I ask you: do you expect the job creators who’ve been given massive tax breaks time and again to dole out their charity by creating a job for you? Do you expect companies to do the right thing by making products that are safe under production guidelines that are safe? Do you assume that companies police themselves? Have you learned nothing from the tobacco companies? They lie, and they make and sell poisons and tell you that they are completely safe.
Am I preaching to the choir or are you still in the dark about the connection between the pain you’re suffering and these companies who don’t give a crap about your life. They’re making a PROFIT at our expense: oil and gas, banks, chemical companies, retailers who’ve outsourced jobs. Chevron, Monsanto, Dow, Dupont, Cargill, B of A, Shearson Lehman, Goldman Sachs, Walmart, Coke… name your favorite companies to hate.
“The concern of patriotic men is to put our government again on its right basis, by substituting the popular will for the rule of guardians, the processes of common counsel for those of private arrangement. In order to do this, a first necessity is to open the doors and let in the light on all affairs which the people have a right to know about.
“In the first place, it is necessary to open all the processes of our politics. They have been too secret, too complicated, too round-about; they have consisted too much of private conferences and secret understandings, of the control of legislation by men who were not legislators, but who stood outside and dictated, controlling oftentimes by very questionable means, which they would not have dreamed of allowing to become public. The whole process must be altered. We must take the selection of candidates for office, for example, out of the hands of small groups of men, of little coteries, out of the hands of machines working behind closed doors, and put it into the hands of the people themselves again by means of direct primaries and elections to which candidates of every sort and degree may have free access. We must substitute public for private machinery.
“It is necessary, in the second place, to give society command of its own economic life again by denying to those who conduct the great modern operations of business the privacy that used to belong properly enough to men who used only their own capital and their individual energy in business. The processes of capital must be as open as the processes of politics. Those who make use of the great modern accumulations of wealth, gathered together by the dragnet process of the sale of stocks and bonds, and piling up of reserves, must be treated as under a public obligation; they must be made responsible for their business methods to the great communities which are in fact their working partners, so that the hand which makes correction shall easily reach them and a new principle of responsibility be felt throughout their structure and operation.”
Wilson, Woodrow. “Chapter 6/Let There Be Light.” The New Freedom; a Call for the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People. New York and Garden City: Doubleday, Page, 1913. 111-112. Print.