The Fake Philosophy Behind Capitalism Michael Parenti

TITLE: The Fake Philosophy Behind Capitalism | Michael Parenti CHANNEL: Free Speech TV DATE: 2013-05-17 ---TRANSCRIPT--- [Music] I want to um I want to point out you know that in every every class Society that’s ever existed um the ruling elements do not rule nakedly they always Adorn their rule with myths or themes and symbols and and and the like um to justify their privileged positions at the apex of the social pyramid um so the 1% spins its self-legitimating myths as I said no ruling class rules nakedly all of them make up uh uh they take strenuous efforts to justify their rule I tell students when they say oh they don’t care what we think they ignore us and all that I say oh no no that’s the only thing they care about you the only thing they care about you is what you’re thinking they don’t care if you eat correctly they don’t care how your living conditions are they don’t care that they’ve built up an inhuman and irrational traffic system that’s strangulating us and polluting our air they don’t care about anything what they the only thing about you they care about is what you’re thinking in the morning they start what’s going to be the story today how do we manipulate how do we control how do we contain how do we influence how do we act upon what it is that they have in their minds modern capitalist societies avoid telling the truth about themselves instead we get those raged to riches mythologies the Horatio aler stories myths about fair play equal opportunity self-reliance Freedom Liberty all those kind of things that they feed us again and again a system that’s been so productive and so wonderful and the like the two fundamental myths of modern corporate capitalism that I want to treat are the myth that capitalism creates a general prosperity and a well-being material well-being that’s myth number one myth number number two that capitalism creates or bolsters democracy we even hear the phrase capitalist democracies Western capitalist democracies and the like let me start with the one about Prosperity before I get into that I there’s another secondary myth I want to put aside when I’m talking about capitalism I’m talking about giant corporate capitalism okay I’m not I’m not talking about Mom and Pop small businesses we’re talking about transnational corporations and Banks you know Lenin himself dealt with that question he said he said uh 10 million small businesses count for nothing a few giant count a few giant cartels count for everything uh and uh he it wasn’t he wasn’t that he was dismissing or thinking less of the small he was saying he was talking in terms of power where the power is who’s shaping the condition of Our Lives who determines the quality of the air we breed the food we eat the water we drink the kind of jobs we can have the images we have to deal with and such that’s not mom and pop so I want to put Mom and Pop aside and talk about multi-national corporate capitalism the prosperity myth that it creates prosperity corporations have given us wonderful things and wonderful for them consider some consumer realities the replacement of public nonprofit rail transit systems with polluting expensive Automotive transer Systems involving Billion Dollar Highway systems uh Millions killed or maimed over the decades who didn’t have to be killed or maimed if they if we had uh fast bullet uh well as as as LA had before General Motors bought bought up all the tracks ripped them all up and made people dri ride buses and then finally got rid of most of the buses and made people buy their own cars the replacement of local organic food supplies with pesticides ridden factory farms genetically modified foods antibiotic ridden Meats shipped long es for a long time this is this has changed for the better a tobacco industry several generations of lung cancer with you remember that wonderful that wonderful film of the uh Senate hearings with the the represent the CEOs from Lig and Myers and all the other tobacco companies and each one of them said no caffeine is not addictive and it’s no caffeine they all said that and they all knew meanwhile the evidence finally came up they all knew it was addictive and they all were deliberately injecting more caffeine into the cigarettes so they would be uh nicotine thank you oh what am I smoking okay nicotine I mean I’m glad you’re with me um don’t be so picky well well they got up These Guys these guys should be in jail that’s called that’s a that’s called uh perjury they lied under oath to Congress they should be in jail they never went to jail but uh the tobacco industry is is uh unfortunately cigarette consumption has stopped declining in America it’s kind of leveled off now and it’s increasing dramatically in the third world what the cigarette companies did is start moving out to the third world cigarettes became the cool thing in a lot of other countries Asia Africa places like that unsafe at any price and there’s an avalanche of disposable products cosmetic medical whatever products that keep creating solutions for things that are not problems trying to get you convince you that you have this need or that problem and you should buy this and have that um the history of capitalism has been a history of both great prosperity and great poverty we often note how wealth and poverty we often say isn’t it how unfortunate that so much wealth here with so much poverty right here as if it was just an unfortunate jux deposition and in fact it’s not at all it’s um uh there’s a dynamic interaction between those two things this poverty exists because of this wealth this wealth exists because of this poverty uh it’s a dynamic inter relationship the wealth of the few rests on the poverty of the many there could not be Oki as as Cicero called them Oki P Au U CI uh Latin it is it meant the few the really Elite group that ruled the Roman senate the Roman senate is as such one thing but that inner group the richest most powerful men R running Roman senate they they could not have um ruled and lived the way they want if they didn’t unless they had slaves and proletariat impoverished people who worked for Bare subsistence um there could be no Lords and Ladies without surfs who labor from dawn to dusk to keep the Lords and Ladies in the style to which they accustomed there could be no c cap corporate capitalists without workers and indentured workers and debtors and taxpayers and all sorts of other people so there’s a there’s a real relationship between wealth and poverty do the I I’ll return to that in a minute I just want to say something else do the do the 1% that top plutocracy which you know it’s really not 1% you know that don’t you 1% would be three million people it’s really more like a a fraction about one quarter tenth of 1% it’s about 12,000 people who really compose the super rich and have the wealth uh of America and and when people say whoa you know that oh that top 1% uh has as much wealth as the bottom 30 or 40% that’s not true at all the bottom 30 40% has nothing I don’t know where people what why people are saying that Robert Reich I heard him say that the 140 richest billionaires have as much wealth as the as the poorest uh oh what was it 75 million people the poorest 75 million in America don’t have a pot to spit in they most of them are in debt most of them are maxing out on their credit cards most of them are just barely getting by H how are you comparing these two what what kind of what kind of a dazzling statistic is that supposed to be but does that 1% believe their own mythologies yes of course people believe in their own virtue yes of course they believe in their own value to Society of course you think Mitt Romney doesn’t he thinks he’s God’s Gift well he’s got a special problem with the Mormon stuff and all that but he he thinks he’s God’s gift to to Society for the most part the class propaganda they put out elevates them just justifies their worth so why would they not believe it they find it very persuasive we all find things very persuasive that are flattering to us rather things that are that are that are critical of us you don’t know what you’re talking about what do you mean that’s what you but when someone says something that’s positive you say oh you really think so hey they believe they believe uh uh you know it elevates them it justifies their we so why would they not believe it it’s very persuasive because it serves their interests they believe that the poor are the authors of their own poverty they believe their own wealth is earned and socially useful it creates jobs it provides growth they believe the free market system is the most productive and beneficial in history they believe competing systems and reforms and government regulations are harmful and distress from the performance of the uh good things they believe that government should not be a nanny State tending to the needs of the needy let them learn self-reliance those people down there with their hands out at the same time they Overlook the fact that their own class is not at all self-reliant no one is more reliant on government handouts than corporate America um we they get tax breaks more than you and I get they get about a100 billion doar a year out of every budget in direct subsidies everything that they produce is almost everything is is subsidized by the government they get loan guarantees they get export subsidies they get Equity grants and land giveaways they get almost free leases on a lot of government land to do what harvest the timber mine the copper uh drill for the oil they get oil they get oil giveaways practically or leases or the land I mean it’ll be estimated that there’s that there’s a $15 billion dollar worth of oil in a certain reserve on the government land and they’ll lease it the government will lease it to them for for like half a million or a million peanuts or something so they can go ahead and take that that’s stealing from the public Treasury the airwaves they get to lease the airwaves for a song for a song Fox News gets to get get these airwav the airwaves ladies and gentlemen brothers and sisters the airwaves are the property of the people of the United States you’d never know it though they’re they’re sent out and they’re and they’re used to Great profit by the um media corporations and their advertisers and and the like and they get bailouts they get billion doll bailouts mom and pop doesn’t get a bailout if things go down you go out of business you lose your grocery store you lose your little cafe whatever it is federal government does not give you a bailout and say hey you’re too small to fail let’s give you some more money to boost you up here a little bit that doesn’t happen well big corporate capitalism besides being hypocritical self-deluding and diluting us is also a irrational system Marx said it was a ruthlessly rational system that demystified and shattered the Dark Ages you know there’s that incredible paragraph in The Communist Manifesto where Marx and Engles talk about the dynamic productive energy of capitalism and how it broke loose from the shackles of a thousand years of the Dark Ages and if you read you know and if you read the enlightened men writers uh I had a book of the book an anthology of the Enlightenment I started read them I was so struck I mean I was just so struck by how naively enthusiastic they are I mean just the like a Ben Franklin or people like they were just there at the edge knowing that the world was opening up and I said I got to be I’ve got to be a little more generous the these guys they’re coming down from a thousand years of the Dark Ages they’re coming down from a from a civilization that condemned the Paris Medical Society and the medical school in Paris for what you know what what they condemn Paris for empiricism they said Paris medicine suffers from empiricism back this is back during the time of Louis CTO Louis the 14th or so that empiricism that is they were doing things like cutting open kavas and looking and learning what the body really was about and where it was and what happened and and and doing that sort of thing rather than using the Bible as its Authority for judging why someone is sick and there are four humors there are five this and there are seven that and you you made these you made these These Old superstitious deductions and then you gave the guy whatever it is the eyeballs of a frog and to eat or and and and and and he had to say 10 Al fathers and that would make them better um so so these so the so the the people of the Enlightenment are coming down from that and and the whole world is opening up and Marx is pointing out how well you know from from the late 18th century right up to his day which is the middle of the 19th century in that 60 years they saw all sorts of Sciences emerging they saw they saw continents being subdued dude canals being dug the canals then being ignored because they were building railroads now across stretches of land and they saw this incredible burgeoning of Mills and mines and and all this sort of dynamic um explosion so this Marx says is really uh you know a very impressive thing it is but it becomes irrational in its social relations I would also add that capitalism is amazingly amazingly irrational in regard to the environment it explicitly ignor the environment if you know what I mean uh it’s and it doesn’t really ignore environmentalism uh it’s more than envi ignoring environmentalism it condemns environmentalism it it attacks it it has pejorative terms like tree huggers and um what what are what are some of the other terms ECOT terrorists right I eot terrorists what are they talking about they’re the eot terrorists um and um so they’re irrational in regard to the environment they treat the environment first of all they treat it it and its resources as Limitless and that’s incorrect we now know most of our top soil is almost gone um and it and the environment is not Limitless that’s one and they also treat the environment as disposable um it’s it’s a disposable environment you can use up some stuff here and turn it all into Wasteland and toss it aside and move on to somewhere else and do the same um capitalism’s crises are not exceptional they are the common mode in other words under modern corporate capitalism the irrational the wasteful the destructive the impoverishing all of that is the norm normal normal um balanced productive calm Equitable social relations and periods are the exception crisis panics recession crisis again that’s the norm of capitalism in the late 1780s we had dead rebellions in America Shay’s Rebellion the best known one maybe but others too after the American Revolution we had monetary crisis then there was the Panic of 1792 the Panic of 1809 which lasted a a number of years the panic of 1819 the Panic of 183 37 let’s skip let’s skip the rest of the 19th century you can go on to the very end of the century that that decade of 1890 where the economy the US already was the leading manufacturing country in the world um and um and yet that whole that Whole Decade 1890s they couldn’t pull out of the recession they were having a tough time Teddy Roosevelt said we need a war any War let’s have a war they were looking for War I mean very explicitly War would do two things one it would stimulate the economy and get it going and two it would uh distract people from their economic Grievances and get them flag waving which indeed it did with the Spanish American war um all through the 20th century Wars and recessions you we we know the 1920s as the Jazz age you know Charleston Charleston Oh and things were great the 1920s were a period of severe recession especially in agrarian agrarian areas less so in the cities um after that after that came the Great Depression as you know 1929 and that lasted right on up to 1941 when World War I began um all through the 20th Cent C we’ve had Wars recessions inflation Market crashes investor panics depressions massive deficits Bubbles and bailouts and subsidies hardly a normal year when you got the free market that market Ain’t So free um it is a system that can never settle with itself the corporate crimes and crises we endure are not irrational departures from a rational system it’s not that this is an irrational time or a crazy time it’s it’s the converse just just the converse of that they are the rational outcomes of a basically amoral and irrational system when you got that kind of system this is what you’re going to get it’s not that these are just some deviancies some real bad things or some Bernie made offs did this and then now it’s all upset and all that no that doesn’t work uh the the system puts forth these people and rewards them tremendously John Maynard KES the liberal um the guru of liberal capitalism um and kan’s and Canes is looking pretty good nowadays but it’s hard that with the the free market the free market Orthodoxy prevails in much of Academia in economic departments that you can’t even read Kings anyway it makes a lot of sense he made made this point now he was the guru of liberal capitalism he was not it he was not his shill he wasn’t his shill he was not selling it he was quite critical of capitalism and he said quote what an astonishing idea that the most wickedest of men he uses a double superlative there he uses bad grammar to be cute to sort of emphasize the point he says what an astonishing idea that the most wicket of men doing the most wickedest of things will produce beneficial results that’s what he was saying when the when the depression came he said whatever could you possibly have thought was going to happen if you leave these people uh to be doing all this stuff people who are not known for their human empathy or their willingness to sacrifice and share and even if they were known for that they seem to lose it once they get into this game Corporate America and both of its major parties and both political parties are in the service of corporate America the leader of the democratic party uh uh Obama Barack Barack Obama in the debate just last week with Romney made his profession to the free enterprise capitalist system he said that you know he he’s very explicitly made that point um they’re wetted to A system that brings poverty and hard times and attrition most of the world is capitalist and most of the world is poor capitalist Nigeria capitalist Indonesia capitalist Mexico capitalist Thailand capitalist South Africa I said to you I said capitalism creates immense prosperity for a few but it creates men’s poverty and here it is all of these capitalist countries they usually not even thought of as capitalist countries isn’t that right they just thought of as third world countries no they’re capitalists they’re big companies that are in there and they hire people and they got mines and Mills and and whatever else and and as capitalism spreads and grows all over these worlds so does poverty the number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population did you get that so that poverty is spreading in other words spreading even as wealth accumulates even in the United States in 1900 the United States was a third world country 50 years before the term was invented we had typhoid epidemics in Philadelphia and Baltimore and places like that we had chronic and mass underemployment chronic and mass poverty we had um all that sort of stuff um all the diseases of poverty too tuberculosis malnutrition rickets and the light I remember as a kid tuberculosis and rickets and all those were still those were still um diseases to be dealt with the Great American prosp erity America as the land of prosperity is a myth it was it didn’t exist the Great Depression came along uh at the same time Western Europe those great wonderful social democracies like like Finland and and Denmark and Norway and Sweden and life where life where life and Social Services have been better for a while they were third world countries too people were living hard and and mean lives in those countries too um World War II brought a massive increase in spending in America there are three things that led to the American Prosperity that came that Prosperity started developing 1945 46 47 in the in the 1940s and that came by for three things as I see it one was the great backlog of consumer demand an interesting things started happening when World War II came all sorts of people started making money my uncle I have an uncle Nick he was a mechanic a workingclass guy I come from an Italian workingclass family in New York East Harlem which was a big Italian neighborhood in those days Uncle Nick worked in a in a garage he made about $40 a week which was good money in those days for blue CA Working Class People when the war came he quit being an auto mechanic and he um first of all there were many many less automobiles on the road nobody had had automobiles he became he went to work in an arms Factory and was making $100 a week I mean $100 a week was unbelievable the problem was there was nothing to spend it on oh he found he went to nightclubs and did things all but even he had a surplus in his lifestyle um you couldn’t buy cars cuz Detroit was now making tanks and planes and the like you couldn’t buy new refrigerators you had to keep your old one if you had a refrigerator many people still had ice boxes with ice in it um my family did um and the like but there but what it did was everybody said when when this war is over there’ll be a depression in other words we’ll be back to way it was in the 30s when the war was over you had this backlog of consumer demand people wanting things and having saved up money from all the jobs they had during the war because the government was spending and spending in a way that that some of this just trickled down did get around uh that this was the kind of money they could not um they could not spend it during the Depression itself they couldn’t spend that much but they could spend it for war and killing um the second the the second thing that happened besides this great backlog of of people wanting homes too and and and as I say all these durable consumer goods and the like um after World War II there came what was called the GI Bill of Rights I remember there was constant talk about what happened to our veterans after World War I and constant little pictures old photographs and such of veterans of World War I standing on the corner selling apples and the Word was out are we going to let our boys come back from from the Pacific and from Europe now this time and we’re going to make them stand on corners and sell apples again and Congress was really swept up in this thing and and so they passed this remarkable legislation the GI Bill of Rights um which really unlike the GI bill today which is so miserable so so meager so deficient that guys come back for a GI and they they volunteer in the Army in the hope of getting these GI benefits they come back and they get them and it’s not enough they have to they have to borrow money they have to take extra jobs and the like it’s very disappointing the GI Bill back in 1946 47 was a terrific deal you got a stien a full amount to be able to live on and you had all your tuition paid and it was uh nobody had to run into debt nobody had to take second job jobs or this to that or anything like that and the GI Bill took about um 9 million 9 million Americans came back and got the GI Bill many of them got trained as professionals as Artisans as skilled workers as all sorts of going into businesses I knew a friend of mine a Floris business his father his old Italian father had a Floris shop and he de learned new ways of doing bouquet and all this stuff and and Advance the business and so so forth there was an incredible an incredible shot in the arm when you inject it with all of these people who are better trained better skilled capable ready willing and and doing all this kind of work so you had that the backlog of consumer demand and the GI Bill of Rights and then the third great stimulus was the giant military budgets that by 1947 Harry Truman was pushing military budget that was it wasn’t as big as World War II but it’s as big as we know him now now that is uh it led to the building of an enormous armaments industry which which kept a lot of those top paying jobs for blue collar workers and such so you put those two those three things together and you got this dream about the ordinary worker living the middle class life he now had a little Ticky Tac house in a development he had a little car uh and his kid could go to the State University that was terrific uh this was like something that he or his grandpa could have only dreamed of doing um and that Prosperity lasted until 2008 it started going under attack in 1978 in 1978 which was the beginning of the third year of Jimmy car’s Administration uh us Chamber of Commerce guy commented and said we have got to roll this back we got to stop it th we are becoming a social democracy so these guys understood the term social democracy there’s only about four or 500 people in America who understand the term social democracy and are familiar with what it means the social democracies will use that term to mean Finland Norway Sweden Denmark Holland to some extent France at Western Europe in general uh it is countries that are that are capitalist but the private the public sector has been expanded and is um is creating a social wage that is really helping helping the people uh you know Health Care guaranteed free health care uh affordable housing programs of job programs um and and all all that kind of stuff that’s was that’s was the social democracy paid vacations good wages that same emergence of a social democracy was developing and emerging for the first time in their history in the social democracies in Western Europe also and there they had another impetus they had terrible destruction from the war it wasn’t like the US which was very prosperous and hadn’t hadn’t lost a single house in World War II um but they had had something else they had this other enormous impetus they had the Marshal plan the US sending them millions of dollars to reconstruct and they had Soviet troops along the Elber River and there it was all of Eastern Europe where you had countries where people were had guaranteed right to a job uh guaranteed free medical care all of these things under communism they may not have had the freedoms that people might want but they had these other things and and that became the big competition that also became a competition in America again and again us spokesman would get up and say we have to demonstrate that our people have have a decent living and this and that and it’s much better than what the poor people in communism they never allowed they never admitted that the Communists had a good living and all that sort of thing but the same thing with race relations they say it’s it’s disgraceful we’re going to lose the battle for men’s Minds if we don’t improve Pro much of civil rights many of the Civil Rights liberals would start off every time they got up and they would and they would have to say if we want to win the coowar against the Communist adversary and most of the world you know is not white it is black brown yellow whatever 10 whatever the different Hues are uh and um and um and those people will not believe us and they’ll turn toward the Communists unless we get rid of Jim Crow and unless we uh build a a more Equitable life with civil rights for people of all colors uh so the influence the threat the competitive image of the communist countries was another impetus that led to um that spurred them on and and and it led to what was called that what was that called the the great historic compromise with American labor that American labor would come in and there wouldn’t be this class War anymore and labor would get its cut all right your boys will get a contract we can work three years under these conditions right and uh and you’ll get and you’ll get um you’ll get vacation time from now on you get an eight hour day finally you’ve been fighting for you’ve been fighting since 1920 for an eight hour day I mean say 1900 to 1920 was a 10-hour day they were fighting for now they’re fighting for an 8 hour day we’re going to give you an 8 hour day you’re going to get time and a half overtime in fact that was done in the New Deal some of these things were even done during the New Deal again because of the threat of Revolution the Communist Party in America had 100,000 members there was all sorts of Lefty groups coming agitation of all kind um they made certain kinds of concessions we got to we got to let you have this not only get a vacation you get vacation with pay you know and and that was the way it was going and things were getting improving again and again well there was that element within American capitalism that was saying this is too much when is it going to stop we don’t want this social democracy and in 1979 that year I told you about reaganism began back in those days in 1980 when Reagan won and was President I said reaganism came in two years before Reagan and that was under Jimmy Carter he immediately increased the military budget he started cutting back on uh the social wage on on benefit benefits of various kind and the like um and so so there was this uh roll back a couple of years ago I was reading in the New Yorker and there was a GOP leader and he said things are pretty good our goal was to roll back the social democracy there’s that word again these these Republican leaders know about social democracy they never use the term publicly but they use it when when it’s a question of the class struggle that they’re waging against us all the time he said that was our goal and we’ve succeeded we have succeeded in rolling back the social democracy well they they’ve rolled back quite a bit I mean life is very tough and getting more raw and more raw and ra and and the like um if you ask Jo W bush it wasn’t completely rolled back he said just a couple of weeks ago did anybody see that he said my Administration was a success he got what he wanted he he he said he cut the taxes on the rich he rolled back all these government regulations and controls he uh he he didn’t he didn’t mention this but he got involved in in the war in Iraq and and led to enormous spending he he he more than doubled the uh the U military budget in America he said but I I have two failures two things I left unfinished I couldn’t accomplish and that was rolling back Social Security and Medicare uh which is is admitting a lot and we got a guy in office right today who said Social Security and Medicare I’m talking about Obama he said Social Security and Medicare are on the table they’re there to be bargained and and uh trimmed if we if we have to or not Social Security which is the most successful anti-poverty program America has ever had uh is on the table and in Western capitalism you got the same kind of thing happening you know they as I said they had to make all these concessions here with this this this uh wave of communist countries and and giant communist parties in France and Italy agitating and such they were making all sorts of concessions vacations and social wages and working wages minimum wages and medical care and this and that and so forth and pension rights and the like um now today that’s being all rolled back in Western Europe uh under the guise of austerity under the guise of the crisis of the system they’re using the crisis of the system itself as the bludgeon to force working people to now uh make sacrifices and get rid of the social democracies and that’s their goal in Spain Italy Greece and uh pretty much anywhere so you see recessions can be a weapon and a very useful one recessions are not such a bad thing for the 1% at the top Mitt Romney did he suffer much through this past recession did any of his five sons all of whom have multi-million dollar trusts did they suffer very much in this past recession did they show any signs of suffering I I don’t I don’t think so I mean I didn’t spend too much time with them I I I I don’t really know I don’t really know but um but it’s a recession is not really so bad for the big boys it really isn’t um a recession is a form of mass poverty but it’s not bad for the big boy otherwise we wouldn’t have so many of them you know if it was bad recessions tame labor labor gets tamed you labor unions get broken labor unions settle for miserable contracts almost next to nothing um recessions uh tame individual workers all sorts of people line up for jobs today who would not have imagined working for those wages just uh five years ago um small business business are bought up at bargain prices and even big ones big businesses swallow big businesses if you study media the media ownership patterns that they don’t just buy up small independent radio stations newspapers I mean you got big businesses buying other other big huge businesses um you see the 1% the 1% also does not want a well-educated self-confident public they don’t want a public a work potential Workforce with a developed sense of entitlement they don’t want people with high levels of expectations they want us hungry in that sense recessions are quite useful the hungrier you are the harder you will work for less and less why do you think Indonesians work for 17 cents an hour in Indonesia 15 16 year old girls working for 17 cents in a Nike Factory to make those shoes that Nike then brings over here and sells you for a real bargain for $200 shoes that cost them 8 or $9 to make even with all the Outsourcing and all that and transportation cost why do you do that do they do that cuz they’re so concerned about you that’s some bargain $200 for these shoes wow that’s so cheap no that’s not cheap at all that’s very expensive but um but why did they do it it’s to increase the margin of profit to diminish the cost of production and keep the price high and fancy so why is it the US why is it us workers don’t work for 17 cents an hour is it because we’re so much more self-respecting than the Indonesians is that it or is it something else it’s that we are at a level of historical struggle where we don’t want to and don’t have to and will not work for 17 cents an hour but the goal is to get us down closer to that number from where we were the goal is to get rid of those benefits and paid vacations and more and more jobs now are just contracted there are no benefits nothing you just the hours you work you get paid if you’re late off for two days you’re off for two days that and and the like um so there’s real method in their Madness and by the way all those signs were coming that crash of 2008 before that the the seven or eight years before that there already was another six million out of out of jobs I got those figures somewhere here right 6 million out of a job median family income had declined by $2,000 which was a lot of money for modest income families 7 million people lost health coverage in that time the Consumer Debt more than doubled from from 2003 to 2008 compliments of uh of George Bush and Dick Cheney um so but it was okay with the guys at the top the Dow Jones was up at record hid and the banks were making more money than than Santa Claus they were having a great time um another myth is that capitalism Fosters democracy and that I’m just going to laugh away every Democratic gain we have made it’s been with the opposition of that ruling class the ruling landed Merchant banking investing class opposed the abolition of of uh property qualifications for voting they opposed that they did not want to abolish they they supported property qualifications they have always fought to limit to limit the number of people who can participate in democracy we see that happening right today with the vter so-called voter fraud things of you have to have proof that you were born here and this and that and using these things they’ve disfranchised they figur several million people in uh in various States um here in the US they have never thought the people should be doing much with government if you look at every elitist from ancient Greece with Socrates right on down to Roger Sherman Alexander Hamilton John J all of them saying the people should not rule the people who own the land should rule it and and the like very explicitly and today too you see all sorts of undemocratic laws being put in suspension of habus Corpus Mass arrests use of torture use of FBI for illegal use of surveillance these are all these are all instruments of the conservatives their goal in fact is to put hamstring and limit democracy because democracy does not um serve when democracy is successful that creates problems for free market capitalism um let me just say something about this the free market Advocates insist that everything works better in the private sector rather than the government sector therefore we should have government run more like a business so you know you and I might wonder how could that be possible exactly what businesses should government be run like the 50,000 firms that go bankrupt every year or the large successful corporations themselves giant bureaucracies recipients of billions of dollars in public subsidies bailouts payouts uh with big multi-million dollar salaries to every agent head so the Secretary of of Transportation now should make a 1015 million salary that if you want to run it like a private business the CEO he’s the CEO if we run government like a business who would take care of the cost ly nonprofit public services that the public demands and business itself demands operational expenses are generally Less in public bureaucracies than in private corporations administrative costs for the uh us government’s Medicare program are under three cents per dollar that’s socialism in action three cents a dollar Administration you’re always you’re taught that OB bureaucracy it’s so wasteful it’s this government is wasteful corrupt and the like administrative costs for private profit health insurance are 26 cents per dollar that’s capitalism in action poor service at higher expense because the explicit function is to extract profit it’s not to give good service at low cost social security has been more reliable and less expensive as a retirement program than private pension plans a rope of poll asked Americans to estimate the administrative cost of Social Security as a percentage of benefits so they’re so used to being told that government is so wasteful respondents said well Social Securities administrative costs I would say um 50 cents 50% of their budget is for administration actually it’s 1% that’s spent on Administration that’s socialism in action by comparison the administrative costs for private retirement plans are about 133% of annual payments Public Utilities owned by local governments offer rates averaging 20% less than those charged by private power companies that operate for profits that’s socialism in action what do you have here do you have a public utility or private what I can’t hear you we’re having an election right now for for a public one yes very good that’s great um the most expensive one is pg& where I live in North in North Cal Northern California pg& spent $2 million in lobbying and transferred 5.1 billion in profits to Mo the most affle uent stockholders and executive heads over a three-year period That’s capitalism in action but now let’s look at some Public Utilities the one in paloalto transferred $7.3 million uh to the uh to the their local government budget pg& transferred zero to the California state budget and Palo the LA Public Utility transferred $124 million to their uh local governments that’s socialism in action they made money they not only gave you lower rates but the money they made they put into the budget which would then keep your taxes down and and and help you pg& has given nothing back to the communities it all goes to their stockholders and such the capitalist leaders want to eliminate public spending programs not because they don’t work but because they do that’s why they want to get rid of Public Utilities they work fine they demonstrate that this thing could be done cheaper and at greater return for the public and such um that’s why they’re destroying the US Postal Service and inflicting upon it a terrible go to common dreams and Jim hiow has a good article on on on the on on the uh post office the post office isn’t going broke it wasn’t it’s not it’s not dwindling it’s it it’s handling more mail today than it ever did even before the internet it may not not as much first class mail but an awful lot of junk mail and such and the other stuff but um I call it junk mail I mean it it serves some some some service sometimes um but but they they’ve been forced to raise $5 billion do a year for a pension fund for workers that haven’t even been born yet it’s for the next 70 years they’re supposed to find Finance this thing it’s a way literally of of underfinancing and stripping and destroying the US Postal Service and that’s what they’re doing um and they’re doing that because it works you tell me you tell me what private Postal Service what private Postal Service in this country will deliver door too from here to New Jersey let’s say a a piece of mail to my aunt Tessy me for 45 cents what what private company will do that nobody you know what your mail will cost if you want to send somebody a birthday card or well you won’t you’re going to send it over the over the internet but but but there are people who still do that uh it it would cost it’s going to cost quite a bit and that’s what’s wrong that that is any kind of service that outperforms the public uh that outperforms the private Corporation ations shall be um shall be uh attacked and that’s why Social Security is being attacked that’s why Medicare is being attacked and so forth these represent threats to profit markets so let me just tell you about as far as the environment goes there was a cartoon in the New Yorker uh a year ago it showed a guy at a business meeting you know he had a lect turn here and there was the table and people all sitting there and there were all the charts in the back and all and he’s saying to the business meeting he’s saying so while the end of the world scenario will be Rife with unimaginable Horrors we believe that the pre-end period will be filled with unprecedented opportunities for profit and that’s where they are that’s why I call it a pathology these guys are crazy I mean this thing is happening right before their eyes the Arctic is melting years ago I said they’re not going to wake up until the North Pole itself melts I didn’t say Arctic I said the North Pole well the North Pole is melting away and now and what are they doing they’re going oh we can get at the oil that’s under there the very oil and fossil consumption that’s causing all this to oh we’ll have a Northwest Passage finally as old as Lewis and Clark over 100 years we’re now the dream was always to find a Northwest Passage to the Pacific you know but now we could have it no more going through the isus no more going all the way down Cape Horn or anything now we can just we’ll be able to cut and they got they’ve got corporations developing whose specialty is to show other corporations how to make money with global warming you see they’re crazy and so I had this image I I pointed I said we make just imagine that everybody everybody in the world was in this bus a very large bus and we’re hurling down this road and it’s going to plunge off a cliff you know what these guys will be doing they’ll be running up and down the aisles selling us seat belts at at very inflated prices because they very inflated prices um and and and uh and and that’s where they are they they’re crazy they have it’s a it’s a rational pursuit of irrational ends becomes itself ra the pursuit itself becomes R irrational and these people themselves although they sound perfectly rational are part part of this pathology um and our job is to our job is to grab control of the bus turn it around get these guys off the aisles maybe open the door throw them out slow down slow down first when you throw them out and and the like um and um I leave you with this someone someone wrote this on the internet and I couldn’t find out the party’s name but it was something like this actually I’m rephrasing it quote what an incomprehensible insane World it seemed to me until I realized that it was ruled by rapacious money mad sociopaths then it all made sense and that’s what I tried to do here now was have it all make sense in the hope that we can bring good sense to triumph over self-driven greed and pathology thank you very much [Applause] [Music]