Bill Moyers Quotes

Nigeria has had the misfortune - no, the fortune - of seeing the worst face of capitalism anywhere in Africa. The masses have seen it, they are disgusted, and they want an alternative.

The new social question is: democracy or the rule of the financial markets. We are currently witnessing the end of an era. The neoliberal ideology has failed worldwide. The U.S. movement Occupy Wall Street is a good example of this.

All the actions of your government have been in favour of the markets, and against the people.

We have a Democratic Party that cannot defend the American people from the worst Republican Party in history because it's a Democratic Party of war and Wall Street.

I was there in Washington in the '90s. It was pretty bad then. It's much worse now [in 2015]. And that vicious cycle is you've got again big corporations, executives, Wall Street, very wealthy individuals in both parties who are calling the shots.

Somehow, failures in the public sector are always judged as systematic. The private sector thus exists to ride to the rescue - and their failures are only judged anomalies. A pretty nice arrangement for investors. The only people who suffer are the citizens.

A lot of people are deeply dissatisfied by the diminishing control they have over their lives, because of the way our system of government is set up, to cater to the powerful, cater to the wealthy, cater to the corporations, and not to the individual American citizen.

I'm not overly alarmist about it, but I do think there are some worrying signs, like the growing accumulation of wealth by a very small proportion of the population, plus elections in the US are much more dominated by money than anywhere else calling itself a democracy.

I say to the Occupy protesters - you're occupying the wrong place, you're protesting the wrong thing.

The economical policies that are instigated really makes you think that the American government is a bunch of evil bastards. So just because you're black, you're still representing that government, and when Obama came into office he enacted the same policies that we would critique other presidents for.

I believe that cronyism is nothing more than welfare for the rich and powerful, and should be abolished.

Any of the social changes in American history are because people thought there was injustice. We have to show that this corporate welfare and cronyism is unjust - and that it's not only rigging the system so people get wealthy who don't deserve to get wealthy.

I have no political ax to grind; I just find it absurd that huge billion-dollar corporations can take over elections. I just find it insane that, for instance, we give tax breaks to people like myself making millions of dollars, while there're no tax breaks for working people. That, to me, is not a political issue, that's a life issue.

Global warming, the ongoing destruction of the planet, Third World debt, the uselessness of the railways, the takeover by the corporations, the scary George Bush person: all these things are important and should be animating me into outrage. Yet somehow they do not.

(Referring to president Herbert Hoover) ... the banker's friend, the Holy Ghost of the rich, the protective angel of Wall Street.

The struggle, begun this morning upon the hustings of your old town, is not a struggle between two men—it is a struggle between two countries. On the one side, the side of the Whig candidate, hangs the red banner beneath which your senate has been sacked, your commerce has been wrecked, your nobility has been dishonored, your peasants have been starved. On the other side … floats the green flag beneath which your senate sat, your commerce thrived, your nobility honored, your peasants prospered.

It is a sad commentary upon our form of government when every decision of the Supreme Court seems designed to fatten capital and starve and destroy labor.

There is a burgeoning wealthy class in Nigeria, but it is small, and its members thrive largely thanks to political connections and connivances.

We live in a world today where the capitalists' confidence in their ability to rule has been shaken.

Free markets were supposed to lead to free societies. Instead, today’s supercharged global economy is eroding the power of the people in democracies around the globe. Welcome to a world where the bottom line trumps the common good and government takes a back seat to big business.

In short, Republicans under Trump have finally destroyed the New Deal, turning the government over to a small cadre of wealthy businessmen, unhampered, to run the country as they see fit.

People have been savaged by a predatory economic and political system, and some are turning to Trump. Unfortunately, Trump is just more of the same.

The problem is that when government controls the economy, those who can influence government keep winning, and everybody else just stays the same.

In the US, there is basically one party - the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to those policies. As is most of the population.

Legislation to level the playing field for working families is dead on arrival in the Citizens United Congress.