E. L. Doctorow Quotes

The people are weary of detecting the voice of a corporation manager in every political utterance, in the legislature, the Governor's messages, in the expressed opinions of mayors of cities and the Senators sent by the State to Washington, and even in the decisions of judges on the bench.

Money often determines not only who gets elected, but what gets done. Which voices do lawmakers listen to, the banks or home owners, coal companies, or asthma sufferers, the CEOs or the unemployed?

Washington is corporate occupied territory …. The two parties are fighting it out to see who will take orders from their corporate paymasters.

Washington is rigged to favor people who have an army of lobbyists.

From drug companies to health insurers to Wall Street banks, big corporations are spending millions to buy influence in Washington and drown out the voices of regular people.

What has become clear to many Americans is that the electoral system is bankrupt. As the political process becomes more privatized, outsourced, and overrun with money from corporations and billionaires, a wounded republic is on its death bed, gasping for life.

The FBI has always supported big business and big government.

In constant pursuit of money to finance campaigns, the political system is simply unable to function. Its deliberative powers are paralyzed.

The idea that the business world's needs get ignored in Washington is perpetuated by business so it can fulfill even more of its needs, real or imagined.

Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.

A large majority of Americans believe that corporations exert too much influence on our daily lives and our political process.

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.

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

There is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Gallery's version of the Barack Obama 'Hope' poster previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists. Depressing because Mr. Obama's Washington was not supposed to be the lobbyists' Washington, the place we learned to despise during the last administration.

Everywhere I go - from Main Street to Wall Street - people ask, 'What's happened to our political system? Why can't Washington folks work together?'

If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it.

Sadly we have government of the lobbyists, by the lobbyists, and for the lobbyists. That is no way to run the Senate.

We have needed … reforms for quite some time. But because of collusion between politics and business, nothing happened.

Historians, studying us, will say that we allowed corporations to become the government.

I do not allow hirelings of Standard Oil to define my democracy.

One party is under the ironclad control of Wall Street and the other one caters to Wall Street.

Corporations write the legislation. They vote on the legislation. And they give advice on how to pass their bills.

The evils of the use of corporate money in connection with political elections are so generally recognized that the committee deems it unnecessary to make any argument in favor of the general purpose of this measure.

We live in a country where Wall Street owns Washington.

They are one of the most profitable industries in the world, and they’re throwing money into Washington DC. They’re buying politicians.