Quotes About Inequality

Clockers asks--almost in passing, and there's a lot more to it than this--a pretty interesting question: if you choose to work for the minimum wage when everyone around you is pocketing thousands from drug deals, then what does that do to you, to your head and to your heart? (Hornby's thoughts after reading Clockers by Richard Price)

L'amore, evidentemente, è antidemocratico come il denaro: si accumula attorno a persone che ne hanno già fin troppo: i sani di mente, i sani nel corpo, gli amabili

Dumnezeu i-a dat ochi saracului doar asa, de podoaba.

There are thirty-seven million people in the United States without any form of medical insurance. Every other leading industrial nation in the world—Germany, Italy, France, Japan, England, Canada, and all the others—supplies health care to all its citizens, at a fraction of what the world's richest country spends for inadequate health care. It's our national shame.

Native-born Protestants loathed and oppressed Catholics and immigrants, and Catholics and immigrants scorned and murdered Negroes, as if each group fed off its hate, needing the nourishment provided by the bone marrow of someone weaker.

Los protestantes nativos aborrecían y oprimían a católicos e inmigrantes, y los católicos e inmigrantes despreciaban y asesinaban a los negros, como si cada grupo viviera de su odio y necesitara el alimento que proporcionaba el tuétano de alguien más débil.

The war against working people should be understood to be a real war…. Specifically in the U.S., which happens to have a highly class-conscious business class…. And they have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except they don't want anybody else to know about it.

Of course all such conclusions about appropriate actions against the rich and powerful are based on a fundamental flaw: This is us, and that is them. This crucial principle, deeply embedded in Western culture, suffices to undermine even the most precise analogy and the most impeccable reasoning.

As in the past, the costs and risks of the coming phases of the industrial economy were to be socialized, with eventual profits privatized ...

But entertainment has the merit not only of being better suited to helping sell goods; it is an effective vehicle for hidden ideological messages.24 Furthermore, in a system of high and growing inequality, entertainment is the contemporary equivalent of the Roman "games of the circus" that diverts the public from politics and generates a political apathy that is helpful to preservation of the status quo.

If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to sell themselves in order to survive. Now, you can say, they rent themselves freely, it's a free contract - but that's a joke. If your choice is, do what I tell you or starve, that's not a choice - it's infact what was commonly referred to as 'wage slavery' in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

We should not forget Adam Smith's perspicuous observation that the "masters of mankind"—in his day, the merchants and manufacturers of England—never cease to pursue their "vile maxim": "All for ourselves, and nothing for other people.

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.

The economic consequences of these policies have been the same just about everywhere, and exactly what one would expect: a massive increase in social and economic inequality, a marked increase in severe deprivation for the poorest nations and peoples of the world, a disastrous global environment, an unstable global economy and an unprecedented bonanza for the wealthy.

But for another thing, there's no law of nature which says that control over capital has to be in a few hands?that's like saying that political power has to be in a few hands. Why? There wasn't a law that said that the king and the nobles had to run everything, and there isn't a law that says that corporate owners and managers have to run everything either. These are social arrangements. They developed historically, they can be changed historically

Occupy is the first major public response to thirty years of class war

War is a racket. The few profit, the many pay.

Corporations barely pay taxes. The corporate tax rate is already very low, but corporations have worked out an array of complicated techniques so they often don't have to pay taxes at all... The scale of sheer robbery by corporate power is enormous.

Aristotle was right—the way to overcome the paradox of democracy is by reducing inequality, not reducing democracy.

Workers and their families may starve to death in the New World Order of economic rationality, but diamond necklaces are cheaper in elegant New York shops, thanks to the miracle of the market.

Workers aren't free to move, labor can't move, but capital can.

For the majority, real incomes have pretty much stagnated, sometimes declined. Benefits have also declined and work hours have gone up, and so on. It's not Third World misery, but it's not what it ought to be in a rich society, the richest in the world, in fact, with plenty of wealth around, which people can see, just not in their pockets.

It is rather striking to observe that the policies that the rich and powerful adopt for themselves are the precise opposite of those they dictate to the weak and poor.

It means that students, if they don't come from very wealthy families, they're going to leave college with big debts. And if you have a big debt, you're trapped. I mean, maybe you wanted to become a public interest lawyer, but you're going to have to go into a corporate law firm to pay off those debts. And by the time you're part of the culture, you're not going to get out of it again.