Big corporations have money and power to make sure every rule breaks their way; people have voices and votes to push back.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the balance of power between corporations and individuals in influencing rules and regulations.
In this quote, Elizabeth Warren highlights the stark contrast between the immense resources and influence that large corporations possess, which often allows them to manipulate rules in their favor, and the collective strength of individuals who, through their voices and votes, have the power to challenge and hold these corporations accountable. It serves as a reminder of the importance of civic engagement and oversight in a democratic society.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a public forum discussing corporate influence in politics.
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.
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?
The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal - that you can gather votes like box tops - is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.
While democracy must have its organization and controls, its vital breath is individual liberty.
We must judge a government by its general tendencies and not by its happy accidents.
Where I think historians can help preserve and actually restore democracy is to remind us of how we got it.
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.
As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel, it is going to be either non-Jewish or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.
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