“We talk endlessly of the individual and of individualism, for example, when any sensible glance at major issues indicates that we live in an era of great conformism. Our societies turn upon democratic principles, yet the quasi totality of our leading citizens refuse to take part in that process and, instead, leave the exercise of political power to those for whom they have contempt. Our business leaders hector us in the name of capitalism, when most of them are no more than corporate employees, isolated from personal risk.”

— John Ralston Saul

Voltaire's Bastards (1992)

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John Ralston Saul 85

Canadian author and essayist 1947

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“In most parts of our country men work, not for themselves, not as partners in the old way in which they used to work, but generally as employees,—in a higher or lower grade,—of great corporations. There was a time when corporations played a very minor part in our business affairs, but now they play the chief part, and most men are the servants of corporations.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

Section I: “The Old Order Changeth”, p. 5 http://books.google.com/books?id=MW8SAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA5&dq=%22In%20most%20parts%20of%20our%20country%22
1910s, The New Freedom (1913)

“We have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism. … We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe—and would benefit the vast majority—are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets. … It is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when those elites were enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s.”

Naomi Klein book This Changes Everything

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014), p. 18
This Changes Everything

“Today, more than ever, it is critical for American citizens to understand the difference between the free-market capitalism that made our country great and the corporate cronyism that is now corrupting our political process, strangling democracy and devouring our national treasures.”

Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr. (1954) American activist

In "Crimes against nature" in Rolling Stone magazine (11 December 2003).

“The idea that each corporation can be a feudal monarchy and yet behave in its corporate action like a democratic citizen concerned for the world we live in is one of the great absurdities of our time”

Kim Stanley Robinson book Antarctica

Source: Antarctica

“The more we understand what is happening in the world, the more frustrated we often become, for our knowledge leads to feelings of powerlessness.
We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor, and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion. Very often, the fear of total permanent war paralyzes the kind of morally oriented politics, which might engage our interests and our passions. We sense the cultural mediocrity around us-and in us-and we know that ours is a time when, within and between all the nations of the world, the levels of public sensibilities have sunk below sight; atrocity on a mass scale has become impersonal and official; moral indignation as a public fact has become extinct or made trivial.
We feel that distrust has become nearly universal among men of affairs, and that the spread of public anxiety is poisoning human relations and drying up the roots of private freedom. We see that people at the top often identify rational dissent with political mutiny, loyalty with blind conformity, and freedom of judgment with treason. We feel that irresponsibility has become organized in high places and that clearly those in charge of the historic decisions of our time are not up to them. But what is more damaging to us is that we feel that those on the bottom-the forced actors who take the consequences-are also without leaders, without ideas of opposition, and that they make no real demands upon those with power.”

C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) American sociologist

Source: Letters & Autobiographical Writings (1954), pp. 184-185.

“Our generation can change this. We know what the problems are and we know what the solutions are, but we have to demand that our elected officials and business leaders take action. At the federal and state level, we have to fight efforts to repeal equal pay laws. We have to support increases in the minimum wage. And we have to demand that the United States join our global competitors in giving workers paid leave. All these issues affect our individual financial health and the strength of our collective economy.”

Sandra Fluke (1981) American women's rights activist and lawyer

CNN, (April 17, 2012).
Articles

“By [refusing] to work for a traditional revolution we would not be "giving up the struggle". As we saw in the previous three chapters, we would be struggling – nonviolently – against the Prison [of consciousness] and its institutions, which are more responsible for the sterility of our lives (and our society) than "human nature" or "capitalism". But even if we can't do any more than embark on the stage of self-healing, even if we can't get a strong group together, or if all our group efforts fail to heal society, we would still be learning to preserve our worth as human beings. And that is an essential part of the political process today. For without life-oriented people… there can be no New Age evolution. And only New Age evolution can take us off of the production-consumption continuum and out of the Prison.”

Mark Satin (1946) American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher

Page 201. The second word above was printed as "trying" in the second edition, but was printed as "refusing" in the first edition, page 78, and in the third edition, page 230. "Refusing" is consistent with Satin's argument.
New Age Politics: Healing Self and Society (1978)

“And if so many brave men and women could sacrifice their lives for our most fundamental rights, then surely we can do our parts as citizens of this great democracy to exercise those rights. Surely we can get to the polls on an election day and make our voices heard.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

2010s, Democratic National Convention speech (2012)

“We live in a system described in obsolete terms. We have come to believe our own repeated declarations that our society is based on individual initiative – whereas, in fact, most of it is no more individual than an infantry division. We assume that our economic system is based on “private property.” Yet most industrial property is is no more private than a seat in a subway train, and indeed it is questionable whether much of it can be called “property” at all. We indignantly deny that we are collectivist, yet it is demonstrable that more than two-thirds of our enterprise is possible only because it is collectivist: what is really meant is that the State did not do the collectivizing.”

Adolf A. Berle (1895–1971) American diplomat

Source: Power Without Property, 1959, p. 27; Cited in asociologist.com http://asociologist.com/2009/12/07/retrosociology-quotes-of-the-day-berle-power-without-property/, 2009/12/07.

“Although I am not a legalist when it comes to the conquest of power, I am one when it comes to the exercise of power. If parliamentary processes result in our being called upon to exercise power within the framework of existing institutions, we should do so legally and fairly without taking advantage of our presence in government to fraudulently transform the exercise of power into the conquest of power.”

Léon Blum (1872–1950) French politician

Quoted in Jean Lacouture, Léon Blum (1979), p. 206.

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John Ralston Saul 85

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