Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The public should have access to unfettered communication and commerce, and the Internet is increasingly the medium where that takes place.
So one of the things I want to focus on is how we can show how taking on private financing is taking on this fundamental democratic threat.
Amazon's outsized power is looking less and less like smart business and more and more like oppressive politics - one company bullying us all.
Oftentimes people get it wrong when they say we need to educate voters first and then give them power. I tend to favor giving them power first.
Amazon's capitulation to those opposed to their expansion in New York City is an epic moment for people power over an enormous corporate bully.
A lot of politics plays at the level of myth, and if you understand that, then you feel like you have access to the secret language of politics.
It is time to call out Google for what it is: a monopolist in search, video, maps and browser, and a thin-skinned tyrant when it comes to ideas.
Most of the corruption in Albany is legal corruption, not illegal bribery. It comes from campaigns being funded by millionaires and corporations.
I have always wanted to run for Attorney General, and I always wanted to have a baby, but I did not think I would be doing them at the same time.
Creativity is essential to any kind of joyful living. Sometimes I act, sometimes I draw, I paint, I write poems. I can't imagine living without it.
If those people in power never made any mistakes, we'd be done for as a democracy. But people keep making mistakes. History is a series of mistakes.
We need to ban outside income for elected officials. Transparency alone is not enough; it doesn't solve the problem of creating outside dependencies.
One of the most dangerous things about Fox News isn't that it's right wing but that it's nihilistic. It takes away the capacity to believe in politics.
After Citizens United, unlimited money could go directly to a corporate entity that can tell people who to vote for, with names and polling places included.
There is so much we don't know about Facebook. We know we have a corporate monopoly that has repeated serious violations that are threatening our democracy.
I hope the true public servants learn from this that they should not be afraid and they will get incredible grass-roots support if they call out corruption.
There's this myth out there that self-perpetuates that candidates believe that although the populace cares about corruption, they're not going to vote on it.
New York has really thrived both upstate and downstate when there are tens of thousands of small businesses all representing their different creative impulses.
If you think art is a competitive forum, then you're going to stop doing it if you're not good. But if it's not competitive, it's something that you'll keep doing.
People respond to political characters in archetypal ways. A fun game is to think of a politician and ask, "Which god is that? Are they like Aries? Are they like Athena?"
It's said that history inevitably marches toward democracy, but it only leaves the possibility of democracy, and the constant threat that it would be eroded by big money.
There is a long American tradition of suspicion of concentrated economic power because of its tendency to corrupt government and turn it from a democracy into a plutocracy.
Integrity is hard work. I do think the Internet makes it harder because of the temptations of performance. You can perform and have integrity, but it's easier just to perform.
So the job of building structures, building a constitutional structure, is not just to punish those who behave badly but actually to protect people from their own temptations.
The Internet is an important organizing tool. But the goal of a campaign isn't to use the Internet for organizing; the goal is always to win, and to change policy and politics.
I represented a man on death row whose lawyers had spent all of eight hours looking into his claim of innocence. I met men whose lawyers had never looked into their backgrounds.
And increasingly, as people live online, we are used to making really snap judgments about somebody's character based on their Facebook page or the way their blog feels or look.
Mom and pop shops paying taxes while Amazon got billions just to come to town didn't seem right, and, post-FoxxConn, people are less likely to fall for the promised jobs numbers.
Corruption is when people in public office use that public office for private or selfish ends. This is one of the most central debates in the last 40 years in law, what is corruption.
It's one of those secrets that not a lot of politicians realize: The Internet is not a 10th-tier policy issue. It's not an add-on policy. It's something that affects everybody's life.
Public education is so important - resisting privatization and charterization, high-stakes testing, and defunding. It's important for New York, but it's also important for the country.
History is a series of mistakes. Now the task is to plan for those mistakes so those of us who are populists can actually take over the reins of power when the right mistakes are made.
Because jurors have an extraordinary amount of power over the situation and of the people and the story in front of them, they tend to pay pretty intense attention to what's happening.
I propose a full day of live one-on-one debates on unannounced issues, with no aides to help or reply. Each candidate would be paired with another candidate for seven 60-minute sessions.
Creating systems where people feel like they're being punished for things they didn't do wrong breaks all kinds of trust and makes people feel like they're not being treated with dignity.
Google has established a pattern of lobbying and threatening to acquire power. It has reached a dangerous point common to many monarchs: The moment where it no longer wants to allow dissent.
The core of my platform is to change the role of money in politics, support public education and break up monopoly power. All of these are fundamental prerequisites to a responsive democracy.
The structure of private campaign finance has essentially pre-corrupted our politicians, so that they can't even recognize explicit bribery because it feels the same as what they do every day.
A real economic development policy would address the root issues hampering business growth, like access to credit and marketplaces so dominated by giant companies that it is impossible to compete.
The federal government has shown little willingness to stand up to corporate monopolies, and use its powers under the existing antitrust statutes, including the powerful Clayton Act and Sherman Act.
As a school board member, I might have particular views about the ways we might increase the economics curriculum in a local high school, but I'm not sure I should mandate that for the entire country.
And my whole life I've been focused on questions of anti-corruption laws, on constitutional law, and it's essential that the power of this office be maximized to stop corruption at the national level.
The way we fund campaigns is a feminist issue and a race issue. If you want more representation, you can't say it's going to be really expensive to run for office and you need a rolodex of billionaires.
In the absence of relative equality - quid pro quo - a court might question whether there was an actual contract. If I give you a dollar, and you give me a mansion, our contract would lack quid pro quo.
I don't have any particular plans in mind. What I see is that you can become so focused on the idea of running that winning becomes your motivation, as opposed to what you stand for being your motivation.
The tools Facebook provides make discrimination easy. Facebook has monopoly profit margins, so it could easily provide real staffing to protect against discrimination, if it wanted to. It doesn't want to.
A combination of working in politics as well as teaching and being [an actor] certainly helped. I became so much more comfortable in front of a crowd. I felt like I was calling on all those other experiences.
Dependence on private money to run campaigns causes pain to Republicans and Democrats alike - and business owners. It's time we did something about it. And public financing of elections should be the first step.
Politicians are expected to spend half their time talking to funders and to keep them happy. Given this context, it's not hard to see how a bribery charge can feel like a technical argument instead of a moral one.
Congress is corrupt, gridlocked, broken, dysfunctional. It's not working and we need it working again. It's not going to get fixed by people who are deeply, in one way or another, inside this really broken system.