← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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Sam. Sa. Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Our jobs, our incomes, our debts, those looming down the road for us and looming a bit further for our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and currently I teach at the New School University here in New York City. Well, today we're going to have an interesting program in multiple ways. But of course, given the arrival of a new president, some of what I have to say about what's happened in the last week has to deal with this phenomena about which millions are anticipating with excitement and millions with trepidation. So let's start. I want to start with an advisor, a leading advisor to new President Trump, a man named Anthony Scaramucci. And if you haven't heard of him, let me be the first to introduce you. Mr. Scaramucci, like so many of Donald Trump's advisors, has a long history of working with the Goldman Sachs Corporation, the same company that Mr. Trump excoriated during the campaign. And he has now, of course, surrounded himself with them. And none more colorful than Mr. Scaramucci. But Mr. Scaramucci had a problem. His problem was he runs a hedge fund, a fund of funds, as it's called, one of the kinds of funds that. That are run on Wall Street. And the thought occurred to some people that if he was an advisor to the president and at the same time owned and operated a hedge fund, there might, I stress the word might be a conflict of interest lurking somewhere in that situation. And so he had to sell his company, which is called skybridge. Skybridge. And he had to sell it before Donald Trump took office. And he kind of waited till the last minute. So he had to sell it in a hurry, and he had to make the price attractive so he could sell it in a hurry. But I'm glad to report for all of us that he sold it, apparently sold it in Davos, Switzerland, where there's the World Economic Forum going on. That's where the leading business types and financiers get together and talk business and make public appearances. And he was there because that's a lot of what he does. And he sold his company. And I want to tell you who he sold it to and what the conditions were, because nothing gives you a better idea of what's really going on than these sorts of business deals. Control of skybridge was passed to two companies. The first is called Ron Transatlantic, and the second one is called HNA Capital, clearly with names like that. You haven't the faintest idea who they are. So let me tell you about them. Both of these are Chinese companies. That's right. Companies based in and built in the People's Republic of China, where they have a very close relationship with the Chinese government, which is now the owner through them of Mr. Scaramucci's company. And Mr. Scaramucci is very pleased with it. Ron, in case you haven't heard of it, is very famous. It's a conglomerate, owns lots of different businesses. And among the partners of Ron is a man named Reginald Love, best known as President Obama's body man and close aide. Is it getting murky? Oh, good. We're just beginning. The other company that bought SkyBridge, HNA Capital, was a Chinese airline, and then it went into all kinds of other things, a sprawling business empire that includes a 25% stake in the Hilton Worldwide hotel chain. Is it getting murkier? Oh, good. It gets murkier still. It turns out that SkyBridge runs conferences and was recently excited to announce it revived an old television program called Wall Street Week, which is now a regular running program on the Fox Business News Network. Speculation is abounding whether Mr. Scaramucci will also sell another interest he has, which is his ownership stake in the Hunt and Fish Club, a midtown Manhattan steakhouse. There's an old saying that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Next economic update. Occasionally the scholarly press puts out a paper that is so interesting and so original that it finds its way onto this program. So I found one recently in a publication, a working paper produced by something called the American Antitrust Institute. And you can find them@antitrustinstitute.org if you're interested. This paper was published January 13, back in 2007. So why am I bringing it up now? Because it answers a question many of you have sent to me over these last few years. And now I can answer you the question you sent to me. When companies are busted because they're running, in effect, a monopoly or a cartel and overcharging for whatever it is they sell, and when they get, excuse me, caught and required to pay a penalty, is the penalty effective as a disincentive for this kind of illegal, unethical, extortionist kind of behavior, and in a paper way back then that I only learned about, recently published by John Connor, C O N N O r working paper number OH7 01. If you're actually going to pursue it at the American Antitrust Institute, here's what he found. The study he conducted, looked at cartels that were exposed, monopolies that were exposed between 1990 and 2005 here in the United States. And he measured in terms of their value as of the end of that time, 2005, how much extra these companies were able to get by overcharging us because they were a monopoly. They had gotten together the few companies in this area and they jacked up the prices. So he measured good research. He measured how much money they made and the overcharges he added up came to, well, the number isn't so important, but over a trillion dollars. And then he examined what the penalties were when they were caught and had to pay a fine of some sort to a government. 21% was his number. The median penalty was 21% of how much they overcharged. In other words, for every $5 they overcharged, if they got caught, the penalty was 20 cents of the extra buck that they squeezed out of their monopoly position. If you're wondering why more and more companies emerging and more and more industries are becoming cartelized, well, now you know, next item. And this one I do, both for political obvious reasons, I hope, and also because in February we're going to have Black History Month. And this gives me a chance to talk about the intersection of class and race. But perhaps in a way you're not familiar with, the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, a very important source of good research that you can find@epi.org recently collected a group of charts that they say summarizes what happened in the American economy, particularly in 2016. But the chart that interests me the most is the one that compares the rise in workers wages from 1980 to, to 2015. In other words, the last 35 years. How have wages gone in this country? And they compare white men and black men's wages and white women and black women's wages. So let me give you the results of this, but you can get the chart and all the data if you're interested@epi.org the group that did the worst in these 35 years, the worst, bar none, is black men. Their wages went down 6%. That is in 2015, their wages were 6% lower than what they were in 1980. An abysmal experience. Nor did the Obama administration make the slightest difference. Black men's wages fell more during the Obama administration than any other group's. Who was second? White men. Their wages dropped 1% between 1980 and 2015. Compared to their wage declines. Women did much better. Black women saw an increase of 15% over that 35 year period. And white women, 31.6%, they did the best. So the women beat the men and the whites beat the blacks. Before Mr. Obama and after Mr. Obama and during Mr. Obama. So the argument that Mr. Obama privileged minorities, which I hear from time to time, is simply wrong. He didn't. Not in terms of wages, which is probably the key variable in all of this. And men did worse than women, which may have something to do with how this election came out, if you know about the election statistics. But now let me shift the focus, because the graph that EPI does also contains a number for the increase in productivity of all workers. How did the productivity of men and women, blacks and whites, how did it go over the same 35 years from 1980 to 2015? Much, much, much higher. That's right. The growth in the productivity of all laborers went up much faster than the wages of any of them did. It wasn't even close. Now why is that important? Productivity measures how much we as working people provide to the person who employs us or the company that employs us. That's all productivity measures. How much per hour does our labor give to the employer? Wages are the opposite. They measure how much the employer gives to us. So if over 35 years, the productivity rose by much faster than the wages of anybody. Now you know that the system has been working real well for employers. They've done much better in terms of what they get from working people than what they paid to those working people. All of those working people, men and women alike, whites and black alike, have a shared interest in changing that situation. If they're giving more to the employer than he's giving to them, there's a fundamental inequality and exploitation that all working people share as a common interest. And maybe the conclusion that you could draw is that more important than struggling over whether the men and the women should get more or less and the blacks and the whites get more or less. A valid issue for sure. But maybe something even more urgent is that all of them understand that they're all being ripped off by a system that allows the rising productivity to go up so much faster for 35 years, more than an entire generation than what is given to working people. Okay, next I want to celebrate. This is very rare for me, an action by the British Parliament. And even more surprising, it's an action in which the Labour Party and the Conservative Party, that's their equivalent to Republicans and Democrats, are united, at least in a moment. And this doesn't happen very often in England any more than it happens Often here. And you'll be even more surprised by what they're in lightened and united about. Recently, the all party that means both parties all party parliamentary group on social mobility of the Parliament came out with a stunning they are dead set against unpaid internships which they want to get rid of in Great Britain in the United Kingdom. Listen to a couple of the statements made in the course of this group's work. Tory. That's the standard name for the Conservative Party. Tory MP Alex Shellbrook had the following to Interns are the acceptable face of unpaid labor in modern Britain. Wow. There's a kind of blunt honesty. An intern is a way of having labor done for which you do not pay. And he found it Alec did Unacceptable. Let me read you another. Alan Milburn, who's the chair of the Social Mobility Commission, wrote as spoke as follows, quote, Research has consistently shown that people from more affluent backgrounds and who attend private schools and elite universities take a disproportionate number of the best jobs while those from poor, poorer backgrounds are being systematically locked out. Ooh, another breath of fresh honest air. Because of course, an internship at a company or government bureau that doesn't pay you anything is impossible for a person who doesn't have any money. It can only be engaged in by a person who does either their own money or their parents money if they're young people. So those who have more are more eligible to take unpaid internships, which allows those who need at least to get the advantage. And the British, unlike the Americans, have a major governmental push to outlaw internships, that is to outlaw unpaid internships for more than one month. That's the proposal to being presented to the Parliament. You can work without pay for one month. After that you cannot. Next item. I have to go back to the Davos, Switzerland events of the last week. The World Economic Forum brings together leaders of government, leaders of big business, the biggest bankers in the world and so on. And there's been a flood of news coming out about the meetings they're having, the panels they're having, the private conversations that leak into the press because it's profitable for somebody to do it. And I wanted to bring a couple of the interesting items to your attention. One is the statement of a number of major bankers, including Lloyd Blankfein, the head of Goldman Sachs, and the heads of most of the other big banks in New York and around the United States. And what's striking to me about them is the happiness, the glee, and they don't disguise it with which they welcome the Trump administration They say publicly over and over again that he's better for big banks than the Democrats would have been. They are counting on a reduction of regulation, a relaxation of the Dodd Frank rules that came out of this last collapse of capitalism in 2008. They're making it very clear that they are not among those who are worried or upset or frightened or sad about the Trump administration. On the contrary, they're very happy about it. The second thing I found interesting, and there wasn't much that was new or interesting coming out of Davos, Switzerland, by the way, Davos, Switzerland is a very expensive, very ritzy ski resort in the mountains of Switzerland. The other item that was interesting was the fact that a great deal of noise, excuse me, conversation, was all about the middle class that's vanishing, or the other way that they like to put it, the rising tide of populism, which when it comes out of their mouth sounds like a new kind of disease that's really worrying them. And some of them seem to be genuinely worried, worried. And so they're urging each other with moving language to be concerned, to be worried, to take it into account, to do something about it. But as a number of skeptical commentators have pointed out, and I would be glad to join them in this case, it's quite clear that when they talk about that problem and they have it in their minds, that whole issue disappears two seconds later when they're talking about what their companies are going to be doing, what deals they are making, what futures they anticipate. Because in all of them, nothing has to do with anything concrete that would change the very story of growing gap between rich and poor that I just explained by looking at the difference between productivity and wage growth over the last 35 years. And as these commentators have pointed out, and as I want to reiterate here, no one is going to give the working classes of the west and of the rest of the world a better deal if they expect that a government shift between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, between Trump and the Democrats, etc. If they believe that's going to change their situation. But they will be as disappointed in the next 35 years as they have been in the last 35 years. Gains for the working class of people, the vast majority depend on whether they make them happen. Otherwise they don't happen. And that means you have to provide for working people, either a labor movement or a political party or some combination or some other institutions that work in that way, so that working people have the weapons and have the organization, have the clout to change the situation. That's the issue. And needless to say, not one word about that was uttered in Davos, Switzerland, because these folks can't see that far or don't want to. Okay, my last economic update for this first half of the program has to do with an interesting study called, produced and recently released by the United Way, that's the largest social service organization in the United States. And they've been conducting research state by state and they've completed 14 states across the 50 states. And what they're looking at is what they call a more accurate, a more honest, a more socially useful measure of poverty. And in it they do two things. First, they take the government's poverty line roughly for a family of four, $24,000 roughly. And they ask, well, how many people in any state that they're looking at live below that poverty line? But then they ask another question and they came up with a measurement which they call Alice. Like the woman's name, Alice. I'll tell you what it means, but then I'll give you the name first Asset limited income constrained but employed. Alice. Here's what it means. This population of people who get just enough income to get by in life to do a kind of basic survival to cover the costs of housing, transportation, health care, taxes, utilities, food, food and child care. Okay, those issues, what does it really cost for a family of four? That's an Alice number and that's more than the poverty level. A good bit more, as you're going to see in a moment. So let's do the numbers very quickly. And I'm going to use the state of New York, the most recent state that they covered all 62 counties in the state of New York. And here United Way found, quote, the average annual household survival budget for A family of four, $62,472. Family of four needs $62,000 just to get what's called basic household survival. We're not talking any luxury, we're talking basically getting by. Doesn't even include college education, et cetera, et cetera. How could it, given what colleges cost? And now here are the numbers across the state of New York in the last year or two that they did the study, 44% of households were either living below the poverty line or in this week to week survival situation. In the Bronx, the poorest county in New York City, the percentage was 71%. In New York City as a whole, 20%. Because there are rich and poor in New York. What does this mean? Well, it matches other numbers that I have quoted to you recently. Numbers like the percentage of American families who, if confronted by an unexpected $500 emergency bill for something medical or something that breaks in the car or the home, can't cover it. They would have to find an emergency solution because they don't have $500 in a reserve to cover that kind of unexpected eventuality. Well, this is the same measurement coming at it from another angle. And United Way is a very respected old organization that does this in a systematic way through all of its local offices. Bottom line, the American recovery since 2008, like the American economy of the last 35 years, is an economy that has functioned more and more for an ever smaller slice of the population and has left a growing percentage of the people in really difficult economic circumstances. 44% of the people of New York State, one of the largest states in the United States, are either living below the poverty line or living at or below bare survival at a minimum level. For a country that has grown as wealthy as ours has, this is a moral, ethical, as well as political and economic horror story. And there is nothing being proposed by any of the incoming political leadership that recognizes, let alone deals with this issue. So much for the short updates. I want to take a moment before we have our mid program break and shift to a very, very interesting interview that I think will excite my audience, which is why they're here. But before I get to that, I want to remind you and ask you to partner with us. This is a program that now reaches between 1 and a half and 2 million people every week. That's an amazing fact that we stand in awe of all the time. That's counting both the radio audience and the television audience and the audience that gets this through the Internet. We are very proud of all of this and it's mostly the achievement of all of you who've been listening for the five years that we've been on the air, starting with one small station in New York City, WBAI, and expanding now to 75 radio stations, two major television stations, and more to come. So I want to thank you. But I also want us to learn the lesson. You partnering with us is the best possible arrangement. And by partnering, I mean use what we do on this radio program. Talk to your friends, your coworkers, your family about this. Make use of what we do here, copy it, go to our websites, which provide all of this information and much more. Rdwolf with two f's. Com and democracy at work. That's all one word, democracy at work. Those websites are yours 24 7. No charge for anything on there. You can contact us with questions like those I answer on the air. You can tell us what you like and don't like about the program. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Lots of things to do there. Interviews are posted up there. Articles are posted up. There's a blog with all the information about worker co ops you could imagine being posted all the time. Make use of it. Let others who might be interested know about this. Be our partner and if you know of a local radio station that might be interested, let us know. We'll follow up. If you would like me to come to wherever you are to give a talk, let us know. We'll follow up. If you'd like to sponsor any of the things we do, let us know. We'll follow up. We need you as partners. You have been enormously helpful to building this project. We'd like you to continue. Stay with us. We'll be right back. And I think you'll find the second half more interesting even, I hope, than you found the first. Be right back. Stay with us. Sam. Months awake. Well, at the coming of dawn. Yes, as this earthly stage is cooked. Well done. Let's climb upon this hill without. Oh, yes, pick a flower, but don't let it down. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of each economic update. I want with great pleasure to welcome to the Microphones here with me in New York, Becky Bond and Zach Exley. So welcome, Becky. Welcome, Zach. Let me tell you who they are and why they're here. Both Becky and Zach were senior advisors to the Bernie Sanders campaign for president inside the Democratic Party over the last year or so. Plus, Becky, in addition to that, has previously been a political director at credo, where she was particularly involved in developing techniques and styles of organizing using technology and so forth. We're going to learn more about that shortly. Zach Exley, likewise was a senior advisor in the Bernie Sanders campaign. He has a history of working in this kind of organizing for Howard Dean, for John Kerry, and he also worked for Wikipedia. Becky lives in San Francisco. Zach lives in the Ozarks. Welcome to the Microphones.
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B
Thank you.
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A
I want to hold up for those of you that can see the program, their book, Rules for Revolutionaries, How Big Organizing Can Change Everything, which was released when, how recently?
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C
The week after the election.
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A
A week after the election. So hot off the press, literally. And there are many blurbs. I just want to read one from Naomi Klein. Here we go. We can win, but only if we continue to develop the kinds of tactics, tools and vision laid out in this vitally important book, perhaps the first to explore how to organize at the true scale of the crises we face. Rules for revolutionaries, Becky Bond and Zach Exley. Becky, let me start with you and say, give us an idea of what the central thesis, the central argument that animates this book. What did you, both of you, put in here? But give us an overview.
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C
So this book talks about something that Zach and I have termed big organizing. And you have to understand, when we came on board the Bernie Sanders campaign, it was a presidential primary that was both like other presidential campaigns before, but also unlike them. So like most presidential primary campaigns in the past, we had a traditional field campaign focused on the first four contests, things you hear about all the time, Iowa, New Hampshire, etc. But we also had hundreds of thousands of people across the country that were demanding to be let in to help Bernie Wynn and change the country. So we had to develop a new model of organizing, which we called big organizing, so that we could let them in and let them do some of the work of the campaign. And let me tell you a few things about big organizing before we get started. It's a simple and powerful concept. Big organizing is about tapping into the latent capacity in the grassroots to do work behind a strategic central plan to win a big victory. And it's big in three ways. So big organizing is big because the goal that we're going for is something really big that if we win it, it would really change people's lives. It's also big because it requires a lot of people to participate. It needs mass participation. We need as many people as possible to get involved in the organizing. And it's also big because it lets people from the grassroots, volunteers, step up and do big things. We don't just ask them to do small things. We ask them to do big things, which means taking leadership responsibility, taking management roles, and putting lots of time into the organizing. So we believe that for the crises that we face today, that a big organizing is the kind of organizing that we're actually going to need to win the change that these radical problems demand.
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Well, let me put a question then right away to you, Given that the campaign is now over, Bernie finished before the election and so on. Do you believe that this style of organizing that you developed was a key part of why he got as many millions of people to vote for him, that he became a serious contender, even though he had been dismissed at the beginning as being a. A small fry who would drop out along the way? As others have. Is that your argument that you figured out a way that can mobilize large numbers of people to do things politically that were thought impossible?
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C
Well, what I'd say is, on the campaign, our biggest asset was Bernie's message. So Bernie had an amazing message that addressed all the issues and called for radical change. And as it turned out, there were millions of people that were inspired and energized because they shared that political analysis. And the second biggest asset we had was Bernie himself, because he was an authentic messenger that the people trusted if he would actually get elected, that he would actually do the things he said. And so what the big organizing model allowed us to do was actually plug the people who believed in the message and believed in the messenger, allow them to do work that wouldn't just get him in the news, but would actually contact enough voters that they could make him viable as a candidate. So I think that Bernie's message and Bernie as a messenger, that was the key elements to get the campaign off the ground. But big organizing was one of the ways that we let millions of people get involved in the process of turning Bernie into someone who had 3% name recognition, someone that people thought had no chance, and turn him into someone that got 46% of the delegates at the Democratic National Convention, which is astounding.
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Right. Well, I suspect you're being modest, so let me pull you a little further. I mean, I don't dispute what you said about Bernie as a candidate and as a messenger. That's all correct. But let me put it this way. All kinds of social change efforts in this country have been going on for quite a while, which had good messages, good arguments, that large numbers of people agreed with, and often had decent spokesmen and women who made the case, but they didn't generate a mass movement on the scale that happened this time. And that has energized people, and that is going to change American history. Because, in a sense, the growing worry or doubt of the American people that they could ever make a change, that they could ever break out of the situation. You seem, in this campaign, with the organizing part of it, to have actually suggested to people that it's doable. This is a dynamite change. Am I saying something that is more than what you think is fair?
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B
No. Well, we actually ran this experiment within the Bernie campaign. And because of the way presidential primaries work, all the attention at first is on those first four states. Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina and Nevada. And that's where all the resources go. And what we knew from looking at the last few presidential cycles, and I worked on a couple other presidential campaigns that we knew that it actually, especially looking at 2008, that these later states were going to count just as much as the early states. And normally, again, presidential campaigns don't try to organize those later states. So the experiment that we basically ran was to say, can we. We know we're not going to get any resources or hardly any resources, but can we build a campaign out of volunteer power? Because what we learned from Dean and from Obama and from some other campaigns is that in these presidential campaigns, people don't just want to work in Iowa and New Hampshire. They want to work all over the country. And so, of course, the vast majority of the volunteers that are available are in states that don't matter in the beginning. And so we tried to build an operation that mobilized those volunteers to do two things. One, to call into and even go visit those early states and to actually make a difference by calling the early states. And volunteers wound up making 81 million calls to voters, which was unprecedented in a primary and really kind of amazing. But we also organized them to organize their own states. And, yeah, I think that lead time that we had, that preparation that we were able to help volunteers do, and we eventually were able to build out a team to do this stuff, that preparation paid off because there were some states where our field staff didn't, you know, the on the ground traditional field staff never got to or only got to a couple days before the election. There were other states where they got there several weeks or even a couple of months before the election. And in those states, I think that having that volunteer organization ahead of time was really important now. So, yeah, the experiment that we were able to run was, I think, was really significant, but we don't want to. The thing is, volunteers did the work, and we had so little resources and so few people. For the first several months, there was just two of us. There was myself and Claire Sandberg, and then Becky came on board. So for several weeks, it was two of us and 46 states. It was a little crazy. We had literally hundreds of thousands of volunteers that wanted to get involved. And for the first several months, we just had a few people able to do anything with them. So if you talk to a lot of these volunteers, they're like, what? We got nothing from those people. What are they talking about? And so it was a real tragedy. Week after week as we were trying to build out a structure and get stuff up and running for so long, we were not able to support Volunteers. But eventually, and that's what was so heartbreaking about losing the primary. Because, you know, by the very end of our, you know, Bernie's participation in the primary, we had such an amazing operation, you know, and it was in all 50 states. And by the end we even got that traditional field campaign integrated with our program. You know, we got together and it was a beautiful thing. And if we had made it to the general election, it was just going to be huge. It was going to be utterly mammoth. So yes, so we wanted, because of that experiment, we felt so privileged to be a part of that. We wanted to write down the principles that we learned so that in the next insurgent presidential campaign or in the next insurgent union campaign, when workers are trying to take over one of the unions that did not back Bernie, for example, which is crazy. So what you were talking about earlier, we need a workers movement or trying to take over your neighborhood that we think that these principles will really help.
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A
So let me ask then the dangerous question because it's on many of my listeners minds, given that you had such a good organization at the peak, had it gone the other way, what do you think about Mr. Sanders versus Mr. Trump?
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C
You know, I think given the contest that we had in the general, I personally believe that the Bernie supporters, with the amount that they were willing to work and how the intensity of their passion and the power of Bernie's message, I think that Bernie would have won.
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B
Yeah, personally, I think there's no question. I mean Trump, the only reason Trump won, Hillary got 3 million more votes than Trump. The only reason Trump won was those three Rust Belt states where he got 40,000 more votes than Hillary. And those three states were the states where three states are Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Right. And those three states were the states where Bernie's message was what was needed more than any other states. That was the place where these working class folks who had been victims of de industrialization and who have heard the Democratic Party just basically say screw you for the last 40 years, as that graph has been playing out that you were talking about, as, as real wages have been declining, especially for those industrial workers, they've seen their means of making a living be dismantled. And Bill Clinton, and of course Hillary Clinton is going to be associated with Bill Clinton and her policies were not all that different and her positions on trade and all that were very much the same. So the Clinton brand very much was tied up with these folks losing their means of making a living. And what was so amazing to watch and kind of the thing that really struck me and made me so angry and sad was watching Trump deliver these speeches in those states where he said, they've been dismantling your means of making a living. And he said, means of making a living. This was my translation of means of production. And he's up there in these stadiums saying, they took apart your means of making a living, and I'm gonna rebuild it. And this guy, I don't think that many people fell for it. You know, he got fewer votes in those states than Mitt Romney or Bush, who lost those states. It's just that so many workers could not bring themselves to come and voluntarily vote for somebody who represented the destruction of their means of making a living. And, you know, there was other stuff, like in Michigan, Hillary did not visit a single UAW hall in Michigan. Now, it's hard to go to Michigan without. You're liable to pull over to use the bathroom, and it will be a UAW hall. I mean, you can't go to Michigan and not wind up in a UAW hall. Especially as a politician running for president. She didn't visit a single one. And then the. And then her campaign had the nerve to complain about the UAW not following through all the way on its GOTV commitments. You know, I mean, so, yeah, Bernie would have won.
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A
Okay, this is a program about economics. So bear with me. What's the relationship between this kind of organizing that you talk about in the book and that you developed, and correct me if I'm wrong, this number we keep hearing that the average financial contribution to the Bernie campaign was $27 per contributor or per person. Is it a lesson of your work and of your organizing that you write about in this book that the left or the critical movements in this society do have access to the financial resources they need if they know how to organize them? Is that a conclusion that you're comfortable with?
- [44:17]
C
Well, if you have a compelling message and you're actually going to go for a big win, that's going to make a difference. People are willing to fund that. Right? The people are willing to fund that activity. And one of the things, it wasn't just that the average contribution was $27, but the average age of a contributor to the Bernie Sanders campaign was 28 years old. Right. This is a very promising situation. And so if you take small dollar, you know, if you take small dollar money, not only do you not have to spend all your time hanging out with rich people, well, if you get elected, you don't have to spend all of your time doing what the rich people want. Right. And so if we want a movement that reflects our values, we have to fund the movement. And one of the things the Bernie campaign showed was that was possible, right? So it showed it's possible to fund a movement with small dollar donors. It's possible to have a movement that's made up of a diverse, like, you know, from young people to old people, working people of all colors, men, women, working hard for this. And also it changed, I think people's idea of what was possible in terms of Bernie came so close. And many of the trade unions didn't support him, I think, because they didn't think he was electable. I think we changed the idea of who's electable and what agenda is going to be acceptable to the American people. And we hope this book will inspire people to run campaigns not just for president, because that only comes every four years. We don't always get someone that stands up for our values. But we wrote this book and we got it out really fast because there's so many social justice struggles that are happening right now. There's so many groups that have passionate supporters, that have great ideas. And we wanted to get the tactics and the values behind the work that we did on the Bernie campaign into their hands so that they can use these principles that we learned and they can have the confidence to go for the big vision and to actually use volunteers to do the work and then actually let the community fund it so that it can be the campaign that we all believe in.
- [45:59]
A
Tell me, do you think this is translatable to the labor movement? I mean, here we have a movement that back in the 1950s represented a third of American workers. Today it represents less than 7% of the private sector and under a third of the public sector. It's a 50 year old, tearful decline. Is what in what you have done might be in your mind applicable or usable if there were to be a revival of a labor movement that advocated traditional benefits to working people?
- [46:36]
B
Yeah, I mean, part of, you know, the title of the book is a play on Rules for Radicals, which was Saul Linsky's primer on organizing. And Saul Alinsky, our book is kind of a critique of Alinsky, and we kind of take a little shot at what Alinsky organizing has become over the decades, in the beginning of the book, but it's interesting because Alinsky's organizing model was literally developed and born in the shadow of the mass movement labor organizing of the 50s. And there were massive rallies happening in Chicago in stadiums where the steel Workers were organizing millions of workers at a time all over the country at this time, and filling stadiums where they would. All the workers in the city would come in and get on, hear this message about what they were doing, and they would go back out and organize in all their communities and take on the biggest corporations and organize them all at once. Well, in the shadow of that, literally, Alinsky was working with some other people in a neighborhood, trying to get a handful of people together. Well, what do people who don't work at the steel mill do? How do we operate? And it kind of led to this. There was a whole bunch of steps from there, but this Alinsky sort of style of organizing developed with help of financing not from labor unions, but from foundations. Right. So it was really rich people's money. You know, as time went on and the 60s came along and, you know, radical movements were rising up as people of color were getting radicalized. In the. After the beginning part of the civil rights movement, a lot of these rich folks at foundations, you know, these white liberals were like, what's going on? Why? We thought everything was going to be okay now. And so Alinsky kind of came to them and served up this organizing model that was kind of a little bit of conflict. You know, like, we're going to go and kind of, you know, have a little protest outside of town hall, but for something small, you know, for. For a stop sign on the corner of this busy street, or for, you know, improvements to public housing or something like that, but not a revolution, you know, and not even a mass movement. And Alinsky was very critical of the idea of a mass movement because he said, well, you get these big mass movements, but then the mass movement dies. Well, think about that. With the labor movement, there was a huge mass movement, and yeah, it did die down, but what was left behind? A middle class wage and this huge inflated middle class with millions and millions of new people actually doing well. So I think, yes, I think part of what we're getting at in the book is we're inspired by those old mass movements. Movements. Right. And we think that some of that should come back. And the first step of igniting a mass movement is making that big ask. Right? So what? John Lewis, the steelworker leader. John Lewis.
- [49:41]
A
Mine workers.
- [49:42]
B
Yeah, or mine workers. The CIO was standing up there in front of stadiums like Bernie was like. Trump was like, Obama was this stadium organizing and saying, we want to organize everybody that works for the 10 biggest corporations in America. It would be like going after Walmart right now. And after McDonald's right now and being serious about it and not saying, let's try to get a stop sign on the corner.
- [50:12]
A
I was going to ask this question, and I don't mean to be embarrassing. You did choose the word revolution. And usually the word revolution means not a little thing, a big thing. And to push it a little bit that you want to change the system, not this or that aspect of it. Is it then your assumption that we're at that point in American society, that there are now a mass of people, maybe even the majority, who find that it isn't this or that problem, it is a system? Is that a sense you have from your experience and your reflection on it by writing this book?
- [50:49]
C
Well, Bernie really brought the word revolution back by talking about a political revolution, right? By which we mean sort of a peaceful change of power through elections. What I think we are seeing in a lot of, especially a lot of the young people that were part of the Bernie Sanders campaign is they have a really strong critique of capitalism, and the American political system is not putting an alternative right in front of them. But I think that these young people actually could create one if we don't actually change some of the huge pressures on society. You know, there was a meme that was circulating a couple weeks ago, and it was like, you don't hate Obamacare, you hate capitalism. Right? And I think we're starting to see this consciousness shift in a major way. But for Zach and I think in writing the book, talking about rules for revolutionaries is like, listen, the problems that we're facing are radical, and it's only going to be radical solutions, right, that can address them in the time period that we need, before the planet burns up, before everything our institutions break down. And so the form that revolution takes, whether it's massive structural change or whether it's a bunch of people sweeping in and taking over every office in the land and changing it. We need change. And it's going to depend on the leaders that emerge, and it's going to depend on who has a plan that the people can support. But something has to change. The people are hungry for change. And now organizing is in Bernie. The Bernie campaign showed that organizing is in their hands, right? So I think big change is afoot, and I think revolution is how it should be changed. Talking about it.
- [52:12]
A
All right, the same question with other words. For 50 years, it was taboo in the United States for anyone to accept a public label that he or she was anti capitalist and or a socialist. So Bernie has, if nothing else, he has shown that you can be a socialist, you can accept the name, you cannot run away from it, and millions and millions of Americans will not turn away from you because of it. Is that a sign in some sense of what's behind your success in your big organizing model? In other words, is there already in place in America a shift away from the capitalism that was considered the greatest thing since sliced bread and beyond which you cannot go?
- [53:02]
B
I mean, I think the terms in America are so broken, and they have. They don't really have any.
- [53:07]
A
I mean, the language itself.
- [53:08]
B
Yeah. The word socialism, capitalism. I mean, I started out as a labor organizer, and I remember on several. In several conversations with workers in their living room when they were describing their workplace and how oppressive it was and how there was no freedom of speech and how they were abused and they couldn't do anything about it. And when they were looking for a word to describe it, they said, it's like communism, you know. And so it's like, well, no, actually, it's like capitalism, you know, and they. So the words are meaningless, I think. You know. I mean, Bernie. Was Bernie a socialist? I mean, I actually don't think so, you know, but he did accept the word. Well, he didn't run away from it. It's funny, he might have been a socialist in the 80s, you know, but he's. Or the 70s, but he's not a socialist anymore. And I think by democratic socialism, according to what he said, he meant, I believe in, you know, that everybody should have health care and that everybody should have the fire department and stuff like that. Okay. You know. Well, I mean, there's a lot of capitalist support, you know. Believe in that, too.
- [54:10]
A
Hayek.
- [54:11]
B
Right? I mean, you know, in his introduction, he's like, well, of course I believe in universal healthcare, universal education, you know, universal. You know, he was a socialist according to, you know, today's standards. So I, you know, I think a lot, you know, a lot of people who were Bernie supporters, they were so upset with the way things are going in the economy, and they kind of said, well, yeah, this socialist thing, that sounds kind of cool, maybe. What is it? I should learn some more about that. And it was appealing for just as many Bernie supporters. I think it was actually something that repelled them. But because they were like, socialism, that's. Isn't that lack of freedom, and I can't go to church anymore, and they're gonna burn my Bible. And. But a lot of those people were with Bernie anyways, because they said, hey, I don't know what this socialism Thing is, but he's talking my language, so, you know, I think it was a mixed bag. Yeah.
- [55:05]
A
Okay. But the bottom line is, whatever the fuzziness of his politics, the word socialism didn't block millions of people from listening to him and even to the point of saying, I like what he says, rather than turning away by the very label. So that this was an athlete.
- [55:25]
B
Yeah. Because people are ready for change. And I think when you look at the Trump vote in those three states, I mean, those are states that voted for Obama. Right. The last two times. Right. And those three states that gave Trump the election. And in the same way that socialism didn't turn off people who didn't like the idea of socialism or thought they didn't, you know, a lot of people came out to vote for Trump despite all the incredibly horrible stuff. Right. So people are ready for change. Right. And so I think it's up to the left or progressives or whoever wants to make change to be able to figure out a way to communicate to people. And Bernie did that well. And unfortunately, Trump did that well. Right. And communicated to people very well about the stuff about when it came to the economy, about what really mattered to them, their jobs, you know, and so we got to do that.
- [56:19]
A
Becky, your last words. Since we're running out of time, what is the single most important thing you would like people to take away from the book you wrote?
- [56:26]
C
The biggest thing that I would like them to take away is that what happens next is really in their hands, and that you shouldn't wait for your leaders to invite you to do something that's going to change things, that you can actually get together with your friends, come up with a big idea and bring volunteers together, and you can start the revolution yourself.
- [56:43]
B
Because unfortunately, it's going to be a few years before your leaders catch up.
- [56:48]
C
That's right. That's right.
- [56:50]
A
Usually how it is.
- [56:51]
C
That's right.
- [56:51]
A
Thank you both Becky and Zach, for coming. I wish we had more time, and maybe if your travels bring you to New York again, we can do it again.
- [56:59]
B
Thank you.
- [56:59]
A
Thank you to my audience. Thank you very much for listening. I want to thank truthout.org, that independent source of news and analysis that has been partnering with us for years now. I want to remind you about our two websites, rdwolf.com with two Fs and democracyatwork.info be a partner for economic update. Make use of the websites. Contact us for any and all ways that you might do that, and I look forward to speaking with you again. Next week going to be my time. My time, babe. They ain't gonna change. Thing gonna change. Yeah, Sam.