Mary Elizabeth Lease Quotes

The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master. . . . The politicians said we suffered from overproduction. Overproduction, when 10,000 little children, so statistics tell us, starve to death every year in the United States. . . . We will stand by our homes and stay by our fireside by force if necessary, and we will not pay our debts to the loan-shark companies until the government pays its debts to us.

Evidently there is no need for delay, no need for further study, if the government takes a loss and Wall Street makes a profit, but it is absolutely necessary to delay if homeowners might have a chance to cut their mortgages and stay in their homes. This is wrong, and it is time to fight back!

I've said we need to look at things from the perspective of working people and taxpayers, not from the perspective of government and government officials.

My message to David Cameron, as the head of our government, is to seriously think again about this Robin Hood tax, the tax to help the poor by taking a little bit from the rich.

Millions of Americans were duped by the federal government and the Federal Reserve into buying homes they could not afford and failed to count the cost. When the financial crisis of 2008 hit, they could not keep up the monthly mortgage payments and defaulted.

Let's not forget, it was the government, Department of Finance and Central Bank that decided to unfairly land the taxpayers of this country with unmitigated losses of Anglo and massive legacy issues that would have been expected when nationalising a fraudulent bank.

Washington is broken. Bailing out Wall Street with no strings attached while leaving middle class Arkansas taxpayers with the bill. Protecting insurance company profits instead of patients and lowering health costs.

Millions of Americans are struggling to pay their mortgages. They have a right to know whether members of Congress receive sweetheart deals in order to pay for theirs.

UC Merced is the University of California's newest campus and lies among farm fields in the San Joaquin Valley, 2 1/2 hours east of San Francisco and not far from where I spent most of my childhood. It's a part of California that has suffered deeply from the recession with high unemployment and a skyrocketing home foreclosure rate.

Occupy Wall Street means making Wall Street and the corporate power elite understand that the people affected by the binge of unregulated greed are not going away, and they are not going to give up.

When we see the banks get bailed out with seemingly no consequences while ordinary people pay the price with job and wage cuts through austerity measures, who could blame a person for wondering where the loyalties of their elected leaders really lie?

Every time a bank swoops down to snatch up a home, it should be met with a crowd of jeering, obstructive neighbors. And although this may be point 4.5, how about organizing a mass refusal to pay back student loans?

Poverty became something one could see and experience firsthand, no matter where one was on the economic ladder; it became something you could viscerally experience through the lives of friends, family, neighbors, colleagues. I'd venture to say it's a rare person in 2013 America who knows nobody who lost a job in the recession, or knows nobody whose home went underwater or who went into foreclosure.

It's time to make our government work for all of us... and not just the 1%.

All of this is happening because there has still been no reckoning post the financial crisis. So governments have fallen, one bloke has been to prison, the banks have gone pretty well back to status quo, the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer. And it's fuelling anger. And somehow [Donald] Trump, who represents the worst aspects of capitalism, has persuaded people he can deal with that.

[Steven] Lerner said that unions and community organizations are, for all intents and purposes, dead. The only way to achieve their goals, therefore - the redistribution of wealth and the return of '$17 trillion' stolen from the middle class by Wall Street - is to 'destabilize the country.

I think the right-wingers have to buddy up to the fact that either the minimum wage has to go up, and people get enough money to live, or you're always going to have people needing government assistance. You can't have it both ways.

At home, we have begun the monumental task of returning the government back to the people on a scale not seen in many, many years.

If Martin Luther King looked at the Obama administration and saw an intimate connection with Wall Street, he'd be very critical. If he saw drones being dropped on innocent people, he'd be very critical. If he saw rights and liberties violated by secret policies of the government, of the kind we've seen by the National Security Agency, he'd be very critical.

Securities based on risky mortgages are what toppled financial institutions but it was the government that made the mortgages risky in the first place, by making home-ownership statistics the holy grail, for which everything else was to be sacrificed, including commonsense standards for making home loans.

In 2010 there were a lot of folks who were still out of work. There were a lot of folks who had lost their homes or saw their home values plummet, their 401k's plummet.

What should really be happening is a revolution. The system should be torn apart by the people and banks shouldn't be allowed to do what they do, and giant corporations shouldn't be allowed to run the world to the ground the way they're doing. But that's not happening for whatever reason.

Class warfare or soaking the so-called rich may make for good populist demagoguery and serve the political ends of the governing masterminds, but it does nothing to solve the grave realities of the federal government's insatiable appetite for spending and its inability to reform itself.

Trusting the government to monitor your calls without listening. It's kind of like trusting Chris Christie to pick up the McDonald's and not eat the fries on the way home.

The failure so far of the governments of so many of the worlds most powerful countries in the face of such egregious unfairness ... to make the slightest progress on the issue of fair trade is hard to explain.