Published on

Wednesday, July 01, 2015

New Project Connects History of Racial and Economic Oppression with Vision for System Change

From Slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration, video addresses economic roots of dehumanization

by

Sarah Lazare, staff writer

"African-Americans, going back to before the civil war and the earliest African-American spokespersons and writers and leaders like Frederick Douglass and others argued that the fundamental feature of the American economy was dehumanization," said MIT Professor Phil Thompson. (Image: Screenshot/Youtube/NextSystemProject)

From slavery to Jim Crow to the modern era of mass incarceration, racism and economic dehumanization in America have long been intertwined, argues MIT Professor Phil Thompson in a stunning new short video.

The release is the latest installment of The Next System Project, which describes itself as "an ambitious multi-year initiative aimed at thinking boldly about what is required to deal with the systemic challenges the United States faces now and in coming decades." Co-chaired by scholars Gar Alperovitz and Gus Speth, the project takes on issues from climate crisis to poverty to respond to what they illustrate as widespread "hunger for a new way forward."

Alperovitz and Speth wrote that the initiative tackles "important questions that would need to be addressed in any comprehensive proposal for a next system." For example: "How can we account systematically for the need to undo the legacy of harm inflicted historically on communities of color? What are the specific systemic drivers of racialized mass incarceration, and how can these be dismantled?" 

As this latest video shows, racism and economic exploitation—and the way those dynamics have operated throughout U.S. history—are a critical part of the equation.

"African-Americans, going back to before the civil war and the earliest African-American spokespersons and writers and leaders like Frederick Douglass and others argued that the fundamental feature of the American economy was dehumanization," as Professor Thompson explains in the video. "And they also argued you can't have a democratic institution and an economic system that degrades and exploits people."

Praising the new release, actor and director Danny Glover said: "The sad reality is that America became an economic powerhouse through the dehumanization and exploitation of a cheap labor force (slavery, migrant workers, mass incarceration). We must know our history in order to create a better system!"

IN THESE TIMES

With Liberty and Justice for All

Bringing Socialism Back: How Bernie Sanders is Reviving an American Tradition

The Sanders campaign is resurrecting socialist electoral politics and paving the way for a more radical public discourse.

BY JOSEPH M. SCHWARTZ

Socialism. For most of recent U.S. history, the word was only used in mainstream discourse as invective, hurled by the Right against anyone who advocated that the government do anything but shrink, as anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist once put it, “to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

How is it, then, that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a democratic socialist, has repeatedly drawn crowds in the thousands or tens of thousands in cities and towns throughout the nation and is within striking distance of Hillary Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire? In a country that’s supposed to be terrified of socialism, how did a socialist become a serious presidential contender?

Young people who came to political consciousness after the Cold War are less hostile to socialism than their elders, who associate the term with authoritarian Communist regimes. In a Pew poll from December 2011, 49 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds in the United States held a favorable view of socialism; only 46 percent had a favorable view of capitalism. A New York Times/CBS News survey taken shortly before Sanders’ Nov. 19, 2015, Georgetown University speech on democratic socialism found that 56 percent of Democratic primary voters felt positively about socialism versus only 29 percent who felt negatively. Most of those polled probably do not envision socialism to be democratic ownership of the means of production, but they do associate capitalism with inequality, massive student debt and a stagnant labor market. They envision socialism to be a more egalitarian and just society.

More broadly, a bipartisan consensus has developed that the rich and corporations are too powerful. In a December 2011 Pew poll, 77 percent of respondents (including 53 percent of Republicans) agreed that “there is too much power in the hands of a few rich people and corporations.” More than 40 years of ruling class attacks on working people has revived interest in a political tradition historically associated with the assertion of working class power—socialism.

But at this point in American politics, as right-wing, quasi-fascist populists like Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and others of their Tea Party ilk are on the rise, we also seem to be faced with an old political choice: socialism or barbarism. Whether progressive politicians can tap into the rising anti-corporate sentiment around the country is at the heart of a battle that may define the future of the United States: Will downwardly mobile, white, middle- and working-class people follow the nativist, racist politics of Trump and Tea Partiers (who espouse the myth that the game is rigged in favor of undeserving poor people of color), or lead a charge against the corporate elites responsible for the devastation of working- class communities?

This may be the very audience, however, for whom the term socialism still sticks in the craw. In a 2011 Pew poll, 55 percent of African Americans and 44 percent of Latinos held a favorable view of socialism—versus only 24 percent of whites. One might ask, then: Should we really care that the term “socialism” is less radioactive than it used to be? With so much baggage attached to the word, shouldn’t activists and politicians just call themselves something else? Why worry about a label as long as you’re pursuing policies that benefit the many rather than the few? Is socialism still relevant in the 21st century?

Fear of the ‘s’ word

To answer this question, first consider how the political establishment uses the word. The Right (and sometimes the Democrats) deploy anti-socialist sentiment against any reform that challenges corporate power. Take the debate over healthcare reform, for example. To avoid being labeled “socialist,” Obama opted for an Affordable Care Act that expanded the number of insured via massive government subsidies to the private healthcare industry—instead of fighting for Medicare for All and abolishing private health insurers. The Right, of course, screamed that the president and the Democratic Party as a whole were all socialists anyway and worked (and continues to work) to undermine efforts to expand healthcare coverage to anyone.

But what if the United States had had a real socialist Left, rather than one conjured up by Republicans, that was large, well-organized and politically relevant during the healthcare reform debate? What would have been different? For one thing, it would have been tougher for the Right to scream “socialist!” at Obama, since actual socialists would be important, visible forces in American politics, writing articles and knocking on doors and appearing on cable news. Republicans would have had to attack the real socialists—potentially opening up some breathing room for President Obama to carry out more progresssive reforms. But socialists wouldn’t have just done the Democrats a favor—they would also demand the party go much further than the overly complicated and insurance company friendly Obamacare towards a universal single-payer healthcare program. The Democrats needed a push from the Left on healthcare reform, and virtually no one was there to give it to them.

What is democratic socialism?

So what do we mean by “democratic socialism”? Democratic socialists want to deepen democracy by extending it from the political sphere into the economic and cultural realms. We believe in the idea that “what touches all should be governed by all.” The decisions by top-level corporate CEOs and managers, for example, have serious effects on their employees, consumers and the general public—why don’t those employees, consumers and the public have a say in how those decisions get made?

Democratic socialists believe that human beings should democratically control the wealth that we create in common. The Mark Zuckerbergs and Bill Gateses of the world did not create Facebook and Microsoft; tens of thousands of programmers, technical workers and administrative employees did—and they should have a democratic voice in how those firms are run.

To be able to participate democratically, we all need equal access to those social, cultural and educational goods that enable us to develop our human potential. Thus, democratic socialists also believe that all human beings should be guaranteed access, as a basic social right, to high-quality education, healthcare, housing, income security, job training and more.

And to achieve people’s equal moral worth, democratic socialists also fight against oppression based on race, gender, sexuality, nationality and more. We do not reduce all forms of oppression to the economic; economic democracy is important, but we also need strong legal and cultural guarantees against other forms of undemocratic domination and exclusion.

What socialism can do for you

The United States has a rich—but hidden—socialist history. Socialists and Communists played a key role in organizing the industrial unions in the 1930s and in building the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s; Martin Luther King Jr. identified as a democratic socialist; Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph, the two key organizers of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom were both members of the Socialist Party. Not only did Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs receive roughly 6 percent of the vote for president in 1912, but on the eve of U.S. entry into World War I, members of the Socialist Party held 1,200 public offices in 340 cities. They served as mayors of 79 cities in 24 states, including Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Reading, Penn., and Buffalo.

Brutally repressed by the federal government for opposing World War I and later by the Cold War hysteria of the McCarthy era, socialists never regained comparable influence. But as organizers and thinkers they have always played a significant role in social movements. The real legacy of the last significant socialist campaigns for president, those of Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas, is how the major parties, especially the Democrats, co-opted their calls for workers’ rights, the regulation of corporate excess and the establishment of social insurance programs.

As the erosion of the liberal and social democratic gains of the post-World War II era throughout the United States, Europe and elsewhere shows, absent greater democratic control over the economy, capital will always work to erode the gains made by working people. This inability to gain greater democratic control over capital may be a contributing factor to why the emerging social movements resisting oligarchic domination have a “flash”-like character. They erupt and raise crucial issues, but as the neoliberal state rarely grants concessions to these movements, they often fade in strength. Winning concrete reforms tends to empower social movements; the failure to improve the lives of their participants usually leads these movements to dissipate.

In the United States, nascent movements like Occupy Wall Street, the Fight for 15, Black Lives Matter and 350.org have won notable reforms. But few flash movements have succeeded in enacting systemic change. Only the revival of a decimated labor movement and the rebirth of governing socialist political parties could result in the major redistribution of wealth and power that would allow real change on these issues.

For all their problems—and there are many—this is the promise of European parties like Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain. But the Syriza government retreated back to austerity policies, in part because Northern European socialist leaders failed to abandon their support for austerity. The election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the British Labour Party may represent the first step in rank-and-file socialists breaking with “third way” neo-liberal leadership.

Is Bernie really a socialist?

For Sanders, “democratic socialism” is a byword for what is needed to unseat the oligarchs who rule this new Gilded Age. In his much-anticipated Georgetown speech, Sanders defined democratic socialism as “a government which works for all of the American people, not just powerful special interests.” Aligning himself with the liberal social welfare policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, Sanders called for restoring progressive income and strict corporate taxation to fund Medicare for All, paid parental leave, publicly financed child care and tuition-free public higher education.

Yet he backed away from some basic tenets of democratic socialism. He told the audience, “I don’t believe the government should take over the grocery store down the street or own the means of production.” But democratic socialists want to democratize decisions over what we make, how we make it and who controls the social surplus.

In truth, Sanders is campaigning more as a social democrat than as a democratic socialist. While social democrats and democratic socialists share a number of political goals, they also differ on some key questions of what an ideal society would look like and how we can get there. Democratic socialists ultimately want to abolish capitalism; most traditional social democrats favor a government-regulated capitalist economy that includes strong labor rights, full employment policies and progressive taxation that funds a robust welfare state.

So why doesn’t Sanders simply call himself a New Deal or Great Society liberal or (in today’s terms) a “progressive”? In part, because he cannot run from the democratic socialist label that he has proudly worn throughout his political career. As recently as 1988, as mayor of Burlington, Vt., he stated that he desired a society “where human beings can own the means of production and work together rather than having to work as semi-slaves to other people who can hire and fire.”

But today, Sanders is running to win, and invoking the welfare state accomplishments of FDR and LBJ plays better with the electorate and the mainstream media than referencing iconic American socialists like Eugene V. Debs. In his Georgetown speech, Sanders relied less on references to Denmark and Sweden; rather, he channeled FDR’s 1944 State of the Union address in which he called for an Economic Bill of Rights, saying, “true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. 'Necessitous men are not free men.'”

Sanders’ campaign rhetoric does occasionally stray into more explicitly democratic socialist territory, though. He understands the nature of class conflict between workers and the corporate moguls. Unlike most liberals, Sanders recognizes that power relations between the rich and the rest of us determine policy outcomes. He believes progressive change will not occur absent a revival of the labor movement and other grassroots movements for social justice. And while Sanders’ platform calls primarily for government to heal the ravages of unrestrained capitalism, it also includes more radical reforms that shift control over capital from corporations to social ownership: a proposal for federal financial aid to workers’ cooperatives, a public infrastructure investment of $1 trillion over five years to create 13 million public jobs, and the creation of a postal banking system to provide low-cost financial services to people presently exploited by check-cashing services and payday lenders.

Harnessing the socialist energy

While Sanders is not running a full bore democratic socialist campaign, socialists must not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The Sanders campaign represents the most explicit anticorporate, radical campaign for the U.S. presidency in decades. Thus the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), of which I am a vice-chair, is running an “independent expenditure campaign” (uncoordinated with the official campaign) that aims to build the movement around Sanders—and its “political revolution”—over the long run.

For us, even if Sanders’ platform isn’t fully socialist, his campaign is a gift from the socialist gods. In just six months, Sanders has received campaign contributions from 800,000 individuals, signed up tens of thousands of campaign workers and introduced the term “democratic socialism” and a social democratic program to tens of millions of Americans who wouldn’t know the difference between Trotsky and a tchotchke. Since the start of the Sanders campaign, the number of people joining DSA each month has more than doubled.

Though elected to both the House and Senate as an independent, Sanders chose to run in the Democratic presidential primary because he understood he would reach a national audience in the widely viewed debates and garner far more votes in the Democratic primaries than he would as an independent in the general election. The people most vulnerable to wall-to-wall Republican rule (women, trade unionists, people of color) simply won’t “waste” their votes on third-party candidates in contested states in a presidential election.

The mere fact of a socialist in the Democratic primary debates has created unprecedented new conversations. Anderson Cooper’s initial question to Sanders in the first Democratic presidential debate, in front of 15 million viewers, implicitly tried to red-bait him by asking, “How can any kind of a socialist win a general election in the United States?” The question led to a lengthy discussion among the candidates as to whether democratic socialism or capitalism promised a more just society. When has the capitalist nature of our society last been challenged in a major presidential forum?

Yet without a major shift in sentiment among voters of color and women, Sanders is unlikely to win the nomination. Sanders enthusiasts, who are mostly white, have to focus their efforts on expanding the racial base of the campaign. But, regardless of who wins the nomination, Sanders will leave behind him a transformed political landscape. His tactical decision to run as a Democrat has the potential to further divide Democrats between elites who accommodate themselves to neoliberalism and the populist “democratic” wing of the party.

Today, Democrats are divided between affluent, suburban social liberals who are economically moderate—even pro-corporate—and an urban, youth, black, Latino, Asian American, Native American and trade union base that favors more social democratic policies. Over the past 30 years, the national Democratic leadership—Bill Clinton, Rahm Emanuel, Debbie Wasserman Schultz—has moved the party in a decidedly pro-corporate, free-trade direction to cultivate wealthy donors. Sanders’ rise represents the revolt of the party’s rank and file against this corporate-friendly establishment.

Successful Left independent or third-party candidates invariably have to garner support from the same constituencies that progressive Democrats depend on, and almost all third-party victories in the United States occur in local non-partisan races. There are only a few dozen third-party members out of the nearly 7,400 state legislators in the United States. Kshama Sawant, a member of Socialist Alternative, has won twice in Seattle’s non-partisan city council race, drawing strong backing from unions and left-leaning Democratic activists (and some Democratic elected officials). But given state government’s major role in funding public works, social democracy cannot be achieved in any one city.

The party that rules state government profoundly affects what is possible at the municipal level. My recollection is that in the 1970s and 1980s, DSA (and one of its predecessor organizations, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee) had more than 30 members who were elected members of state legislatures or city councils. Almost all of those socialist officials first won Democratic primaries against conservative Democratic opponents. In the seven states (most notably in New York, Connecticut and Oregon) where third parties can combine their votes with major party lines, the Working Families Party has tried to develop an “inside-outside,” “fusion” strategy vis-a-vis the Democrats. But the Democratic corporate establishment will never fear progressive electoral activists unless they are willing to punish pro-corporate Democrats by either challenging them in primaries or withholding support in general elections.

The tragedy of Jesse Jackson’s 1988 campaign was that despite winning 7 million votes from voters of color, trade unionists and white progressives, the campaign failed to turn its Rainbow Coalition into an electoral organization that could continue the campaign’s fight for racial and economic justice. This lesson is not lost on Sanders; he clearly understands that his campaign must survive his presidential bid.

As In These Times went to press, the Sanders campaign only has official staff in the early primary states of New Hampshire, Iowa, South Carolina and Nevada. Consequently, the Sanders movement is extremely decentralized, and driven by volunteers and social media. Only if these local activists are able to create multi-racial progressive coalitions and organizations that outlast the campaign can Sanders’ call for political revolution be realized.

Campaign organizations themselves rarely build democratic, grassroots organizations that persist after the election (see Obama’s Organizing for America). Sanders activists must keep this in mind and ask themselves: “What can we do in our locality to build the political revolution?” The Right still dominates politics at the state and local level; thus, Sanders activists can play a particularly crucial role in the 24 states where Republicans control all three branches of the government.

Embracing the ‘s’ word

Sanders has captivated the attention of America’s youth. He has generated a national conversation about democratic socialist values and social democratic policies. Sanders understands that to win such programs will take the revival of mass movements for low wage justice, immigrant rights, environmental sustainability and racial equality. To build an independent left that operates electorally both inside and outside the Democratic Party, the Sanders campaign—and socialists—must bring together white progressives with activists of color and progressive trade unionists. The ultimate logic of such a politics is the socialist demand for workers’ rights and greater democratic control over investment.

If Sanders’ call for a political revolution is to be sustained, then his campaign must give rise to a stronger organization of long-distance runners for democracy—a vibrant U.S. democratic socialist movement. Electoral campaigns can mobilize people and alter political discourse, but engaged citizens can spark a revolution only if they build social movements and the political institutions and organizations that sustain political work over the long-term.

And because anti-socialism is the ideology that bipartisan political elites deploy to rule out any reforms that limit the prerogatives of capital, now is the time for socialists to come out of the closet. Sanders running in the Democratic primaries provides an opportunity for socialists to do just that, and for the broad Left to gain strength. If and when socialism becomes a legitimate part of mainstream U.S. politics, only then will the political revolution begin.

JOSEPH M. SCHWARTZ

Joseph M. Schwartz is a professor of political science at Temple University. He is a Vice-Chair of Democratic Socialists of America and the author, most recently, of The Future of Democratic Equality: Reconstructing Social Solidarity in a Fragmented U.S. (Routledge, 2009)

Time for a People's Movement for Real Social Security and Medicare for All

OpEdNews Op Eds 1/15/2016 at 09:32:52

Sanders campaign a historic opportunity: Time for a People's Movement for Real Social Security and Medicare for All

By Dave Lindorff (about the author)   

An independent mass movement on SS and Medicare is needed now
(image by ThisCantBeHappening!)   DMCA

The rising fortunes of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, the self-described democratic socialist US senator from Vermont, in the Democratic presidential primaries, provides a unique opportunity for organizing a new radical movement around key political goals including a national health care program for all Americans, not just the elderly and disabled, and a national retirement program that people can actually live on.

The elements are there already. Sen. Sanders is calling, on the stump, for expanded Social Security benefits, which with the collapse of employee pensions and the destruction of retiree savings in the Great Recession and the ensuing "lost decade" of the stock market, is badly needed. He is also calling for expanding and enhancing the Medicare program to cover everyone from birth to death, much as is done in Canada and in every other modern nation on the globe except the US.

The key here is to build a movement around these two programs that might work in parallel with the Sanders presidential campaign, but that would remain separate from it so that, when the election is over, win or lose, that movement will continue. If Sanders were to win the presidency, as is looking increasingly possible if polls can be believed, and if, as some polls also suggest, his win helped Democrats to retake both the Senate and the House, then having an independent movement in place would be critical. Such a movement militantly demanding Medicare for all and enhanced Social Security benefits would put intense pressure on both a President Sanders and a new Democratic congress to deliver. Meanwhile, if Sanders were to lose, a having a strong, well organized movement in defense of both programs would become even more urgently important.

Better yet, Sanders is a movement veteran, not just someone like Obama who supposedly did a little stint as a "community organizer." Sanders' entire political life dating back to his college days has been about fighting for more income equality, and improved lives for the poor, minorities and working people. One can and must (and this journalist does) criticize his record of support as a member of congress for most of the US government's imperial policies abroad, and even for most of its illegal wars, but domestically, at least, his record of support for fairness and for more racial and economic equality, for worker rights and for women's equality is pretty much unassailable.

What this means is that as long as he is running -- which looks like it could be right through to November -- then win or lose he will be pressing for those issues of strengthening Social Security and for replacing Obamacare -- that huge, cumbersome gift to the insurance industry -- with an expanded and universal version of government-run Medicare. If a movement built around those two issues were to organize marches and rallies and Occupy-style actions in Washington, DC and around the nation, a candidate Sanders could be counted on to appear at them and to support them as he looks to build voter support.

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At the same time, a movement fighting for Medicare for all and for expanded and improved Social Security would keep the media more honest, preventing the spreading of the kind of treacherous lies such as just spewed out by Sanders' main opponent Hillary Clinton. A recipient of millions of dollars in "donations" from the heatlh insurance industry, she has been allowed by a supportive corporate media to claim, largely unchallenged, that Sanders' Medicare-for-All plan would mean "dismantling Obamacare, dismantling CHIP programs (state programs that offer health insurance to poor children), and dismantling Medicare and Medicaid," and that his plan would end up "making health care more expensive for most people."

Her assertions are lies, and Clinton knows it when she utters them. She knows Sanders would only be dismantling Obamacare because his plan to expand Medicare would eliminate the need for private insurance, both for individuals and for employers. He would clearly not eliminate Medicare, as he wants to make it universal, not just available to the disabled and those over age 65 as it is today. He would eliminate Medicaid, the miserly and bureaucratic state insurance program for the poor, but only because Sanders would have those people instead covered by the much more expansive benefits of Medicare. The same for children who currently receive insurance through CHIP. And Sanders' scheme would be cheaper for everyone because even though Medicare for All would be funded by higher payroll taxes, nobody would be paying premiums to insurance companies for health insurance anymore. Neither would employers, who would instead be pressed to provide savings to employees in the form of higher wages.

The reality is that the US is far and away the world's biggest healthcare spender both on a share-of-GDP and on a per-capita basis. According to the Commonwealth Fund, based upon Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) data, the US spends the most on health care among the top 13 high-income nations of the world: Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United

 States, and yet its health outcomes, for example life expectancy and infant mortality rates, are worse.

In 2013, the OECD data shows (see chart) that the US spent 17.1% of Gross Domestic Product, which is a measure of all economic activity in the country, on health care. That was 47% higher, or nearly double the 11.6%, spent by the next biggest spender on health care: France, which has a medicare-for-all style system. It's 60% higher than the percentage of GDP spent on health care in neighboring Canada, which has a system of universal insurance actually called Medicare. and it is nearly double the cost of the British National Health System which, more like the US Veterans Administration system, actually employs its medical workers and owns the hospitals, and devotes a paltry 8.8% of GDP to health care costs.

As for per-capita health spending, the situation is even more dramatic. Including public health spending by states, local governments and the national government, employer spending, and spending by individuals and families, the per-capital annual spending on health care in the US in 2013 according to the OECD was $9,086. The next highest country was Switzerland (ironically the only other of these countries that relies on private insurers to cover most of its citizens, though with stipulations mandating no profits on basic plans, which all health insurers must have on offer), at $6,325 per person -- just two-thirds of what Americans spend. In France, the figure was $4,361 and Canada $4,569. Both those figures ae less than half the US per-capita health expenditure (see table for the rest).


In the case of Social Security, the US is again at the bottom among OECD countries in terms of the benefits it pays to its retired citizens and its disabled. In most modern countries, social-security systems, generally government run like US Social Security, replace about 60 percent of a working person's income when they retire, which, since they generally no longer have children to support, have free or almost free medical care, and by then own their own home or live in affordable apartments, is enough to allow them to retire without taking a hit in their standard of living. In the US, where Social Security was founded as, it's benefits have never moved beyond being just an "underpinning" source of income for the disabled and the poor. Providing an amount that on average replaces just 40% of a working person't income, American Social Security is a program, in other words, not meant to fund a decent retirement, but rather just to keep the elderly and infirm from ending up living in cardboard boxes on heating grates.

A movement to change all that, organized now during the current election year when one leading candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, is calling for the same goals, could really take off, and by remaining independent of the Sanders campaign, could help push the issue forward and build support through the year and, were Sanders to win, into a key spot on his first-term agenda. It would also be a bulwark against inevitable attacks on both critical programs should Republicans somehow manage to win the White House and both houses of Congress.

The first primaries are just weeks off. There is not a moment to waste. All progressive movements, along with the labor movement, must come together urgently to kick off a mass movement of all races, young and old, workers and the unemployed, citizens, immigrants and the undocumented, to fight for these programs -- not just to preserve and protect them, but to bring them into the 21st Century as an implementation of the right of all in this nation to a secure old age and to quality health care.

DAVE LINDORFF is a member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the independent, uncompromised, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site. His work, and that of colleagues JOHN GRANT, JESS GUH, GARY LINDORFF, ALFREDO LOPEZ, LINN WASHINGTON, JR. and the late CHARLES M. YOUNG, can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of the collectively-owned, journalist-run online newspaperwww.thiscantbehappening.net. He is a columnist for Counterpunch, is author of several recent books ("This Can't Be Happening! Resisting the (more...)

ECONOMY

'Bernie Sanders Is Right': Robert Reich Sums up Why Sanders Is Surging

"If anything, Bernie Sanders understates the problem."

By Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez /Democracy Now

October 1, 2015Print

Photo Credit: via Democracy Now!

Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary under President Clinton, discusses the economic plans of Democratic front-runners Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, as well as his new book, "Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few." The book looks at why the United States is now experiencing the greatest income inequality and wealth disparity in 80 years.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s turn to the Democrats, because it hasn’t only been the Republicans who have been in power, and that sucking sound from the bottom to the top has been quite as loud. In July, Hillary Clinton outlined her economic vision in a speech at The New School here in New York City.

HILLARY CLINTON: First, hard-working families need and deserve tax relief and simplification. Second, those at the top have to pay their fair share. That’s why I support the Buffett rule, which makes sure that millionaires don’t pay lower rates than their secretaries. I’ve also called for closing the carried interest loophole, which lets wealthy financiers pay an artificially low rate. And let’s agree that hugely successful companies, that benefit from everything America has to offer, should not be able to game the system and avoid paying their fair share, especially while companies who can’t afford high-priced lawyers and lobbyists end up paying more.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response to what Hillary Clinton has said, someone you know well?

ROBERT REICH: Well, it’s a step in the right direction, Amy, but it’s not far enough. I mean, we do have to substantially increase taxes at the top, if we’re going to have enough money to do everything that needs to be done with regard to investing in education, infrastructure, do a lot of things that, despite President Obama’s efforts, have still not been done. But I think we even have to go beyond that and really change the way the market is organized. I mean, if you look at antitrust law, for example, you’ve got huge combinations now in health insurance, in airlines, in banking, in food. That means Americans are spending much more than otherwise for all of these basic necessities—airlines may not be a necessity, but certainly the others are necessities—and that’s a redistribution upward.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you recently, in an op-ed piece in The New York Times, talked about the digital monopolies and the need to break up some of these companies now that have such enormous influence over our lives—the Googles and the Amazons and the Facebooks. Could you talk about that?

ROBERT REICH: Well, up until quite recently, we had antitrust scrutiny, very careful antitrust scrutiny of some of these big high-tech firms. They are creating larger and larger entry barriers. It’s harder for other companies to get into the business, because they have platforms that are basically network monopolies over whether it’s search or shopping or whatever you want. And those huge—that huge market power, those network monopolies end up giving them the power to keep competitors out—ultimately charge higher prices, but also deter innovation. We need to apply antitrust law. I don’t mean we necessarily have to bust them up, but we’ve got to make sure that we don’t stifle innovation, and we’ve got to make absolutely sure that consumers down the line are not ending up paying too much.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you mention in your book—I thought it was a fascinating nugget—that Google and Apple are spending more money acquiring the patents of others than they are—and fighting over these patents in court cases, than they are in actually new research and development.

ROBERT REICH: And also on litigation and on lobbying. I mean, Google is now the number one lobbyist in Washington. It’s simply kind of a consequence of having more and more market power. And it’s not—I’m not saying Google is a bad company. I’m not saying Apple is bad. I’m not saying that anybody—people—companies are not bad—people are not companies, companies are not people, despite what the Supreme Court says. But what you’ve got to be careful of in an economy is the aggregation of market power that turns into political power, inevitably. And we’ve seen that again and again. And that’s what antitrust laws were created for in 1890, the Sherman Act. And yet antitrust scrutiny has waned over time.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to Bernie Sanders. Your book is called Saving Capitalism: For the Many, [Not] the Few. He is a socialist. He is a Democratic presidential candidate. In July, he was interviewed at an event hosted by the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., and was asked about his position on financial institutions and his support for reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial from investment banking and was repealed in 1999. This is a part of what he said.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: We have six of the largest financial institutions in this country who have assets equivalent—assets of about $10 trillion, which is equivalent to about 60 percent of the GDP of the United States. So, point number one, you have a handful of huge financial institutions that have enormous economic clout. They issue a significant amount of the mortgages in this country and the credit cards in this country. So the first issue is, for a vibrant economy, do we think it is a good idea for a handful of financial institutions to have that much economic clout? ...

What Wall Street has done is create a business model which says, "We really don’t care about small and medium-sized businesses. What we care is about being an island unto ourselves," coming up with the most esoteric financial tools imaginable, that nobody in the world knows, but enables Wall Street to make huge, huge amounts of money in highly dangerous and speculative activities. That led us to the Wall Street crash of 2008, which created the worst economic downturn since the Great Recession. I personally believe that the business model of Wall Street is fraud. ...

When I was in the House, I was a member of the House Financial Services Committee, that dealt with deregulation. And we had the Clinton people, and we had the Republicans coming before us. And remember what they said? They said, "It’s a great idea if we merge investor banks—investment banks with commercial banks, with large insurance companies. It will be great for us internationally." I never believed it for one second, fought against it. So, to my mind, what we have to do is, A, re-establish Glass-Steagall, maintain those separate entities, but second of all, more importantly, we have got to break them up.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Bernie Sanders. Actually, Glass-Steagall was repealed under the Clinton administration in 1999, Robert Reich.

ROBERT REICH: Bernie Sanders is right: We’ve got to re-establish Glass-Steagall. Repealing it—

AMY GOODMAN: And explain why it’s so important.

ROBERT REICH: Well, because after the crash of 1929, the United States set out to prevent that kind of crazy risk taking by the banking sector that led to the crash of 1929—we’re not talking about 2008, we’re talking about 1929. One thing we did was separate commercial banking from investment banking, so that people’s deposits, the ordinary savings of ordinary people, would not be used for gambling operations by the investment banks. We ought to maintain that. I mean, that’s one of the reasons that we got into trouble again.

We also need to bust up the biggest banks. Bernie Sanders actually understated the reality. I mean, the five biggest banks, they used to have 10 percent of total banking assets back in 1990, now have 44 percent of total banking assets in this country. I mean, they are far too big to fail. I mean, they are so large that they are—just because of their political clout and their scale, they are gaining more and more market share of the entire banking industry. That’s dangerous. It’s dangerous for the economy. It’s dangerous for our political culture, because those banks have a great deal of political power.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve also talked about welfare reform. You were the labor secretary when President Clinton signed off on this. And your experience that day, as he was signing off in the White House, you were his guy, but you weren’t standing next to him.

ROBERT REICH: No, I was very disappointed that he signed that bill that came over from the Republicans to basically get rid of welfare and substitute a five-year maximum lifetime public help for people, because five years in somebody’s lifetime is—it may not be enough. In fact, we discovered in the Great Recession it was not enough. But look, if you’re in a president’s Cabinet, you’re not going to agree with the president on everything, and there are certain things that you have to ask yourself, "Is it worth resigning over, or can I do more good inside?" There’s no easy answer to that, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: And Hillary’s stance at the time?

ROBERT REICH: I don’t know what her stance at the time was. I do not think that she ought to be blamed or credited for what her husband did as president. I don’t think that’s fair to her. I think she has to stand as a candidate separately. But she needs to be, as every candidate needs to be, including Bernie Sanders, pushed to be bolder on issues that are really critically important to America at this time.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to talk about that in a minute. We’re talking to Robert Reich, former labor secretary in the first term of President Clinton, now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His latest book is called Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few. He’s also chair of Common Cause. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Our guest is Robert Reich, former labor secretary under President Clinton, now professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His newest book, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few. Juan?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Robert Reich, the title of your book, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few, I’m sure there are a lot of people out here in our audience who would say, "Why save capitalism?"

ROBERT REICH: You know, it’s interesting, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Why not contain capitalism or control capitalism for the many, not the few, or upend capitalism?

ROBERT REICH: I’ve been out on a book tour now just a couple of days, and there are two groups of people: one who says, "Why are you criticizing capitalism? Saving Capitalism sounds like there’s something to be saved, and it’s perfectly fine as it is," and then the other group says, "Why do you want to save it? Let’s get rid of it." So, the title is actually doing what I had hoped, and that is, riling everybody up.

But the most important point is to recognize that even Denmark and Sweden and so-called social democracies are still capitalist fundamentally. That is, they’re based on private property and voluntary exchange. Even China is becoming a capitalist nation.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: A capitalist—

ROBERT REICH: Forgetting the ism, the real issue is: Is the system working for most people, or is it working for a very small group, becoming smaller and smaller, at the top, who are gaining more and more economic power that is being transformed into political power? And the answer is, in the United States, particularly, yes, unfortunately. The system is not working for most people, and the beneficiaries are really getting smaller and smaller and richer and richer and richer. That’s not sustainable. I mean, you know, we talk about inequality. We talk about insecure work. We talk about the engulfing of our democracy in money. These are all connected. And the reason, I believe, that so many Americans are so angry, whether their anger is transferred into a Donald Trump-like scapegoating or whether it has become a kind of Bernie Sanders’ fundamental reform, it is still populist anger of a kind that, hopefully, will fuel reform. That’s what we had in 1900.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, one of the refreshing aspects of your book, I found, was that your—your main idea that the free market is a myth, that, in essence, what is occurring constantly is a battle in terms of the different groups in society to get government to better regulate the existing system, and that there are many decisions made, not only the big ones, but small ones, regulatory decisions, that have major impact on what kind of economy we have.

ROBERT REICH: Exactly. There is no free market. And I want to state that again: There is no free market. And the kind of battle that we’ve had between liberals and conservatives for the past 40 years or 50 years, between do you trust the market or do you trust government, is a fatuous and silly battle, because you can’t have a market without government creating the rules of that market. And it’s in those rules, exactly as you said, Juan—and this is what the point of the book is—it’s inside those rules that you find the most important issues that ought to be debated. I mean, for example, look at Wall Street. One of the reasons that you have so many people on Wall Street making so much money off of everybody else is that we have in this country the weakest laws against insider trading of any advanced country. We also have high pharmaceutical prices. Why? Partly because we’re the only country that allows pharmaceutical companies to pay off generic companies, of generic pharmaceuticals, to delay the introduction of generic pharmaceuticals. And go on down the line. I mean, there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of examples of ways in which the deck has been stacked, the dice have been loaded, the game has been rigged, in favor of very wealthy, very powerful people and companies and banks.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go for a minute—you talked about the different groups critiquing your title. Let’s go outside the system, to Pope Francis. Earlier this year, he spoke at the World Meeting of Popular Movements in Santa Cruz, in Bolivia, where he focused on the damage done to the Earth by capitalism.

POPE FRANCIS: [translated] Time, my brothers and sisters, seems to be running out. We are not yet tearing one another apart, but we are tearing apart our common home. Today, the scientific community realizes what the poor have long told us: Harm, perhaps irreversible harm, is being done to the ecosystem. The Earth, entire peoples and individual persons are being brutally punished. And behind all this pain, death and destruction, there is the stench of what Basil of Caesarea called "the dung of the devil." An unfettered pursuit of money rules. The service of the common good is left behind. Once capital becomes an idol and guides people’s decisions, once greed for money presides over the entire socioeconomic system, it ruins society. It condemns and enslaves men and women. It destroys human fraternity. It sets people against one another. And as we clearly see, it even puts at risk our common home.

AMY GOODMAN: So, basically, you have Pope Francis talking about capitalism as "the dung of the devil." Robert Reich?

ROBERT REICH: There is and should be a moral core to any economy. And whether it’s called capitalism or any other system, if it doesn’t have that moral core, in which we agree on basics, kind of minimum standards of decency—we agree that we’re all in it together, we understand that trust is critical if an economic system is going to be maintained and sustained—then you’re in trouble. I think one of the problems in the United States, and one of the problems with contemporary capitalism as practiced by the American model, is that it celebrates greed as the central principle. But that can’t possibly be the central principle, because if it’s all about greed, then you end up spending more and more of your resources protecting yourself from everybody else’s unvarnished greed. I mean, what’s happening, if you look at the GDP, we are spending more on protection—that is, on lawyers and on accountants and auditors and on security guards and on everybody else, that are protecting us from each other’s greed—than we are on actually producing goods and services and food and everything else we need.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, we only have about 30 seconds, but I’m interested—your critique dovetails very much with a lot of the stuff that Bernie Sanders has been saying on the campaign trail. Your sense of what he’s bringing to the debate that’s going on now in America?

ROBERT REICH: I think he’s telling the truth, and I think people are responding with extraordinary enthusiasm, even many conservatives and Republicans I meet, to a truth teller.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Robert Reich, I want to thank you very much for being with us, former labor secretary under President Clinton, professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His latest book, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few. He’s also chair of Common Cause.