Chrystia Freeland Quotes

In large commercial cities, the money power is, I fear irresistible. It is not by open corruption that it always, or even most generally, operates.

Do the elected officials in Washington stand with ordinary Americans - working families, children, the elderly, the poor - or will the extraordinary power of billionaire campaign contributors and Big Money prevail? The American people, by the millions, must send Congress the answer to that question.

Big corporations have money and power to make sure every rule breaks their way; people have voices and votes to push back.

There are two Americas. One which influences government and economic policy and the other which must live with the results.

It matters not one iota what political party is in power or what President holds the rein of office. We are not politicians, or public thinkers; we are the rich; we own America; we got it, God knows how, but we intend to keep it if we can by throwing all our tremendous weight of our support, our influence, our money, our political connections, our purchased Senators, our hungry Congressmen, and our public-speaking demagogues, into the scale against any legislation, any political platform, any Presidential campaign that threatens the integrity of our estate.

Money speaks louder than words in Washington.

The rich are hijacking American democracy.

The class which has the power to rob upon a large scale has also the power to control the government and legalize their robbery.

Exxon, Coca-Cola, BHP Billiton and News Corporation have much more say in organising the global agenda than the planet's 5 billion mature-age voters without a ballot box.

It doesn't matter who you vote for. It's still the same billionaires that run the world.

Have you ever seen a candidate talking to a rich person on television?

People live with the illusion that we have a democratic system, but it's only the outward form of one. In reality we live in a plutocracy, a government of the rich.

I don't like gross monetary inequities. I firmly believe that the wrong people and the wrong professions are being rewarded, and rewarded absurdly, and that the hardest work the obscenely rich do is ensuring that they preserve their privileges, status symbols, and bloated bank accounts.

Obviously no one wants to give members of Congress a lot of money, because they barely do anything, and many of them are terrible, but a Congress that is made up of rich-but-not-super-rich people is going to be more corruptible than a Congress of really rich people.

We need wealthy dogs off the seats of power. They're taking us back to feudalism and I really don't want that. But I'm very far from being a socialist.

Maybe, just maybe, something is wrong when the greatest part of new money earned in our country goes to the top 1 percent.... There is something profoundly wrong then the millionaires and billionaires are running the politics of our country.... When billionaires are buying elections, that is not democracy.

It is no accident that in America today the gap between the very rich and everyone else is wider than at any time since the Gilded Age. Now, as then, the titans are seeking an even greater political voice to match their economic power. Now, as then, the inevitable danger is that they will confuse their own self-interest with the common good.

We're not a democracy. It's a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we're a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy.

Today’s super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves

Poor people don’t make campaign contributions.

We live in a country where Wall Street owns Washington.

America is less democratic than it might be because the preferences of the ultra wealthy often outweigh the preferences of everyone else.

Sadly, the system in this country is rigged in favor of wealthy elites who have purchased tremendous influence in our government.

I do worry about a world in which the rich get to write the rules.

Money buys access; access buys influence.