Factoids

This page lists some impressive statistics and quotations about the state of our world and what we can do about it.

Corporate Power and Wealth Disparity

"According to Business Week, the average CEO made 42 times the average blue-collar worker's pay in 1980, 85 times in 1990 and a staggering 531 times in 2000."
- AFL-CIO "Executive Paywatch"

"We stand for the maintenance of private property... We shall protect free enterprise as the most expedient, or rather the sole possible economic order."
- Adolf Hitler

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
- Thomas Jefferson, letter to George Logan, November 1816

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country ... corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war."
- Abraham Lincoln, letter to Col. William F. Elkins, Nov 21, 1864. Reference: The Lincoln Encyclopedia, Archer H. Shaw (Macmillan, 1950, NY)

"Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."
- Benito Mussolini

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism -- ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any controlling private power."
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Most of the world's 100 largest economies are not governments but corporations.

Environment and Health

"Each year, smoking kills more people than AIDS, alcohol, drug abuse, car crashes, murders, suicides, and fires -- combined!"
- Centers for Disease Control

"If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know."
- World Scientists' Warning to Humanity, 1992, signed by a majority of the world's Nobel laureates in the sciences

"Before I Kill You, Mr. Bond..."

"Of course, I have as much power as the President has."
- Bill Gates, in "The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But The Truth", Wired, November 2000

"Since water is as central to food production as seed is, and without water life is not possible, Monsanto Co. is now trying to establish its control over water."
- Robert Fraley, Chief Technology Officer of Monsanto, in The Hindu, Saturday, May 1, 1999