← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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Sam. One of these days I ain't gonna change. One of these days. Welcome, friends, to an edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, incomes, debts, those coming down the road for us and those facing our children in the years ahead. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and that, in a way, has prepared me to present this last week's economic highlights. For your interest, I'm going to begin with what's been on everyone's mind who watches the media or listens to them, namely these enormous storms, first in Texas, then in Florida, with more apparently churning their way up from the Caribbean and threatening to bother us yet again in serious ways. I'm not going to talk about the natural dimensions of it. You've heard that story. I'm not going to talk about the heroic efforts to rescue people, which are indeed stimulating and provocative in the best sense. I want to talk about what the media generally doesn't talk about, which is the relationship between our economic system, capitalism, and these storms and what they mean. So I'll start with a few dimensions and then build up to what I think is the big question. First, a few dimensions. One of the things that got a lot of play, and I'm glad it did, was what we call in economics, price gouging. The two biggest examples were when Delta Air Lines jacked up the price of a flight out of one of these areas from $400 and something to $3,000 and something, simply taking advantage of the desperate need for people to get out of the way of a desperate storm. There was another picture that flashed across the media of a Best Buy store where a case of bottled water was being sold in excess of $40. Sellers of commodities were taking advantage of a natural disaster, so it was called, to really squeeze people at a moment when they had no choice, when they were desperate. It's an example of how markets work. Markets are a part of our system, and markets, as you all know, depend on the laws of supply and demand. And if the demand becomes desperate for people literally trying to save their lives, well, then you can charge quite what the market will bear. And that's what they did big time, all over the place, not just those that were recorded by the media, but thousands of examples that were not, or at least not in a general way. What is this about? Well, you do have, and I apologize for my fellow economists since many of them do this. You do have those who believe that profit is holy, or at least as holy as anything can be, and that therefore profit can never be questioned. So since the people who gouge in moments of crisis make more profits by jacking up their prices, well then that must be reasonable. And indeed, my fellow economists, more than I would like to admit, have been busy in recent days justifying this unbelievable behavior. But I'm also proud of the American people, at least in the sense that the bulk of the comments that I could see did notice that if you jack up the prices, if that's how the market works in a time of crisis, making it more difficult for all of the people suffering to cope with a crisis situation in order to benefit the profits of a relative few, that that might not just be the best way to manage an economic crisis or a natural disaster. And maybe suggests that the market and the system of profit driven decisions in business isn't the best way to go. Maybe not just in emergencies, but more generally. Then I noticed another aspect from the capitalist system. Some years ago, when big profitable insurance companies noticed that storms kept coming, particularly to Florida, they withdrew from the state. This is another aspect of the capitalist if you can't make profit, don't do it. Which then opens the question, what happens to the people who need whatever it is you do that you're not doing anymore in the way of Allstate and other big insurance companies that withdrew? Well, lots of little companies came in to catch hold of the profits that could be made there. It is the profit system by setting up small insurance companies to fill the vacuum left when the more profitable big ones withdrew. Then the problem is an insurance company is only as good as the money it has to make good on the claims of the policyholders. And if the insurance company is small, it may not have. Oh, you can see where this story is going, can't you? Well, you're right, that's where it's going. The little insurance companies that now do the bulk of the business in Florida don't have enough money to cover their claims, not themselves, and not in the reinsurances that they themselves take out to cover the situation. So the fear growing in Florida now is that the government will in the end have to backstop. Because that's how a capitalist system solves the difficulties of private profit, by fixing it with public money. That looks like what it's going to happen. Either the taxpayers of Florida will have to kick it in or the people making claims won't get what they thought they could get when they bought the insurance policy. What a way to handle natural emergencies. But these are the little stories I want to get to the big one. And this is actually more applicable to the Texas situation than to Florida because of the way the storm evolved. The amazing thing about the Harvey storm in Texas was the absence of preparation. The governor of the state of Texas goes on the television during the crisis to answer reporters questions, why did you not order an evacuation of all of the areas lying in the path of this horrible storm so they would get out of there and not be threatened in their lives and in their homes. And his answer was to scoff at the reporter and say, you don't seem to understand. If I said evacuate, the highway would immediately be filled with millions of cars. Who would they be unable to move? Well, this is a none too subtle way of saying, I can't handle it. We're not prepared. I learned later that the ground in Texas around the area that was hit is spongy. It absorbs a certain amount of water and then it can't anymore. In other words, you have to prepare. And now let's look at the economics of preparing. Who's going to do that? The developer eager to build tracks of homes, eager to build shopping and industrial malls. Eager to build roads. If you're a construction company, they don't want to hear about all the difficulties. They want to get the contract, build the house. Build the people who buy the house and leave. The long term effects are not part of their profit calculation because they'll be out of there once the development is undertaken. Gee, they might then push against the government holding up the project until they can decide what's safe. The government mandating walls and barriers to protect the government deciding to move a production site from one location to another to be less risk. And that would give the government power. And private capitalists don't like to do that unless the government is helping them. And these things don't seem to help them. We have a system that systematically underprepares. And that's true in Texas, and that's true in Florida, because it's not privately profitable. No one is doing it. And the government demonized by the very private profit mechanisms and institutions of our culture. The government is unable to raise the money to do these things. It's constantly portrayed as wasting money, as if intrinsically it was less efficient to do something in the government than it was to do it in the private sector. And let me be an economist for a moment. There's absolutely no evidence for this. There are as many examples of inefficient private production as there are of inefficient government production, and the same is true of efficiency. Besides which, how efficient is it to now have hundreds of billions of dollars? If you combine Texas, Florida and who knows how many others coming down the pike, how efficient is it not to take the productive measures that could have and that should have been taken? One final word here. There is a society near where the storms hit that's different, that gives the government an enormous role. We're used to making fun of that society. It's called Cuba. So I want to read you from the New York Times on 10 September the following story, and I'm quoting from the New York Times on that day. While the Cuban response to the storm seemed to be a well oiled machine, that elsewhere in the Caribbean the government reaction has been halting. This is the New York Times language for saying the Cubans have a well oiled system of preventing and protecting because they're not driven by private profit the way we are. There's a lesson here. But of course, like all lessons, if you're not open to learning the lesson, well, then you won't. My next economic update has to do with something I have come back to over and over again, but I have to, because it's an ongoing crisis that's economic as much as anything else. It's the drug crisis, or more precisely, the epidemic of overdoses from opiates and opioids in this country, now running at the rate of 50 to 60,000 deaths from overdose per year in the United States. These are numbers that are staggering. I'm going to explain in a few minutes how different they are from country to country depending on how the economy deals with this awful situation. But just to give you an idea and whet your appetite, I'm going to tell you a little bit later about another country, Portugal, not that far away, which handles its drug problems differently. Deaths per million can be measured and have been measured in the United States and in Portugal. In the United States, deaths per million, about 185 overdose deaths per million of American citizens, 185 per million over these last two or three years, dying in Portugal, how many per million? Three. Not 300, not 33. How is it possible that in our country one hundred and eighty five per million kill themselves by overdose and in Portugal, which once had a very severe drug problem, has reduced it to three? Well, I will come back and I will tell you, but first let's talk about the economics of the drug business. Here are some of the businesses involved in drugs in the whole drug epidemic and so on. First there are all the businesses that produce the drugs, that transport the drugs and that distribute the drugs. Many of them are legal businesses, many of them are illegal businesses. But in terms of the drug epidemic, it really doesn't matter because they are a big business employing thousands of people earning millions, if not billions of dollars producing, transporting and distributing it. Then there's a second group of businesses, those involved in the medical care and the medicines for people already addicted, because the number of addicted is of course much larger than the number that are dying from overdose of those drugs. Then there is the enormous cost of the criminalization of drugs, the enormous apparatus of police of prisons. Someone once told me that a majority of the people in prisons directly or indirectly, have something to do with the drug problem in the United States. We know from statements made by the Haldeman, Ehrlichman combo, those that are left from the Nixon administration that prosecuting African Americans and young radicals for drug possession became a way of decimating that part of the population, denying them the vote. Because if you have a felony conviction, you can't vote in many states of the United States and so on. But prisons and staffing prisons and supplying prisons, that's another big business which might be harmed if you legalized or better yet, solved your drug problem. It's a failure. We've had this war on drugs now for many years. It hasn't done very well according to what I can see the death rate from overdose being worse now than it has been in a long time. So we're not succeeding in dealing with it. And I suspect that the economic interests that have money to be made from this industry and have been making a lot of money from it are not a small part of why this war on drugs seems to be so horrible and unsuccessful. And then the last thing that just happened this last couple of weeks, the Attorney General in the state of New Mexico, Hector Balderas, filed suit in court against the opioid producing pharmaceutical companies for systematically misinforming and basically finding ways to sell their death dealing drugs. He specifically singled out the following and I thought you'd be interested to Purdue Pharma, Johnson and Johnson, Endo Health Solutions, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries and activists. He accused them publicly of, quote, falsely representing and downplaying the highly addictive nature of the painkillers to doctors. In doing this, Mr. Baldera cited documents from the Centers for Disease Control. I won't repeat those all to you. I just want you to know that New Mexico is now the eighth state, eighth state to have its Attorney General file suit against these or other companies and alleging that they systematically did what made profits by distributing killer drugs, addictive drugs, to people in ways that directly violate the law. That's the charge that now eight states have limited. Now Portugal 2001 Portugal was suffering from major problem with opiate type drugs, heroin and so on. And so they made a drastic they would legalize drug possession. Basically no more punishment. You don't go to jail. If you're caught with heroin or a synthetic version of heroin like fentanyl and so on, you get a reference to a drug treatment center and you may get a very small fine. The money accumulated through such small fines and in other ways is used to provide a countrywide program of drug counseling, psychotherapy, medication and so on. Overdose deaths in Portugal are 3 per million, and in the United States there are 185 per million. Something is working in one place and something is not working another. The big drug companies either didn't bother or weren't able to get the freedom to function in Portugal that they have in the United States. And I will keep talking about this crisis so long as the economics seem to dominate and keep that industry alive and growing in terms of its profits and in terms of the social damage it does does. I also came across this last week and am presenting to you the findings of a new study. And this new study caught my attention because of who did it and what they were studying. So let me tell you first who did this study. It was carried out by the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, and it was a study conducted in conjunction with the Alabama center for Rural Enterprise. Here's what it that a disease associated throughout the history of medicine with poverty has resurfaced in the United States decades after it was officially announced to have been eradicated. The disease is called hookworm, an intestinal parasite that thrives. This is a quote from the story in the Guardian on extreme poverty. Here's what it that in the state of Alabama, which is where this study was conducted, there are all kinds of incidences of hookworm that we thought we had eradicated. To give you just one example, in a survey of people living in Lowndes county, which is a county in Alabama, an area with a long history of racial discrimination and inequality, 34% of the people tested positive for traces of hookworm. A third of the people, and the reason the number is like that is because they haven't been looking for this since they thought it had been eradicated. If you want signs that the so called economic recovery from the crash of 2008 has been a very variegated business. Some people, the rich, by and large, have recovered and the rest of us haven't. Here's another statistic that drives that point home. Poverty has returned of a kind we thought we had eradicated, and with it come diseases like hookworm. The last economic update for which we will have time is going to come in a minute. But before that, I want to remind you that we maintain two websites that are full of material like what we do on this program, elaborated in greater detail, that have interviews, that have press activities that we are engaged in. These websites are available 24,7 at no charge whatsoever. Make use of them. They're there for you to do that. The first one is rdwolff with two f's. Com and the second one is democracyatwork. That's all one word, democracyatwork.info Become a partner of this program. Make use of what we produce in talking with your friends, your co workers, your family. If you're interested in this material, then here's a resource available to you whenever it's convenient for you to do so. You can also find a video version of this program on patreon.com p a t r e o-n patreon.com for a video version. And finally, let me urge you back again to the two websites, rdwolf with two Fs com and democracy at Work. Because there you can, with the click of your mouse, find, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, connect to us through YouTube, communicate to us, let us know what you'd like us to cover, what you like and don't like about the program. It's a way of making the partnership we hope that develops between you and us more ongoing, more interactive than it might otherwise be. Okay. The last economic update that we will have time for today has to do with the elite universities of the United States. I return to them from time to time because of their remarkable economic situation. This is an economics program, as I'm sure you know, because we've discussed it. Elite universities, and indeed all universities, enjoy in the United States a tax exemption that is unlike you. When they buy something at the store, they don't pay a sales tax. Unlike you. When they earn income, somehow they don't pay an income tax, neither to the federal nor the state, nor if they're in a city which has an income tax, not to that either. They don't pay property taxes. They pay no taxes at all on their educational property and activities, which is mostly what they do. And this raises an interesting question, because they get all the public services that everybody else gets. If they need the police, the police come. If they need the fire department, they get the fire department. If they want the children of their employees to get a public education, indeed, if they want their employees to have a public education, they don't have to pay for the police or the fire or the schools that they benefit from. That's the value to them of a tax exemption. Most colleges and universities got these tax exemptions long ago in American history when the communities, states or localities decided that in order to have an educational institution, it being difficult and expensive to set one up, they would make it easier by foregoing taxes for a while. But in institutions that have been around, as the elite ones have for hundreds of years, they are now very, very wealthy and long ago stopped being institutions that need a tax exemption in order to provide the teaching that helps our society. So why do they get it? There's a big question. Let me explore that then with you. Not long ago, the New York Times, in fact, had an editorial back in 2015 in which it pointed out critically that Yale University in that year had spent $480 million in fees to hedge funds to manage their endowment. During the same year that they paid out $480 million to hedge fund managers, they spent $170 million on all tuition and tuition assistance and fellowships for students. Let me do that again. They spent way more on fees to manage their billions in endowment than they provided in fellowships and in tuition assistance to all their students. 75% of the wealth owned by American Institute, American universities, excuse me, 75% is owned by 4% of the universities. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, you know who they are. So I was touched by the fact that universities like that are getting a tax exemption. Billions that they would otherwise pay to support localities, states and the federal government. They don't have to pay. They get all the services. Everybody else does, but they're not required to pay for them. Well, the initial rationale was they're helping everybody in the community. But then imagine what you do with the following statistic, which comes from the Equality of Opportunity Project. The elite universities, including Princeton and Yale, I'm quoting from the report, admit more students from the top 1% of earners in America than from the bottom 60% combined. More students from the 1% richest than from the bottom 60%. But it's the bottom 60% who suffer the consequences of the tax exemption. Because if you have to provide fire police and education to the elite universities and they don't pay any taxes to pay for that. Then it's you and me who pay for that. We pay the taxes that keep the fire and the police departments serving Harvard and Yale and Princeton. The 60% suffer the consequences of the tax exemption, but their kids don't get to go to the school. It is a bizarre upside down Robin Hood in reverse situation, isn't it? It's taking from the middle and the bottom to service the top. And that is the bottom line of much of today's set of economic updates. They're about a system that doesn't work anymore for the majority of the people and that has to be confronted. Otherwise all of these interconnected problems will continue to provide raw material for this program, but will not be overcome so that we can go on to other and more interesting things. Thank all of you for joining us once again. I hope you found this as fascinating and interesting as I did. I want to thank you for partnering. Sam. Talk about terror, people that been terrorized all my days. I say you talk, you talk about terror. People have been terrorized all my days. No you took my name and you know you love me, love me, love me, keep me in chains. You wouldn't let me go to school. You know I couldn't read or write. You know they would let me go to school. And you know I didn't know how to read or write. You know they gave me the music. And they call me a fool. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. As we often do in this second half, I am very pleased to introduce to you my guest for today. The introduction will be brief, not because of any lack of material. It's in the opposite problem. There's too much. My guest is Chris Hedges. He's a Pulitzer Prize winning former reporter for the New York Times. He's the author of Wages of the Moral Imperative of Revolt. He is a speaker who crisscrosses both the United States and Canada and also is busy abroad. I bump into him from time to time. I've had the good fortune to do a few things together with him in recent years. So it is an enormous personal pleasure as well as a treat, I believe, for all of you to have a conversation with him about what's going on here in the United States and beyond that in the world. So welcome to our program. Chris thanks, Rick. All right, let me jump right into it, given what this program does and ask you where in the broader picture of what you see going on in the United States and beyond is the problem of the economic system. What we talk about on this program. I thought my viewers and listeners would enjoy how it looks from another perspective from yours, you have broad interests, but in that the capitalist system and its ways figure. And I'd like to hear you say a few things about it.
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Well, since I've been tutored by your work, I think that Marx got it, that we're in the twilight stage of capitalism when, as Marx predicted, what capitalism does is essentially not only become parasitic but cannibalistic. So you've de industrialized the country, you've thrust, and we know the figures, the official figures of unemployment, of poverty are fixed. You've impoverished the country, de industrialized the country, stripped social services, and you have large corporations essentially consuming the very machinery that sustains the state. And the whole notion of the common good, of the commons, of any kind of government as a structure to foster and maintain community, has been jettisoned by neoliberalism. And so we're watching in the Trump administration this extreme kleptocracy. And I'm not speaking about just the personal kleptocracy of Trump and his family, which is extreme, but the kleptocracy of corporations and hedge funds that seek to extract money. The Education Department, we spend about $800 billion a year on education. We have placed a lobbyist, Betsy DeVos, who has never even was an educator in the essentially, who has this mantra that we're going to destroy public education and make it better. And they want that money and they're getting it through charter schools, which we know do not perform in states like Michigan, where DeVos foundation has set up numerous for profit charter schools. We know it doesn't function better. We know it's a form of educational apartheid in the sense that they will refuse to accept not only poor students, students of color, but students with learning disabilities, students for whom English is a second language because they're more expensive to educate. They have a kind of for profit model. They're completely vocational. They destroy teachers unions. They bring in people who are ill equipped to teach and essentially teach by rote. And this is just writ large now. So you have her brother of all people, Erik Prince, attempting to privatize the war in Afghanistan. You have Bowes Allen Hamilton, which gets 99% of its revenue from the federal government by privatizing intelligence, which of course, where Edward Snowden came from. And that Fusion, by the way, of corporate access to all of our personal information and government access to all of Our information, we have 16, roughly intelligence agencies and 70 or more percent of its work is done by private contractors. So that's the stage that we're in. You see, in distressed cities, Detroit would be an extreme example. But any city, really, where they are selling off their municipal assets, their sewers, their parking authority, anything to try and pay back usury loans at high interest rates that they have had to take out of Wall street, especially after 2008, in order to continue to have the city function. The main institutions left in most American cities when they have them are universities and hospitals. So I would say that presages a very frightening scenario because not only is it not sustainable, but eventually it will lead to systems collapse. And I'm talking about the inability of urban areas to collect the garbage. You know, people can't pay their property taxes.
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So Detroit, they couldn't pay for the water, right?
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And so they do a hostile takeover and, and they bring in somebody who poisons the families, including the children of the city, pumping toxic water out of the Detroit river because they don't want to purify it. I mean, that's. I think Detroit is an extreme example of where we're heading.
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All right, let me push this. One of the symptoms of the capitalism, at least as it's developing here in the United States is well known. It's the growing gap between rich and poor. It's been underway at least 30 to 40 years, a kind of rollback of what happened out of the Depression and the war. Here's the question that I think is on millions of American people's minds. How much further can this go before it reaches some point of intolerability so that people. Or is that the wrong question to ask? In other words, this very stage, as you put it, of a capitalist decay or decline has with it the conditions that you might expect provokes a resistance. Do you see that or is it a wrong question?
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No. And the elites are acutely aware of that, which is why they have militarized police forces. You know, handing military grade equipment, including tanks we saw on the streets of Ferguson, 50 caliber machine guns. Most of these cops don't even know how to use these weapons. And the wholesale surveillance, which is a characteristic of any totalitarian society, as Hannah Arendt writes, you collect information on all of the citizenry not to seek a crime, but when you want to criminalize a person or a segment of the society, you have information by which you can use in order to justify, even though it's innocuous. So the elites are well aware that there's blowback. What I worry is that with the collapse of, the complete collapse of the left in the United States, unlike in Europe, where there are kind of residual pockets still communist socialist entities certainly atrophied, but ours were just destroyed in the name of kind of the war against communism. If there are anarchic uprisings, which I think there will be, then without vision and without a national kind of focus that is in my, I think your case and mine, that would be a kind of socialism, then they're easily quelled because they can be dealt with as individual brush fires across the landscape. And certainly all the tools of the state or the mechanisms that the state has accrued to itself. And we're not just talking about the physical mechanisms of wholesale surveillance and massive homeland security. These groups are all infiltrated and monitored, but also the legal mechanisms, the ability to deny people habeas corpus. We see in marginal communities where people of color live, many police states where they essentially, they have no right to due process. These. Most of the. I teach in the prison system in New Jersey. My students never got a trial. And in fact, the ones who were usually didn't do the crime. Many of them didn't do the crime. And as you said, many of them in there for drugs. Well, most of them are in there because they're poor and black. If they go to trial, then the way they force you to plea out is by stacking you with 15, 20 charges, most of which you didn't commit, including major charges like kidnapping, which has 25 year sentence, and then saying, well, we'll remove this, we'll remove that, and you can go to prison for 11 years or whatever, 15. These sentences are quite long often, but if they go to trial, then they get all the charges. The public defender is not going to spend more than 10 or 15 minutes with them. I mean, I've taught people in prison, I taught one guy who had life plus 154 years. They never committed a violent crime. It was all weapons, possessions and drug charges. That's not uncommon. And so they, but they use those people as kind of poster children, say, well, look, look what happened to them. You don't want to go to trial. So 94% roughly of the people in our prison system never got a trial. Then you've got all the SWAT teams that can kick down doors. These people are going for nonviolent drug offenses, terrorizing people in the middle of the night. You've got, you know, it's far worse than stop and frisk racial profiling. As you know, I sued President obama over Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization act, which overturns the 1878 Pose Comitatus act that prohibits the military from acting as a domestic police force. We won the case in the Southern District Court of New York. The Obama administration immediately appealed. It went to the Second Circuit. The Second Circuit wouldn't rule. Wouldn't rule. Wouldn't rule because it's so patently unconstitutional. And what they did is they used another case I was part of the case against Clapper versus Amnesty International on wholesale surveillance was the Supreme Court said, we didn't have a right to bring the case. So the Second Circuit said, well, he doesn't have Hedges. It was Hedges versus Obama. He doesn't have a right to bring the case. In that case, he doesn't have standing. And so therefore he doesn't have standing. So they never ruled. They just threw it out. And we filed a cert or petition of the Supreme Court. They wouldn't take it. It's now law. So they have the mechanism now to deploy the military in. In the streets of American cities, to seize American citizens who they deem to be terrorists, strip them of due process, and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers. That's law. And we saw what happened to 110,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. In fact, Judge Katherine B. Forrest, in her opinion, cited that internment of Japanese Americans as now being legal. So the legal and the physical mechanisms are there.
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And again, in effect, you're saying, and correct me if I'm wrong, that the folks who run this society, they kind of know that they're pushing against the potential for real blowback and are therefore taking these steps almost in preparation, completely. The very thing I said in the first half. We don't prepare for the storm. This is a storm they are preparing for.
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Yeah, and the Pentagon's preparing for climate change. They've issued numerous reports. I mean, even the head of the CIA, Woolsey, wrote a long report, I think it was 2003, talking about not only mass migrations, but mass migrations from the coast of Florida. I mean, they have to live in the real world if they want to retain power. So they know very well what's coming and they're ready. Unfortunately, you know, we live in a society utterly awash in electronic hallucinations, Derek Jensen calls them. We're awash in lies. And the corporate press, you can see it. You mentioned it in the first half of your show. But the coverage of the devastation in Houston and Florida, what was it? It was feel good stories about heroic rescues or dramatic photos of flooded streets or. But not a word about climate change. These are patterns of. Because we have disrupted the climate, these are going to become. Houston will get hit again, Florida will get hit again. We know this. Climate scientists have run.
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A
They expect Jose, the one that's already built, to do it again, right?
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B
Model after model, we know what's coming. But the corporations, in particular the fossil fuel industry, and we can't let the animal agriculture industry off the hook. They have a lock on systems of public information and public education. So yes, they know what's coming. Yes, they are preparing, both legally and physically. And I think what's most ominous is that when you walk into marginal communities where poor people of color live, that is their practice space. And should there be unrest outside of those communities, I mean, mass incarceration, which is obscene in this country, 2.3 million people, almost all poor people of color, although the poor whites are increasing, including women, are swelling that population. That's a form of social control. They do it through terror. This is what lethal police force in this country is about. It's like lynching in that it's not just about killing. I think 3.1 unarmed fellow citizens, usually people of color, poor people a day. But like lynching, it creates a state of terror. So that if you are the parents, even the mayor of New York has had to concede this. If you are the parents with a young black man who walks out, you want him home by dark because he may not come home. I mean, this is just like Jim Crow South. And when Hannah Arendt writes about the plight of the stateless, she herself being stripped of her German passport, living in France with no rights, said that when you create both the legal and the physical mechanisms to strip people of rights, rights become privileges. And that's where we are. And once rights become privileges, then they can be taken away from anybody. So I live in Princeton, which you know, is increasingly the domain of the upper 1%, unfortunately. And so they, they don't. You don't see it, you don't see it in Manhattan, but all of the mechanisms, the constitutional mechanisms by which we once were able to defend ourselves have been taken from us by judicial fiat, by a reinterpretation. I mean, the Constitution is quite clear in the 14th Amendment about search and seizure. They don't have a right to all of our personal information without a warrant, yet they have it. Right to privacy. All of that's gone. And then they'll take through Citizens United, the absurd idea that unlimited dark campaign contributions by corporations is the right to petition the government or a form of free speech. These are the legal system or the judicial system. The 1 million lawyers in this country, when the history of this country is written, you know, where were they? Where were the, you know, all these people talking about, you know, going back to the Constitution, like Scalia and others? Well, what about privacy? What about search and SEIZURE under the 14th, you know, the legal system? As you know, I don't want to draw comparisons too tightly with Nazi Germany, but they have been a bulwark of. They've sold their soul to corporations and corporate power. And this is not just true. I mean, we have figures that the Trump administration, Gorsuch and others has pushed, but Obama was just as guilty as this. I mean, most of the federal judgeships that he appointed, they were all corporate lawyers. They all serve corporate power.
- [46:58]
A
Listen, I'm reminded because of being in the field of economics as I'm watching the so called tax reform process underway, that from Trump on down through all the others, there's this endless talk about helping the middle class, the lower class, cutting their taxes. And when you look at what they're actually doing, there's something here that's almost genius. They're cutting taxes on corporations 12 Ways to Sunday and on very wealthy people. The numbers that you can put together are clear. But their ability to have the press carry their verbal nonsense instead of the analytic means that you have a kind of general consensus to do something which the same people who believe in this would hate if they understood what happened to them.
- [47:56]
B
Right. Well, first of all, what's going on?
- [47:57]
A
You're the journalist in a way, tell me.
- [47:59]
B
Well, first of all, it's not a tax reformist tax boycott. I mean, most of these Fortune 500 companies are Citibank, they don't pay any taxes at all. So let's be clear about what they've orchestrated. That's the first thing. The second thing, and Matt Taibbi did a nice book on this called Divide. There's a two tiered legal system in the country. So if you're a small business owner, you are crushed. I mean, you can pay up to 40% of your profits in taxes. You have all sorts of regulations. But if you're Goldman Sachs, that's very different. And so the perception among our dwindling small business community is that government is intrusive. There are too many regulations, taxes are too high. And they're right. But on the upper scale, where all these lobbyists, banking lobbyists and hedge Fund lobbyists are writing the legislation. It's naked kleptocracy and pillage.
- [48:54]
A
But then tell me for all these small businessmen, and I agree with everything you said, they've been through this. Now, they have seen their critique of the government as intrusive and burdensome be used not to relieve them of the burdens, but to help the biggest ones. They've been through this. Can they be fooled again?
- [49:13]
B
Well, it's not a matter of being fooled. It's where do you go to get the information? I mean, PBS is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Koch brothers. No, literally the NewsHour. I mean, I was just on WGBH. David Koch sits on the board. So where do you go for the information? You have to go to the fringes of, to your show, to what I write. But we've been so marginalized. And as I was saying before the show, that's not true. In Canada, I'm on prime time on CBC nationally for a half hour radio. I'm nationally in France, on Radio France or, you know, my books get. My last book got a two page spread in Le Monde, you know, and of course, my last book here, although it got on the front page of the New York Times Sunday Book Review, was given to the troglodyte George Backer, who trashed it, which is why they gave it to him. So it's that kind of rational discussion of economic pillage and corporate power is unacceptable within the mainstream discourse, just like climate change, just like all sorts of stuff. And so unless you're extremely proactive, and most people are not proactive about getting information and less and less people read, which I think is a tremendous problem, because you have to struggle through. I didn't read all of three books of Marx's Capital, but I did get through one, which has more math than I needed. But you have to read that. You have to read Polloni. You have to read the stuff you write. You have to. And so that takes, I mean, there's I think, a small percentage of the population that will do it, but it's probably in single digits.
- [51:02]
A
All right, Here comes the $64 trillion question. Given what you write, given what you see, given what I see, given what I write, given what our audience, which is why we have an audience, is it premature to think of a significant movement for social change emerging here in the United States? In the title of your book, the Moral Imperative to Revolt, is that imperative being felt and seized and internalized by the people of the United States, or at least a Significant portion. Do you see the blowback from everything you've witnessed and described? Do you see that?
- [51:49]
B
Yes, but it may be a far right blowback. There is going to be blowback. We're in a period. Alexander Berkman wrote an essay and he talked about when old ideas, in the old turn of the century, it was monarchy, divine right of kings. In our case, it's neoliberalism. When they lose their credibility and neoliberalism has lost. It's a zombie ideology. No one believes. Even the banks don't believe it, because how can you believe it if you then go loot the U.S. treasury? I mean, who knows what they believe other than greed is good. So that ideology, which quite effectively stripped the nation state of its assets and impoverished the working class to make it the working poor and radically atrophied and diminished the middle class, it doesn't have its currency, but we don't have. And this is what Berkman writes, Anything to take its place yet. And so that's a very dangerous moment for me, a seminal and very frightening moment was the reaction of the state to the Occupy movement. Because what the Occupy movement asked was so tepid as so many. I mean, if you remember Tiananmen Square or even when I covered the revolution in East Germany originally in Leipzig, they just wanted the opposition, just wanted legal recognition. I mean, they ended up overthrowing the Stasi state. So what the Occupy movement, what did they ask for? They did have demands. They asked for that corporate power be restrained, that, you know, there'd be jobs programs, that there'd be universal health care.
- [53:31]
A
And that 1% 99 would not be that way.
- [53:35]
B
Well, and that they would not be burdened with $100,000 in student loans while they were working in a deli. So, you know, these were very rational, reasonable demands. And what was the response of the state? It was to, in a coordinated effort under the Obama, was to shut the down physically. And that is dangerous. So is there going to be blowback? There is, but that blowback may be very ugly. It may be blowback by a disenfranchised white working class. What happens when these people realize that Trump has sold them out?
- [54:10]
A
Right. Big question.
- [54:11]
B
And they've all got guns.
- [54:13]
A
I mean, and he is selling them out.
- [54:15]
B
And he is selling them out. And thank God, I mean, Charlottesville lease on both sides, but in particular on the right, they were armed to the teeth. And all you need is one person to pull out their Glock and start firing the crowd and you've got dozens wounded and dead. And that's what's coming. And of course that's a gift to the state because then they use it to what they want to. They're already using it to demonize the left. That's why I've been critical of the black bloc and Antifa. Their goal is to shut down even those of us who are non violent, anti capitalist act. They want that shut down because internally these people are frightened. They know far better than you and I how utterly corrupt and depraved the system is. And I think Occupy frightened them immensely, more than the Occupy activists understood. Because if anybody knows how game the system is, it's all those criminals sitting in Goldman Sachs or Citibank. I mean, let's be clear, they are criminals. They are clearly under. You know, if we consider massive fraud a criminal activity, they should be. I don't, I'm kind of a prison abolitionist. But they should be handing out soup somewhere, you know, in Camden, New Jersey, cleaning their diapers. Yes, yeah, they know and they're prepared. And the seizure of any state paralysis, this is what we have is political paralysis. The inability of the state or the government to respond to the most minimal rights and needs of the citizenry and the diversion of all resources to the further enrichment of a global oligarchic criminal class means that eventually, because these people only know one word and that's more. It means eventually there's blowback. But given the fact that the left has been so decimated in the United States and what I see as often articulating the left, groups like Black bloc, Antifa, which I find immature, juvenile and you know, catharsis is not how we carry out a revolution. Throwing a rock through a window. We have to be extremely tactical and well thought out and disciplined. I mean, you know, we can have another show on Lenin. But Lenin understood, and Lenin understood the danger of random acts of violence and terrorism, which he was rabidly against. So we could very well slip into a kind of corporatized, militarized. It's not fascism because as Sheldon Wolin points out in Fascism, politics trumps economics and corporate totalitarianism. Economics trumps politics, but some kind of very frightening dystopia.
- [56:59]
A
Well, I don't want to leave us on the note of dystopia, but it's a realistic process and we have to face it as part of the dialogue.
- [57:06]
B
We have to fight it. We have to fight it. And you know, that's that great line I use the end of my book. I don't fight fascists because I'm going to win. I fight fascists because they're fascists.
- [57:16]
A
Thank you very much, Chris, and thank all of you for joining us once again. I hope you found this as fascinating and interesting as I did. I want to thank you for partnering with us. I Want to thank truthout.org that you independent source of news and analysis that has been a good partner for economic update for years. I look forward to talking with you again next week. Sam. Sa.