this has been the greatest wealth transfer in the history at least of the american kind if not m you know a real life development dwarf in the most elaborate conspiracy fiction all of these consequences are the end result of a brilliantly executed every day human lives the common dreams of people everywhere were never see my grandmother was born into the world of boom and bust boom and bust as it had been from seven hundred ninety four until the great depression once upon a time we knew in this country we had a great depression and we had a stock market crash in thousand twenty nine followed by several years of twenty five percent unemployment of corporations declaring bankruptcy of people in the streets on bread line of the great depression president roosevelt's new deal put millions back to work provided unemployment insurance created social security and made it easier for workers to join unions and bargain collect what f d r in that government and the balls to do was enact legislation that really took command of the last three environment and said you know what you can't speculate with other people's money coming out of the great depression just three laws fundamentally altered the course of america's history the first one f d i c insurance make it safe to put money in banks the second one glass steagall try to separate the risk taking on wall street from your local community bank and the third one ses the regulations provide some cops to watch the robbers of that what we got was fifty years of economic peace no financial panics no meltdowns and during that fifty years we built a strong and prosperous middle class in america after world war two the new deal evolved into a great deal with the american people growing prosperity and social justice seemed to be everyone's destiny as the u s economy exploded when we had the homeownership rate in this country going from about forty four percent on the eve of world war to two sixty four percent and by the mid sixty's we had the blue collar middle class and entrepreneurs did beautifully corporate america did fine the new deal established that ordinary people have the right to protect themselves against corporate abuse the early seventy's expanded those safeguards the creation of agencies like the occupational safety and health administration was mission was to protect workers the environmental protection agency created tech human health and the environment regulation is nothing more than the imposition of a set of rules to prevent the free market from behaving in a way which is contrary to the common good a decision was reached by corporate america that working with unions working with government to improve the standard of living for all people was not the right thing to do in one nine hundred seventy one corporate leaders began to or lewis powell was a well respected citizen of richmond virginia he was a corporate lawyer a partner in a prestigious corporate law firm and friends with an executive at the chamber of commerce named eugene si sit in or asked his friend if he would draft a position statement that he could submit to the chamber of commerce that would then sort of form the framework for how to make the organization more able to confront what they thought was a growing threat to business interests polls memo laid out a strategy to radically alter public perceptions ensuring that big business interests would dominate public policy oh advocated bassed heard of liberal elements in society he saw how corporate money could own the media and talk louder than organized labor and consumer protection but for power a future supreme court justice the real endgame was business control of law you see this memorandum bouncing from desk to desk from boredom to boredom around corporate america inspiring and inciting business leaders to find a way to get involved and to join what they had already many of them had already perceived to be a battle for the soul of america and a battle to save free enterprise to make their point the chamber of commerce created very clever advertising to influence public opinion  restored it will freedom the u s chamber of commerce and the recently formed elite business roundtable an exclusive club of c e o s join forces to lobby congress and push their agenda with major campaign contributions their goal to buy congressional votes to implement a corporate make over of america you had massive lobbying beginning in seventy six seventy seven seventy eight for cutting taxes on rich people trickle down economics cut capital gains taxes cut dividend taxes cut income taxes and the economy will flourish some of the democrats start drinking the kool aid along with the republicans next big business set its sights on the biggest threat to their bottom line the wages and benefits of the american workforce especially union members who starting in the one nine hundred thirty s and one are getting power or wages working conditions and but instead of negotiation big business memo business men should use their financial muscle to shape the politics of the country nor should there be reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose it by hundred seventy eight business outspent organized labor three to one to defeat a bill that would have made it easier for workers to join unions this was a critical turning point setting in motion the decline of organized labor as a major political force douglas frazier president of the united auto workers said in a magazine interview at the time i believe leaders of the business community with few exceptions have chosen to wage a one sided class war today our country a war against working people be unemployed or the minorities the very young and the very old and even many in the middle class of our society one of the geniuses of the right united states because they funded these twelve big washington organizations heritage cato the competitive enterprise institute organizations that range from quite principled taito to complete shills the competitive enterprise institute for the causes of their numbers heirs to six of the largest family fortunes in the united states is their private foundations to fund organizations that would promote unregulated markets one notable one would be the role of just of corps at the heritage foundation who constantly cited the powell memo as one of the reasons that he was inspired to create a conservative pro business think tank  heritage well heritage is a conservative think tank and if you read the back of our business cards it says noting in america where freedom opportunity prosperity and civil society flourish and that's heritage is goals working in unison the six families used their private foundations as shaped business schools and manipulate the media most of all they wanted to restructure government to serve their own interests  they're not think tanks these are not academic research organizations these are ideological marketing organizations they're no different then the people who persuaded young men when i was a young man that we should put brylcreem in our hair you know grease to your hair it'll make you even in the great depression when twenty five percent of americans were out of work you have these apologists for free market fundamentalism argue against increased government spending increased regulation strengthening the hands of unions stronger net the same things happening today the motive was illogical putting millions and millions of dollars into funding right wing ideas factors but then those ideas needed to get pushed out into the media you know the kind of narrative that republicans have used and conservatives have used have come out of forty years and tens of billions of dollars worth of efforts by conservative think tanks to try to develop just the right kind of words to use together in the election in one thousand eight where the right had built up this powerful political financial and intellectual infrastructure and it all comes together i run ronald reagan do so by the time reagan takes office there is an of policy wonks who have a whole game plan that can be put into effect very very quickly to deregulate everything that hasn't been deregulated and require america  as the host of television's general electric theater his charm kept us from noticing that he was there to sell appliances as president reagan's policies followed the power memo script serving the big business interests that financed his campaign heritage produced something first for the reagan administration and what this was was a catalog of how heritage felt that government programs should be changed we formed eliminated started it's harder to best meet conservative call us the newly elected president and out the heritage foundation's mandate for leadership to every member of his cabinet for the next eight years this anti government policy guide drove the reagan administration's make over of federal government from protecting the public good into working for the rich and powerful ronald reagan is my hero  he gave us loyalty gave us patriotism he brought back our position in the world he brought us out of darkness and into like he cut taxes for those of the top instead of balancing the budget he ran the biggest deficits in history then he presided over the passage of a series of tax increases on ordinary people only he didn't call that the washington press corps went along with the white house calling these revenue to make it as a system that doesn't work and in reality rich folks don't need governments they live in their own gated communities they have their own security they swim in their own swimming pools they go to their own private schools rich people take care of themselves the ideology of the free market then said that if we allowed them to just use their own creativity to be able to do what they want the wealth of the created would trickle down to create jobs and create consumer goods and make america an even richer and more prosperous society than it was well all that was beautiful theory either believe it or you don't the whole idea of a free market is a mess to begin with markets are structured based on laws and the real issue is who the structure benefits there's just no question that when ronald reagan came in the target of reaganomics was the labor movement one of his first  chairman and will be terminated they understand that it's not just about labor supporting the interests of members of labor unions but it has been the labor movement that has supported the interests of all workers you wouldn't have social security you wouldn't have unemployment compensation you wouldn't have medicare you wouldn't have all of these things which are not just for labor union members as the bumper sticker says they are the people who he was able to pull off an ideological counter revolution and by the time he was over most of the new deal  while reagan was breaking unions and demolishing regulations he also convinced congress in one thousand nine hundred one to pass his economic recovery tax act cutting the top tax brackets by nearly a third but raising taxes on middle class by dramatically increasing the social security tax as recommended by alan greenspan to ronald reagan we shifted the burden of government so that today seventy some percent of americans pay a heavy your share of their income in social security and medicare taxes then they do in income taxes and we pushed the burden down at the same time at the very very top we radically cut taxes so that the one thousand richest men women and children in america total federal tax rate so security and income taxes but so seventeen cents on the dollar and their average income is two hundred sixty three million dollars after decades of lobbying driven by corporate money the tax code is now full of loopholes and special deals that help big business avoid pain its fair share to avoid paying taxes u s corporations have stashed more than one point five trillion dollars in offshore corporations only pay thirteen percent of the federal budgets revenues at a two and a half trillion dollars corporations only pay thirteen percent so i just want to list some ten the ten worst corporate tax  e exxon mobil largest oil company in the world made nineteen billion of profits in two thousand and nine exon not only paid no federal income taxes it actually received one hundred  fifty six million dollars rebate from the i r s over the past five years while general electric bay twenty six billion in profits in the united states it received a four point one billion dollar refund from the i the palmetto recommended constant surveillance of content in text books newspapers magazines radio and television insisting the big business use the media to convince americans that an end to business regulation would somehow benefit us all for thirty eight years the federal communications commission had enforced the fairness doctrine which mandated that all broadcasts of the public airwaves offer a balance of viewpoints in one nine hundred eighty seven ronald reagan stopped in force of the fairness doctrine opening the floodgates for corporate money to talk directly to america through the media a few years ago studies were showing that three hundred fifty top markets in the country you had something like ninety percent of right wing talk and less than ten percent press of talk media and the regulation isn't being stoic i think it's fair to democracy most people don't have any idea what's going on after his one nine hundred ninety two election democratic president bill clinton continued to implement elements of both the power memo and the heritage foundation's prescriptions for government by and for big business in one thousand nine hundred six clinton signed the first major overhaul of telecommunications law in sixty two years people have to understand that now there are just a handful of corporations that own the me and every one of them has an agenda what rupert murdoch thinks is more likely to be what you think than anything else i think the media is awful awful they don't do  angeles times general you know that's not true i know that's not true today if you said something like that you'd be fired you would be fired we don't ask tough president that you don't get the information that you need and you pretty much on your own the same thing has happened in business has happened in broadcasting it's just completely pro of america as the most important and powerful industrial society on earth since one thousand nine hundred seventy three approximately forty million good pain american jobs with benefits have been shipped overseas or dismantled by corporations boosting their own profits at working americans expense there is this notion that this was only a republican villainy when in fact much of what happened happened during the eight years of bill clinton we seek a new and more open global trading system not for its own sake but for our own sake i supported nafta then i supported nafta now i still support nafta now for the same reason for the same reasons the main one is i like most economists generically favor trade liberalization because trade leaving ordinary people out what that really means in simple language is the corporations are able to move anywhere in the world they want to cheap labor and exploit people and use that as leverage against workers here and i think they're trying to get out three countries and wages of workers have been stagnant the productivity of workers has skyrocketed and workers in all three countries have gone into debt in order to maintain their living standards we also saw a mess of movement toward unfettered free trade and the theory of that was that if you create trade agreements with china where people are paid forty fifty cents an hour and you shut down plants of america you move to china or you move to mexico so in some way that we haven't quite figured out yet this is going to be good for the american worker for twenty years the american public believed we could  is offshoring of services the number and range and variety of jobs that could in principle be done abroad say over the internet it's enormous if you look at it patriotism they're not you will be paid for and for a number of reasons one of them that's going to be large maybe over the course of the next generation thirty forty million jobs it's important to note this is not either about only low skill jobs or only high skilled jobs they're all over if what you do is write computer code routine computer code you lose nothing in quality if you move the jobs from indiana to india reaganomics feels that big business has gone too far all these ladders are being dismantled where were the jobs for university graduates they are now beginning to face the same the luminous that blue collar workers face when they lost their twenty dollar home in fracturing jobs with their good benefits and so we have an economy that is starting to impoverish its workforce an infinite number of people coming in who are taking jobs that pay over one hundred thousand a year you know they're going to pay taxes we create lots of other jobs around those people in my that the country should welcome as many of those people as we can get and what the corporations are doing in the tell congress all there's a shortage of engineers is a shortage of scientists we can't find any this is all with the age are many corporations will go to any lengths including these legal but deceptive practices to hire cheaper foreign labor look at this video clip recorded at a seminar conducted by an american law firm for human resources professionals and our goal is clearly not to find a qualified teachers did us worker and you know that in a sense that sounds funny but it's what we're trying to do here i get fifty resumes my god this is the last thing i want to do is interview these fifty people does the law require that i actually interview each and every candidate you know everything if it gets to the point where the somebody is the mike to very likely asked them to have the manager of professors tend to be ivory tower type what they've done for the last twenty years is destroy the ability of people who work hard play by the rules to have decent retirements big business was not satisfied with just outsourcing jobs and getting huge tax breaks to increase their profit stock it's marketed like another consumer item at the same time pension funds are started changed why for example should a company have to put away that kind of money as a liability to pay off its retired workers when instead they could take some  kind of pay cut and their bad economics defined benefit pension plans were on top of your salary that made you work for a company for thirty years or so you were tired you knew exactly how much money was going to get paid out of the pension because the company kept this pension fund and kept enough money in it to pay you well under a four zero one k plan you have to save money out of your paycheck so you have less money company may give you a match but these plans typically save a company fifty then you assume all the risks of investing your money if the average person could manage investments then why in the world would be pay the gigantic salaries t the day state governments are beginning to shift public worker i'm here to support the social security benefits that my parents can't and i'm here to support the social security benefits that i hope to get and my children hope to get social security is not just our retirement benefit three tier benefit so it helps millions millions of seniors stay out of poverty and to live a decent life in their retirement but it also helps disabled people when disabled people need our support as a society and helps them function and just as importantly is the survivor benefits so that if working people are killed unfortunately in some circumstance their children will have a source of income the greatest pieces of ever suggested privatizing social security why do just with pensions if it works for pensions take the whole social security fund the one element of the new deal reform plans and still remains and put that in the stock market this had been a goal of the anti franklin roosevelt anti new deal conservatives from the one thousand thirties already it actually came as pros like close to happening as it ever could have under the presidency of george the check you will receive from social security under reagan the mandate agenda included not only the regulation of main street industry but the financial industry as well this set the scene for a future disaster on a scale previously unimaginable starting with the hundreds of savings and loan bankruptcies of the late one nine hundred eighty s the financial razzle dazzle that thirty years later takes down the economy really starts when wall street starts inventing all kinds of new gimmicks the regulators give all this stuff a free pass everything has rules you know baseball has rules right down to how many stitches are on the baseball and when you remove the once wall street was deregulated their profits mushroomed large commercial banks like city corp watch with envy and in the mid one nine hundred ninety they too began fierce lobby to get their slice of the pie  forty three congress passed a law called the glass ceiling and that was said well you know it doesn't take a genius to figure out you allow a value so that's a speculative security brings down the banking system when the market fails then maybe we shouldn't it was very simple and maintained the commercial banks that were responsible for individuals deposits and savings and lives were kept separate and were backed by the government from the more speculative risky trading activities of the investment banking community it works so well the people forget and in one thousand nine hundred nine a genius by the name of photographs aided by a brilliant president named bill clinton who signed the bill and pushed by a free market ideology that had been peddled to the united states people since the day ronald reagan was elected said we don't need glass steagall anymore we haven't had bank panics glass steagall was the longest lived and modernization act deregulating shadowy financial products known as derivatives one of those instruments known as the credit default swap became the prime culprit in the two thousand and eight worldwide financial crisis the head of the when greenspan was widely praised as unions and he got out just in time he got how much just before the crash and his policy of deregulating everything and financing all of this speculation with  money that's going to look a lot worse in light of history that it did at the time he wanted to give wall street really a gift at the time which was cheaper money which is why he cut rates and all the speculators take advantage of the very cheap money and they invent a whole bunch of new toxic stuff like sub prime in the last ten years something crazy happened the mall took all of the value of housing to people's incomes went through the roof and that was a classic case of a speculative b and this was engineered on wall street because there was so much trading there appeared to be a demand for mortgages which meant it appear there was a demand for home being sold which inflated the actual cost of homes there was some sounds that well maybe even if it goes down we won't be the last company holding the bomb wall street pay their chief executives hundreds of millions of dollars for you made a mistake that i made a mistake in presuming that the self interest of organizations specifically banks and others were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own s the equity in the firms the consequences of this mistake are huge again it wasn't accidental this wasn't just random delusion it was prevalent because so many people were making so much money as soon as the casino cause biased they want government to bail them out now that's not a free market that saw socialism money downside and capitalism on the upside if greenspan and ruben had really believed the ideology that they preached they would not have bailed out the s n l's the way the greenspan did they would not have ruben would not have bailed out the the wall street holders of mexican bonds in  greenspan would not have bailed out the stock market in two thousand and two thousand and one the only explanation i can have for this is that it's a class question these people were protecting their class wall street and the wealthiest one percent would now tell us that government is running out of money and they want us to believe that social security and medicare cuts are needed that the eligibility age for social security should be cause of the deficit which are the reagan in the bush tax cuts they then say we have to take an axe to all of these middle class and time and programs peter g peterson a multi billionaire who was one of the i think we're in a situation now where i have where i have to modify my philosophy a little bit and maybe maybe a lot i'm just been totally i was the guy comes up and says i'm going to do away with medicare i will campaign against him like you have never say because i'm a beneficiary of medicare the guy who wants to get rid of social security i put a whole lot of money in those social security i want min these guys too hard they can say oh really you don't want us to get bonuses you want us to be accountable you want to know about our legal behavior well tell you what we're going to do we're going to freeze a credit completely your kind of news going to overturned a conviction won by the justice department against accounting firm arthur andersen implicated in the enron scandal now incredibly the government tells companies to police themselves the justice department's current position is that a company can escape criminal prosecution if they just promise to change their behavior you would think the congress it's like who caused that who we're going to hold accountable all people going to jail where's the prosecution you would think that would have happened right  of the democrats would not be able to simply say always those that george w bush it was him well you know what it was a lot of bush but i'm afraid the republicans will be able to say sorry not just last take a look at robert rubin secretary of treasury under bill clinton and all of the rubin guys they were working with alan greenspan they were working with phil gramm to deregulate all of the stuff so you got true bipartisanship everybody wants what bob is a you got and the memory of in this country is some kind of a great leader is a crime in memory of any of the republican leadership or the democratic leadership for that matter over the last twenty five years being as anything other than conspir theft of america is a crime we didn't actually clean up yesterday we actually didn't slay the beast but we actually put them on life support and they've been  it for thirty years and we've been turning up fifty on average americans slowly and it's been turned up at such a slow pace that if you say this is a crisis people look at you as if you're weird when the majority of the american public can no longer feed their families when you have a crisis and that's where we're headed we don't want to see our way of life we don't want to see our standard of living  seen over the last thirty years is a deliberate transfer of wealth from middle class on the board to the very wealthiest people in our country the game is fundamentally rigged and that ordinary people who do everything right system i don't think people are going to stand how low incomes are in america from work one third of jobs in america pay less than fifty thousand dollars a year now that includes part time workers and people to small jobs but half make less than twenty five thousand and three quarters make less than fifty four thousand ninety nine percent make less than two hundred fifty thousand dollars in reality working americans have been pushed to rely on credit to make up for the lack of growth in wages even as corporate profits skyrocketed wages have stagnated since one nine hundred seventy three despite increased worker productivity instead the benefits of americans hard work have gone to executives and shareholders what does the bible denounce the old testament the new and the qur'an all of them denounce again and again and again w really powerful word denounce as evil it is taking from those with last to give to the rich i don't want to create a country where there is a landed gentry where because you happen to make five billion dollars the next twenty generations of your children will get all the best spots and all the best colleges non sense that's not what america is out instead of a society which we're struggling together to deal with environmental crisis to deal with education to make sure that all of our people have health care we are a society now in which which the goal is to be one of those people on top and if someone does well and tremendous everybody was shocked by hurricane katrina and by the you know these images poor african americans and other people abandoned you know stuck on rooftops waving american flags for two three four days holding babies without a drop of water without the u s government of the richest country in the world being able to get them a scrap of food after three four five days people were shocked and it was shocking what nobody wanted it to dress was it was a logical necessary and never bow out of thirty years of public policy that both parties a champion saying if you're poor you're on your own if you're poor sink or swim and it's better for you it's morally right that we won't help you if you're poor you should pull yourself up by your bootstraps and if you can't cut it you should be left to sink or swim your wife passes actually had a heart attack on the flu you call you call the local government and you expect the local government to do something dumb it's not evil government is sometimes incompetent thank god and his own responsive government isn't fence two point five kids and some big it's easy in the driveway you have to recast what that means now that much more inclusive dream and vision about what it is to to be in this country to making a life in this country there's an opportunity to reframe the american dream one of the things that faces americans is to build something beyond traditional capitalism beyond traditional socialism that is american in character the builds on the unbelievable