The Rise of the Oligarchs | Empire

[Music] the top 1% of the top 1% grabs all the wealth 85 people have as much money as 3 and A2 billion other people that's the old news he had to reclaim that house as the people's house now the story is about power about the decline of democracy think in many ways it's the American Nightmare by the decline of the nation state the old idea of the nation state is crumbling around us the story is about a small group of super wealthy ruling the United States is this the rise of the oligarchs here and throughout the world oligarchs I mean it's just I am Maran bishar and this is [Music] Empire [Music] I like the best this one the rise of the [Music] oligarchs no not Russia the United States in fact a controversial new study from Princeton and Northwestern universities concludes that America is now ruled by the interests of the rich which of course makes us not a democracy but an [Music] oligarchy America taken over by oligarchs what do you [Music] mean it sounded like science fiction we decided to speak to an economist Branco milanovic who explained how Financial power becomes political power in order to run elections in order to win as we know you need to have extremely high amounts of money and we went to zotti park where the Occupy Movement was born to speak to one of its non leaders you have to be approved by the people that have money that's called oligarchy this is really it seems to me like economics one to get that money you need to do what they're going to ask you to do later it sounded logical but also extreme for the world's longest running democracy so we went to Forbes where they love rich people where they're really serious about keeping track of them Indian you think so see that I mean the Princeton study have spoken about oligarchy in America because the political I mean this the Princeton stud the two Scholars from Chicago and now they talk about I don't think that most Americans I I really don't don't an oligarchy I really don't I think that um I think that you know people in the academics the media but I think that most people in the United States don't think it's you know they talk about income inequality right they talk about the super rich but oligarchs I mean it's just maybe the only way to discover the truth was to get our own pair of special glasses and then we saw it the Princeton study that said average citizens have zero impact on policy except when they agree with the elites Sam Walton demonstrates the virtues of faith hope and hard work the HS of Sam Walton the founder of Walmart are clustered at the very top of the Forbes list and if there's one company that symbolizes the changes in America it's his super stores so that was the next stop on our journey into the land of the oligarchs [Music] I got a beautiful feeling being with Walmart [Applause] today shame on wmart Amon Walmart respect what time is it what time is it so very pleased to be here I truly admire your company you know and the more I learn about everything that you do I'm inspired by what you all create every day so of course you know welcome and all that to the show and I actually have a whole bunch of things to talk to you about but um is the Walton Walmart story is this an American dream or is an American Nightmare unfolding which one is it exactly what do you think I think in many ways it's the American Nightmare you know people um being paid very low wages that they can't support a family on that they can't support themselves um and um and you know Walmart is the um a leader in creating this um type of low-wage job but it's not just Walmart our economy is generating many more of these types of low-wage jobs um than of um middle class jobs well actually I think it's a Triumph for far many more people the T and hundreds of millions of people who actually shop at Walmart and the whole point of Walmart and so much of our economy is how much we drive down the cost of essential goods and services so the cost of clothes the cost of food Walmart delivers these products to Consumers more efficiently and so there's been enormous wealth creation for those people who now can buy the same goods and services that they need to buy every day at a lower price and they are shopping Chinese products well yes product manufactured in China and what's wrong with that so you know one of the things we talk about income inequality but we forget that actually income inequality around the world is narrowing because a billion people have been lifted out of poverty in the last 10 years and a large part of that is because people in China and India are are making products that we buy in this country but the things that are actually um so um basic and necessary to a good life in the United States Health Care education housing I mean those things um have not gotten any cheaper they have only gotten more expensive and and the wages of a Walmart worker cannot buy those things and the wages of many many workers in the low wage economy is modeled by Walmart um they can't do that either so is the is the disparity between making a fortune that's worth about 140 $150 billion and people getting paid $8 an hour that's not exactly an American Dream no but see but you're again you're not taking into account the billions of dollars in wealth creation that's come from the fact that all those hundreds of millions of consumers can spend less the cost of things like education and healthare has gone up and up and up in this country and so middle class people can not as easily afford those services and goods as they could before that's not because wages are low if you factor in inflation salaries are lower today than they were in the 1970s or 1980 you can't just look at wages right the the the disparities or the way you think about mobility and income it's not just wages there are taxes and transfers right so there's been enormous growth in the transfer economy people pay taxes who are wealthy and that money is transferred to lower income people so there's some redistribution the 1% in this country has enjoyed 90% of the economic gains of the recent recovery so I mean in comparison to the wealth generated in this country right now wages are certainly lows onwards yeah and that's when the real thing took off yes that's that's certainly when it became globalization really was the engine behind the success of Walmart yes at that point yes it was quite successful you know on a regional and you know sort of Southern level before that but yes it did become um the the global phenomenon that it is now um because of globalization I the left sees globalization as a Sinister force that creates oligarchs no what globalization does is it allows people in places like India and China and Vietnam to to make Goods that people in America can buy but these are not mutually exclusive I mean they did they did create OLS throughout the world it's more important that we lift people out of poverty than whatever the fact that the Waltons have $150 million is a necessary byproduct because they are the ones who created the mechanism for lifting it's a necessary byproduct absolutely the government government agencies can't create a Walmart you have to have a private corporation that has the initiative to do these things that has the incentive economically I mean as much as globalization is important to the Walmart story The hierarchies within the United States um have contributed um incredibly to the business model as well by making it so um easy for Walmart to exploit um cheap labor at home I don't think that Walmart could have been a success successful without the phenomenal exploitation of its workers at home in the US so and some of them are collecting food stamps I read of course the actual employees who work 9 to5 jobs col collecting food stamps oh yeah W Walmart gives them the papers to sign up for food stamps so this idea that you're only on food stamps if you're some desperate starving person that's not true today there we spend 90 or 70 I think it's 75 73 billion doll a year on food stamps and it's quadrupled not because poverty is quadrupled in this country but because the program has quadrupled so it's important to understand that just the term food stamps a lot of people are you Sur agree that poverty has a new modern sense it's not about starting well but no but there's a huge amount of transfers and redistribution in the US system that go to alleviate whatever income inequality is there and part of it again is the lower cost of goods you can buy more things if those things are cheaper and so if you only focus on wages and you don't focus on taxes and transfers and you don't F focus on cost of living you're missing an enormous part of the story and Walmart has been a great force for good in this economy and that is this land is their [Music] land how did this come to be is it just globalization or is there more the halls of Congress you know I'm fairly certain are bought and paid for by Halton over the past 25 years a sophisticated campaign has been waged to privatize government services well in Tennessee it's trash collection in Ohio it is the state lottery in the border states with Mexico it is the private prison the theory is that corporations can deliver government services better and at a lower cost than the government The Waltons love love Charter Schools the Walton Family Foundation has invested more than $1 billion and Now ladies and gentlemen the Milton Freedman [Music] choir for every taxpayer dollar spent on federal programs over 40 cents now goes to private contractors defense the Monopoly on violence is considered the very foundation of the nation and yet companies like halberton and Blackwater have made billions performing tasks that used to be done by our nation's military forces the most controversial figure in the privatization of the military is the founder of blackwat Eric Prince so that's who we went to see let's go back to the beginning here's a young man who who comes from a wealthy background joins the Navy SEAL leaves the Navy SEAL and then somehow forms a company that reconnects him to the military what what happens there you know I never I never really started the uh the blackw business as a to be a major company I thought it would be a um a good um shooting club almost like a country club for SEAL Teams to use no really no we built the facility to train 150 people at a time tops um and then um you know things changed we had the USS coal uh Coline the terrible shooting at that high school you know after Coline we we ended up training tens of thousands of police officers to in a different Paradigm because before when a terrible event like that would happen they would surround and negotiate but that's not the answer when you have an active shooter trying to kill innocent people you have to get in and stop the problem so we built a mockup high school on the compound and did that when you have private dollars private capability that you can see the problem and move immediately to solve it or provide a solution for your customer it works that's the that's the American way the big opening for you the um The Big Break came with the water on T our customers that have been coming to us for training um were then tasked with operating overseas in a much much bigger way and so they took us with because we had the uh the mentality the capability to operate in difficult places and to assist them whatever they needed it was a job to keep uh diplomats and reconstruction officials alive so they could help put Iraq back together it's War you get paid big dollar it's dangerous and and um you know our people we our people were asked to do the most dangerous work you know on Earth and hence you went involved in and and you know in shootings uh unfortunately uh sometimes we were attacked and our guys would have to uh use their weapons I mean we we weren't issued air rifles they issued real rifles because you got a lot of beatings for that um yeah we uh we certainly became a political hot button but is it because you were targeted because they didn't like you I mean you after all you are a patriot you're you're giving a service you're efficient so why is the government upset uh some of our men carried weapons and sometimes they had to use them and so it made the absolute perfect Target for an angry anti-war left go after us and you felt betrayed but before we get to that I want to talk about you actually settled you paid $49 million to the state department you've paid $7 million to justice for someone who pays $50 million in fines of sort or settlements I mean there was wrongdoings even your co-author Max boot says that you've admitted to a lot of mistakes you know what when um when you're asked to do um significant fast and dangerous work uh for the US Government we grew very quickly sometimes mistakes in paperwork could have been made um some of those some of those mistakes I I don't regret you know if if we have 30 sets of body armor that we need to get to our men in Baghdad working for the state department keeping them alive in Baghdad where people are trying to kill those State Department diplomats and the paperwork isn't done to ship the 30 sets of body armor because State Department takes so long to process them I don't regret sending the body armor making sure that my people are alive uh to continue to do the job and that's the kind of nonsense that state came back came after us for it was a absolute a political Witch Hunt at that point and they were looking for anything but the state department is not leftwing radicals um they were certainly uh driven by the farle in Congress and there were it absolutely was a Witch Hunt so suddenly we moved from the first Gulf War to the second Gulf War from 1991 to 2003 and instead of being approximately 1 to 60 cont contractors now we have one to one contractor versus foot soldiers that's quite a change that's quite a transformation of the way America fight its sces um that is a uh it certainly is a change you know because the first Iraq war was not a counterinsurgency so why are you guys better than than them in the asymmetrical Warfare well they didn't have the numbers you're civilians but the US government did not have the numbers to be as many places they needed to be they didn't have the ability to spool up that quickly to provide it so they turn to the private sector just like if you need a car for the weekend you rent a car does it make it easier when there when you guys are are available for Wars to happen rather than if anyone has to Institute a draft um you make it easier and apparently more efficient private sector capability uh is essential it's quicker to come online and it's quicker to turn off when you're done and now is very important the US government r large spends way too much on everything I think the one of the ways they can they can get a handle on defense over spending is you're turning to the private sector and seeing what would it cost the government to do it versus what will cost the private sector if you were to remake or if to you make the American Military from scratch today based on today's conditions it would look radically different right well there's just a lot of overhead that you could lean out certainly and you would make you would Outsource it much more um again let the let comp comptition dictates where the private sector can add value or not but you don't think what's patriotism that should be the number one factor discipline loyalty loyalty excellent excellent customer service whatever that might be are all essential pieces of it but corporations don't have to sacrifice corporations don't have to have loyalty especially not in this Dy age when everyone is multinational um you know I guess some um some activities could be limited to us companies only staffed by uh by American citizens there you were asked in 2007 you said why don't you say in blackwat that you are and will give Services only to American or American approved company you said that that would be just redundancy but you moved a long way since 2007 sure but everything everything that a us-based company um has to do has to be licensed and approved by the state department so they can't just go off and do it anywhere they they choose to everything you do in Hong Kong or whatever you don't have to give us any details but everything you do now is approved by the state government no no but it's not I'm I'm not working for a US company anymore so let's talk about that so the arc sort of kind of makes its way from a young man joining the Navy SEAL God military country to a guy feel bitter and betrayed to now a guy who's his critics say he's betraying the country he's working for the competitors even perhaps the enemies uh are you a traitor certainly not you know um uh we we based a we based on a company in Hong Kong because it's really the center for for Asian Capital flows Asia has the need and the desire to invest in the the frontier markets of of Africa China you mean uh China what for China in Africa that's China India uh major mining concerns out of Australia I have no doubt But Eric Prince within Dozen Years have made a huge turnaround from being the young man in the Navy SEAL and then putting together coroporation against all Arts to serve the American Military into a guy who is global working perhaps for the competitors or for the Nemesis overseas in Africa that's a that's a long way and for what for profit um look having having built a business from scratch built in on its merits performing an excellent job uh serving the country and having it wrecked by politics is a most disagreeable experience having having it wrecked by politics absolutely eviscerated you paid a bit of a settlement why did you I mean people go through much more difficult things they don't leave the country when you have um members of Congress telling you we don't care what you guys do but we're going to ride you until you're out of business okay so you you learn that lesson and move on so you felt prosecuted uh there was certainly uh left-wing members of Congress that were out to to drive Blackwater and drive me out of business so you left but the private security companies around Washington have proliferated how do you feel about that how do you what do you think about in all sectors whether it's uh information technology or Staffing all the rest if the private sector can say all right we're going to we're going to free up the the space and and replace 10 guys with three guys that's that makes sense because you have to have cost savings efficiency and the flexibility but now you're talking like a businessman I'm talking like a taxpayer fine like a taxpayer I'm talking to you now as someone who has crossed from the national to the international and from the military to the C Civic and back to the military so you are really at the for lines of a number of these uh fields that are transforming the world and transforming the way we fight more than ever before these are intertwined what does it say now that you can get a company an army For Hire I I don't know that you can get an army For Hire I don't know anyone that has one of those sitting on the shelf armies cost a lot of money so so now when when China can hire folks that who were trained by the American Military and the Emirates can hire such and such transnationality what does that say now about how we fight and how countries deal with their Securities I don't know I mean what I'm doing is not about um going out to fight it's about building a Airway an Airfield a road a camp a warehouse a port facility um security might be one part of it but but you know the challenges in Africa is getting your stuff from one point to the other and there's a lot of money to be made there well um I'm not doing it as for you know uh solely for solely for fun or philanthropy yeah I mean I I just did a uh hard trip I was in um a lot of countries in a very few days um so I am trying to uh to build a great company again the to but is that the whole story does that mean we live in an oligarchy we'll be back as our journey continues they they have no loyalty there the the notion of a US company or a US Bank is [Music] Antiquated free [Music] trade it was as if the whole world was banging at the factory Gates it kicked the legs out from under American workers it also destroyed American [Music] manufacturing collateral damage privatization the old idea was to take money from those who could best afford it to spend on what was good for the whole Community because that made everyone wealthier privatization means using the things that everyone needs even Justice to funnel money from the many to the privileged few but there had to be something more in the equation financialization the choosing of this space here Wall Street is the choice of where the 1% goes to work every day where Global capital is dictated you have Goldman Sachs two blocks away you have JP Moran headquarters right over here you have a lot of um of the top law firms that represent them I mean this this is where the 1% of 1% and it's symbolic right the banks shook off the shackles of Regulation slow their entrepreneurial Spirits were Unleashed you me let's try to make some money it was High Times it was a thrill maybe not if you simply had some sort of a regular job but if you could speculate suddenly it was all unraveling falling apart crushing down it was a terrifying time now it has snowballed into what may be the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression breaking news here socks all around the world are tanking we're in the last days of this country surviving would someone do something the 198 are making I mean at the time who was it Paul uh Paul ol son right uh people from uh JP Morgan people from city pson was Goldman Sachs wasn't he at the time yeah yeah he was a part of the government part of the treasury the first step to recovery is to safeguard our financial system I talked at length to the secretary about his recommendation uh on the decisions made to um to safeguard city city Corps it was a shocking proposal there had never been anything like it a $700 billion bailout given the situation we are facing not passing a bill now would cost these Americans much more later it was to save America to save the world that's what we were told is that what happened we went from Wall Street to Washington to speak with David roov author of super class the global power elite and the world they are making and Nomi Prince author of all the president's Bankers the hidden alliances that drive American power she used to be with Goldman Sachs the same place that Henry pson came from and that's not how she sold the deal what happens is you Goldman wants its money back because AIG is protecting its its Investments right and AIG doesn't have money to do it and Goldman's like give me money back because whatever it is you're doing isn't going to work we want our money back and the system starts to implode and then Hank pson gets a call from Lloyd blank F find and he's like you know we've got some serious you multi-billion dollar exposures here do something and then Hank pson gets on his knees I'm I'm I'm summarizing before you know P Etc and then says you we need a congressional bailout purpose of the steps I've outlined tonight is to safeguard the Financial Security of American workers and families and small businesses theide idea that this was done to help people um or to save the US economy from the catastrophe which is the word he's used was just a lie really classic case of the Federal Reserve helping big Banks get bigger while at the exact same time Main Street was doing terribly local banks Community Banks family businesses are failing not able to get loans Community Banks failing small businesses can't get capitalized that wasn't the end of the deception and slight of hand we knew that the Fed was engaging in significant unconventional policies the actual data pertaining to who received the benefits was hit I wrote you a letter and I said hey who'd you lend the money to what were the terms of those loans how can my constituents in Vermont get some of that money who makes the decisions you guys sit around in a room do you make it are there conflicts of interest so my question to you is will you tell the American people to whom you lent 2.2 trillion of their dollars will you tell us who got that money and what the terms are of those agreements tell us who they are no this was all for the most part Hush Hush although it was going on under our noses because you could see the numbers just not where they're at and eventually it got to the point where I believe Bloomberg and Fox News had to sue the Federal Reserve to release this information there are the numbers the Federal Reserve said were too dangerous numbers that for the first time reveal the Staggering sums the world's biggest banks borrowed from the FED to get these numbers Bloomberg fought the FED all the way to the Supreme Court it's 26,000 pages right initially is what it is so what we decided to do was just to add them all up just stop and add them up and when you add them up you get up to something like 29.6 one6 trillion is shocking justifiably I mean US GDP 16 trillion right right you know I mean2 29616 trillion you have to be a large greedy Reckless financial institution to apply for these monies there were only two criteria to get in on the action you had to be in the finance business and you had to be big you didn't even have to be American 11 trillion approximately went to foreign central banks they they have no loyalty there the the notion of a US company or a US Bank is Antiquated you know because essentially most institutions including small businesses today go where the businesses wherever it is any place in the world they're foreign Banks it's just you can't even make this stuff up who profited so now there's a problem with the with the with the phrase that says what's good for the banks is good for the country well it isn't because not because right now the productive purpose that Banks even used to serve is no more their business line their business line is to have this backing from from the federal government which they've amassed particularly over the last few decades by deregulating a lot of rules that kept them from the pool of deposit money the pool of loans that they use they use other people's money to speculate with to go into these derivatives markets to back these hedge funds to expand internationally in places where they have no accountability to those Nations or um to their their American home nation so there there is no more accountability in the financial system there's no more personal accountabil there's no demand like in some cases were from certain presidents um LBJ for example he said to Bankers you know what if you want lower taxes on what you're doing you got to help me with my Great Society my plans to help the individuals in the country you have to give back there's no accountability the social role played by bank which is to take money from people who have it lend it to people who need it so that they can build businesses create jobs improve Society invest in their homes invest in their buildings and so forth has become increasingly peripheral to the business of banks which essentially have discovered a way to make a lot of money off of the churn of money circulating through the system making it in milliseconds but you know there are other examples in the world you know Canada didn't go through this banking crisis Canada had a regulated system did that mean there were no banks and no hedge funds and no investment of Canada of course not but they had a balance Sweden went through a crisis in the early 90s looked at the crisis they have a society that's very much oriented towards social benefits they responded with the restructuring of their banks that actually ultimately became a model for us after our problem so it is possible to balance social desires with having a functioning Financial Center what they've been doing is rather than helping individuals restructure their mortgages or small business loans or things that they perceive to be risky they're instead increasing the amount of Leverage or borrowing they're giving to the hedge funds who then make all these International is the earnings last year of the top 25 hedge funds guys came out it was 21.5 billion for 25 guys top three something like six seven billion right but the top 25 averaged right a billion dollars right in their 2013 so that says what to you David Insanity I mean look there is no economic reason to pay them that much cuz I suspect they would have worked just as hard say for 100 million rather than a billion for one year's compensation and there's no social reason in fact it's socially catastrophic so how is it that they're making that much money they're leveraging cheap money into Rising markets Che money which is the government is the one giving out on zero compared to some rates in the market right you know I mean they were at very low rates then the FED goes from being a lender Last Resort helping out private financial institutions or even um assisting in the uh the um helping out gold or Not Gold um AIG and bare Sterns to actually making markets right and and then in this case they're kind of serving as a market maker allowing for banks to make loans and agreeing that these loans would be bought since then it seems that or presumably when you read the mainstream press is that now the bankers are under scrutiny now there are regulations they are they're not the sizes of their balance sheets are bigger they have more assets they have more deposits the big six banks have more concentration than they've ever had before so all that stuff is like smoke around the edges also so what are you saying that big is now becom bigger it is bigger bigger to big is now bigger it's absolutely there's more too big to fail Banks today than there were before the crisis big six banks are bigger than they were wouldn't make sense if they had actually tried to fix it but they didn't try to fix it so it actually does make well because size yeah look I went to see Bob Rubin when I was doing my last book the former treasury say and I went to see him but um when I was doing my last book and I said you know have you thought about this whole you know too big to fail thing did we go too far and he said you don't understand too big to fail is not an aberration from the system it is a system it is the system that's true I was at an event in Davos a lunch Jamie Diamond had the day before been fined $20 billion at JP Morgan and he stood up Davos the World Elite massive Applause good for you Jamie you know you're standing and he got a raise he got a raise after getting a$2 billion fine because they just think of that as a cost of doing business they say there is no accountability in the context of this thing what's happening now is that there's been a fortification um of the power that the largest institutions have and and you seem to think that it's more likely than n for some of these big Bankers for example in Goldman Sachs to be in government rather than just to influence it from the outside it's just the fact John Whitehead was the head of Goldman Sachs then in the Reagan Administration Bush Administration he went became deputy secretary of state Robert Rubin was the head of Goldman Sachs he became the president chief economic adviser became the Secretary of the Treasury Steve fredman was the head of Goldman Sachs he became George Bush's chief economic advisor John Corine was the head of Goldman Sachs uh he became a senator and the governor um um Hank Paulson was the head of Goldman Sachs he became a Secretary of the Treasury um and so you know I mean it after a couple of those things you stop thinking it's an accident you know and the ideology the culture of a place like Goldman Sachs becomes the ideology of the senior policy makers in the United States government so the Tom Perkins system is you don't get to vote unless you pay a dollar of taxes but what I really think is it should be like a corporation if you pay a million dollar in taxes you get a million votes it is as if there's been a c call it the banker coup leaving the government of the United States with one single purpose to serve finance and the mortgage loans on your broken down checks yeah they've been foreclosed by Goldman Sachs is that it is the rule of the oligarchs the order of today is there any resistance can it succeed or will it fail well it's kind of crummy and it's really shoddy that the one% most everybody and the 1% of that 1% hell they own the 1% as well this land is their land this land ain't ours friend it's after the bailout a public backlash seemed [Music] inevitable so how does it feel now that you're here and it feels dead right now definitely the space was alive it was uh it was it had a space for dreams it had a space for people to step out of their alienation and now this seems to be almost fash fashionable to talk about inequality with recent publications of the Princeton study and of the book I think the inequality got put on the table because of occupy inequality is a euphemism for class the people here were privileged people largely whites it's a class that got demot right the dream stopped working and it stopped working so fast to the point that people found themselves taking to the street politicized even though they weren't politicized we've identified the enemy and it's 1% and that 1% can probably be reduced to 400 to 500 families that own probably the largest five media corporations in the United States what happened to that am I think the American dream is an American nightmare right now and I think people are slowly waking up I think occupy rang the bell and I occupy may have rung the bell and for a moment the old economic consensus may have been shattered but as the protesters were cleared from the streets the oligarchs Consolidated their power according to Forbes the Walton are the richest family in America the CES are the second richest along with a handful of powerful allies they had an audacious plan to redraw America's electoral map the Supreme Court lifted limits on campaign spending and suddenly the doors were flung open the billionaires used front groups like Americans for Prosperity paid for by Americans for Prosperity Americans for Prosperity is responsible by content of advertising neas Prosperity is responsible for the content of this advertising one of the states they targeted was North Carolina it had been controlled by democrats for over a century unemployment in eastern North Carolina their money poured in attack ads ran day and night Americans for Prosperity is responsible for the content of this advertis when the election was over the most radical republican legislator in the South was in charge they cut taxes for the rich cut unemployment insurance cut union rights they blocked government medical care for half a million poor people they made it more difficult to vote and they changed the election District to guarantee Republican domination for the foreseeable future the Democrats have um four seats now they will keep those but the like Ood is the Republicans are going to control the legislature for the foreseeable future and Dallas Woodhouse ran the coch brothers group American for Prosperity during the 2010 and 2012 election campaigns he now has a new political action committee called people who Rising so we would never talk about our donors um uh you know we've seen you know harassment of people who give to calls us so we don't do that but of course if you want to write me a check I'll keep your confidence as well you know what happened to the Democrats for once out of a hundred years they got beat and now they cry to the refs they whine and moan to left leaning um uh media they cry and moan they do what losers do they cry to the refs that's what they do according to Dallas even if they do it in secret hiding behind front groups the more billionaires spend the better it is for democracy the more debate the better I hope there are a gazillion TV ads run I mean it seems like to me that people pick on Charles Koke and they pick on Art Pope but the the Democrats have their guys that run a lot of TV ads and in a world of TV campaign ads money is speech of course it is we're here to reclaim that house as the people's house repent and repeal your attacks on Medicaid and the poor repent and repeal of your attacks on unemployed workers and the Working Poor repeal and repent of how you have taken money out of the pockets of needy people and given it to the rich repent and repeal and return North Carolina to a moral place of kindness and decency and fairness [Music] when Reverend William Barber started protesting in 2013 he was arrested but he went back and it became a movement to fight and try to take their state back the Supreme Court now has become an enabler to those who want to buy our democracy and they're creating an environment where is as though people are being being treated like things and corporations are being treated like [Music] people and they made a distinctive decision about how they would hold on to power in this nation and that which they would go into the states and what many liberals and progressives have got to understand is is one thing to win congressional seats and one thing to win the presidency but more importantly is what goes on in state houses because what goes on the state houses determines voting rights it determines the districting lines for your Congress and that's why you have to have a moral movement because down through history the only thing that's been able to break the back of that kind of economic domination have been moral movements people in the street people being really engageed nonviolent people being ready to speak out from our from our pool pits people rising [Music] [Applause] up Reverend Barber's Coalition is impressive the Monday protests have drawn as many as 80,000 people and have spread hundreds of cities around the state but the Coke brothers money and their newly drawn electoral map May insulate them from the pressures in the street but they say in the Democracy own forceing on on people these are elected governments they they make the laws oligarchs don't make the laws oligarchs pay politicians to make the laws that's what we have in the United States so you think it's democracy for higher yeah it's definitely democracy for higher can there be change is there a real possibility of change a crisis some kind of a crisis that shows the last crisis strengthened the exactly it needs to be look I think the reaction to the last crisis may be totally different from what you think it was I think the re you know which was this is a big crisis the biggest sense the Great Depression I think the reaction history may look at it at the last crisis was that it was not big enough it was not big enough to produce the changes that were necessary in the political system the economic system banking system come with me please gentlemen this private this is a private piece of property thank you let's go [Music] it's kind of interesting Crossing to this side of things and I'm not talking about the moaning and the whining I'm talking about how things seem uh so much Rosier brighter super confident even fun life of gold if you're into this kind of thing because even if it's not the end of History it's certainly the Triumph of capitalism over communism but I ask you what is it that you want to do with billions that you can't do with Millions because you see when we talk about billions we're talking about power about the oligarchy and the destruction of democracy in a civilization it's the society that defines wealth not the few wealthy that Define society and democracy because that's what matters until next [Music] time

Channel: Al Jazeera English

Views: 470,449

Keywords: aljazeera, al jazeera, aljazeera english, al jazeera english, The Rise of the Oligarchs | Empire, The Rise of the Oligarchs, Rise of the Oligarchs, Rise, The Rise, Oligarchs, the Oligarchs, Empire, Wealth inequality, inequality, Forbes, Forbes Magazine

Id: cN8esxNb1t0

Length: 47min 39sec (2859 seconds)

Published: Mon May 26 2014