When giant companies wanted more tax loopholes, Washington got it done. When huge energy companies wanted to tear up our environment, Washington got it done. When enormous Wall Street banks wanted new regulatory loopholes, Washington got it done. No gridlock there!
Interpretation
This quote critiques the ease with which powerful corporations influence government actions, often at the expense of the public and the environment.
Elizabeth Warren highlights the troubling reality that government often caters to the demands of large corporations rather than addressing the needs of the average citizen. She points out that while there is often political gridlock on important issues, when it comes to accommodating the desires of wealthy companies, the government acts swiftly and effectively, raising concerns about priorities and accountability in politics.
In practice
In a political debate, to emphasize the influence of corporations over legislation.
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 very essence of a free government consists in considering offices as public trusts, bestowed for the good of the country, and not for the benefit of an individual or a party.
Government ... can't be trusted to control its own bureaucrats or collect taxes equitably or fill a pothole, much less decide which of its citizens to kill.
The "progressives" who today masquerade as "liberals" may rant against "fascism"; yet it is their policy that paves the way for Hitlerism. Nothing could have been more helpful to the success of the National-Socialist (Nazi) movement than the methods used by the "progressives," denouncing Nazism as a party serving the interests of "capital." The German workers knew this tactic too well to be deceived by it again.
We owe gratitude to France, justice to England, good will to all, and subservience to none ... it was by the sober sense of our citizens that we were safely and steadily conducted from monarchy to republicanism, and it is by the same agency alone we can be kept from falling back.
There is too much disagreement for disagreement's sake. In a time of persistent challenges that still call into question our most sacred aspirations as a country, we cannot afford shallow callous divisiveness in our public debate.
Politics is not like an ocean voyage or a military campaign... something which leaves off as soon as reached. It is not a public chore to be gotten over with. It is a way of life.
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