My name is Peter Joseph and the following
is a critique of the Bernie Sanders
March 19th Town Hall with Michael Moore,
Elizabeth Warren and others
from the standpoint of a structuralist.
Structuralism simply means you're
accounting for larger order contexts
when addressing a given situation.
The point being that much
of what was discussed
in the context of root causes and
solutions was rather disappointing to me
as the true origins of the problem
of socioeconomic inequality
and loss of democracy
was not really addressed at all.
Naturally if you do not
understand the root problem
you cannot create viable
solutions to problems or symptoms.
And it's frustrating to see how this
representative group of influencers
still don't seem to have the
awareness or perhaps the courage
to go after the market economy
and its incentive psychology
and procedural dynamics.
When I say incentive psychology I'm
referring to the individualistic,
effectively antisocial incentives
generated through competition,
seeking short-term profits
generally at the expense
of long-term sustainability
not to mention humane ethics.
An obvious example is that when a
person works to invent something,
they do it first and foremost to sell,
to make money.
The incentive is to make money,
not advance society.
While some argue this relationship -
this proxy relationship -
has been fruitful,
which of course it has on one level,
it has also simultaneously
been unnecessarily destructive,
especially when other economic alternatives
that remove this proxy incentive system
could be applied to human society.
Also, things do not get done
in our society because
they have no profit possibility,
which is extremely depressing
and one of the main core reasons
so many problems go unresolved today,
from the resolution of ecological decline
to the prevalence of
poverty and homelessness.
Similarly, when I say procedural dynamics
I'm referring to the game of market trade
and how it orients human rationality.
In the same way a person plays a sport,
orienting behavior around the
structure of the game itself,
there's a near automatic pattern of response
happening throughout human society
working to game itself in effect
for each individual or group's advantage.
For example, a universal constraint
inherent to this market game
is the need for cost efficiency.
Cost efficiency simply means people
are trying to save money on input
while maximizing gain upon
the final sale of course.
And what has this led to?
Well, slavery for one.
Whether abject slavery,
or the millions of slaves
that exist in the world today
getting paid virtually no money or so
little that it doesn't even matter,
in various degrees of coercion
driven by poverty and vulnerability.
And keep in mind -
and I think it's an important distinction -
that what we call capitalism
or a capitalist society,
isn't really capitalist
by any absolute definition
because there's no such thing as a purely
capitalist society nor could there ever be
in terms of the free-market foundation.
It's more accurate to say
that it is capitalistic:
a qualitative property.
And this capitalistic tendency
was birthed by the Neolithic
Revolution 12,000 years ago
molding and evolving society
and culture ever since.
It's a specific structural
framework that we've been inside of.
And if you're not familiar with that
I can point you to my book
'The New Human Rights Movement' which details it
along with other issues related
to socioeconomic inequality.
But suffice it to say, it's very
important to understand that there's a
long term geographical
determinism that has set
the characteristics of our society in motion.
That said, and put another way,
countless people are pulling
levers on a giant machine,
engaging the market economy's gaming
through cost efficiency and so on,
not realizing that the long term result
includes human exploitation and abuse
along with a loss of earthly sustainability.
It's built into the
collectively-operating mechanism.
without the need for
individual malicious intent
on the part of any single individual.
Cost efficiency is often
confused with the idea
of technical or natural
efficiency and design.
The truth is cost efficiency
is deeply destructive
because it doesn't actually
employ any kind of true science.
Systems science would define true efficiency
in the design and production of a given good.
True efficiency is about doing things correctly
from a scientific perspective in other words,
and cost efficiency is simply about
doing things in order to maximize income
and reduce loss in the process
of production and sale.
This again leads to enormous earthly
waste and perpetual human abuse
as empirical and formal evidence shows.
And when you put these two things together -
incentive psychology and
procedural dynamics of capitalism -
you begin to understand why any attempt
to push back against the outcomes,
the inevitabilities of this
system that we see consistently,
will either be short-lived or they will fail.
It will also happen, again regardless
of the moral aptitude of the society,
because this isn't some trivial
matter in decision-making.
This is about survival:
individual self-interest coupled
with familial or group self-interest,
coupled with an expansive materialist
culture now derived from our need to
keep consuming and having growth
and GDP and creating jobs and so on,
will forever condemn any hope of improvement
in the context of socioeconomic
inequality or class war
without large-scale
structural economic change,
which effectively voids
what we consider to be
the purest form that we've
ever known of market economics.
In other words if you want to change the behavior
of people and how we relate to each other
you have to change the
framework they are operating in.
That said, let's begin with the basic
opening by Sanders stating their cause.
[B. Sanders] But tonight's discussion
is not just an analysis of our problems.
We're going to talk about solutions,
about where we go from here,
and how we create an
economic and political system
which represents the needs of all Americans
and not just a handful of
wealthy campaign contributors.
Elizabeth, what's going on in America?
[E. Warren] Okay.
So I want to start this where
we're picking up where
Bernie left off and that is
look at all the data right now
about inequality in America,
inequality in wealth, inequality in income.
But I want to reframe this a little bit.
I see this as inequality in opportunity
and that that is one of
the most corrosive parts
about what's happening and what's
gone wrong over a generation.
[PJ] The synergy of influences
that limit human potential,
individual by individual, is vast
and the idea of equality and opportunity
or equal access to potentials of society
become increasingly dubious,
tenuous and confused
when the entire society is actually premised
in something that moves against
any type of balance or equality.
In other words,
the foundation of the society we have today
is premised in scarcity, competition,
and the game of seeking income
to support future interests
and hence greed and so on.
You can't have equal opportunity in a society
that for example makes money out of debt,
selling that money like any other good.
You can't have equal opportunity
when there is an actual boom
and bust cycle that periodically
wipes out the lower- and
middle-class potentials.
And the list goes on,
and it's a little bit disappointing
and even though I agree
with Warren's gesture,
that no one brings up the other forces that
limit human potential and public health.
And I think the general gravitation of the
Democratic socialists and others of this mindset
is also that you can kind of
regulate it in hard rigid laws
that will preserve some
degree of equal access,
even though the entire society
is premised on unequal access
as a driver of industry and innovation,
by the way.
And once someone does even attempt to create
such legislation like FDR did decades ago,
you'll notice that the general pressure
is always to dismantle such
programs in the name of free markets
and the problem here
effectively is consistency.
You cannot have contradictory social patterns
and expect both of them to preserve themselves.
And while we do see,
as I'll talk about moreso later in the video,
differences between the United States
and say the Scandinavian countries
and other social democracies,
in terms of how they "collar" capitalism,
the United States itself exists in a
completely different level of the sickness.
That even if you regulate in free education,
free health care,
free medical leave, free extended vacations,
all these other things common of
the pop culture socialism
as we know it today,
it would just be a matter of
time before a new constituency
would come in and remove those safety nets
in favor of larger order
capitalist rationalization.
So I hope all of that makes
sense because equal opportunity,
to define that and make it
real and make it applicable,
requires far more than what
these folks are proposing.
- So for me,
what this generational shift is about
is a shift in this fundamental question
about who this government works for
and who it creates opportunities for.
[PJ] You can't pose the question
of who the government works for
without understanding what gives birth to
the structure of government to begin with.
Governments are fundamentally
premised economically.
That may seem odd since we're led to believe
government is the starting
point of our society in action.
But if you examine the nature of
governments since the Neolithic Revolution
you will see that they are first and
foremost concerned with economic behavior.
Feudalism, mercantilism, capitalism
and even socialism and
communism as they have existed,
have had institutions of governance that
organize around those economic foundations
explaining their differences.
This only makes sense since the
economy is what produces survival.
And as a related aside,
I'd like to point out that this
understanding that economics
is the root of survival has led to
some deeply superficial perspectives
that further misunderstand
the nature of government,
such as with modern Libertarians.
They see a false duality
between markets and government
and as the argument goes,
government is a problem
as it restricts the so-called free market
and hence if we reduce
government power or regulation,
as was notably done by the Thatcher
and Reagan administrations,
you will open up markets and wealth will spread,
more people will be supportive and so on.
Obviously it didn't work out that way
nor would it ever work out that way.
And my point here is to not debate
the libertarian perspective directly
but to show the pervasiveness
of this false duality,
or confusion which is even
present in the Sanders panel.
The truth is government and
business are inseparable
because you have to have regulation
of the individualistic and
self-interest-driven anarchy
that defines market behavior.
The invisible hand may exist to some degree
but that degree is so limited,
far too limited to be universally workable.
Markets simply are not a viable
system when it comes to accounting
for human sustainability
or social stabilization.
It's old and out-of-date.
If government did magically vanish,
the negative externalities
produced by market behavior
would pretty much destroy the planet
overnight, gesturaly speaking.
So regulation becomes critical to
collaring this primitive economic model
that simply can't take into
account what is required.
That stated,
overall government has two roles:
the democratic or regulatory rule,
where the general population
sees problems and tries
to vote in regulations
to solve those problems,
while the other role is
to facilitate business
and work to preserve national business
in a competitive global context
along with encouraging and
assisting the expression
of the most successful in business.
Now this second rule explains why there
is a natural gravitation in America
for high-level corporate
power to create legislation
and in effect control government.
More succinctly government
is a regulator on one side
and government is a tool for
groupistic business power
and economic advantage on the other.
Even more, since market economics
guarantees inequality and class hierarchy
due to its very structure,
money and power become intertwined
and suddenly you have
perpetual class antagonism
and competitive threat.
And within that climate
of antagonism and threat
the power elite naturally become fearful,
then generating feedback loops of
lower-class disregard, oppression and so on,
weakening them like a country weakens
another country's infrastructure in war.
All of this is systemic
and should be expected
given the nature of the economic
structure that serves as the foundation
of government behavior.
Now, that stated,
coming back to that structure,
remember government, even though it makes
money out of nothing through its central banks,
still wishes to limit inflation, so they tax.
Taxation is important income for government.
Likewise a thriving economy also allows
government to maintain its geopolitical dominance.
This occurs through economic
power emerging in the form of
colonialistic and globalistic
trade agreements for example,
and the United States being
the empire that it is,
while also housing the vast majority
of the most powerful transnational
corporations on the planet,
we can better understand why the
sickness of political preference
in support of the wealthy class
is so much stronger in the US
than in many other governments.
It just makes perfect sense, systemically.
So the real question is not
"Who does the government work for?"
The question is "What defines the
government's inherent nature?"
What are its natural gravitations?
And it's interesting how
people don't pick up on that.
The corruption against Bernie
Sanders in the Democratic primary
could be considered an anomalous thing.
But maybe it's not.
Maybe it's a natural gravitation of those
in positions of hierarchy and
business and financial power
working to preserve their
positions and so on,
and they move in like a swarm against anyone
that wants to deplete their power.
And if it's found that say the US
government's nature is inherently there
to favor business, wealth,
class and power hierarchy,
maybe it's time to rethink
how the democratic process
is to be approached since this system
can only be fundamentally antagonistic
towards anything that we would
consider true democracy or
egalitarian democracy,
whatever you want to call it.
[M. Moore] And these films I make,
they're about a country
that has an economic system
that's unfair, it's unjust,
and it's not democratic.
You cannot call this a democracy
if the democracy means
we just get to go vote,
but with the economy, we have no say in this,
then it's not a true democracy.
[PJ] I got excited for a brief
moment when Moore said this
because he seemed to hint at the fact that
economic democracy is required
for a true social democracy.
Yet that focus quickly
gets lost in vagueness,
which I guess shouldn't be too surprising
since he made a movie about capitalism
that didn't even address
the structure of capitalism.
Just more vagary,
highlighting certain corrupt extremes while
still supporting general market practice
as if general market practice
doesn't inevitably lead statistically
to a vast spectrum of corrupt extremes.
You're only as free and powerful as your purchasing
power will allow you to be in today's society.
And because all these folks still subscribe
to the market religion in general,
the idea of economic
democracy really only implies
being able to influence the
regulation of how the economy unfolds,
never really touching the actual structure.
Again, if the structural nature
of the economy works against
higher order democratic possibilities,
reinforcing rather than
alleviating oppression,
perhaps it's time we addressed that structure
rather than dance around it
or avoid it because it's too inconvenient,
taboo or complicated to talk about.
[D. Hamilton] And the key frame in
which to address these solutions
is to empower people.
What is really pernicious is that
the most vulnerable people,
when trying to do something for themselves,
they're the most exposed to predation,
be it from the financial sector,
be it from colleges and
universities that might be
incentivized by for-profit as
opposed to a non-profit motive,
so that rhetoric has a harm
on those that really try hard.
We don't want that, we want a society
where your efforts will truly be rewarded.
Hamilton seems to bring up predation and
lower class vulnerability and exploitation
as if it's separate from the incentives
and procedural dynamics of market logic.
This observation needs to move past the fact
that poor people become more
vulnerable to exploitation,
rather focusing on the fact that
the economic system generates this
class hierarchy or inequality
by its very design.
How extreme that class inequality becomes
is subject to other forces of
course as we see across the world.
But it doesn't change the fact.
Where does one draw the line between
predation and strategic cost efficiency?
Where do we draw the line in the
gradient of overall human exploitation
in the capitalist machine?
Because it is just that:
a gradient or matter of degree.
For example,
I am a low-budget independent filmmaker
and I have to find people to do
things cheaper than industry standard.
I have no choice, if I expect to produce
quality that will draw income in the end.
This means as a systemic result,
those who I can afford to hire
are often young, or starting out,
or in a deprived condition whereby they
can't demand as much money for their service.
Now do I like doing this? No!
But I have no choice in the
market game and neither do you
when it comes down to it.
Each one of us every moment of our lives
is engaging in some form of
cost efficiency or savings
to try and secure our futures.
And that inevitably leads to
some form of taking advantage
of other people's circumstances
whether we intend it or not.
And the solution certainly isn't to pretend
that some forms of human exploitation
for another's gain is fine
while some forms are not.
That would be a matter of degree
fallacy or continuum fallacy.
And the way folks intuitively combat that
is to fall back on morality.
They may say "Well it's okay for a poor person
with $100,000 in student loan debt
to work as a janitor in a coffee
shop due to that pressure,
while it's NOT okay for a poor person to work
for six cents an hour in a sweat shop in Asia."
Once again, in order to understand what's
happening in the structure of capitalism
you have to become objective,
removing both your familiarity
with the practice of markets,
how you've been rewarded - that operant
conditioning if you have been successful -
while also removing the
tendency to draw moral lines
when in truth they don't
actually exist logically.
- I'd be remiss not to point
out that these vulnerabilities
are more pronounced for marginal groups.
Race, gender, disability status,
formerly incarcerated,
they face obstacles that the
general population don't.
[PJ] Once again we need to go deeper.
If we don't understand how groups became
marginalized or what keeps them marginalized,
if we don't understand the root causes we
can't develop proper solutions, once again.
For example, black-white race
inequality obviously cannot be understood
until you at least go back
to early American slavery,
in turn considering the arduous and heavily
fought process of integration since.
And the question then becomes
"What incentivized or set in
motion abject African slavery?"
The answer is simple: cost efficiency.
Economic motivations.
Racism itself as we see
vividly in sickness today
is a side effect of this
older period of time.
Race was developed
as a social construct in fact,
a perception to help preserve
the economic institution
of abject human slavery,
and effectively classism.
As Dr. Martin Luther King often talked about,
the black-and-white divide in America was
used to preserve the power establishment,
keeping poor whites and poor
blacks fighting amongst themselves.
In fact if you think about it,
this race class divide-and-conquer
is still occurring today,
for few are talking about this fact
that slavery was an economic decision,
a business decision, a capitalist decision.
So you can't explain the ongoing
deprivation of African Americans today
without seeing this chain of causality
and fundamentally linking the
oppression to capitalism itself.
Now since then racism has grown and
taken on a life of its own as we know,
and coupled with all the
other procedural dynamics
black society has remained
regimented and poor
even though there has been general
improvement through technology really
as time has gone on.
In fact I think the only group
that ever really went after
this system in terms of how it creates
group racism and oppression of course,
besides Dr. King and his Poor
People's Campaign late in his life,
was the work of the Black Panthers movement,
a very large movement in its time,
who were originally opposed to
capitalism based on principle,
which is an important historical footnote
that we don't hear much about anymore.
How many movements out there
are actually going after
capitalism in the way we obviously should?
Anyway likewise, other marginalized
groups cannot be understood
without the competitive element of capitalist
society also being considered again.
Gender inequality has cultural roots
no doubt linked to the history
of patriarchy and sexism.
Women have historically been paid
less and of course marginalized
because male dominated societies
simply got away with it.
But you can't look at wage inequality
between men and women today for example
and not consider cost efficiency.
That's really the motivation.
It's not that men sit back and say
"Women are inferior,
I'm going to pay them less
because they don't deserve it."
It's because they know
this pattern still exists
and they can get away with it
to a certain degree.
I point this out again because you have
to look at human-induced group deprivation
from an economic perspective
before considering cultural matters.
Obviously culture is a big part of things,
it's not always economic,
but you'd be surprised how much
economic involvement past and present
culminates the social condition we see today
including ongoing oppression,
marginalization of groups, etc.
Now as far as disabled
people as he brought up,
it should be readily apparent that
the economic value of people
that have limited capacities, physically or mentally,
make them of less
commercial value by default.
If the libertarian theory of
human value in financial terms,
meaning you get what you work for and so on,
if that's true,
then those that unfortunately suffer
from disabilities of whatever kind
are always going to suffer because the system
simply isn't humane enough to respect them.
The people are worthless to the system.
And as far as those that
have been incarcerated,
which is characteristic
of the US social approach
to further repress those that have
committed crimes on one level,
keep in mind that the
history of convict leasing,
the modern corporate employment of
prisoners for a fraction of minimum wage,
coupled with modern for-profit prisons
that seek increased prison capacity
so they can get more money, presents a cloud
of economic pressures that have very
little reason, very little incentive,
to do anything but continue
limiting people's rights
and literally oppress them and exploit them.
[A. Kasparian] Income inequality continues
to be a great tragedy in a country
such as America where
you have so much productivity,
so much wealth,
but so much of it is
concentrated at the top 1%.
And the reality is another
portion of that tragedy is how
we have allowed the wealthiest individuals
to essentially take hold of the narrative
regarding all of us
and stereotype us as individuals
who expect entitlements,
who expect to get things handed to us,
when in reality as Senator Warren
brilliantly put:
we want equality of opportunity.
[PJ] So I wanted to throw this part in by Kasparian
because it sets up a couple of interesting points.
First, income inequality is a problem in
the 21st century regardless of country,
including the fact America is not an island.
If people are going to complain about
inequality generated from the loss of jobs
due to outsourcing, you have
to then take into account
the existing deprivation or inequality
in the outsourced areas
that are being exploited.
Companies would not outsource unless they
can get people to work cheaper, obviously,
so this is an international synergy.
We should also remember the economic differences
between the north and southern hemispheres
considering this macroeconomic
inequality that has been created
largely through the force of
colonization and globalization.
I want to point out that
without exaggeration,
America is basically this
spoiled child empire that has,
at least its business and government culture,
has raped and pillaged its way to wealth
since the dawn of the 20th century;
its economic growth has occurred
on the backs of other nations.
And then the American public is surprised
when the US business-driven leadership
enables the exact same kind of abuse
in its own populations domestically?
That should be no surprise.
In the game of economic exploitation
of class there are no nations,
there are only those who can dominate and
those who are vulnerable to domination.
This is another reason why the Union argument,
which will be talked about more later,
really falls flat today.
Companies simply are not
bound by national borders,
they will influence any legislation
to restrict their movement,
and hence unions can be
sidestepped very easily
by simply moving operations to
economically weaker nations.
The second thing I want to point out is this
narrative she mentions which is a good point,
which condemns anyone seeking non-market
support or benefits, entitlements,
and they're considered lazy
freeloading socialists as we know.
This has been a powerful tool of propaganda.
But rather than counter it through
just kind of moral objection
it's best to point out
that society as a whole
IS the generating force of
innovation and hence wealth.
Everything we see in terms of
material and intellectual progress
is a social outcome.
It is a social outcome
whether it's generational,
building upon people's
knowledge as time goes on,
or its lateral in the sense of
sharing ideas in the short term
as exemplified by say the power
of the open source movement,
advancing industrial and scientific
development through the group mind.
And that's just the way it is;
no one comes up with anything on their own.
There are no true geniuses.
There are geniuses in the temporal sense
that have built upon other people's work
but no one just spontaneously
comes up with anything.
It's always a social process.
So the propaganda that people
should get what they work for -
as if the competitive market we
see is a level playing field or
in some kind of equality,
where each individual is working to
climb their own individual mountain,
and if they reach the top of that
mountain they should be rewarded
disproportionately against those that
don't reach the top of that mountain -
this is preposterous from
a systems perspective,
a true sociological perspective,
a true epistemological perspective.
Not only is there no level playing field,
people are also not equal in their
abilities or in their biology
and have different strengths and weaknesses.
These are not strengths and weaknesses that
are universally assumed, in other words,
what seems like a strength
or a weakness in one context
could very well be the
opposite in another context.
This propaganda will say that
those with weaker strengths
mental or physically or, who are just lazy,
they deserve less in this sort of
socially Darwinistic assumption,
and it's a very dangerous assumption,
and it's a very false assumption.
So, culture has become obsessed
with individual success,
so-called success, ignoring the
collective reality of our existence.
So coming back to Kasparian's point
people today more than ever
should be receiving a dividend
of society so to speak.
There's nothing wrong with the idea
of people being born into a society
that's actually designed
to take care of them,
building upon the fruits of what
prior generations have done.
There is no greater means to
generate real equality of opportunity
than to actually remove
the stress of survival.
Providing people with the
necessities of life is the root
of allowing people to
actually be creative and free
and to develop and prosper.
So if people could just be relieved of
that foundational stress of survival,
having to worry about
their children's education,
worried about their next job,
worried about their health costs and so on,
if we can alleviate that,
there is your precondition for true
equality of opportunity to
allow people to flourish,
as promoted by organizations
like The Zeitgeist Movement
and new forms of economic models.
So anyway let's not confuse equality
of opportunity with something like
equal opportunity employer or other
market-based notions once again
because equality simply doesn't exist
in this type of socioeconomic structure.
- But business won't come
to this area because there's
no sewage infrastructure.
And if there's no business
there's no tax base
to build any sewage infrastructure -
do you see a pattern here?
about how this works.
So you get these areas
of poverty that just get
locked in poverty.
[PJ] I threw in this comment because
it's just another example of the
procedural dynamics of
market logic once again,
even though no one is speaking of
these types of feedback systems
in that context.
These dynamics have to be pointed out
not as though they are some anomaly
but underscoring the core logic
of the way the system works.
Of course investors are not going to
come to regions that they can't exploit
because there isn't proper infrastructure.
So it becomes a self feeding cycle of
more and more poverty and deprivation
and isolation and so on.
This is a structural problem,
not a problem of policy.
[C. Flowers] Some of those same type of
attitudes that existed prior to the 1960s,
the structural racism that was reinforced by
racial terror is still in existence today.
[PJ] Flowers brings up
structural racism, and again
you can't really talk about racism
without talking about classism.
Classism is racism's father
and racist tendencies, which are created
through economic fear of other groups,
can only be resolved through removing
that economic fear in the end.
Now this isn't to say that all bigoted
views are somehow economically related.
But generally speaking if you view history
and look at patterns of
bigotry across groups,
you will see a history of economic
oppression or economic fear.
And I can't emphasize how important
that foundation is to understand
to try and stop modern bigoted behavior.
There is no silver bullet, but the
closest thing to a silver bullet today
is working to create true
economic equality on this planet,
removing groupistic fears.
[M. Moore] Water doesn't just get dirty.
Those are the decisions that get made.
And you don't have clean drinking water
because of decisions about money
that are made- we were
talking backstage about Flint.
And there are many Flints around
this country and it's not just
that we have an environmental problem
but we have an economic problem
where those people - in your case
in Alabama, in my case in Flint -
where decisions get made where
they say "You know what?
These people,
they're not worth the investment."
[PJ] I again almost got excited here
hoping Moore would link what he just
described to the inherent incentives
and procedural dynamics
of the market economy.
Instead the phenomenon pointed out
of economically poor or dead regions,
is explained in an almost conspiratorial way.
Apathy is not malicious intent.
Business logic doesn't care.
Same with the homeless crisis.
Homeless people don't have any money,
they're not economically viable,
so they are ignored.
So these decisions he speaks of
are about what's profitable and what isn't,
and deep poverty-riddled areas in America
are really systemic outcomes.
Primary logic of markets -
efficient regional exploitation -
if it can't be exploited
investment doesn't occur.
So, Flint Michigan and other such
regions really need to be understood as
"negative market externalities,"
negative externalities of capitalism
that are inevitable like pollution,
not some failure of policy.
- Economic justice should
be a moral imperative.
Why are we relying on the
private sector to begin with?
Somebody's dignity should not be
based in the profit of a firm-
that's just the bottom line.
[Audience cheering]
[PJ] And the crowd goes wild!
Yet it's this kind of moral
invocation that continues to stifle
any type of technical progress
in the activist community.
We have to stop thinking in
terms of what is right morally,
demanding people act against their
own self-interest in the market game.
Because that's what the invocation implies.
It's exhausting listening to
the platitudes and righteousness
of what "should be" in this public
debate on effectively human rights,
when we are entrenched in a system that
is really morally bankrupt by default
and isn't designed to
favor equality or justice.
It's designed to favor
hierarchy and INjustice.
Everybody's dignity so to speak
is contingent upon income and
profit in this type of system.
One's dignity is proportional to
their purchasing power in other words,
for only their purchasing
power gives them in effect
any human rights, to whatever degree.
- When we talk about the
decline of the middle class
clearly were talking about the loss
of 50,000 factories in
this country since 2001,
of jobs being sent abroad to China, etc.,
of workers now working for
much lower wages than they use to,
and the decline of the trade union movement.
I want to say a few words about those issues.
[PJ] And this begins the extensive
conversation about unions
which seems to be at the core of the
solutions proposed by this panel.
While unions are important
to keep some balance
in market class warfare
as I touched upon before,
remember we live in a
different condition today.
The unions had strong force
decades ago and political power
but the natural gravitations
of capitalism have eroded that,
and rather than look at this as an ebb-and-flow
let's look at this as an evolution.
Sanders mentioned the sending of
jobs overseas, declining wages,
marginalization, battles against unions, etc.
The implication is that these
things are supposed to not happen?
When of course the truth is that the
entire gravitation of our economy ensures
this constant diminishment, attenuation
and antagonism from the ownership class
which really holds power,
as naturally would be the case
in this type of government
with the foundation being markets once again.
It may seem redundant for me to say all this,
but if this Town Hall was supposed
to be progressive and in-depth,
we can't keep falling back on these
old notions of economic warfare
and the idea that the lower classes
will simply organize more strongly,
develop strong unions, influence
political party and somehow maintain
a social justice equilibrium.
While it is certainly possible
with very heavy improbable,
but counter-system legislation to
stop international capital flows,
the outsourcing of labor and so on,
along with perhaps the application
of universal basic income to give
the working class less vulnerability,
enhancing their ability to fight back against
being manipulated into lower
wages or poor circumstances -
that's simply not the way it's gonna go
if government is composed of business power.
I'm not saying anything is impossible,
once again I'm saying that it's improbable.
And I know the conversation is difficult
regarding trying to make structural
changes to our economic system.
It's extremely difficult and requires
a deep mass movement and sharp focus
about what the changes need to be.
But the fact that we're leaving this out of
the conversation here is the actual problem.
[C. Estrada] But even 15 isn't a living wage.
It's not the wage that we grew up with
and so we have to have 15 and a union.
Workers have to have a seat at the table
because if it's left up to employers
they're always going to make a
decision on their bottom line.
It is about their bottom line,
they're always going to send it
to their shareholders in corporations
so I agree with what you said,
we can't leave it up to the private sector.
Workers have to get a seat at the table,
and how do we build that
trade union movement again
when employers are spending
a billion dollars a year
fighting and union busting,
fighting workers as they try to organize.
[PJ] Not to run this into the ground
but I keep trying to find a
fitting analogy that embraces
the kind of naivety we hear along
the lines of what Estrada is saying.
She points out the actual problem
but doesn't give the gravity of
that problem the weight it deserves.
For lack of a better analogy it's like
capturing a lion in the wild from Africa,
plopping it in the living room as a pet,
and then being surprised when it attacks you.
It's also important to point out that unions
are really no different in their incentives
than business owners.
If a union had the option and power
to increase its wages a hundredfold,
you can bet that they probably would
in the exact same self-interest,
self-preservation that business owners have,
to pay as little as
possible to their employees.
So unions and management, unions and company,
are really two sides of the same coin
of economic warfare.
And the goal should be to remove
the need for war to begin with.
So yes, the working class needs
a seat at the table obviously,
in the context that we are in,
but I'm tired of people once again speaking
of unions as though they are a solution
when they're really just a reaction.
- Because 60% of workers want a union
so you ask why don't they get one?
And they don't get one because
they're being fired,
they're being told that
their jobs will go to Mexico
where they're competing with $3.95.
[PJ] What did you expect?
Estrada again makes it seem like
these behaviors are anomalous
and the implication is that
some kind of legislative force
has to come in and limit the ability
of businesses to diminish union power.
But if the ownership class
runs government as it does,
as it would be expected to
given the economic foundation of government,
why would it favor any such legislation?
Even with mass voter force
it still runs against the current.
We also can't forget the dark
violent history of unions
as the most central
expression of class warfare.
When unions were considered anti-American
and communistic, the Red Scare
worked to try and diminish union power
and so on in the mid 20th century.
I want to again reinforce
that there's a current,
a trend in our society,
and that current flows one direction.
Anything that moves against that current,
of the market's inherent
incentives and procedural dynamics,
will periodically drown or be
pulled in the other direction
one way or another, just a matter of time.
- Unions built America's middle class,
it'll take unions to rebuild
America's middle class.
I just think that's ... [Applause]
[PJ] No, unions today will
not rebuild the middle class
because conditions have changed.
They will help to whatever
degree they can be enforced
but they have very diminished
efficacy in the current
condition we have on the planet now.
What allowed for the middle class
after the post-World War 2 era
was a synergy of influences.
The middle class flourished in a short-lived
domestic and international condition.
With Europe and much of the
industrialized world in shambles,
emerging US hegemony enabled a
delicate period of stress reduction;
it was a petri-dish stage of a new era.
US-based industry started to
grow and dominate as a result.
These industries then expanded to
absorbing wealth from other regions
through emerging globalization,
hence reinforcing the US Empire,
still semi-loyal to the nation.
In this, union power was far more tolerated
because there was less pressure on American
society to be competitive on the whole
against other nations.
At the same time the ongoing
Industrial Revolution allowed for
increased productivity and
hence a more relative abundance,
again easing social stress.
Sorry to be rambley here but with
anything sociological it's complex.
You can't understand the post-World
War 2 period of US growth
and the rise of the middle class without
taking into account the international condition
and recognizing new trends.
It was really just a matter
of time before self-interest
of these new powerful industrial
capitalist organizations evolved
into evermore greedy and ruthless action,
including working against
its own domestic population
just as it works against third
world nations in exploitation.
Transnational corporations simply
stopped having respect for the borders,
suddenly this grace period of
middle-class respect ended,
as corporate America expanded globally.
So the middle class diminished
in America because the very idea
of the American middle
class became irrelevant.
Companies became international.
The entire dynamic changed,
and hence it makes sense that the US,
which houses most of the transnational
corporations that are empowered today,
at least houses in the sense of
"we are the origin nation,"
but that is not to be confused
with the idea that there's any
loyalty to the US middle class
as these folks basically imply.
Today businesses really don't see nations.
Transnational dominance and capitalist
expression doesn't care about regions.
It's not loyal to anything
so what's basically happened
is the abuse that you've seen
through colonization and globalization
has been transferred domestically as
corporations became more international.
And good luck trying to legislate
around that kind of global dynamic
to somehow magically improve
the American middle class.
- Back when I was growing up
in Flint Michigan
nearly every job was a union job.
The person who bagged the
groceries in the checkout line-
there was a union for grocery bag baggers.
And everybody did well.
And you only needed one income.
[PJ] Here we have again the nostalgic
position that America can simply return
to some institutionalized
systemic state that existed prior
when that can't happen,
again because of international dynamics
and just general technological
change and so on.
Things evolve,
they don't just ebb and flow once again,
in society, sociologically.
Like Donald Trump's
"Make America great again!"
we're obsessed with this as a society,
we can't seem to think
systemically or from an
evolutionary perspective,
understanding how outcomes change
circumstances as time moves forward.
And I want to give an analogy for this,
an analogy for market capitalism itself.
Think about the discovery
of hydrocarbons and oil.
If it wasn't for the discovery
of hydrocarbons and oil
we would not have all of the
great progress that we've seen.
But now what is hydrocarbon energy doing?
It's destroying our atmosphere,
it's polluting the environment
to almost a deadly extent.
So at once it used to be fine, best we knew,
turned out to be deeply problematic on
another level as time moved forward.
And this is exactly how people should
be thinking about market capitalism:
as an evolutionary phenomenon.
[G. Lafer] As a political scientist
I'm asked sometimes how does it happen
that in a democracy laws get passed that
go against the interests of the majority.
And to answer that question
we really have to look
behind the politicians and behind the parties
to see what is the real power
that is writing our laws.
And that's not just the Koch brothers
but it's a handful of the biggest
and most powerful political actors in America
which is the big corporate lobbies.
The biggest vehicle through which corporate
political activity happens in the States
is called the American Legislative
Exchange Council or ALEC.
They meet several times a year
in committees that are made up half of elected
legislators and half of corporate lobbyists.
[PJ] So Lafer here continues the
common general outrage argument
that politicians are corrupted
by lobbyists for money,
laws are being written by
lobbyists and so on and so forth,
as if that should be a surprise.
And I'm not gonna go through the litany of detailed
incentives and causality that explain this.
Rather I'm just gonna put it this way:
If legislation is not for sale
in a social system where
everything else is for sale,
we have a consistency problem.
Market economics as the
foundation of our social system
says that people should be able
to operate without coercion
on a voluntary basis,
and whatever happens within those parameters
anything can be exchanged
and so on and so forth.
So buying and selling politicians
is like buying and selling pizzas.
This whole idea of getting money
out of politics is possibly
the most naive platitude and
argument I've ever heard,
because it goes against absolutely everything
we are taught about how our society is run.
So as far as I'm concerned if
we're going to be consistent
the Koch brothers SHOULD own and run America.
If you want to stop the corrupt
influence of groups that
are disproportionately gaining
advantage over other groups
then maybe, just maybe, it's time we begin
asking what kind of economy
would actually facilitate that
as a social precondition.
- Describe for our audience how it happens
that not only here in the Congress now
but in state after state,
the needs of working people are ignored,
the needs of the wealthy
and powerful are addressed.
- Well first of all I think it's important
to say that it's not a partisan issue.
As you said a majority of
both Republicans and Democrats
support a higher minimum wage,
support a right to paid sick leave,
think that Citizens United should be
overturned, and a bunch of other things.
And the corporate lobbies are not
cheerleaders for the Republican Party.
They want more money and power for themselves
and they're not hesitant about going after
pro-working-people Republicans. In Michigan,
when right-to-work (which is a law that's designed
to kill unions in the private sector) was passed,
the Senate majority leader who was
a Republican was opposed to it.
And he was taken in a backroom with
big money donors who essentially said
"Do what we say or this will be
your last term in office because
we'll pull our money from you and
will fund a primary opponent."
[PJ] Building upon the consistency of money
and how those with the most
money are going to win
(they vote with their dollar, no pun intended),
we also have to think about the
evolution of this society once again.
For the first time in
history the United States
has both a plutonomy and a plutocracy.
Plutocracy simply means the government
is run by big elite business interests
in favor of money and capital and so on,
and a plutonomy is an economy
that has such a large
percentage driven by the 1%,
the enormously wealthy are spending
so much money amongst themselves,
that they actually have more
importance on a certain level
to the entire overall economy,
making the lower class economic
behavior virtually irrelevant.
The amount of money that's being
moved amongst the upper 5-10%
is so extreme that it greatly
diminishes the importance,
economic importance,
of the middle and lower classes.
When you take that into account
you begin to see something very
interesting and that is that
capitalism is basically a
precondition for fascism.
And plutonomy and plutocracy
emphasizes the wealthy class
while diminishing the lower classes
and hence different forms of constraint
will always exist to dominate
because power and money
are so deeply intertwined.
- The issues with regards to politics
is beyond just voting and that's
clearly evident with the ways in which
corporatists can lobby and control things.
So I think we need to be even more
sophisticated than just talking about voting.
Voting is obviously essential and important
but beyond voting we need social movements
and Senator Sanders has talked a lot
about this, building a social movement,
he's used the word political revolution.
[PJ] I certainly agree that we need something
more sophisticated than just voting.
Social movements however need
to have an actual platform.
What kind of platform are you people
proposing for these social movements?
Just people saying they want more equality
and using old techniques to achieve that,
that have proven a lack of efficacy?
People standing in free speech zones
yelling at buildings, holding up signs,
hoping someone will look out the window
from Congress and listen to them?
And that's another thing by the way:
have you ever noticed that the political
process effectively for the general population
is really just this half-assed
kind of public display technique?
People have no say on direct
policy unless there's a referendum.
And yet we actually sit back
and call this democracy,
holding up signs, yelling at buildings,
electing people that don't pay attention to us.
It seems ridiculous as a concept but yet
people are still locked into that world.
So I ask again: what are these
social movements exactly proposing?
So there needs to be a very defined platform
which is why I'm advocating
more radical approaches here
because unfortunately the platforms
being promoted are just more of the same
and accomplish little.
- And the vision that all
of us are talking about,
I know we get criticized
"we're too radical, we're too extreme,"
you know what?
All of the stuff that we're talking about
exists in other countries around the world.
[Applause]
[PJ] And I'm gonna conclude
this critique with this.
It seems rational to say
"Well, we can just superimpose the policies
of other more successful social democracies
like Norway and Finland, on the United States
and everything will be fine."
If only it was that simple.
And this is probably one of the more
complicated sociological considerations
because you have to look
at the state of any nation
as a consequence of the
entire global evolution.
Like in domestic society,
on this planet we have upper-class nations,
middle-class nations
and lower-class nations, generally speaking.
Upper-class nations are the empires:
China, the United States, Russia;
middle-class nations include
European social democracies:
Finland, Norway, Scandinavian countries,
while lower-class nations
include much of the Global South
such as in Africa or destitute
regions of the Middle East.
And just as inside the domestic
economy of the United States
the dynamics of trade and politics
merge together to create hierarchy.
Global hierarchy mirrors domestic hierarchy
in terms of class relationships.
At the same time
each individual nation of
course has pertinent histories
that define the nature of
that nation and culture
such as the history of North Korea
or the history of Cuba.
It's very easy to track to a certain
degree the influences that have generated
those nations and why
they are the way they are
due to geopolitical policy,
war, sanctions and so on.
And it's within this synergy of history
and the real-time dynamic of national classes
that explains why the United
States is such a bizarre anomaly
and why simply imposing reforms that we
see in other nations really won't work
because they don't fit the dynamics.
As an analogy if you drive your car into a
traditional middle-class neighborhood somewhere,
you might get the impression everyone's happy,
doing the jobs they love and so on
IF you don't take into consideration
the extremes on other ends.
So you have a housing project
of poor people on one end,
you have Beverly Hills-styled
neighborhoods on the other,
and you have the middle-class
neighborhoods in the middle.
This gives a false impression
if you saw nothing else
that this pocket of middle-class
happiness exists on its own.
Oh capitalism works!
the middle class is there.
But it's a pocket, and it only exists
because of the extremes on either side.
So without going into
any more detail as to why
the United States has become so bizarre
in this upper-class national nightmare,
it is within this context
we have to understand that
the system of political and economic power
we have in the United States today,
how its evolved, where we are,
will simply not allow,
easily, basic human interest
and public health advancements
such as say universal health care.
It's representative of a different
stage with the capitalist sickness
and that much harder to change.
Anyway much could be said on that but
I'm tired now so that's enough for me.
I hope this has been helpful
and I would appreciate
if people share this video with others
that are not informed
about these relationships.
Thank you.
