https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crAILGJG9pE
“If you think libertarianism is good, you either don’t care about dead coal miners or have never thought about dead coal miners (or loggers or ship workers or farm workers or whatever).”
“Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.”
“By the same logic, if the unemployed were denied food and water, it would increase the intensity of their job search, at least until they grew too weak to pound the pavements or fall on their knees before job-creators, from whom all blessing flow.”
“Seriously? You named ripping off poor people after César Chávez? You’re going to hell.”
“Republican judges are continually pushing the United States toward the New Gilded Age, where employees no longer have rights but employers have expansively defined rights that happen to coincide with Republican policy beliefs about the workplace.”
“The war on poverty was a success. A wild success, indeed, by nearly every meaningful measure.”
“[Rep. Paul] Ryan is fine with our laws reflecting little concern for human dignity, safety, or justice as owed to the poor, but somehow expects people to differ enough from the moral structure of their laws to fill in the extraordinary gaps without any assistance from the state.”
“Scripture’s view of poverty is not like this at all. It exposes basic truths about negative habits that can produce poverty, but it never assumes, as we are so prone to, that a given instance of poverty was caused by such habits.”
“When her bankruptcy proceedings concluded in 2010, ECMC began to hound her, and garnished her Social Security income, all in the name of repaying loans that had already been paid in full.”
“There’s a pretty good chance that you, your friends, and your family are going to live three or four years less than you should, solely because you live in America.”
“It’s a perverse truth of the U.S. health-care debate that the solutions that have worked both here and around the world are the only solutions the political system refuses to consider seriously.”
“Fruit is my favorite. Peaches. Nectarines. Cantaloupe. Bananas. I like Fuji apples. Can’t afford to eat it.”
“Raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour could lift about 4.6 million people out of poverty directly.”
“The Cambodian workers desperate to make a decent living, like the Bangladeshi workers and like the Indonesian workers and Chinese workers and Vietnamese workers, face a government that has no interest in representing them and with a lack of meaningful democratic processes to create that change in ways that American liberals deem acceptable, i.e., the ballot box. So given that, what are they supposed to do?”
“Citizens who treat politics as consumption, however, will lose both power and prosperity.”
“If we can figure out a way to stay within this carbon budget before it’s too late, we can still avert a climate disaster. If we can’t, then we too might look back at today’s record-breaking temperatures, droughts and floods as a fond memory of milder times.”
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