Michael Leunig Quotes

There is a huge shift taking place in the global awareness in the last 5 years with strong views about globalization and the power structures of major corporations.

Greed and globalization aren't just America's fault.

Our military doesn't defend our American people. Our military is the strong-arm muscle of corporations.

I like where we're going with technology and global integration, but the fact that corporations and dollars rule everything in our lives, I don't like it. This isn't the Hollywood I wanted to be part of.

Politics is just a function of business now, just a tributary of the great entrepreneurial capitalist system.

Microsoft represents the best of ourselves or the worst.

And that's why I wrote the book, because our country really needs to understand, if people in this nation understood what our foreign policy is really about, what foreign aid is about, how our corporations work, where our tax money goes, I know we will demand change.

Americans today are blaming globalization for change itself and the pace of change, much of which has little to do with globalization.

We are told that we must open up, that trade and commerce must be totally free. Free for whom? For rogue speculators. For anarchists wanting to destroy weak countries in their crusade for open societies, to force us to submit to the dictatorship of international manipulators.

The facts of our present industrial system are of so, complicated a nature that they have not only defied the attention of economists for the last fifty years, but they have deceived practical men who have given to them not only the time economists have given, but their whole lives.

We now live not in an economic order or a political order, but in a political economy that is closely linked with military institutions and decisions.

Because of my politics, I don't necessarily think that the independent capitalist is that much better than the multinational capitalist; it's just that the independent capitalist hasn't grown as big yet.

American intelligence and military agencies have a huge footprint in terms of how the world works, but they're largely invisible. I'm interested in exploring those 'geographies' of secrecy from many different angles: political, legal, economic, spatial, etc., because I am fundamentally just interested in how the world works and how societies work.

Tax the rich. End the wars. Break the power of lobbies in Washington. These are the demands of Occupy Wall Street. They are very important. The US corporations dominate Washington. The big oil companies, Wall Street banks and the military-industrial complex - they rule this country and their influence and power has to be broken.

Hillary talks the talk, but in my view, she is as big a corporatist, as big a war monger, as big an imperialist as any of the Republican presidential candidates. Her rhetoric is less offensive.

The tragedy of 9/11 and the bloody scrambling-up of the Middle East were painful reminders that the world had not yet reached any end-of-history ideal. But these events mattered less to the assumptions and strategies of huge multinational companies than one might guess.

I think I'm a critic of corporate power, whether locally or globally. And the term 'globalization' I've never found all that helpful.

I read Naomi Klein's 'No Logo' when I was 15. It's one of the things that's shaped my relationship to fame - to endorsements, to selling things.

Not only in Africa but in much of the world, most leaders' pockets are lined by industrial business. And industrial business is never going to stop aiming at profit.

The 21st century can and must be an American century. It began with terror, war, and economic calamity. It is our duty to steer it onto the path of freedom, peace, and prosperity.

It isn't inevitable that we have a globalization which is used by the corporations not to pay taxes. It is not inevitable that we have a form of globalization in which corporations use the threat of moving jobs abroad to lower wages. None of this is inevitable.

The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy.

With Hillary, you know, I think, across the board, Hillary is the Wal-Mart candidate. Though she may change her tune a little bit, you know, she's been a member of the Wal-Mart board. On jobs, on trade, on healthcare, on banks, on foreign policy, it's hard to find where we are similar.

Though many of the poor have come to see the affluent middle class as its enemy, that class actually stands between the poor and the real powers in this society - the administrative octopus with its head in Washington, the conglomerates, the military complex.

Capitalism is destroying the world.