Rashida Tlaib Quotes

'Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream' is an intentionally angry film. How could it not be when the chance of an infant dying is five times greater on the Bronx Park Avenue than on Manhattan's Park Avenue just across the Harlem River?

Capitalism is, fundamentally, an economic system that promotes inequality.

To understand the Left, one must understand that in its view the greatest evil is material inequality. The Left is more troubled by economic inequality than by evil as humanity has generally understood the term.

Inequality has risen to the point that it seems to me worthwhile for the U.S. to seriously consider taking the risk of making our economy more rewarding for more of the people.

The migration of the black middle class out of the cities in the wake of the civil rights movement and the deindustrialization of urban economies has left a corroded core, cut off from the social; mainstream and reliant on inadequate federal support.

For a quarter-century, and changing only very recently, the main IMF prescription has been budgetary belt-tightening for patients much too poor to own belts. IMF led austerity has frequently resulted in riots, coups, and the collapse of public services.

Bolsonaro is adopting a regressive policy as regards rights but a neoliberal policy when it comes to economic policy.

When we shift our public dollars away from our schools and city services and into company developments, it increases the root causes of poverty: unemployment, underemployment, lack of community resources, and lack of quality public education.

Government after government has prioritized the preservation of corporatist loyalties over the promotion of economic growth and emphasized clientelist distribution over entrepreneurial innovation and creation of level economic playing field.

Under the notion that unregulated market-driven values and relations should shape every domain of human life, the business model of governance has eviscerated any viable notion of social responsibility while furthering the criminalization of social problems and cutbacks in basic social services, especially for the poor, young people and the elderly.

Exploitation. Now, there's a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.

I really did have this powerful sense, when I was in New Orleans after the storm, of watching all these profiteers descend on Baton Rouge to lobby to get rid of the housing projects and privatise the school system - I thought I was in some science-fiction experiment.

Plutocrats were the chief beneficiaries of so-called neoliberalism and the suite of political changes it brought beginning in the late 1970s - deregulation, weaker protection for unions, the shareholder value movement, and the subsequent inflation of executive compensation.

Mom and pop shops paying taxes while Amazon got billions just to come to town didn't seem right, and, post-FoxxConn, people are less likely to fall for the promised jobs numbers.

I'm here to speak for those who say the American Dream isn't working for them, because I know it isn't. I'm here to say it's not your fault: the ruling class... has failed you.

I do think that there is both a very powerful sense of entitlement and a kind of bubble of wealth which makes it hard for the people at the very top to understand the travails of the middle class.

Individual nations have offered their own contributions to income inequality - financial deregulation and upper-bracket tax cuts in the United States; insider privatization in Russia; rent-seeking in regulated industries in India and Mexico.

When you socially neglect a people, when you economically abandon a people, when you transfer wealth from them to the well-to-do, what are a people going to do? They're going to respond with very sad forms of despair, and that's true for everybody - I don't care what color you are.

Beginning in 1981, when government policies began to undermine the liberal consensus of the previous generation, wealth began to diverge. It is more unevenly distributed than ever before.

The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy.

The fact that apartheid has been tied up with white supremacy, capitalist exploitation, and deliberate oppression makes the problem much more complex. Material want is bad enough, but coupled with spiritual poverty, it kills.

I think calling what Paul Ryan is doing a 'budget' is lending some validity to it. It is not a budget. If it were a budget, he could justify his revenue projections, he could justify his cuts, and he can't. This is a scheme to rob the poor and give to the rich.

European officials thought that austerity was part of what they called their 'convergence policies,' of trying to bring countries together. Instead, it actually made things worse. There's more inequality within countries and more disparity across countries.

At a time when the United States is handing out tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas, corporate jet owners, and millionaires and billionaires, it is ludicrous that we would even be looking at Social Security and Medicare as a solution to our debt crisis.

When the National Theatre was built, it was a public building. If you wander round that building now, there are bits hived off for people who pay more money. That's happening across the arts.