Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: In this episode, we discuss the 2017 film Saving Capitalism, which is currently airing on Netflix and follows former U.S. labor Secretary Terry Robert Wright as he breaks down how the US Economic system has been intentionally configured in recent times to primarily benefit the few at the expense of the many, and how that in fact imperils the continued operation of our democratic system.
Hello, welcome to the Call Like I See it podcast. I'm James Keys, and joining me today is a man who, when he sets his sights on something, can be quite a terrifier. Tunde. Ogunlana Tunde. You ready to show them why podcasting is your art, even if you clown around sometimes?
[00:00:56] Speaker B: Of course, man. I thought you were going to ask me how my wife felt about when I set my sights on her and how that was received. So we'll make a difference.
[00:01:07] Speaker A: You keep that private. Yeah.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: That'Ll be the next show for the audience.
[00:01:12] Speaker A: We'll interview my wife, the after hours show.
[00:01:15] Speaker B: We'll see how that goes.
[00:01:18] Speaker A: Before we get started, if you enjoy the show, I ask that you subscribe and like the show on YouTube or your podcast app. Doing so really helps the show out. We're recording this on October 20th, 2nd, 2024, and today we continue our streaming between the Lines series and take a look at the 2017 Netflix documentary film Saving Capitalism. It's directed by Jacob Kornbluff and Sari Gilman, and the film follows professor and former U.S. labor Secretary Robert Reich as he embarks on a book tour from his 2015 book, Saving Capitalism for the Many, not for the Few.
Through this, Reich is able to explain concepts like free markets and how free markets, while oftentimes people think of them as that being the absence of government action, that these are actually creations of the government and they need to be maintained by the government, while also discussing the state of the American economy and how the rules of the system in America have been manipulated through government action over time under the guise of deregulation for free market in order actually just to rig the system against the masses. And Wright also gets into how this manipulation goes hand in hand with the will of the people, being further and further disconnected from the levels of levers of power and how that can get dangerous in many respects. So tune that to get us to start, to get us to get our discussion started. What do you make of kind of the claim he really starts out with that one of the biggest fallacies that's accepted in our political and economic discussions is that free markets kind of, you know, result from the government getting out of the way like they just magically spring forth once the government gets out of the way.
[00:03:00] Speaker B: No, I think first of all I thought it was a great documentary for all the reasons you're citing and what we'll discuss. But also I think it was very good in the way that it was pretty succinct. You know, it wasn't one of these two, three hour kind of tomes of all this economic jargon and, or a multi part series. It was around an hour, hour and 15 minutes and it was very well explained. And so I think that helps us even in our discussion now because some of these things can be very complex. And the way Robert Rice, as kind of the main character narrating the documentary, he was really able to expose some very straightforward simplicities. And it's not that they're necessarily simple, but if you just kind of really just see them for what they are, they're pretty simple. And I think that alludes to what you're saying is that, you know, this idea of free markets, because one of the things that made me realize is as consumers of political information, meaning all of us as voters in a Democracy, let's go 30,000ft there, everyone is marketing for our attention. So there's a lot of slogans that have been thrown around culturally for like you and I's whole lifetime. Right. And I think what you're alluding to is just that the idea of free markets, it does sound like, well, the free market must mean it's unshackled by the chains of a government or by some overlord. That's, that's, that's, that's stifling all of this competition and all these, it's free.
[00:04:32] Speaker A: Of something, you know.
[00:04:33] Speaker B: Correct. Yeah, that's what I mean.
[00:04:34] Speaker A: It's a market free of something. Yeah.
[00:04:37] Speaker B: But, but the reality is the government is also necessary in order to make sure the free markets function well, that there isn't collusion or monopolistic activity that would cause a free market to no longer be free.
Things like regulation, regulation of securities markets, like the stock market, regulation of banking. And these are things that we've seen just even recent years, not even going back to like the 08 crash. But remember what happened with Silicon Valley Bank? You know, it's, it's, that's my point. Like we have this very interesting relationship culturally in America with our government and free markets because we want the government out of things and everything free. But then when something like Silicon Valley bank happens, everyone's looking at the government saying, oh my God, what are you going to do? And so. Well, yeah, that to me was, yeah, the interest.
[00:05:25] Speaker A: Well that was kind of the point he made where like the government's going to be involved no matter what. Either the government is involved. Yeah. At the beginning and throughout the process to try to prevent these major catastrophes or the government's got to step in when these major catastrophes happen at the worst possible moment and spend the most possible money and you know, like trying to keep things floating. I think the idea of, you know, this central premise, like I said, that he really started with like, hey, the way you're thinking about a free market is not necessarily an accurate reflection of what you're talking about because I think there's, there's the two terms, you know, there's the free part and there's the market part and I think really the piece. And then I know this just from, from things that I had read previous to this as well. Just the market part of it. You, that's you need the government to have the market in itself, you know, and so if you don't have a government setting up a market where like, like there are rules to the game, so to speak. And he actually listed some of these things. The government has to set up systems for property against monopoly. If you have a monopoly, you don't have a market. A market requires multiple sellers in competition. And so if you, if you allow, if you, if you don't enforce antitrust, if you just allow big companies to buy up other big companies and you end up with Standard Oil, then there's no market there. So the government has to break up larger entities, successful entities in order to maintain a market. But he said, I'll go through them all. Property market, excuse me, property monopoly, contracts, bankruptcy and enforcement of, you know, with presumably of all these things. And so you can't have the market. The government has to set up the market. And then the idea of it being free is really about how much the government is going to. And once the, once the system is kind of set up beyond enforcing the basics of making sure, hey, there's multiple participants. If people sign contracts, then they honor those contracts. Other than monitoring the basis, what basics, what else does the government need to do do you want? Now I think most of us would agree we don't want the government to be heavy handed at that point. And that's where you get into this idea of it being a free market. It's saying, okay, beyond the core stuff, there's things that we do want the government to do. But we don't necessarily want them to just be looking for things to do, so to speak, like it might be. And the documentary went through some of these, like when you had Glass Steagall put in place after the Great Depression, and they say, hey, investment banks and traditional banks, you can't be under the same house because that encourages the investment banks to use people's money to gamble in the investment world with. And so. And that was taken down in the late 90s that they reversed that law. And then less than 10 years later, you have a financial crash which involved the investment banks gambling with people's savings money. So it's these things like. So that's the kind of thing that. That's not impeding a free market necessarily to say, hey, these are kind of risks that we've seen that we want to make sure that we. So we don't have to bail people out on the back end. We kind of put. Put a speed limit on you on the front end. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you're not operating with a free market. And so I think that kind of understanding, that overall construct is very important because you are correct. It's presented as if all of this stuff is so complicated that, you know, we kind of just, we can be told anything. And if we like the person telling us that, we just go along with it.
[00:08:37] Speaker B: Yeah. And one of the things, as you're talking, it makes me realize the government's role in all of this is clear. I mean, whether you like the role or not, meaning not you personally, but someone listening to us is besides the point. It's more of.
What do you call it? Like, I see the positive aspects of the way our government has dealt with business in general. And like you said, I recognize that over regulating certain sectors and certain things can stifle activity. But you used an important term with one of the rules, which was bankruptcy. And again, people don't appreciate that the United States was like, profoundly at the forefront of the idea of this bankruptcy. The way we see it now here domestically in the United States and now in a lot of first world nations. In the 1800s, most parts of the world still locked people up. They had debtors, prisons in most of Western Europe, and debts used to follow generations. If your parents had debt and died with it, you owed that debt as a kid. The United States, we have a process called probate, which is where debts are settled to death. But more importantly, the idea that the government of the United States and then the states and all that said that Bankruptcy is not something that you go to prison over. Generally, bankruptcy in the United States is a way for an entrepreneur to wipe the slate clean. Now, it could be embarrassing, it could hurt your credit, all that, but you'll survive it. And so what that's done in the United States, more so than other economies, has allowed for that entrepreneurial spirit to be unleashed. And again, this velocity of money to flow through the system. And so that's an example where.
[00:10:19] Speaker A: Real quick with that. Because one key piece with that is that that encourages risk taking. You know, if you want to start a business and it's like, yeah, but if it doesn't work, then I'm going to be in debt. They might throw me in jail, or my kids are going to have to pay this stuff off if I don't make it, or if I don't survive everything like that, then you're less likely to try things. So that's something that encourages more market participants. Again, the government is trying to create the market here, so we want to incentivize people to enter the market. And bankruptcy is one of the ways it does that. But one of the things the documentary talked about, though, is how, in terms of this idea of how the rules have been manipulated over time is that the bankruptcy rules have been very. Been liberalized and kind of really opened up for. For businesses where at the same time they've been tightened up for individuals, you know, and so that's. That's not really how. If you're trying to encourage risk taking, that's not how the system is supposed to work. You're supposed to be trying to encourage the individuals or give the individuals a chance to start over so that they can try again, so to speak. Not necessarily for the. That's not necessarily for the businesses to get to a point where they behave recklessly and then say, oh, well, we'll just use bankruptcy in that sense. So it's. That's another one of the examples where he gave, where it was just like, hey, while we're all arguing about things that may be considered trivial, this economic system, the people who understand that are kind of turning the levers in ways that are. That benefit the few at the expense of the masses.
[00:11:44] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I mean, unfortunately, we see that also in the legal field, you know, in your world, in this country, where, you know, the manipulation of certain courts and judges and all that, and people pushing certain cases up certain different avenues where they know they're going to get a favorable judge to give a favorable ruling, and those usually are in the favor of either large corporations or certain ideological interests which aren't really in the interest of the majority of Americans. And he alluded to some of that stuff in the documentary as well. Not so much outside of economics, but I think it shows. This is why I like this documentary because as an economist type of guy, he was able to kind of put together several crosscurrents in our culture and things that have happened, let's say, in the last 50 years in the system, and then tie that into why so many Americans also feel apathetic and feel why and why they feel the system doesn't work well. And that kind of lead to this populism that we've seen in the last decade or so. And so I think, yeah, it's interesting, James, because he kind of ties the economy and the democracy together in the idea that in the end we're the responsible ones, meaning all of us, the society, the citizens we vote, these elected officials in who make legislation and make these decisions. And if we're not dialed in and tuned in, then we can't expect that it's gonna go any better than it has. Yeah, that's my way of saying it.
[00:13:20] Speaker A: But that's not because I agree with you. The way he tied it together is like if we lose control of, you know, kind of the economy as far as one that serves the interests of the many and not just the interests of the few, but then we can lose control of the democracy in the same sense. And he actually directly hits on the court case Citizens United and what that did from the entry of more and more money into the government. And I want to get to that, you know, because I think that that's another key piece, you know, in this. But before we do, the populism piece is really interesting because he really put that succinctly because he pointed to post Gilded Age in the United States, which is a time similar to now, where you have this explosive concentration of wealth in the hands of the few and the many really struggling. He points out there's two ways that it can go when that happens and that public anger rises up. And he does at the same time now actually it was interesting when he resigned in 1997 from labor secretary. He talked about how this creating this two tiered society, you know, creates anger and disillusionment that is easily manipulated, you know, along these lines. But the populism, he talks about how in the late 1800s, early 1900s, the anger and which led to the populism was harnessed by leaders to then reform the system, that's when you first had antitrust laws onto the book saying, hey, you guys can't just get one big company that controls everything. So and that stuff started to be enforced, other rules, regulations, Teddy Roosevelt, the trust buster and all that. And so leadership didn't take that energy from the public and then try to manipulate that for their own personal glorification. They took it and reformed the system with it. And that went even further when the, the, the, the few broke the economy with the, with the Great Depression. Then the fdr, you know, actually took it even further and said, okay, we're going to rebalance the system even more. But the other, the other side, it can either go to a reform minded or it can go to a popular, excuse me, an autocratic type of authoritarian strong man. Have one guy can fix it, so to speak, which can be, get, become less democratic, not more democratic. So it's one way or the other that societies tend to go when you have this, this unfairness building up that people feel and then they're looking for a way to kind of address it. So just like, well, I guess I throw all that out. I can't. I'm not going to just pivot on you. I'll let you respond. But then I do want to get to his discussion on the Citizens United and all the money that goes just.
[00:15:51] Speaker B: To finish up this section. No, because I was going to smile when he said about his resignation in 1997 because they said, they said that it was.
[00:16:00] Speaker A: And we're talking about Robert Reich there.
[00:16:01] Speaker B: Robert Reich, yeah. He needed to spend more time with his family. And I was like, oh, that's the ultimate. You know, when you're in some big position like, you know, or like when Stan Van Gundy was the head of the Heat, the coach of the Heat, and all of a sudden Pat Riley's the coach. You're like, oh, Stan Van Gundy wanted to spend more time with his family. I'm thinking, hold on. So he coaching Dwyane Wade, Shaq and Alonzo Mourning and now you want to go. You worked your way to the top of your profession and now you want to go spend time with. No, they fired you and put in Pat Riley. So I feel like that was the.
[00:16:29] Speaker A: Example of Pat Riley was the executive, but he was the one that fired him. Exactly.
[00:16:35] Speaker B: Pat Riley said, damn, I want to coach this team.
But yeah, that's another show too. But no, I thought about it because he talked about the different. Again, this goes back to real life human stuff, right? The different. Ideologies within that administration at the time in the 90s. And what that told me when they said he had to go spend more time with his family was that Robert Rubin, who was the treasury secretary at the time, kind of won that internal fight. The one you were talking about represented.
[00:17:02] Speaker A: Or he was a former Goldman, Goldman Sachs guy.
[00:17:04] Speaker B: Right. Wall Street.
[00:17:04] Speaker A: He represented that, you know, like that side where so.
[00:17:07] Speaker B: And that's where he talked about that.
[00:17:09] Speaker A: The other side.
[00:17:09] Speaker B: Yeah, that Rice came in with a genuine desire to want to kind of adjust some of these things that got out of whack between, let's say the top of the corporate structure versus the working and the labor.
[00:17:23] Speaker A: And it looks like he lost just real quick. One of the things they cited, they were showing how the average worker pay versus the was diverg, you know, and so that was one of the things they want to try to correct. They're saying, hey, there's no reason why. And there were policy ways that they were going to try to do that, which, you know.
[00:17:41] Speaker B: No, but I'm going there with this point. That's why I want to draw this arc in the 90s. Because what happens is I realized, because you talked about the 1930s and FDR and what I realized is that just like the 1930s under Herbert Hoover was kind of like a more right wing kind of experiment of how to do economics.
[00:18:04] Speaker A: Well, I would say laissez faire more than. More than. Which. Let me just get through the point. Associate with the right.
[00:18:09] Speaker B: Yeah, but yeah, let me just get to the point because the video was great. That's what I want to say to the audience because it reminded me of the 90s, which I was alive, but I was young, I was in high school, that we lived through that again without kind of realizing it. It made me realize, watching this documentary that the 90s represented something similar where from about 92 to 2008, I mean that period of time, that 16 year period was another attempt at that laissez faire, kind of more of a libertarian right leaning experiment of like you said, the government is competing with us instead of being a partner. So let's try and weaken the government as much as possible and deregulate as much as we can. And to your point, that ended in the 08 crisis. And so it just. That's what I would just want to. Before we pull it to the next section, the reminder. And as you mentioned, that's what I wrote on one of my notes. As I said, I wanted to get to that too, which was in 1992, they showed Bill Clinton giving a speech saying that the same things we hear now, the CEO pays too high and the average working person at minimum wage is living below poverty. So it's interesting to see the same stuff being talked about for the last 35 years. But at the time, Bill Clinton specifically said CEO pay is 100 times more than the average worker. And to your point exactly, people can see this chart that Rice shows in the video. By the early 2000s, that had gone to 376 times the pay of the average worker. So you're talking in a decade. And that's what it made me realize, James. Like, well, hold on. A lot happened in the 90s that I just wasn't aware of. That this went from, Yeah, I mean 100 times to 376 is a lot in eight years.
[00:19:46] Speaker A: And it goes from over the 20 years before that. It's like in the 30s, you know, like 30 times, you know, so it's, it's, it's this ramp up. And yeah, I mean, and I think, and here, but here's kind of that point. I'll get us to the next section now. But the, we talk about it as, and I think about it as laissez faire, but it's not necessarily laissez faire. It's kind of a, it's a different type of regulation. Like one of the things specifically pointed to was the, when we did the Drug act after this was in the 2000s, still in that same timeframe though. And the law is written, the regulations are written so that the government, as a large purchaser from pharmaceutical companies is not allowed to negotiate on price. They just have to do whatever price that the company says they're going to have to pay. Any other large purchaser would surely negotiate the price. But the law was written in a way to make sure that the government couldn't do that. So the government then is, is the government is regulated, hands tied that they can't get the best deal that someone with their purchasing power could get. So it's not necessarily like the government just hands off. It's saying, actually we're going to, we're going to tweak things a little bit so that you person who owns this big company can benefit more than you otherwise should with any other large purchaser. So it's just, it's how we think about it though is like, oh, that's laissez faire. But it's like that's not laissez faire.
That's a thumb on the Scale, but we got moving, man.
[00:21:07] Speaker B: Well, real quick, though, it's oligarchy within a democr. That's what it is. Yeah, it's the creep.
[00:21:12] Speaker A: So it's the creep. And I mean. And that's. And he gets into that. And that's the next part we're in right now in talking about one of the things that during that reformist, you know, kind of populist energy that happened after the Gilded Age, one of the laws that was signed into place was a prohibition on corporate money going into political campaigns. Well, in the early 2000s, the Citizens United decision where the Supreme Court overturned that, basically equating corporate rights to individual rights and money as speech, saying basically overturning that law. Corporations can give unlimited money now. And what we've seen as a result of that is a substantial rise in the. What's called dark money, which is money. We just don't know who's giving it. But dark money going into politics. And like, that's on top of the automatic already how much money goes into politics from people we know. You're like. But so what we're seeing is money playing a larger and larger role. And what this shows is the further and further disconnect from a voter or a just an average America, any American who's not in this donor class, their connection to what's happening in the country keeps getting further and further away. You know, and so what. What stood out to you in that section or. And then, you know, talking about how, you know, again, all of these lessons that were Learned in the 1900s, early 1900s, after the gilded Age and after the Great Depression, we saw being unwound in between. In the same time period you said, between like 92 and 2008, 2010 or so, we saw them all being unwound and we're heading right back into a gilded age, which we saw didn't work out well already.
[00:22:45] Speaker B: Yeah, I know. I'll just say I was smiling because I was like, we're also seeing, you know, we've been through fascism before too, as a world, and we seem to want to experiment with that again. So, again, that's a different discussion that.
[00:22:55] Speaker A: We'Re learning after that people put in place to say, hey, so this doesn't happen again. It seems like a lot of those barriers keep people taking them back down, and then you kind of revert back to something that. Because the boundaries are gone, you know, like, maybe there's something.
[00:23:09] Speaker B: I thought about it in our discussion that it didn't escape me that George HW. Bush, ending his presidency in January of 1993, was the last president that lived through the Great Depression and could remember it and was part of that generation prior to the baby boomers. Bill Clinton and George Bush for baby boomers. And so I do think, and we've talked about this loosely in different program shows, is this idea of a living memory. I think that's very important. I've learned that as I've gotten older. I just think that leadership up until the 90s in our country and probably globally when we talk about beating back fascism and things like that. But on the economic side, our leaders had seen the Great Depression. They had lived through World War II. They lived through the oil embargo in the 70s and the kind of malaise of the 70s economy. And I just think that they understood that ecosystem and the need to balance the zeal and the animal spirits of the corporate and entrepreneur class versus the need to balance it with a regulatory environment that wouldn't allow the system to have these booms and busts and these things. And I think that like, like normal younger people think they're smarter than the old fogeys that came before them. And I'm sure with the NASDAQ and computers and by the late 90s, everybody thinking they're so much smarter and they can catch different things and, you know, the same thing happens because humans don't change. So I do think that, that, that that's part of it is just that we, we now are in a world where all of us adults who are running things didn't live through the disaster.
[00:24:45] Speaker A: We got to learn these lessons again.
[00:24:47] Speaker B: Yeah, we're going to learn the hard way, unfortunately. So I think there's a part of that, but I do think y. That's what I mean as we finish that last section about the creep, just to define that is really that this idea that the wealthy and the powerful crept back in to having their hands on the levers of power after, like you're saying that period post Gilded age, let's say 120 years ago or so late, you know, early 1900s, after they were prevented from having such a massive influence on the political system. And, you know, I mean, it's becoming just more plain as day again watching videos like this, that yes, the root of a lot of our dysfunction internally with our own culture as Americans right now and how we talk to each other, how we deal with political discourse is really based on this. It's based on the money in politics and the fact that more and more, because that Money is serving fewer and fewer interests in order to distract the rest of us in the population. We got to talk about immigrants eating people's cats and dogs and other people don't seem that important.
[00:25:56] Speaker A: Well, that, plus the fact that that's the other piece of the living memory that's been lost is that people alive now don't see how quickly that can turn into mass murder. And so they don't appreciate, like the H.W. bush generation. And it wasn't that everybody in his generation or those generations, but enough people were like, hey, this can turn really, really bad really quickly. So we got to put a tamp down on this stuff. Like, that doesn't mean you're an angel. That doesn't mean you won't play around, you know, on the line. But you definitely had an appreciation and a respect for it. From an economic sense, you can see that in H.W. bush. Going from read my lips, no new taxes, to saying, hey, we. What we're doing here as far as this, you know, trying to cut all the taxes on. On, you know, so extremely on these wealthy people and stuff like that. We can't keep living like that. But you also see it in terms of not wanting to push the envelope too far on the animal spirits as far as how people will treat what they perceive as outsiders. And so, and yeah, like, all of those are the tried and true kind of once power starts becoming too concentrated, once wealth starts becoming too concentrated, this energy in. This anger and energy in society starts bubbling up. This is why, like, if you listen to, if you, if you're watching the film and you listen to Wright's comments from 1997, you would think that he's talking about. He's talking like this year, you know, in terms of the energy, the anger, the disillusionment, how that will, you know, like what that does to people, you know. And so what we're these kind of cyclical things. It's because human beings are kind of, you know, we are stimuli response type of creatures in the same way as most things in nature are. And so when certain stimuli starts hitting us, you know, then we start reacting in certain ways. And it's not, you know, one to one or anything like that, but there's tendencies, there's. There's masses and so forth. And so what we're seeing through with the Citizens United decision is another one of the guardrails that were put in place the last time things got kind of sketchy or one of the, you know, one of the last times things got kind of sketchy being taken down. But I look at it as equivalent to, you know, what we saw with the, with Glass Steagall, you know, with, with once the, the investment. What's the, the law that kept investment banks and traditional banks separate. Traditional banks being boring banking like take in savings, make mortgage loans, you know, like just basic stuff but, or business loans or whatever but not like that. The extreme speculation on things and so forth. So we would, that got put down and then like I said, less than 10 years later you have a financial crisis that is directly tied to that and you got all these investors.
[00:28:27] Speaker B: No, a good follow up because I was thinking about it because that video was made long enough ago that a lot has happened since. You know a good example of a good way that the system responded to that was the Dodd Frank bill, the Basel Accords. A lot happened after the financial crisis. So that when Silicon Valley bank happened last year in 2023 and remember that was. We all had a little bit of emotional muscle memory from Lehman like holy crap, is the system going to go down and all that. And the Fed and the Treasury Department came and said now we're good. You know, it's just.
[00:28:55] Speaker A: And you know what? That's because of the regulation and already still like within the same, you know, Living Memory Project 2025 wants to take that stuff apart, you know, so.
[00:29:06] Speaker B: No, but, but, but let's talk about that.
[00:29:08] Speaker A: But that is because, but so the point being is that is because when you have such large sums of money coming into the system, it's going to imbalance the system and these are the things. So that's going to imbalance the system, the power dynamics and so forth. And then you're going to have this reaction from the public and then we go down this pathway where again the public either gets driven towards a reformist mind and we start solving these problems again or we go into this more authoritarian mind and anti democratic mind where we just want somebody to solve it for somebody who promises us the moon. Hey, you go solve it for us.
[00:29:43] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:29:44] Speaker A: I don't care if you say this or say that, but just I believe you're strong enough to solve this for me.
[00:29:49] Speaker B: I think that's a great way to say it, man. Like you're right, it's, it's the, the ability to respond to how people feel is going to be one of those two directions. And you're right, there's no other choice. And that's interesting Jane, because what I wrote a note while you were talking earlier as you're talking it makes me realize and I thought about this a little bit when I was watching it and like you said, the clips from Robert Reich in 97 and then even like I said Bill Clinton in 92 talking about the same stuff and I'm like, you know, it's interesting. This does remind me a little bit like climate change. There's some people have been ringing this bell for 20, 30 years that this is going to happen. If you don't deal with this, you know, the imbalances in our economic system and you know that, you know, keep taking people, you know, keep giving these breaks to the large corporations and allow the wealth to get wealthier, at some point it's going to topple over and just like the climate and maybe because we've had these recent storms and the issues with FEMA and the propaganda around all that, it's, it's more like I'm thinking about the same thing. Like if we're smart about climate change and not, I'm not even arguing how it started, I'm beyond that now. It's just we know that the weather's changing. Would we rebuild houses right on the coast in Florida, Will we rebuild infrastructure the same way? Or should we have a game plan in place of how to deal with this going forward as it's going to keep happening? And I think it's the same thing.
[00:31:06] Speaker A: As long as, but this is, this is where all the corporate, like there's so much corporate money involved in denying climate change at this point because people's.
[00:31:14] Speaker B: That'S, that's from business interest that we.
[00:31:17] Speaker A: Can'T get to a consensus in society that we can then start making, start making plans and making decisions because other short term business interests will take over. Like there was some amazing stats in there. Like it's like the people that studied how far the average person is removed from power or just an average voter. And it's like yeah, if, if the vast majority of society wants to do something, you get like a 30 chance of it.
[00:31:42] Speaker B: That's what I was saying earlier that yeah, they showed that that's why people are so unhappy. And so yeah, the, the, and that's what I'm getting at James is just like climate change is these economic stuff is similar where there's a lot of business interests and all that that are, that are jockeying for the attention of the legislatures, legislators who make the laws. So instead of saying let's get on a good economic track that can deal with certain shocks and crises that may come up, just like climate we're just lurching to clean up the last mess. But we're not able to as a nation and with our political leaders because they're being so influenced trying to raise money from a very small group of people. I mean, it's all about your constituency. And I think that's one thing that Robert Wright, I want to make sure I say this because I quoted him, he said our system can reflect our values. Capitalism is what we make of it. And I really like that because there is a lot of this handling about capitalism or socialism, all this stuff. To me, capitalism is the best system, just like democracy, until someone figures out something better. And so what I like again about the video is he kind of ties our responsibility as the public, both in the democracy and in capitalism, because an informed public can also make, could, let's put it this way, can do a better job at electing politicians that make the laws who might do things in the long term economic interest of the country and of the population.
[00:33:05] Speaker A: Well, but you and I, if, if, if other factors beyond actual speech, you know, like if money is speech.
[00:33:13] Speaker B: Well, of course, yeah, I agree. Like, that's, that's where this got out of whack. I mean, think about this, James. He had an interesting statistic, but we.
[00:33:21] Speaker A: Got to keep it moving though, man, real quick.
[00:33:22] Speaker B: The study had ended because a video was made, like you said, a few years ago. So I think the latest year he had was dark money in politics. Post to Citizens United was 2013 was 370 million.
Right now we already know there's, there's billions of dollars being paid and we're talking a decade since, you know that, that stat. So this is only going to get worse if someone doesn't act to do anything different or make.
[00:33:46] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean, and that, that amount of money, like what he was talking about was like almost 6 million per congressional or person in Congress. And it's like, oh, you know, like it's, that's how much on average and that's, you know, like you said 26 back then. Yeah, the other, the other thing he was throwing, one of the stats he threw out was who's your constituents? Is it the people who show up and vote and who, who speak verbally like human beings? Or is it the people who give you money? Because one of the things he threw out people like what? One of the project 20, 25 things, oh, we're gonna get rid of the Department of Education, yada, yada, yada. And it's like, well, his number, they're showing 100 billion in corporate welfare and 78 billion to run the Department of Education annually. Like, it's like we're giving more money in corporate welfare than we are to run the Department of Education. Yet we're looking at, certain leaders are looking at Department of Education to get rid of, you know, as being extraneous. And so it's like, who's your constituents? Is it who gives you money or is it who you're trying to get a vote from? Or do you realize that whoever gives you money, you can go get votes with that money?
[00:34:45] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:34:46] Speaker A: Which I think we got a guy trying to do that right now in Pennsylvania.
[00:34:49] Speaker B: Yeah, but that's the thing. It's a lot easier to go get one guy with a billion dollars than to try and convince, you know, 2 million people to get that and raise a billion that way. So. And the wealth of people know that.
[00:35:00] Speaker A: You know, only if you're willing to sell yourself, you know, like, if you're willing to sell kind of yourself as, hey, I'll do whatever you say for that money. Because when your constituency are many, then you're more so guided by your character. When your constituencies are one or, you know, five, then you're, you're, you're, you're guided by whatever they say because you're more dependent on each one of them.
[00:35:23] Speaker B: You know, James said it, I was finished with this. Just this section. I know you want to move, but we said it in the show this year that the Congress, remember, they threatened to shut down the government unless you defunded. Which agencies? The irs, the Consumer Protection Bureau and the epa. And I was thinking, like, really, like, these people in the Congress were, like, telling us who they represent. Because I'm thinking, like, what average American wants to defund the Consumer Protection Bureau? Like, that helps. That makes sure that we're not eating lead paint. You know, they're not painting. Using lead paint on kids toys and the epa. Like, I didn't know that was my enemy, that I wanted my waters here in South Florida to be clean and not have pollution. Like, you know what I mean? Like, so you're right. Like, that's what we joked. Who's their constituency?
[00:36:11] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, well, but let me, let me, let us. The last thing I want to touch on this. I have to be quick. But you often say that money and power always find each other, you know, so I want to know from this video, you know, does that make you more or less sure of that idea? And what do you think about, you know, like, at the end, he leaves us with the idea that it's important for people to organize and build institutions to counterbalance corporate power and money. Like, do you think that that is a check on your first point, that money and power always find each other, you know, like so kind of just throw that to you, you know, what were your thoughts in that context?
[00:36:45] Speaker B: I say a lot of things.
That is when I do say and when I do believe.
So, no. So yes, I do believe that. I think this is what we've kind of talked about and what his documentary does a great job showing is like you said, after money and power were kind of forced apart in the early 20th century, took a long time and a lot of work through organization. He talks about this, the think tanks that started in the 1970s with things like the Heritage foundation, who we know authored Project 2025, or the Federalist Society, which has, you know, five Supreme Court justices now that carry that ideology into the court. So this has been a long time coming, this kind of infiltration of the money behind the scenes into our actual political existence and reality. So I don't think it's going to also be something we can snap our fingers and just get rid of. I do think that he's right and that's why I love the way he tied into democracy and the capitalism part together, which is the informed public. I think this is one reason why we've had an attack on public schools in the last generation or so, because again, if you have a less informed public, they're going to be less informed about how things should work, how they do work, how they work, when they worked. Well, like you're saying about the New.
[00:38:03] Speaker A: Deal in the attack on having civics in school, you know, like. Yeah, we've seen that.
[00:38:08] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:38:08] Speaker A: But just in general. Yeah, now, now it's like people don't want to let. They don't want people to learn history.
[00:38:14] Speaker B: Yeah, you're right. Because they'll want to block things like the New Deal, the GI Bill, this idea that usually when we have prosperity, I mean, this recent period shows it. But I'd say this was a little bit more ham fisted because it was in response to a pandemic which was not something that was planned, it was emergency. But is when you put money in the system, the economy will generally boom. I mean, we have a stock.
[00:38:36] Speaker A: Well, no, no, there's a caveat to that. When you put money in the system, either with mechanisms that force it down to the working people, because the working people always spend it and then it Comes right back up. So you gotta. Either you force it down or you just give it directly to the people down in the masses. But if you put money into the economy and just put it at the top, it does a great economy.
[00:38:54] Speaker B: Yeah, because. Because that's a great point to make that distinction. Because you're right, the CARES act and the stimulus is. I mean, I know some people at the top got PPP money too, but generally it was across the board to Americans. Now that's why I say this was a little bit ham fisted because it was an emergency. So. Cause inflation, there was other side effects of it. But the idea that if the government spends the money wisely and strategically, it can have great economic outputs. Like what happened in the New Deal, building the New Deals and other roads and bridges.
[00:39:23] Speaker A: Yeah, people point to, oh, it was the spending from World War II, but it was also the fact that you had a tax code that didn't allow people to accumulate large sums of wealth at that very time if they would have spent that same money without the kind of tax code, the money sticks at the top and you don't build the greatest middle class in the history of the world. And so the how matters with a lot of these things and these things that have been seen. I'll say this, I do want to wrap this up, but for me. So I started with one of your sayings. One of the things that I've heard you say many times. I'm sure listeners that have been with us for a while have heard you say before, as far as money and power always find each other. Well, I respond with one of the things I like to say, which is there's no finish line. And so I think that the idea that money and power always find each other with this, the main point or the finishing point from the documentary, that the people need to organize and build institution to counterbalance corporate and corporate money and power. Those two are the comp. They're complementary like the, the. Because of the former. Because money and power always find each other. People need to continually. There's no finish line. You don't get to a point, okay, we did the New Deal, you know, kick it up, we're good, you know, for the next 300 years, you know, like we got a fair society now, you know, like it won't be like that. Because as soon as that happens, the reaction is coming. And the reaction took the form of, you know, think tanks and as, you know, going through it and then the documentary. And so then if the people just sit back on their laurels or they lose the living memory of how this, how the tragedy happened that led to this, you know, this boom, so to speak. And then what things were done to lead to the boom in the face of the tragedy. If you, if you lose that, then it can go a different direction, you know, and so the. Because money and power always find each other. It's important, as the documentary said, for people to organize, build institutions that counterbalance this power and it never will end. This is just going to be. This is. You know, when I was young, my dad would explain to me it. Most of the fights you see, they may be saying this or saying that, but it's ultimately about the haves versus the have nots in many respects. And so that goes back throughout time and, you know, human time and really what we're dealing with now and what we were dealing with 100 years ago and what we were dealing with, what we will deal with 50 years from now or whatever. Are these sames kind of. How are the spoils of society? One, how is society going to organize itself to generate spoils? And then two, how are those spoils going to be distributed amongst the, amongst the society? Do you get forever winners? Do you get to win one time, one big time and then be a winner forever? Or do you have to continually participate in the economy and, you know, like, things can go good, things cannot go good, you know, like. Or is it going to be a situation where, yeah, you just got people at the top and they just stay at the top. And those, you know, when that's happened in history, you've had very stagnant times. You know, like these dynamic times have always coincided with, with the ability for people, you know, to have mobility, you know, like, and, and to be able to be innovative and to be able to take risks and stuff? Those types of setups, they have a.
[00:42:17] Speaker B: Name to generate better when you don't have it. They called it the Dark Ages. Remember that?
[00:42:21] Speaker A: Yeah, it called it the Dark Ages.
[00:42:22] Speaker B: Feudalism. That's one of, you know, the one guy at the top named Charlemagne and everybody else, we've seen it, but we've.
[00:42:27] Speaker A: Seen it from the other side too, you know, because at that time in the Dark Ages in Europe, you know, the Arab world, you know, the Muslim world was booming. That was the center of intellect. And this innate. Didn't have that same kind of setup, so to speak. So it's, it's really interesting how you can see that throughout time, you know.
[00:42:42] Speaker B: And that comes back to an educated population, like you said. Back then is when the Arab lands were seeking knowledge and having open thought, scientific, you know, method was, was not shone down and all that over time that transferred to Europe. And now unfortunately, the Arab world has become more authoritarian and you know, not to knock them, right, but kind of was in the dark ages for the last 100, 200 years or so. So yeah, it shifts, but it's interesting and I'll finish my thing with, I really appreciate in the video how at the very end he really had a positive message about the fact we all got to talk to each other. And I think that was a big thing. Like, yeah, you know, what part of this money in politics on purpose has driven the polarization along with the algorithms and all that. But really it's the money that's doing it.
And so if we just get back to having a dialogue, all of us in this country, even if we disagree, probably the barriers will come down, we'll realize we're not all that bad, you know, with the other side and all that. And we can actually begin to form solutions to some of these long term issues that we discuss. Like there's economic stuff, climate, how to deal with the effects of climate change going forward, all that.
[00:44:00] Speaker A: No, no, I mean that's 100% true. I mean, and that is like the mass accumulation of money can only be counterbalanced by the mass accumulation of people. And this is why people who want to weaken the interests, and this is across societies. You know, you can always see whoever is trying to separate, divide the people are trying to increase the relative power of the moneyed interests. If you're trying to unite the people, you are going to decrease the relative power of the money and interest because a lot of people will beat a lot of money. But divided people will always lose to a lot of money. And so, and again, this isn't about taking all the money. This is about just having a distribution of the spoils of society that makes sense. And that's something that's within our grasp. And you know, but it has to be something again that there's no finish line for. Like society, people need to, the first step is talking to each other. The next step, you can't organize and work together towards common interests. If you don't talk to each other or if you're told that the whoever you don't, whoever you disagree with on this and that is evil or something, something like that. And so you got to be careful, you know, those kind of messages. If the messages you're getting are the people that don't agree with. You are evil. That's some. That's a message that is designed to increase the relative power of the, the moneyed interest, not of the masses. So. But no, I mean, I think we can wrap this from there. It was great. We definitely would recommend the documentary. Definitely. Very informative. And then also just good perspective, good context. And he made it a point. He was talking to people of all political stripes and telling them, hey, let's leave the, the political labels at the door. Let's just talk, you know, let's see what's going on.
[00:45:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:45:30] Speaker A: So. So, yeah. But we appreciate everybody for joining us. Until next time, I'm James Keys.
[00:45:35] Speaker B: I'm Tundra Vilana.
[00:45:36] Speaker A: All right, we'll talk to you then. Or talk to you next time.
