Henry Giroux Quotes

Wall Street, the banks, and corporate America, has been able to call the shots here. They control our members of Congress and they get what they want.

Until the public demands otherwise, the policy makers will continue to serve their financiers.

The nation is faced with one of the most corporate-orientated anti-consumer Congresses in our history.

There's one political party in this country, and that's the corporate party.

Since FDR's New Deal, corporations and wealthy families have been non-stop finding new ways to get tax breaks, deregulation and entitlements from the government.

In the U.S. you have a system of lobbying and influence on our policy and law makers which is incredibly pronounced. The gas industry spent $250 million getting an exemption from our Safe Water Act. Every one of those dollars is toxic; a contaminant in our political system. It disrupts the normal flow of justice, science, fact and reporting.

Unfortunately, public officials are largely controlled by the very corporations against which they should proceed.

The financial interests have captured the government institutions.

Three industries in particular—finance, real estate, and insurance—benefit from the system, which they achieve by lobbying heavily and systematically contributing to political campaigns in order to retain and fortify their privileges.

Representing the people is not something 'our' representatives do. They are too busy representing a handful of private interest groups such as the financial sector, the military/security complex, and agribusiness.

The FBI has always supported big business and big government.

Every single dollar spent lobbying a legislator on behalf of oil and gas is a toxic dollar that undermines public health and safety laws that protect Americans. That's contamination of the political system.

The whole process of getting licenses to broadcast, which took place decades ago, was done behind closed doors by powerful lobbies, and wealthy commercial interests got all the licenses with no public input, no congressional input for that matter.

To me, regardless of who's in office, the government is strangled by business. And the government's priorities are dictated by business. I mean, why does America, even after healthcare reform, still not have free universal healthcare? I'm sure it has something to do with the insurance lobby.

The idea of allowing corporations to have unlimited influence on our democracy is very dangerous, obviously.

What we do today has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism. It is a crony type of system that transfers money to the coffers of bureaucrats.

So when you go up against the Far Right you go up against the big financial special interests like the Halliburtons of the world, the big oil companies, the big energy companies who work so hard to rip us off.

Both the Democratic and Republican parties are bought and paid for by corporate America and cater to the needs of the highest bidder as opposed to the people they claim to represent. I cannot be bought.

Real lobbying reform must end the practice of corporate lobbyists writing our laws.

Everyone knows that our current system is kind of like legalized prostitution. The corporate sector completely controls the civic sector.

Law has become a business. Health care has become a business. Unfortunately, politics has also become a business. That really undermines society.

The problem is we have a Wall Street-to-Washington access of power that has controlled the political climate. The donor class feeds the political class who does the dance that the donor class wants. And the result is federal government keeps getting bigger.

There might be a lot of difference between Republicans and Democrats on key social issues like women's rights and health care. But when it comes to taking corporate cash, they're pretty much the same beast.

The political battle is between big money combines who spend a thousand pounds or more on every constituency they fight… when they speak democracy, they don't mean government by the people...they mean financial democracy, in which money counts and nothing but money.

The wonder of this month's military procurement scandal is that it can still scandalize us. The practices that are being exposed—the revolving door between government and industry, the mutual backscratching between the military and the companies that build the weapons—aren't abuses of the system. They are the system.