Hunger Games 2012......or Rome

Gale knows his anger at Madge is misdirected.  On other days, deep in the woods, I've listened to him rant about how the tesserae are just another tool to cause misery in our district.  A way to plant hatred between the starving workers of the Seam and those who can generally count on supper and thereby ensure we will never trust on another.  "It's to the Capitols advantage to have us divided among ourselves," he might say if there was no ears to hear but mine.  If it wasn't reaping day.  If a girl with a gold pin and no tessera had not made what I'm sure she thought was a harmless comment. 


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MORRIS:  The president is running an absolutely stupid campaign.  His campaign is based on the assumption of not appealing to the middle, not even regarding the middle.  He's just going after the left.  He's trying to re-create the coalition that elected him in 2008.  He's trying to re-create that environment.  Instead of using hope and change and uplift, he's using envy and fear and dislike and distrust.  In the course of it he looks horrible, his personal approval ratings are dropping.

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Over the last few months, I’ve been talking about a choice we face as a country. We can either settle for an economy where a few people do really well and everyone else struggles to get by, or we can build an economy where hard work pays off again – where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same rules. That’s up to us.

Today, I want to talk to you about the idea that everyone in this country should do their fair share.
Now, if this were a perfect world, we’d have unlimited resources. No one would ever have to pay any taxes, and we could spend as much as we wanted. But we live in the real world. We don’t have unlimited resources. We have a deficit that needs to be paid down. And we also have to pay for investments that will help our economy grow and keep our country safe: education, research and technology, a strong military, and retirement programs like Medicare and Social Security. 

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ARMENDARIZ:  I gave an analogy to my staff about my philosophy with enforcement.  It was kind of like how the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into little Turkish towns somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw, and they’d crucify them. And then, you know, that town was really easy to manage over the next few years.