Thomas Pogge Quotes

Transnational, gigantic industrial companies no longer operate within political systems, but rather above them.

We cannot cede our moral authority to multinational debating societies.

The multinational corporations now developing budgets often bigger than medium-sized countries — these live in a global space which is largely unregulated, not subject to the rule of law, and in which people may act free of constraint.

What's amazing to me? General Electric has a bigger budget for - special interest budget than all of the oil companies combined, and yet nobody says anything.

Stability means you do what we say, and what we say is that Colombia and the resources of the Andean region shall be freely available to the rich and powerful of the world, particularly US-based multinational corporations.

The Grocery Manufacturers Association is behind the bills which have been trying to pre-empt states' labeling laws in the Senate. And they have a lot of money and power in Washington. So it's a classic David versus Goliath story, where corporate lobbying outweighs consumers' rights.

What gives these corporations like CONOCO, SHELL, EXXON, DIASHAWA, ITT, RIO TINTO ZINC, and the WORLD BANK a right which supercedes or is superior to my human right to live on my land, or that of my family, my community, my nation, our nations, and to us as women?

It's being reported that Google spent over $5 million on lobbying just during the first quarter of this year. You'd think Google wouldn't really need to lobby politicians. All they have to say is, 'We have your search history. Do what we tell you.'

Often vastly more important, international agreements are not routinely published in draft form or publicly debated, and civil society organizations and ordinary citizens often learn of important global institutional design decisions only after they have already been finalized and adopted. The only reliable way to be kept informed and to exert timely influence is by lobbying and paying the politicians and their negotiators.

President Eisenhower saw it coming, and it is here. Patriotism no longer exists among many of these corporations. Some companies have more economic clout than entire countries. They can make or break a politician.

There is at the global level a very small number of actors who can meaningfully weigh in on global institutional design, who are able - through powerful governments and most effectively through the government of the United States - to exert substantial influence on international negotiations, which are routinely conducted behind closed doors.

business itself is now the most powerful force for change in the world today, richer and faster by far than most governments. And what is it doing with this power? It is using free trade, the most powerful weapon at its disposal, to tighten its grip on the globe.

The world needs a new global architecture, additional layers of governance, to deal with issues that neither nations nor traditional forms of intergovernmental organizations can cope with.

The smaller the office, the more power individuals with big money have.

All the studios are owned by multinational corporations, which are not usually bastions of the left. So all the actors, writers, and directors - or at least a great majority of them - live in fear because we're all insecure, we all want that next job, we all want to be loved, and we don't want to piss off some studio chief who won't hire us for the next movie.

The UN can go as far as the U.S. will allow, and no further. And it's bound by conditions that the powerful states, which means mostly the U.S., impose.

Most people assume because I'm an actor that's all I know about and care about, I'm actually a camera geek and a film geek. I grew up making short films the same time I was acting. For me, it's a motion picture, not a play. I'm just as interested in what the camera department is doing and world building through costume design and production design as I am in acting. I think all good directors do that whether they're an actor or not.

Our Supreme Court has lifted the practice of buying legislation to the level of a constitutional principle by repeatedly protecting corporate spending for and against political candidates, as well as promises and threats of such spending to bribe and blackmail such candidates, by appeal to the free-speech clause of the First Amendment.

As an actor, I was taught, from an early age, that secrets are the most powerful thing that you can have on screen, and that what you withhold is as important as what you share.

The corporations who invest in lobbyists, it pays in terms of tax loopholes, tax subsidies, all the rest. It pays. Clearly, the money has a big effect.

...Local prohibitions cannot block advances in military and commercial technology... Democratic movements for local restraint can only restrain the world's democracies, not the world as a whole.

There are three major political organizations in this country: the Republican Party, the Democratic Party and the Koch Brothers Party. With billions to spend on campaigns. think tanks and 'educational' organizations, the Koch brothers are the most powerful. We must overturn Citizens United, move to public funding of elections and pass real tax reform.

If globalization is to realise its potential as a force for good, we have to look more closely at the means by which we handle our growing interdependence. We do not have a world government, but we do have an increasingly complex network of institutions that are concerned with global governance. They are central to our future and international human rights law

This is what class warfare looks like: The Business Roundtable - representing Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and others - has called on Congress to raise the eligibility age of Social Security and Medicare to 70, cut Social Security and veterans' COLAs, raise taxes on working families and cut taxes for the largest corporations in America.

The lobbying over China most favored nation trading status was disgusting. There's no way in hell that MFN would have passed in '95, '96, '97, '98, '99, 2000 if all these companies hadn't come in flooding and making campaign contributions and ask for people's support. That drove the debate. Every year was the allure of corporate dollars flooding into members' bank accounts.