We have an underdeveloped democracy and overdeveloped plutocracy.
If you know what’s going on and know how society can be improved and happiness advanced, you tend to focus on how to get things done that will help health, safety, opportunity, justice, accountability of powerful institutions to the people they are supposed to serve.
The various Social Security privatization schemes, full and partial, would cost both the ‘social’ – that is the public, cooperative, societal – element of the program and ‘security’ – the rock-solid income guarantee afforded by the system. It should be rejected.
Things have gotten so bad in this country, you look back at Richard Nixon with nostalgia.
Members of Congress are like the voters in one respect – they want to go with the winners.
Word of mouth is the most effective means of communication.
This welfare for wealthy companies wastes taxpayer dollars, harms the environment, and makes a mockery of the recent reductions in federal social spending programs.
Democrats have become very good at electing very bad Republicans.
Today the large organization is lord and master, and most of its employees have been desensitized much as were the medieval peasants who never knew they were serfs.
Is there a number or mark planned for the hand or forehead in a new cashless society? YES, and I have seen the machines that are now ready to put it into operation.
The food industry, its trade associations, and research foundations, is well financed and highly organized to pressure the FDA.
A citizenship of wholesale delegation and abdication to public and private power systems, such as prevails now, makes such periodic checks as elections little more than rituals.
Power concedes nothing without a demand. The struggle for justice must never be adjourned. The forces of injustice do not take vacations.
Obviously, the answer to oil spills is to paper-train the tankers.
The job of a leader today is not to create followers. It’s to create more leaders.
For almost seventy years the life insurance industry has been a smug sacred cow feeding the public a steady line of sacred bull.
How often do police accidentally shoot and kill bankers who are committing financial crimes, stealing homes, and plunging the nation into economic instability and recession?
It is a disturbing sign of the times when the two most transformative science technologies affecting the globe – biotechnology and nanotechnology – are governed by no external ethical or legal frameworks to protect public safety and other public interests, despite the fact that both industries have benefited from heavy taxpayer-funded government support.
If the people are the landlords of the public airwaves and the television and radio stations are the tenants, why don’t the tenants pay rent?
The World Health Organization has named antibiotic resistance as one of the three major health problems of the new century.
Our public lands contain a wealth of natural resources – trees, oil, gas, coal, gold, silver, copper, iron, zinc, and many other minerals, onshore and off. We own these lands. Yet under current law the corporations control their extraction and pay very little to Uncle Sam for what revenues and profits they reap. Sometimes, in fact, they pay just about nothing.