Corporate Corruption Quotes

The stock market is a racket. Those guys are crooks.

Organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

This Court now concludes that independent [political] expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.

…the new front of great corporate transgression.

Big business does not want honest government.

If you're cutting deals with one company or another, eventually, there's going to be a quid pro quo. There's going to be a bribe. There's going to be something.

The economic game is not supposed to be rigged like some shady ring toss on a carnival midway.

I want to say something, and it may sound harsh, not to you, but to the American people. In a sense, in my view, the business model of Wall Street is fraud. It's fraud. I believe that corruption is rampant, and the fact that major bank after major bank has reached multi billion dollar settlements with the United States government when we have a weak regulator system tells me that not only did we have to bail them out once, if we don't start breaking them up, we're going to have to bail them out again, and I do not want to see that happen.

Like sex in Victorian England, the reality of Big Business today is our big dirty secret.

I don't like writing straight-up thrillers. I like writing about families hurled into crisis and danger - soccer moms and regular dads and husbands who might have to rescue their daughters or who are, say, hedge fund managers and have one foot on the sidelines watching their kids and the other in nefarious cover-ups and conspiracies.

From coast to coast, the FBI and Securities and Exchange Commission have ensnared people not only at hedge funds, but at technology and pharmaceutical companies, consulting and law firms, government agencies, and even a major stock exchange.

I want to give businessmen an honorable place but they make crooks out of themselves.

A father and two sons run Adelphia. It's a cable company. And they took from that company a billion dollars. A billion. Three people - three people took a billion dollars. What were they gonna do, start their own space program? 'Let's send the monkey to Mars, Dad!'

Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government.

I think the presumption is, for some reason, anybody who comes from the business or the corporate world is corrupt.

Economic crimes are complex in nature, difficult to untangle, and they must be investigated according to the procedures set by the law.

Corporate bodies are more corrupt and profligate than individuals, because they have more power to do mischief, and are less amenable to disgrace or punishment. They feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor goodwill.

I don't want corporate America to think they can continue their duplicitous double-dealing.

From 1934 to 1963, the biggest criminals in America ended up on Alcatraz. Nowadays they end up on Wall Street.

At bottom, the Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.

Last week convicted Enron crook Ken Lay died of a heart attack. They announced they were going to cremate him. Where he's going, why bother?.

By incentivizing Wall Street players to sniff out inefficient or corrupt companies and bet against them, short-selling acts as a sort of policing system; legal short-sellers have been instrumental in helping expose firms like Enron and WorldCom.

These people say free markets are the way to go, but wink, wink, the markets aren't really free. They're just a protectionist racket, and we have to pay for it all on every level. It's really quite extraordinary, and immoral, and illegal. These things need to be named, and shamed, and outed, and mocked, and prosecuted.

Whatever we want to think about American business - work hard, tell the truth, have morality - it's a myth. There's a lot of graft.

Why is JP Morgan getting so much heat? Maybe because it is a massive international crime syndicate.