conversations is when kreider who is a long term observer of the situation political economic situation from washington having reported for the washington post and for the rolling stone magazine he's the author of a newly published just now in april or may have one thousand nine hundred and ninety two a book by simon and schuster it's in titled who will tell the people subtitled the betrayal of american democracy and he is also the major correspondent for recently a recently broadcast program in the frontline series for the national public television documentary consortium called to be trail of american democracy and we're very happy to welcome him to the program  we began the program this evening by by asking him to comment on the fact that the the moneyed interests in the special moneyed interests have become so prevalent in terms of setting national policy that it it prompted him to refer to washington as the the grand bazaar and we asked him as and in an introductory sense to say is it the fact that money which has always been important but it's become so especially important now that politics and the national agenda and the whole democratic agenda now has simply become a matter of very large vested interests and very large really a matter of money and interest and we asked him that question and invited him you can not see it over to the over that period of time money of course has always been money the plug hole has always been a one of the four columns of american politics from the beginning sophisticated manner and the people are not organized and that's a crude way of saying that our our our basic democratic understanding are not functioning people kind of know that you don't have you could walk out on the street in new york or believe me any community in america rich poor white black it doesn't matter have a serious conversation with people in any setting about politics and sooner or later that will come to the surface or i think the last couple of ministrations or as have been the tendency is going all along where there have been times when there was the civil rights movement it was a feisty you know sense of democratic participation or maybe the realities were stuck where it was just democratic just variation in the governmental and economic process and i think that is it's something quality well it's a it's it's a series of complicated changes i think that are happening simultaneously but not necessarily connected to one another that have produced this and it didn't start this year it did it actually didn't start with ronald reagan right my my liberal friends don't like to hear that but but that's the truth of the matter is it's spread over really the last generation and and let me list a couple of those things one the political parties which as we know were never perfect vessels of representing people anyway but they lost their capacity to mediate between citizens at large and the government and sometimes they did that crudely and for rather narrow minded purposes but but you can't know you can't have known what politics was like in a lot of  and as we showed in the in the frontline documentary i went back we went back to louisville where i had worked as a young reporter in the sixty's and into a neighborhood called germantown these wonderful folks they really hadn't changed that much  and just talking to people and going into the barber shop and they all had the same feeling of yeah the democratic party i wish it still was here yeah but what did you get out of it well they come around and knock on your door and talk to you and you felt like you mattered and you were connected and you had in the end yes if you were out of work they'd help you find a job and maybe it would be a city hall job or maybe it would be somebodies garage or whatever but i mean political parties especially the democratic party used to do that  which is also described more fully in my book is that again quite imperfectly nobody is claiming that we once had perfection and it is now lost but the death of a party organization gave a place for people to go to hold public officials accountable and right actually who is who was a congressman from toledo for two thousand five hundred and thirty years and i liberal democrat who is  now head of a major bank trade association i mean he's with the biggest city biggest banks in the country and a close personal friend of george bush so this is not an anti establishment character but he's but he's an honest politician a and he was talking about the experience as a young congressman going back to toledo and having to go to the ward meeting the ward chairman's meeting once a month or the precinct meetings and getting into dialogue not about who was cleaning the streets but about public policy issues and he tells us vivid story of how they brought him to to the ground on the war in vietnam he was pro johnson he was pro war he was a good patriotic cold warrior and and right and the end he in day and he started going to these meetings and they started yelling at him and he said they practically drove me out of the  hall and he said it i said well did you change your mind he said i had to change my mind if i was going to run for reelection because this is countability that's i mean that's what accountability means it was your now my question is where does that happen in our society right and the because what you're doing is taking in lots of eyes and ears you're not just listening to a cadre of of highly educated experts who are looking basically at numbers not real life you're you're you're at least filtering into the system the millions of voices experiences and so forth and and trying to figure out how does their idea of reality fit with government policy and that's a very that's a very decent it's an important discipline and the and the further the government gets away from that sort of discipline the more likely it is to go plunging over various cliffs as as the government seems to do get with t political democracy in the sense that everyone over eighteen does every right to vote is they can't they vote less and less was actually pretty that's a pretty thin idea of what the mocker siemionow know what i mean even at that fifty percent of those do you hold presidential y actually find i think we had seven percent in the new york primary so very small there's a turn but that we have it very much our society is obviously in there was a piece in the new york times today the federal reserve figures came out that we are very very much in the united states and economic plutocracy have been and are continuing and are and the trending is that direction that their wealth and the of the capital wealth and the capital assets are very very narrowly held and probably the vast majority of people don't even think of terms of having any ownership of capital instruments or anything of that sort it's very much of an economic good doctor see is that reality beginning to get the fact that the economics are so the well there's beginning to catch up with the political process is there a relationship between i think i think i'm ever the optimist but i would i wouldn't be terribly sanguine about current events as are as a change in the in these deep patterns one of the things that happened we lost the political parties and they are connective function simultaneously the federal government took on a lot of obligations that it hadn't really tried to fulfill before most dramatically the environmental regulation that gave corporate america a very direct incentive to bring a lot of money to have an early seventies and those were the landmark laws however they set off they gave corporations a very powerful incentive to unify their politics throw their money together into think tanks that would churn out policy reports and propaganda form coalitions of lobbyists that would work a tax bill or an environmental bill or etc hire lots and lots of lawyers scientists economists it's all of the experts all of whom would be focused not just at the legislative process but at the regulatory process where much of what gets passed as law gets on done and it was very important public education and propaganda and you step back some evening and watch television and see how many messages are directed at the american public every evening that basically say she is a wonderful company i b m takes care of children in the ghetto wire house and plants trees dow environment and in fact ignoring laws not just now and then but year after year after year in that same house what you call hollow yeah i mean the manipulate this process i mean it it makes one gag a bit when you see the conflict which i describe quite directly here in my book and here's the good part of this story on the whole i think most americans don't really quite swallow the message i think probably it is yeah it is ed deeper level they don't need it but but that but all of those things all of the propaganda public education and all obvious do they have this effect i think they build a fence around the debate they confine the public to dialogue to a kind of limited set of ideas that are acceptable and you are outside that fence that's all of that same out of paradis turns on you and says that's a mom except for the idea that's right that's radical that's dangerous but you know they have a whole set of words historic sense of what we would say the truth i'm arguing out of what are literally supposedly the shared values of the society salute me if we have time to sort of basic questions all right democracy means we have accountability do we have accountability you couldn't get ten percent of the american people to say yes absolutely they have run i mean another important value of our democracy is equal protection of the law do you believe that the government enforces the law equally in the world pretty much treated more adapted focusing the attention on the lobbying effort than they had been historically the desire to store the numbers the numbers of of representatives and lawyers who were kind of go both ways as a warrior lobbyist they could both know the concentration of the wealth and that sort of thing and then it's developed like that and what the result as far as the broad citizenry is concerned is they feel very much left out of the well it has other others in c d s effect on the people in the governing community itself and i mean even the good people who really do want to try to keep their minds open to the big picture you know i mean you place was you here yeah you can't live in a mill you know of sort of fancy restaurants and and all of the other perks everything else without somehow absorbing that in your social vision you know and i don't know and i make the argument and this will offend a lot of good people in washington but i really believe it's true financial regulation and they were talking about i or a's and they were sitting around and they didn't have the numbers before them so they were sitting around arguing about whether what do you think the average size of the ira of an american family is in  attacks upon labor i mean the go we just had the caterpillar thing was very disappointing that was another mediating agency and ideal i deal with those in the book and you know i hope original ways you know if you don't have a couple of chapters essentially about labor and what happened to it and i am as steep as anybody in the in the critique of labor's leadership and what unions did wrong and so forth but that story has been told amply over the last twenty years and has has strong elements of truth to it but what gets left out is that the labor movement st was the progressive core of our politics it and it went its way to every other important cause from the civil rights movement byrom have the new consumer movement none of those landmark laws would likely have become reality decline its decline really was driven by two things one is the global economy which is is now a roadie the industrial unions which are were the core of the labor movement treat of this so well in the last chapter of the nd last chapter collectively in their own behalf and represent and get representation with their employer that they had thirty or forty years ago those rights have been gradually circumscribed or voted of manipulated and whenever labor goes into the political arena as it's doing now and tries to get even very modest reforms to restore its its legal rights not everybody turns away but anybody in general even a lot of democrats who after all get a lot of money from labor you know sort of shy away as though that's a that's such an unfashionable cause yeah they get him a bother yeah it is well i mean i'm in a way i'm my argument is say very  go back to fundamentals you know if you if you if the democrats or anybody else or say they are protecting working people then they've got to help labor unions to get back the capacity to organize those people and that's that's not a popular idea at this time in our history as you know it has widened but and then the nd half of that is the global economy if you talk to say auto workers in the midwestern  workers are good many other many manufacturing workers they are portrayed usually as the sort of no nothing protectionists you know they want to beat up tear up the japanese car yeah  the reality i have seen is that people who work in plants that are trading in competing in the global economy a real smart about it very sophisticated they know the price realities around the globe they know exactly who their competitors are in different markets and they understand what most americans don't quite yet understand which is that this is this this global trading system on regulated unfettered is is a system running downhill and it's it's it's it's gradually pulling down our wage levels but it's also pulling down our laws and that is you know literally national our national sovereignty is being eroded by th system now in the name of competitive in the name of the united states canada if the united states wants to impose these standards on corporations whether it's taxes environmental law worker safety child labor things we the united states is losing its ability to establish its own social standing why hasn't that been the case throughout the history or has it been the head out throughout the history of the capitalist experiment and i think it's very busy just that it's becoming more efficient to move prove so that they can you know take advantages of these kind of things were you know fifty years ago where the coal that was was important in the transportation wasn't so well developed why is it that they're able to do the pattern and today so matter where experiencing now in the global economy is actually quite consistent with the history of capitalism and the capitalist development and clothing especially the industrial age  revolution has whole weeks had a pattern of breaking forward to new technologies new capacities and doing that in a highly exploitative manner if you go back and   rd world countries and the history of politics has always been that sooner or later people have to become sufficiently outraged enough and aware of this process to back to do you can go back to the life of this city how many years ago right ok and in lower manhattan the children worked and it was said that if they if you wouldn't let the children work why the economy would collapse beginning to happen in the city you know some of the  really just living with almost slave labor not to mention the workers in china and other kinds of places that are literally under questions that were amount that were up real honest to god wage slave media i mean this is not a moral judgment not about corporations and business it really is and it's a historical judgment that they will always break to new higher ground and do and i mean that's the nature of a corporate enterprise yeah you stay until whether it's church or government or social movements talk back to them and say wait a minute this is wrong and that ought to be some governmental involvement in terms of that if you're going to be kind of organized something by the people against these vested in power and what's happened what's happened really in the last thirty years that is that new technologies communication transportation so forth computers allowed a high mobility of capital you can close a factory in indiana and put up a new one in mexico still a matter of i mean you're an economist and so what i mean how much of the overall if i could maybe it's a relevant question to say so you know but how much of the per productive cost of producing goods and services in the modern world economy is labor related and how much of it is increasingly technology and are they getting such advantages by paying rather than five or seven or ten dollars an hour one dollar an hour and is that labor question such a critical one in terms as they would try to argue in terms of these economic u i and a large you know the inspectors and so we could answer we have some extra week of the incidence to that but it doesn't matter how we answer right ok all right ok it only matters how the corporate numbers crunchers as they call them answer and they'll give it to as a d v d they are going to say yes there's certain things wrong and mexico among others we they have no roads and they don't have modern plumbing and a lot of places and so forth but if we move to mexico guess what we don't pay any property tax right we don't have the what he calls we can we get that we can get the government to give us a fifty year lease for nothing and we can pay the workers and now here's the killer in fairness to those corporate decision makers they will say to themselves all the only we don't want to abandon those people in illinois but if we don't do it our competitor is going to do it so let's just go ahead and do yeah right that's where that's the point and i'm saying that quite sincerely that that it's too easy to say well we just if we had decent americans running these companies they would do that to us yeah they're caught too they're caught in this global trading system and everybody is fighting for the price advantage because all they they have to fight to are dinner later they'll be role is all moving to some lower common lowest common denominator or you know and the arguments that they would make is well eventually they will be as indeed it is and in the long run the swells will accumulate and allow more investment and more and it will be distributed eventually so that in the long run everyone will benefit and you know of course john  riposte of all dead in the long run we're all dead or aren't and of course that's that's he wasn't being facetious about that yeah it is it is not an answer to people to say well you're losing your standard of living and your children lose their job standard of living but fifty or one hundred years from now the world is going to be better off and you just and you have to accept your condition yeah that's momma that's nominee answer than any human being could be should shouldn't have to accept it and in fact the way out i think  n and i grant that it's very difficult it will take years of political action from lots of different people but the way out is is for people in this country to see the the mutual their political interests with people on the other end of the transmission bill that is in places like mexico and so forth and begin to build international new standards for the global trade international stand yeah hose them on i mean there isn't a government probably anywhere in the world that will take the lead in that at the present moment they're all trapped in the same competition gathers no value is trying to roll over to whoever will put a factory in there in their territory who can push it and only the stronger countries namely the united states have the base of prosperity be able to say look we're going to started posing some rules if you want to trade in this market it is the largest market in the world you're going to have to start accepting these rules and that applies not just to japanese or german companies it applies to america that would have to be done at a governmental level in there yeah yeah and so and where we're going to find the political strength given the kind of weak performance of our labor unions and other kinds of democratic institution although as you say in your book and in the documentary piece there's beginning to be so much really nation so much you know at the at the common sense every day level so much reaction to this that there may be building up a in abilities for the people to a certain sense to i don't know take back the democracy or see i eat and yeah i asked to write i guess i'm an optimist st because of american history you can go through barack and history as you know and find even more daunting moments and the people eventually broke out of them not with perfect fulfillment but but they did get their act together secondly i think that the political status quo is much more vulnerable than conventional wisdom holds if vulnerable that is to to a really organized a soul from people outside and by that i mean people getting organized in some continuing way they can't just come together in the nd week of april for the new york primary and expect that to change the world that's you know his costs silly and simple minded you believe that but if they begin to build connections with other people  and and and demonstrate that they are there for the long run then challenge the status quo then you could i mean i give this may be wishful thinking or a heart but i have a sense that  that the that the president order is very vulnerable to that kind of intrusion and i think really before we get to any of these difficult questions like how do you take on the global economy people st have to demonstrate that they are willing to destabilise the status quo and whether they do that within a dinner party or outside of it as rd parties or as you know ross perot the mainline media is very very carefully very nearly and becoming ever more narrowly held by again the same big best of money interest people who own the wealth and which the federal reserve reports to us now is increasingly become more and more that those who own the wealth are getting more and more of the world have gotten more and he said the ownership of the mechanisms of communication is becoming highly concentrated along with everything out along with everything television it takes lots of money to get the equipment and so forth on the other hand on the other hand it's relentlessly populous and the elitist speak very directly to people and you don't have to have a ph d to understand is right that's right everybody and it picks up new on and  institutions like political parties and accountability i'm a bit and basically an optimist about the medium i think i think it is it has the seeds to make people powerful again including their ability to produce the young these people a collection of activists and a concern around the country who began are also trying to begin to tap into the realities of satellite distribution which is the economic route is very exciting and they're doing it at just a local level and beginning to get something going because that's fighting against in a certain sense the big interests and it's indicative also if i may of the fact that you have a great number of channel capacities which in a metaphor sense represents in a certain metaphor sort of sense if i may the fact that the emerging technologies in the technologies of the time which we find are so one of the frustrating aspects of the contemporary human condition is that we do have a knowledge base and a technological capability of answering the ancient scourges of the human condition clit is among president it's almost abundant and what we have and we have these political things that are getting in the way don't say what i mean no i agree completely the act no i think i mean it has a certain abundant quality that these cable systems that is perhaps a harbinger or a metaphor for a broader metaphor for the economy i argue it in the book and i know that this contour is this is goes against the supposed scientific evidence but i've seen this over  my lifetime people in this country are basically smart but they are also much better informed than they're given credit for and i attribute that to tell if it's true they may not have their knowledge sort of neatly lined up the way a political reporter would or or an academic or an academic as a taker examiner that's right yeah i've done this again and again you go into the most read most corners of america talk to people who are very humble in their lives now and you find yourself talking to them about the same big public issues that you talk about in new york and they know very jolly well they have intimate they have a very clear idea of what the argument is about yeah they may not know all of the fine leaders be quite hostile to lead should be questions of the elite should be question because the i mean we've had an industrial revolution for three hundred years the human species has been on the earth for two hundred thousand years we have this incredible technological productive capability intrinsic to the contemporary moment as we move into it the computer chip continues to just go through revolution after revolution almost on a on a yearly basis in terms of the ability to use information with this tremendous capability and we still have poverty in our midst something is not  physical restraint now on feeding everybody in the world absolutely not to matter to everybody in this country absolutely you can i mean absent think of that is there think of that in terms of the industry we are literally literally living at the very st era in human history where you could say that yes that's right one hundred years ago five hundred years ago it's two thousand years ago the economic struggle for most of the world was literally a struggle of survive hard honest to god we get enough to feed our children hard on is that i know on and on and on year after year scarcity scarred as scarcity now we know because of all these technological changes that have cleared and  development of different societies we have a paradox where it is not just that some of us are wealthy and some was in the world or very poor the world is awash in surplus food absolutely not only surplus that that's it that's a as opposed to some people must start because there are enough food to go around did you just take that as a given into all the precept but i mean economics some have said economics is the science of the allocation of scarce resources what would we do if we ever reached a point where five point plus one billion people in the world now apparently who st appeared two hundred thousand years ago it's really interesting we all the human species st appeared we're all descended of one person we reach a point where we have these number of people and we have the capacity apparently for the st time to render the planet incapable of the continuation of the species with the destructive aspects of technological just weapons  real like we come to a time as you say of course perhaps of really truly qualitative transformation another metaphor might be we've been gestating four hundred for two hundred thousand years and we reach a point where we really must not study war no more people distant from power who maybe in very ordinary humble circumstances can see reality more clearly than experts frequently i mean if i give lots of different examples of that right right but i mean and that's not just a sort of sweet hearted clich of mobile working people it's true and i give the most striking example if you go back to the fifty's or sixty's people in various parts of this country began say talking vaguely about a cancer epidemic and they attributed to various things some of them not eat yeah but but but the bay next one nation was all these chemicals in our environment  pollution in the food we eat and so forth and so on and the scientific opinion almost unanimously dismissed that as as unfounded fear either were or as the political order in the here we are thirty years later and the scientific evidence comes in every year there is a a there is a cancer victim rising cancer rates excluding lung cancer which is mostly attributable cancer and what is most outrageous surprising cancer rates among children and they don't yet know in a scientific manner is the exact explanation for this but some of the authors of these studies have said in a speculative way well it's probably environmental pollution as it seems to be concentrated in industrial nations and areas and so forth now my only point is yeah right here is this certitude that science and politics and government offered to people thirty years ago in corporate america of course and the people so wasn't it didn't feel that way to us and people were right in and we now have an area in the southwest louisiana texas gulf coast which is literally they call against the law since ninety seven you know what do you have you know how could they get away yeah you have the you have this very interesting concept where they pass hollow laws where they talk to the issues that people feel and then in the regulatory process and yet a piece of lloyd cutler i think worry he says it's the interpretation of that they can just bargain all of that away and they can manipulate it away with the power and again it comes back to the fact that the money interests are so very powerful in the terms by which money and interest of the business world and the  economic conditions are so set up you have written i want to i don't want to backtrack from the book or anything for that but you put a great deal of attention to a very very very important book called secrets of the temple how the federal reserve runs the country and i quite long but i have to say it's very satisfying to me to know that the wonderful thing about a book is that it takes a commitment from from both sides i mean to write when you really have to make a commitment absolutely if it's a long serious book to read it you have to make a commitment so i still hear from lots of people around the country who have just read that book i write and have questions or reactions or something and and that's a very very satisfying experience and i hope the same happens with this book not necessarily tomorrow or the next day although obviously i hope it sells well but you know the wonderful thing about a book is that it's on the shelf and you don't know who's going to pull it down five or ten years from now and learn something from it we have these federal reserve banks twelve them around the country and they're privately owned or part of a private banking system in a certain sense the democratic or the democratic control of congress over the terms of interest the terms by which the economy is to be operating these very very important questions to a certain degree have we given up any democratic control over that issue and handed over a great deal of the control of the terms by which business is going to operate in this country to people who have a very conflict of interest a vested interest in terms of handing it over to the banking industry itself that sort of like mr woods charles woods who is running for president now as a democratic we do interviews it's  look it's interesting mightily to this concentration of wealth expression of the ignorance of contemporary americans that most people do not understand the federal reserve and w been lost not totally by accident i now say because citizens in this century have been educated to defer to authority yeah and the federal reserve which is mostly economists bankers is the ultimate authority secret you can't you can't see what they do with their meetings that's right and yet it makes decisions mainly about interest rates that ripples through the economy with the certainty that presidential declarations do not now rattle the reason we're in recession now the reason we have this recession is because the federal reserve in one thousand nine hundred and eighty in the middle of the presidential election started kicking up interest rates and they kicked him up nearly double and they held him up there for about a year and a half and it's true they started bringing him down but it was too late the economy was in recession on the federal reserve has made some profound mistakes in its management over the last two or three years  and eighty eight in the election that they held off giving the worst notification of the savings and loan and you have in your documentary and in your book a very disquieting fact that seventy billion dollars now something but i don't barely got out of it incredible devoted woke up right after george bush's ignore world to discover what they had not been told during the campaign or the years before which is that they were liable for several one hundred billion dollars by the way you're going to have to pay for the commercial banks too and if we are unlucky the cost of the commercial banks in syria might be even larger than the s n l's i hope it doesn't get that bad but more but i'll just tell you a few things now the answer to people to bail out the bankers and what could be done with those billions of dollars in terms of the social agenda need to send here's what i mean dollar repair and chicago resulted in a one billion dollars loss of commerce and what not i mean i'm sorry i didn't mean to go see here is one of the ironies of our time which is very difficult for people to face the f d i c the insurance deposit insurance system was created in and three by democrats in a in the big at the dawn of a great era of reform savings and loan deposit insurance system likewise was was was a creation of liberals who want to do who want to spread housing in this country and for thirty or forty years both of those systems worked and now they have been so corrupted that they are serving an opposite purpose but it's very hard for reformers of our time to stand back and say wait a minute i know this came out of the new deal yes but look at the results of producing now we have to rethink bank regulation we have to think rethink housing and how we we reform them you know how can we reform them and how can we begin to recapture something of the sense of participation by the citizen that is really woefully lacking now and appropriately so given the realities of this  understood that the money interests have come in if you touch on two of those major big issues in the whole ones you say you're optimistic you have in your piece and in the book these groups of people down in texas where they begin to get together the man even avoided politic brooklyn queens starting in the south bronx and they have they have developed ways to to allow poor people working class people to build their own political  they do not create an instant millennium in politics obvious alone but they're giving something of a real place for people to come to form their political agendas and then to confront the people in it gives those people self realization and i think people have forgotten the politics is a way of realizing yourself you know partly by building relationships with other people ryan and we look at formal politics that's gone i know what the term populist kind of attitude toward the society would build a society in the st place in a sense from disparate ability for people to do yeah and it's not very american is a very it's all american quality like that you know and we've also just one la like to touch on one minute or so this idea of the concentration of ownership thirty seven maybe forty percent of the assets own the idea quickly you give general credence to the degree can be worked out of kelso's idea of trying to build a ship you know difficult as it is within the land was the was the property in the case of our economy now it's stock and finance stock ownership and financial assets so he what he was devising is mechanisms by which workers communities  people in the society at large can share not by taking wealth away from somebody who has lots of it but share equitably in the distribution of the new wealth that is created by our kind have opening to credit to buy and the kelso who was giving people the answer and and they just didn't hear well one macro view of how it could be done lord knows we should be looking around for answers or something that can happen and in the meanwhile we should be getting ourselves together i may say so trying to get ourselves together in the face of the conditions that are really dismal and becoming more creasing numbers of people obviously so one thing we could do is read your book if i may say so those who will tell the people where you cried are going to i guess the subtitle betrayal of american democracy out simon and schuster now and of course he's the worker in the writer of the documentary recently played on public television happy to have been able to welcome him to the television studio here in bills by the way talking with you your pleasure we're running short of time so i'll just say we'll