The Vicious Cycle Of Wealth And Power

The American Dream depends on something we rarely measure directly: whether ordinary people can still shape the rules they live under. When wealth concentrates into the hands of a tiny elite, the damage isn’t just economic. It changes what democracy can even do. We dig into how today’s inequality is driven by “super wealth,” why that concentration is historically familiar, and how it quietly kills class mobility by making stable work, home ownership, and upward movement harder to reach.

We follow the money as it moves from boardrooms into politics, turning elections into high-priced contests that pull parties toward major donors and corporate power. Along the way, we connect the dots between financialization, offshoring, wage pressure, and the deliberate use of worker insecurity to weaken bargaining power. We also get specific about the policy pipeline: tax shifts away from wealth and toward wages, deregulation that invites crashes, and a bailout cycle where the public absorbs the risk while the gains stay private. If you’ve ever wondered why public opinion can feel irrelevant, this is the mechanism.

Then we step back and ask what’s happening to solidarity itself. Social Security and public schools aren’t just programs; they’re shared commitments, and they become targets when the goal is to turn citizens into isolated consumers. We also unpack corporate personhood, money as speech, and Citizens United, plus how advertising logic bleeds into political messaging to produce an uninformed electorate. The episode ends where it should: with the practical lesson that rights and reforms are won through organizing, sustained pressure, and countless small deeds that build real movements.

If this connects with what you’re seeing in your community, subscribe, share the episode, and leave a review so more people can find it. What part of this cycle do you think is most urgent to break first?

Transcript

Setting The Stakes

SPEAKER_21 0:28

During the Great Depression, which I'm old enough to remember, there was and most of my family were unemployed working class. There wasn't it was bad, you know, much worse subjectively than today. But there was an expectation that things were going to get better. There was a real sense of hopefulness. There isn't today. But if you refine it more closely,

Depression Memories And Lost Hope

SPEAKER_21 1:15

the inequality comes from the extreme wealth in a tiny sector of the population, a fraction of one percent. There were periods like the Gilded Age in the 20s and the roaring 90s and so on when a situation developed rather similar to this. Now this period's extreme, because if you look at the wealth distribution, the inequality mostly comes from super wealth. Literally the top one-tenth of a percent are just super wealthy. Not only is it extremely unjust in itself, inequality has highly negative consequences on the society as a whole. Because the very fact of inequality has a corrosive, harmful effect on democracy. You open by talking about the American dream. Part of the American dream is class mobility. You're born poor, you work hard, you get rich. It was possible for a worker to get a decent job, buy a home, get a car, have his children go to school. It's all collapsed. What do you see? In a democracy, public opinion is going to have some influence on policy. And then the government carries out actions determined by the population. That's what democracy means. It's important to understand that privileged and powerful sectors have never liked democracy, and for very good reasons. Democracy puts power into the hands of the general population and takes it away from them.

How Inequality Erodes Democracy

SPEAKER_21 4:33

Particularly so as the cost of elections skyrockets, which kind of forces the political parties into the pockets of major corporations. And this political power quickly translates into legislation that increases the concentration of wealth. So fiscal policy like tax policy, uh deregulation, rules of corporate governance, and a whole variety of measures, political measures designed to increase the concentration of wealth and power, which in turn yields more political power to do the same thing. And that's what we've been seeing. So we have this kind of vicious cycle in progress. You know, actually it is so traditional that it was described by Adam Smith. In 1776, you read the famous Wealth of Nations. He says in England, the principal architects of policy are the people who own the society. In his day, merchants and manufacturers. And they make sure that their own interests are very well cared for, however grievous the impact on the people of England or others. Now it's not merchants and manufacturers, it's financial institutions and multinational corporations. The people who Adam Smith called the masters of mankind, and they're following the vile maxim: all for ourselves and nothing for anyone else. They're just going to pursue policies that benefit them and harm everyone else. And in the absence of a general popular reaction, uh, that's pretty much what you'd expect. Right through American history, there's been an ongoing clash between pressure for more freedom and democracy coming from below and uh uh efforts at elite control and domination coming from above. Goes back to the founding of the country. James Madison, the main framer, who was as much of a believer in democracy as anybody in the world on that day, nevertheless felt that the United States system should be designed, and indeed, with his initiative was designed, so that power should be in the hands of the wealthy, because the wealthy

Madison’s Design To Limit Rule

SPEAKER_21 7:31

are the more responsible set of men, and therefore the structure of the formal constitutional system placed most power in the hands of the Senate. Remember, the Senate was not elected in those days, it was selected from the wealthy. Men, as Madison put it, had sympathy for property owners and their rights. If you read the debates at the Constitutional Convention, Madison said the major concern of the society has to be to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. And he had arguments. Suppose everyone had to vote freely. He said, Well, the majority of the poor would get together and they would organize to take away the property of the rich. And he said, that would obviously be unjust, so you can't have that. So therefore, the constitutional system has to be set up to prevent democracy. That uh this debate has a hori tradition. It goes back to the first major book on political systems, Aristotle's politics. He says of all of them, the best is democracy. But then he points out exactly the flaw that uh Madison pointed out. If Athens were a democracy for free men, the poor would get together and take away the property of the rich. Well, same dilemma. They had opposite solutions. Aristotle proposed what we would nowadays call a welfare state. He said, try to reduce inequality. So, same problem, opposite solutions. One is reduce inequality, you won't have this problem. The other is reduce democracy. If you look at the history of the United States, it's a constant struggle between these two tendencies. A democratizing tendency that's mostly coming from the population, a pressure from below, and you get this constant battle going on, periods of regression, periods of progress. The 1960s, for example, were a period of significant democratization. They became organized, active, started pressing their demands. And they became more and more involved in decision making, activism, and so on. They just changed consciousness in a lot of ways.

The 1960s Surge And Backlash

SPEAKER_21 10:45

Minority rights.

SPEAKER_10 10:57

Women's rights.

SPEAKER_21 11:16

Opposition to aggression.

SPEAKER_10 11:17

I say to those who criticize us for the militancy of our dissent that if they are serious about the law and order, they should first provide it for the Vietnamese people, for our own black people, and for our own poor people.

SPEAKER_16 11:31

One day we must ask the question when are there for the million poor people in America? When you begin to ask that question, you're raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. The question of restructuring the whole of American society.

SPEAKER_21 11:48

These are all civilizing effect. And that caused great fear. I did not anticipate the strength of the reaction to it. The backlash. I mean, over on the right, you see it in things like the uh famous uh Powell memorandum sent to the Chamber of Commerce, the major business lobby by later Supreme Court Justice Powell, warning them that business is losing control over the society. And something has to be done to counter these forces. Uh, of course, he puts it in terms of defense, defending ourselves against outside power. But if you look at it, it's a call for business to use its control over resources to carry out a major offensive to beat back this democratizing wave. Over on the liberal side, there's something exactly similar. The first uh major report of the Trilateral Commission is concerned with this. It's called the crisis of democracy. Trilateral Commission is liberal internationalists. Their flavor is indicated by the fact that they pretty much staffed the Carter administration. They were also appalled by the democratizing tendencies of the 60s and thought we have to react to it. They were concerned that there was an excess of democracy developing. Previously passive and obedient parts of the population, what are sometimes called the special interests, that were beginning to organize and try to enter the political arena. And they said that imposes too much pressure on the state. It can't deal with all these pressures. So therefore, they have to return to passivity and become depoliticized. They were particularly concerned with what was happening to young people. The young people are getting too free and independent. The way they put it, there's a failure on the part of the schools, the universities, and churches, the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young, their phrase, not mine. If you look at their study, there's one interest they never mentioned, private business. And that makes sense. They're not special interests, they're the national interest, kind of by definition. So they're okay. They're allowed to, you know, have lobbyists uh buy campaigns, staff the executive, make decisions, that's fine. But it's the rest, the special interests, the general population, who have to be subdued. Well, that's the spectrum. It's the kind of ideological level of the backlash. But the major backlash, which was in parallel to this, was just redesigning the economy. Since the nineteen seventies there's been a concerted effort on the part of the masters of mankind, the owners of the society, to shift the economy in two crucial respects. One to increase the role of financial institutions, banks, investment firms, and so on, insurance companies. By 2007,

Financialization And Offshoring The Economy

SPEAKER_21 16:49

right before the latest crash, they had literally forty percent of corporate profits, far beyond anything in the past. Back in the 1950s, as for many years before, the United States economy was based largely on production. The United States was the great manufacturing center of the world. Financial institutions used to be a relatively small part of the economy, and their task was to uh distribute unused assets, like, say, bank savings, to productive activity.

SPEAKER_09 17:39

The bank always has on hand a reserve of money received from the stockholders and depositors. On the basis of these cash reserves, a bank can create credit. So besides providing a safe place for depositing money, a bank serves the community by making additional credit available for many purposes. For a manufacturer to meet his payroll during spack selling periods, for a merchant to enlarge and remodel his store, and for many other good reasons why people are always needing more credit than they have immediately available.

SPEAKER_21 18:11

That's a contribution to the economy. Regulatory system was established, banks were regulated, the commercial and investment banks were separated, cut back very risky investment practices that could harm private people. There had been, remember, no financial crashes during the period of regulation. By the 1970s, that changed. Enormous changes in the financial sector from traditional banks to risky investments, complex uh financial instruments, money manipulations, and so on. Increasingly, the uh business of the country isn't production, at least not here. The primary business here is business. You can even see it in the choice of directors. So a director of a major American corporation back in the 50s and the 60s was very likely to be an engineer, somebody who graduated from a place like MIT, maybe industrial management. More recently, the directorship and the top managerial positions are people who came out of business schools, learned financial trickery of various kinds, and so on. By the 1970s, say General Electric could make more profit playing games with money than you could by producing in the United States. You have to remember that General Electric is substantially a financial institution today. It makes half its profits just by moving money around in complicated ways. And it's very unclear that they're doing anything that's of value to the economy. So that's one phenomenon, what's called financialization of the economy. Going along with that is the offshoring of production. And what it's led to is a reduction in the share of income on the part of working people. It's been particularly striking in the United States, but it's happening worldwide. It means that an American workers in competition with a super-exploited worker in China. Meanwhile, highly paid professionals are protected. They're not placed in competition with the rest of the world, far from it. And of course, capital is free to move. Workers aren't free to move, labor can't move, but capital can. Well, again, going back to the classics, like Adam Smith, as he pointed out, free circulation of labor is the foundation of any free trade system. But workers are pretty much stuck. The wealthy and the privileged are protected, so you get obvious consequences, and they're recognized, and in fact, praised. Policy is designed to increase insecurity. Alan Greenspan, when he testified to Congress, he explained his. Success in running the economy as based on what he called greater worker insecurity.

SPEAKER_12 22:08

Atypical restraint on compensation increases has been evident for a few years now. But as I outlined in some detail in testimony last month, I believe that job insecurity has played the dominant role.

SPEAKER_21 22:26

They are not going to ask for, say, decent wages or decent working conditions or the opportunity of free association, meaning unionized. Now, for the masters of mankind, that's fine. They make their profits. But for the population, it's devastating. Well, these two processes, financialization and offshoring, are part of what led to the vicious cycle of concentration of wealth, concentration of power.

SPEAKER_20 23:11

And I've been getting more and more heavily involved in anti-war activities for the last few years.

SPEAKER_19 23:23

Noam Chomsky has made two international reputations. The widest is as one of the national leaders of American resistance to the Vietnam War. The deepest is as a professor of linguistics who, before he was 40 years old, had transformed the nature of his subject.

SPEAKER_17 23:41

You are identified with the New Left, whatever that is. You certainly have been an activist as well as a writer.

SPEAKER_18 23:49

Professor P. Nolan Chomsky. He has listed in anybody's panel as among the top heroes of the New Left. The standing he achieved by adopting over the past two or three years a series of adamant positions, projecting at least an American foreign policy, at most America itself.

SPEAKER_21 24:17

Well, actually, this notion anti-American is quite an interesting one. It's actually a totalitarian notion. It isn't used in free societies. So if someone in, say, Italy is uh criticizing Berlusconi or the corruption of the Italian state and so on, they're not called anti-Italian. In fact, if they were called anti-Italian, people would collapse in laughter at the streets of Rome or Milan. In totalitarian states, the notions are used. So in the old Soviet Union, dissidents were called anti-Soviet. That was the worst condemnation. In the Brazilian military dictatorship, they were called anti-Brazilian. Now it's true that in just about every society, the critics are maligned or mistreated different ways, depending on the nature of the society. Like in the Soviet Union, say Vatslav Havel would be imprisoned. In a US dependency, like El Salvador, at the same time, his counterparts would have their brains blown out by the U.S.-run state terrorist forces. And other societies that just condemn their vilified and so on. And in the United States, you know, one of the terms of abuse is anti-American. There's a couple of others, like, you know, Marxists. There's an array of terms of abuse. But in the United States, you have a very high degree of freedom. And so if you're vilified by some Commissars, well, who cares? You go on to your work anyway. These concepts only arise in a culture where if you criticize state power, and by state I mean more generally, not just government, but state corporate power, if you criticize concentrated power, you're against the society, you're against the people. That's quite striking that it's used in the United States. In fact, as far as I know, the only democratic society where the concept isn't just ridicule, and it's a sign of elements of the elite culture which are quite ugly. So in the 1950s and 60s, say there was uh the biggest growth period in American economic history. The golden age. It was pretty egalitarian growth, so the the lowest fifth of the population was improving about as much as the upper fifth. And there were some welfare state measures which uh improved life for much of the population. It was, for example, possible for a uh uh a black worker to get a decent job in an auto plant, uh, buy a home, get a car, have his children go to school, and so on. And the same across the board. When the U.S. was uh primarily a manufacturing center, it had to be concerned with its own consumers. Here, famously, uh Henry Ford raised the salary of his workers so they'd be able to buy cars. When you're moving into an international plutonomy, as the banks like to call it, a small percentage of the world's population that's uh gathering increasing wealth. What happens to American consumers is of much less concern, because most of them aren't going to be consuming your products anyway, at least on a major basis. Your goals are profit in the next quarter, even if it's based on financial manipulations, uh, high salary, high bonuses, produce overseas if you have to, uh, and produce for the uh wealthy classes here and uh their counterparts abroad. What about the rest? Well, there's a term coming into use for them too. They're called the precariat, precarious proletariat, the working people of the world who live increasingly precarious lives. And it's related to the attitude toward the country altogether. During the period of great growth of the economy, 50s and 60s, but in fact earlier, uh taxes uh on the wealthy were far higher. Corporate taxes were much higher, uh, taxes on dividends were much higher, uh uh simply taxes on wealth were much higher. The tax system has been redesigned so that the taxes that are paid by the very wealthy are reduced,

The Precariat And Tax System Redesign

SPEAKER_21 29:57

and correspondingly the tax burden on the rest of the population's increased. Now the shift is towards trying to keep taxes just on wages and on consumption, which everyone has to do, not say on dividends, which only go to the ridge. The numbers are pretty striking. Now there's a pretext. Of course, there's always a pretext. The pretext in this case is, well, that increases investment and increases jobs. But there isn't any evidence for that. If you want to increase investment, give money to the poor and the working people. They have to keep alive, so they spend their incomes. That stimulates production, stimulates investment, leads to job growth, and so on. If you're an ideologist for the masters, you have a different line. And in fact, right now it's almost absurd that corporations have money coming out of their pockets. So, in fact, the general electorate are paying zero taxes and they have enormous profits. And this is common American corporations. This is quite different from the people they claim are their heroes, like Adam Smith, who based his whole approach to the economy on the principle that sympathy is a fundamental human trait. But that has to be driven out of people's heads. Uh, you gotta be for yourself, follow the vile maxim, don't care about others, uh, which is okay for the rich and powerful, uh, but uh devastating for everyone else. Well, you know, it's taken a lot of effort to try to drive these basic human emotions out of people's heads. And we see it today in policy formation. For example, in the attack on social security. Social security is based on a a principle. It's based on a principle of solidarity, solidarity, uh caring for others. Social security means I pay payroll taxes uh so that the widow across town can get something to live on. For much of the population, that's what they survive on. It's of no use to the very rich. So therefore, there's a concerted attempt to destroy it. Uh one of the ways is defunding it. You want to destroy some system, first defund it. Uh then it won't work. People will be angry, they want something else. That's a standard technique for uh privatizing some system. We see it in the attack on public schools. Public schools are based on the principle of solidarity. I no longer have children in school, they're grown up, but the principle of solidarity says I happily pay taxes so that the kid across the street can go to school. Well, that's normal human emotion. You have to drive that out of people's heads. I don't have kids in school, why should I pay taxes, privatize it, uh, so on. The public education system, all the way from kindergarten to higher education, is under severe attack. I mean, that's one of the jewels of American society. You go back to the golden age again, the great growth period in the 50s and 60s. A lot of that is based on free public education. Uh, one of the results of the Second World War was the GI Bill of Rights, which enabled veterans, and remember that's a large part of the population, and to go to college. They wouldn't have been able to otherwise.

SPEAKER_02 34:57

They essentially got free education. Where a community, state, or nation courageously invests a substantial share of its resources in education, the investment invariably is returned in better business and a higher standard of living. U.S. was way in the lead in developing extensive mass public education at every level.

SPEAKER_21 35:18

By now, more than half the state's, most of the funding for the colleges comes from tuition,

Attacks On Solidarity And Public Goods

SPEAKER_21 35:24

not from the state. That's a radical change. And that's a terrible burden on students. It means that students, if they don't come from very wealthy families, they're going to leave college with big debts. And if you have a big debt, you're trapped. I mean, maybe you wanted to become a public interest lawyer, but you're going to have to go into a corporate law firm to pay off those debts. And by the time you're part of the culture, you know, you're not going to get out of it again. And that's true across the board. In the 1950s, it was a much poorer society than it is today, but nevertheless could easily handle essentially free mass higher education. Today, a much richer society claims, doesn't have the resources for it. That's uh just what's going on right before our eyes. That's the general attack on uh principles that I mean, not only are they humane, they're the basis of the prosperity and health of this society. And the reason is because they know that sooner or later they can take over the regulators. And it ends up with what's called regulatory capture. The business being regulated is in fact running the regulators. Bank lobbyists are actually writing the laws of uh financial regulation. Gets to that extreme. And that's been happening through history, and again, it's it's a pretty natural tendency when you just look at the distribution of power. One of the things that expanded enormously in the 1970s is lobbying. As the business world moved sharply to try to control legislation. Business world was pretty upset by the advances in public welfare in the 60s, and in particular by Richard Nixon. It's not too well understood, but he was the last New Deal president, and they regarded that as class treachery. In Nixon's administration, you get the consumer safety legislation, safety and health regulations in the workplace, the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency. Business didn't like it, of course. They didn't like the high taxes, they didn't like the regulation, and they began a coordinated effort to try to overcome it. Lobbying sharply increased deregulation began with a real ferocity. There were no financial crashes in the 50s and the 60s because the regulatory apparatus of the New Deal was still in place. As it began to be dismantled under business pressure and political pressure, you get more and more crashes. And it goes on right through the years. 70s sort of starts to begin. 80s really takes off.

SPEAKER_01 39:34

Congress was asked to approve federal loan guarantees to the auto company of up to one and one half billion dollars.

SPEAKER_21 39:40

Now, all of this is quite safe, as long as you know the government's going to come to your rescue. So take, say, Reagan, instead of letting them pay the cost. Reagan bailed out banks like Continental Illinois, the biggest bailout of American history at the time. Actually, he ended his

Deregulation, Bailouts, And Neoliberal Rules

SPEAKER_21 39:57

term with a huge financial crisis, the savings and loan crisis. And the government moved in and bailed it out. In 1999, regulation was dismantled to separate commercial banks from investment banks. Then come see Bush and Obama bailout.

SPEAKER_15 40:19

Mayor Stearns is running to the feds to stay afloat. President Bush today defended the decision to bailout Citigroup. Fanny May and Freddie Mac have asked for a total of three billion dollars more. The bailout could get much bigger, signaling deepening troubles for the U.S. economy.

SPEAKER_21 40:39

And they're building up the next one. Each time the taxpayer is called on to bail out those who created the crisis, increasingly the major financial institutions. In a capitalist economy, you wouldn't do that. In a capitalist system, that would wipe out the investors who made risky investments. But the rich and powerful, they don't want a capitalist system. They want to be able to run to the nanny state as soon as they're in trouble and get bailed out by the taxpayer. That's called uh too big to fail. I mean, there are Nobel laureates in economics who significantly disagree with the course that we're following. People like Stiglitz, uh, Paul Krugman and others. None of them were even approached. The people picked to fix the crisis were those who created it. Uh the Robert Rubin crowd, the Goldman Sachs crowd, they created the crisis, are now more powerful than before. Is that accident? Well, not when you pick those people to create an economic plan. I mean, what do you expect to happen? Meanwhile, for the poor, uh, let market principles prevail. Don't expect any help from the government. The government's the problem, not the solution, and so on. That's essentially neoliberalism. Uh and it has this dual character, which goes right back in economic history. One set of rules for the rich, opposite set of rules for the poor. There's nothing surprising about this. It's exactly the dynamics you'd expect. And if the population allows it to proceed, it's just going to go on and on like this until the next crash, which is so much expected that credit agencies, which kind of evaluate the status of firms, are now counting into their calculations the taxpayer bailout that they expect to come after the next crash. Which means that the beneficiaries of these credit ratings, like the big banks, uh they can borrow money more cheaply, uh, they can push out smaller competitors, and you get more and more concentration. Everywhere you look, policies are designed this way, uh, which should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone. That's what happens when you put power into the hands of a narrow sector of wealth which will is dedicated to increasing power for itself, just as you'd expect concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power, uh, particularly so as the cost of elections skyrockets, which kind of forces the political parties into the pockets of major corporations. United, this was January uh 2009, I guess. Uh that's a very important decision, Supreme Court decision. Uh, but it has a history. And you've got to think about the history. The Fourteenth Amendment has a provision that says no person's rights can be infringed without due process of law. And the intent, clearly, was to protect freed slaves. It says, okay, they have got the protection of the law. I don't think it's ever been used for freed slaves, if ever marginally. Almost immediately it was used for businesses, corporations. Their rights can't be infringed without due process of law. So they gradually became persons under the law. Corporations are state-created legal fictions. Maybe they're good, maybe they're bad, but to call them persons is kind of outrageous. So they get got personal rights back about a century ago. That extended through the 20th century. They give corporations rights way beyond what persons have. So if, say, General Motors invests in Mexico, they get national rights, the rights of a Mexican business. While the notion of person was expanded to include corporations, it was also restricted. If you take the Fourteenth Amendment literally, then no undocumented alien can be deprived of rights if they're persons. Undocumented aliens who are living here and building your buildings, cleaning your lawns, and so on, they're not persons. But General Electric is a person, an immortal, uh, superpowerful person. This perversion of the elementary morality and the obvious meaning of the law, it's quite incredible. In the 1970s, the courts decided that money is a form of speech. Then you won through the years to Citizens United, which says that the right of free speech of corporations, namely spend as much money as they want, can't be curtailed. Take a look at what that means. It means that corporations which anyway have been pretty much buying elections are now free to do it with virtually no constraint. That's a tremendous attack on the uh residue of democracy.

Corporate Personhood And Citizens United

SPEAKER_21 46:44

It's very interesting to read the rulings, like Justice Kennedy's swing vote. His ruling said, Well, look, after all, the CBS is given freedom of speech, they're a corporation. Why shouldn't General Electric be free to spend as much money as they want? I mean, it's true that CBS is given freedom of speech, but they're supposed to be performing a public service. That's why. That's what the press is supposed to be. General Electric is just trying to make money for the chief executive and some of the shareholders. It's an incredible decision, and it puts the country in a position where uh business power is uh greatly extended beyond what it always was. This is part of that vicious cycle. The Supreme Court justices are put in by reactionary presidents who get in there because they're funded by business. That's the way the cycle works. But with all its flaws, it's been in the forefront of uh uh uh efforts to improve the lives of the general population. That's organized labor. It's also a barrier to corporate tyranny. So it's the one barrier to this vicious cycle going on, which does lead to corporate tyranny. A major reason for the concentrated fanatic attack on unions and organized labor is they are a democratizing force. Diplomatic America defends workers' rights, but also popular rights generally. And that interferes with the prerogatives and power of those who own and manage the society. I should say that anti-union uh sentiment in the United States among elites is so strong that the fundamental core of labor rights, the basic principle in the International Labor Organization, is the right of free association, which would mean the right to form unions. The U.S. has never ratified that. So I think the U.S. may be alone among major societies in that respect. It's considered so far out of the spectrum of American politics, it literally has never been considered. Remember the U.S. has a long and very violent labor history as compared with components societies.

SPEAKER_07 49:54

But the labor movement had been very strong by the 1920s, in the period like today, Roosevelt.

SPEAKER_21 50:33

He himself was rather sympathetic to progressive legislation that would be in the benefit of the general population. But he had to somehow get it passed. So he informed uh the labor leaders and others,

Unions As A Democratizing Force

SPEAKER_21 50:46

forced me to do it. What he meant is go out and demonstrate, organize, protest, develop the labor movement. When the popular pressure is sufficient, I'll be able to put through the legislation you want.

SPEAKER_08 51:01

I am not for a return to that definition of liberty under which for many years a free people were being gradually regimented into the service of a privileged few. I prefer that broader definition of liberty.

SPEAKER_21 51:22

So there was a kind of a combination of a sympathetic government and by the mid-30s, very substantial popular activism. There were industrial actions, there were uh sit-down strikes, which were very frightening to uh ownership. You'd have to recognize a sit-down strike is just one step before saying we don't need bosses, we can run this by ourselves. And business was pulled. You read the business press, say, in the late 30s, they were talking about uh the hazard-facing industrialists and the rising political power of the masses, uh, which has to be repressed. Things were on hold during the Second World War. But immediately after the Second World War, the business offensive began in force. And Taft Hartley Act.

SPEAKER_14 52:20

Taft-Hartley Act written for only one purpose, to restore justice and equality in labor management relations.

SPEAKER_21 52:29

And McCarthyism was used for massive corporate propaganda offensives to attack unions. It increased sharply during the Reagan years. I mean, Reagan pretty much told the business world if you want to illegally break organizing efforts and strikes, go ahead.

SPEAKER_06 52:46

They are in violation of the law, and if they do not report for work within 48 hours, they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated.

SPEAKER_21 52:56

Continued in the 90s, and of course, with George W. Bush, who went through the roof. By now, less than 7% of private sector workers have unions. The effect is that uh the usual counterforce to an offensive by our highly class conscious business class has dissolved. Now, if you're in a position of power, you want to maintain class consciousness for yourself, but eliminate it everywhere else. You go back to the 19th century in the early days of the industrial revolution in the United States. They, in fact, overwhelmingly regarded uh wage labor as not very different from slavery, different only in that it was temporary. In fact, it was such a popular idea. That was a slogan of the Republican Party. Well, that was a very hard class consciousness in the interest of power and privilege. It's good to drive those ideas out of people's heads. You don't want them to know that they're an oppressed class. So this is one of the few societies in which you just don't talk about class. In fact, the notion of class is very simple. Who gives the orders, who follows them? That basically defines class. It's more nuanced and complex, but that's basically it. And the reason is pretty clear. It became clear by about say a century ago that it was not going to be so easy to control the population by force. Too much freedom has been won. Uh labor organizing parliamentary labor parties in many countries, uh, women starting to get the franchise and so on. So you had to have other means of controlling people. And it was understood and expressed that you have to control them by control of uh uh beliefs and attitudes. Well, one of the best ways to control people in terms of attitudes is what the great political economist Thorstein Webline called fabricating consumers. If you can fabricate wants, make obtaining things that are just about within your reach, the essence of life, they're going to be trapped into becoming consumers. You read the business press, say, 1920s, it talks about the need to uh direct people to the superficial things of life, like fashionable consumption, and that'll keep them out of our hair. You find this doctrine all through progressive uh intellectual thought, like uh Walter Lippman, the major progressive intellectual of the 20th century. He wrote famous progressive essays on democracy, in which his view was exactly that the public must be put in their place so that the responsible men can make decisions without interference from the bewildered herd. There to be spectators, not participants, then you get a properly functioning democracy straight back to Madison and on to Powell's memorandum and so on. And the uh advertising industry just exploded uh with with this as its goal, fabricating consumers.

SPEAKER_03 57:06

And it's done with great sophistication. You don't see many wild stallions anymore. He's one of the last of a wild and very singular breed. Come to Marlborough Country.

SPEAKER_21 57:20

The ideal is what you actually see today. Where, let's say, teenage girls, if they have a free Saturday afternoon, I'll go walking in the shopping mall. Not to the library or somewhere else. The idea is to try to control everyone,

Advertising, Consumer Culture, And Elections

SPEAKER_21 57:39

to turn the whole society into the perfect system. Perfect system would be a society based on a dyad, a pair. The pair is you and your television set, or maybe now you and the internet, in which that presents you with uh what the proper life would be, what kind of gadgets you should have, and you spend your time and effort uh gaining those things which you don't need and you don't want, and maybe you'll throw them away. But that's the measure of a decent life. What we see is in say advertising on television, if you've ever taken an economics course, you know that uh markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. Well, if we had a system like that, a market system, uh then a a television ad would consist of, say, General Motors uh putting up information, saying, here's what we have for sale. That's not what an ad for a car is. An ad for a car is a football hero, uh, you know, an actress, the car doing some crazy thing like uh going up a mountain or something. Uh the point is to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices. That's what advertising is all about. Uh and when the same institution's PR uh system runs elections, they do it the same way. They want to create an uninformed electorate which will make irrational choices, uh, often against their own interests. And we see it every time one of these extravaganzas take place. Uh, right after the election, uh, President Obama won an award from the advertising industry for the best marketing campaign, and uh wasn't reported here if you go to the international business press. Uh, executives were euphoric. Now they said we've been selling candidates, uh, marketing candidates like uh, you know, toothpaste ever since Reagan. And this is the greatest achievement we have. I don't usually agree with Sarah Palin, but when she mocks the uh what she calls the hopey changey stuff, she's right. First of all, Obama didn't really promise anything. That's mostly illusion. You go back to the campaign rhetoric and take a look at it. There's very little discussion of policy issues, and for very good reason, because public opinion on policy is sharply disconnected from what the two-party leadership and their financial backers uh want. Policy more and more is focused on the private interests that fund the campaigns, with the public being marginalized. One of the leading political scientists, Martin Gillens, came out with a study of the relation between public attitudes and public policy. What he shows is that about 70% of the population has no way of influencing policy. They might as well be in some other country. And the population knows what it's led to is a population that's angry and frustrated, uh, hates institutions. It's not acting constructively to try to respond to this. There is popular mobilization and activism, but in very self-destructive directions. It's taking the form of unfocused anger, attacks on one another and on vulnerable targets. That's what happens in cases like this. It is corrosive of social relations, but that's the point. The point is to make people hate and fear each other and look out only for themselves and don't do anything for anyone else. One place you see it strikingly is on uh April 15th. April 15th is kind of a measure, the day you pay your taxes, of how uh democratic a society is. Uh if it to the if a society is really democratic, uh, April 15th would be a day of celebration. It's a day when the population gets together, uh, decides to fund the programs and activities that they have formulated and agreed upon. What could be better than that? So you should celebrate it. It's not the way it is in the United States. It's a day of mourning. It's a day in which some uh alien power, you know, has nothing to do with you, is coming down to steal your hard-earned money. And you do everything you can to keep them from doing it. Well, that is a kind of a measure of the extent to which, at least in popular consciousness, democracies actually function. Not a very attractive picture. The tendencies that we've been describing within American society, unless they're reversed, it's going to be an extremely ugly society. I mean, a society that's based on Adam Smith's

Anger, Powerlessness, And Social Breakdown

SPEAKER_21 1:03:43

vile maxim, you know, all for myself, nothing for anyone else. A society in which normal human instincts and emotion of sympathy, solidarity, mutual support, in which they're kind of like driven out. That's a society so ugly, I don't even know who would want to live in it. I wouldn't want my children to. The value that is greed and the desire to maximize personal gain at the expense of others. Now, any society, uh maybe a small society based on that principle is ugly, but it can survive. A global society based on that principle is headed for massive destruction. I don't think we're smart enough to uh design in any detail what a uh perfectly just and free society would be like. I think we can give some guidelines, and more significant, we can ask how we can progress in that direction. John Dewey, the the leading social philosopher in the late 20th century, uh, he argued that until all institutions, production, commerce, uh media, unless they're all under participatory democratic control, uh, we will not have uh a functioning democratic society. As he put it, policy will be the shadow cast by business over society.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:39

Well, that's essentially true.

SPEAKER_21 1:05:51

Where there are structures of authority, domination, and hierarchy, somebody gives the order, somebody takes them, uh, they are not self. Justifying. They have to justify themselves. They have a burden of proof to me. Well, if you take a close look, usually you find they can't justify themselves. If they can't, we ought to be dismantling them. Trying to expand the domain of freedom and justice by dismantling that form of illegitimate authority. And in fact, progress over the years, uh, what we all thankfully recognize as progress has been just that. The way things change is because lots of people are working all the time. And, you know, they're working in their communities and in their workplace or wherever they happen to be, and they're building up the basis for popular movements which are going to make changes. That's the way everything has ever happened in history. One of the real achievements of American society, it's first in the world in that. It's not in the Bill of Rights, it's not in the Constitution. Freedom of speech issues began to come to the Supreme Court in the early 20th century. The major contributions came in the 1960s. One of the leading ones was a case involving the civil rights movement. Well, by then you had a mass popular movement, which was demanding rights,

Dismantling Illegitimate Authority Through Organizing

SPEAKER_21 1:07:26

refusing to back down, and in that context, the Supreme Court did establish a pretty high standard of freedom of speech, or, they say, women's rights. Women also began identifying oppressive structures, refusing to accept them, bringing other people to join with them. Well, that's how rights are won. To a non-trivial extent, I've also spent a lot of my life in activism. I mean that doesn't show up publicly, but yeah. Actually, I'm not terribly good at it. I'm not the greatest organizer.

SPEAKER_20 1:07:59

I think that we can see quite clearly some very, very serious defects and flaws in our society, our level of culture, our institutions, which are going to have to be corrected by operating outside of the framework that is commonly accepted.

SPEAKER_21 1:08:12

I think we're going to have to find new ways of political action. But the activists are people who have created the rights that we enjoy. Not only carrying out uh policies based on information that they're receiving, but also contributing to the understanding. Remember, it's a reciprocal process. That you have a great deal of you try to do things, you learn. You learn about what the world is like that feeds back to the understanding of how to go on. There's huge opportunities. It is a very free society. It's still the freest in the world. Government has very limited capacity to coerce. Corporate business may try to coerce, but they don't have the mechanism. So there's a lot that can be done if people organize struggle for their rights as they've done in the past, and uh they can win many victories. Well, my close friend for many years late Howard Zinn to put it in his words, that what matters is the countless small deeds of unknown people who lay the basis for the significant events that enter history. They're the ones who've done things in the past. They're the ones left to do it in the future.