Eddie S.

“Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be taught that all is right as it is. And so, the schools, the churches, the popular literature taught that to be rich was a sign of superiority, to be poor a sign of personal failure, and that the only way upward for a poor person was to climb into the ranks of the rich by extraordinary effort and extraordinary luck.”
― Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present

“The [carried-interest] loophole was in essence an accounting trick that enabled hedge fund and private equity managers to categorize huge portions of their income as ‘interest,’ which was taxed at the 15 percent rate then applied to long-term capital gains. This was less than half the income tax rate paid by other top-bracket wage earners. Critics called the loophole a gigantic subsidy to millionaires and billionaires at the expense of ordinary taxpayers. The Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, estimated that the hedge fund loophole cost the government over $6 billion a year—the cost of providing health care to three million children. Of that total, it said, almost $2 billion a year from the tax break went to just twenty-five individuals.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“For too many of us, the occasional binge becomes habitual. That extra drink at the party turns into substance dependence. Procrastinating on a deadline unfolds into life dreams that are not pursued. Picking fights with the people you love becomes a method for avoiding the intimacy you so desperately crave.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“the industrial and political elites of North and South would take hold of the country and organize the greatest march of economic growth in human history. They would do it with the aid of, and at the expense of, black labor, white labor, Chinese labor, European immigrant labor, female labor, rewarding them differently by race, sex, national origin, and social class, in such a way as to create separate levels of oppression—a skillful terracing to stabilize the pyramid of wealth.”
― Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States