Quotes About Inequality

To continue present policies is to make permanent the division of our country into two societies; one, largely Negro and poor, located in the central cities; the other, predominantly white and affluent, located in the suburbs and in outlying areas.

since 2008, no high-ranking executive from any financial institution has gone to jail, not one, for any of the systemic crimes that wiped out 40 percent of the world's wealth.

We have a profound hatred of the weak and the poor, and a corresponding groveling terror before the rich and successful, and we're building a bureaucracy to match those feelings.

Ironically, the very brokest people in America, Hispanic immigrants, are one of America's last great cash crops.

Sanders is a clear outlier in a generation that has forgotten what it means to be a public servant. The Times remarks upon his "grumpy demeanor." But Bernie is grumpy because he's thinking about vets who need surgeries, guest workers who've had their wages ripped off, kids without access to dentists or some other godforsaken problem that most of us normal people can care about for maybe a few minutes on a good day, but Bernie worries about more or less all the time.

For a country founded on the idea that rights are inalienable and inherent from birth, we've developed a high tolerance for conditional rights and conditional citizenship. And the one condition, it turns out, is money. If you have a lot of it, the legal road you get to travel is well lit and beautifully maintained. If you don't, it's a dark alley and most Americans would be shocked to find out what's at the end of it.

Bill Clinton's political formula for seizing the presidency was simple. He made money tight in the ghettos and let it flow free on Wall Street. He showered the projects with cops and bean counters and pulled the cops off the beat in the financial services sector. And in one place he created vast new mountain ranges of paperwork, while in another, paperwork simply vanished.

Images of poor, inarticulate people are disturbing to audiences, especially upscale ones (read: people with disposable incomes who can respond to advertising). That's why we don't show poverty on TV unless we're laughing at it (Honey Boo Boo) or chasing it in squad cars (Cops).

there's a concrete difference between how we treat an individual who commits fraud within the structure of a giant multinational company with a lot of settlement money lying around, and how we treat, say, an ordinary broke person who commits welfare or unemployment fraud.

It's become a cliché by now, but since 2008, no high-ranking executive from any financial institution has gone to jail, not one, for any of the systemic crimes that wiped out 40 percent of the world's wealth.

If you're a person of means, you get full service for all ten amendments, and even a few that aren't listed. But if you owe, if you rent, you get a slightly thinner, more tubercular version of the Fourth Amendment, the First Amendment, the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, and so on.

The amazing closeness of American elections has never made sense. In a country in which 10 percent of the population owns 90 percent of the wealth, you'd expect the very rich to be a permanent electoral minority. That it doesn't work out that way is odd. But this is not the kind of observation pundits tend to make.

Bill Clinton's political formula for seizing the presidency was simple. He made money tight in the ghettos and let it flow free on Wall Street.

After Clinton, just to get food stamps to buy potatoes and flour, you suddenly had to hand in a detailed financial history dating back years, submit to wholesale invasions of privacy, and give in to a range of humiliating conditions. Meanwhile banks in the 1990s were increasingly encouraged to lend and speculate without filling out any paperwork at all, and eventually borrowers were freed of the burden of even having to show proof of income when

For a country founded on the idea that rights are inalienable and inherent from birth, we've developed a high tolerance for conditional rights and conditional citizenship. And the one condition, it turns out, is money. If you have a lot of it, the legal road you get to travel is well lit and beautifully maintained. If you don't, it's a dark alley and most Americans would be shocked to find out what's at the end of it.

Our leaders know we're turning into a giant ghetto and they are taking every last hubcap they can get their hands on before the rest of us wake up and realize what's happened.

The new America, instead, is fast becoming a vast ghetto in which all of us, conservatives and progressives, are being bled dry by a relatively tiny oligarchy of extremely clever financial criminals and their castrato henchmen in government, whose job is to be good actors on TV and put on a good show.

Twenty-six billion dollars of fraud: no felony cases. But when the stakes are in the hundreds of dollars, we kick in 26,000 doors a year, in just one county.

In the new American ghetto, the nightmare engine is bubble economics, a kind of high-tech casino scam that kills neighborhoods just like dope does, only the product is credit, not crack or heroin. It concentrates the money of the population in just a few hands with brutal efficiency, just like narco-business, and just as in narco-business the product itself, debt, steadily demoralizes the customer to the point where he's unable to prevent himself from being continually dominated.

poor white trash became the subject of extensive public debates in the antebellum period.

how could authorities distinguish between a white person who was merely poor by circumstance and one who was biologically predisposed to poverty, crime, and low social standing?

Dramatically and effectively, the Times article established symbolic and social linkages between blacks and poor whites and assigned responsibility for the disease to both.

For poor whites, some of the most pernicious, invidious, and damaging distinctions imposed by eugenicists were those that focused on intelligence and cognitive skills, areas of human ability that these professionals regarded as key to establishing and organizing a just and meritocratic democracy.

Inequality… has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.