Smedley Butler Quotes

The FBI has always supported big business and big government.

I think a lot of Americans are not sure which side Washington is on: the side of banks or the side of the people.

I spent 33 years ... most of my time being a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short I was a racketeer for capitalism.

We are ruled by big business and the government as its paid hireling … the divine right of kings has been replaced by the divine right of CEOs.

All those who controlled the moneyed institutions of the state either did not choose to do business with us, or they feared the ill will of a certain class of businessmen who considered their interests antagonistic to those of our order.

I think that Goldman Sachs and the Pentagon determine more of America's outcome then any president or any congress, that sounds a bit cynical, but I think I am right.

Politics is just a function of business now, just a tributary of the great entrepreneurial capitalist system.

Money often determines not only who gets elected, but what gets done. Which voices do lawmakers listen to, the banks or home owners, coal companies, or asthma sufferers, the CEOs or the unemployed?

It is a world of extremes, which can be characterised most clearly in terms of exclusion. That means political exclusion, whereby the rights of citizens are marginalised by the interests of big business: George W Bush's environmental policy, for example, is clearly formulated in the interests of U.S. energy companies.

If you are realistic about how our present society works, the economic clout - and a lot of the political clout, frankly - is in the business sector. And it's the locus of innovation.

I was anxious to save the great coal operators and all of the class of big propertied men, of which they were members, from the dreadful punishment which their own folly would have brought on them if I had not acted.

Middle-class democracy has proved the best camouflage of the political dominance of big capital.

Control would be exercised by a few over the political conduct of the many by first acquiring that control over the labor and earnings of the great body of people.

Men in the shadow of Wall Street are not qualified to be President.

Say no to politicians who sacrifice the interests of individual investors to corporate interests.

Corporations are neither physical nor metaphysical phenomena. They are socioeconomic ploys — legally enacted game-playing — agreed upon only between overwhelmingly powerful socioeconomic individuals and by them imposed upon human society and its all unwitting members.

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..

Get up in one of our industrial centers today and say that two and two make four, and if there is any financial interest concerned in maintaining that two and two make five, the police will bash your head in.

The upper 1 percent, the people down on Wall Street, the corporate executives, they're the people that control this economy.

Though many of the poor have come to see the affluent middle class as its enemy, that class actually stands between the poor and the real powers in this society - the administrative octopus with its head in Washington, the conglomerates, the military complex.

The rules of the global economy are rigged against those who have to work to earn a living and in favour of multinational corporations and the ultra-rich.

I want them poor and they deserve to be poor. You can't have capitalism without punishment.

The only force more ruthless and cynical than the business of big politics is the politics of big business.

There is a public perception that the Republican Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street.

In British tradition, the American elite expected the lower classes to fight their wars.