Sharan Burrow Quotes

We are beginning to see a fundamental outrage at the whole interconnected mess of a system: at energy companies who record massive profits, yet allow pensioners to struggle to stay warm in winter; at CEOs who can earn up to a 1,000 times the salary of their average worker; and soon, any day now, at those politicians who allowed this to happen.

The Bush White House sold out the birthright of the Republican Party by bailing out Wall Street.

This is America. We don’t disparage wealth. We don’t begrudge anybody for achieving success. And we certainly believe that success should be rewarded. But what gets people upset – and rightfully so – are executives being rewarded for failure, especially when those rewards are subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, many of whom are having a tough time themselves.

Public anger over bank bailouts was as much about fairness as the billions of dollars spent.

I have a lot of sympathy with the ideas and frustration of the Occupy movement. I absolutely agree with the sense that Wall Street has brought an economic calamity to the middle class and that no one has been held accountable.

The Tea Party grew out of indignation over the Wall Street bailout - an indignation shared by the vast majority of Americans. But the Tea Party ended up directing its ire at government rather than at big business and Wall Street.

If you or I fail at business, we fail. If we cheat and fail, we go to jail. But if you're rich and politically connected, your incompetence may be protected by a government bailout.

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.

All the actions of your government have been in favour of the markets, and against the people.

The American People got fucked. Then tell 'em the American Family got fucked.

I don't know how we will ever have the moral authority to deal with social welfare if we can't deal with corporate welfare.

The Tea Party movement and the Occupy movement were both, in a sense, complaining about the same thing, namely the use of public money to rescue failed banks.

Trump has predicated his whole campaign on the unfairness of the playing field. Big corporations, rich donors, big media, and trade deals that punish the little guy.

The jobs crisis has reached a boiling point, which is why we see Occupy Wall Street protestors crying out for an America that lets all of us reach for the American Dream again - a dream that says if you work hard and play by the rules, you can have a good life and retire with dignity.

I think Republicans need to take income inequality more seriously. Not because I favor equality of outcomes. I do not. I think the Right is correct to stress merit and earned rewards, not handouts and forced equality. But I think what Republicans are blind to is that power corrupts.

I want to see somebody go to jail over the financial crisis and not just black, brown and poor whites over humbles and minor drug beefs.

I like where we're going with technology and global integration, but the fact that corporations and dollars rule everything in our lives, I don't like it. This isn't the Hollywood I wanted to be part of.

Somehow, failures in the public sector are always judged as systematic. The private sector thus exists to ride to the rescue - and their failures are only judged anomalies. A pretty nice arrangement for investors. The only people who suffer are the citizens.

Unlike the Tea Party, who see themselves as the customers of government, people in the Occupy Wall Street movement understand that we are the government. Stated most simply, we are trying to run a 21st-century society on a 13th-century economic operating system. It just doesn't work.

Since the governments are in the pockets of businesses, who's going to control this most powerful institution? Business is more powerful than politics, and it's more powerful than religion. So it's going to have to be the vigilante consumer.

There's a delicious irony in seeing private luxury jets flying in to Washington, D.C., and people coming off of them with tin cups in their hands saying that they're going to be trimming down and streamlining their businesses. There's a message there.

Capitalism unchecked is not a democratic system.

Why is this government so insensitive to the concerns of the middle-class people?

In a world of global dependencies with no corresponding global polity and few tools of global justice, the rich of the world are free to pursue their own interests while paying no attention to the rest.

A lot of people are deeply dissatisfied by the diminishing control they have over their lives, because of the way our system of government is set up, to cater to the powerful, cater to the wealthy, cater to the corporations, and not to the individual American citizen.