David Cay Johnston Quotes

In just a third of a century, the widespread liquidity that nourished the economy—reliable streams of cash going to workers and owners alike—has... dried up.

America has been transformed from a land of growing economic plenty into a hollow shell.

Citizens United is to the expansion of corporate power what the big bang is to the beginning of existence...

Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas insist that they are "originalists,"... interpreting our Constitution as a document fixed in time. No honest originalist could... have signed on to Citizens United, but intellectually corrupt justices who worship corporatism, disdain the poor and enjoy the perks of power...

[C]lassical "corporations"... existed not for profit but in service of the state. ...A key tenet ...has changed since ancient times... If a business fails, the chief executive does not have to become a slave to the bank... Corporations... have inverted the Roman equation: ...the state serves them.

Workers may toil their entire lives, communities may tax themselves to create infrastructure a corporation needs, and vendors may invest their entire fortune to supply the corporation—but none of these parties, Friedman said, has significant legal rights or moral claims. [T]he idea... was not supported by the development of the law, the regulation of business and the advancement of civilization over thousands of years. But... Friedman's ahistorical thinking has come to dominate...

[L]imiting liability... has also obscured a corporation's responsibility to function for the benefit of society. The greater good is an idea that is thousands of years old, but in the recent past corporations have been permitted to lose site of that... notion.

Unlike individuals, who must take responsibility for their conduct, corporations' legal responsibility... has benefited from limits to that responsibility established by law. The rationale... is that people who... build a business would not take the same risks if failure meant they would lose... their houses, cars... and everything else. ...[T]hey can go about their corporate business, creating enterprises and generating wealth.

If... immortal, amoral and greed-driven people walked the earth, we would have to rewrite our laws governing property. ...[O]ur new class of immortals could just keep accumulating wealth and power forever. In time they would probably own every... asset on earth worth having. ...[That] immortal being is the modern corporation.

Wyoming Corporate Services... for a fee, will create a company, set up a bank account, appoint officers and directors... provide a lawyer as a corporate director so the company can invoke attorney-client privilege... [and] make any required regulatory filings... without anyone being able to ascertain, without a court order, who is behind any corporation it creates.

[B]usiness has been regulated throughout history. ...[I]n the past four decades, we have forgotten the tried and tested (and therefore profoundly conservative) principles of business developed over thousands of years. ...[O]ur wealth... well being and... freedom are being diminished daily.

Legislatures passed these laws, presidents and governors signed them and the courts have endorsed them. In many cases they effectively gut state constitutional provisions and laws banning gifts to business.

[L]aws in nineteen states... let companies pocket the state income taxes withheld from their workers' paychecks for up to twenty-five years. ...In many of these subsidy programs, no jobs are created.

[S]tate and local governments alone spend at least $70 billion a year of taxpayer's money to subsidize factories, office buildings [etc.]... $900 per year for a family of four.

Businesses have gotten policies adopted that have allowed some managers to run corporations as, effectively, criminal enterprises... ... those in control run the fraud.