State of Democracy: Richard Wolff

I want to welcome you to the first of our Campbell Institute events of this year this is a lecture and our state of democracy series I'm grant reader I'm director of the Campbell public affairs Institute and we're excited to be co-hosting this talk by economist Richard Wolff and in this endeavor we're being joined by a number of different other programs and departments here at the University and in the community we're being joined by the program for advancement of research on conflict in collaboration the department's of geography anthropology history political science and sociology and also from the community the New York cooperative and we've received generous support from the chancellor's office so Richard you have lots of friends here before I say a bit more about professor wolf I'd also like to thank the dean's office here at Maxwell for its support of the series and for technical support Tom Fazio and the information and computing technology group and Bethany Wallander and Kelly Coleman who work in the Campbell Institute and helped to organize these talks I also want to do some quick market research can I ask how many of you are here because you recently received an email directly from the Institute okay so it's working a little bit that's good all right great thank you let me say a few words about how we'll proceed although professor Wolf's arguments are not traditional we will be employing our traditional state of democracy format will first hear from Professor wolf and then we'll have two brief responses one from my political science colleague Mark Rupert and the other from my political science and Campbell Institute colleague Elizabeth Cohen after that we'll ask you to join in and we'll take your questions and brief comments and when we do that I would like to ask you to please wait for the microphone to be past you we have two that will be going around so that you are part of our archives and our livestream and then we'll repair to the foyer for a nice reception where there will also be some of Professor Wolfe books available for purchase and signing a nod to capitalism I guess and now we make one important announcement that I was just reminded about 20 seconds ago and that's to please silence all ringing devices and anything else that will make noise of that sort and let me now say a few words about Richard Wolff professor wolf is a professor emeritus and economics from the University of Massachusetts but he's hardly retired or as you will soon discover hardly retiring in fact I think he's the hardest-working man in radical economics he's currently a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs of the new school University and he also teaches classes regularly at the Brecht forum in Manhattan he's published three books in the last two years democracy at work occupy the economy and contending economic theories as well as a second edition of capitalism hits the fan he's also got a very active blog and in partnership with Truthout org a radio program called economic update so please join me in welcoming the very busy professor Richard Wolff thank you all for spending some time here today thank you to the institution for inviting me I always begin or almost always with a request as I go along talk discussing the economic system we all live with some of what I say may strike you as upsetting sad depressing if that happens please remember I didn't cause any of this I'm just the messenger and there's an old saying don't shoot the messenger if you don't like the message so I hope you keep that in mind that way we can be friends one suggestion made to me over the last few hours as I arrived on the campus and met a whole host of people who've been really kind and welcoming to me was a suggestion so I'm going to start with that because it tells you something broader than the analysis I'm about to present I've been a professor of economics all my adult life but most of that time as a critic of capitalism which I became as a young man it's been an existence that's relatively marginal all once in a two or three months somebody would invite me to give a talk being obviously a little nervous about having invited a person like this to come and talk I remember being on the radio and having the host say well ladies and gentlemen today I have one of those and I won't bore you with the details but it wasn't a good way to be invited and immediately thereafter the host would say aren't I wonderful to have one of those on my program every once in a while although don't worry not too often so imagine my amazement is that over the last two years everything changed in the last two years I've had more invitations to speak than I had in the entire previous 40 something in the United States is changing big-time because the song I sing isn't so different but the audience suddenly finds it entrancing and I won't deny for a minute that I'm having a wonderful time being able to speak publicly on the media and so on about these things and they suggest something is changing so what might that be that'll get me into my presentation I think the United States for the last half of a century it's a long time has lived with a taboo you know we're a country that is proud and for good reason that it questions the systems that make up our society we debate our school system we debate our energy system we debate our transportation system why we even gotten off the last couple years debating things like health insurance and what marriage is it's pretty courageous but when it comes to capitalism no debate look at the records of the United States Congress for 50 years try to find a debate about the strengths and weaknesses of capitalism you won't find it we treat capitalism as beyond debate it is something about which there's a taboo can't ask the obvious question what are its strengths what are its weaknesses and like any system that is spared debate it becomes possible for it to indulge it's worse two tendencies because it isn't subject to debate and criticism it's not a good idea we strengthen a society by debating its systems openly and honestly we don't do ourselves any favor by exempting capitalism so in part to remedy these 50 years of taboo the rest of what I have to say today is a contribution to that end so let's go let's talk about capitalism honestly as best we can capitalism presents two qualities in its history in the United States in the rest of the world that ought to have you worried and concerned because it affects every one of you first the system is stunningly unstable every three to seven years where ever capitalism has settled there's been a business cycle that's a polite term for suddenly large numbers of people are thrown out of work not because they aren't working hard not because what they do isn't important but because this system does not know how to prevent that periodically this the economic downturn is a real doozie you're living through one right now second worst one in the history of the United States the only thing worse than this was the 1930s and we're gonna have something to say about that for millions of people these are terrible times these downturns they lose their job they lose their home their education czar interrupted and many never returned the waste involved is stupefying let me just give you the numbers now so you can get an idea of what I'd mean by waste according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington the unemployment today the number they call u6 there's actually a bunch of unemployment numbers u6 is the one many of us use it counts the number of people looking for work but can't find it the number of people who are so discouraged having looked so long then I've been looking anymore and the third group of those that are part-time employees but don't want to be they want to be full-time for all those people these are very hard times we're talking 20 million Americans right now idle people who want work who wanted to be able to earn an income pay their bills raise their children all the rest at the same time the Federal Reserve System of the United States our bank keeps a statistic called utilization of capacity is its name and that basically measures what portion of the tools equipment machines office space store space all the rest is sitting idle and what part is used and the Federal Reserve currently reports 20% of our capacity to produce is gathering rust and dust because it isn't being used ok let's put these two together 20 million people who want to work all the tools equipment and raw materials they could possibly need to work and if we got these two together the unemployed people and the unused resources we could produce trillions with a tea worth of wealth that could go to solve our poverty problems our central city problems indeed all of our problems what kind of an economic system periodically imposes this catastrophic waste on the people who live in it it's called capitalism and you live in it and we're in it now so this is a system that's been bouncing around unstable every president since Roosevelt has promised that he would get us out of the crisis and by the way you know why every president has promised it because every president has been president during one of these that's how often they happen every president promised if you follow my policies you'll get out of this crisis and at that moment the president leans across the podium stares us all in the face and says not only will I get you out of this crisis but my policies will make sure that there isn't another one to bedevil our children every president made the promise no president has ever been able to keep the promise this is a system that is unstable and has not yet figured out any way to prevent it you you lived with a person as unstable as this system you would have moved out years ago or you would have said to that person you must get professional help so ask yourself sometime while you live in an system and don't ask those questions and don't make those demands the second problem of capitalism long term besides its instability is its tendency to produce gross inequality gaps between rich and poor such that the poor have less and less access to wealth power culture and more and more of that access is concentrated in a relatively tiny portion of the population I don't have to make all the arguments because thanks to Occupy Wall Street the differential between the 99% and the 1% is now pretty well understood here in the United States periodically we have broken through the inequality capitalism imposes on us drives for example if you study American history you'll know that between the end of the Civil War and the end of the 19th century we had another one of these states of growing inequality some of the literature at that time was very dramatic we don't dare do that in the last 50 years but Americans once were courageous they called the people who were making tons of money robber barons books were written robber barons then captains of industry today same thing it's just a more pleasant name and that spawned a reaction among the American people populism progressivism those things that happen at the end of the 19th century were the reactions of people horrified by what a society split into extremes of wealth and poverty looked like and worked like and so there was a retrenchment are moving towards a bit more equality less inequality but as soon as World War one was over we went right back in the roaring 20s we built up inequality again and that one ended in 1929 when we got really unequal and then the whole capitalist economy crashed from 1929 to 1941 we were in a depression it's called the Great Depression of the 1930s and something really interesting happened in the 1930s which those of you that are Americans are interested in American history would do well to keep in mind because the reaction to massive unemployment worse then that we have so far in this one the reaction was utterly different from today here's what happened thumbnail sketch three groups got together in the depths of the depression with a determination that the government was going to be called upon to help the mass of people not just bail out the big banks and corporations no no help at the bottom where the mass of people live the first was the cios called the Congress of Industrial Organizations CIO those of you know what the afl-cio is that's that CIO the last three letters they undertook an effort to organize workers in America to join unions it was the most successful organizing Drive in the history of the United States we had never had anything like it before and we have never had anything like it since in a couple of years tens of millions of Americans joined unions people who had never joined a union before the unions had helped in the organizing they had help from the US Communist Party a strong organization in those days and they also had help from two large socialist parties I assume that you're good students and you've all had good courses so you know that the socialist and communist parties in America were one strong and elected a lot of people to all kinds of office if you don't know that and that's something that you should hold your teachers accountable for those organizations work together in the 1930s from below demanding help for the mass of people and they got it they went to the President of the United States at that time Franklin Roosevelt and they said to him sometimes in kind words sometimes not so kind you bet they woke they waved their fingers at the president they said you better do something for the mass of people you better help them the Union people said if you don't you're gonna lose the next election the Socialists and communists said to him if you don't we're gonna overthrow capitalism in this country so you better help us or you're gonna lose it all Roosevelt took them very seriously and he went and he spoke to his friends Roosevelt was not a poor person he came from the elite of the United States his relatives had been a president before him so Roosevelt went to the corporate leadership of America and the rich and he said ok here's a deal we've got to do something for the mass of people I got millions of organized workers in unions I've got socialists and communists working together they are a lot of people and if we don't do something for them there's going to be trouble and I advise you to give me the money you rich people so I can take care of the masses because if you don't you probably will be left with nothing at all so part with some to keep the rest half of the rich people and the corporations in America agreed with Roosevelt half never did but half was enough and Roosevelt went to work with an alliance Union socialist communist on one hand rich corporations and wealthy people on the other and so here's what he did just again to remind you in the midst of a depression worse than this one when no City no state the federal government had no money he created the Social Security system in the middle of a depression he said to every person over 65 the government will now give you a check every month for the of your life we're gonna help you and we're gonna help your children so that you don't become a burden on them we're gonna help you and by giving you that money you'll be able to spend it and you'll be able therefore to create demand for goods and services and that'll put other Americans to work you might call it trickle-up economics you give to the bottom and it goes up it's just the obvious logical alternative to trickle-down when you give to the top and hope that it comes down but he wasn't done the second thing Roosevelt did is he created the unemployment compensation system also in the middle of the depression when there were millions of people out of work he said for the first time in American history we're going to give every unemployed person a check for a year or two every week to help them and to put money in their pocket so that they can keep their mortgage and not lose their house and help pay for their kids bills and all the rest but he still wasn't done he then created a federal jobs program between 1934 and 41 Roosevelt on behalf of the United States government hired 15 million American unemployed how was all of this paid for money for the older folks money for the unemployed and money to hire all these workers by taxing corporations and the rich that's what he did and again a little history only because this history is crucial and so little of it is known I'll just give you one example in 1943 President Roosevelt President Roosevelt tax the rich taxed Corporation and used the money to help the people at the bottom our leaders today don't even dare think like that and they certainly don't talk like that did it hurt mr. Roosevelt that it hurt his political career no Roosevelt's the most popular president we've ever had in the United States the man was reelected four times in a row no president had ever achieved that so freaked out were the Republicans that when Roosevelt died they rammed through a bill that no president could serve for more than two terms after that did it hurt mr. Roosevelt on the contrary it made him a quasi saint for half the people of the country Wow in 1943 Roosevelt sent a bill to the Congress and the bill proposed that the highest tax rate on the richest people should be 100 percent that's what he said also in his State of the Union message that year what was what does that mean here's what it meant every dollar you earn over twenty five thousand dollars a year in 1943 the government would take all of it it was a proposal for a maximum income in America the equivalent today would be about three hundred ninety five thousand dollars a year every dollar over that you get you don't get he sent that bill to the Congress the Republicans went ballistic half the Democrats - that's usually how it works and then it was yelling and screaming and then a compromise was reached and here's the compromise signed off by the Republicans and the Democrats that the highest bracket highest rate of income tax on the richest people would not be a hundred percent they were set at 94% every dollar over twenty five thousand you earned in those years you kept six cents and the other ninety four cents went to Uncle Sam you can't tax corporations in the rich you're kidding we already did that that's old news we've been there we've done that and it worked well the only interesting question is why are we not talking about it now why do we have a president and a Congress who act as though this never happened kind of political amnesia that calls for professional help and maybe lots of it so this is a system that produced extraordinary inequality and periodic breakdown cycles instabilities but the Roosevelt program pushed by the unions the Socialists in the Communists made us a much more equal society by helping those at the bottom and taxing those at the top we became much less unequal by 1945 and 50 we were a remarkable egalitarian country much less inequality than all the major countries of Europe but over the last 40 years normal capitalism resurged came up again and now I have to report to you that having been less unequal than all the countries of Europe we're now more unequal we caught up again and we're back where we once were and Americans are again discovering what it means to live in a system that produces this kind of inequality ok now let me take a step back and look at a longer frame of capitalism in America from our beginnings 19th century 20th century 200 years of American capitalism 250 300 years of capitalism elsewhere in the world what can we see going on well it's remarkable particularly here in the United States after we become independent we have this new little country broke away from Britain and we have a little capitalist economy very successful we have good harbors we have good soil we have a good climate we have people who work hard we really have kind of everything with one exception everything there for a good capitalist economy profits plow them back in but we slack one thing we don't have enough workers why well not to belabor the obvious we weren't real nice to the folks we found here we killed them we did ethnic cleansing on the local folks so they couldn't serve us as workers those we didn't kill we stuck in reservations and they're still not over it so we didn't have people that was a problem we solved that problem two ways in the south for cotton we purchased people we brought them over in slaves African Americans that's where that comes we solved the labor problem with slavery in the north we didn't find that as a solution we found a different solution and this is crucial we raised wages we had to bring people here otherwise capitalism couldn't grow it couldn't survive it couldn't succeed so we began paying higher wages we did it from the 1820s to the 1970s a hundred and fifty years of rising wages to pay for a successful capitalism it's stunning probably no other capitalist society has been able to deliver 150 years of rising real wages to its working class it makes Americans strange among workers in the world Americans because it lasted for 150 years began to think strange thoughts they didn't seem to understand that it's not a problem or a mystery it's called a labor shortage and we solved it by raising wages bringing Europeans here and then keeping them on the coasts where capitalism thrived so they wouldn't run into the interior and become farmers which is what they had been in Europe we had to keep raising wages and so successful was capitalism here that it could afford to keep raising wages and Americans began to get wonderful ideas there was something exceptional about America America is a charmed place America is a place where if you work real hard you do better and your children do better than you and your grandchildren still better and God loves us more than other people thought would see wonderful it was built into America that every generation will live better than the one before the problem is in the 1970s the labor shortage ended and with it the rise in American wage but the population wasn't prepared for it the population had no understanding of it and no leadership emerged to explain this to the American people wages stopped rising the real wage is a very important number for economists that's when you take the money a person gets on average and you adjust it for the prices that they have to pay so you get a measure of what they can really afford with their wage the real wage in the United States today is roughly what it was in 1978 we've had 30 40 years of no increase in wages we hadn't had that before in the history of this country it's an epoch-making change and your faces give you a way most of you didn't know it until I just told you that's not a good sign the wages didn't go up why not labor shortage was over why very easy to explain number one the computer replaces people like nobody nobody's business don't need millions of people doing all kinds of things because the computer could do it we didn't need workers the way we used to second thing American corporations were starting to leave the United States and I'm going to come back to that in a minute they didn't need Americans the way they used to and just as the demand for workers shrank the supply of workers jumped most important adult American women moving into the labor force in huge numbers starting in the 1970s radically altering the profile of the average American married woman and a new wave of immigration not from Europe this time from Latin America more people looking for work less jobs end of labor shortage and of any need for a business to raise wages and they stop doing it you don't even know that need to go to business school to learn that if you can avoid paying workers more for the same work don't do it an American business is all responded to this challenge and stopped raising wages this meant that the American working class was confronted with a cast fee every parent had promised his or her children the better life that was built into America but they couldn't afford it anymore the wages weren't going up they were going to get a better car but they couldn't afford it we're gonna move to a nicer neighborhood that couldn't afford that either what did the American working class do since the 70s it tried to solve this sad problem another way it tried to find an individual solution to a social problem the end of the labor shortage it's never a good idea to try to find an individual solution to a social problem best way to deal with a social problem was with a social movement otherwise you get very upset and very frustrated and that's what the American people did here's how they solved their problem if the wages aren't going up per hour we're going to have more people in the household do more hours of work that's when Papa got a second and third job that's when mama went out to get a job that's when the teenagers worked on the weekend and the old people came out of retirement little statistic that the OECD sends around Americans do more hours of paid work per year than any other population on this planet we're working ourselves literally to death the second thing Americans did was to discover that having mother work and other people work wasn't going to solve the problem because if mother had to work they had to get a second car and if mother had to work they had to get another set of clothes for her and the expenses were too much so they didn't didn't solve the problem so how could you hold on to the American dream when the wages to pay for it weren't going up but the cost of it was going up Americans answered that problem by becoming pioneers again not going across the Prairie they became the first working class in modern I take that back in any history to borrow quantities of money the likes of which we had never seen before borrow on your house borrow on your car borrow on your credit card borrow for your schooling when the depression broke in 1929 the average American family had debts equal to 25 to 30% of their annual income when this Depression hit in 2007 the annual debt the average debt of an American family was a hundred and twenty five percent of its annual income that's why this crisis is lasting so long and cutting so deep Wow let's pick up the story and take it the next step American capitalists weren't watching this development blind they knew what was going on they knew that as capitalism succeeded in order to overcome the labor shortage they had had to raise wages and raise wages and then workers formed unions and fought them and they had to raise wages by the 1970s American rages and the standard of living Americans was very high much higher than in the rest of the world indeed the rest of the world had become a vast hinterland bringing to the United States the food the raw materials sometimes like to tell my students this morning you probably had a cup of coffee and you put sugar in it we don't make coffee in the United States and we do make sugar we depend on other parts of the world to do that for us an experiment I like to offer to my students who usually get very excited the older folks among you might not but the young ones will and I propose a little exercise I want everyone to stand up take off all your clothes I told you you would be interested and come to the front and I'm one pile over here you put all the clothes not made in the United States and over here a pile of all those made in the United States you all know right this pile will be very high and that pile will be invisible we depend on the rest of the world the capitalists in America looked at the rising wages the high wages the good luck of the American working class for two hundred years and they said go buy we don't need this we don't want this in the 1970s we developed jet engines and get you around the world quickly and we developed the modern internet communication system internet telecommunications and so on it became possible in the 1970s to supervise control regulate an enterprise a factory in office 10,000 miles away about as easily as what you used to do 10 miles away and American corporations made a decision the energetic among them those profit hungry competitors said I'm moving to China I'm moving to India I'm moving to Brazil a movement in Nigeria I'm moving to Singapore are moving why because the wages of much cheaper there those people didn't participate in Western capitalism neither the European nor the American nor the Japanese those were the hinterland people the people who provided the food the raw materials their wages never went up last week there was a demonstration through the streets of Dhaka in Bangladesh 200,000 workers demanding a $100 a month minimum wage because their current is $38 a month you want to understand why a factory leaves Syracuse and moves to Shanghai now you know or to Dhaka or to empty in other places but this leaves a profound question for all of you not only is capitalism a system producing unspeakable inequalities not only is it fundamentally unstable and unable to put idle resources idle people together to produce the wealth we all need and want but capitalism is abandoning the areas in which it grew for the first 250 years it grew in Western Europe North America and Japan and over the 250 years it drove up the wages and now it realizes it can make much more money by leaving those areas and going to where the wages are much much lower so American workers had a good ride with capitalism in its first 200 years because they got rising wages as the condition of that capitalism's success the question is for all of you cuz it's your life will you be satisfied to be part of a capitalism that has said goodbye to you and the place where you live because we're moving someplace else where it pastures a greener it's already here if you've not seen it take a trip to Detroit or Cleveland or Camden New Jersey or the town in which I was born Youngstown Ohio you will see there the future that capitalism has for the United States oh yeah there'll be some pockets Silicon Valley maybe Scarsdale for those of you who don't know and so forth but the reality is a capitalism that has abandoned you a capitalism that you're going to remain loyal to that's your question very practical very real and about you your family your future your job there's a reason why you're the first generation of students with enormous debts at the same time that your job prospects aren't real good that's how it hits you well what do we do in this kind of a situation my goal believe it or not is not to upset you or depress you on the other hand if you don't want to hear this then pretend this lecture never happened go back to television and you will not be disturbed what's the alternative well we used to think many of us in our naivete that we could pass some laws pass some regulations and and this sort of thing wouldn't happen we came out of the Great Depression with a whole new set of tools monetary and fiscal policy the wisdom of John Maynard Keynes from England and a whole bunch of other things that were going to save us from these kinds of crises didn't work I'm afraid the problem runs too deep and yet there is a solution and it has to do with the theme of these lectures it has to do with democracy and it's a simple idea like all important ones in the end are it's a simple idea you can call it the democratization of the economy or you might call it the democratization of the enterprise why do capitalists do what they do because it's in their interest most of America's business is done by corporations remember what a corporation is the owners are shareholders you know about how that works roughly 1 percent of the shareholders the United States owned 75 percent of the shares a tiny number of people are what we call major shareholders they select the board of directors a group of 15 to 20 people who make all the decisions in an enterprise they decide what will be produced how it will be produced where it will be produced and what is done with the profits whoa let's do that again hundreds thousands hundreds of thousands of people go to work in the company but they don't make those decisions they are excluded from those decisions even though if a company moves they have no job even though if a company uses a dangerous technology they breathe polluted air when you go to work you live with the consequences of decisions with which you have nothing to do over which you have no power from which you are excluded if democracy means anything it means participating in the decisions that affect your life we insist that our representatives of the neighborhood's we live in our mayors our Congress persons our senators we insist that they are in some sense responsible to us electable by us but we don't do it where we work and for heaven's sake why not when you're an adult you spend most of your life at work five out of seven days 8 in the morning till 5:00 at night and you either recouping or preparing for it many other hours you've committed to democracy the first place it should be instituted is where you spend most of your time at work but we don't have any democracy at work we never did we have no such principle we allow tiny groups of people to make the crucial decisions over which we have no control at all you know like what your employer does get another job what an interesting response you don't like what your elected official does leave whoa most of you would not be able to be here tonight if you actually carried that out remarkable and how would this work this is actually simple so I'm gonna end with that there's an old idea about enterprises that are organized in a democratic way they have lots of names but the one you probably heard most often is workers co-op it's when a group of people get together and decide that they're going to run their business democratically they're all gonna have one vote and they're gonna get together and decide what to produce how to produce where to produce and what to do with the profits there are firms working like that all across the United States and they always have been it's an alternative and let me show you what difference it might make imagine for a moment with me a company thinking of closing its Factory in Syracuse and moving to Bangladesh suppose all the workers got together and had a discussion you think they'd all vote to kill off their own job unlikely there'd be no movement they would keep it here you think if there was a toxic technology a machine that hurt your ears or polluted the water if that decision is made by a Board of Directors a thousand miles away who can make more profit that way it'll probably be done but if the workers themselves have to make that decision because they and their husbands and wives and children and neighbors have to breathe that air and drink that water hmm think we would get a little bit greener in the way we run our economy but here's the big one weird as most of the inequality in the United States come from I know some of you have strange ideas on this subject let me try to clear it up for you it's how we distribute profits if you distribute profits equally among people then the differences amongst us are relatively small but if you distribute the profits that we make each year in a concentrated way to a few people and that give everybody else none of it well then of course we become very unequal nowadays we have incredible profits in our corporations and the people who run the corporations do something really surprising that give themselves most of the money and they give the rest of the people next to nothing which is why we have an inequality guess what if the people in every enterprise collectively made the decision how to distribute the the profits that they all helped to produce you think they would give a few top executives fifty million dollars and everybody else has to borrow send their kid to college I don't think so you see democracy has always been hard as it is for many to hear it the enemy of capitalists the capitalists all know it here's the problem capitalism produces more and more instability and inequality the mass of the people don't like either of them the mass of the people sooner or later figure out that they might use their majority in politics to undo the results of a capitalist economy to undo the downturn when it happens to undo the inequality as it festers so the mass of people say well with a majority will use politics to undo capitalism's unfortunate results that's why capitalists are nervous about democracy and have always been that's why so much money is spent today to control the political parties a couple of months ago many of you read the chief executive of the Amazon Corporation an extraordinarily large and profitable corporation bought the Washington Post basically the most important newspaper in our country capital is now owned by a by a warehouse manufacturing person giving him clearly the qualifications to run a newspaper and the head of the in Boston of a sports team bought the Boston Globe what is this every politician who runs for office gets tons of money from whom we have a race in New York City some of you pay attention to it a bit of a liberal named de Blasio won the Democratic primary is running against a man named lota and the Republican Court a suit was filed in federal court last week to overturn the cap there's a cap right now that a person cannot give more than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to a political action committee to support a candidate I know this is going to come as a tremendous limitation for many of you who were planning to give more than one hundred and fifty thousand dollars if that doesn't include you good you understand something but these people don't like 150 thousand dollar cap they want that cap removed they brought this to court in three states in the United States in each case they won the judgment they want no limits they want that in New York because the only way mr. lota can win in New York City is if he swamps the mass of people with money therein lies the issue it was always a pipe dream to imagine you could have a political democracy founded on an economic absence of democracy you're fooling mostly yourself if you imagine that and we're living in the results of doing that let me conclude by pushing you a little why not transform our enterprises make them democratic certainly puts us more in line with the values we claim to have as a society let's put aside the tough question why we never did it before but let's do it now we need it but some of you may think gee yet how is that going to be possible the person who sweeps up should have a vote akin to the person who's a trained professional and all of those kinds of concerns but that's what of course was said when we made the breakthrough to a political democracy the people who supported monarchy used to say the king has a special competence how can an average person decide political questions we need a king we need a queen we need azar we need an emperor then people finally got so fed up they cut off the heads of those folks and did the end of civilization happen know that our societies fall apart now guess what if a tiny handful of people stopped being the ones that make the economic decisions we're not gonna have any worse time than we did when we decided to try political democracy we're just scared the way the people who overthrew monarchy were scared too and for no better reason can it work some of you worried maybe a small group of people can get together and run but I'm not a big corporation well let me answer that not by giving you all the reasons why that's not reasonable but by giving you a real-life story the most famous workers co-op in the world today began in 1956 it started when a Roman Catholic priest in the north of Spain in what's called the Basque region a special cultural area of that part of the world partly in France and partly in Spain on either side of the Pyrenees Mountains it was a desperately poor part of the world that had suffered from first to Spanish Civil War and then the Second World War and they were really desperate and the priests got them together in the church and he said if we keep waiting here for some employer some capitalists to come into our area and hire us we will all die of old age before that happens so let's not wait let's set up a cooperative and we'll do it ourselves we won't wait for an employer we don't need one and with the blessings the full sense of the term in the blessings of the Catholic Church this project was begun now fast forward to today 2013 what can I tell you about what is now called the Mondragon cooperative corporation call that because it's in the little town of Mondragon Spain that all this happened that corporation now employs over a hundred thousand people it's a composite of three hundred co-ops all run democratically by their workers owned by those workers - it is the seventh largest corporation in all of Spain and the single largest corporation in the north of Spain can co-ops become large question answered and in case you're doubting me little history lesson when feudalism fell apart in Europe all the early capitalist enterprises that came out of it was small mainly small and I'd no doubt there were people who said see capitalism only works if you sold and then it turned out that capitalism could figure out how to grow and be big and guess what coops learned it too so we don't have to guess we have the alternative final story in Italy in 1985 they had a big unemployment problem they passed the bill and the bill went like this if you get unemployed in Italy you have two choices here in the United States we only have one choice if you're unemployed you can go and get a dole from the government for a year or two you can get a weekly paycheck unemployment in Italy you can choose to do that like here but you don't have to you can choose something else here's what it is it's called the mark oral law after the Italian legislator who pushed it through by the way still on the books in Italy from 1985 right till now here's your second choice you can go to the government you can say I want my entire two or three years worth of unemployment given to me right now as a lump sum if you get at least nine other unemployed workers to make the same decision with you the government will give you that lump sum all ten of you on the following condition you use it as the startup capital for a cooperative enterprise which is one reason why Italy has lots and lots and lots more of them than we do is it feasible of course it is has it been done all over the place is it an alternative to a system that isn't working real well for most of you you bet and here's the last thing for you to think about I go around the country explaining this writing about it appearing on TV and radio I can't do all the invitations I get the hunger in this country is enormous for finding a way out of the economic malaise I've just sketched for you and here's what I found as I tell this story and explain this option and defend it if there were a movement to push this in America the American people would support it that's the reality they don't know in many cases about this but when they hear they understand there is an option you do not have to live in a capitalism that has abandoned you you do not have to live in a society where the next 20 years you're gonna wonder whether Detroit is gonna come to wherever it is you live you're not gonna have to worry about whether you got to be paid for school it's a very important moment in American history things are changing big-time capitalism's promised to deliver the goods isn't working it isn't delivering them most of the time from Americans capitalism is now regularly delivering the beds and that's a time when we can catch up to our 50-year taboo break it and talk honestly weigh the costs and benefits and make the changes that are overdue you'll particularly those of you that are young this is your call and it's your life and you can do better than SIA way from these problems as it been done in the last 50 years the Soviet Union is not our great enemy the Cold War is not there to keep it going there's no excuse at this point the changes can be made and they depend on us thank you very much for your time thank you very much professor wolf now we're gonna hear briefly from Mark Rupert and Elizabeth Cohen thanks everybody for coming I want to say I'm really pleased that Professor wolf could be with us today for reasons I'm gonna explain in a moment I think occasions when we can consider questions like those professor wolf is raising with us are extraordinary occasions and valuable so I want to stop for a moment and offer my special thanks to grant reader and to Bethany Wallander wherever Bethany is and to the other staff members in the Campbell Institute for their hard work on making this possible and also I want to offer a special thanks to a Chancellor Nancy Cantor who went out of her way to help us do this so in thinking about what I might contribute to this discussion I settled on the notion that maybe the most important thing I could do with my five minutes to your time is to say a few words about the political context in which we encounter professor Wolf's questions and his project and why I think it's important in terms of that big picture why I think his project is important for us to think about and it occurred to me while he was talking that may be one way of summarizing what I have to say is that capitalism is is not only unstable and unequal but I think it's legitimate to say that it is disabling and undemocratic and that part of the political context has to do with that we live in a time in a place where the power of markets the sanctity of private ownership the social priority of private profit have become widely accepted as something approaching self-evident common sense the mythology of freedom and efficiency in an apparently apolitical market has a firm grip on our culture but it wasn't always like this and in many parts of the world the hegemony of free market fundamentalism is questioned much more often and vigorously than it has been in the u.s. so perhaps we're mistaken when we accept as rock-bottom belief the idea that the pursuit of private self-interest through wheeling and dealing in the market is hardwired into us as the irreducible essence of human nature the propensity to truck barter and exchange that Adam Smith attributed to us and perhaps the widespread acceptance of these claims is not so much an acknowledgement of an objective truth in human nature as it is a political accomplishment a kind of index of social power as it's been organized in our society on my reading one of the core insights we can derive from Marx is that capitalism has created privatized centers of power in the economy and at the same time defined those social powers as if they were prerogatives of private property that's what I mean by privatize social powers so it has empowered the owners of capital as employers as investors such that their decisions affect all of us every day and then it has insulated those social powers in a seemingly a political economy so by appearing to separate economic life from politics it has made those private powers democratically unaccountable and it has cloaked the inequality of power that that implicitly resides in the capitalist economy behind the apparent norm of equality of citizenship that appears to govern our political sphere as if each of us had an equal voice in the determination of our collective futures something that that none of my students even accept as a reasonably plausible claim so through this apparent separation of politics and economics I want to argue capitalism both creates and hides these class-based powers that are extremely consequential for our social lives and as Professor Wolfe has reminded us there have been times in places where those social powers were vigorously contested and certainly the rise of the industrial union movement in the in the 1930s and 40s and the example of the CIO represents one of those occasions and one of the things that struck me when I was first reading about this is the diversity and pluralism of these movements and the extent to which even in the American political culture there was an astonishing array a richness of different kinds of political tendencies everything from Catholic corporatists to communists trotskyists democratic socialist anarchist all those kinds of tendencies were were active in the movement more or less directly I would argue these kinds of historical movements called into question those privatize social powers that we have come to attribute to capital and thereby also calling into question the apparent separation of economic and political life but in the intervening decades a kind of pre-emptive counter-revolution has taken place that banished this kind of questioning to the fringes of social and intellectual life that undermined or destroyed the social and political organizations that were potentially threatening to these private powers of capital and that thereby re-established the apparent separation of politics and economics that we more or less take for granted today in recent decades through a deliberate strategic campaign carried out over the long term business hegemony and the ideology of free-market fundamentalism have been even more firmly established in our economic political and cultural lives and here I would recommend to you some new work by NYU historian Kim Phillips fine who has documented in detail the various aspects of this campaign for business hegemony from the containment and rollback of industrial unionism to the attack on regulation in the public interest to the promotion of free-market fundamentalism through think tanks Institute's and endowed professorships other scholars such as a thon Theo Harris Ellen Shrek Ursa throws and Feld have also done some extraordinary work in recent years documenting the multi-faceted apparatus of official and unofficial repression that effectively destroyed the organizational basis of the American left and suppress dissent from the Red Scare to COINTELPRO to the war on terror and it's in that context I think that I'm most alarmed by recent revelations about NSA spying our governor has a track record of abusing surveillance for political purposes and that just plainly frightens me so it's in this kind of context that we encounter professor wolf and his arguments about democratizing the economy insistently questioning this apparent separation of economic from political life suggesting that we might Rhian vision our economic lives in more democratic forms and that seems to me to be a brave enterprise something that's unlikely to bring riches power or a claim but I think it's critical that we not lose sight of the fact that these privatized social powers of capitalism are a political accomplishment rather than as Locke suggested a gift from God thank you I also want to join mark and grant and thinking Richard Wolfe for being here and also to thank our fabulous Campbell Institute staff for making this possible and I'll be quick because I know we've been here for a while and it's warm in here Richard Wolff is making an argument that capitalism is unstable and unreliable and he's also making an argument not for more regulation which we hear a lot of these days but for democratizing our enterprises so I'd like to think about the implications of that for a few moments as I think we've now kind of figured out we're in the midst of what I would term as a second Gilded Age and Richard Wolfe is the second state of democracy lecture in a row to call our attention to the gross disparities of wealth income and opportunity that are available to the one percent and the 99 percent of the US population so last spring you'll remember that sister Simone Campbell lined us up right going all the way out the room just to depict how gross these disparities really are while there's many differences and some of them I think you pointed out between these gilded gilded ages they I would say that they more than simple economic disparities in common as well they each demonstrate what is unfathomable to me anyway I would suspect some other people in the room which is that the persons least likely to benefit indeed the persons most likely to be exploited by economic arrangements comment to market capitalism they often make up the numeric majority of its supporters and this is true whether or not we have a thriving labor movement both gilded ages also share some demographic considerations about those least likely to benefit from market capitalism and it's that I want to draw our attention to first each Gilded Age was preceded by attempts on the part of the federal government to affect changes to equality of opportunity particularly as experienced by racial minorities in the u.s. so in the latter part of the 19th century this meant a series of constitutional amendments we may remember followed by largely toothless legislation that was overcome when the Supreme Court affirmed legal segregation in Plessy v Ferguson our current era of ambivalence and outright hostility towards remedies for racial segregation was also preceded by a period of heavy intervention on the part of the federal government in the form of corrective voting regulations that we're now losing we think and affirmative action in addition each Gilded Age was also embedded in an extended influx of immigration that got a little bit of mention not too much attention and that this influx was characterized by native-born residents frequently as non-white in both cases and treated as unwelcome and undeserving of equality I could go on making these demographic comparisons between each Gilded Age but I just want to confine myself to one topic for the sake of brevity so I'm going to speak about what these demographic commonalities have in common what they what they have to say with respect to democratizing capitalism and capitalist workplaces and to do this I want to draw to work together the work of a few other political scientists first a thesis put forth by a political theorist who reminds us that there are at least two variants of conservatism - which support for the free market is linked and I think which will both always be with us and that's important first we've got mainstream or true conservatives that are committed to gradual change they want to avoid radicalism avoid rapid change they don't want to disrupt a long-standing order they really do seek to conserve tradition second we have reactionary conservatism and reactionary conservatives espouse similar core commitments to mainstream conservatives in a superficial sense but their actions demonstrate a commitment to radical change actually they want to upset a well entrenched order in ways that aren't really conservative and you're gonna recognize if you haven't already that these are the hallmark traits of right-wing third parties like the know-nothings in the antebellum era and of course the Tea Party today and the reason I bring up these two types of conservatism is that each will commit itself to a very different type of capitalism I think but also each would influence workplace democracy very differently since our concern is workplace democracy in the contemporary u.s. let's talk about reactionary conservative because it's reactionary conservatives that are driving our population so radically rightward I think right now and reactionary conservative conservatism is not the product of principled commitments to the basic tenets of political conservatism it can express simple greed to the affluent to be sure but in order to gain electoral traction reactionary conservatism also has to make a populist appeal and this populist appeal has to persuade people who are not in the 1% in America and elsewhere but in America this is often meant stoking the anxieties and the frustrations of working-class white people and directing their reactive energies towards perceived threats arising from immigrants and racial minorities in each Gilded Age we see reactionary conservatives espousing doctrines of racial threat we see a white working class under tremendous stress and we see the scapegoating of non-white workers for structural failures that really aren't their fault and I raise this point because in my mind it calls into question the degree to which we can expect economically democratized workplaces and the u.s. to also be socially democratized in the late 19th century and again today we see a white working class that has been radicalized in support of excluding immigrant workers and rolling back integration and equal opportunity in the late 19th century this led to the movement that culminated in Chinese Exclusion we didn't just invite European workers over the advent of Jim Crow and the mobilization of social science in support of scientific racism that supposedly proved the genetic inferiority of Irish Americans southern Europeans Eastern Europeans and African Americans and let's not forget that Roosevelt's New Deal was deeply deeply racist in ways that we are still paying for and about this topic I would recommend IRA Katznelson is most recent work today we see deep antiquity for the legal infrastructure that attempted to reverse the effects of Jim Crow and we see a tea party that wants to blame immigrants particularly Latino immigrants for the economic woes of the working class wants to deny them citizenship and has succeeded in pressuring the federal government into record high rates of deportation we also see the mass incarceration and disenfranchisement of black American men and the demonization of Muslims or anyone suspected of being Muslim in short not all inequality is economic inequality and I point this out because it may be true that well harnessed self-interest could yield economically democratized workplaces but even if this were possible I'm dubious about the ability of our society as a is currently constituted or has been constituted in the past to create socially specifically racially democratized workplaces I think most of us in this room can't even imagine the stress experienced by someone whose entire identity and purpose is bound up with providing for a family and who finds himself unable to do so even with the help of a partner this stress we are learning causes people to make poor financial decisions it can even cause people to commit suicide but very often it also causes people to cast about for scapegoats and in the u.s. we have an ongoing tradition of a script of American that sets up our racial minorities to be on the receiving end of this working class stress as much as I like the idea of grassroots democratized workplaces I don't yet see that we're a country that can be trusted to create a gala terian workplaces that are equally open to all without stringent regulation from above to curb our worst national demons and until we are that country I want to know that we're going to regulate ourselves from above assuring every citizen that they will be welcome in all unions in all jobs and in all offices [Applause] well I'm guessing that there are some questions that want to be raised from the audience I think we should move directly to that the microphones are there and they're just please raise your hand and we'll bring them over to you Eric there's someone right behind you there Eric someone right behind you there oh this you don't have to go to Youngstown or Camden or anywhere else to see the effects of capitalism in America of cities over a hundred thousand people Syracuse is the poorest we have 57 percent as of last week's numbers of our children under 18 living in poverty and we have almost 40% of all of our citizens living in poverty and I want to challenge the students in this room because you have a unique opportunity this year my colleague Howie Hawkins right down here who co-founded the Green Party in New York State is running for the 4th district City Council seat most of you live in the 4th district and I'm running for mayor on the Green Party ticket along with Howie and the facts of the matter is the way that democracy is breaking down right now is that I have about two grand in my bank account and my incumbent Democratic opponent has about four hundred thousand and despite the fact that those jobless and poverty numbers are higher than they've ever been and certainly higher than they've been in the last four years she is refusing a debate and I challenge all of you to invite myself my campaign Howie to your sorority house to your fraternity house to your civic organizations there are 30,000 students in this city and you could transform a conversation in American politics we would be the largest city in America to go green and you'll see plenty about mondregon and cooperative networks on our websites Kevin bot org it's the cornerstone of our platform so thank you very much got to be another question out here somewhere well let's let's let's let's take let's take a turn now we will take a turn I'm gonna wait you out here Oh Mitch go ahead we'll get to get the microphone down here seems to me that one of the issues with democratizing the workforce is that the workers are on both sides of this economic transaction as workers there they're producing things but then they go out and they're consumers and they're buying things and aren't they really driven by price and doesn't that have an effect of undermining their their ability to make you know decisions as producers when the goods that they're producing are going to be sold competitively based on price and our workers who are consumers have shown it seems to me that they are so driven by price I mean we see Walmart replacing all of these neighborhood institutions that we had because they offer goods at such a reduced price so it seems to me the problem is that the workers are on both sides of the economic transaction you can answer from your chair if you argue Terry well enough yeah okay work is shaped by price this is another political accomplishment not an analytical reality here's what I mean if you portray to the population of the United States that the choice is between something high-priced in your local store in the middle of town versus something cheaper in your Walmart on the edge of town you're suggesting that that's the only metric that's the only standard by which you should measure this transaction but suppose the people who are displaced in your little shops in the middle of town we're all earning fifteen to twenty dollars an hour and the standard wage at Walmart in case you're not aware is about nine to ten dollars an hour you're telling your people if you if you're honest then we're going to change this whole community we're gonna change this community from what it is with fifteen to twenty dollars an hour to what it will now become with nine or ten dollars an hour and here and you can do this and it's all this work has been done here are the consequences to the culture the politics the economics the physical safety every dimension of life is changed by this bargain you're getting from Walmart when you do the calculation it's not bargain at all it's only a bargain if you look at the price of one and the price of the other that's been the success of Walmart to make that the issue because if they honestly told the people of the United States what's at stake in going from lots of small businesses to a couple of monsters the people wouldn't have gone for it they would have understood that when you calculate all the consequences of this move it's a whole different decision an honest society would put that before the people okay let's choose you have lower price with these social consequences you have higher price with these social consequences including jobs for your neighbors the quality of your community the cultural life it can afford at this level of weight you put it all and then the whole thing becomes much murkier much less clear and Walmart doesn't walk away with the one virtue it has lower price being the only metric used to make the decision it's as if I come up to you and I say let's have a duel you and I and I've spent my entire life sword fighting and I can say let's have a duel you can pick any weapon you want as long as it's swords wait a minute something has been happened here something has happened here that I don't want to accept that's not what I ought to be able to choose among it's the same thing in all these calculations let me give you a more general example because for those of you studying economics this can save you years of frustrating loss of time there is an in in economics a concept called efficiency if you believe in efficiency then you ought to also go back to the Middle Ages and debate with the great churchmen how many angels can dance on the head of a 10 there is no such thing as efficiency and there never was here's what efficiency means that you can weigh the benefits and the costs of something and choose to do it if the benefits exceed the cost its efficient or you can choose between two things because one has a greater benefit to cost ratio than the other this is lovely assuming that you know what the costs and benefits are that you know what all the consequences of any Act you're considering are but you don't because you can't many of the consequences of any act you can you contemplate are in the future and unless you have extraordinary capabilities you don't know what's in the future because the consequences of any act are infinite in number infinity is a mathematical concept it means you don't know therefore the notion this is efficient I'm going to do it is a hustle all it means is you've counted something you've chosen not to count all the other ones even if you could identify them efficiency was invented for the following purpose when there's a conflict between two ways to go the people who want to win that conflict develop the notion let's count the costs and benefits because they knew they had more resources to carry out that absurd calculation than their enemies and so by establishing that rule they'd win the contest but make no mistake knowing all the consequences of any action has never been accomplished and is undoable it has exactly the same status theoretically as your capacity to fly over this building no matter how long you train no matter how many courses you take you're not gonna do it and the efficiency is a game and that's where the Walmart example comes in Walmart wanted you to compare the efficiency of buying at six dollars rather than the efficiency of buying at 11 and was wanting you to be really impressed that you could get it for six instead of eleven you're not just getting the commodity at six you're getting a thousand other social consequences that are going to impact you more than the five dollars you saved but unless that is presented to you unless there's an honest debate which in our system there isn't and why isn't there because Walmart has the money to make sure that the understanding and the debate are carried out in the terms they win act like me suggesting we have a duel with swords that's a hustle I'm only saying if so you don't permit yourself to be hustled Walmart is now the largest private employer in the United States it plays a major role in lowering the real wage of the United States because it has taken the lead in doing that let me give you a couple more examples in Cup Walmart's wonderful whoa okay what'd you do about all the rest of it so do you need I mean so we all make cooperatives that's great how does the rest you know what do you do about all the rest of it about the baking industry what did we do about the globalisation of finance it's nice to hear that cooperatives are flourishing in northern Italy but I don't think that neoliberal capitalism has disappeared from that part of the world because of it so what's the next step if you listen to the story I told then you will remember that in the 1970s the wages stopped going up because employers didn't have to pay well let's follow that a little bouncing ball when that happens American workers desperate to hold on to the American Dream which they can no longer afford begin to do something with the help of local banks and national banks they start borrowing like crazy the growth sector in our financial industry is about consumer banking that's what's taken off in the last 30 years that was only possible and necessary because we didn't pay rising wages the way we had though previous under the 50 years had coops been the rule in our society they would have raised the wages with rising productivity just like I'd been done in the previous hundred and 50 years because they wouldn't have been bound by the labor shortage issue in which case there'd be no financial sector exploding in our society and you know the irony is when capitalists made more money because the productivity went up work gave the employer more with each hour that's what rising productivity means but the wages were flat which means what employers give workers didn't go up that's where profits came from when the workers borrowed the money who do you think they borrowed all that money from from their employers who made the extra by having rising productivity in a flat wage in basically what happened in this country was employers shifted from paying workers higher wages which they had done 450 years and instead lent them the money there by screwing them twice first as an employee second as a borrower absent that you wouldn't have had the explosion of finance you wouldn't have had this speculation on mortgage debt and household debt that has exploded in the gray you wouldn't have those that's why it's important to understand that a shift to a cooperative based economy transforms the entire economic history of the society in in countless ways that we could show would avoid large portions of the problems we've had since thank you again for coming um you mentioned before that a hundreds of years ago we were able to overthrow monarchy and start over and then you mentioned that this is something that we can do that that it's something that we're scared to do but it can be done what I'm asking is and this is my belief as a 19 year old student don't you think that the way that America's progressed in the world the way that our world has become so globalized that's really not something feasible that we can really that change can be it change like that they can actually happen it may just be that we're scared but we actually I feel like the America and the world is at a point right now where a change like that just seems so impossible do to corporations and and and how how the world runs today so what do you think you know it's a great question but my answer is basically straightforward a few weeks after the Russian Revolution in 1917 Lenin Trotsky Stalin and the other leaders sat down and opened the new books that had been taken from the secret police ministry that they could finally open and they opened them and they found that half of the leadership of the Bolshevik Party was working for the police the conclusion they drew was when the wind is in your favour it doesn't matter in the years before the Soviet Union imploded in 1989 nobody not the Soviet secret police nor the CIA had any inkling that this was going to happen the idea that the Soviet people would simply say okay we've had enough of this it's over was unthinkable with their security apparatus and their mechanisms and all the things we learned about the Soviet Union it was thought to be impossible but it wasn't impossible suddenly in a way that nobody quite could get fathom fundamental change moved from the unthinkable to the immediate the idea that it can't happen here really doesn't make much sense up until in September of 2011 if we had been sitting here and I had said to you I got an idea let's get you know 20 tents and put them up in a park few blocks from Wall Street and put our sleeping bags in there and declare we're against the one percent you would have thought I was a little loony and that it whitea might be fun this is hardly gonna spark us but you would have been wrong and I would have been wrong suddenly in in 350 cities across the United States people were doing this suddenly the New York Times which works so hard not to see most of this had to have stories had to have stories about the 99% in the 1% which has now become part of the language of our society the president talks about the 99 he didn't do that before occupy they radically altered the way Americans think about the society they certainly made my life better and different because I can't I can't and I say this to you because I want you to know from my own life what's going on that's why I mentioned that I talk more in the last two years in the previous 40 something very profound is happening to the American people I've sung the song that you heard me sing tonight for many years and I was kind of out in the wilderness suddenly this song is a jingle everybody wants to hear I'm real happy about it gives me a lot of opportunities but it says something fundamental is changing in this culture you know the right wing you see it because it's organized the Tea Party the Republican Party yeah we don't have on our side those organizations we have to build them from scratch that's what occupy was and the first effort made some headway but then fell back there's gonna have to be more efforts because we have to recreate the organization's we had and worked real well in the last depression but we're destroyed afterwards so we have to do it that's the difference between us and the Europeans the effort to destroy communism socialism and the unions in Europe never worked as well as it did here that's why they're in the streets that why they're fighting that's why each of the things that happened there was an election in Germany less than the most important country in Europe now the headlines in this country were charming Merkel wins again Merkel got 40 percent of the vote the third party in Germany the third party is called the d-link party which means in German the left the slogan of that party that one out of eleven one out of twelve Germans voted for one of the twelve the slogan of that party is Germany can do better than capitalism if that can happen in Germany where they didn't just go after the left they killed them in large numbers that's what Hitler was about then I'm sure that we in the United States with our history have more than enough resources and already more than enough support the real question is what combination of political organizations will bring Americans to make the effort I think we'll all be surprised by what happens here just as we were in Russia in the Soviet Union [Applause]

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Published: Thu Oct 03 2013