They take preexisting divides and deepen them further, so the people who were already getting most screwed over before the disaster get extra doses of pain during and after.

Hunger isn't about the amount of food around—it's about being able to afford and control that food. After all, the U.S. has more food than it knows what to do with, and still 50 million people are food insecure.

Too often, when politicians introduce climate policies divorced from a broader agenda of economic justice, the policies they introduce are actively unjust.

are symptoms of the same underlying sickness: a dominance-based logic that treats so many people, and the earth itself, as disposable.

This perception of fairness—that one set of rules applies to players big and small—has been entirely missing from our collective responses to climate change thus far. For decades, regular people have been asked to turn off their lights, put on sweaters, and pay premium prices for nontoxic cleaning products and renewable energy—and then watched as the biggest polluters have been allowed to expand their emissions without penalty.

Superstorm Sandy, meanwhile, has been a windfall for New Jersey real estate developers who have received millions for new construction in lightly damaged areas, while it continues to be a nightmare for those living in hard-hit public housing, much as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina played out in New Orleans.10

The lady in the Rolls-Royce car is more damaging to morale than a fleet of Göring's bombing-planes.

Justice is expensive. That is why there is so little of it, and it is reserved for those few with enough money and influence to afford it.

We're cannon fodder, and human shields, and useful new blood, and minions, and janitors and maids, and thanks to all the work the losers in here do trying to get into an alliance and an enclave after, the enclave kids get extra sleep and extra food and extra help, more than if it was only them in here. And we all get the illusion of a chance. But the only chance they're really giving us is the chance to be useful to them.

Justice is expensive," Tharkay said. "That is why there is so little of it, and that reserved for those few with enough money and influence to afford it.

Women's flesh is evidence of a God-given wrongness; whereas fat men are fat gods.

No matter how "right on" the upper-middle class was, no matter the social-justice proclamations of my former liberal, affluent urban "tribe," no one really expressed any objection to this unequal distribution of risk and harm.

Men and women of the present day are, to those we might hope to bring into existence, what the pariah dogs of the streets of an Eastern town are to our own highly-bred varieties," Galton predicted.

Goddard seemed comfortable with the notion that 40 percent of immigrants were morons. "It is admitted on all sides that we are getting now the poorest of each race