News is the rich paying the rich to tell the middle class the poor are to blame.
Anonymous
May 31, 2020
He can stay, he can go. He can be impeached, or voted out in 2020. But removing Trump will not remove the infrastructure of an entire party that embraced him; the dark money that funded him; the online radicalisation that drummed his army; nor the racism he amplified or reanimated.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
May 23, 2020
The moral crisis of our age has nothing to do with gay marriage or abortion; it’s insider trading, obscene CEO pay, wage theft from ordinary workers, Wall Street’s continued gambling addiction, corporate payoffs to friendly politicians, and the billionaire takeover of our democracy.
Robert Reich
May 10, 2020
I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful, to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives, secure barely enough for a wretched existence.
Eugene V. Debs
May 9, 2020
The curve has become flatter. It needs to be like this so it doesn’t overtax our health system. We have made model observations. We’re now at about reproduction factor 1 … that is an average of one person infecting another one. If we get to the point where everybody infects 1.1 people, then by October, we will reach the capacity level of our health system with the assumed numbers of intensive care beds. If we get to 1.2 people, so everyone is infecting 20 percent more. Out of 5 people, one infects two and the rest one, then we will reach the limit of our health care system in July. And if it’s up to 1.3 people, then in June we will reach the limits of our health system. So, that’s where you can see how small the margin is, and the whole evolution is based on the fact that we assume that we have an infection figure that we can monitor; that we can track. But it is this ice … or a fragile situation or really a situation where caution is the order of the day, and not overconfidence.
Angela Merkel
April 19, 2020
Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all.
Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over 800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts [serial killer] Whitman’s rifle and [serial killer] Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
If this is true here at home, so it is true elsewhere in world.
Robert F. Kennedy
April 18, 2020
Two months on, that anxiety has not gone, although it’s also been joined by a sense of sadness. It’s now clear that so many people have died, and so many more are desperately ill, simply because our politicians refused to listen to and act on advice. Scientists like us said lock down earlier; we said test, trace, isolate. But they decided they knew better.
Helen Ward (epidemiologist, London School of Public Health)
April 16, 2020
I don’t want to see religious bigotry in any form. It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it.
Billy Graham
April 5, 2020
Only now, hopefully not too late, we are beginning to understand that all that stands between us and the plague’s most horrifying effects is good government, something which we have sought to destroy for some decades, deriding it, dismissing it, downsizing it, underfunding it, and, as witnessed when the Morrison government returned to power, hectoring and bullying it.
And so we reap our bitter harvest.
A system of thought, an idea of the state, a way of running nations, a grossly unequal economy, all that began 40 years ago with Margaret Thatcher’s declaration that there is no such thing as society, must end with the way we respond to this deadly virus.
Richard Flanagan
March 28, 2020
If the battle cry of our government’s response to the global financial crisis was “go early, go hard, go households”, this government’s approach to the current crisis seems to be “go late, go half-measures, and go ... well ... go to Hillsong”. For a decade we have been accused of having gone too far in our efforts to avoid the GFC. When we look back on the decisions taken over the last month, they will be seen (as with the bushfires) as the mark of a complacent and negligent government.
