yes to opportunity. it. was. time for. myself and my friends that. this was. a. massive job loss record of home foreclosures and devaluation.

the mess we're in today did not begin on wall street long before the financial collapse the dismantling of government regulation was well underway this has been the greatest wealth transfer in the history at least of the american kind if not mankind. this is class warfare. in a real life development dwarf in the most elaborate conspiracy fiction all of these consequences are the end result of a brilliantly executed. every day human lives the common dreams of people everywhere were never a factor all that mattered was profit who did it how are they able to pull it off right before our eyes this is the story of the biggest fights in american history.

see my grandmother was born into the world of boom and bust boom and bust as it had been from seven hundred ninety four until the great depression once upon a time we knew in this country we had a great depression and we had a stock market crash in one thousand twenty nine followed by several years of twenty five percent unemployment of corporations declaring bankruptcy of people in the streets on bread lines. oh a narrow. gun safe. in the depths of the great depression president roosevelt's new deal put millions back to work provided unemployment insurance

created social security and made it easier for workers to join unions and bargain collectively. what f.d.r. and the government and the balls to do was an act legislation that really took command of the wall street environment and said you know what you can't speculate with other people's money. coming out of the great depression just three laws fundamentally altered the course of america's history the first one f.d.i.c insurance make it safe to put money in banks the second one glass steagall try to separate the risk taking on wall street from your local community bank and the third one ses the regulations provide some cops to watch the robbers out is that what we got was fifty years of economic peaks no financial

panics no meltdowns and during that fifty years we built a strong and prosperous middle class in america after world war two the new deal evolved into a great deal with the american people growing prosperity and social justice seemed to be everyone's destiny as the u.s. economy exploded into the greatest economic machine in history. the new deal was stablish that ordinary people had the right to protect themselves against corporate abuse the early seventy's expanded those safeguards the creation of agencies like the occupational safety and health administration whose mission was to protect workers the environmental protection agency created human health and the environment. regulation is nothing more than the imposition of a set of rules to prevent the free market from behaving in a way which is contrary to the common good.

a decision was reached by corporate america that working with unions working with government to improve the standard of living for all people was not the right thing to do in one thousand nine hundred seventy one corporate leaders began to orchestrate the details battle plan to eliminate any government policies that might stand between them and profits the plan was laid out in an influential memo called a act of american free enterprise system. lewis powell was a well respected citizen of richmond virginia he was a corporate lawyer a partner in a prestigious corporate law firm and friends with an executive at the chamber of commerce named eugene sidner and sydney asked his friend if he would draft a position statement that he could submit to the chamber of commerce that would

then sort of form the framework for how to make the organization more able to confront what they thought was a growing threat to business interests polls memo laid out a strategy to radically alter public perceptions ensuring that big business interests would dominate public policy advocated bassed heard of liberal elements in society he saw how corporate money could own the media and talk louder than organized labor and consumer protection groups but for power a future supreme court justice the real endgame was business control of law politics to make their point the chamber of commerce created very clever advertising to influence public opinion. what can be done. to repair the strength of the nation's economy and re store individual freedom the u.s. chamber of commerce and the recently formed elite business roundtable an exclusive

club of c.e.o.'s joined forces to lobby congress and push their agenda with major campaign contributions their goal to buy congressional votes to implement a corporate make over of america you had massive lobbying beginning in seventy six seventy seven seventy eight for cutting taxes on rich people trickle down economics cut capital gains taxes cut evident taxes cut income taxes and the economy will flourish some of the democrats start drinking the kool-aid along with the republicans. and the. next big business set its sights on the biggest threat to their bottom line the wages and benefits of the american workforce especially union members starting in the one nine hundred thirty s. at one targeting power or wages working conditions and benefits but instead of

negotiation big business want to control. lewis powell the poll memo businessman should use their financial muscle to shape the politics of the country nor should there be reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose it why nine hundred seventy eight business outspent organized labor three to one to defeat a bill that would have made it easier for workers to join unions this was a critical turning point setting in motion the decline of organized labor as a major political force and the voice of working americans. douglas frazier president of the united auto workers said in a magazine interview. at the time i believe leaders of the business community with few exceptions have chosen to wage a one sided class war today our country a war against working people be unemployed or the minorities the very young and the

very old and even many in the middle class of our society. one of the geniuses of the right united states because they funded these twelve big washington organizations heritage cato the competitive enterprise institute organizations that range from quite principle. to complete shills the competitive enterprise institute. for the causes of their donors heirs to six of the largest family fortunes in the united states is their private foundations the fund organizations that would promote unregulated markets one notable one would be the role of joseph coors at the heritage foundation who constantly cited the powell memo as one of the reasons that he was inspired to create a conservative pro-business think tank called heritage well heritage is a conservative think tank and if you read the back of our business cards it says

noting in america where freedom opportunity prosperity and civil society flourish and that's heritage is goals. working in unison the six families use their private foundations to shape business schools and manipulate the media most of all they wanted to restructure government to serve their own interests they're not think tanks these are not academic research organizations these are ideological marketing organizations they're no different then the people who persuaded young men when i was a young member we should put brylcreem in our hair even in the great depression when twenty five percent of americans were out of work you have these apologists for free market fundamentalism argue against increased government spending increased regulation strengthening the hands of unions stronger safety net the same thing is happening today the motive was to be a logical putting millions and millions of dollars into funding right wing ideas

factors but then those ideas needed to get pushed out into the media anywhere until the kind of narratives that republicans have used and conservatives have used have come out of forty years and tens of billions of dollars worth of efforts by conservative think tanks to try to develop just the right kind of words to use the republicans were the ones that pushed through president bush's tax policy in two thousand and one that lowered the debt pact the broad question of how it was that the right managed to get people who shouldn't have voted for them to vote for them is is obviously the million dollar question but when it came to something like the state tax the way the law was originally written no one was affected by the state tax except extremely rich but of course the way they talked about it was brilliant and it's the most i'm sure that's there is they've already paid taxes on this money but they've made it with a capital gains taxes along the way and here we are at dallas and we're going to

give them a go when you say death tax what you save when it now they're taxed in your for dying for god sakes they tax the one that make the money they taxed away spend it now they're going to tax me for die enough that i've had enough. and what republicans understood was you test those kind of things until you find that kind of language that really resonates with people my plan will give businesses tax incentives that result in plant expansion greater output more jobs and we will regulations that freed up the cost of doing business strong creative leadership and re store america as the mightiest industrial nation on earth the time is now for reagan it all comes together in the election in one thousand eight. where the right had built up this powerful political financial and intellectual infrastructure and it all comes together under reagan fire ronald reagan do so so by the time reagan takes office there is an army of policy wonks who have a whole game plan that can be put into effect very very quickly to deregulate

everything that hasn't been deregulated under carter. who are close the music is their job the army are destiny and these soldiers don't know what real arms look like but it didn't take them a single shots to conquer the world. china and korea try to imitate them america and europe cried bravo absolutely amazing amazing. meanwhile back in russia military artists are losing their grip on the audiences. and the young people especially soldiers they seem to me to differently from. the russian musical army has been fighting for eighty five years now sixteen teams with the

times and win over the younger audience is up to date as the time comes to give up the fight and defeat. i. mean from the looks of the interviews intrigued. visit. america ronald reagan as someone trustworthy as the host of television's general electric theater his charm kept us from noticing. its president reagan's

policies followed the script serving the big business interests that financed his campaign. heritage produced something first for the reagan administration and what this was was a catalogue of how heritage felt that government programs should be changed we formed eliminated started it's better to best meet conservative calls the newly elected president and out the heritage foundation's mandate for leadership to every member of his cabinet for the next eight years this anti-government policy guide drove the reagan administration's make over of federal government from protecting the public good into working for the rich and powerful ronald reagan is my hero why is he my hero he gave us. he gave us more oil gave us patriotism he brought back our position in the world he brought us out of darkness and the like he cut taxes for those at the top instead of balancing the

budget he ran the biggest deficits in history. then he presided over the passage of a series of tax increases on ordinary people only he didn't call him that the washington press corps went along with the white house calling these revenue enhancements government is not the solution to our problem government is the problem was attacking government attacking the institutions of government and trying to make it as a system that doesn't work and in reality rich folks don't need governments they live in their own gated communities they have their own security they swim in their own swimming pools they go to their own private schools rich people take care of themselves. but but paul

idea of a free market is a myth to begin with the markets are structured based on laws and the real issue is who. the structure benefits and there's just no question that when ronald reagan came in the target of reaganomics was the labor movement. one of his first thoughts was to destroy the air traffic controllers which was the signal to all american businesses that it was open season on union as they are in violation of the law and if they do not report for work within forty eight hours they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated they understand that it's not just about labor supporting the interests of members of labor unions. but it has been the labor movement that has supported the interests of all workers you wouldn't have social security you wouldn't have unemployment compensation you wouldn't have medicare you wouldn't have all of these things which are not just for

labor union members as the bumper sticker says they are the people who brought you the weekend. he was able to pull off an ideological counter-revolution and by the time he was over most of the new deal and dismantled. while reagan was breaking unions and demolishing regulations he also convinced congress in one thousand nine hundred want to pass his economic recovery tax act cutting the top tax brackets by nearly a third but raising taxes on the middle class by dramatically increasing the social security tax as recommended by alan greenspan to ronald reagan we shifted the burden of government so that today seventy some percent of americans pay a heavy your share of their income in social security and medicare taxes then they

do in income taxes and weep. pushed the burden down at the same time at the very very top we radically cut taxes so that the one thousand richest men women and children america face and effective total federal tax rate social security and income taxes about seventeen cents on the dollar and their average income is two hundred sixty three million dollars after decades of lobbying driven by corporate money the tax code is now full of loopholes and special deals that help big business avoid pain its fair share to avoid paying taxes u.s. corporations have stashed more than one point five trillion dollars in offshore accounts. corporations only pay thirteen percent of the federal budgets revenues at a two and a half trillion dollars corporations only pay thirteen percent so i just want to list some ten the ten worst corporate tax avoidance

exxon mobil largest oil company in the world made by king billion of profits in two thousand and nine. exon not only paid no federal income taxes it actually received one hundred fifty six million dollars rebate from the i.r.s. over the past five years while general electric bay twenty six billion in profits in the united states it received a four point one billion dollars refund from the r.s. so if you're working step it make it thirty forty thousand dollars yeah you're paying taxes but if you're chevron or you made ten billion of profits in two thousand die and you don't have to pay any taxes you get a nineteen million dollar refund. the palmetto recommended constant surveillance of content in text books newspapers magazines radio and television insisting the big business use the media to convince

americans that an end to business regulation would somehow benefit us all for thirty eight years the federal communications commission had enforced the fairness doctrine which mandated that all broadcasts over public airwaves offer a balance of viewpoints in one thousand nine hundred seventy ronald reagan stopped in force of the fairness doctrine opening the floodgates for corporate money to talk directly to america through the media a few years ago studies were showing that. three hundred fifty top radio markets in the country you had something like ninety percent of right wing talk and less than ten percent of progressive talk media deregulation is a big story i think it's fair to democracy most people don't have any idea what's gone. after his one thousand nine hundred two election democratic president bill

clinton continue to implement elements of both the palm memo and the heritage foundation's prescriptions for government by and for big business in one thousand nine hundred six clinton signed the first major overhaul of the. law in sixty two years people have to understand that now there are just a handful of corporations that own the me and every one of them has an agenda. saddam hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from africa our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production twenty years ago nobody who was in journalism thought anything of saying to a politician to his face senator stop lying to the los angeles times general you know that's not true i know that's not true. today if you said something like that

you'd be fired. you would be fired we don't ask tough questions and we have these orchestrated white house press conferences and obama is actually worse then his predecessor george bush on this issue so with that let me say who's on the west or starve checked out. a president that you don't get the information that you need and you pretty much on your own the same thing that's happened in business has happened in broadcasting it's just completely profit driven. us still get now out of the steel business and they're getting out of this community and they're saying good bye we had and there's no more left we think we've been great we're going on to greener pastures we've seen the acceleration of the hollowing out of america as the most important and powerful industrial society on earth since one thousand nine hundred seventy three approximately forty million

good pain american jobs with benefits have been shipped overseas or dismantled by corporations boosting their own profits at working americans expense. there is this notion. that this was only a republican. villainy when in fact much of what happened happened during the eight years of bill clinton we seek a new and more open global trading system not for its own sake but for our own sake . i supported nafta then i supported nafta now i still support nafta now for the same reason for the same reasons the main one is i like most economists generically favor trade liberalization because trade leads to gains on both sides. jorge castaneda who was later the finance minister of mexico once said he said

nafta was arranged between the rich and powerful of all three countries leaving ordinary people out what that really means in simple language is that corporations are able to move anywhere in the world they want to to seek cheap labor and exploit people and use that as leverage against workers here in the united states of america if you look at the statistics since nafta in all three countries wages of workers have been stagnant the productivity of workers has skyrocketed and workers in all three countries have gone into debt in order to maintain their living standards we also saw a massive movement toward unfettered free trade and the theory of that was that if. you create trade agreements with china where people are paid forty fifty cents an hour and you shut down plants of america and you move to china and you move to

mexico in some way that we haven't quite figured out yet this is going to be good for the american worker for twenty years the american public believes we can simultaneously outsource all of our jobs and simultaneously maintain our quality of life alone we thought we could do that guess what. no such thing we can have our cake and eat it too we are in the us a raging on manufacturing capability all in the name of lower prices all in the name of free trade all in the name of the market always knows best market doesn't as offshoring of employment has been with us for a very long time but has mostly been restricted to manufacturing the new wrinkle is offshoring of services the number and range and variety of jobs that could in principle be done a broad say over the internet it's enormous. if you look at it in terms of sure business there the right decisions you go to the

lowest labor cost in terms of. what's what's the right world patriotism. they're not. it will be paid for and for a number of reasons one of them is going to be large maybe over the course of the next generation thirty forty million jobs it's important to note this is not either about only low skill jobs or only high skilled jobs they're all over if what you do is write computer code routine computer code you lose nothing in quality if you move the jobs from indiana to india paul craig roberts a co-founder of reaganomics feels that big business has gone too far all these ladders are being dismantled. where. are the jobs for university graduates they are now beginning to face the same the lumens that blue collar

workers face when they lost their twenty dollars on fracturing jobs with their good benefits and so we have an economy that is starting to impoverish its workforce. some of these traditional chili lines they've been bred and developed and passed on from generation to. this is a total structure and the culture of mexico i tell you i mean this this is not going to impact asylum in mexico whatever happens here. we're eating out about x. in the in the open a in all organ and so forth for. genetically engineered crops why do you think this country is full of obese and sick people because we have a crappy food system.

the book .

i would rather as questions for people physicians will instead of speak on their behalf and that's why you can find my show larry king now right here on our t.v. question more. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear sees some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm charming welcome to the big picture.

an army shows it's in no mood to compromise breaking up mass rallies of pro islamists calling for the reinstatement of the ousted leader mohamed morsi and warning of a wider crackdown. around six million surveillance cameras or keeping watch on u.k. citizens twenty four seven and that's according to a new report that's alarmed privacy campaigners and prompted calls for greater transparency. and financial movers and shakers from the world's leading economies me to moscow at hand of the g. twenty summit in st petersburg we'll look at how the upcoming event is being overshadowed by the russia u.s. dispute over and what's known as.