Quotes About Corporate Power

#1. We need to expose the motives of our political leaders, point out their connections to corporate power, show how huge profits are being made out of death and suffering.

Howard Zinn

#2. The most meaningful engine of change, powerful enough to confront corporate power, may be not so much environmental quality, as the economic development and growth associated with the effort to improve it.

Barry Commoner

#3. I don't know how it could be more stark or clear: this entire society is being dominated by corporate power in a way that may exceed what happened in the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century.

Russ Feingold

#4. A genuine free enterprise system, without state-enforced artificial scarcities, artificial property rights or subsidies, would be like dynamite at the foundations of corporate power.

Kevin Carson

#5. The media, itself an arm of mega-corporate power, feeds the fear industry, so that people are primed like pumps to support wars on rumor, innuendo, legends, and lies.

Mumia Abu-Jamal

#6. The strike, the boycott, the refusal to serve, the ability to paralyze the functioning of a complex social structure-these remain potent weapons against the most fearsome state or corporate power.

Howard Zinn

#7. This massive ascendancy of corporate power over democratic process is probably the most ominous development since the end of World War II, and for the most part "the free world" seems to be regarding it as merely normal.

Wendell Berry

#8. The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance. The growth of democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth of corporate propaganda against democracy.

Alex Carey

#9. Corporate power consolidation is so enormous that even the government could be viewed as a small appendage of a larger corporate organism.

Bryant McGill

#10. Corporations barely pay taxes. The corporate tax rate is already very low, but corporations have worked out an array of complicated techniques so they often don't have to pay taxes at all ... The scale of sheer robbery by corporate power is enormous.

Noam Chomsky

#11. Young wives are the leading asset of corporate power. They want the suburbs, a house, a settled life, and respectability. They want society to see that they have exchanged themselves for something of value.

Ralph Nader

#12. The clinical definition of "fascism" is when private concentrated economic power takes government away from the people, turns government into a guarantor, a subsidizer, a covering of corporate power.

Ralph Nader

#13. The forces of power, particularly corporate power, are impatient with what is adequate for a coherent community. Because power gains so little from community in the short run, it does not hesitate to destroy community for the long run.

Wes Jackson

#14. The media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly.

Noam Chomsky

#15. Everyone in the Chinese economic world knows that the country is not going to move out of cheap-workhouse status, toward the realm of 'real' rich-country corporate power and prosperity, unless (among other changes) it begins removing these price distortions.

James Fallows

#16. There is all of this protesting against corporate power, but in reality, corporations have to persuade you - they could have a ton of money, but actually only government can use force.

John Stossel

#17. Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power

Benito Mussolini

#18. 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.

Dana Spiotta

#19. The history of the twentieth century was dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems of state power. The twenty-first will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power.

Eric Schlosser

#20. In 'Power Play', Finder uses the thriller structure to make pointed observations about gender in the workplace, the corporate caste system, and the true nature of risk in the global business environment.

M.J. Rose

#21. The Grocery Manufacturers Association is behind the bills which have been trying to pre-empt states' labeling laws in the Senate. And they have a lot of money and power in Washington. So it's a classic David versus Goliath story, where corporate lobbying outweighs consumers' rights.

Zoe Lister-Jones

#22. The real power is not corporate; it is private. They choose not to have a name. It is a dynasty of banking families - Rothschild and Rockefeller being two - that operate chiefly out of London, in the boardrooms out of the city of London and the Bank of England, which they own.

Betty Dodson

#23. More and more I think of privatisation as being not just about the takeover of resources and power by corporate interests, but as the retreat of citizens to private life and private space, screened from solidarity with strangers and increasingly afraid or even unable to imagine acting in public.

Rebecca Solnit

#24. The Establishment is amassing wealth and aggressively annexing power in a way that has no precedent in modern times. After all, there is nothing to stop it.

Owen Jones

#25. The thing American people fear about corporations is that they might achieve too much power. We have an antipathy to power even as we admire it.

Annie Proulx

#26. More than ever before, consumers have the ability to unify their voices and coalesce their buying power to influence corporate behaviors.

Simon Mainwaring

#27. Writers can feel pretty powerless in the big corporate world of publishing, but sometimes our greatest power is the ability to say 'no.'

Carrie Vaughn

#28. Corporate bodies are more corrupt and profligate than individuals, because they have more power to do mischief, and are less amenable to disgrace or punishment. They feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor goodwill.

William Hazlitt

#29. There is power in corporate fasting and power in corporate praise.

Jentezen Franklin

#30. I am concerned about how to reverse the process by which a fundamentalist right and a corporate elite were able to seize power in the United States.

Todd Gitlin

#31. The danger of the Internet is cocooning with the like-minded online - of sending an email or Twitter and confusing that with action - while the real corporate and military and government centers of power go right on.

Gloria Steinem

#32. The social havoc wreaked by unfettered economic greed comes to be interiorised as the personal weakness and irresponsibility of those principally affected.

David Smail

#33. The trouble in corporate America is that too many people with too much power live in a box (their home), then travel the same road every day to another box (their office).

Faith Popcorn

#34. Tatemae is a charming attitude when it means that everyone should look at the other way at a guest's faux pas in the tearoom; it has dangerous and unpredictable results when applied to corporate balance sheets, drug testing, and nuclear-power safety reports.

Alex Kerr

#35. I was not going to surrender to the status quo and corporate insistence that ordinary people have no power and influence.

Rebecca Solnit

#36. Imagine the American people united for the first time in a movement for fundamental change. Imagine society's power taken away from the giant corporations, the military, and the politicians who answer to corporate and military interests. We

Howard Zinn

#37. Those of us who are condemned as radicals, idealists, and dreamers call for basic reforms that, if enacted, would make peaceful reform possible. But corporate capitalists, now unchecked by state power and dismissive of the popular will, do not see the fires they are igniting.

Chris Hedges

#38. I have introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and make it clear that the Congress and state legislatures do have the ability and the power to regulate and get corporate funding out of political campaigns.

Bernie Sanders

#39. The idea that each corporation can be a feudal monarchy and yet behave in its corporate action like a democratic citizen concerned for the world we live in is one of the great absurdities of our time -

Kim Stanley Robinson

#40. The world is fast becoming a corporate caliphate

Agona Apell

#41. As parents and as consumers, we have the right and the power to pressure the entertainment industry to respond to our needs. Americans, after all, should insist that every corporate giant - whether it produces chemicals or records - accept responsibility for what it produces.

Tipper Gore

#42. The corporate government is heavily influenced by the utility company cartel.

Steven Magee

#43. The silent workers get lost in the endless
darkness of the corporate world. Those
who work hard and constantly seek to
be visible to their superiors, those who
showcase their hard work, are the ones who
advance to positions of greater power and
responsibility.

Abhishek Ratna

#44. Fascism should rightly be called corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.

Benito Mussolini

#45. After years of telling corporate citizens to 'trust the system,' many companies must relearn instead to trust their people - and encourage their people to use neglected creative capacities in order to tap the most potent economic stimulus of all: idea power.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter

#46. The corporate woman has been defined as the 'liberated woman' and I see that as the exact opposite. I think she now is more enslaved, maybe even more than the housewife was; because she's so out of her power, and imitating male power is not female power.

Kenny Loggins

#47. We know that power is shifting from brawn to brains, from north to south and west to east, from old corporate behemoths to agile start-ups, from entrenched dictators to people in town squares and cyberspace.

Moises Naim

#48. For most of the history of the American empire, government has been a tool for preserving and furthering the power and might of white male corporate elites ...

Cornel West

#49. If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.

Howard Zinn

#50. It is one of the great ironies of corporate control that the corporate state needs the abilities of intellectuals to maintain power, yet outside of this role it refuses to permit intellectuals to think or function independently.

Chris Hedges

#51. The present combination of corporate or commercial control theoretically answerable to politically appointed Boards of Governors is not in any sense a democratic enough procedure to control the power the broadcasters have.

Tony Benn

#52. Ultimately, we must turn to the God who is both the One and the Many for the standard of His law. He created to live both as individuals and as corporate units; and His law perfectly balances the liberties of the many with the power of the one political unit.

Kevin Swanson

#53. Journalism is the only profession explicitly protected by the U.S. Constitution, because journalists are supposed to be the check and balance on government. We're supposed to be holding those in power accountable. We're not supposed to be their megaphone. That's what the corporate media have become.

Amy Goodman

#54. According to the World Bank, the concentration of wealth and the structures of corporate economic power have no bearing on woman's rights.

Michel Chossudovsky