Before being elected to Congress, I oversaw the Cook County Hospital System as a Cook County Commissioner for 10 years.
In the early 1980s, I burned my Social Security card at the New Orleans Investment Conference in protest of the state pension system.
The one thing that I do is take really complicated systems and subjects and make them accessible to regular people.
Everyone in a complex system has a slightly different interpretation. The more interpretations we gather, the easier it becomes to gain a sense of the whole.
If we had more reliable systems of law and governance perhaps our friendship would be shallower.
It is time for Congress to provide relief for tobacco farmers. Since the 1930's tobacco production has been regulated by a quota system, which required farmers to purchase quota in order to grow tobacco.
All forms of power - even based on the consensus of the democratic system - react when they are being attacked, or when those who exercise power become a target.
We come out of Jewish-refugee, Holocaust stock, which means that our predecessors fled and we learned that systems of power are vulnerable to corruption and can treat the defenseless in a destructive fashion.
It appeared as if the whole world was one elaborate system, opposed to justice and kindness, and set to making cruelty and pain.
The politicians always told us that the Cold War stand-off could only change by way of nuclear war. None of them believed that such systemic change was possible.
The less you think counterfactually, the less you experience stress. Stress, in this light, isn't a bad thing. It's simply a warning system telling you that your mind has lost touch with what's real.
If you have a native monetization system where the atomic unit of content is the ad unit, that scales down all the way to a small screen experience. That's why Twitter is performing so well on mobile.
Of everyone else who was running, and there were some very talented people, none of them had anywhere near the experience I had in hiring people, holding them accountable, creating systems for accountability.
Despite elections and the experience of post-Soviet personal freedoms by the Russian people, the fate of democracy in Russia is perhaps more ambiguous now than at any time since the collapse of the Communist system.
The demand for beef in Canada remains strong because I think people in America, in North America, know that we have a very strong food safety system and that our food is safe to eat.
To address our current food system problems, I propose a series of local, regional, national and global conversations - starting around the dinner table - to rethink the food we produce, buy and eat.
The industrial food system is so cruel and so horrific in its treatment of animals. It never asks the question: 'Should a pig be allowed to express its pig-ness?'
I think there's a lot of work to be done with our societies. My biggest passions are the environment and health. And when I say 'health' I mean the secrets behind health and our food system.
I studied what principles under-laid peace and prosperity and concluded the only way to achieve societal well-being was through a system of economic freedom.
Our port facilities should have the freedom to levy a market-based container fee which will provide new revenue and make our system more equitable to the American taxpayer and American manufacturers.
A free America... means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call democracy is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it.
