As we segregate by income into different communities, schools in lower-income areas have fewer resources than ever.
Robert ReichRead
There is a crisis of public morality. Instead of policing bedrooms, we ought to be doing a better job policing boardrooms.
Interpretation
The focus on personal morality should shift to corporate ethics and governance.
Robert Reich highlights the disparity in how society prioritizes issues of personal morality over the ethical responsibilities of corporations and their leaders. By emphasizing the need for better accountability and transparency in boardrooms, he calls for a reassessment of where moral policing should truly be directed, suggesting that the common good is at stake when corporate conduct goes unchecked.
In practice
Using this quote in a discussion about corporate governance reform.
As we segregate by income into different communities, schools in lower-income areas have fewer resources than ever.
What are called 'public schools' in many of America's wealthy communities aren't really 'public' at all. In effect, they're private schools, whose tuition is hidden away in the purchase price of upscale homes there, and in the corresponding property taxes.
What someone is paid has little or no relationship to what their work is worth to society.
Tax laws favor capital over labor, giving capital gains a lower rate than ordinary income. The rich get humongous mortgage interest deductions while renters get no deduction at all.
The dirty little secret is that both houses of Congress are irrelevant. ... America's domestic policy is now being run by Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve, and America's foreign policy is now being run by the International Monetary Fund [IMF]. ...when the president decides to go to war, he no longer needs a declaration of war from Congress.
You can't inspire people if you are going to be uninspiring.
The worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. That is what it would mean; starting a life with you, without Him. Julia to Charles
We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt; culture means a form of life that is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and arational.
If you have indeed been so highly distinguished, should you not βlive no longer to yourselves, but altogether unto Him who died for you and rose again?β Should any thing short of absolute perfection satisfy you? Should you not labour to βstand perfect and complete in all the will of God?β
Once you step inside, history has to be rewritten to include you. A fiction develops a story that weaves you into the social fabric, giving you roots and a local identity. You are assimilated, and in erasing your differences and making you one of their own, the community can maintain belief in its wholeness and purity. After two or three generations, nobody remembers the story is fiction. It has become fact. And this is how history is made.
Freedom only for supporters of the government, only for the members of one party - however numerous they may be - is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of 'justice' but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when 'freedom' becomes a special privilege.
The symbolic language of the crucifixion is the death of the old paradigm; resurrection is a leap into a whole new way of thinking.
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