M.I.A. Quotes

My own feeling is that a corporation has no right to have a political or social influence.

Corporations are economic entities or structures, and yet they're allowed to fund political candidates, and when those candidates are elected, guess who gets in the door first? It's corporations.

Corporations write the legislation. They vote on the legislation. And they give advice on how to pass their bills.

The size of your business should be matched by the size of your political influence. If your political influence is smaller than your business, it will be taken away from you. If your political influence is bigger than your business, then you are a politician.

Citizens United provided unprecedented political weaponry to big special interests. My personal view was it was calculated to do that.

What's amazing to me? General Electric has a bigger budget for - special interest budget than all of the oil companies combined, and yet nobody says anything.

President Eisenhower saw it coming, and it is here. Patriotism no longer exists among many of these corporations. Some companies have more economic clout than entire countries. They can make or break a politician.

There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains.

What I see increasingly is that companies are playing political roles. We should actually have our research and our laws map that.

It has become more and more obvious that there is one political party in America, and that is The Business Party.

Wealth aggregates and becomes political power. Simple as that. ‘Corporation’ is just the most recent name for it.

Business must learn the lesson. Political power is necessary, that such political power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination.

He [President Dwight D. Eisenhower] came under enormous pressure to authorize the purchase of expensive military systems, often from retired officers who had joined corporate boards.

As I explored Trump's inextricable relationship with his commercial brand, and its implications for the future of politics, I began to see why so many of the attacks on him have failed to stick - and how we can identify ways of resisting him that will be more effective.

Apple is to the United States government what Clarence Thomas was to the civil rights coalition. How dare you get this big sidestepping us.

If 2016 taught us anything, it's that President Trump's political prowess should not be discounted or underestimated.

Corporations have enormous treasuries, and there are a lot of things they want from government, many of which clash with the public interest.

The interests of big corporations have so permeated government that its major decisions are indistinguishable from the boardroom demands of the leading companies in each commercial sector.

The corporate sector in my view is the most important since it is actively involved in the shaping of our life on the planet. The corporate world has the power and the means to influence politics and public trends.

Not surprisingly, corporate monopoly leads to political power. It has always been thus. The giant railroads of the 19th century tried to bully and buy entire legislatures, including the U.S. Congress. Today, Major League Baseball—exempt from antitrust laws—and a cohort of megacorporations such as Delta and Coca-Cola are trying to order about states on election integrity, while Google, Facebook and Twitter decide which citizens may say what in the public square. Nike lectures the nation on social justice while it is suspected of profiting from forced labor overseas, as the Congressional-Executive Commission on China noted in its March 2020 report. Welcome to the woke economy, led by concentrated woke capital. Do as these companies say or face cancellation.

The domestic power structure - how power is exercised in the United States, for instance - greatly influences the structure of international institutions. So, for example, the Clinton administration was very influential in shaping the WTO treaty, and, because of the way the US domestic political system works, this meant that corporations could use the US government to wield a huge influence.

The Democratic and Republican parties, two apparently distinct political entities feeding at the same corporate trough.

I'm not against the corporations. They are our wealth. But they are getting too greedy. I don't want to do away with corporations. I want them to make our cars, however, not our laws.

The Grocery Manufacturers Association is behind the bills which have been trying to pre-empt states' labeling laws in the Senate. And they have a lot of money and power in Washington. So it's a classic David versus Goliath story, where corporate lobbying outweighs consumers' rights.

The range of debate between the dominant U.S. [political] parties tends to closely resemble the range of debate within the business class.