The Fine Print Quotes

“Corporations have grown so powerful that they have inverted the Roman equation: rather than corporations existing to serve the state, the state serves them.”
― David Cay Johnston, The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use "Plain English" to Rob You Blind

“You will even read about an insurance company owned by one of America’s most admired billionaires that asked a paralyzed man to die because the cost of keeping him alive was cutting into the insurer’s profits.”
― David Cay Johnston, The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use "Plain English" to Rob You Blind

“How the promise of cheap, competitive and unlimited telecommunications service has been turned into a reality of expensive, monopolistic and limited service is just one part of the larger transformation in the American economy since the late 1970s.”
― David Cay Johnston, The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use "Plain English" to Rob You Blind

“Halliburton’s is a more extreme example, one in which a powerful and wealthy company transcends national borders so thoroughly that it is not an American company but a truly global enterprise with no allegiance to anything or anyone except the bottom line and the investors and executives who gain from its profits.”
― David Cay Johnston, The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use "Plain English" to Rob You Blind

“No other modern country gives corporations the unfettered power found in America to gouge customers, shortchange workers and erect barriers to fair play. A big reason is that so little of the news, which informs us about the world around us, addresses the private, government-approved mechanisms by which price gouging is employed to redistribute income upward.”
― David Cay Johnston, The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use "Plain English" to Rob You Blind

“In effect, Wisconsin politicians forced the owners of these 8,000 small, family-owned and taxpaying businesses to turn over a month’s profits so the money could be given to one of the biggest companies in the world, General Electric, and its partners to make a film glamorizing violent theft.”
― David Cay Johnston, The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use "Plain English" to Rob You Blind

“All this was done under the guise of “deregulation,” but the harsh truth is that there’s really no such thing. Everything has rules. Deregulation is just a disingenuous name for new regulation, too often under rules that favor corporations over their customers.”
― David Cay Johnston, The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use "Plain English" to Rob You Blind

“You’ll learn in this book how other courts, including the United States Supreme Court, have diminished the rights of consumers, voters and workers while enhancing corporate power.”
― David Cay Johnston, The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use "Plain English" to Rob You Blind

“In many of these subsidy programs, no jobs are created. Instead the state income taxes are given to companies that agree to move jobs from one state across the border to another, as AMC Theatres agreed to do in moving its headquarters from Kansas City, Missouri, to Leawood, Kansas, just ten miles away. AMC will get to pocket $47 million withheld from its workers, a boon to its major owners: J. P. Morgan, Apollo Management, the Carlyle Group and the firm Mitt Romney cofounded in 1984, Bain Capital Management.”
― David Cay Johnston, The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use "Plain English" to Rob You Blind

“The worst of these are laws in nineteen states that let companies pocket the state income taxes withheld from their workers’ paychecks for up to twenty-five years.”
― David Cay Johnston, The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use "Plain English" to Rob You Blind