the us workforce. meaning that the people who put food on our tables can't afford to put food on their own family's tables. the other key issue that we find that workers face is the lack of paid sick days and healthcare benefits -- two-thirds of all workers report cooking, preparing, and serving food when they're ill, with the flu or other sicknesses. and with a wage as little as $2.13, so reliant on tips for their wages, these workers simply cannot afford to take a day off when sick, let alone risk losing their jobs. the majority of workers are adults. many are parents and single parents, single mothers, using the restaurant job as their main source of income. we partner with more than a hundred small business owners around the country who are doing the right thing, providing good, decent wages, better working

conditions, paid sick days, benefits, opportunities for advancement. so i think that's the first thing i would say to a small business owner is, "look, there are tons of people who are already doing it. we're here to help you, they're here to help you try this new way of doing business." >> we're workers united, we can't be defeated. we're workers united, we can't be defeated -- >> bill moyers: acting on that democratic impulse, saru jayaraman and the protesting workers march from capitol hill to the capital grille steakhouse, owned by one of the biggest restaurant chains in america. >> saru jayaraman: 86,000 customers of yours have signed a petition calling on you to pay a minimum of at least five dollars an hour to your workers cause $2.13 is just not enough to live on. so here you go. >> thank you. >> saru jayaraman: thank you. >> narrator: we now return to "moyers and company." >> bill moyers: you're also not enthused about regulation, which is what so many liberals and others are calling for now. is there some parallel reason for that? >> richard wolff: yes. i find it astonishing to hear folks talk about regulation. we regulated after every one of our great panics in the 19th

century. by the way, in those years, we were more honest. we didn't refer to a "great recession." we used much more colorful language, "the panic of 1857." i mean, that describes what people felt. anyway, after every one of our panics, crises, recessions, depressions, we have regulated. and the regulations were always defended, first by lower-level officials and eventually by the president and the highest authorities, usually on two grounds. "with this regulation, not only will we get out of the crisis we're in, but," and there was a pregnant pause, "we will prevent a recurrence of this terrible economic dilemma." it never worked. the regulations never delivered on that promise. we're in a terrible crisis now. so all the previous promises about all the previous regulations didn't work. and they didn't work for two reasons. >> bill moyers: yeah, why?

>> richard wolff: either the regulations that were passed were then undone, or they were evaded. and that's the history of every regulation. during the great depression, it was decided, as it has happened again now, that banks behaved in an unfortunate way that contributed to the crisis. and that in particular, they took the depositor's money, businesses and individuals, and then made speculative investments and then the house of cards came tumbling down. so in the great depression, a bill was passed, a regulation called the glass-steagall act, 1933 banking act, which basically said, "there has to be two kinds of banks, the banks that takes deposits cannot make risky investments. for that we need something separate called an investment bank. the first thing will be a commercial bank, takes deposits, and we'll make a wall between them." okay. the bill was passed. for the banks, this was trouble. this was a problem. they didn't like this. so they spent the first 30 years, 20 to 30 years evading

it in a hundred different stratagems. meanwhile, they began to realize that with some work with politicians, they could weaken it. and after a while, they decided that even better than evading and weakening, why don't we just get rid of it? and so in the 1990s, they mobilized, led by some of our biggest banks, whose names everybody knows, and they finally succeeded. the congress repealed the glass-steagall act, and president bill clinton signed the repeal. >> bill moyers: it was a bipartisan repeal. >> richard wolff: right. it's a joke. that allowed the banks to make risky bets with their depositor's money. eight years later, our financial system collapsed. it's like a joke. don't you learn over and over again that the regulations are simply another problem from the businesses you're regulating. this is a system that creates in the private enterprise a core mechanism and a logic that makes them do the very things that need regulation and then makes them evade or undo those

regulations. >> bill moyers: you probably saw the recent story that facebook, which made more than one billion dollars in profits last year, didn't pay taxes on that profit. and actually got a $429 million rebate from you and me and all those other taxpayers out there. ge, verizon, boeing, 27 other corporations made a combined $205 billion in profits between 2008 and 2011 and 26 paid no federal corporate income tax. what will ultimately happen, richard, if the big winners from capitalism opt out of participating in the strengthening, nurturing, and financial support of a fair and functioning society? >> richard wolff: well, the worst example i just learned about a few days ago. and i got it actually from senator bernie

sanders from vermont. that during the very years 2009, '10, '11, that the federal government was basically bailing out the biggest banks in the united states, they were busily establishing or operating subsidiaries in the cayman islands, in the caribbean, in order to evade taxes. and it's a wonderful vignette in which the very government pouring money to salvage these private capitalist institutions is discovering its own revenue from them being undone by their evasion of the regulations about income tax by moving to cayman islands where the corporate tax is zero instead of paying their corporate tax in new york or wherever they're based. >> bill moyers: your assumption that runs through your books, through your teaching, through this very interesting dvd, is

that democracy, theoretically if not practically, but you hope practically, acts as a brake, b-r-a-k-e, a brake on private power and greed. and it's clear that that brake doesn't work anymore. that it's not slowing down the growth of power to the capitalist class. >> richard wolff: right. and i think it's very poetic here in the united states. in the 1930s, when we after all had a crisis even worse than the one we had now by most measures, higher unemployment, and greater incidents of poverty and so on, we did still have a political system that allowed pressure from below to be articulated politically. we had the greatest unionizing drive in the history of the united states, the cio. we had strong socialist and communist parties that work with the cio, that mobilized tens of millions of people into unions who had never been in unions before. and they went to the power structure at the time, president roosevelt as its emblem. and they said, "you have to do something for us. you just have to. because if you don't, then the system itself will become our problem. and you don't want that. and many of us in the union

movement don't want it either." although some of the socialists and communists might have been quite happy to go that direction. and i think roosevelt was a genius politician at that time. he understood the issue. he went to the rich and the corporations of america, the top, who had become very wealthy at that time, and he basically said to them, "you must give me, the president, the money to meet at least the basic demands of the massive people to be massively helped in an economic crisis. because if you don't, then the goose that lays your golden egg will disappear." and he split the corporations and the rich. half of them were not persuaded. and i believe they represent the right wing of the republican party to this day. but the other half were. and they made the deal. and so we had this amazing thing. politics, the threat of the mass of people from below to politically act to change the system led us to see something we've almost unimaginable today.

a president, who in the depths of the depression, creates the social security system, giving every american who's worked a lifetime of 65 years a check for the rest of their life every month. he created unemployment compensation to give those millions of unemployed a check every week. and then to top it off, he created and filled 12.5 million federal jobs because he said, "the private sector either can't or won't do it." so in the midst of a terrible depression, when every level of government says, "there's no money," mr. roosevelt proved there is the money. it's just a question of whether you have the political will and support to go get it. and when people listen to me explain this history, and it's always amazing to me how many americans kind of never got that part -- >> bill moyers: don't know it. >> richard wolff: but when i do that, and they say, "well, that's a very risky thing for a politician to do, support the mass of people by taxing the rich, unthinkable."

and then i remind them, roosevelt is the most popular and successful president in american history. nobody had ever been elected four times in a row before that. and it was so upsetting to the republicans that after mr. roosevelt died, they pushed that law through that gives us a term limit of two presidential terms. so it wasn't the end of his political career, it made him the most powerful popular president we've ever had. there must be a lesson here somewhere. >> bill moyers: well, it was one of the few times in history in which the political elite and a few financial elite formed an alliance for the people. >> richard wolff: right. >> bill moyers: and yet, richard, it still took the war to create the spending that pulled us out of the depression, right? >> richard wolff: right. because they were always large groups of corporations and the rich who were angry at all of this, like they are today, who didn't want to pay higher taxes, much higher than corporations pay today, who didn't want to pay high personal income tax rates, much higher than they are

today. but they had to. right, people don't remember in 1943, president roosevelt proposed a top income tax bracket of 100%. >> bill moyers: yeah. >> richard wolff: his bill that he sent to the congress, a proposal, was that anyone who earns over $25,000, which would be roughly $350,000 a year now, in current dollars, would have to give every nickel of it, beyond the $25,000, to the government, 100%. that's maximum income. the president of the united states, with massive popular support. and when the republicans said, "no, we can't do that." they fought. and the compromise was a 94% top rate. >> richard wolff: compared to the 39%, and .6% that we have today. i mean, you can see there that that -- that was a lesson. that i believe the corporations and the rich in america have learned. they saw that they were forced between two choices. a real revolutionary possibility, or a compromise. they voted for the compromise. they gave the mass of people real support, far better than

anything they're getting now. and they did that because politics was a real possibility to undo their economic system. after the war, i think our history is the history of a destruction of the communist and socialist parties first and foremost, and of the labor movement shortly thereafter. so that we now have a crisis without the mechanism of pressure from below. and that may look to those on top as an advantage because they don't have that problem. they don't have a c.i.o. they don't have socialists and communists, the way they do in europe. but i think it's a pyrrhic victory, because what you're teaching the mass of the american people is that politics, debate, and struggle, is a dead end. and if you think people are just going to sink into resignation, that's wishful thinking. they're going to find other ways to protest against the system

like this, because the pressures are building in that direction. i think this is a capitalism that i would say has lost its sense of its social conditions, its social limits. it's killing the mass support without which it cannot survive. it is creating tensions and hostilities that will take left wing, right wing, a variety of forms. but it's producing its own undoing and doesn't imagine it because it focuses so much on making more money in a normal way of business that it somehow occludes from itself. it doesn't see the larger social conditions and what its behavior is doing to them. >> bill moyers: for a moment, wasn't there kind of quirky or eccentric symbiosis between the tea party and occupy wall street? that, 'cause in their own different ways, they were reacting to the colossus that was coming apart all around them. and upending their lives. >> richard wolff: absolutely. i think in country after country

going through this crisis, you're seeing more or less the same thing. a upsurge of right wing agony and hostility and opposition to what's happening in this capitalist system and a left wing one. but only difference from country to country is the balance between the two. and i think the tea party comes first because being a right wing party in this country's much easier, much more socially acceptable to form, and there's the old roots of it, anyway, in the john birch societies and all the rest in american history. so we have a tea party resurgence. then echoed a couple years later by the occupy wall street, which is a left wing response to all of this. and i don't think we've seen the end of either of these. i think these were the first explosions of this process, the first reflections and signs of a society coming apart because capitalism can't deliver the

kind of society and results that people want. and i think we're going to see more of it and there may be difficult forms of it. but it is part of a system that has come, i think, closer and closer to its historical if not end, then a severe crisis. >> bill moyers: but there is no agitation here. people seem not to know what to do here. >> richard wolff: i think americans are a little bit like deer caught in the proverbial headlights. they thought that they were in a society that kind of guaranteed that each generation lives better than the one before. that the american dream gets better and better and is available. they promised when they got married to one another to provide the american dream to each other. and then they promised their children to provide it to them, that the children would have a good education, that children would have the opportunity. they can't quite believe that it's not there anymore.

you know, for 30 years, as the wages in america stopped rising since the 1970s, americans reacted by doing two things. because they couldn't give up the idea that they were going to get themedrea how do you buy the american dream, which becomes ever more expensive, if your wages don't go up, per worker, per hour? which they haven't since the '70s. the first thing you do is send more and more people out to work. the women went out in vast numbers. older people came out of retirement. teenagers did more and more work. here's a statistic. the oecd, leading agency gathering data on the world's developed economy shows that the average number of hours worked per year by an american worker is larger than that of any other developed country on this planet. we work ourselves like crazy. that's what you do if the wages per worker don't go up. you send out more people from the family in order to be able to get that american dream. but of course if you do that, everybody's physically k>nek

time, and 2007 happened to be that time, when you couldn't do it anymore. you couldn't borrow anymore because you couldn't pay it back. and so you stopped your mortgage or you stopped your credit card payment or you couldn't make your car payments. and this is a situation that explodes the expectations of a good life. and i think americans are stunned. and they haven't yet kind of gotten their heads and their

arms around the reality they face. and so what -- we see people in shock, if you like. i mean, i'm stretching the metaphor, but -- >> bill moyers: that's all right. >> richard wolff: the american dream that they thought they could access, that they were told they could access, if they just worked hard or went to school or both of the -- it's not there. a whole generation of young people is learning that in order to get the education, without which the american dream is not possible, you have to borrow so much money that your whole situation is put in a terrible vice. then you discover, at the end of your four years and you have your bachelor's degree, that the job you had thought you were then entitled to and the income you thought would go with it, they're not there. and yet you have the debt, the effects of this on our society, not just for the young people confronting it daily, but for the parents who helped them, who led them to expect something,

that is producing a kind of stasis, immobility, shock. but beware, if my psychiatrist wife is right, as she usually is, what happens after that period of stasis, of shock, is a boiling over of anger, as you kind of confront what has happened. and that you were deceived and betrayed in your expectations, your hopes. and then the question is, where does that go? >> bill moyers: i'm struck by the fact that you give a fairly dire -- not fairly, a dire analysis of what's happened to us in the last several years. but at the end of both your book and of your lecture, you don't wind up cynical or pessimistic. you -- >> richard wolff: not at all. >> bill moyers: you sound like you're saying, "let's take to the barricades." >> richard wolff: yeah. i think there's a wonderful tradition here in the united

states of people feeling that they have a right, even if they don't exercise it a lot, to intervene, to control. there is that democratic impulse. and i put a lot of stock in the hope that if this is explained, if the conditions are presented, that the american people can and will find ways to push for the kinds of changes that can get us out of this dilemma. even if the political leaders who've inherited this situation seem stymied and unable to do so. >> bill moyers: i know you have some alternatives, that you've given a lot of thought to the critique, but you've also given a lot of thought to the correcting of our system. >> richard wolff: one of the things that has happened to me in the last two years is as we've developed the criticism and people see the process of how we got here, the most insistent questions is, "what do we do? where do we go? if regulation isn't the solution and if punishing this one -- if it is a systemic process, how can we conceive and talk about an alternative system?" >> bill moyers: richard wolff, i've really enjoyed this conversation. the dvd is "capitalism hits the fan." and the book is "democracy at work: a cure for capitalism." thank you for being with me. >> richard wolff: thank you, bill, for the opportunity.

>> bill moyers: that's it for this week. i'm bill moyers. see you next time. ♪ -- captions by vitac --

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>> coming up -- deborah potter looks at a new movement to help the country's two million prison inmates. >> we don't recognize the god in our brothers and sisters who are in prison. >> and, popular evangelical leader joni eareckson tada on her battle with breast cancer. >> start where you are. this is the new base line, now get on with living. >> plus, the devotion of sufi whirling dervishes.