Robert Kiyosaki Quotes

Disproportionate corporate power over governments is giving license to the greed that denies workers even minimum living wages. It is also seemingly a license to allow the sheer brutality of treatment of working people at the base of the supply chains.

The collapse of Enron was devastating to tens of thousands of people and shook the public's confidence in corporate America.

Ken Lay, the disgraced former chairman of Enron, found a way to escape his legal problems: He died after being convicted of fraud and conspiracy charges.

Wage theft, worker rights and workplace discrimination should not be swept under the rug. The United States cannot have a functional economy where all the gains go to the corporate class while all the pain goes to regular workers.

I remember when I did my Enron film, my executive producers at the time felt very strongly that I should mock the Enron executives more viciously because everybody wanted that moment.

The focus of our public discourse has been on how American companies are competing with Japanese, German, and other foreign companies. What this allows us to ignore is how each of those American companies is really in competition with the families of the workers. That's the real competition.

Our supporters can send the message that it's wrong for politically connected corporations to make millions while people doing an honest day's work are being cheated out of an honest day's pay.

The workingmen have been exploited all the way up and down the line by employers, landlords, everybody.

The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor - these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small-businessmen, the investments set aside for old age -- other people's money -- these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in..

… the blindness and greed of the so-called captains of industry.

What can happen in 30 years? A Senator can become a multimillionaire in public office while voting 17 times against raising the minimum wage, 3 times for corporate tax breaks that send Kentucky jobs overseas and 12 times against extending unemployment benefits for laid-off workers.

At the height of the Enron mania, the company's market value was $65 billion. Once the dust cleared, the final value was $0.

One of the most pervasive and damaging trends we are seeing in the 21st-century workplace is the deliberate misclassification of workers by employers looking to shift responsibility and cut costs.

We have to put an end to the culture of selfishness and corruption that allows greedy Wall Street banks and executives to rip off working people without any consequences.

Workers are baking the pie of prosperity, but they're not sharing in those dividends. That's unfair.

Wealth plays out in the political sphere in all kinds of ways, often personally. Can Hillary Clinton represent the interests of working people when she and her husband have taken so much money from Wall Street? Was Mitt Romney's private-equity business too ruthless with workers?

The exploitation of distressed workers and the social disparities must not continue.

Can you name the last time Paul Ryan worked as hard for Wisconsin workers as he has for corporate America? I can't. I can't think of one time.

Growing inequality is exacerbated by the companies who simply treat workers as commodities, and our governments are cowered by their demands to perpetuate this model of greed.

Some contractors force workers to provide paybacks to keep their jobs. Others intentionally misclassify workers in order to underpay them - by, for example, paying a skilled construction worker as a general laborer.

Before the New York Times starts running "Portraits in Grief" of former Enron employees, it's worth remembering that even after the collapse, Enron stock is still worth more than the entire Social Security "trust fund."

In the 1980s and 1990s, Jack Welch, the CEO of General Electric, laid off over 100,000 employees. His reward? When he retired from GE, he received a golden parachute of over $400 million dollars. This is the kind of corporate greed and irresponsibility that is destroying the middle class and must be ended.

Because of their marginalised position in the economy, the mass of the workers carry the burdens of society.

For over a decade, the top 1% of income earners have seen their pay skyrocket, riding a wave of lobbyist-sponsored financial de-regulation. For the remaining 99%, wages have stagnated, and employment has fallen off a cliff.

To a generation beaten down by skyrocketing unemployment, plunging retirement savings, and mounting home foreclosures, 'Mad Men' offers the schadenfreude-filled message that their predecessors were equally unhappy - and that the bleakness meter in American life has always been set on high.