On Corruption in America Quotes

“The phenomenon we confront is the worldwide equivalent of a forest fire, of the Blitz. We must react accordingly—with that same impulsive solidarity. Or, to restate this idea in terms of the other metaphor that has threaded through these pages: the only way to defeat the tiny but powerful coalition of meat hogs that is imperiling our whole community is to join together in a far-reaching egalitarian coalition and confront them in unison.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“Singling out petty burglary, drug offenses, and street violence, the push largely ignored white-collar wrongdoing. "But corporate crime and violence inflict far more damage on society than all street crime combined," wrote white-collar-crime expert Russell Mokhiber in 1996. He compared the estimated $4 billion that burglary and robbery cost the country to some $200 billion for fraud. Or the 24,000 homicides per year, as against 56,000 people who died from job-related causes such as black lung disease or accidents due to safety violations. How to count the tens of thousands of consumers who were hurt or killed in car accidents or by lung cancer, while auto giants lobbied against airbags and big tobacco fought warning labels? (Page 265)”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“He wished, he said, to draw his listeners’ attention to “the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government.” But labor, the rail-splitter-turned-lawyer declared,”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“A mere builder of more industrial plants, a creator of more railroad systems, an organizer of more corporations, is as likely to be a danger as a help. The day of the great promoter or the financial Titan, to whom we granted anything if only he would build, or develop, is over. Our task now is not discovery or exploitation of natural resources, or necessarily producing more goods. It is the soberer, less dramatic business of administering resources…of distributing wealth and products more equitably, of adapting existing economic organizations to the service of the people. If”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“We conclude this financial crisis was avoidable,” declared, in 2011, the commission charged with investigating the 2007–2008 financial cataclysm. That event caused more people to take their own lives in the United States than the 9/11 terrorist attacks caused casualties. It triggered what would be considered a humanitarian crisis in any African or Middle Eastern country, as millions of Americans, forced out of their homes, became internally displaced people.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“Where the cutting has been wholesale, and has lasted, is in Congress—Congress: the first branch of government, closest to the people; Congress, which on our behalf keeps an eye on all those unelected bureaucrats. Congressmen and -women have sabotaged their own institution’s ability to do that for us. They have smashed the tools it possessed to help fashion laws in the public interest. They have crippled their own capacity to come to independent conclusions as to the nature of the problems such laws would address. Congress has been disabled from inside. Most of this happened in one of those revisions of the House of Representatives’ internal rules when an election flipped the majority party. It was January 1995, and a last-minute geyser of campaign cash had delivered an upset Republican victory two months before. Newt Gingrich held the gavel. The very first provision of the new rules he hammered through on January 5 reads: “In the One Hundred Fourth Congress, the total number of staff of House committees shall be at least one-third less than the corresponding total in the One Hundred Third Congress.” Congressional staffers are the citizens’ subject matter experts. Over years, these scientists and auditors and lawyers and military veterans build up historical knowledge on the complex issues that jostle for House and Senate attention. They help members, who have to be generalists, drill down into specifics. Cut staffs, and members lose the bandwidth to craft wise legislation, the expertise to ask telling questions in hearings—the ability to hold oversight hearings at all. The Congressional Research Service, the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Budget Office all suffered the cuts. The Office of Technology Assessment was abolished—because, in 1995, what new technology could possibly be poised on the horizon? Democrats, when they regained control of the House, did not repair the damage. Today, the number of staff fielding thousands of corporate lobbyists or fact-checking their jive remains lower than it was a quarter century ago.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“it is impossible to become a billionaire without bending the rules. Most of the members of that class run their operations and live their lives in ways that injure our communities. Most are trying to rig the system even further. These are not upstanding citizens. They are parasites and freeloaders—however they try to justify themselves. We do not owe them deference.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“It is time to restore other values to primacy. That means honoring them, not just with words, but in ways that matter. For culture does not just happen. It must be nurtured. We do so by honoring people who build their lives around other priorities—ensuring they can earn a dignified living, even if we must pay more taxes ourselves to raise salaries for public servants. We do so by buying something handmade or hand grown when we possibly can, instead of at Walmart, or spending our own time and money on beauty and its creators. We do so by reducing our tolerance for ugliness.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“That means our places of worship, of course. It means our schools and universities, and our health-care facilities, the provision of our fundamental necessities, such as water and electricity and garbage collection, our food, and our natural surroundings. We must resist efforts to privatize these crucial functions. That means charter schools. It means public infrastructure such as railroads and ports and broadband. It means the fighting of our wars. Let us be adamant: money does not equal speech, that singularly human gift.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“When people receive gifts, no matter how innocent, they feel obligated and try to reciprocate. It is a lovely reflex in everyday life and has furthered community bonding and artistic vocation. But in politics, it leads to corruption. An outright ban on such gifts would protect officials from the unintended worst consequences of their best reflexes—and from the temptations that will inevitably be dangled before them.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“That explains the United States Constitution’s hard-and-fast rule against accepting any item of value from a government official or his or her agent.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“The point here is to do something. Not just anything, not waste our time just blowing off steam. Let’s all of us pick some part of our exploitative economy that especially galls us, consider our own assets and aptitudes, and change our behavior.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“It was a counterweight, the first I have felt in years. It was a note on a ram’s horn, before the walls of Jericho.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“With her final poem, “Bless This Land,” she declared: “Luminous forests, oceans, and rock cliff sold for the trash glut of gold, uranium, or oil bust rush yet there are new stories to be made, little ones coming up over the horizon.” Harjo did this revolutionary thing under the great greened dome of the Library of Congress,”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“means ceasing to make excuses for the meat hogs inside our own political or racial or gender or cultural in-group and demanding the same rigor from our own favorites as we do from the others.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“A third principle comes not from ancient Greece, but from the Farmers’ Alliance. It is the importance of ideas, the need for independent analysis, developed and transmitted in a constant exchange with and among neighbors, and the need to teach it actively. Too much dogma, unquestioned across the political spectrum—such as that unlimited growth is a sign of health—serves to reinforce the business model of the kleptocrats, or to distract us from it.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“A ratchet-up would be to expel violators like him from powerful jobs they currently hold if the wrongdoing continues or their contracts come up for renewal. The next notch would be to take their freedom—that is, to investigate, prosecute, and send them to jail. That option terrifies the dominator coalition. Why else would it have worked so hard for thirty years to eliminate it?”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“For example, executives and HR departments should not offer the vice president of Enron a string of government jobs in the public-private international development and infrastructure industries after his company’s debacle.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“A Nigerian friend once told me that an Islamic precept is not to punish a wrongdoer in a material he has in abundance. That is, a rich person should not be fined; it won’t trouble him. The trick then is to discover what is dearer to today’s kleptocrats than money—even in this era of full-blown Midas disease. Two such precious substances might be the prestige their money buys and the freedom—the “What the fuck” freedom to do anything they want with the people and the world around them.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“There is no magic formula, no step-by-step method for bringing the hydras that are laying waste to our societies under control.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“Consider the implications. Last time humanity was locked onto this course, it led to the collapse of the global economy and two world wars—and genocide, starvation, plague, and the detonation of nuclear bombs that wiped some 200,000 human beings off the earth and gave us the power to end our species. What manner of calamity lies ahead of us now?”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“Trump has taken mafia government to heights unrivaled in this country’s history. His swiftness to trade U.S. policy concessions for personal advancement will be the most shameful legacy of his presidency.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“The whole thing was a lavishly funded laboratory experiment in the Reagan-era unfettered pro-business principles that the Clinton administration was validating. Harvard, with its liberal reputation, added to the validation. Simultaneously across Asia and Latin America, similar experiments were being launched. Unfortunately, the grotesque virus that resulted did not stay sealed inside the post-Soviet laboratory.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“But leading lights of the Democratic Party and the businesses affiliated with them quickly embraced the new plutocratic ethos.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“over the 1982–84 period, taxes actually increased for all those making less than $30,000 a year….For those making over $200,000 a year, however, the Reagan cuts brought an average reduction of…15 percent.” Thus was perpetrated, say two other analysts, “what may well have been the most accelerated upwards redistribution of income in the nation’s history.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“It is this shared experience of disaster, and its psychological and social transformations, that helps explain why the radical reforms of the 1930s and 1940s happened, and finally took hold, when they did.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“Not a war. Two wars, which unleashed two genocides, mass starvation in Europe, and a pandemic of proportions unseen since the bubonic plague; two wars that debased humanity as no events before them ever had. And a global economic collapse. That’s what it took. That was the price the world paid to break the grip of the hydra.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“Disaster on such a scale does more than spur personal generosity. It has effects that are relevant to the large-scale enactment of regulatory and social welfare measures in the 1930s and 1940s. Disaster “provides an unstructured social situation that enables…the possibility of introducing desired innovations”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“The generalized disaster of the era for the United States as a whole, however, was the Great Depression. And, though class barriers hardly disappeared, a vivid sense of sociologist Charles Fritz’s “survivor community” feeling does emerge from the words of those who endured it.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake

“Leadership matters. Different leadership pushed the United Kingdom and the United States in a different direction. It might have nurtured egalitarian tendencies in Germany, too.”
― Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake