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The Best Notable Quotables of 1990:
The Linda
Ellerbee Awards
For Distinguished Reporting
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Bring Back the Iron Curtain Award |
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First
Place
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"This is Marlboro country, southeastern Poland, a place where the transition from communism to capitalism is making more people more miserable every day....No lines at the shops now, but plenty at some of the first unemployment centers in a part of the world where socialism used to guarantee everybody a job."
-- CBS News reporter Bert Quint on the April 11 CBS Evening
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Runners-up: |
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"Communism is being swept away, but so too is the social safety net it provided....Factories, previously kept alive only by edicts from Warsaw, are closing their doors, while institutions new to the East, soup kitchens and unemployment centers are opening theirs...Here are the ones who may profit from Poland's economic freedom. A few slick locals, but mostly Americans, Japanese, and other foreigners out to cash in on a new source of cheap labor."
-- Reporter Bert Quint on CBS This Morning, May 9.
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"These refugees have been told little about the realities of life in the West, including the fact that some people sleep on the street...They will soon learn that jobs are hard to find, consumer goods expensive, relatives in Albania will be missed. Many refugees, according to experts, will suffer from depression, and in some cases, drug abuse."
-- ABC's Mike Lee on what's facing fleeing Albanians, July 14 World News
Tonight.
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Kevin Phillips Tax Fairness Award
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First
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"[C]ountless liberal analysts over the last five years have documented time and again how Reaganomics delivered a feast to the greedheads and starvation to the poor....[The Gilded Age and The Roaring Twenties] were marked by the same kinds of excesses as the 1980s -- gross concentrations of wealth in the hands of a tiny privileged elite, achieved primarily by deliberate Republican policies that left most Americans behind while debt, greed, and conspicuous consumption soared out of control."
-- Robert Rankin, national economics correspondent for
Knight-Ridder Newspapers, in the July 22 Philadelphia Inquirer. |
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Runners-up: |
"For ten years Ronald Reagan taught us there was a free lunch. Folks, he said, we're going to cut your taxes and we're going to spend like there's no tomorrow and you don't have to pay for it. Folks, we're now paying for it and it's bitter medicine....we're going to have to raise taxes to get some sort of fairness here....For ten years the great wizard sold us that idea, that we could grow our way out of the deficits and we bought it, and we didn't."
-- Sam Donaldson on This Week with David Brinkley, October 7. |
"The tax package hammered out last weekend continues a Washington policy established in the Reagan era: It takes a heavy bite out of the paychecks of working-class Americans."
-- Beginning of front page story by Boston Globe reporter Charles Stein, October 2.
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Bring Back the Gas Lines Award
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First
Place |
"We have allowed this country to be held hostage by an industry that produces a product vital to our national interests. This makes about as much sense as having the military services or the nation's water supply controlled by private corporations....In the long run, what would make the most sense would be to nationalize the oil industry to protect the economy."
-- Washington Post columnist Judy Mann, August 8.
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Runners-up:
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"The hottest new proposal was a broad-based tax on sources of energy -- gasoline, oil, natural gas, and nuclear power. In all, it would raise about $20 billion. Everybody seemed to agree it was a good idea except, of course, the transportation lobby."
-- Unbylined box in Newsweek, July 16. |
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