Requiem for the American Dream Page #2
for our own black people
and for our own poor people.
Concern for other people,
One day we must ask
the question,
"why are there 40 million
poor people in America?"
When you begin
to ask that question,
you're raising a question
about the economic system,
about a broader
distribution of wealth,
the question of restructuring
the whole of American society.
These are all
civilizing effects...
And that caused great fear.
I hadn't anticipated
the power...
I should've, but I didn't
anticipate the power
of the reaction
to these civilizing effects of the '60s.
I did not anticipate the strength of
the reaction to it.
The backlash.
There has been an enormous
concentrated, coordinated...
Business offensive
beginning in the '70s
to try to beat back
the egalitarian efforts
that went right
through the Nixon years.
You see it in many respects,over on the right,
you see it in things like the famous Powell
Memorandum... (Associate Justice of the SC)
Sent to the chamber of commerce,
justice Powell...
Warning them that business
is losing control over the society...
And something has to be done
Of course, he puts it
in terms of defense,
"defending ourselves
against an outside power."
But if you look at it,
it's a call for business to use
its control over resources
to carry out a major offensive
to beat back this democratizing
wave.
Over on the liberal side,
there's something exactly
similar.
The first major report of The Trilateral Commission
(is a non-governmental group founded
by David Rockefeller in July 1973)
is concerned with this.
It's called "the crisis of democracy."
Trilateral Commission
is liberal internationalists...
Their flavor is indicated
by the fact that
they pretty much staffed
the Carter administration.
They were also appalled by
the democratizing tendencies
of the '60s,
and thought
we have to react to it.
They were concerned that
there was an "excess of
democracy" developing.
Previously passive and obedient
parts of the population,
what are sometimes called,
"the special interests,"
were beginning to organize
and try to enter the political
arena,
and they said, "that imposes
too much pressure on the state.
It can't deal with all
these pressures."
So, therefore, they have
to return to passivity
and become depoliticized.
They were particularly concerned
with what was happening
to young people.
"The young people are getting
too free and independent."
None of us will
beget any violence.
If there's any violence,
it will be because of the police.
The way they
put it, there's failure on
the part of the schools,
the universities,
the churches...
The institutions responsible
for the "indoctrination
of the young."
Their phrase, not mine.
If you look at their study, there's one interest
they never mention... Privat business.
And that makes sense, they're
not special interest, they're
the national interest,
kind of by definition.
So they're okay.
They're allowed to, you know,
have lobbyists, buy campaigns,
staff the executive,
make decisions, that's fine.
But it's the rest, the special interests,
the general population,
who have to be subdued.
Well, that's the spectrum.
It's the kind of ideological
level of the backlash.
But the major backlash,
which was in parallel to this...
Was just redesigning
the economy.
Since the 1970s, there's been
a concerted effort on the part
of the masters of mankind,
the owners of the society,
to shift the economy
in two crucial respects.
One, to increase the role
of financial institutions,
banks, investment firms,
so on...
Insurance companies.
By 2007, right before
the latest crash,
they had literally 40%
of corporate profits...
Far beyond anything in the past.
Back in the 1950s,
as for many years before,
was based largely on production.
the great manufacturing
center of the world.
Financial institutions used
to be a relatively small part
of the economy
and their task was
to distribute unused assets like,
say, bank savings
to productive activity.
The bank always has
on hand a reserve of money
received from
the stockholders
and depositors.
On the basis of
these cash reserves,
a bank can create credit.
place for depositing money,
a bank serves a community
by making additional credit
available for many purposes.
For a manufacturer to meet
his payroll during slack selling periods,
for a merchant to enlarge
and remodel his store,
and for many other good reasons
more credit
than they have
immediately available.
That's a contribution
to the economy.
Regulatory system
was established.
Banks were regulated.
The commercial and investment
banks were separated,
cut back their risky investment
practices that could harm private people.
There had been, remember, no financial
crashes during the period of regulation.
By the 1970s, that changed.
increase in the flows of speculative capital,
just astronomically increase,
enormous changes
in the financial sector
from traditional banks to risky investments,
complex financial instruments,
money manipulations and so on.
Increasingly, the business
of the country isn't production,
at least not here.
The primary business
here is business.
You can even see it
in the choice of directors.
So, a director of a major
American corporation
back in the '50s and '60s
was very likely to be an engineer, somebody who
graduated from a place like MIT,
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology
maybe industrial management.
More recently, the directorship
and the top managerial positions
are people who came out
of business schools,
learned the financial trickery
of various kinds, and so on.
By the 1970s, say General Electric
could make more profit
playing games with money
than you could by producing
in the United States.
You have to remember
that General Electric
is substantially
a financial institution today.
It makes half its profits just
by moving money around
in complicated ways.
And it's very unclear that
of value to the economy.
So that's one phenomenon,
what's called financialization
of the economy.
Going along with that
is the off-shoring of production.
The trade system
was reconstructed
with a very explicit
design of putting
working people
in competition with one
another all over the world.
And what it's lead to
is a reduction in the share of income
on the part of working people.
It's been particularly striking
in the United States,
but it's happening worldwide.
It means that an American
worker's in competition
with the super-exploited
worker in China.
Meanwhile, highly paid
professionals are protected.
They're not placed
in competition with the rest
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"Requiem for the American Dream" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 22 Dec. 2024. <https://www.scripts.com/script/requiem_for_the_american_dream_16797>.
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