George Packer Quotes

Banks are slowly but surely lending again, and never again will taxpayers foot the bill for Wall Street's excesses. In case we forgot, that was the change we believed in. That was the change we fought for. That was the change President Obama delivered.

The term 'too big to fail' must be excised from our vocabulary.

We are watching industries crumble, Wall Street firms disappear, unemployment spike, and unprecedented government intervention. And our designated opinion leaders want to know: Is Obama up this week? Is he down? And is his leadership style more like Bill Clinton's, or Abraham Lincoln's?

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

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

The deficit crisis is real and must be addressed. But it cannot be solved on the backs of the weak and vulnerable.

The Dodd Bill does very little to reduce financial risks. What it will do is make Wall Street even more the servant of bureaucrats in Washington and the political party in power. That is not in the best interests of the American people.

The single most remarkable (and revealing) fact of the Obama presidency may very well be the lack of a single prosecution of Wall Street executives for the massive fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis.

I can't get very excited about the House of Commons these days because I don't feel the power is there. What is really bizarre is that you sense it is not in Washington either. It is now very hard even to locate the levers of power, let alone to pull them and change things.

The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history.

Main Street versus Wall Street was the 2008 economic mantra of Democrat Barack Obama.

Occupy Wall Street means making Wall Street and the corporate power elite understand that the people affected by the binge of unregulated greed are not going away, and they are not going to give up.

Almost the first thing Obama did in the White House was to return the bust of Winston Churchill to the British embassy. That suggests a major re-ordering of things. It'll be fascinating to see what happens from now on. It was a genuine break with the recent past - perhaps to re-connect with the past past.

I turned on Wall Street for the same reason everybody else did: The American taxpayer was forced to cut mook deals to bail out guys who didn't deserve it.

Wall Street's biggest fight with Obama was over the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which Obama signed into law in the summer of 2010.

I think there are really serious problems in this country and I think politics in a lot of ways is failing the country.

In the 1990s, the Democratic Party began to cozy up to their long-time enemies: Wall Street Bankers. They took their money and relaxed their regulations until the Great Recession forced the Democrats via Dodd-Frank to re-regulate the banks.

The people of Kentucky have had enough. They have had enough of bailouts for Wall Street banks.

There are party leaders, big corporation, Wall Street. There are very wealthy individuals who kind of represent where the Democratic Party, the official Democratic Party was and to some extent still is.

In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.

Ironically, the universities have trained hundreds of thousands of graduates for jobs that soon will not exist. They have trained people to maintain a structure that cannot be maintained. The elite...know only how to feed the beast until it dies. Once it is dead, they will be helpless. Don't expect them to save us. They don't know how....and when it all collapses, when our rotten financial system with its trillions in worthless assets implodes and our imperial wars end in humiliation and defeat, the power elite will be exposed as being as helpless, and as self-deluded as the rest of us

The Democrats are hardly agents of change, or even remotely interesting talkers or reality observers. The workings of actual power in the US is so remote from the ordinary person, who, it seems, can only be victimized by it, but is powerless to change anything.

What I want people to know is I went to Wall Street before the crash. I was the one saying you're going to wreck the economy because of these shenanigans with mortgages. I called to end the carried interest loophole that hedge fund managers enjoy. I proposed changes in CEO compensation.

Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth.

It's important that the American people understand that President has proposed and passed this stimulus plan not as the end-all and be-all to our economic woes but as our bridge over troubled water until we get the finance system, the banking system working again.