“The ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay is 273-1, down from a high of 383-1 in 2000, but up from 20-1 in 1965.”
“We have to speak kindly but firmly to people who we think are not being nice to other people sometimes.”
“The minute the facade cracks and reveals your struggle, no one wants to be around you. No one wants to see it.”
“Given these facts, it seems deeply questionable to extract this verse as a general principle for public policy, much less to cite it as somehow overriding the clear priority of helping the poor that is pervasively attested throughout the Hebrew Bible and New Testament.”
“These are seniors. … Many of them are disabled, very, very low-income.”
“Technically, downward mobility is still mobility, you see.”
“California workers recovered less than half of the $390 million employers withheld from employees from 2008-2011 … by failing to pay overtime, requiring off-the-clock work, or paying less than the minimum wage.”
“Wal-Mart’s labor relations practices have been so egregious that they go beyond regulatory infractions and enter the realm of human rights abuses.”
“Mexican authorities have rescued at least 275 people who were being held in slave-like conditions at a camp where tomatoes are sorted and packed for export.”
“That’s like if your neighbor invited you over for a drink and after saying ‘hi’ you pointed out that their neglect of their yard was lowering your home values.”
“Policy is no big deal: you try stuff, you fix what doesn’t work. … But that’s not really the debate here. The real debate is: they don’t deserve it.”
“The war on the unemployed isn’t motivated solely by cruelty; rather, it’s a case of mean-spiritedness converging with bad economic analysis.”
“I don’t know, and in most respects don’t care, whether Paul Ryan believes his own rhetoric. The whole point is that in terms of how it affects the objects of this love, fear or hatred, it just doesn’t matter.”
“Nothing says God Bless America like trying to balance the budget on the backs of people who live at or below 130 percent of the poverty line.”
“The Quincy Street Salvation Army builds a completed wall made of 18 tons, or 36 bales, of unwanted clothing every three days.”
“If divided evenly across Feeding America’s national network of food banks, every food bank would need to provide an additional 4 million meals each year for the next 10 years, and that is just not possible.”
“I’ve eaten government food during two periods in my life: as a child and as a soldier. The first led to the second in more ways than one, and permanently influenced the way I look at food aid.”
“Happy to take millions in farm subsidies. Not too sure about nutrition for the poor.”
“The United States is the only advanced economy in the world that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation.”
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