tv Documentary RT January 31, 2020 6:30am-7:01am EST
6:30 am
the 2020 presidential campaign is. the 2016 race but this time around the insurgent. who is not even a member of the democratic party again are not interested in establishment politicians in fact they appear to be rebelling against. sanders showdown. trade and investment to become magic spells to conjure economic development. most people think about trade they think about goods and services being exchanged between countries and the investor a chapter of a trade agreement is a very different but won't when investment leads to toxic manufacturing the destroys sacred sites all ruins the environment. that means local communities that are being poisoned if they object if they do anything that the company feels is interrupting their profits they can do no national is of taking on the whole nation
6:31 am
philip morris is trying to use i.s.t.'s to stop oracle buying from implementing new tobacco regulations aimed at cutting domestic smoking rates a french company sued egypt because egypt resists minimum wage democratic choice of a trunk corporate law joins us as we try to find don't want to party. norm chomsky am right and especially at mit and i was. getting more headlines as we were activities for the last few years. noam chomsky has made to international reputation why did this is one of the national leaders of american resistance to the vietnam war the deepish this is
6:32 am
a professor of linguistics who before he was 40 years wrote to transform the nature of his subject. you are identified with a new level whatever that is you certainly have been an activist as well as a writer. has the time scared. me as well as to. anybody catalog monday. girls of the new law. is standing. by robin over the past 2 or 3 years a series of adamant. rejecting at least american. bochy this notion anti american is quite an interesting one sashes to tell tarion notion it is used in free societies so if someone and say italy is
6:33 am
criticizing barrels going to me or the corruption of the italian state and soon then a cold area 16 they were called india today and people would collapse and laughter in the streets of rome or milan. in totalitarian states the notions used so in the old soviet union dissidents were cold and he says via that was the worst condemnation in the brazilian military dictatorship they were gold in any brazilian . no it's true that in just about every society the critics are malign. are mistreated different ways depending on the nature of the society like in soviet union say the old imprisoned. in the us dependency like el salvador at the same time this counterfeit i said other brains blown out by the us or and state terrorist worse. than others is it just condemned their villa from the zone
6:34 am
in the united states or one of the terms of abuse is anti american and there's a couple of others like you know more because there's an array of terms of abuse. of in the united states in a very high degree of freedom and so if you're vilified by some commas or who cares . go on and do your work anyway at least concepts only arise in a culture where if you criticize state power and when i state i mean. we're generally not just government but state worker our 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 concept isn't just ridicule and it's a sign of. elements of the elite culture which are the great the glee.
6:35 am
6:36 am
so the lowest 5th of the population was improving about as much as the upper 5th. and there were some welfare state measures which improve life for much of the population it was for example possible for a. a black worker to get a decent job in an auto plant. get 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 raised the salary of his workers who would be able to buy cars. when you're moving into an international ton of a is the max like to call it
6:37 am
a little small percentage of the world's population that's 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 produce for the wealthy classes here and their counterparts abroad what about the rest well there's a term coming into use for them too 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 all together.
6:38 am
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 wealthier much rare the tax system has been redesigned so that the. taxes that are paid by the very wealthy are reduced and correspondingly the tax burden on the rest of the population's 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 dividends which i go to the rich.
6:39 am
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 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 that corporations have money coming out of their pockets. 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
6:40 am
the population. 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.
6:41 am
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 formation for example in the attack on social security. social security is based on a principle it's based on a principle of solidarity saw terri caring for others. 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
6:42 am
want something else that's a standard technique for. private eyes exam 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 they're grown up but the principle of solidarity says i happily pay taxes so that the kid across the street can go to school that's normal human emotion and 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.
6:43 am
you 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. and 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 do otherwise of the century of free education where communities date or nation regularly invest substantial shared resources in education the investment invariably returned and better business and a higher standard of living u.s. was way in the lead in developing. extensive. every little. more than half the states most of the funding for the code has come from to issue. radical change and that's a terrible burden on student but it means that students if they don't come from
6:44 am
very wealthy families they're going to leave college with big debt and few of the good you're trapped i mean maybe you want to become a public interest lawyer but you're going after going to a corporate law. to pay off those dead by the time you're part of the culture you are going to get out of it and that's true. but we don't want to tell the employer with an axe and the monument we want the kind of. streets filled with events. with this conference center maybe i love going to conferences and debates and such events like the battle of the bobby confronts these are the kind of things was to be striving on and. making connections with people to set up projects.
6:45 am
the plastic is a problem it's in the food supply. plastic and obviously plastic in the body is going to kill you so life expectancy is down and banning plastic is not going to change the equation one iota because it's too far gone so should we care or just consider that humans had a great ride why we did this and then shuffle off our mortal coil and that you know . and the. more my uncle or the good things come to say the boy more tonight i didn't. even know her about them and they didn't.
6:46 am
go into. the kylie kwong. you know move on which i didn't know and then showed up to move this guy who i was an infant and we're going to be out in so which does and i must. say i thought a lot of the thing was i was it as a child as he was outside your path it's a 1000000 years. in the 1950 s. is a much poorer society today but nevertheless could easily handle centrally free mass higher education today a much richer society claims dozen of the resources for. that just what's going on right before our eyes and it's the
6:47 am
a general attack on the principles that i mean not only are they humane they're the basis of the prosperity and health of this society. 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
6:48 am
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 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 where it was pretty upset by the advances in
6:49 am
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 to get the consumer safety legislation safety and health regulations in the workplace the e.p.a. the environmental protection agency. business didn't like it of course they did like that taxes. they didn't like the regulation and they began a coordinated effort to try to overcome it. lobbying sharply increase deregulation began with the rule ferocity. there were no financial crashes in the fifty's and the sixty's because the greater the story apparatus of the new deal was still in place. as a pm to be dismantled under business pressure and political pressure. to get more
6:50 am
and more crashes. and it goes on through the years. seventy's sort of starts begin. eighty's really takes off congress was asked to approve federal loan guarantees to the auto companies about the want and want to have $1000000000.00 all of this is quite safe as long as you know the government's going to come to rescue so it takes a break and instead of letting them pay the cost break and build out the banks like continental the biggest bail out of american history at the time actually ended his term but it's a huge financial crisis the savings and loan crisis and the government moved in and build it out in a kind of $300.00 in a diary saving n.a.t.o.'s $199.00 regulation course dismantled to separate commercial banks from investment banks. and then come see bush and obama
6:51 am
build on bear stearns is running to the feds to stay afloat president bush today defended the decision to bail out citi group that in may and freddie mac. and asked for a total i mean $1000000000.00 more to sail out could get much bigger than milling 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
6:52 am
a capitalist system they want to be able to run to the nanny state as soon as they're in trouble and get build a taxpayer it's called the too big to fail. i mean there are no will or it's an economics who significantly disagree with the course that we're following people who 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 the problem not the solution and so on that's essentially neo liberalism
6:53 am
and it's has this dual character which goes right back in economic history one set of rules for the rich opposite set of rules for the poor. 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. status of firms are now counting into their calculations the taxpayer bailout that they expect to 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 out smaller competitors and you get more and more concentration everywhere you look policies are done this way which should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone that's what happens when you put power into the hands of
6:54 am
a narrow sector of will which will is dedicated to increasing power for itself just as you'd expect. be. concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. particularly so as the cost of elections skyrockets which kind of forces the political parties into the pockets of major corporations. the citizens united this was january 2009 i guess that's a very important decisions prim court decision but it has a history and you've got to think about the history. of 14th amendment has a provision that says no person's rights can be infringed without due process of
6:55 am
law. and the intent clearly was to protect freed slaves said ok they have 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 their 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 it 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
6:56 am
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 amendment literally the no undocumented alien can be deprived of rights if their persons. undocumented aliens who are living here and building their 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 young elementary morality and the obvious meaning of the law is quite incredible. and the 1970 s. the courts decided that money is a form of speech. but reverse value menu on through the years to citizens
6:57 am
united which says that the right of free speech of corporations members spend as much money they want can't be curtailed. take 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. interesting to read the rulings like justice kennedy's swing vote his ruling said well look after all the c.b.s. is given freedom of speech there are corp why shouldn't general electric be free to spend as much when is that what. 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. sitting critical decisions and it puts the country in
6:58 am
a position where business power is greatly extended beyond what it always was this is part of that issue cycle the supreme court justices are put in by reactionary presidents who get in there because they're funded by business and that's the way the cycle works. and another one of the. way both. benefits will flow to. plus we've got it all through hard not to think i don't have the discipline at this moment to look at what they are and i don't know at the end of it. this is the only
6:59 am
7:00 am
c. into murky waters on its. voyage to economic storms on the. northern island. over the corona virus outbreak growth people around the globe reports an increase discrimination against chinese people. and it's a race against time to save a one year old baby's life as his parents try to raise the $2400000.00 price tag for the world's most expensive.
24 Views
Uploaded by TV Archive on
