eastern. and our campaign 2018 coverage continues with several debates. massachusetts democratic senator elizabeth warren debates her republican warren continues wit her challenger jason diehl. that's at 8:00 p.m. at 9:00, heller and rosen. at 9:00 p.m., walker and evers. c-span is your primary course for campaign 2018. this weekend on american history tv on c-span3, saturday at 10:00 p.m. eastern on real america, "the nixon answer," southern town hall. >> i do not believe that nuclear bombs and nuclear weapons should

be used in vietnam. i do not think they're necessary to be used in vietnam and i think nuclear weapons should be reserved only for what we hope will never come and which i think great diplomacy, and it will have to be great diplomacy can avoid and that is confrontation with a nuclear power. and on american artifacts, we'll tour the baseball of americana exhibit which includes baseball magna carta which spells out the rules of the game. >> and at 8:00, josie bush reflects on former first lady barbara bush. >> she had this motto that you will be judged on the success of your life with your relationship, family, friends, coworkers and people you meet along the way. >> watch on american history tv this weekend on c-span3.

while the ralph nader conference on capital limb breaks f -- capitalism breaks for lunch, we'll start with some opening remarks from ralph nader. >> we're going to turn the material into a variety of media interfaces. it's important to know that free market mythology is a basic tool in this country where the chamber of commerce, for example, go right into the middle schools and teach what isn't so. they teach the myths of free markets, which are very hard to find these days, given the prevalence of corporate power.

d there will be additions to the proceedings here. we invited several other people, professor margaret rayden, professor lisa heiserl ing dealing with separate contracts, contracts of cohesion which the professor calls torts themselves, that they have been for wrongful injuries and all of us have to sign on the dotted line. also professor heiserling taking on the part of how those are twisted to favor corporate power contrary to any concept of market economics. at the outset, i'd like to thank john richard and his assistants matt marin and ethan weisbaum who worked on the logistics of

this conference. there are many ways to look at any economy or political economy, as we know. we can look at them in the way edg edgar caan, who is a progenitor for legal acts in the '60s, and he came up with what he calls the core academy of the household, which isn't paid for as a volunteer part of the sector produces extremely valuable services, the market economy itself and the public services or public goods economy. there are other ways to look at the economy, the movement in recent years, to redefine progress and change the way gdp

yardsticks are measured. indeed the controlling process here that implements the myths of market fundamentalism are the yardsticks of progress and we hear that our economy is booming, but for who? as professor daniel oster said. it's distribution, distribution, distribution. we get yardsticks, but we don't get distributional yardsticks when the press releases every so often come out of the government and the corporate economic realm. and so, for example, we see yardsticks on corporate profits, corporate capital, some yardsticks on unemployment, but they ignore child poverty. they know the poor quality of

the economy, the horrific distribution of inequality and the economy that the deappreciation of natural resources in the economy, the environmental devastation in the economy, even the huge surge since 1980 of obesity in this country, which is now over 30% when it was under 10% in 1980 and all the health consequences of that as a result of massive commotion of fast food, salt, fat and sugar at a very young age by the electronic child molesters or marketeers in this area. so the question is, though, what is market fundamentalism and nobel laureate receiver joe

steidlitz says market fundamentalism goes back a long ways, but it was given a high profile by margaret thatcher and ronald reagan. he said, for a quarter century a provision of the west has been market fundamentalism. i say it was a religion because it was not based on economic science or historical evidence. it was sold by thatcher in the u.k. and by reagan in the usa. it made reference to some old ideas in economics, specifically adam smith's notion of the invisible hand, which is the argument that fimprms who pursu them would lead as a divisional a to societal well-being. he was aware of this argument, in fact, he warned about

unfettered markets, but they advocated a particular form of organization, profit maximizing government firms without regulation. this issue of market fundamentalism are critical. the question is why is it so important to challenge market fundamentalism? anyone advocating in the market areas when these advocacies are put out publicly, the market fundamentalists fire back that the corporations have no control over markets, they have to subject themselves to free market discipline, and that is their legitimacy. that's how they justify even

what many people would think they're failures, their refusal to sell their discrimination, their ignoring of basic human needs in the market context. i think it's useful to see how these ideas get of constant. remember the book of capital freedom came out in 1962 and it was given huge publicity by the major corporate think tanks as well as by academics. the book was very readable. it was full of plausability suffering from political malnutrition. that has been the kind of

arguments that have been used, very little impirical base for the arguments. i happened to get a degree in briar in virginia, one of these corporate retreats, and he indicated something quite interesting. he's best known for his statement that corporate industries have only one purpose, and it's to produce profits. when he was asked after that, how about obeying the law? he said, of course, they also have to obey the law. he kept saying that he's against u.s. chamber of commerce, he thinks their demands are outrageous, at least under government control, and as i said, he's not pro-business, he's pro-free enterprise, he's pro free markets. so i proposed this to him.

i said, you've recommended, dr. freedman, abolition of licensure, that licenses are not necessary. what if you saw a butcher put out a sale on heart bypass surgery because there's no license, would you permit that? >> he said nothing is worse than the american medical association cartel. i said, would you permit that? he said the free market will discipline and sooner or later people won't consider the butcher because the butcher will have butchered the operation. it reminds us of the comment sooner or later. that's what we're up against. we're up against during the kavanaugh hearing, senator mike lee just threw out this.

the cost of regulation is $2 trillion. where does that figure come from? it comes from murray weedenbaum who started it when he went to louis university when he did a stint under the economic advisers. he came up with a figure of 250 billion and we asked him, where did you get that? he said there's really no good data there, but i took the budgets of the major regulatory agencies and multiplied by five. and so year after year, this figure grows, and year after year, there is no effective rebuttal to it. it's seen by progressive economists or a lot of other economists. it's so absurd that it's not worthy of rebuttal. in the meantime, it's constantly drilled by the political structure of our country and the

political allies until it becomes reported by the press as if it's a reality. now, we all know that there is a difference between small business and big business. i don't think much of the description here is going to relate to small businesses, ma and pa stores, that try to compete and never get bailed out. so i think it's important to use the words corporate capitalism when we discuss market fundamentalism. and in many ways the structure of fabrications here can be described in a general plane, and that is that they use the free market argument to deter all kinds of activity they don't

like, including government health and safety regulation labor standards and the like, and yet with every fiber of these giant corporations' being, they work with their corporate attorneys to develop an incredible matrix of controlling markets, monopolizing markets, dissipating markets, getting rid of markets, twisting markets into grotesque impacts on innocent people. and that is what i think we'll hear a lot about today with the speakers. it's not free trade. that's market fundamentalism. it's corporate-managed trade agreements. it's a system of government that upholds labor and environmental

standards to corporate trade to which these basic values have to adhere and be shaped by. so i've pulled together five ways that corporations provericate in terms of their alleged adherence to free market discipline. these are the five principles of capitalism that large corporations violate. the first principle is that owners are supposed to control what they own with some reasonable degree of control. there is eminent domain and other restrictions, of course. well, the shareholders, institutional and individual, own the corporations. they are virtually powerless. their power has been sucked out

to their ownership into the hired hands of corporations and boards of directors. it's now gone to such an extreme that the business judgment rule almost allows mergers in some cases, bankruptcy decisions in some cases, all kinds of executive compensation to escape any kind of either advisory or mandatory approval by the shareholders. the second under capitalism business is supposed to sink or swim. it's supposed to avert the marketplace, and we know that through experience there are a lot of companies too big to fail, like the wall street banks. they demand an uncle sam, serve as their all-purpose protecter, providing a variety of public guarantees and emergency bailouts.

capitalism, number three, is supposed to exhibit a consensual freedom of contract. you can't have market economics without freedom of contract. 99% of all contracts will ever sign our fine print contracts. we sign on the dotted line. no amendments, and we click on and on never even see part of the contract. freedom of contract has been destroyed, and it's remarkable how little this argument is used against the market fundamentalist. that is a principle achilles heel because it's understood by every american without exception who has to sign on the dotted line and then be very surprised at the rights that they have given up on page 18 in the fine print. the airbnb contract, for example, is over 60 pages of

fine print and many of these contracts include unilateral modification, which is the exact opposite of the meeting of the minds in contractual consent as well as compulsory arbitration and exclusion from having their day in court consumers and trial by jury. the power upheld by all too many right wing judges in a power that no government can impose on us, no government can block us from using the 7th amendment to have our day in court, but corporations can. the fourth is capitalism requires a framework of law and order. adam smith, john lock, frederick all understood this policy. and this was used to prevent mayhem fraud and predatory practices. only those caught in situations of extreme dereliction, like

enron, never have a reason to expect anything but a slap on the wrist for providing illegal mandates. fifth and finally, capitalist enterprises are expected to compete on an even playing field. that is a laughable p proverification in the land of corporate capitalism. the start with bundles of cash have developed a corporate state where governments lash many subsidies on business while comparing to individual businesses and family business. we have a government of big business for big business. the use of a tax system is another technique to disadvantage small business and severely tilt the playing field. we have today a really

tremendous array of experts who are going to deliver their considerable expertise which they have honed over the years, both in the field of action and in the field of thought. and do so in a way that provides more laser beams on the myths of microfundamentalism and how free mind idealogy is used to justify the worst behaviors of these global corporations. i remember the head of intel testifying before the senate a few years ago desperately asking for a renewal of the free research and development funds to sustain silicon valley, saying, we're not very good at basic research of these very profitable companies like cisco,

intel, capital, facebook and so on, but we're very good at applying research. but you must continue to spend taxpayer money for that purpose. and indeed, where would these corporations be without the fdic? where would they be without the department of agriculture that they heavily rely on? where would they be without the infrastructure that makes their private sales possible? where would they be in dozens of areas where the government is filling the huge gaps unmet by markets? there are huge piles of capital that are not looking for investment. trillions of dollars held abroad

by u.s. corporations and in this country. nobody would have predicted 30, 40 years ago when the capital formation shortage was a big issue here in washington that they would have so much capital that they wouldn't know what to do with it because management was so inept they didn't know how to find new investment, worker training, higher salaries, shoring up pension funds, doing r and d and even gaining in acquisitions. instead they're using 6 to $7 trillion, as we'll see, in stock buybacks since 2005. a totally unproductive use of capital. and so we have these mutations where corporate capitalism goes way off the foreseeability and prediction of market scholars.

huge piles of capital while there are huge unmet needs in this country. unmet needs that are called redlining, that are called 30 million unbanked americans here. and yet the market fundamentalist in their proverifications willing to take the fdic guarantee and other guarantees of banks too big to fail are opposing postal savings, systems are opposing public banking systems, even though they have refused to deal with tens of millions of people's banking needs. >> thank you, ralph, for pulling this together. i'm reminded of john kennedy's kwip at one of ja quip at one of jackie kennedy's

galas. i go back to 1958 with ralph. a reporter from the washington star introduced us and he had him meet him on the corner of f street, and ralph was going to meet us there. bob showed up in a corvair. ralph would not get in the car. we walked to a nearby middle eastern restaurant and that was the beginning of a friendship. in 1943, michelle coletsky, who was a polish-born economist who was a protege of cain's wrote a political essay called the political economy of fallen employment. coletsky conceded that as a matter of economics, cains was right. you could harness capitalism by

regulating it and using policy, but it was a matter of politics. the capitalists would never let you do it. now, in the post-war era, which is the subject of my last book, it looked as though cains had won the argument with coletsky. capitalism was housebroken. for a remarkable period of about 40 years, the economy not only grew at record rates but it grew more equal at record rates. then the capitalist came roaring back. ever since the late '70s with reagan and thatcher, we have turned the capitalist economy back into a predatory economy run by and for capitalists. now, i want to say a little bit about ralph's career and a very polite disagreement i have with one aspect of his view of the world. part of what ralph has done, and

he's done so much, has been to recognize the problem that coletsky identified. if you're going to make anything like a capitalism operate in a remotely public interest, you need a great deal of counterveiling power. so all the consumer groups that ralph organized, very ingenius things like cubs, communities of utility subscribers, and the great piece of legislation that was killed at the last minute, the consumer protection agency. this was all about counterveiling power so that when you devised forms of regulation, they were less likely to be captured. so the cains might once again stand to win that debate against coletsky. however, one other facet of

ralph's is to make the market capitalized in a kind of brandeisy way. here is the ounce of disagreement i have over this. it seems to me that there is a realm in which we need markets. we need entrepreneurs. there are some things that markets do well. but we also need a public realm, a market realm and a civic realm. part of the market realm, it's not that it's been corrupted, but it's too big. we need fewer markets altogether, because markets have this formal habit, as everybody from marks to parogi to ralph have said, stocks tend to take

over. give them an inch and they'll take a mile. so the prospect of getting people interested is kind of a fool's errand and the last 40 years proves that. i wrote a book in 1997 called "everything for sale: the virtues and limits of markets" in which i tried to sort out what markets do well and what don't do well, and where they need to be subpoena planted altogether. 21 years later, i conclude that we need even a small sfer -- in the last 20 or 30 years,

allegedly you can take private issues and use the impulse to achieve public goals. that turns out to be mostly malarkey. you've got so many case studies of this from voucher schools to privatized highways, to privatized park where the power of the market is gained. and you have corruption introduced that dwarves the normal sort of corruption that equips the public sector when the public sector is just doing its job. you have case after case after case of something that worked extremely well when it was a public institution, like fannie mae gets privatized, then get corrupted and then gets complicated so it's too transparent to regulate.

you've got aborted power where the logic of some progressives in that era was, okay, the agency has been corrupted to a point where the only remedy is capital punishment. so let's kill the agency and then place our faith in competition. i think that proved to be naive about the potential power of industry to gain the rules. so instead of intensified competition, you've gotten hypertra hypertransformation. we've seen this in industry after industry after industry where the airlines have been the absolute world champions at gaining the bankruptcy laws. i think every one of them has gone bankrupt and then reemerged more profitable than ever after shedding gains that served other public interest. you have other things like

social security, which is as simple as it could be, which is better, more efficient, more equitable than any kind of pension system, let alone 401 ) 401(k)s that the private sector comes up with and they have less looting by intermediary. we've got the case of the medical sector, which is more important than any counterpart. on and on and on. i guess my one-liner is, yes, to the extent we have market institutions which we need for part of the economy, because there are some things that markets do well, let's have them as honorable and as uncorrupted and as transparent as they can possibly be. it's a pleasure to be here with bill ford because modernizing them so they can not only go after older abuses but also new

abuses that he could not have thought of, absolutely. the general purposes and economic purposes are not only served more ethically, they're served more efficiently. chattanooga, tennessee may be partly the legacy of tea, the other example of how the public does something more efficiently and publicly than private. chattanooga has public internet service. it's cheaper, it's faster than anything else in the country. there may be a few others that are comparable to it, but as a consequence of this, chattanooga uses the fact it's got very fast, very efficient, very cheap internet service as a strategy of economic development to attract industries that need fast, efficient and cheap and reliable internet service.

there is no reason what evever that not to be a public utility. the same with banks. if you look at what banks actually do, the era after roosevelt finally regulated them, banks in effect were one step away from public utilities. they might as well have been public utilities in savings and loans as well. they were regulated in terms of conflicts of interest, they were regulated in terms of interest they could charge, interest they could pay. and there were no bank failures in that. so i think, yes, on the one hand we need to think very hard at making markets as honorable, open and efficient as they possibly could be, but we also need to think about shrinking the market realm all together both because they're more efficient in their own right and

because they teach an idealogical lesson. the things we do is more efficient than things we trust to markets. of course, the other tremendous element to this is corruption. we now have private sector corruption and public sector corruption feeding other that gave us a donald trump. . bill was quite good at describing the sfault. this gue -- guy was better than

obama was. at this point the public just throws up its hands and doesn't find a credible champion for the frustration people feel. so when somebody like trump comes along and says "blow it all up," he actually has more credibility than the mainstream parties. so i think the other reason to restore a much greater role for the public realm is that when you have a smaller market sector, you are less likely to get the hyperconcentration of wealth that leads to the hyperconcentration of power that then leads to the rigging of rules and the collusion of both parties with wall street against the interest of ordinary people. hillary clinton did herself in in many respects, but one of the most powerful things she did to do herself in was take one of

the banks. how could she possibly have done that? it's a gamble of the corruption of clinton winning the democratic party, and it gave trump an opening. so if we're going to have progressives to put forward a very different story, narrative, that connects to the frustrations of ordinary people, they have to be as far removed from that world as they possibly can be, and i think we've talked about public options, we've talked about strengthening the public sector, but i think we need to go beyond some of the assumptions about, yes, of course we want to clean up markets, we want honest markets, we want regulated markets, but maybe we need a small market realm altogether. some people would call this socialism, and it's really interesting that bernie sanders dard dared to call himself a socialist and that was actually a plus for a lot of younger

people. when i give a book talk about managed capitalism, invariably someone puts up their hand and says, why would you want to have managed capitalism? why not have social democracy or socialism? the title of my last book was "can democracy survive global capitalism?" i think of democracies to survive. it's going to require a much smaller realm of capitalism and a much larger realm for public institutions and public. i think that will take both extraordinary political leadership and a ton of grassroots organizing and a lot of intellectual acuity. i hope to hear more of that. so thanks, ralph, thanks to all

of you. [ applause ] >> thanks, bob. my favorite book written by bob -- he's written a lot -- is called "everything for sale." and the book raises the seminal question of what zones could there be in our country that are not commercial, that cannot be commodified as non-commercial zones? if everything can be commodified, everything can be prioritized instead of soldiers beholden to our. everything is subjected tom we would. it's not that they have no

boundaries, they want everything. it's that they can make you pay or die for health insurance. they can make you pay or die for anything they sell. whereas public goods they cannot withhold from you. so where we have a commercialized imperialism here, there are some things in our country that should never be for sale. government should not be for sale, elections should not be for sale. childhood free of commercial exploitation should not be for sale, education should not be for sale. health services should not be for sale. firefighting services should not be for sale. because they can be withheld if they're for sale. that was really the takeaway from bob cutner's book "everything for sale." you can see the massive drive from washington, d.c. to

corporate tax everything under the phrase privatization, including the postal service, for example. imagine being withheld in terms of postal service because you can't pay the freight as a user. one thing i'll say at the outset is i'm not speaking on behalf of the american anti-trust institute. another is i'm not an economist. i did study at the university of chicago law school, but please don't confuse me with being an economist. the third thing is the title of this talk "anti-trust and how hyptocracy and how the market corrupts what's supposed to be doing well," is not my idea. that's ralph's. ralph is ralph and i'm not ralph. so i'm going to deal with this challenge but asking four questions. what is market fundamentalism? what are markets supposed to do

well? what is anti-trust supposed to do well? and finally what is kleptocracy and how does that fit into this discussion? maybe the best way to start on microfundamentalism is to reduce construction in the way policies fail in markets today. we have laissez-faire. next to that is the chicago school of economics. then let's talk about socialists, democrats and economists. i'm not talking about all of those, but which ones fall into the category of market fundamental and chicago's

school, primarily. t tmt. >> the market fund mentalist has a view of human nature which focuses on the model of economic m man. always rational, acting in their self-interest to maximize their interest, which is usually profit maximumization. th they. it has empirical aspects. the business schools take a different view of competition, and it's fundamentally different. it says, when you look at the way strategic smgt taught and

the textbooks that face it. . and businesses are not always rational in their decision ma maki making. they don't have a complete market, but it's often incomplete. and what they do is a market to maintain competitive advantage in the marketplace. quite different and important to understand the difference in perspectives. now, the market fundamentalists take the extreme position in favor of private actors and opposition to state intervention. they're highly individualistic, they're skeptical of a common good that can be obtained

through the state other than the necessities of police and defense and having rule of law that will protect contract rights and property rights. typical strategies they adopt is regulation, privatization, contracting out, and they seek the unlimited opportunity for the able and the ambitious. the key word is efficiency. not only is government deemed inefficient and incompetent, but under the theory of what's called public choice, there is no such thing as public interest. remember, rational activity involves self-interest. naturally that should apply to the people in government as well. if that applies to people in

government who are acting in their self-interest in promotion of their political lives, then there is no public interest. if there's no public interest, anything government does is likely to be bad. that also leads to another important aspect which is recognizing the government intervention will sometimes make mistakes. where do you want to err? do you err on overenforcement or under enforcement? the fundamentalist forms of government often say let's err on interference, in other words, let the market work itself out. the problem with fundamentalism is there are no good ideas here. it's not that the market is a bad idea, it's that their ideas go to harmful extremes that are unjustified and unsupportable.

what are markets supposed to do when they work well? first of all, facilitate voluntary exchange of goods and services between willing sellers and willing buyers. so it's freedom oriented. robust competition is supposed to, and generally does, keep prices near costs. that's good for consumers. in a world of limited resources, markets lead to the most efficient means of production. that's good because you don't want to waste limited resources. competition assures that resources will be employed by those who can make the most efficient use of those resources, and that's called allocational efficiency. now, the two efficiencies i mentioned, productive and allocational, are both static. but markets also drive dynamic

efficiency. and this is where you get innovation, innovation gives you growth, growth gives you a larger pie so that with proper political distributional decisions, more people can be prosperous and live in better ways. from a political side, markets decentralize both economic and political power. the main alternative is central planning. and i think that market fundamentalists have a good point when they say that central planning is very complicated, very difficult to pull off in an advanced industrial society, and likely to have large and irreversible mistakes. finally i want to say that markets operating well can shift blame from politicians to

markets. the market made it happen, not the politician. so this eliminates from the discourse a lot of the decisions that are really quite political at their base. this is an easy area to talk about and disagree on. but let's move on to what is antitrust supposed to do well? first of all, it's supposed to maintain robust competition by enforcing laws against restraint of trade, anti-competitive mergers and abuse of monopoly power. this is the sherman act, the clayton act, the federal act and a multitude of federal antitrust laws. some fundamentalists would abolish federal trust completely. they say it's undisciplined, it's highly discretionary and it amounts to theft. i've been accused of being a thief in