Does anyone believe that Goldman Sachs is gonna give up a deal that would yield millions of dollars because someone fussed at them behind closed doors?
Interpretation
The quote highlights the unlikelihood of corporations sacrificing profit due to ethical concerns voiced privately.
Elizabeth Warren's quote underscores the pervasive influence of profit motives within major corporations like Goldman Sachs. It questions the effectiveness of private complaints or ethical discussions in instigating real change, suggesting that financial incentives often outweigh moral considerations in corporate decision-making.
In practice
During a debate about corporate accountability, this quote could be used to emphasize the challenges of ethical reform.
Families rely on financial services more than ever, but those who need them most - who struggle to make ends meet - too often must contend with sky-high interest rates and tricks and traps buried in the fine print of their loan products.
There's been such a sense that there's one set of rules for trillion-dollar financial institutions and a different set for all the rest of us. It's so pervasive that it's not even hidden.
Mitt Romney is the guy who said corporations are people. No, Governor Romney, corporations are not people.
I talk to nurses and programmers, salespeople and firefighters - people who bust their tails every day. Not one of them - not one - stashes their money in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.
'Middle class' used to be synonymous with secure, with steady, with boring, because middle-class people were people who were pretty much safe from the time they first started work on through retirement and until their deaths. No longer.
We shouldn't be profiting from our students who are drowning in debt while giving a great deal to the banks. That's just wrong.
Life, and you, and I, and all of us together became for a while interesing to ourselves once more.
...Individualistic material progress and the desire to gain prestige by coming out on top have taken over from the sense of fellowship, compassion and community. Now people live more or less on their own in a small house, jealously guarding their goods and planning to acquire more, with a notice on the gate that says, 'Beware of the Dog.
Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire.
We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal's 'Pensees' and read, 'I am the great silent spaces between worlds.'
And a rock feels no pain; And an island never cries.
Our faith is stronger than death, our philosophy is firmer than flesh, and the spread of the Kingdom of God upon the earth is more sublime and more compelling.
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