29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

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Benjamin Franklin

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

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President Dwight Eisenhower

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."

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President Dwight D. Eisenhower

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Evil is real. There is no light grey. Murdering innocent people to move a political point of view has been, is, and always is evil."

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President George W. Bush

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"If it is not the inexorable laws of economics that have led to America's great divide, what is it? The straightforward answer: our policies and our politics. So corporate welfare increases as we curtail welfare for the poor. Congress maintains subsidies for rich farmers as we cut back on nutritional support for the needy. Drug companies have been given hundreds of billions of dollars as we limit Medicaid benefits. The banks that brought on the global financial crisis got billions while a pittance went to the homeowners and victims of the same banks' predatory lending practices. Where justice is concerned, there is also a yawning divide. In the eyes of the rest of the world and a significant part of its own population, mass incarceration has come to define America — a country, it bears repeating, with about 5 percent of the world's population but around a fourth of the world's prisoners. Justice has become a commodity, affordable to only a few. While Wall Street executives used their high-retainer lawyers to ensure that their ranks were not held accountable for the misdeeds that the crisis in 2008 so graphically revealed, the banks abused our legal system to foreclose on mortgages and evict people, some of whom did not even owe money."

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Joseph E. Stiglitz

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Overgrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty."

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President George Washington

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"US lawmakers have succumbed to the absurd argument that direct price negotiations by the government is akin to price controls and have prohibited Medicare from directly negotiating prices.Under current law, ownership of the patents on drugs discovered with taxpayer money is given away to the academic institutions that discover them. They license those patents to the pharmaceutical industry in exchange for the payment of a royalty which the public actually pays since the royalty increases the price charged for a drug. Federal law essentially socializes the cost of drug discovery while privatizing the profits since it does nothing to limit the prices that can be charged or the profits that can be earned from drugs discovered at public expense.For decades, Congress has simply been transferring wealth from ordinary citizens to the pharmaceutical industry. While claiming to believe in free market capitalism, it has created a web of monopolies which cause the United States to pay the world's highest prices for drugs even though it is the largest purchaser."

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Alfred Engelberg, intellectual property lawyer

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Wall Street insiders have enough influence in Washington already without locking up one powerful job after another in the Executive Branch of our government. Sure, private sector experience can be valuable — no one ever said otherwise — but there is a point at which the revolving door compromises public interest. And we are way beyond that point."

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Senator Elizabeth Warren

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"It is important that I state clearly that support for military forces or intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread repression of the kind described in the report was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake. We must and we will instead continue to support the peace and reconciliation process in Guatemala."

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President Bill Clinton

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"I don't think any sensible person would disagree that the invasion of Iraq led to the massive level of instability we are seeing right now. I think that was one of the worst foreign policy blunders in the modern history of the United States. If you look at history, you will find that regime change — whether it was in the early '50s in Iran, whether it was toppling Salvador Allende in Chile, or whether it was overthrowing the government of Guatemala way back when — these invasions, these toppling of governments, regime changes have unintended consequences."

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Senator Bernie Sanders

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Our world is facing a refugee crisis of a magnitude not seen since the Second World War. This presents us with great challenges and many hard decisions. On this continent, too, thousands of persons are led to travel north in search of a better life for themselves and for their loved ones, in search of greater opportunity. Is this not what we want for our own children? We must not be taken aback by their numbers, but rather view them as persons, seeing their faces and listening to their stories, trying to respond as best we can to their situation, to respond in a way which is always humane, just and fraternal. We need to avoid a common temptation nowadays to discard whatever proves troublesome. Let us remember the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you—do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

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Pope Francis

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

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President Dwight D. Eisenhower

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists."

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Ernest Hemingway

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Mr. President, the most powerful single force in the world today is neither communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile it is man's eternal desire to be free and independent. The great enemy of that tremendous force of freedom is called, for want of a more precise term, imperialism - and today that means Soviet imperialism and, whether we like it or not, and though they are not to be equated, Western imperialism.Thus the single most important test of American foreign policy today is how we meet the challenge of imperialism, what we do to further man's desire to be free. On this test more than any other, this Nation shall be critically judged by the uncommitted millions in Asia and Africa, and anxiously watched by the still hopeful lovers of freedom behind the Iron Curtain. If we fail to meet the challenge of either Soviet or Western imperialism, then no amount of foreign aid, no aggrandizement of armaments, no new pacts or doctrines or high-level conferences can prevent further setbacks to our course and to our security.I am concerned today that we are failing to meet the challenge of imperialism - on both counts - and thus failing in our responsibilities to the free world."

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Senator John F. Kennedy

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"America's unsavory record of violent interventions in Syria—little-known to the American people yet well-known to Syrians—sowed fertile ground for the violent Islamic jihadism that now complicates any effective response by our government to address the challenge of ISIL. So long as the American public and policymakers are unaware of this past, further interventions are likely only to compound the crisis. This is the bloody history that modern interventionists like George W. Bush, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio miss when they recite their narcissistic trope that Mideast nationalists "hate us for our freedoms." For the most part they don't; instead they hate us for the way we betrayed those freedoms—our own ideals—within their borders."

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Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. author

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind. War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. (On the manipulation of language for political ends.) We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act."

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George Orwell

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices — mint, dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law — justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men's bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous."

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Matthew 23:23-24 / 27-29

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

Southern trees bear strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root / Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

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Pastoral scene of the gallant south / The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth / Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh / Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

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Here is fruit for the crows to pluck / For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck / For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop / Here is a strange and bitter crop.

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Poem by Abel Meerpool - Song by Billie Holiday

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists."

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President Franklin D. Roosevelt

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"We have consistently supported a legalization program which is both generous to the alien and fair to the countless thousands of people throughout the world who seek legally to come to America. The legalization provisions in this act will go far to improve the lives of a class of individuals who now must hide in the shadows, without access to many of the benefits of a free and open society. Very soon many of these men and women will be able to step into the sunlight and, ultimately, if they choose, they may become Americans."

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President Ronald Reagan

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."

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President James Madison

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Look for some peace organization to join. It will look small at first, and pitiful and helpless, but that's how movements start. That's how the movement against the Vietnam War started. It started with handfuls of people who thought they were helpless, thought they were powerless. But remember, this power of the people on top depends on the obedience of the people below. When people stop obeying, they have no power... So, yes, people have the power. If they begin to organize, if they protest, if they create a strong enough movement, they can change things."

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Howard Zinn, historian

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad."

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President James Madison

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

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Smedley Butler, U.S. Marine Corps Major General

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"It's impossible to evade the fact that Endless War will inevitably degrade the citizenry of the country that engages in it. A country which venerates its military above all other institutions, which demands that its soldiers be spoken of only with religious-like worship, and which continuously indoctrinates its population to believe that endless violence against numerous countries is necessary and just - all by instilling intense fear of the minorities who are the target of that endless violence - will be a country filled with citizens convinced of the virtues and nobility of aggression."

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Glenn Greenwald, journalist

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"After years of stalling, Congressional Republicans have finally released their jobs plan: attacking women's health. To paraphrase our old friend, Rep. Barney Frank, Republicans in Washington believe that life begins at conception but ends at birth -- they want to eliminate contraception and abortion, but won't support early childhood education like Head Start or universal Pre-K, pay equity for single mothers, affordable child care, or SNAP benefits. It's time to stop attacking women's health and start paying attention to the economic issues that Americans really care about."

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Congresswomen Louise M. Slaughter and Diana DeGette

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"The first truth is the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in essence, is fascism."

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President Franklin D. Roosevelt

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded... hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire."

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Tomas Young, American military veteran

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

Soldiers! Don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you; who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don't hate! Charlie Chaplin

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."

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President Woodrow Wilson

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"I worry very much what it does on the floor of the House and the Senate. How many people are going to have the guts to stand up to big money when they know that the airwaves in their states are going to be flooded with negative ads if they vote against Wall Street or vote against coal or oil? So I would say that one of the major issues that we've got to deal with is Citizens United. I think we need a constitutional amendment to overturn it. I think it would be a wonderful rallying point for folks all over this country."

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Senator Bernie Sanders

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent."

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President Franklin D. Roosevelt

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Come you masters of war / You that build all the guns / You that build the death planes / You that build all the bombs / You that hide behind walls / You that hide behind desks / I just want you to know / I can see through your masks.

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You that never done nothin' / But build to destroy / You play with my world / Like it's your little toy / You put a gun in my hand / And you hide from my eyes / And you turn and run farther / When the fast bullets fly.

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Like Judas of old / You lie and deceive / A world war can be won / You want me to believe / But I see through your eyes / And I see through your brain / Like I see through the water / That runs down my drain.

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Let me ask you one question / Is your money that good / Will it buy you forgiveness / Do you think that it could / I think you will find / When your death takes its toll / All the money you made / Will never buy back your soul."

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Bob Dylan

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character."

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Joseph Heller, writer

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

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Albert Einstein

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"It's all embarrassing really. After a while you realize as a scientist that politicians don't act rationally. Many of the conservatives know climate change is not a hoax. But those running for president are hamstrung by the fact they think they can't get the nomination if they say this is an issue. They wouldn't get money from the fossil fuel industry."

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James Hansen, former NASA scientist

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"The courage we need is not the fortitude to be obedient in the service of an unjust war, to help conceal lies, to do our job for a boss who has usurped power and is acting as an outlaw government. It is the courage at last to face honestly the truth and reality of what we are doing in the world and act responsibly to change it."

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Daniel Ellsberg, former U.S. military analyst

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

Every single American — gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual, transgender — ev- ery single American deserves to be treated equally in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of our society. It's a pretty simple proposition. President Barack Obama

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths — that all of us are created equal — is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth."

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President Barack Obama

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"The gospel at its best deals with the whole man, not only his soul but his body, not only his spiritual well-being, but his material well-being. Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial."

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Martin Luther King, Jr.

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

Megyn Kelly: "But time and time again, history has proven that you got it wrong in Iraq as well, sir. You said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. You said we would be greeted as liberators. You said the insurgency was in the last throes, back in 2005. And you said after our intervention that extremists would have to 'rethink their strategy of jihad.' Now with almost $1 trillion spent there, with 4,500 American lives lost there, what do you say to those who say, 'You were so wrong about so much at the expense of so many'?" Dick Cheney: "Well, I just fundamentally disagree, Reagan — uh, Megyn."

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Megyn Kelly, political commentator, and Dick Cheney, former Vice President

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"We watched the U.S. falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while month after month we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against "oriental human beings," with quotation marks around that. We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in the European theater or let us say a non-third-world people theater... we watched pride allow the most unimportant of battles to be blown into extravaganzas, because we couldn't lose, and we couldn't retreat, and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point."

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Lieutenant John Kerry

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"To my wonder, I would see how committee hearings and press leaks can be almost as effective as suicide bombers in promoting narrow, parochial causes. To my dismay, I would find that the tentacles of big oil stretch from the Caspian Sea to the White House. And to my anger, indeed to my rage, I would also see how money, not lives or national security, skews so much of what takes place in the very places most charged with protecting us all."

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Robert Baer, CIA Officer

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

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President Abraham Lincoln

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

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Smedley Butler, U.S. Marine Corps Major General

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"The money power preys on the nation in times of peace, and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes."

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President Abraham Lincoln

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me--and I welcome their hatred."

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President Franklin Roosevelt

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"A handful of billionaires own a significant part of the wealth of America and have enormous control over our economy. What the Supreme Court did in Citizens United is to say to these same billionaires: "You own and control the economy, you own Wall Street, you own the coal companies, you own the oil companies. Now, for a very small percentage of your wealth, we're going to give you the opportunity to own the United States government." That is the essence of what Citizens United is all about — and that's why it must be overturned."

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Senator Bernie Sanders

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them. When we are hit with indications that if we do prosecute — if we do bring a criminal charge — it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy. I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large. It has an inhibiting impact on our ability to bring resolutions that I think would be more appropriate. That is something that you all need to consider."

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Attorney General Eric Holder

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"American citizens' rights to garden in their backyards with seeds they freely exchange with one another are under attack by Monsanto. African farmers' livelihoods are under attack by Monsanto. The world's food system is under attack by Monsanto. Hundreds of thousands of Indian cotton farmers have died under attack from Monsanto. It is a war being waged to profit from every grain of corn and soya, rice or banana you eat. The citizens of the world are victims of this war, from the U.S. and Argentina to India, across the Pacific through the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and across the Atlantic through the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). If a country other than the U.S. was blocking and subverting the review of the Monsanto Law, that country would have been bombed by drones a long time ago. It is time to tell the U.S. Government to stop being a Monsanto Government writing laws on behalf of Monsanto at home and imposing them worldwide. It is time for the U.S. government to stop being a rogue nation and stop blocking the mandatory review of TRIPS, the International Monsanto Law—even if it's 16 years late. It is time to tell the U.S. government to stop criminalizing farmers who save seeds or whose seeds are contaminated by Monsanto."

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Vandana Shiva, environmental activist

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

The power of money is overwhelming in Washington. I've said for years that Congress has become a farm league for K Street... serving the public used to be considered the highest calling; now, many see it as a stepping stone to lucrative lobbying careers. U.S. Representative Jim Cooper

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"If we pollute the air, water and soil that keep us alive and well, and destroy the biodiversity that allows natural systems to function, no amount of money will save us."

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David Suzuki, environmental activist

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster."

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Aldous Huxley, writer

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country; we could be quiet; we could hold our silence; we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, the fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds, and not redcoats but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out... In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart."

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Lieutenant John Kerry

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy, instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars."

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Martin Luther King, Jr.

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Warriors are not what you think of as warriors. The warrior is not someone who fights, because no one has the right to take another life. The warrior, for us, is one who sacrifices himself for the good of others. His task is to take care of the elderly, the defenseless, those who cannot provide for themselves, and above all, the children, the future of humanity."

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Tatanka Iyotaka (Sitting Bull)

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"As soon as I arrived in the Indies, in the first island which I found, I took some of the natives by force, in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts....They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no arms and their spears are made of cane....They would make fine servants....With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."

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Christopher Columbus

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shore, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it. Our children are still taught to respect the violence which reduced a red-skinned people of an earlier culture into a few fragmented groups herded into impoverished reservations."

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Martin Luther King, Jr.

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all citizens, whatever their background. We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization."

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Franklin D. Roosevelt

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"The Muslim world right now is undergoing intensely traumatic conditions of war, death, civil strife, sectarian witch-hunts, breakdown of social norms, and the destruction of law, order and infrastructure. There have long been many outstanding local problems, but rarely has the extent of regional devastation been of this magnitude. We must acknowledge the huge degree of US responsibility in creating and prolonging many of these conditions abroad. The anguish of the region is now spreading out across much of the globe and leaching back into our own American society. The US cannot kill at leisure abroad and remain untouched at home."

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Graham E. Fuller, former senior CIA official

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"I am not blind to the shortcomings of our own people. I am not unaware that leaders betray, and sell out, and play false. But this knowledge does not outweigh the fact that my class, the working class, is exploited, driven, fought back with the weapon of starvation, with guns and with venal courts whenever they strike for conditions more human, more civilized for their children, and for their children's children."

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Mary Harris Jones, labor organizer

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Because the truth is — right now — the Department of Defense and the VA are losing the battle against the mental and behavioral wounds of these wars. To see that you don't need to look any further than the tragic fact that already this year over 150 active duty servicemembers have taken their own lives, or the fact that one veteran commits suicide every 80 minutes."

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Senator Patty Murray

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"It has been almost five years since the financial crisis, but the big banks are still too big to fail. That means they are subsidized by about $83 billion a year by American taxpayers and are still not being held fully accountable for breaking the law. Attorney General Holder's testimony that the biggest banks are too-big-to-jail shows once again that it is past time to end too-big-to-fail."

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Senator Elizabeth Warren

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"This discrimination, unjustifiably attributed to a Higher Authority, has provided a reason or excuse for the deprivation of women's equal rights across the world for centuries.

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At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities.

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The same discriminatory thinking lies behind the continuing gender gap in pay and why there are still so few women in office in the West. The root of this prejudice lies deep in our histories, but its impact is felt every day. It is not women and girls alone who suffer. It damages all of us."

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President Jimmy Carter

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"America is a Nation with a mission - and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic peace - a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman."

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President George W. Bush

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"We have learned your religion also. We have read your Sacred books. Hundreds of our people have embraced their doctrines, practiced the virtues they teach, cherished the hopes they awaken, and rejoiced in the consolations which they afford. To the spirit of your institutions, and your religion, which has been imbibed by our community, is mainly to be ascribed that patient endurance which has characterized the conduct of our people, under the laceration of their keenest woes. For assuredly, we are not ignorant of our condition; we are not insensible to our sufferings. We feel them! we groan under their pressure! And anticipation crowds our breasts with sorrows yet to come. We are, indeed, an afflicted people! Our spirits are subdued! Despair has well nigh seized upon our energies! But we speak to the representatives of a Christian country; the friends of justice; the patrons of the oppressed. And our hopes revive, and our prospects brighten, as we indulge the thought. On your sentence, our fate is suspended; prosperity or desolation depends on your word. To you, therefore, we look! Before your august assembly we present ourselves, in the attitude of deprecation, and of entreaty. On your kindness, on your humanity, on your compassion, on your benevolence, we rest our hopes. To you we address our reiterated prayers. Spare our people! Spare the wreck of our prosperity! Let not our deserted homes become the monuments of our desolation! But we forbear! We suppress the agonies which wring our hearts, when we look at our wives, our children, and our venerable sires!"

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Chief John Ross of the Cherokee

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

Alan Elsner: How would you describe the events taking place in Rwanda? Christine Shelly: Based on the evidence we have seen from observations on the ground, we have every reason to believe that acts of genocide have been committed in Rwanda. Elsner: What's the difference between "acts of genocide" and genocide? Shelly: As you know, there is a legal definition of this. There has been a lot of discussion about how the definition applies under the definition of genocide contained in the 1948 convention. If you're looking at that for your determination about genocide, clearly not all the killings that have taken place in Rwanda are killings to which you might apply that label... Elsner: How many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide? Shelly: Alan, that's just not a question that I'm in a position to answer. Elsner: Well, is it true that you have specific guidance not to use the word "genocide" in isolation, but always to preface it with these words "acts of"? Shelly: I have guidance which, which, to which I – which I try to use as best as I can. I'm not — I have — there are formulations that we are using that we are trying to be consistent in our use of. I don't have an absolute categorical prescription against something, but I have definitions. I have phraseology which has been carefully examined and arrived at as best we can apply to exactly the situation and the actions which have taken place. Christine Shelly, State Department Spokeswoman, and Alan Elsner of Reuters

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Horrified. We all know that the various officials of the Bush administration, George W. Bush himself, will never be held accountable for most, if not all, of the things that happened under their watch. They can now sit back and crow about one thing or another and indulge in one form of partisan politics after another. Maybe that's the most disturbing thing about this story. If they took us to war for no good reason, shouldn't they be in some way held accountable for that fact? Isn't that important to our democracy, that we just don't simply sweep the past under the rug, that we deal with it in some fashion?"

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Errol Morris, film director

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Over the years, elections have become public relations operations, largely stage-managed. Candidates decide what to say on the basis of tests that determine what the effect will be across the population. Somehow people don't see how profoundly contemptuous that is of democracy. Suppose I'm running for office, and I don't tell people what I think or what I'm going to do - I tell them what the pollsters have told me is going to get me elected. That's expressing utter contempt for the electorate. That's saying, "Okay, you people are going to have the chance to push your buttons, but once you're done, I'll do exactly what I intend, which is not what I'm telling you."

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Noam Chomsky, linguist, historian

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"The moral crisis of our age has nothing to do with gay marriage or abortion. It's insider trading, obscene CEO pay, wage theft from ordinary workers, Wall Street's continued gambling addiction, corporate payoffs to friendly politicians, and the billionaire takeover of our democracy."

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Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Short-term geopolitical considerations and national interest, narrowly defined, have repeatedly taken precedence over intolerable human suffering and grave breaches of and long-term threats to international peace and security."

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Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Such difficulties within the executive branch were nothing compared with the pain of dealing with Congress. Congress is best viewed from a distance—the farther the better—because up close, it is truly ugly. I saw most of Congress as uncivil, incompetent at fulfilling their basic constitutional responsibilities (such as timely appropriations), micromanagerial, parochial, hypocritical, egotistical, thin-skinned and prone to put self (and re-election) before country."

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Robert M. Gates, former Secretary of Defense

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"It might also be added that corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their 'personhood' often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of 'We the People' by whom and for whom our Constitution was established."

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Justice Jean Paul Stevens

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out... and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.... And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for "the universal brotherhood of man" — "with his mouth." Mark Twain

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"I have attempted throughout to remember the impact on the nation and to the CIA workforce from the attacks of September 11, 2001. I can understand the CIA's impulse to consider the use of every possible tool to gather intelligence and remove terrorists from the battlefield, and CIA was encouraged by political leaders and the public to do whatever it could to prevent another attack.

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The Intelligence Committee as well often pushes intelligence agencies to act quickly in response to threats and world events.

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Nevertheless, such pressure, fear, and expectation of further terrorist plots do not justify, temper, or excuse improper actions taken by individuals or organizations in the name of national security. The major lesson of this report is that regardless of the pressures and the need to act, the Intelligence Community's actions must always reflect who we are as a nation, and adhere to our laws and standards. It is precisely at these times of national crisis that our government must be guided by the lessons of our history and subject decisions to internal and eternal reviews.

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Instead, CIA personnel, aided by two outside contractors, decided to initiate a program of indefinite secret detention and the use of brutal interrogation techniques in violation of U.S. law, treaty obligations, and our values."

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Senator Diane Feinstein

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. President Ronald Reagan

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Northern impersonality and Southern revenge converge on a common American theme: a growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It's hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible. No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:

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"Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them."

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Adam Gopnik, writer

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Hands up! Don't shoot!" "I can't breathe." "Black lives matter."

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Why do preachers persist in talking about violence on American streets and cities rather than about ISIS beheadings or the Charlie Hebdo killings? We do so because the nature of prophecy has always been about God's critical judgment of oneself and one's own community. It is easy to condemn violence done by others. It is harder to look at violence done on one's own behalf. The killing of innocent people by terrorists is always a moral outrage. But it is not my moral outrage to address. The killing of innocent people in my own country is also a moral outrage, and it is our collective moral outrage to address. To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, the proper response to a moral imperative is not "thou shalt" but rather "I ought."

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The Very Reverend Gary Hall

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020"He's being interviewed, I think, by the American Enterprise Institute, and he says it would be a disaster, it would be vastly expensive, it would be civil war, we'd have no exit strategy. He goes on and on for five minutes — Dick Cheney saying it would be a bad idea. And that's why the first Bush didn't go into Baghdad. Dick Cheney then goes to work for Halliburton. Makes hundreds of millions of dollars — their CEO. Next thing you know, he's back in government, it's a good idea to go into Iraq... It became an excuse, 9/11 became an excuse for a war they already wanted in Iraq." Senator Rand Paul

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen."

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Mark Twain

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"The system does not work; you have to report wrongdoing to those most responsible for it. If the highest officials in government can break the law without fearing punishment or even any repercussions at all, secret powers become tremendously dangerous. The secret continuance of these programs represents a far greater danger than their disclosure. It represents a dangerous normalization of 'governing in the dark', where decisions with enormous public impact occur without any public input." Edward Snowden, former Central Intelligence Agency employee

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Being at the service of dialogue and peace also means being truly determined to minimize and, in the long term, to end the many armed conflicts throughout our world. Here we have to ask ourselves: Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society? Sadly, the answer, as we all know, is simply for money: money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood. In the face of this shameful and culpable silence, it is our duty to confront the problem and to stop the arms trade."

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Pope Francis

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Members of Congress already get better health insurance and retirement benefits than other Americans. They are about to get better insider trading laws as well. Strangely, while insider trading by corporate insiders has long been the white collar crime equivalent of a major felony, the Securities and Exchange Commission has determined that insider trading laws do not apply to members of Congress or their staff. That is because, according to the SEC at least, these public officials do not owe the same legal duty of confidentiality that makes insider trading illegal by nonpoliticians.

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On closer examination, it appears that what Congress really wants is to keep making the big bucks that come from trading on inside information but to trick those outside of the Beltway into believing they are doing something about this corruption. For one thing, the rules proposed for Capitol Hill are not like those that apply to the rest of us. Ours are so broad and vague that prosecutors enjoy almost unfettered discretion in deciding when and whom to prosecute.

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If enacted, the law of insider trading will remain one of many where one reality applies to Congress and an uncomfortable and insecure reality applies to everybody else. Just as Congress is protected from the vicissitudes of ObamaCare, Congress will remain safe from the vagaries of insider trading law. The rest of us will still be vulnerable."  

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Jonathan Macey, professor of Corporate Law

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Slavery, segregation, economic injustice, aggressive policing—all these are acts of coercive force which sooner or later will necessarily provoke a violent response... As a people, as a nation, we are still paying for the sin of slavery and its subsequent mutation into racism, segregation, mass incarceration, police brutality, and a massive disparity in economic opportunity. We cannot live in true harmony in America until justice prevails... The sin of racism is alive and well in our nation. Our job, as God's people and Jesus's followers is to face into it and not look away... We are members of each other. We will only heal our nation as we attend to the lingering effects of slavery, the originating act of violence that still ricochets through our history over time." The Very Reverend Gary Hall

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"This is a textbook example of why it's hard to conduct foreign policy. In the implementation of our foreign policy we need to consider principles and values, yes, democracy, human rights, freedom. But we also have to consider the national interest, whether or not the particular entity we're dealing with is aligned with the United States or not. And those two considerations meet head-on in this conflict."

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James Baker, former Secretary of State

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"We must ask ourselves humbly - in looking back at the American century have we acted wisely and humanely in our relations to the rest of the world; a world in which the richest few hundred or thousand or couple thousand have more wealth than the poorest 3 billion. Have we been right to police the globe? Have we been a force for good, for understanding, for peace? We must look in the mirror. Have we perhaps in our self-love become the angels of our own despair? The bomb has allowed us to win by any means necessary, which makes us, because we win, right; and because we are right we are therefore good."

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Oliver Stone, film director and producer

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"The erroneous ruling of the supreme court, where millionaires, billionaires, can put in unlimited amounts of money, give legal bribery the chance to prevail, because all the candidates, whether they are honest or not, or whether they are Democratic or Republican, depend on these massive infusions of money from very rich people in order to have money to campaign. As the rich people finance the campaigns, when candidates get in office they do what the rich people want. And that's to let the rich people get richer and richer and the middle class get left out. All the statistics show that the middle class are stagnant or going down in their income for the work that they do."

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President Jimmy Carter

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Whether by the government or its extension in the US media, whistleblowers have been portrayed, declared and branded as traitors. By speaking up on government criminalities, by exposing illegalities committed by the government, whether on torture or illegal surveillance or illegal wars ... or many other illegalities and abuses of power, whistleblowers have become traitors to the United States government. These Whistleblowers exemplify the ultimate selfless disloyalty to a government engaged in illegalities. That is a fact: whistleblowers are traitors. Thus, since the United States government is traitor to the American people and their liberties, what would that make the whistleblowers who are traitors to the United States government? Aren't they traitors to the traitors? And if so, who should the American people be supporting in this great scheme of betrayals, treacheries and traitors? The government as traitors to the people? Or the whistleblowers as traitors to the traitors who have betrayed the people's rights and liberties?" Sibel Edmonds, founder, National Security Whistleblowers Coalition

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Our democracy works best when everyone's voice is heard, and no one's voice is drowned out. But five years ago, a Supreme Court ruling allowed big companies — including foreign corporations — to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence our elections. The Citizens United decision was wrong, and it has caused real harm to our democracy. With each new campaign season, this dark money floods our airwaves with more and more political ads that pull our politics into the gutter. It's time to reverse this trend. Rather than bolster the power of lobbyists and special interests, Washington should lift up the voices of ordinary Americans and protect their democratic right to determine the direction of the country that we love." President Barack Obama

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions--poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed--which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.

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It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity."

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Howard Zinn, historian, activist

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Growing inequality, combined with a flawed system of campaign finance, risks turning America's legal system into a travesty of justice. Some may still call it the "rule of law," but in today's America the proud claim of "justice for all" is being replaced by the more modest claim of "justice for those who can afford it."

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"Countries around the world provide frightening examples of what happens to societies when they reach the level of inequality toward which we are moving. It is not a pretty picture: countries where the rich live in gated communities, waited upon by hordes of low-income workers; unstable political systems where populists promise the masses a better life, only to disappoint. Perhaps most importantly, there is an absence of hope. In these countries, the poor know that their prospects of emerging from poverty, let along making it to the top, are minuscule. This is not something we should be striving for."

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Joseph E. Stiglitz, economist

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Today, too many ideologues call for U.S. force as the first option rather than a last resort. On the left, we hear about the "responsibility to protect" civilians to justify military intervention in Libya, Syria, Sudan and elsewhere. On the right, the failure to strike Syria or Iran is deemed an abdication of U.S. leadership. And so the rest of the world sees the U.S. as a militaristic country quick to launch planes, cruise missiles and drones deep into sovereign countries or ungoverned spaces. There are limits to what even the strongest and greatest nation on Earth can do—and not every outrage, act of aggression, oppression or crisis should elicit a U.S. military response. This is particularly worth remembering as technology changes the face of war. A button is pushed in Nevada, and seconds later a pickup truck explodes in Mosul. A bomb destroys the targeted house on the right and leaves the one on the left intact. For too many people—including defense "experts," members of Congress, executive branch officials and ordinary citizens—war has become a kind of videogame or action movie: bloodless, painless and odorless. But my years at the Pentagon left me even more skeptical of systems analysis, computer models, game theories or doctrines that suggest that war is anything other than tragic, inefficient and uncertain. On each visit to the war zones, as I would go to joint security stations in Baghdad or forward operating bases and combat outposts in Afghanistan, I knew I wasn't being exposed to the true grim reality of our troops' lives. And I could only contrast their selfless service and sacrifice with so many self-serving elected and nonelected officials back home." Robert M. Gates, Former Secretary of Defense

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days. Prison growth and the resulting "prison-industrial complex"—the business interests that capitalize on prison construction—made imprisonment so profitable that millions of dollars were spent lobbying state legislators to keep expanding the use of incarceration to respond to just about any problem. Incarceration became the answer to everything—health care problems like drug addiction, poverty that had led someone to write a bad check, child behavioral disorders, managing the mentally disabled poor, even immigration issues generated responses from legislators that involved sending people to prison. Never before had so much lobbying money been spent to expand America's prison population, block sentencing reforms, create new crime categories, and sustain the fear and anger that fuel mass incarceration than during the last twenty-five years in the United States." Bryan Stevenson, human rights lawyer

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"You know, I think many people have the mistaken impression that Congress regulates Wall Street. In truth that's not the case. The real truth is that Wall Street regulates the Congress."

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Senator Bernie Sanders

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"We cry out today for all those who have become invisible, those who have disappeared behind prison walls, those who have become prey—rape, torture, beatings, prolonged isolation, sensory deprivation, racial profiling, chain gangs, forced labor, rancid food, inadequate medical care, children imprisoned as adults, prisoners forced to take medications to induce lethargy, little or no heating and ventilation, decades-long sentences for nonviolent crimes and endemic violence—and we damn the state that perpetuates this abuse. We say to all those who have turned mass incarceration into a business—the commissary companies; key supply companies; the phone companies, Global Tel Link; the food service companies, like Aramark; the private prison companies, like Corrections Corporation of America; their lobbyists, who write the laws that ensure long sentences, full prisons and huge recidivism rates; and our politicians who pass these laws in exchange for campaign contributions in our system of legalized bribery—we are not deceived. We call out the corporations that exploit underpaid and bonded prison labor for their complicity in neoslavery: Chevron, Bank of America, IBM, Penney, Sears, Wal-Mart, Eddie Bauer, Wendy's, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Motorola, Caterpillar, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, Pierre Cardin and Target. We say to all those who oppress the poorest and most vulnerable among us that what you do is sinful and evil in the eyes of God." Chris Hedges

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"The financial scandals of our time were made possible by an unprecedented collusion between corporate interests and politicians that, despite all the breast-beating about reform, is still going strong. Together, these two powerful groups tore down hard-won regulations that restrained the worst capitalist excesses, leaving in their place a shaky edifice of feckless self-policing and cowed regulators, powerless to prevent the corporate Chernobyls.

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Because corporations are such generous campaign donors and such demanding patrons, they have been coddled and cuddled and humored by lawmakers until little remained of a regulatory regime dating back to the last great era of capitalism run amok, the 1920s...

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Corporations get their way in Washington by traveling a long-established highway of corruption-with well-stocked gift shops at every exit. Lobbying in America has become a $1.55 billion business. There are 38 lobbyists for each and every member of Congress. Lobbyists from just one industry alone, the hyperactive pharmaceutical business, outnumber actual members of Congress by 623 to 535. Get those guys a dose of Ritalin.

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This is the nexus of corporate corruption; the source of all the swill. The unseemly link between money and political influence is the dark side of capitalism."

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Arianna Huffington

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"The $5 billion settlement with Goldman Sachs should make it clear to everyone that the business model on Wall Street is fraud. In my view, the time has come to shut the revolving door between Wall Street and the federal government. Instead, we need federal prosecutors and regulators with a clear track record of standing up to the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street."

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Senator Bernie Sanders

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"Mr. Chairman, we have in this country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks. The Federal Reserve Board, a Government board, has cheated the Government of the United States and the people of the United States out of enough money to pay the national debt... Mr. Chairman, when the Federal Reserve act was passed, the people of the United States did not perceive that a world system was being set up here... and that this country was to supply financial power to an international superstate — a superstate controlled by international bankers and international industrialists acting together to enslave the world for their own pleasure." Congressman Louis T. McFadden

29"x23", Mixed Media on paper, 2010-2020

"The real issue is this: Why have we surrendered control over something so basic to human survival as seeds? Why have we bought into the biotech industry's program, which pushes a few monoculture commodity crops, when history and science have proven that seed biodiversity is essential for growing crops capable of surviving severe climate conditions, such as drought and floods?

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Monsanto may be Public Enemy Number One, but a win for Mr. Bowman is hardly a win for mankind. It's time we ask ourselves: How long are we going to let Monsanto bully farmers and politicians into controlling the very source of life on earth? How long will we tolerate the growing monopolization and genetic engineering of seeds by an aggressive cabal of chemical and pesticide corporations who pose a deadly threat to our health, our environment and the future of our food? And when does "how long" become too late?

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"Katherine Paul, director of development and communications at the Organic Consumers Association. Ronnie Cummins, founder and director of the Organic Consumers Association.