Privatize Quotes & Sayings

The ultimate goal of the political elite is to privatize the air. So as not to destroy their own edifice of democratic compassion they will make provisions for the sick and the poor. Air will be rationed by a privatized bureaucracy and only those who complete a series of stringent means tests will be allowed to breath freely. If this sounds like untenable dystopian sci-fi, you haven't been paying attention. In the 17th century Dean Jonathon Swift satirically proposed that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food for rich gentlemen and ladies. Many Lords in Westminster at the time took this as a sign that an Irish voice was finally speaking sense. The descendants of these Lords still stalk the corridors of power today. Never underestimate the callousness or the hereditary madness of the ruling class. — Dean Cavanagh

We all should know what the Right's agenda is here: privatize education, kill public schools, and transfer the teaching of the young to private entities. — Barry W. Lynn

Corporations continue to do their dirty work in poor countries. At the turn of the 21st century, the World Bank put pressure on Bolivia to privatize water services. Bechtel, the engineering giant, took control of this vital resource in Cochabamba. Bechtel's executives immediately raised the price of water so high that most people could not afford it. Its contract, made in collusion with the Bolivian government, gave Bechtel the right to charge people for water they took from their own wells. Bechtel even sent collectors into people's homes to demand payment for rainwater that people gathered in pots and pans on their roofs. — David Zindell

Like Russia's gangsterism and Bush's cronyism, contemporary Iraq is a creation of the fifty-year crusade to privatize the world. Rather than being disowned by its creators, it deserves to be seen as the purest incarnation yet of the ideology that gave it birth. — Naomi Klein

Mark my words, there will be an intensive effort to privatize Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. — Bernie Sanders

The search for happiness is one of the few actions in which human beings absolutely agree upon, though they may not agree on what it implies or how to find it. This quest for satisfaction emphasizes the creation of physical and mental boundaries that we would like to "privatize" for our welfare and security, trying to keep them unchanged in appearance and actions. That quest is ultimately insatiable and eventually results in more suffering and dissatisfaction — Ivan Figueroa-Otero

Many conservatives see higher education as a threat to their reactionary and corporate oriented interests and would like to defund higher education, privatize it, eliminate tenure, and define the working conditions of faculty to something resembling the labor practices of Walmart workers. — Henry Giroux

For decades the G.O.P. has won elections by appealing to social and racial divisions, only to turn after each victory to deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy - a process that reached its epitome when George W. Bush won re-election by posing as America's defender against gay married terrorists, then announced that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security. — Paul Krugman

Of course the Republicans have long wanted to privatize Social Security and destroy it. But Social Security has been the most important and valuable social program in the history of the United States. — Bernie Sanders

I never sought to privatize Social Security. — Saxby Chambliss

When we privatize our faith, we cease to be salt and light in the world. No longer part of a countercultural revolution, or an outpost of heaven demonstrating God's plan for restoration and resurrection, we reduce our faith to this: "Jesus came, died, and rose from the grave to get me into heaven. — Mike Slaughter

Due to the major demographic changes we have gone through in the last few years in this country, we will be a majority/minority nation and there are a large number of people who do not like that. Donald Trump has tapped into those people's fears because he comes from the extreme right wing part of the Republican Party, as does Ted Cruz. They believe that we should cut taxes to wealthy Americans and enforce anti immigrant laws. They don't believe in Education or Social Security, they would end it and change it and privatize it. — Debbie Wasserman Schultz

History suggests that attempts to privatize Medicare by relying on private companies to offer Medicare benefits in rural America simply will not work. — Bennie Thompson

Even as the quality of available water is constantly diminishing, in some places there is a growing tendency, despite its scarcity, to privatize this resource, turning it into a commodity subject to the laws of the market. Yet access to safe drinkable water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights. Our world has a grave social debt towards the poor who lack access to drinking water, because they are denied the right to a life consistent with their inalienable dignity. — Pope Francis

There are very powerful and wealthy special interests who want to privatize or dismember virtually every function that government now performs, whether it is Social Security, Medicare, public education or the Postal Service. — Bernie Sanders

We're not going to give tax breaks to billionaires and then cut back on the needs of our elderly or poor or kids or education. We're not going to privatize Social Security - in fact, we're going to strengthen it. We're going to provide quality education for every kid in America, from preschool through college. We have to take on these corporate leaders who are selling out the American people, whose allegiance is now much more to China than it is to the United States. If we have the courage to take these people on, I think we can overwhelm George W. Bush and his friends. — Bernie Sanders

Once you privatize something, it becomes a for-profit business. — Jesse Ventura

Conservatives deny that the private depends on public resources. Citing Ronald Reagan's credo that "The Government is the Problem," conservatives are constantly trying to eliminate public resources and to privatize as much as possible. — George Lakoff

A tremendous amount of the entrepreneurial initiative, if you want to call it that, comes from the dynamic state sector on which most of the economy relies to socialize costs and risks and privatize eventual profit. And that's achieved by, if you like, advertising. — Noam Chomsky

Many university presidents assume the language and behavior of CEOs and in doing so they are completely reneging on the public mission of the universities. The state is radically defunding public universities and university presidents, for the most part, rather than defending higher education as a public good, are trying to privatize their institutions in order to remove them from the political control of state governments. This is not a worthy or productive strategy. — Henry Giroux

He immediately began to de-privatize. He revoked the licences to the unpopular Imperial Continental Gas Association and fashioned it into a company owned by the municipality. The same happened with the water pipeline over the dunes and the Amsterdamse Omnibus Maatschappij (Amsterdam Omnibus Company), which had run a number of horse-drawn trams in the city since 1875. In doing all this, Treub instigated an evolutionary process that was to give a lasting social basis to city policy. From — Geert Mak

However, the Administration's plan to privatize Social Security will undermine retirement security for all Americans by cutting guaranteed benefits by more than 40 percent, and risky private accounts won't make up for the loss of benefits for millions of Americans. — Ruben Hinojosa

I oppose the president's plan to privatize Social Security. — Brian Higgins

They privatize the profits and socialize the losses, so whichever way the wheel spins, they win." Quote from a millionaire Wall-Streeter in Hitchhiking with Larry David by Paul Samule Dolman. — Paul Dolman

Let's define a Crapitalist: A well-connected friend of the powers that be who scores big bucks at taxpayer expense. From bagging millions in tax dollars for phony "green energy" companies that go bust, to vacuuming public coffers to build glitzy sports stadiums, to utilizing little-known tax credit loopholes to loot $1.5 billion a year for Hollywood movies - Crapitalists know how to use every trick to enrich themselves at taxpayer expense. Rather than playing and winning in the rough-and-tumble world of business competition, Crapitalists use government to rig the game in their favor and leave you and me - the taxpayers - holding the bill. These corporate sissies know their ideas suck, so they try to stack the deck to privatize their profits and socialize their losses.
And there's the rub: crony capitalism is socialism's Trojan horse. — Jason Mattera

The corporations don't like open courts of law, trials by jury. They want to privatize by pushing people into compulsory arbitration where they win most of the time and the whole process is pretty secret. — Ralph Nader

Libertarianism and communism are equally crazy in opposite ways. Libertarians believe that it is possible to privatize everything without anarchy, while communists believe that it is possible to socialize everything without tyranny. — Michael Lind

An anarcho-capitalist is someone who agrees that the best way to eliminate the tragedy of the commons is to privatize it away, and realizes that state politics is the mother of all such tragedies. — Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski

Secretary [Hillary ] Clinton is absolutely right, there are people, Koch brothers among others, who have a group called Concerned Veterans of America, funded by the Koch brothers. The Koch brothers, by the way, want to destroy Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, every governmental program passed since the 1930s. Yes, there are people out there who want to privatize it. — Bernie Sanders

The Presidents plan to privatize Social Security would actually take away guaranteed benefits and put the promise of a secure retirement in jeopardy. — Patty Murray

If it moves, privatize it; if it doesn't move, privatize it. Since everything either moves or doesn't move, privatize everything. — Walter Block