Quotes About Power

The most important political competition over the next decades will not be between the right and left or between Republicans and Democrats. It will be between a majority of Americans who have been losing ground and an economic elite that refuses to recognize or respond to the majority's growing distress.

The meritocratic claim that people are paid what they are worth in the market is a tautology that begs the questions of how the market is organized and whether that organization is morally and economically defensible. In truth, income and wealth increasingly depend on who has the power to set the rules of the game.

The system is created by people. The question is, 'Which people?' The central issue is not more or less government. It's 'Who is government for?'. In other words, it's all a question of power — who has it and who doesn't.

If you took the greed out of Wall Street, all you'd have left is pavement.

They used the façade of Bork's pinched academic analysis to justify killing off antitrust.

I give money to everybody, even the Clintons, because that's how the system works," Trump said in 2016. Those might have been the most honest words ever to come out of his mouth.

Markets need rules for determining the degree to which economic power can be concentrated without damaging the system.

History will show that the CEOs of America's largest corporations had the power to constrain the most dangerous, divisive, and anti-democratic president ever to occupy the Oval Office, but they chose not to use that power.

Edward G. Ryan, the chief justice of Wisconsin's Supreme Court, warned the graduating class of the state university in 1873. "The question will arise, and arise in your day, though perhaps not fully in mine, 'Which shall rule—wealth or man; which shall lead—money or intellect; who shall fill public stations—educated and patriotic free men, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?

Moreover, people who believe the game is rigged are easy prey for political demagogues with fast tongues and dumb ideas.

truth, income and wealth increasingly depend on who has the power to set the rules of the game.

Economic bullying takes many forms but almost always preys on individuals and families that have little or no power and are at the mercy of those who do.

he is awash in self-delusion, a condition especially dangerous in people who have significant power over others. Dimon doesn't see how he has contributed to the mess we're in. He doesn't acknowledge the inconsistencies between his preferred self-image as "patriot first" and his roles as CEO of America's largest bank and chair of the Business Roundtable. He doesn't understand how he has hijacked the system.

President Woodrow Wilson explained the dangerous connection between excessive economic and political power in similar terms, in his 1913 book, The New Freedom: "I do not expect to see monopoly restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it.

On introducing his antitrust bill in 1890, Republican senator John Sherman of Ohio thundered, "If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life." Sherman's

Capitalism has become more responsive to what we want as individual purchasers of goods, but democracy has grown less responsive to what we want together as citizens

Commitments to social responsibility are also conveniently reassuring to talented or privileged young people who want to do good while also doing well, and who don't want to acknowledge the cruel joke that, as Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All, has pointed out, people with the most to lose from genuine social change have put themselves in charge of social change.

We're not in trouble because gays want to marry or women want to have some control over when they have babies. We're in trouble because CEOs are collecting exorbitant pay while slicing the pay of average workers, because the titans of Wall Street demand short-term results over long-term jobs, and because of a boardroom culture that tolerates financial conflicts of interest, insider trading, and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign "donations.

What's truly immoral is not what adults choose to do with other consenting adults but what those with great power have chosen to do to the rest of us. America's problems have nothing to do with private morality. The breakdown is in public morality—abuses of public trust that undermine the integrity of our economy and democracy

The idea of a "free market" separate and distinct from government has functioned as a useful cover for those who do not want the market mechanism fully exposed. They

the underlying issue has nothing to do with a hypothetical choice between the "free market" and government. Decisions must be made about whether a particular company or group of companies has "excessive" market power.

Republicans want us to believe that the central issue is the size of government, but the real issue is whom government is for. Public

We are perilously close to losing an economy and a democracy that are meant to work for everyone and to replacing them with an economy and a government that will exist mainly for a few wealthy and powerful people.

My conclusion is that the only way to reverse course is for the vast majority who now lack influence over the rules of the game to become organized and unified