David Cay Johnston Quotes

When this country was founded, there had only been 7 corporations... in the... old British colonial United States, at the time of the Declaration of Independence. Six of them were what today we would either call a charity or a utility. ...One corporation, created in the colony of New Haven, was set up solely to make profit. It was such a scandal they had to shut it down within a year and it took 10 years to clean up the mess. The Founders disliked and distrusted corporations. But they believed in collective bargaining, and I can prove that because in 1792 Congress passed the first significant labor law and subsidy law. It was to benefit the cod fishing industry. We got a quarter of our foreign earnings from cod and we were deeply in debt from... the Revolutionary War. So it was important we had foreign earnings. ...[T]o address ...harassment by the British Navy the cod fishing industry wanted a subsidy, and Thomas Jefferson ...ordered a study and concluded that those ships that only paid wages to their fishermen should be excluded. But if... the workers were paid partly in the share of the profits... then you got the subsidy, and 5/8 of the subsidy went to the workers and 3/8 to the company. ...[T]hat sounds a lot like collective bargaining.

The super rich... largely control what the government knows about their incomes. And their friends in Congress have slashed budgets for inspecting the tax returns...

Trump has left the vast majority of positions under his control vacant.

Rewriting the economic rules... in the past few decades has been done under the banner of "" and its promise that less government means more economic growth. The term itself is a misnomer. No society is free from regulation. Everything has rules...

Let's go to the student loan industry. ...What is the Trump administration doing? "We're going to address the student loan problem." So brings in... executives from the companies that made the student loans. ...This is building a new hen house designed by the fox!

This growing concentration of income at the top... resembles the distribution of income found in three other major countries: Brasil, Mexico, and Russia. ...They all have growing, and seemingly intractable, poverty at the bottom. ...These four countries are also societies in which adults have the right to vote, but real political power is wielded by a relatively narrow, and rich, segment of the population.

Questions of corruption and foreign influence are on the front burner... because of the extensive business holdings of Donald Trump and his actions encouraging foreign powers, lobbyists, and other favor seekers to spend money at his Washington hotel and other properties.

During the Constitutional Convention... [d]ictionaries from the era... show that emolument had a broad meaning, including profit, gain, benefit, and advantage. John Mikhail... found that "the majority of Blackstone's usages of 'emolumnent' involve benefits other than government salaries and or perquisites," including profits from business and rents from land.

[T]he Democrats, who have not paid attention to their knitting for 40 years, while the Republicans have been building bench strength, passing laws to suppress votes, coming up with laws to throw out votes after they're cast, as we saw in Michigan. The Democrats have to run candidates who are viable. I was sent a news clip by a friend... a couple of interviews of people who want to run for office as Democrats... they were young and they were earnest and... then they got asked questions... [T]hey immediately fell apart because they didn't know anything. They were just like Donald Trump. ...You've got to find and develop real candidates.

Donald Trump has been involved with the Russians back to 1983. He has worked very hard to suppress a lawsuit about a quarter billion dollar tax fraud which he authorized. ...DCReport.org, the nonprofit news service that my friends and I started ...is in court trying to get access to some of the documents in this case that have been sealed, because Trump has been incredibly successful in hiding the record of his conduct.

The government agencies, without nearly enough money to oversee safety... write superficial reports, and when it comes to accidents at rail crossings, they thoroughly investigate only 4 out of 3,000 cases.

[The] only determinant of your economic life in 18th century France was how well you picked your parents. ...The functional equivalent of what would happen if we repealed the occurred, in that all capital and all land (and this was essentially an agrarian society) were tied up. Either the Church or trusts controlled so much that there was no movement...

[T]o the extent that people have said... "I don't care what the government's doing..." politicians fall under the influence of other people... in our age they have fallen heavily under the influence of their [political] donors. ...We have a government that is increasingly estranged from the needs of the people, and focused on the needs of the moneyed people and large corporations.

[L]egislatures have rewritten basic business laws, some whose principles date back thousands of years. Too often the goal has been to thwart competition, artificially inflate prices, hold down wages by decimating unions, reduce worker benefits and... restrict or bar access to the courts by those aggrieved.

So all of the things we were promised, most... haven't happened. There have been some good things. Airfares have fallen... There have been some benefits. It is not black and white, but my focus is on these areas where we now have massive transfers of wealth and income from those with less, to the politically connected few. Billions and billions of dollars being handed up the ladder.