Requiem for the American Dream Page #4

And in fact, right now,

it's almost absurd.

Corporations have money

coming out of their pockets.

So, in fact, General Electric,

are paying zero taxes and they

have enormous profits.

Let's them take the profit somewhere else,

or defer it, but not pay taxes,

and this is common.

The major American corporations

shifted the burden of sustaining

the society

onto the rest of the population.

Solidarity is quite dangerous.

From the point of view of

the masters, you're only

supposed to care about yourself,

not about other people.

This is quite different from

the people they claim are their

heroes like Adam Smith,

who based his whole approach

to the economy on the principle

that sympathy

is a fundamental human trait,

but that has to be driven out

of people's heads.

You've got to be for yourself,

follow the vile Maxim,

"don't care about others,"

which is okay for

the rich and powerful,

but is devastating

for everyone else.

It's taken a lot of effort

to drive these basic human

emotions out of people's heads.

And we see it today

in policy formation.

For example,in the attack on

social security.

Social security is

based on a principle.

It's based on a principle

of solidarity.

Solidarity, caring for others.

Social security means,

"I pay payroll taxes...

So that the widow across town

can get something to live on."

For much of the population,

that's what they survive on.

It's of no use to the very rich,

so therefore, there's a concerted

attempt to destroy it.

One of the ways is defunding it.

You want to destroy

some system? First defund it.

Then, it won't work.

People will be angry.

They want something else.

It's a standard technique

for privatizing some system.

We see it in the attack

on public schools.

Public schools are based

on the principle of solidarity.

I no longer

have children in school.

They're grown up...

But the principle

of solidarity says,

"I happily pay taxes so that

the kid across the street

can go to school."

Now, that's normal

human emotion.

You have to drive that

out of people's heads.

"I don't have kids in school.

Why should I pay taxes?

Privatize it," so on.

The public education system,

all the way from kindergarten

to higher education,

is under severe attack.

That's one of the jewels

of American society.

You go back to the Golden Age again...

The great growth period

in the '50s and '60s.

A lot of that is based

on free public education.

One of the results

of the second world war

was the G.I. Bill (of Rights),

which enabled veterans,

and remember, that's a large

part of the population then,

to go to college. They wouldn't

have been able to, otherwise.

They essentially

got free education.

Where a community,

state or nation...

Courageously invests

a substantial share of its

resources in education,

the investment invariable

returned in better business and

the higher standard of living.

U.S. was way in the lead

in developing extensive mass

public education at every level.

By now, in more than half

the states, most of the funding

for the colleges comes from

tuition, not from the state.

That's a radical change,

and that's a terrible burden on students.

It means that students,

if they don't come from

very wealthy families,

they're going to leave

college with big debts.

And if you have a big debt,

you're trapped.

I mean, maybe you wanted

to become a public interest

lawyer,

but you're going to have

to go into a corporate law firm

to pay off those debts,

and by the time you're

part of the culture,

you're not going

to get out of it again.

And that's true

across the board.

In the 1950s, it was a much

poorer society than it is today,

but, nevertheless, could easily

handle essentially free mass

higher education.

Today, a much richer society

claims it doesn't have

the resources for it.

That's just what's going

on right before our eyes.

That's the general

attack on principles that,

not only are they humane,

they are the basis

of the prosperity

and health of this society.

If you look over

the history of regulation,

say, railroad regulation,

financial regulation and so on,

you find that quite commonly

it's either initiated

by the economic...

Concentrations that are being regulated,

or it's supported by them.

And the reason is because

they know that, sooner

or later, they can take

over the regulators.

And it ends up with what's

called "regulatory capture."

The business being

regulated is in fact

running the regulators.

Bank lobbyists are actually

writing the laws of financial

regulation,

it gets to that extreme.

That's been happening through

history and, again,

it's a pretty natural tendency

when you just look at

the distribution of power.

One of the things that

expanded enormously

in the 1970s is lobbying,

as the business world moved sharply

to try to control legislation.

The business world was pretty

upset by the advances in public

welfare in the '60s,

in particular by Richard Nixon.

It's not too well understood,

but he was the last new deal president,

and they regarded

that as class treachery.

In Nixon's administration,

you get the consumer safety

legislation,

safety and health

regulations in the workplace,

the EPA, the environmental

protection agency.

Business didn't like it,

of course.

They didn't like the high taxes.

They didn't like the regulation.

And they began a coordinated

effort to try to overcome it.

Lobbying sharply increased.

Deregulation began with a real ferocity.

There were no financial crashes

in the '50s and the '60s,

because the regulatory

apparatus of the new deal

was still in place.

As it began to be dismantled under business

pressure and political pressure,

you get more and more crashes.

And it goes on

right through the years.

'70s it starts to begin.

'80s really takes off.

Congress was asked to approve federal loan

guarantees to the auto company

of up to one and one half

billion dollars.

Now, all of this is quite safe

as long as you know the government's going

to come to your rescue.

Take, say, Reagan. Instead of letting

them pay the cost,

Reagan bailed out the banks

like Continental Illinois,

the biggest bailout

of American history at the time.

He actually ended his term

with a huge financial crisis,

the savings and loan crisis.

President Bush today

signed the 300 billion-dollar

savings and loan bailout bill.

In 1999, regulation was

dismantled to separate

commercial banks

from investment banks.

Then comes the Bush

and Obama bailout.

Bear Stearns is running to the feds

to stay afloat...

(The Bear Stearns Companies)

President Bush today defended the decision

to bail out Citigroup...

(Citigroup Inc)

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

have asked for a total of three

billion dollars more...

The bailout could get much

bigger, signaling deepening

troubles for the U.S. economy.

And they're building

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