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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a regular weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, debts, those of our kids coming down the road, the incomes we need to have, have a decent life, all of that. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and my hope is that it has prepared me well to offer you these economic updates about what's been going on in that economy we all depend on. Before jumping into the updates for today, I want to remind you of this remarkable event that takes place in New York City June 1 to 3. It's called the Left Forum. This year it will be kicked off by Jane Sanders, the number one advisor to Bernie Sanders, who regularly scores in the polls as the most popular politician in the United States. Jane Sanders, who advises him, will be opening the Left Forum with a conversation about how politics looks from that perspective, and there will be many, many others. Over 300 panels will be going on during the week, the weekend, excuse me, and likewise, all sorts of activities, organizations, art exhibits and so on. It's an extraordinary event, takes place at the John Jay College of the City University of New York. Starts June 1, ends June 3. If you are interested in social movements, in social criticism, this is the number one event of the year in the United States, and I urge you to look into it. And the easiest way to go there to get all the information you might need to register is to go to their website. Very simple, Leftforum. That's all one word. Leftforum.org leftforum.org let's turn to our updates. And the first one is a kind of continuation from an earlier interview I had with Professor Miguel Duran Robles, because it touches on what he talked about with us, namely the decline of American cities, this peculiar moment in the history of the United States when the kind of onward rush to privatize everything, to make everything the private event rather than the community or the collective or the state event. This part of the demonization of government to cover up all the shortcomings that afflict the private sector. Well, we're about to apparently take it one step further. You know, of gated communities, those parts of our cities and towns increasingly over recent decades that close themselves off from everybody else. They begin to have their own water system, sometimes their own schools, their own policing, their own. You get the picture? Well, we're about to take it one step further. An organization calledand note the name Free Private Cities is raising money around the United States and offering itself to wealthy people who don't want to live with anybody else who isn't, who don't want to be part of any public community event. They want to live with carefully selected people to just like themselves in a city literally separated legally, jurisdictionally, politically, you name it. From everybody else, their image is the city of Singapore in Asia, which is itself not just a city, but its own nation separated from everything else. It's a city, nation combined. They make Singapore their model. They do not mention that Singapore has been a political dictatorship for many, many years and has thereby excluded the people it didn't want, shaved out all of the parts of society that rich folks don't want to see near them. It's a remarkable step in the disintegration of collectivity, of community, of solidarity, private cities from which all who haven't got the money will be excluded. And you know, of course, that when you take the rich folks and put them in their own cities, all that will be left for everybody else is to make it on their own, without the solidarity of the people whom they made rich by their labor, whom they continue to make rich by their labor, but who will not share with those who produce the wealth what the wealth makes possible. If you ever needed a sign of the disintegration of contemporary capitalism, there it is, moving right along. Here's another sign of the problem of capitalism. There's a freelance marketplace called upwork, which keeps track of how many of us here in the United States are working without a regular job situation. You know, where you go to the same place 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, working with job security and so on. Here's what their research came up with, which I wanted to share with you. There are now, according to Upwork, 57 million US freelancers, that's 35% of the entire workforce, do not have a regular job. They freelance. They get work where and when they can for a particular job, for a particular period of time during which they can worry about how much space there'll be between the next job they get and so forth. Among millennials, the younger part of our workforce, the percentage of the millennial labor force that is freelance is 47%, just shy of half the freelance category is growing three times faster than the rest of the workforce. You know, it doesn't take a genius to understand that if you are a freelancer, it means it's very hard to plan your life. You do not know from one week to the next, from one month or year to the next, how in the world are you going to make the basic commitments of life, where to live, who to live with, whether to have a family and so on becomes impossible situation and has more than a little to do with the fact that the birth rate in the United States has been dropping in recent years in a way that is not replicated in other parts of the world. At least not yet. The next update I want to share with you. The Supreme Court issued an interesting decision recently. I wanted to bring it to your attention. They basically have legalized sports betting. Every state in the United States, all 50 are now allowed to make whatever rules they want governing sports betting. Well, I'm interested in this not so much on the issue of sports betting itself. I mean, we bet on almost everything else. Why not sports too? Obviously there's a problem of addiction to all kinds of gambling and this of course, isn't going to help that situation much. I'm more interested in the why and the why now parts of the question. And I'm an economist, so I'm going to go after that. Legalizing sports betting is being done because cities, towns, but particularly states can tax that activity. They can go in and get money. It's a little bit like the legalization of marijuana. That was also a taboo, like gambling, but it is a way of raising money, which. Without doing what? Without taxing corporations and the rich. That's the truth of it. You see, over the last 40, 50 years, the burden of taxes in the United States has shifted. At the end of World War II, it was heavily focused on corporations and much less on individuals. That's all changed. The burden of corporations taxes have been relieved. They pay less and less and less, both at the state level and at the federal level. And the burden of taxation has been correspondingly shifted onto the individual. That's why we've had 50 years of quote unquote tax revolts, because the burden of taxation has risen disproportionately on people, not on businesses where it once was. So you've come to the point where the mass of people will not tolerate it anymore. That's the secret of the Republican Party's political success. They champion the no taxes, which people feel as a real burden. Not only that, taxes have also been shifted from high income individuals to middle and low ones. So that if you take the whole 50 years, the last 50 years together, the burden of taxation has been shifted from, from corporations to individuals and from rich individuals to the middle and the bottom. No wonder everybody's freaked out about their taxes. Well, then how are you going to run? The community needs that we have the Schools, the police, the fire, the parks, you know, the things that make communities what they are. And the answer is the sooner or later we're going to have to tax the corporations and the rich who have gotten away with being tax evaders for half a century, and they know it. So they're desperately trying to find ways that will prevent them from finally being taxed as they ought to have been all along. Enter marijuana. Oh good, we can get some taxes by charging people who use marijuana. And now the Supreme Court decision. Oh good, we can tax people who bet on football games and basketball games and baseball games, anything in the world, even violating old religious and other kinds of cultural commitments of the United States. Long opposed to marijuana, long opposed to gambling, sports betting, and so on. Many of you will remember the enormous scandals that have come up as points were shaved in games to make money for people who gambled on them. All of that is to be forgotten because the number one goal is, is to save corporations and the rich from finally having to face the tax burden being put back on them when it shouldn't have been taken from them in the first place. I want to take a moment before doing the next updates to remind you that particularly for those of you that are listening to this program on the radio, that, that if you would like to see it as a television program, as a video program, please go to Patreon P A T R e o n patreon.com economicupdate the name of the program. And that lets me thank our Patreon community for their enormous supportive relationship to this program, making use of what we do, but also helping us along the way in all kinds of ways. So hats off to the Patreon community from all of us at Economic Update. For those of you who watch on YouTube, please remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel for economic Update. And finally, take a look at our website, the Democracy at Work Store, where you will find all kinds of interesting things, especially here in the month of May, the 200th anniversary of Marx's own work, his bicentennial. It's another way to participate and partner with our project. We also invite you to take a look at the Puerto Rico Forward, the podcast that's also available on Apple Podcasts and Google Play. It's a remarkable free analysis of the developments in that very important part of underreported American history, Puerto Rico. And again, a reminder, the Left Forum is a thing that is worthy of your interest and support and you can find out all you need@LeftForum.org returning to our updates I have to report I'm a little sad about it that yet another company has gotten caught, an automobile company, cheating on the emissions control. I've been telling you about this ever since the scandal broke around Volkswagen in Germany. This time it's the Fiat Chrysler Corporation and some of its suppliers such as VM Motori and Bosch. Many of you are familiar with them. They are all now embroiled in an evolving scandal in which these kinds of cheating devices were installed. They weren't. This was not explained to buyers of things like Jeeps and Ram 1500 pickup trucks. I'm not interested in the details. It's the same with all of these companies and that's the point I want to drive home with you. Namely to trust large capitalist corporations not to cheat, not to lie. That's been given the lie by what's emerged here. All of the auto companies, without exception it looks like. And if there are a couple of exceptions, my guess is there won't be exceptions much longer however have been caught doing this. And I want to drive home what they got caught at. It wasn't just cheating and lying to the buyers of their cars. It was cheating on something that deteriorates the quality of the air we all breathe. No one can know how many people have gotten emphysema, lung diseases of all kinds, lung cancers, how many lives were lost by the extra pollution caused for all of us by the profit driven behavior of large corporations. Even when the government comes in as it did to try to control pollution for our health, these companies went around that legislation. It shows you that state regulation, however valuable you might think, is no solution here. That's what we've learned. So here's a suggestion. One of the reasons we endorse and support on this program an economy based on worker co ops is for the simple reason that if a business is run by all the workers together we'll have a chance that some of them have the decency, the honor, the concern for their own families to not let such a cheat that hurts everybody go through. It's not 100%, but it's better than what we have, which is to rely on capitalist corporations whose bottom line is profit and a government too easily, how shall I say this, corrupted. That might be a nice word to be effective regulators. There's a lesson here. And oh, just as we were going to press, add another, the Porsche company which just recalled 60,000 Porsche SUV's for guess what? An apparent error that had something to do with emissions controls. And if you believe it was an error. Well then there is the Brooklyn Bridge on which I will give you a very good point price if you wish to buy it. This last week for another update, three senators in the United States Senate, Senators Gillibrand of New York, Booker of New Jersey and Sanders of Vermont offered a bill to provide a federal jobs guarantee. This is in a way a resubmission of an old bill that had the name Humphrey and Hawkins back in the 1970s because that bill had the same goal. The idea is if the private sector of the United States, private businesses are either unable or unwilling to hire all the able bodied adults who want a job, then the solution is not to leave those people without a job. That's not an efficient solution. It's horrible for the millions affected, it's horrible for the families of those people, it's horrible for all the rest of us who could enjoy what those unemployed people could be helping to produce if they had a job. Franklin Roosevelt, with the support of the Congress back in the 1930s, responded to this situation by saying, okay, if the private sector either can't or won't, we, the government will. We will provide a job guarantee. We'll give everybody a job. Well, that's what Gillibrand, Booker and Sanders are proposing again. And let me drive home the economics of it. When a person goes to work for a private employer, the name of the game is you produce as a worker more than it costs the employer to get you to come there. That more is called profit and it is pocketed by the employer. That's why he hires you. He pays you $20 an hour because whatever it is you add to his output to sell, each hour that you work is worth more than $20. So he sells it, gets, let's say $25, pays you the 20 he owes you for your labor and keeps the other five. You produced it, you just don't get it. Who gets it? The owners of the business who divide it up amongst themselves pay off the big executives. You know the story. Well, if you don't do that, suppose the government comes in. The government hires you, pays you, let's say the same 20 bucks you produce. $25 per hour for the 20 DOL. 20 bucks you get. Now who gets the extra 5 bucks? Well, there are no employers in the private sense. So the government takes the money. And what does the government do with the money? The answer is it provides public services or it can lower everybody's taxes because it doesn't need to tax us since it's picking up the profit. That is being produced by all those public employees. We the people are win. We win by having unemployed people be productive. They win because they have decent jobs, can keep their homes and all the rest. And then we win again because the profits of workers in the public sector can reduce our taxes or provide more funds for public services. Not to do that is a strange decision and depends only on the political muscle of private enterprises. They don't want it. And you know why? Because if you understand it, if you actually live in it, and you know what it works like, you would scratch your head and you would say, why are there any private enterprises taking the profits workers make and giving it to a few people rather than making it available to everybody in the form of reduced taxes or, or enhance public services? They don't want that process to get going. They don't want people to think like that. They want to keep the profits that we all help to produce in the tiny number of hands of those who own and direct American businesses. And we shouldn't be fooled to imagine it's anything else. Next update. The Catholic University in Washington, D.C. is moving forward. It was announced with its plan to, and I'm quoting now, enhance the university's prestige and control its costs. And the way it's going to do that is it's going to be firing tenured professors. Now, I should explain, when you get what's called tenure in the teaching profession in the United States, it basically means that you cannot be fired. You have enough confidence expressed in you by your colleagues and the administrators of your institution that you cannot be fired unless the need for your services disappears. They close a department or there's a financial emergency, or you have misbehaved in some egregious way. But barring those, you have that job until you retire. That's what tenure means. So it's a big step for any university, such as Catholic University in Washington to say it's not going to respect tenure and not declaring a financial emergency. They have not done that, but simply to, as I'll quote again, enhance the university's prestige and control its costs. The professors, as you might guess, are a bit troubled by this situation. Those with tenure thought they had job protection. They're being told they don't. Why the Catholic University would want to do this, I will leave to your imagination, I don't know. But I want to raise the fundamental issue here, very fundamental. In the United States, professors are excluded at the Catholic University, and indeed at most universities, from participating in the management of the university professors job is to come into the classroom. Teach work with their colleagues to manage the curriculum. That's it. They don't participate in. Or to be blunt, they are excluded from managing. And this raises a question, because how the university was managed by people excluding professors clearly led to the current situation where they need to enhance their prestige and control their costs. Obviously they didn't do enough of that before. So now they want the professors to take a cut in their security because non professors messed up their jobs. Well, I would suggest to you, you can't have it both ways. If you want professors to be taking it on the chin because quote unquote, the university needs it, then you've got to let the professors in on all the decisions that led to this circumstance. Otherwise you have one group of people making the decisions and another group of people paying the price when they don't work. And of course, this isn't unique to a university. It's what goes on everywhere. The boss makes the decisions and one day tells you, gee, we have to lay you off. Well, it turns out they have to lay you off because they made the wrong commodity or they made it in the wrong way, or they put the wrong equipment into it, or they used the wrong materials, or they messed up the technology. All the decisions from which workers are excluded lead to that moment when there's a crisis and the workers are told they've got to take it on the chin too. Well, if you want the workers to bear the costs of mistakes, they have to be in on it. Otherwise, to coin a phrase famous from American history, you're going to have taxation without representation. Remember, that's what they threw the boxes of tea into the harbor at Boston many years ago. That's what the real Tea Party was about. You cannot impose burdens on us if you exclude us from making the decisions that led there to be a need for burdens. You can't have it both ways. But capitalism is a system that tries to have it both ways. Exclude the mass of working people from all the key decisions and then make them pay the price when those decisions have been made badly. It's a profound reason why it's time to think about the basic slogan, we can do better than capitalism. Thank you very much for your time. We've come to the end of the first half of this program. Please stay with us. After a short interlude, we will turn to the second half of the program. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. It is with real pleasure that I welcome to our program. A friend of mine, someone I work with from time to time. And each time, I'm glad I have the opportunity. His name is Chris Hedges, and my guess is many of you know his work already. But just to remind you, he's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, the New York Times best selling author, former professor at Princeton University, activist and ordained Presbyterian minister. He has a long list of books he's published. I would guess the most famous is the book called Days of Days of Revolt, but many others. He writes a weekly column for the website Truthdigital in Los Angeles, and he hosts his own show on Contact on RT America. Chris spent two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries during his work for the Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, the Dallas Morning News, and the New York Times. Indeed, in the New York Times, he was part of a team of reporters that was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for coverage of global terrorism. He's taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, and the University of Toronto. He left the New York Times after receiving a formal reprimand from the newspaper for publicly denouncing the George W. Bush administration's invasion of Iraq. Given everything at the time and since this would be a badge of honor if there was honor involved in any of this. So it is with great pleasure that I welcome you to Chris and Chris to the audience.
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Thanks.
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Thanks for coming, Chris. So let me jump right in. We are experiencing extraordinary levels of inequality in the United States. Instability, change, turmoil, and now on top of it, the Trump administration's imposition of an extreme right wing agenda. Do you believe. And you, I know you travel a lot, you talk to a lot of people. Are we approaching a kind of tipping point, crisis point? Do you have a sense of an impending explosion or implosion as the end game of all of this?
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Yeah, but Trump is not the genesis of our problem. We live in a system that Sheldon Wolin calls inverted totalitarianism. And this is spelled out in his last book, Democracy Incorporated. And it's this sense of, you know, the corporate coup d', etat, that it's not traditional totalitarianism where you overthrow a system and replace its iconography and language. And it revolves around a charismatic leader, but it's through the power of the anonymity of the corporate state. It's where economics takes precedence over politics. Fascism, for instance, politics would take precedence over economics. And so the facade, it's like the late Roman Republic, the facade remains. I mean, the Senate under Augustus is still, in theory, operating The Senate operates under Nero Caligula, Commodious. All of the late commodious kind of reminds me of Trump. And so Trump is the product of a failed democracy. Trump is the product of a system that has been seized by a tiny corporate cabal and administered by mandarins or courtiers in the Republican and Democratic Party. So Trump is the symptom, not the disease. He's what dysfunctional societies always cough up. And I covered the war in the Yugoslavia in the form of Yugoslavia, and you saw in the late 1980s the economic collapse of Yugoslavia, in part fueled, of course, by the international banking that wouldn't allow them to restructure their loans. Tito had taken out massive loans that everyone knew he could never repay, but he was useful as a buffer state. So you had hyperinflation, huge factory closures, and essence, deindustrialization, and you vomited up these figures like Slobodan Milosevic or Franjut or others. And that's where we are. So Trump is extremely dangerous. Not because he has any ideology. He has none. But within that ideological vacuum, you are watching the Christian fascists, the Christian right essentially fill or create an ideological symptom, a system that Trump is very willingly serving. And they have a base. They have Liberty University and tbn. And I really, and I speak as a seminary graduate and now an ordained Presbyterian minister. I, look, I didn't use the word. I wrote a book called American the Christian Right and the War in America. I didn't use the term fascist lightly. They are heretical. They are Christian heretics. They did what the German Christian Church did under the Nazis, which is fuse the iconography and language of Christianity with the iconography and language of the state, or in the case of the Nazi Party. So what we are waiting for and what we're going to get, people like you speak about it is at some point, another financial meltdown. This time around, they don't have Plan B because they can't lower interest rates anymore. They're already at zero. I mean, we had cases in Europe where they were actually negative. They would pay you to borrow money. So. And at that point, I mean, these societies that devolve into these monstrosities, as we saw in Yugoslavia or as we saw in Weimar, they need a crisis of that magnitude. And then what I worry is that we bring up. That's when the political freaks really come out and we begin to see empowered people who are even more dangerous and less clueless and less benign. I mean, Trump will look sagacious, you know, kind of wise by comparison. And this is why Noam Chomsky, I think, correctly, says, don't be careful wishing for the impeachment of Trump, because Pence is worse. And he's right.
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Tell me, let me jump a little bit. This word fascism gets used lightly, easily. You just said you didn't do that. Do you think a fascism is underway here or, and I mean fascism in the traditional German and Italian notion of the big businesses and the state literally fusing to manage each other in some sort?
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No, because under Italian and German fascism, there was an uneasy relationship with the state. So when the Nazis came to power, and I would argue that Wall street, they find Trump an embarrassment. How can you not find him an embarrassment? And yet he did do what the fascists did both in Italy and Germany, is they went straight to the centers of power and said, what do you want? And what they wanted was destruction of Dodd Frank, not that it's particularly useful. Massive tax cuts which they got, and deregulation of everything, of the fossil fuel industry, the financial industry, and that's what Trump gave them. And then the military, he gave them a 10% budget increase even though they never asked for it. And he gave them carte blanche to run our overseas military projects. And that's, you know, you look back, I don't want to call Trump Hitler because he's not. They're very different. But Hitler did the same. I mean, the Wehrmacht couldn't stand the Brownshirts, and so he got rid of the brown shirts. Krupp, IB Farben, very uneasy with the Nazis. But I think that power now, Trump doesn't come from a party the way the Nazi party or the way the black shirts were in Italy. So it's different. Power really does rest now completely in the hands of corporate America. And so the proper term is probably Sheldon Wolin's inverted totalitarianism, but it's, I would argue, a species of fascism. And I talked to Wolin before he died, and Wolin said that the great kind of the way you buy off the populace is through cheap consumer products produced in sweatshops overseas and access to easy credit. Well, that access to easy credit is gone partly because of the huge, the trillions in bailouts. The money does have to be paid back, even though it's zero percent interest. And of course, they do it by forcing us into debt peonage. So your credit card is, is late. Next thing you know, you're paying 28% on it. It's all the medical costs, all the ways they have to extract Money from us. So the danger I think that we face comes when that debt bubble implodes. Student debt is what, over a trillion? And eventually it implodes.
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Yes.
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And then the rage, and the rage is already powerful. And I should throw in that we're watching the Democratic Party commit political suicide by refusing to address the issues that gave rise to Trump and the insurgency of Bernie Sanders. And so the Democrats are worrying about messaging instead of worrying about social inequality, chronic unemployment and underemployment, student debt, collapsing corporate run health care system which no one can afford. They won't address any of those, you know, raising the wage, which wages since the 70s have declined to remain stagnant. They won't address any of those issues. And that's because they are an appendage of the corporate state. Figures like Schumer, Pelosi, Perez, Obama, the Clintons, they wouldn't exist without this money. And an elite party structure within the Democratic Party that is deeply anti Democratic. I mean, people are kind of brought out as props at the convention of which is just choreographed, you know, Disneyland. Like it has no actual resemblance to a political convention. And I would argue the Democratic Party is not a real political party. So we are set. We are standing on the precipice and the inability on the part of the left. Once again, we're watching the left put their faith in the Democratic Party. I mean, how many decades of betrayal do they need, I mean, to figure out who these people are? So, yeah, I'm very worried it is coming. And we haven't even spoken about climate change, which we're all pretending doesn't exist. So it's going to be rough. It's going to be rough.
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All right, let me pick up. You're a journalist. What role in all of this is played by the mass media in the United States? Is there any opposition within them that you see or that you see emerging? Is it. Where does Trump's manipulation of the fake news phraseology fit into all of this?
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Well, Trump and the commercial media are in a symbiotic relationship. The entities like CNN or msnbc, they're making more profits than they've ever made in the Trump reality television show. The fact that he is unpredictable, the fact that he is vulgar, the fact that he is paying off porn stars, they love it. And so they function as courtiers in Versailles, gossiping about the proclivities and habits of the monarch. Let's take Louis Quatorze, because he was worse than Louis XVI with all of his mistresses. And that's what they do. But you have a majority of this country that is suffering in real pain and I would argue, being oppressed by the very institutions that Trump attacks. So the inability on the part of the Democratic Party to respond, I would argue rationally to what's happening and the kind of cruelty tweets and taunts and insults that Trump spews forth through his Twitter account or when he's interviewed, it does play to a people who, one have been betrayed, who are still being betrayed, and who hate this system, and they have every reason to hate this system. And the failure on the part of progressives or the left to run a counter narrative. And I would argue that's what happened after the 1929 crash in Weimar, because everyone forgets, although the Social Democrats were in power, what did they do? They imposed austerity. They stopped paying unemployment insurance. The Nazis were polling in single digits in 1928. By 1930, they had what, a third, A third of the Reichstag pushing to.
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The half in the popular vote.
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B
And then they had the Communists and the Social Democrats who couldn't make a coalition. So, you know, history wasn't, you know, it doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. I can't remember who said that, but it does. And Yugoslavia would be another example. So we live in a system of political paralysis whereby all institutions of government and power are directed towards enriching that corporate cabal, which means that they are not responding at all to even the most basic needs and rights of the citizenry. And that is just unsustainable. And when we hit a moment of crisis, an economic, let's call it economic implosion, then you will find the most basic, I mean, garbage collection. I mean, just nothing will be. I'm very worried.
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Tell me about the non sustainable, because you might have said it 20 years ago because much of this was already underway. You might have said it with greater intensity 10 years ago. @ what point does your unsustainable literally mean that you can't sustain this way of functioning anymore? Is it that you're waiting for this economic downturn to kind of plunge.
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It? I don't want to talk economics with you, but the fatal moment is when the dollar is no longer the reserve currency. So we saw what happened in the 1950s when the pound was dropped as the world's reserve currency. The British economy went into a tailspin. Now, the difference is that Britain had been dismantling its empire since the end of the First World War. We have been expanding our empire. And when the dollar is no longer the reserve currency. Let me just throw in there. Part of the antagonism with Iran is that they've walked away from the dollar and now they deal only in the EU currency, in the euro. So that's the fatal moment. And at that point, the economy imports become incredibly expensive. We can't fund these military operations. Yeah. And then Wall street, they can't play this game forever. I mean, it's Marxist fictitious capital. It's making money off of money and it works for a while, although it's a criminal activity. In the 17th century, speculators were hung, which is in the 17th century, everyone in Goldman Sachs would have been hung. And Citibank and everyone else. I'm against capital punishment, so I might hang them for a little while and then let them down. But yeah, these people, speculators have just seized the economy and they're looting and making money as fast as they can on the way down. And you know, I know some of them actually related to some of them, they're as cynical as I am a cynical. I mean, they are cynical. I'm not in the sense that they're just pillaging while they can, but they know it's not going to.
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Continue. I talked to some of my classmates because I went to this more or less the same university as you did, and they say to me over lunch, we're grabbing it all before it disappears. You know, it's sort of this doomsday notion of them. They too somewhere know it's not sustainable. They don't know what to do with the inside, but they kind of feel.
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It. Well, they all think they're going to retreat to their gated communities in Vermont and, you know, or New.
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Zealand. I.
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Really. New Zealand.
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A
Right. If they're really.
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Rich. Or maybe the siley old missile silos and the.
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A
Uc. Do you see any, what am I going to say, positives on the horizon? Do you see a mobilization developing or anything from the Poor People's Campaign to ecological movements to Black Lives Matter, to Bernie? Is there anything you can see in the way of a genuine opposition.
- [45:36]
B
Emerging? Yeah, but it's not. First of all, it always collapses as soon as the elections roll around and supports the Democrats, which is utterly counterproductive. I mean, this was my problem with Sanders. So he raises a lot of money, he gets a lot of popular enthusiasm. We're not going to change the system in one election cycle. And so what happens? The Democratic elites make sure he doesn't become the nominee. Big surprise. And he runs around telling us we all got to vote for Hillary Clinton. So that's not the way out. I see the strikes by the teachers as hopeful. I think part of the problems with groups like Black Lives Matter, while I fully support them, they are not. They've not organized in the sense that they're not organized, they're not grassroots organizations. They will do events. There is, you know, they will do the spectacle of the left. I thought Standing Rock was a good example of the kind of thing we have to do, that sustained civil disobedience rooted in a community rooted in Native American traditions and religion, which keeps it grounded and nonviolent, which is important. And you can see how the state responds. I mean, if everybody puts on a pussy hat, a pink pussy hat and goes to Washington, they don't really care the state. And so I was there. I mean, I took part in it. And the cops were kind of friendly and you know, it was like a big picnic or holiday. But you go to Standing Rock. I was also at Standing Rock. They're furious because you are messing with their economic interests. And there you got over 700 arrests. Attack dogs, pepper spray, water cannons laced with pepper spray in sub freezing temperatures, beatings, heavy infiltration, I mean over the whole camp, all day long were planes circling and filming. And what was particularly frightening is I got there in November so they were beginning to prepare for shutting it down. And they blocked roads so we had to go all the way around. But you be coming down these dirt roads and you would run into a checkpoint, but it wasn't police or National Guard or it was people carrying long barreled weapons in kind of black military outfits with no identification. And they would stop your vehicle and demand to see the press credentials. And then they wouldn't let me through. But I never even knew who they were. They were contractors, they were.
- [48:05]
A
Mercenaries. Yeah, like they do abroad. All right, I want to tap your international activities. How do you make sense of the on again, off again tariffs with China? The off again, on again, if I can say it, Iranian manipulations, breaking the treaty. What does this tell us on two particular fronts? Is there a foreign policy here and what is it in the world? The post Soviet, post Cold War. And secondly, isn't there something breaking in the alliance between Europe and the United States that we need to think.
- [48:48]
B
About? Yeah, I mean, you see it with the destruction of the State Department because ideologues like Pence or Bolton, who's a very dangerous figure, these are not people who understand how the world works. They don't deal in nuance. They don't deal with complexity. They are linguistically cultural, historically illiterate. In short, they're idiots. And they run the place with the idiot in chief. And so, you know, when you have a preponderance of military power coupled with utter idiocy, you lead yourself into some very difficult and dangerous situations. The breaking of the nuclear treaty with Iran was insanity. I mean, Iran was complying. What does this say to the rest of the world? And what's it going to say to North Korea if we ever get there? It's going to say that it doesn't matter what you sign. The diminishing or the withering away of diplomacy and its replacement with violence, with force. I mean, we dropped the mother of all bombs, you know, a few months ago or whenever it was in Afghanistan, just because they wanted to see what the mother all bombs did. And we dropped it on an underground tunnel complex. The CIA had paid for probably hundreds of millions of dollars in the war with the Soviets in Afghanistan. I mean, it's all nuts, but that's kind of what totalitarian societies do. They. I mean, who was the foreign minister for Stalin, Molotov, who was an idiot, and Ribbentrop, who was a former champagne salesman. I mean, that's kind of where we are. And so that puts us in a situation where they don't even know how to respond to the rest of the world. And Bolton's quite. You go back and look at his rhetoric. He believes that he is going to punish or pound the rest of the world into submission. So that's kind of the foreign policy. And this thing with Netanyahu egging them on to go after Iran is. Is really dangerous, because what people forget is that if you attack Iran in the Middle east, and I spent seven years in the Middle east, that is interpreted in the Middle east as a war against Shi', ism, not just Iran. 60% of Iraq is Shia. Several million Shia in Saudi Arabia, mostly concentrated in the oil fields, Bahrain. Huge Shia population. Not only that, Iran is not Iraq. It would entangle us, I mean, as if we haven't made enough of a mess in the Middle East. And yet, I mean, Netanyahu wants to see Iran bombed into the kind of chaos that the Israelis kind of got us to do in Iraq and Syria. And unfortunately, I think the people who Pompeo and others who now have control, they don't really understand how the world works at all. So in terms of foreign policy, and of course, the Europeans are, you know, I don't like Merkel too much, but I mean, you know, she's not insane. They're looking across at us and they've kind of already washed their hands of us. I mean, they realize that this.
- [51:47]
A
Is. But where's that going to take the Europe, American deal to kind of carve up the world and manage? It seems to me that this.
- [51:56]
B
Is. Well, the Europeans are already in revolt over the Iran.
- [52:00]
A
Deal.
- [52:00]
B
Yeah. So I think at this point, they're not going to be acting in.
- [52:03]
A
Concert. And if the United States punishes companies that do business with.
- [52:08]
B
Iran.
- [52:09]
A
Right. There will be pressure in their own countries. The government will want to compensate those companies. The mass of people will wonder we're being taxed to accommodate the United States. What. You know, this is politically unfeasible to.
- [52:25]
B
Manage. I mean, well, because we don't have any foreign policy really. It's not articulated in any rational way. It's a knee jerk. Emotionally driven, willfully ignorant. I mean, I mean, let's be clear about who's running the country. I mean, you know, these are the people running the country. They're, they're, they're, you know, very diminished and impoverished human.
- [52:50]
A
Beings. It's like having Mr. Giuliani run your legal defense.
- [52:52]
B
Right? That's right. Well, you know, I kind of wish that on Trump. I kind of wish he turned.
- [52:58]
A
Around. Have you feeling that he's collecting these people. Chris, it's been wonderful. Thank you very much, folks. I hope you found it as interesting as I did. Chris is a remarkable commentator on the American experience from his vantage point, his history, his training, and his philosopher's way of posing basic questions. Please remember to share what we do on this program with those around you. Your family, your friends, your co workers. That's what makes us make these programs to reach far beyond all of you that are listening and watching, but to the larger community to make the very changes that this program underscores we need. I want to thank truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis, for being that kind of partner with us for a long time. And I look forward to speaking with you again next.