Quotes & Sayings About Corporate America

The tagline behind "House of Lies" is funny, dirty, business. The show is a comedy satire about how big business operates. Most Americans that work in corporate America should be able to relate to this show. — Larenz Tate

Shit, man, democracy failed before it started.

Who thought it was a good idea to let the masses of fucktards decide anything?

[Guess I've got more faith in people.]

People? The election of 2044 -- Curls Bellberry, a boy band presidency on the platform that the Earth is flat and that he'd nuke New York to save Social Security. There's a good reason he was the last president.

Problem with letting people pick a leader is they gravitate towards confident sociopaths no matter how stupid they are.

It's the perception of qualification that fools people.

At least by having corporate executives rule us we get folks who are good at business.

Life hurts, the world is fucked, and that's not going to change. . . — Rick Remender

When I go back to America, after a few days I am once again filled with this kind of angry alienation and disgust with this thing there that America has got - you have no idea how pervasive it is there. The public relations and propaganda put out by the corporate mono-culture there is so pervasive. — Robert Crumb

You know, I never fight for corporate America. — Aubrey O'Day

America is incredibly professional and corporate. — Noel Gallagher

Higher education isn't just a personal investment. It's a public good that pays off in a more competitive workforce and better-informed and engaged citizens. Every year, we spend nearly $100 billion on corporate welfare, and more than $500 billion on defense spending. Surely ensuring the next generation can compete in the global economy is at least as important as subsidies for big business and military adventures around the globe. In fact, I think we can and must go further - not just making public higher education tuition-free, but reinventing education in America as we know it. — Robert Reich

Wall Street, the banks, and corporate America, has been able to call the shots here. They control our members of Congress and they get what they want. — Michael Moore

With so many part-time people on - and not on - the job, corporate America has started to feel like it's on a permanent maternity leave. Colleagues are an amorphous, free-floating army of rotating waifs whose voicemails are clogged with plaintive requests from their own offices for missing information. — Tina Brown

A deep and enduring economic crisis like the Great Depression of the 1930s, or a natural disaster that kills tens of thousands of people, might change America's fundamental calculus about economic justice. Until then, the American public will probably continue to refrain from broadly challenging both male and female corporate leaders who compensate themselves far in excess of their value to society. That — Sebastian Junger

The diseconomies of capitalism are treated as the public's responsibility. Corporate America skims the cream and leaves the bill for us to pay, then boasts about how productive and efficient it is and complains about our wasteful government. — Michael Parenti

By the time they were done, America's progressive and radical movements, which had given the country the middle class and opened up our political system, did not exist. It was upon the corpses of these radical movements, which had fought for the working class, that the corporate state was erected in the late twentieth century. — Chris Hedges

He needed them to translate his extraordinary ambition into the ordinary language understood by corporate America. — Michael Lewis

Part of America's industrial problems is the aim of its corporate managers. Most American executives think they are in the business to make money, rather than products or service. The Japanese corporate credo, on the other hand, is that a company should become the world's most efficient provider of whatever product and service it offers. Once it becomes the world leader and continues to offer good products, profits follow. — W. Edwards Deming

THE COLONIES OF AMERICA C L O U D . M E D I T E C H . D E S C O N . E V E R G R E E N A FREE STATE IS A CORPORATE STATE Abruptly — Marie Lu

The corporate media spends a lot of time covering the lifestyles of the rich and the famous, but not all that much time covering the poor and the desperate. To a large degree, these people , the millions of poor people in America, are invisible, living under the radar screen. Their suffering is not seen on our evening news. But it's there. — Bernie Sanders

There's only one way America's neighborhoods will begin to integrate: people have to want it more than vested public and corporate interests are opposed to it. And more people should want it. Mixed-race, mixed-income housing is a product we need to market. It's the only real solution to segregated schools, for one. (140) — Tanner Colby

We need to be focused in corporate America on the long term. — Thomas Perez

With our technology, with objects, literally three people in a garage can blow away what 200 people at Microsoft can do. Literally can blow it away. Corporate America has a need that is so huge and can save them so much money, or make them so much money, or cost them so much money if they miss it, that they are going to fuel the object revolution. — Steve Jobs

Pulling the plug on the BlackBerry could cost corporate America millions of dollars. The BlackBerry is more than e-mail but a handheld office, and if you shut down the BlackBerry, you shut off the data that powers American business. — Al Smith

Here you can shoot the bad guys,' a mercenary says in Baghdad. 'In America we give them corporate bonuses. — Michael Robotham

Global laissez-faire is not a conspiracy of corporate America. It is a tragedy - one of several that have occurred in the twentieth century - in which an hubristic ideology runs aground on enduring human needs that it has failed to comprehend. — John Gray

When libertarians deride the idea of social fairness as just one more nuisance, they unleash greed. The kind of unconstrained greed that is now loose in America is leading not to real liberty but to corporate criminality and deceit; not to democracy but to politics dominated by special interests; and not to prosperity but to income stagnation for much of the population and untold riches at the very top. — Jeffrey D. Sachs

I am very glad, Anderson, that secretary Clinton discovered religion on this issue but it's a little bit too late. Secretary Clinton supported virtually every one of the disastrous trade agreements written by corporate America. — Bernie Sanders

If we can sell out a venue that's just as big as this in Omaha, if we can sell out DePaul in Chicago tomorrow, which looks like it's going to happen for 1100 or 1200 people, then obviously everyone will know that we can affect between 700 to 1000 people at a time in damn near every city in America, then I think that's a good start. It also tells people, and gives them an example, how independent hip-hop is able to do this without gigantic corporate support. — Immortal Technique

I think the church has done a pretty good job at reaching the "down and outers" but not a good job at reaching the "up and outers." I feel like one of my mandates is to reach corporate America with a message that relates to them. As an avid reader, I realized that the church at large was not speaking the language of corporate America or strategically to the needs of a corporate man/woman. — Keith Craft

Corporate America needs to get its act together to see that the education system is changed so it produces what it needs. The educational system that teaches kids to be passive recipients of knowledge worked when most workers were sitting in assembly lines. — Seymour Papert

If there is a silver lining in the action of MSNBC against Keith Olbermann, it is that people will now pay more attention to the political role of corporate media in America. — Bernie Sanders

I had a very good job in corporate America, but I quickly knew that was not how I was wired. — Bill Rancic

A better way to help American companies compete against competitors abroad is to remove all series and myriad of obstacles they face in America, whether it's union rules in some states or massive amounts of regulation imposed upon them, one of the most expensive combined corporate tax rates on the planet. — Marco Rubio

I've always resented the smug statements of politicians, media commentators, corporate executives who talked of how, in America, if you worked hard you would become rich. The meaning of that was if you were poor it was because you hadn't worked hard enough. I knew this was a lie, about my father and millions of others, men and women who worked harder than anyone, harder than financiers and politicians, harder than anybody if you accept that when you work at an unpleasant job that makes it very hard work indeed. — Howard Zinn

Your story is for - voting for every disastrous trade agreement, and voting for corporate America. Did I vote against the Wall Street bailout? — Bernie Sanders

Branding jails corporate America, but honesty sets entrepreneurs free. — James Altucher

Poetry at large in America is naturally a reflection of the American system and culture. That's my possibly narrow view of it, or reductive view. But I think for as many portals for critical consciousness in the poetry world and in the American spirit that exist, there's also an over-arching, dominant mirroring, in poetry, of the corporate structure, the capitalist enterprise. — Fady Joudah

There was no such thing as just doing what was right anymore. It was a tightrope walk few understood. "National interests" were really corporate interests. Immigration was really about cheap labor for multinational corporations. America's Middle East policy was about cheap oil so that Big Oil could expand their reach and influence without the weak US economy imploding. — William Struse

The government regulates them, or chooses not to, approves or blocks their mergers and acquisitions, and sets their tax policies (often turning a blind eye to the billions parked in offshore tax havens). This is why tech companies, like the rest of corporate America, inundate Washington with lobbyists and quietly pour hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions into the political system. Now they're gaining the wherewithal to fine-tune our political behavior - and with it the shape of American government - just by tweaking their algorithms. — Cathy O'Neil

The support of organizations including the NY Jets, Canon USA, USA Football, and Outback Steakhouse is a great example of how corporate America can make an impact in bettering the communities where employees work and live. — Boomer Esiason

America's corporate and political elites
now form a regime of their own and
they're privatizing democracy. All the
benefits - the tax cuts, policies and
rewards flow in one direction: up. — Bill Moyers

Corporate greed is killing America, and that's what we battling at Boeing. — Bill Johnson

In a 91-part series of sob stories from the laid off and the disgruntled, The NY Times is in the midst of bemoaning 'the downsizing of America' - better known as 'the whining of America.' The cause of all the heartache, in the esteemed newspaper of record's view, appears to be heartless corporate chieftains - as well as capitalism itself. Americans are moving forward, despite shackles. The shackles I am referring to are not NAFTA, not corporations. They are, instead, the barriers imposed by our own government. — Rush Limbaugh

The LPGA is basically corporate America's dinner party, and they can invite whomever they want. They're not ready for people getting up and making declarations. The bottom line is corporate America is pretty homophobic. — Hollis Stacy

I believe that if corporate America expects consumer confidence to be restored, they must first be honest with us. — Bennie Thompson

Ann Romney ... looked to me like a corporate wife. The stories she told about struggles - eh! It's hard for me to believe. I mean, she's a very rich woman, and I know that, and America knows that. — Juan Williams

I still play in corporate America. I protect the suits that want flashy muscle. Something exotic to impress
their friends about what a big shot they are."
"You do the knife act on command?" I asked.
He shrugged. "Sometimes."
"I hope it pays well," I said.
He smiled. "It either pays well or I don't do it. I may be their token Indian but I'm a rich token Indian. — Laurell K. Hamilton

We owe to every businessperson and worker in America the best environment in the world to create a job. We owe that to American businesses. Thirty-five percent corporate tax rate is the second highest in the world. We need to lower it so they don't leave. The goal is to help the middle class. — Lindsey Graham

In the Orwellian dystopia the original sin was thoughtcrime, but in our new corporate dystopia the secret inner crime is need, particularly financial need. People in America hide financial need like they hide sexual perversions.

Why? Because there's a direct correlation between need and rights. The more you need, the more you owe, the fewer rights you have.

Conversely, the less you need, the more you have, the more of a free citizen you get to be. On the extreme ends of this spectrum it is literally a crime to be poor, while a person with enough money literally cannot be prosecuted for certain kinds of crimes. — Matt Taibbi

The TPP is another corporate-backed agreement that is the latest in a series of trade policies which have cost us millions of decent-paying jobs, pushed down wages for American workers and led to the decline of our middle class. We want American companies to create decent-paying jobs in America, not just low-wage countries like Vietnam, Malaysia or China. The TPP must be defeated. — Bernie Sanders

I like to bring people together so we don't waste opportunities and resources and keep doing the wrong things when we know better. Corporate America makes great things and things that can hurt us. They have to be part of the solutions. There's nothing to say you don't make a profit by doing good. — Teresa Heinz

Corporate America was hurling offers at her. Thinking even bigger, wanting even more, she had dreams of starting a Martha Stewart magazine and starring in her own regularly scheduled Martha Stewart television show. Martha saw herself as Betty Crocker, Julia Child, Miss Manners, Emily Post, and Rupert Murdoch all rolled into one juicy pie. — Jerry Oppenheimer

This is America: Corporate stealing is practically the national pastime, and Goldman Sachs is far from the only company to get away with doing it. — Matt Taibbi

The collapse of Enron was devastating to tens of thousands of people and shook the public's confidence in corporate America. — Robert Mueller

I have been tested. I have beaten breast cancer. I have buried a child. I started as a secretary. I fought my way to the top of corporate America while being called every B word in the book. I fought my way into this election and on to this debate stage while all the political insiders and the pundits told, "it couldn't be done." — Carly Fiorina

I'm very, very worried about the invasion of privacy rights that we're seeing not only from the N.S.A. and the government but from corporate America, as well. We're losing our privacy rights. It's a huge issue. — Bernie Sanders

By the accusation of liberal bias ... the institutions that conservatives revere - the military, corporate America, organized religion, and the powerful conservative groups themselves - will be able to escape scrutiny and increase their influence. — Eric Alterman

I didn't appreciate, coming out of corporate America ... what it meant to a founder, the creator of the Macintosh, to be asked to step down from the very division that he created to lead the very product that he believed was going to change the world. — John Sculley

Corporate greed controls political will. — Aaron B. Powell

There is a system of terroristic states-the real terror network-that has spread throughout Latin America and elsewhere over the past several decades, and which is deeply rooted in the corporate interest and sustaining political-military-financial propaganda mechanisms of the United States and its allies in the Free World. — Edward S. Herman

It is clear that corporate America has an obligation to create a fairer, more equitable, more sustainable economy for no other reason than self-preservation. — John J. Sarno

Corporate America is a 20th-century dinosaur, trembling on the edge of extinction, and the only way for you to have a genuinely secure future is for you to take control of that future. — Robert Kiyosaki

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

Conservatives or better, pro- corporate apologists hijacked the vocabulary of Jeffersonian liberalism and turned words like " progress ," " opportunity ," and " individualism " into tools for making the plunder of America sound like divine right ... This "degenerate and unlovely age," as one historian calls it, exists in the mind of Karl Rove the reputed brain of George W. Bush as the seminal age of inspiration for politics and governance of America today. — Bill Moyers

Astute social commentators had been anticipating this rightward shift since the early 1980s. Bertram Gross predicted, in his book Friendly Fascism, that the United States might arrive at a gentler form of the virulent ultranationalism, antilabor activity, and racism, which coalesced into fascism in Europe in the 1930s. Corporate America would tolerate such a rightward drift, so the argument went, because more government restrictions on personal freedom would enhance business efforts to discipline the labor force and increase corporate profits. — Steve Brouwer

Competition is the hallmark of a free enterprise economy. For the past thirty years, however, corporate America has been doing everything it can to cut competition, with major corporations merging and consolidating at every opportunity. — Lou Dobbs

Many businessmen fail to understand Python principles
the ultimate absurdity was an offer from America to buy the 'format' of the Python shows, that is, Monty Python without the Pythons
corporate methods do not have the conceptual framework to deal with an anarchist collective, run by intelligent and arrogant comedians who have proved that their method works. — Robert Hewison

When you see the misogyny of hip-hop, it's so horrible, it's so putrid, it's so, you know, odious, that we know, we smell, we see it. The misogyny that is reified, that is reinforced, that is subtly reproduced in corporate America or in church life or in synagogues and temples and the like, is sometimes more subtly dealt with. — Michael Eric Dyson

Caterham realises corporate America and the American consumer market ... is the largest consumer market in the world and it is something that needs to be part of Formula One. — Alexander Rossi

So often corporate America, business America, are the worst communicators, because all they understand are facts, and they cannot tell a story. They know how to explain their quarterly results, but they don't know how to explain what they mean. — Frank Luntz

All of our political parties are bought and paid for by corporate America, Wall Street, and the wealthy interests. The Republican Party more so, but the Democrats take their share of the loot, too. — Michael Moore

There is no tougher job in corporate America than running an airline: Despite the huge amounts of equity capital that have been injected into it, the industry, in aggregate, has posted a net loss since its birth after Kitty Hawk. Airline managers need brains, guts, and experience - and — Warren Buffett

Income and wealth inequality in America today has reached levels not seen since the 1920s. Corporate — Hillary Rodham Clinton

Profit sharing in the form of stock distributions to workers would help to democratize the ownership of America's vast corporate wealth which is today appallingly undemocratic and unhealthy. — Walter Reuther

In the '70s and '80s, what private equity did is it changed corporate America. It started holding companies accountable, and for the first time managers started thinking like owners. — Henry Kravis

America is now a land that rewards failure - at the personal, corporate, and state level. — Mark Steyn

Whether you're working in corporate America or you're a journalist, construction worker, a teacher or an actor - we're all trying to keep working. If one job is ending, you look for another job. When 'Psych' ends, I will be looking for another job. — Dule Hill

There's a bias on hiring the best engineers wherever they come from. It does seem like a lot of the non-engineering execs come from Ivy League schools, as is true in much of corporate America and government. — Ken Auletta

It seems to me like a perversion of talent for an artist of any kind to further the corporate structure of America or the personal interests of the morons and thieves who run it. — George Carlin

I don't believe there's a red state in America where people believe you should cut Medicare, Social Security and veterans' benefits rather than doing away with corporate tax loopholes. — Bernie Sanders

I've always been business-minded. I worked in corporate America before becoming an actress and knew that acting wasn't the end but a means to an end. It gave me the platform and the exposure I needed to do my philanthropic work. It also gave me the financial security to focus on my other businesses, start new businesses, and even help other people start businesses. — Eva Longoria

When I was a kid, my goodness, corporate America was a bunch of stolid white guys in gray suits trying to be serious, and now it's stolid white guys in gray suits trying to be funny. — Emo Philips

We have bloated bureaucracies in Corporate America. The root of the problem is the absence of real corporate democracy. — Carl Icahn

The problem with the politicians of both parties in the US is that neither of them have a real agenda except to feather their own nests. They both have their hands deep in corporate pockets. All the rest is sleight of hand and distraction to keep the public occupied with trivia, divided against each other, and thinking their vote matters. — Michael Hogan

There are more pompous, arrogant, self-centered, mediocre-type people running corporate America who should be sent out on some postal route delivering mail. — Joe Jamail

If we can just take a few companies, and use those as models, as examples, to show the rest of corporate America how they can become more competitive, that's what I'd like to do and that's what I hope to do. — Henry Kravis

Data quality is corporate America's dirty little secret. — Paul Gillin

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

I'd done my time in corporate America, from McDonald's making shakes to Morgan Stanley making deals and, yet, I felt awfully constrained by the uniform - not just my clothes, but how I felt I needed to conform - that a traditional job required me to wear. — Chip Conley

Over the following years, the concept of "person" was changed by the courts in two ways. One way was to broaden it to include corporations, legal fictions established and sustained by the state. In fact, these "persons" later became the management of corporations, according to the court decisions. So the management of corporations became "persons." It was also narrowed to exclude undocumented immigrants. They had to be excluded from the category of "persons." And that's happening right now. So the legislations that you're talking about, they go two ways. They broaden the category of persons to include corporate entities, which now have rights way beyond human beings, given by the trade agreements and others, and they exclude the people who flee from Central America where the U.S. devastated their homelands, and flee from Mexico because they can't compete with the highly-subsidized U.S. agribusiness. — Noam Chomsky

Now, on the other hand, if we booted all the men out of corporate America, and we had all women there, quite honestly I think they'd be just as corrupt as what we have right now. I think it's best to have diversity and different points of view. — Vicki Donlan

I think our trade policies, for many, many years, have been a disaster. They have benefited corporate America at the expense of working people. — Bernie Sanders

Like the stocks of both Berkshire and Wesco to trade within hailing distance of what we think of as intrinsic value. When it runs up, we try to talk it down. That's not at all common in Corporate America, but that's the way we act. — Charlie Munger

I don't want corporate America to think they can continue their duplicitous double-dealing. — Joe Jamail

Corporate America corrupted the watchdogs that were supposed to be guarding the public interest by feeding them under the table. — Arianna Huffington

The first trailblazer was Ivy Lee. He is often considered the founder of modern public relations and the originator of corporate crisis communications.* In 1914 he went to work for the Rockefeller interests after coal miners striking at one of the mines they controlled in Ludlow, Colorado, were massacred by the National Guard. Between nineteen and twenty-five people were killed, including two women and eleven children. Lee's press releases claimed that their deaths were the result of an overturned camp stove. Ivy Lee was one of the first members of the Council on Foreign Relations when it was founded just after World War I; he was thus co-opted into America's foreign policy establishment. Shortly before he died in 1934, Congress began investigating his public relations work on behalf of the notorious German chemical monopoly I.G. Farben, which helped fund Hitler's rise to power and would later develop the poison gas used in the Nazi death camps. — Anonymous

Although Herbert Hoover in many ways prefigured him, it was Franklin D. Roosevelt who first tried to create an explicit corporate state in America with his National Recovery Administration (NRA). With its fascist-style Blue Eagle emblem, the NRA coordinated big business and labor in a central plan, and outlawed competition. The NRA even employed vigilante groups to spy on smaller businesses and report if they violated the plan. Just as in Mussolini's Italy, the beneficiaries of the U.S. corporate state were - in addition to the government itself - established economic interest groups. NRA cheerleaders included the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Bar Association, the United Mine Workers, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and - above all - Gerard Swope of General Electric, who helped draft the NRA act. Only — Ludwig Von Mises

I want to kill every best-seller list and encourage Americans to discover for themselves inspired new literature that will endure in perpetuity. Let's pluck from squalid obscurity underground, and publish, the next Hemingways, Fitzgeralds, Morrisons, Bellows, Barths, Vonneguts and Faulkners. — David B. Lentz

The Tea Party ended up being a shill for corporate America. — Russ Feingold

So when I say that I think we would have a different ethical level, particularly in corporate America, if there were more women involved, I mean that what women are best at is asking questions. Women ask questions over and over again. It drives men nuts. Women tend to ask the detailed questions; they want to know the answers. — Vicki Donlan

How do you expect to keep our seeing each other a secret? You've been all over the news here for years. People will recognize you wherever you go."
"I won't be recognized, but you will. You're America's corporate sex symbol; you're the one whose motto is "If it moves, take it to bed."
Matt and Meredith — Judith McNaught

You no longer have to wait for the gods of corporate America, or universities, or media, or investors, to come down from the clouds and choose you for success. In every single industry, the middleman is being taken out of the picture, causing more disruption in employment but also greater efficiencies and more opportunities for unique ideas to generate real wealth. You can develop those ideas, execute on them, and choose yourself for success. — James Altucher

As research on willpower has become a hot topic in scientific journals and newspaper articles, it has started to trickle into corporate America. Firms such as Starbucks - and the Gap, Walmart, restaurants, or any other business that relies on entry-level workers - all face a common problem: No matter how much their employees want to do a great job, many will fail because they lack self-discipline. They show up late. They snap at rude customers. They get distracted or drawn into workplace dramas. They quit for no reason. — Charles Duhigg

The problem of race is deep and wide and requires seismic change. But if we look to government to solve it, we might as well feel hopeless. If we look corporate America to solve it, we'll be waiting a long, long time. And if we agree with Ta-Nehisi Coates, who tentatively suggests that "the only work that will matter, will be the work done by us," then we will truly despair, for we know how well that has worked. If we follow that track, we'll quickly add in disbelief, as he did, "Or perhaps not."

As I've said, the problem of race is not "out there." It's "in here," in the human heart. And though there is no task in heaven or on earth more difficult than changing the human heart,I believe in the one who can do it. It requires a supernatural solution.

Yes, I believe in God. You see, I know how God can change a person's heart. — Benjamin Watson