tv Documentary RT September 8, 2019 3:30pm-4:00pm EDT
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a culture where if you criticize state power and when i state i mean. we're generally not just government but state worker or if you criticize concentrated power you're against us you're against the b. it's quite strange in that it's used in the united states and it's for another the only democratic society where the concert isn't just ridicule and it's a sign of. elements of the elite culture which are the great ugly.
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american dream my many ideals was partly a symbolic but partly real so in the 1950 s. and sixty's there was a the biggest growth period in the. american economic history. gold made. it was pretty gala carrion growth so the lowest 5th of the population was improving about as much as the upper fifty's. and there were some welfare state measures which improve life for much of the population it was for example possible for a. black worker to get a decent job in an auto plant. could
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a core of his children go to school and so on and the same across the board. when the u.s. was. primarily a manufacturing center it had to be concerned with its own consumers here famously henry ford raise the salary of his workers that would be able to buy cars. when you're moving into an international ton of me is to make like call it a little small percentage of the world's population that's a gathering increasing wealth what happens to american consumers of much less concern because most of them aren't going to be consuming your products anyway at least on a major basis. your goals or profit in next quarter even if it's based on financial manipulation and. high salary high bonuses produce overseas if you have to and
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produce for the wealthy classes here and their counterparts abroad what about the rest well there's a term coming in to use for them to as they're called the precariat. precarious proletariat the working people of the world who live increasingly precarious lives . and it's related to the attitude toward the country altogether. during the period of great growth of the economy fifty's and sixty's but in fact earlier taxes on the wealthy were far higher corporate taxes were much higher taxes on dividends are much higher simply taxes on wealth for much rare the tax system has been redesigned so that the taxes that are paid by the very wealthy are reduced. and curse found only the tax burden on the rest of the populations
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increased. now the shift is towards trying to keep taxes just done and wages are not consumption which everyone has to do not say and do it and which i go to the ridge . the numbers are pretty striking. now there's a pretext of course there's always a pretext the pretext in this case is well that increases investment and increases jobs but there isn't any evidence for that if you want to increase investment give money to the poor and the working people they have to keep alive so they spend their incomes that stimulates production and stimulates investment that leads to
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job growth and so. if you're an ideologist for the masters you have a different line and in fact right now it's almost absurd the corporations have money coming out of their pocket. so in fact general electric are paying 0 taxes and they have enormous profits let's take the profits somewhere else or the for it but not pay taxes and this is common. the major american corporations shift the burden of sustaining the society on to the rest of the population.
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solidarity is quite dangerous from the point of view of the masters you're only supposed to care about yourself and not about other people this is quite different from the people they claim are their heroes like adam smith who based is whole approach to the economy on the principle that sympathy is a fundamental human trait but that has to be driven out of people's heads gotta be for yourself father while maxon don't care about others which is ok for the rich and powerful but is devastating for everyone else. going to take a whole lot of effort to try to drive these basic human emotions out of people's heads. and we see it today in policy for a major for example in the attack on social security. social security is based on a principle it's based on a principle of solidarity saw terry it is caring for others.
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a social security means i pay payroll taxes so that the widow across town can get something to live upon. much of the population that's what they survive and . it's of no use to the very rich so therefore there's a concerted attempt to destroy it. one of the ways is defunding it you want to destroy some system 1st the fund. then it will work people be angry they want something else that's a standard technique for. privatizing some system. we see it in the attack on public schools and public schools are based on the principle of solidarity. i no longer have children in school or grown up but the principle of solidarity says i happily pay taxes so that the kid across the street
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can go to school that's normal human emotion that it drives it out of people's heads i don't have kids in school why should i pay taxes privatized it so on. the public education system all the way from kindergarten to higher education is under severe attack i mean that's one of the jewels of american society. go back to the golden age again the great growth period fifty's and sixty's a lot of that is based on free public education. one of the results of the 2nd world war was the g.i. bill right which enabled veterans remember that's a large part of the population and to go to college they would have been able to otherwise of a century get free education where
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a community's date or nation regularly invest substantial share of it resources in education the investment invariably returned in better business and a higher standard of living u.s. was way in the lead in developing. extensive mass public education at every level. but now more than half the states most of the funding for the colleges comes from tuitions not from the state that's a radical change that's a terrible burden on students but it means that students if they don't come from very wealthy families they're going to leave college with big debts and if you have the dead you're trapped i mean maybe you wanted to become a public interest lawyer but you're going to have to go into a corporate law firm to pay off those dead and by the time you're part of the culture you know you're not going to get out of it again and that's true of cross the board.
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what politicians do listen to them. and put themselves on the line and they get accepted or rejected. so when you want to be president. or somehow want to be. the 2 i would be impressed as a wife of a 43 in the morning can't be good. i'm interested always in the wires in the house . question. said she stressed to no longer this or that the british presence at the bill of the internet that you know to. stop the show was to you she didn't taste the face conditions and the cia which cost a lot. to which she never happened and i know what you mean
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and i must get your carmona man for sure i. want to talk to you show through my if you're going to contribute. to mr hazlewood support of arms deal with them spittle or does he seem to be arguable that he's to think it's a studio actually of. the barbarians the vandals of wall street are now actively plundering your bank account with a negative interest rate in astronomy come out of policy there and there's no economics behind it that would cue to any school of economics that has ever existed as dr michael hudson said since the bronze age it's just out right or fair enough as of. today there are good terrorists and bad deadens the bad terrorists and those in yemen who the united states deems to be a threat the good that it is those who work in syria the cia and the us military
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were engaged in covert actions really throughout the world. where they were assassinating populist leaders they were backing up right away military windows funding an army of death squads there's no phones and then more because there's always a small income for a really good this good for profit. in the 1950 s. it's a much poorer. than the us could easily centrally free. mass higher education and today a much richer society claims dozen of the resources for. that said just what's going on right before our eyes and it's the a general attack on the principals that and that i mean not only are they humane they're the basis of the press parity and health of this society.
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if you look over the history of regulation say the railroad regulation financial regulation and so on and you find that quite commonly it's it's either initiated by the economic. concentrations that are being regulated or it's supported by them and the reason is because they know that sooner or later they can take over the regulators. and it ends up with what's called regulatory
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capture. the business being regulated is in fact running the regulators. bank lobbyists are actually writing the laws of financial regulation gets to that extreme. and that's been happening through history and again it's a pretty natural tendency when you just look at the distribution of power. one of the things that expanded enormously in the 1970 s. is lobbying as the business world moved sharply to try to control legislation. business world was pretty upset by the advances in a public welfare in the sixty's and in particular by richard nixon and it's not to will understand that but he was the last new deal president and they regarded that as class treachery. and nixon's administration you get the consumer safety
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legislation safety and health regulations in the workplace the e.p.a. the environmental protection agency. business didn't like it of course they'd been like that taxes. they didn't like the regulation and they began a coordinated effort to try to overcome a. lobbying sharply increase deregulation began with the rule ferocity. there were no financial crashes in the fifty's and the sixty's because the regulatory apparatus of the new deal was still in place. as a pm to be dismantled under business pressure and political pressure. to get more and more pressures. and it goes on right through the years of. the seventy's sort of starts begin.
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eighty's really takes off congress was asked to approve federal loan guarantees to the auto companies about the want and want to have a $1000000000.00 and all of this is quite safe as long as you know the government's going to come to your rescue so take say reagan instead of letting them pay the cost break and build out the banks like continental the biggest bailout of american history at the time that she ended his term with so the huge financial crisis the savings and loan crisis and the government moved in and build it out for a family that he handed it in or got a favorite and later. 199 the regulation was dismantled to separate commercial banks from investment banks. and then come see bush and obama bill and bear stearns is running to the feds to stay afloat president bush today defended the decision to bail out citigroup fannie mae and freddie macin asked for
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a total at green $1000000000.00 more to sail out could get much bigger than billing even in troubles for the u.s. economy. and they're building up the next term. b. each time the taxpayer is called on to bail out of those who created the crisis increasingly the major financial institutions. in a capitalist economy you would do that in a capitalist system that would worry about the investors who made risky investments but the rich and powerful they don't want a capitalist system they want to be able to run to the nanny state as soon as they're in trouble and get billed a taxpayer it's called the too big to fail. i mean there are no bill or it's an
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economics who significantly disagree with the course that we're following people like just stiglitz paul krugman others none of them were even approached the people picked to fix the crisis were those who created the robert rubin crowd the goldman sachs croak they created the crisis are no more powerful than before is that accident well not when you pick those people to create an economic plan and then what do you expect to happen. meanwhile for the poor let market principles prevail don't expect any help from the government the government's the problem not the solution and so on that's essentially neo liberalism and it's has this dual character which goes right back in economic history one set of rules for the rich office etc rules for the poor.
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and nothing surprising about this exactly the dynamics you expect if the population allows it to proceed she's going to go on and on like this until the next crash which is so much expected that credit agencies which kind of evaluate the. this status affirms are now counting into their calculations the taxpayer bail out that they take expect a come in after the next crash which means that the beneficiaries of these credit ratings like the big banks they can borrow money more cheaply they can push of smaller competitors and you get more and more concentration every way you look policies are done this way which should come as absolutely no surprised anyone that's what happens when you put power into the hands of a narrow sector of wilf which will is dedicated to increasing power for itself just as you'd expect be
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concentration of wealth you'll to concentration of political power particularly so as the cost of elections skyrockets it which kind forces the political parties into the pockets of major corporations the citizens united this was january 2009 i guess that a very important decisions priem court decision and i but it has a history and he got to think of at the history of 14th amendment has a provision as it says no person's rights can be infringed without due process of law and the intent clearly was to protect freed slaves said ok the
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of got the protection of the law i don't think it's ever been used for freed slaves if ever marginally almost immediately it was used for businesses corporations there are rights can't be infringed without due process of law so they gradually became persons under the law corporations or state created legal fictions. maybe they're good maybe they're bed but to call them persons is kind of rages so they get got personal rights back about a century ago and that extended through the 20th century. as they give corporations rights way beyond what persons have so if say general motors invests in mexico they get national rights the rights of the mexican business well the notion of person was expanded to include corporations it was also restricted if you take the 14th
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amendment literally that no undocumented alien can be deprived of rights if they're persons. undocumented aliens who are living here and building your buildings clear lawns and so on they're not persons. but general electric is a person. an immortal super powerful person this perversion of the. elementary morality and the obvious meaning of the law is quite incredible. in the 1970 s. the courts decided that money is a form of speech. but the 1st value and then you one through the years to citizens united which says that the right of free speech of corporations namely spend as much money they want can't be curtailed. take
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a look what that means it means that corporations which anyway have been pretty much buying elections are now free to do it with virtually no constraint as tremendous attack on the residue of democracy. very interesting to read the rulings like justice kennedy's swing vote his ruling said well look just roll them c.b.s. is given freedom of speech there are corp why shouldn't general electric be free to spend as much when he's that one. i mean it's true that c.b.s. has given treat of speech but they're supposed to be performing a public service that's why that's what the press is supposed to be a general electric is trying to make money for the chief executive some of the shareholders. see critical decisions and it puts the country in a position where business power is greatly extended beyond what it always was this is part of that vicious cycle the supreme court justices are put in by
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reactionary presidents who get in there because they're funded by business and that's the way the cycle works. join me every thursday on the alex salmond show and i'll be speaking to yes on the world of politics that's less i'm show business i'll see you than. ready ready ready ready ready i am sure they need to stop it for continuing to grow. i just never felt very good about the idea of bringing children into the world because i didn't
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feel like things were in very good shape that a life was just going to be a lot of software programs. there's no reason why more kids world 10 things that are going with. there's no reason to make something. to everybody's scared to talk about it certifiable is really dependent on us addressing this issue and if we can't even talk about it and reach anyone have a conversation about it then. we're in trouble ready. well you know the higher degree kind of adopted because we were called pirates for so long. of being there in the small boats next to the harpoon ships and it's scary. stuff and.
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the limo still to be told fish already 90 percent of it daryn got any blown connor . to contemplate 15 scoops 75 tons trying to do it several times a day with a big fleet oh you get an idea for an ocean which. we have to understand we can still use to just. be within this the deal more user. i'm doing this because i want them for the future world to the future can generations to have and enjoy the ocean we have. and the big 10 years since crosstalk started 10 years i think it's time to shake things up maybe change the branding maybe the format here is what i've been
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thinking about next season related episodes filmed on an island 10 experts cited out for a trophy what do you think ok a more affordable option 25 text birds. and one red rose. another suggestion geo political jeopardy parody no political cookout where we will literally wrote the elites. late night show it's a rare format piece based on its chief on him it is an old microphone in a printed banner but to leave me with i guess i can do this campbell after politics gone wild like music. ok crosstalk is not about hype it's about meaning 10 years of talk and still going strong. peter if you want to change something why don't we get rid of the bow tie you know
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millions of so have been made missions reportedly end up in the hands of terrorists in yemen and syria after they were bought by the u.s. on its allies according to leaked documents obtained by a bulgarian journalist i didn't write that i heard planning to do this you don't know that i do think it's part of my thoughts are you part of the world they are all of the thank you. and on goings on i think riots in south africa as foreign owned businesses and limited in the country's laws to city johannesburg. make up one sunday nights out on dates old romainville break they show up the dead both up was there inside and to stand much afraid of me and somehow the flood of schools.
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