Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes
No one should be incarcerated for debt or squeezed for money they have no chance of getting their hands on.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Metropolitan Books, 2001.
England, and most other countries of Europe, had put people who could not pay their debts in prison. When our founding fathers formed the constitution, they too saw debtors’ prison as an acceptable concept. 11 years earlier Congress had outlawed Federal Debtors’ Prisons. However many states and local governments then still had them. Smith wanted them abolished completely. What is fascinating about this quotation is that although the head of a religion, Smith was not advocating the kinds of personal lifestyle issues of his church the way modern religious leaders do, but was concerned with the much larger issues of expansionism, corruption of the courts and judiciary, and land distribution. He was a classic reform candidate in that sense. Smith had written to most of the then likely Presidential candidates of both major parties asking for their position on the Mormons who were facing persecution wherever they went. None of the politicians would make any satisfactory commitments. Smith took Direct Action and became the only major religious official to have run for the Presidency of the United States until Pat Robertson tried and failed in 2000. Smith’s assassination shortly thereafter cut his run for the Presidency short before it made much headway and politically he had no chance to affect the race.
Germany was undergoing a hyper-inflation as the result of a mismanaged economy and the consequence of the First World War. Hitler immediately blamed America and the financers and profiteers. This has been the pattern of almost every government since then that was undergoing a monetary crisis of inflation or deflation—blame the international financers and the Americans.
Attila the Hun
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910. He was instrumental in being one of the major writers who made the American public aware of the fact that the very wealthy sometimes systematically committed crimes involving money and in much larger crimes than the poor criminals.
“Patriot” meant someone who was a supporter of anti-monarchy dissidents and rebels. It was more than a good citizen. The prisoners were incarcerated because they had been accused of supporting the monarchy early in or after the French Revolution.
As a Federal Judge, she was obligated to sentence people guilty of certain crimes to a minimum sentence prescribed by law and a sentencing commission.
Barbara Ehrenreich is an American author and political activist who describes herself as "a myth buster by trade" and has been called "a veteran muckraker" by The New Yorker. During the 1980s and early 1990s she was a prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America. She is a widely read and award-winning columnist and essayist, and author of 21 books. Ehrenreich is perhaps best known for her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. A memoir of Ehrenreich's three-month experiment surviving on minimum wage as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing-home aide, and Wal-Mart clerk, it was described by Newsweek magazine as "jarring" and "full of riveting grit," and by The New Yorker as an "exposé" putting "human flesh on the bones of such abstractions as 'living wage' and 'affordable housing'." She is a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award.
