journalists-from-san-francisco

"Jimmy: This is awful! It's terrible! Hey, Jefferson! [Shouting] Hey! Hey. Jefferson: What's the matter? Jimmy: I made a mistake! Jefferson: Which one? Jimmy: Well... according to this, Morgan isn't a G-man! Jefferson: How can you tell? Well, this claims he's a liar. Jefferson: How does that prove he ain't no G-man?"

"Usually no one sees the city of his birth until he leaves and then returns to it with new eyes, but, ridiculously proud of my brand-new press badge, I was discovering San Francisco as though it were a strange city. I began to realize the city's many hills, as if they had been erected only last month. You go up and down those hills by cable car or auto, and a dozen times a day you catch your breath in the suddenness of beautiful vistas—water, ships, wooded hills across the bay . . . and sea gulls, no matter where the neighborhood, never once letting you forget the nearness of the ocean. They really dominated the Embarcadero, that long stretch of San Francisco's beautiful harbor. On one side were brine-encrusted piers, their pilings creaking against the sides of ships with exciting cargoes from all parts of the world. Across the way were shabby marine stores, pawnshops, tattoo parlors, bedraggled flophouses, and seedy bars. The constant calling of the sea gulls often had to compete with the sirens of police cars. pp. 112–113"

"In the spacious mansions of San Francisco's Nob Hill a Chinese cook was a must. The first thing the nouveau riche did as they tried to scramble up the ladder of society was to jingle gold pieces in the ears of a Lee or a Wong to lure him into their newly furnished houses. But the Chinese themselves had a social position only slightly above that of the rodents who sometimes threatened the fine mahogany wainscoting of their employers' houses. They were commonly referred to as "Chinks," with or without accompanying epithet, except by the gentler of tongue, who invariably spoke of a Chinese as "John Chinaman." pp. 5–6"

"Jefferson: But Mr. Cupid: if you go through that book, lookin' all through them Joneses, we're gonna be late. And we gonna get another traffic ticket, and... Jimmy: Aren't you ashamed of yourself? Don't you want to get a boy friend for a nice girl like Susie? Jefferson: Yeah. And I wanna keep a job for a nice boy like Jefferson."

"Jimmy: Hey, Callahan! Callahan: Hey, Cupid, who sent you down here? Jimmy: Never mind the smart cracks; something important has happened. Callahan: Yeah? Jimmy: Yeah, I... I've decided maybe I was wrong about you. Callahan: So what? Jimmy: Well... so how do you spell your name?, Callahan: My name? C, A, double L, A, H, A, N. Why? Jimmy: Mm hmm. Look... would you mind writin' it for me? Callahan: Writing it? Jimmy: Yeah. Callahan: [Signs.] What's the gag? Jimmy: Well, if this proves you're all right, you're gonna get Susie. Callahan: Hey, are you crazy? Jimmy: No, no! No, I'm a graphologist; now be quiet."

"Jimmy "Mr. Cupid" O'Brien: Come on, step on it, Jefferson! We're an hour late for our deliveries now. Thomas H. Jefferson: Aw, have a heart, Mr. Cupid. Look at that speed meter. Jimmy: What're you worried about? Jefferson: About goin' to my own funeral. [Siren heard.] Mm mm. What'd I tell you? Here come the cops. Jimmy: Now listen! You keep quiet. I'll get out of this. Jefferson: You wouldn't be in it if you would go where the flowers was goin', instead of stoppin' where they ain't."

""I don't like the word tolerance. It sounds stuck up". It was a little old lady speaking, very little and quite old. Her name was Kitty, and she was my mother. "There ain't any respect in tolerating," she continued, the blue of her eyes grown darker with indignation. "That's just putting up with them, like with bad plumbing when you can't afford to move..." [...] She did not "tolerate" the Negro or the Asiatic, the Protestant or the Jew, despite their racial or religious difference. Instead, she respected every human being equally, because she thought Thomas Jefferson had meant every word of the Declaration. pp. 1, 3"

"Gaiety and God were closely connected in my mother's mind. Going to church on Sunday was not enough. Having fun was necessary, if the worship of God were to be complete. "We should enjoy ourselves, especially on Sunday, to show Him how happy we are on His day. If we can't help having a long face once in a while, then for heaven's sake let's have it on a week day." p. 103"

"If Americans don't give up their prejudices because of false notions of religious or racial or national superiority, then, by golly, they're going to have to give them up because the other fellows are getting the guns."

"What they need to do is to look more closely at the fundamentals of American life, sympathetically, not with intent to "commit a message.""

"Next week the Independent and Press will bring you a new column published for the first time anywhere [...] It will be titled "Mary McCarthy's Column." Anything more pretentious would offend Mary Eunice McCarthy."

"In every place where there is no real tax system, such as Honduras or Afghanistan, there is no widespread wealth."

"Congress lets business owners, investors and landlords play by one set of rules, which are filed with opportunities to hide income, fabricate deductions and reduce taxes. Congress requires wage earners to operate under another, much harsher set of rules in which every dollar of income... is reported to the government, and taxes are withheld... to make sure [they] pay in full."

"A government that takes 90 cents out of each dollar above a threshold, as... in the Eisenhower years, is deciding to limit the wealth that people can accumulate... Likewise, a government that taxes the poor on their first dollar of wages, as the United States does with the Social Security and Medicare taxes, is deciding to limit or eliminate the ability of those at the bottom... to save... and improve their lot in life."

"[T]axes are at the core of our democracy."

"In 2006 the trade deficit with China reached $232 billion. ...more than $60 per month for every man, woman and child in America. ...In 2004 when the trade deficit... was $161 billion, it was... more than the $126 billion of income taxes paid by the bottom 75% of Americans."

"In 2006... China, Japan, Canada, and Mexico—accounted for 60 percent of our worldwide trade deficit of $764 billion."

"A lot of people look at the world as they're born into it and assume, like Dr. Pangloss that it must needs be that this is the way that God intended the world to be. It is nowhere written down that we will have our liberties, that we will have the freedoms that we have come to know."

"To the addicted, money is like cocaine: Too much is never enough."

"The impulse to increase profits can blind men to risk, especially when those at risk are strangers. Society imposes rules on corporate behavior to protect public safety in the face of baser impulses. These rules require enforcement..."

"In the past quarter century... new rules... have weakened and even destroyed consumer protections while increasing the power of the already powerful. ...[T]he rules affecting who wins and who loses economically have been quietly and subtly rewritten."

"The result? In the past 25 years, one American family in seven has sought refuge in federal bankruptcy court. Exhaustive research by Elizabeth Warren... and her associates... has proven that the vast majority of people seek refuge... after any two of three events combine: divorce, job loss, or major medical problems."

"Members of Congress routinely vote on tax bills that they have never read, much less understood even on a superficial level. Sanford J. Schlesinger... says that "there hasn't been a member of Congress with a comprehensive understanding of the laws since ...""

"Economists have a term for situations in which someone gets rewards but has little or no incentive to avoid risk: a '. ...Those who occupy the executive suite and gamble millions of dollars on the lives of others are rarely seen as engaged in morally hazardous conduct. Yet reward without risk is a form of moral hazard that blinds us to the consequences of our acts."

"Almost two cents of every dollar reported as losses one year by everyone in the United States, were reported by Donald Trump. ...He's a terrible business man. His business model is not to get an enterprise, to nurture it, to grow it, to make it more profitable over time. His business model is the same as a mob bust-out. ...[S]queeze all the cash out... don't pay your vendors, try to cheat as best you can your employees, don't pay the bankers... Trump once said, "I borrowed money knowing I wouldn't pay it back," and then leave the carcass and go on to the next deal. ...Trump's business model is to rip off one person after another who gets involved with him, thinking he will make them wealthy, while he is destroying their wealth."

"No serious coverage of taxes is possible without reading the journal Tax Notes published by , a nonprofit enterprise whose beneficiaries include reporters."

"[S]ound bytes of politicians in both parties bear as much connection to the reality of the tax system as my... grandson's belief in Santa."

"[O]ur tax system now levies the poor, the middle class and even the upper middle class to subsidize the rich..."

"[T]he majority of Americans are being duped into supplementing the incomes and extravagant lifestyles of the rich and powerful. ...[O]ur current tax system is manipulated for profit by the wealthy and well positioned."

"Democrats and Republicans alike have turned the tax system into a vehicle not just to finance government but to finance social change. For the last three decades, it... has been weighing down the already deep pockets of the super rich while just weighing down everyone else."

"The rich and their lobbyists have taken firm control of the levers of power in Washington and state capitals while remaking the rules in their own interest. They have also imbued private organizations with the power to make rules that few outside the process understand. These same people... [are] the primary source of campaign donations that put politicians in office and keep them there."

"In Britain only about 18 people a year die at rail crossings. ...Even taking into account that America has five times as many people... the death rate at crossings is four times that of Britain."

"[R]ailroads are by far the most deadly form of commercial transportation in the country. ...Measure deaths by distance traveled... and trains are 52 times more deadly than trucks. Trains kill 130 people per 100 million miles traveled, compared with 2.5 deaths in big-rig truck accidents and 1.9 deaths in plane crashes."

"While only a minority of people was taxed during World War II, the politicians got a taste of the huge revenues... by expanding the tax base. After the war... the income tax was steadily expanded until it applied to most Americans..."

"[L]ess than a century after its adoption, the tax system is being turned on its head. Since at least 1983 it has become the explicit, but unstated, policy... to let the richest Americans pay a smaller portion of their incomes in taxes and to defer more of their taxes... a stealth tax cut, while collecting more in taxes from... the middle class."

"After the Sixteenth Amendment... the federal government... enacted a regime to tax incomes, gifts and estates... with the explicit promise that the basic means of sustaining life would not be taxed. The original tax regime applied only to the economic elite, to... "surplus" incomes. ...[I]ncome from capital was taxed more heavily ...in the belief that it was morally offensive to take more from money earned by the sweat of one's brow ..."

"[I]n 1997... Congress passed what its sponsors promoted as a tax cut for the middle class... Buried in that law were many tax breaks for the rich... notably a sharp reduction... on long term capital gains, the source of two thirds of the incomes of the top 400. ...For years the IRS found big tax evaders by looking into people whose reported income did not seem sufficient to support their lifestyle... But the 1997 law stopped such inquiries. ...Lee Shepherd ...said the law "should be called the mobsters and drug dealers tax relief act of 1997." ...1997 cuts for the rich were not enough ...Under ...President Bush in 2001 ...their income going to taxes would slip further ..."

"Inflation, combined with the end of real growth in wages beginning in 1973, created... "bracket creep" that moved people into higher tax brackets even if... real incomes were unchanged."

"Of each dollar people earned in 2005, the top 10 percent got 48.5¢... the greatest share of income pie since 1929, just before the collapsed into the Great Depression."

"For the bottom 90 percent of Americans... the vast majority, annual income has been on a long, mostly downhill slide for more than three decades. ...Even with three decades of economic expansion, the vast majority has to get by on about $75 less each week than... a generation earlier..."

"This growing concentration of income at the top... resembles the distribution of income found in three other major countries: Brasil, Mexico, and Russia. ...They all have growing, and seemingly intractable, poverty at the bottom. ...These four countries are also societies in which adults have the right to vote, but real political power is wielded by a relatively narrow, and rich, segment of the population."

"Rewriting the economic rules... in the past few decades has been done under the banner of "" and its promise that less government means more economic growth. The term itself is a misnomer. No society is free from regulation. Everything has rules..."

"Martin Luther King Jr. said he had a dream that one day his four children would be judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin. ...Today we often value people less by their character than by the contents of their wallet. ...The pursuit of ever more financial zeros... has... produced a moral breakdown... twisting our culture and our values in ways that tear at the fabric of our society."

"[P]residents of companies have gone from apologizing when they had to lay off workers to boasting of the riches... obtained through mass firings. ...[I]nvestors ...owe their wealth ...to buying companies in deals that required destroying lives and careers"

"At the same time that the rules have been rewritten to favor the already rich, new rules have been written that ensure harsh treatment for the poor... Coping with the foul effects of poverty costs us trillions of dollars a year... Poverty wastes minds and spirits, robbing all of us of opportunity. ...It makes us less trusting, less willing to see ourselves as one people..."

"Usury laws that protected consumers against rapacious lenders existed until 1978. Now they are gone because of a Supreme Court decision. ...[O]ur government has set forth onerous new rules that reward those who prey on the poor. ...These lenders, or their fronts, can now charge rates and impose penalties that were illegal, even criminal, a generation ago."

"By deciding not to implement a rule to reduce the chances of truck drivers and train engineers' falling asleep on the job, Trump's Transportation Department has put at risk the lives of those workers as well as the lives of families traveling on our nations highways and trains. And Trump appointed to the Supreme Court Neil Gorsuch, a judge who ruled that a company has the right to fire a worker who chose not to freeze to death on the job."

"If you have heard about companies using a Bermuda mailbox to escape American taxes or that the IRS audits the poor more than the rich or that Enron paid no taxes or that executives have amassed massive untaxed fortunes or that the retired chief of General Electric had a free corporate jet, then you have already had a taste for some of the more shocking stories that I have come across. ...This is not just about facts, figures and statistics."

"[T]hroughout his adult life Trump sought out—and worked closely with—more than a score of criminals, including Mafia associates, Russian mob associates, violent felons, con artists, swindlers, and most significant of all, the embezzler and mob associate Joseph Weichselbaum, a thrice-convicted felon. ...[W]hen Trump was the big man in Atlantic City, he got his helicopters to bring his high-rollers in and out of town through a company formed by Weichselbaum. ...Spy ...reported that Weichselbaum ...personally piloted the Trumps [in the Ivana, Trump’s personal helicopter]. ...Weichselbaum also had another business: importing drugs from Colombia..."

"To pay for World War I... [t]he estate tax and the gift tax, which apply to wealth, were expanded and the income tax came to apply to a larger, but still minute, percentage of Americans."