Bill Moyers: The Plutocracy Will Go to Extremes to Keep the 1% in Control | Alternet From
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Matt Taibbi and Chrystia Freeland on the One Percent's Power and Privileges on Vimeo Quote:
Bill Moyers: The Plutocracy Will Go to Extremes to Keep the 1% in Control
Moyers, Matt Taibbi and Chrystia Freeland explain how the plutocrats have willfully confused their self-interest with America's interest.
The One Percent is not only increasing their share of wealth — they're using it to spread millions among political candidates who serve their interests. Example: Goldman Sachs, which gave more money than any other major American corporation to Barack Obama in 2008, is switching alliances this year; their employees have given $900,000 both to Mitt Romney's campaign and to the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future. Why?
Because, says the Wall Street Journal, the Goldman Sachs gang felt betrayed by President Obama's modest attempts at financial reform. To discuss how the super-rich have willfully confused their self-interest with America's interest, Bill is joined by Rolling Stone magazine's Matt Taibbi, who regularly shines his spotlight on scandals involving big business and government, and journalist Chrystia Freeland, author of the new book Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else.
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CF notes that while it's often OK to examine poverty, it's often much less OK to examine income and wealth inequality -- many think-tank donors don't like it.
NT noted how some Democrats decided that they weren't going to lose the funding battle after their 1984 defeat, and how they started sucking up to Big Money.
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CHRYSTIA FREELAND: You know, the middle class is being--
MATT TAIBBI: Decimated, yeah.
CHRYSTIA FREELAND: --hammered. Those jobs are hollowed out. And where are the people pulling back and saying, "Okay, technology revolution, we love it." Globalization, I love that too. And I think it's great people are being raised up in India and China and now Africa. But let's think about how our society and our politics need to change to accommodate this. And no one is doing that. And meanwhile, the guys at the top, who are making, who are doing so, so well actually are saying, "We need to slant the political system even more in our own favor."
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She continued by noting that US poor people are often demoralized, like a 22-year-old man man who had been stopped and frisked 70 times.
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And so what I think you'll end up seeing is social mobility, which is already decreasing in the United States, being increasingly squeezed. You see particularly powerful sectors, finance, oil. I would say the technology sector is going to be next in line, getting lots of government subsidies.
And meanwhile, I think you see much less money spent on the things that the middle class and the poor need. That's why have this, you know, full bore attack on entitlements, right? Why is the plutocracy so enthusiastic about cutting entitlement spending? Because they don't need it. But they're very worried about their tax dollars funding it.
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CF and MT agreed with BM that we are moving to a more Latin American sort of economy, with a small population of very rich people and the majority of people being poor and struggling.
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MATT TAIBBI: You know, I, that experience completely shaped the way I look at the present situation in the, in America. In the mid-'90s, suddenly when Russia became a "capitalist society" you suddenly has this instant division of the entire society into this very, very tiny group of people at the top who had more money than anybody in the world. And then there was everybody else who had nothing.
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This was due to Yeltsin's privatization efforts, in which corrupt officials would arrange to get for themselves much of what Yeltsin's government sold off. They thus became the new class of oligarchs.
A question left unanswered was what has happened since Vladimir Putin came to power. His presidency was notable for the prosecution of oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an action that was widely criticized as politically motivated. But it seems to me that VP wanted to show who's boss, even if it meant treating MK a bit like some of Stalin's victims. Though I'm sure that Stalin would have considered VP too lenient.
MT then described how members of some of the smaller Wall Street finance firms were reaching out to him, concerned that the bigger ones were getting the politicians to rewrite the rules for their convenience, like getting big bailouts.
CF then noted that these high-flying plutocrats were people who built their corporate empires, and she also noted how many of them distinguished between good plutocrats and bad ones, with themselves being among the good ones. Nothing bad is ever their fault, they believe.
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So you talk to the Silicon Valley guys, they love talking about this, especially after the financial crisis because their view was, "Of course income inequality is a problem. Of course there has been state capture by those bad guys in New York. "We however, are the innovators. We created value ourselves. We are completely pure and good. And these issues really have nothing to do with us."
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MT continued by noting a transformation in the Russian countryside. In the mid to late 1990's, he started to see lots of walled-off houses, complete with guards. It's as if their inhabitants were living in their own private worlds. That seems to be a good description of what's been happening with the economic elite.
CF noted a Silicon Valley magnate who described how spoiled he had gotten. When he dropped a spoon, someone came up to him with 3 sizes of spoon on a napkin, and he recognized how disconnected he had gotten from what just about everybody else has to go through.
About the deregulation that these big-business leaders want,
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CHRYSTIA FREELAND: And what I think is crucial is, this is not framed as, "I want government to do this so I can get rich and my company can prosper." This is framed as "We need to do these things for the greater good." And this is where I think another big problem in America today is a disempowering and a devaluing of the role of government and of its authority as an independent, respected arbitrating body in the center of the ring.
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She then noted how Canada's government refused to give Canada's banks the deregulation that they had wanted, and how, as a consequence, Canada's banks did not need to be bailed out.
Both MT and CF thought that bailing out the banks was necessary, and MT noted that this bailout was done without attaching a lot of conditions. That was a Bad Thing, and MT contrasted the handling of the savings-and-loan scandals of the 1980's. There were big investigations, and something like 1000 people went to jail as a result.
They next discussed Barack Obama and what he's like. He has not exactly acted like either of the two Roosevelts, standing up to big businesses. That's partly because he's more-or-less one of them, and he's appointed a lot of the economic elite to important positions.
But why does much of the economic elite hate BO so much? CF imagined what they might be thinking:
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The size of my bank account doesn't-- it isn't just good for me. It is a manifestation of my civic contribution. And that, in some ways, is Mitt Romney's campaign. He's saying, "I'm a successful businessman. So I will make a good president." And Barack Obama, he is actually saying, "You know what? I don't think that that equation works and is automatic." And actually, in saying that, the plutocrats are not wrong to detect there a very powerful ideological challenge.
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Thus you see Godwin arguments like comparing the repeal of the carried-interest loophole to Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland.
CF noted how in past decades, there were lots of new ideas on how to handle the troubles caused by industrialization and the like. But there aren't many new ideas nowadays.
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And frankly, you know, I see the right not interested in addressing this issue at all. And I see the left not offering enough new thinking. And people know that. And that's why people aren't on the barricades. There's no manifesto to be waving.
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MT then noted that any idea that has government in it gets labeled communist and socialist by certain people.
An alternative is direct action, and we may end up seeing more and more of it. The Occupy movement hasn't been a great success, but it may be the beginning.
So Gilded Age II is not likely to end in a very pretty way.
