Excerpt: "The day after Senator Bernie Sanders spoke at the Democratic
National Convention and urged his supporters to work to ensure his former
rival wins the presidential race, we host a debate between Clinton supporter
Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary under President Clinton, and
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who backs Sanders."
Chris Hedges and Robert Reich. (photo: PBS)
Who Should Bernie Voters Support Now? A Debate Between Robert Reich and
Chris Hedges
By Democracy Now!
27 July 16
The day after Senator Bernie Sanders spoke at the Democratic National
Convention and urged his supporters to work to ensure his former rival wins
the presidential race, we host a debate between Clinton supporter Robert
Reich, who served as labor secretary under President Clinton, and Chris
Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who backs Sanders.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. Our special,
"Breaking with Convention: War, Peace and the Presidency." Im Amy Goodman,
with Juan González.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: As we continue to talk about the Democratic National
Convention, were joined now by two guests. Joining us from Berkeley,
California, is Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary under President
Clinton and is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. And
here in Philadelphia is Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His
most recent book is Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt.
And Id like to begin with Robert Reich. Youre ayou were a Bernie Sanders
supporter. Youre now backing Hillary Clinton. Youre not at the convention,
but your perspective on what you saw last night and the possibility of the
Democratic Party uniting behind Hillary Clinton, or a group of the Sanders
supporters going with Jill Stein?
ROBERT REICH: Well, its very hard to tell what the delegates are going to
do. And its very hard to telleven harder to tell what the electorate is
going to do. You know, this is a very agonizing time for many Bernie Sanders
supporters. I, with a great deal of reluctance initially, because Ive known
Hillary Clinton for 50 years50 yearsendorsed Bernie Sanders and worked my
heart out for him, as many, many people did. And so, at this particular
juncture, you know, theres a great deal of sadness and a great deal of
feeling of regret. But having worked so long and so many years for basically
the progressive ideals that Bernie Sanders stands for, I can tell you that
the movement is going to continue. In fact, its going to grow.
And right now, at this particular point in time, I just dont see any
alternative but to support Hillary. I know Hillary, I know her faults, I
know her strengths. I think she will make a great president. I supported
Bernie Sanders because I thought he would make a better president for the
system we need. But nonetheless, Hillary Clinton is going to be the nominee.
I support her. And I support her not only because she will be a good
president, if not a great president, but also, frankly, because I am
tremendously worried about the alternative. And the alternative, really, as
a practical matter, is somebody who is a megalomaniac and a bigot, somebody
who will set back the progressive movement decades, if not more.
AMY GOODMAN: Chris Hedges?
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, reducing the election to personalities is kind of
infantile at this point. The fact is, we live in a system that Sheldon Wolin
calls inverted totalitarianism. Its a system where corporate power has
seized all of the levers of control. There is no way to vote against the
interests of Goldman Sachs or ExxonMobil or Raytheon. Weve lost our
privacy. Weve seen, under Obama, an assault against civil liberties that
has outstripped what George W. Bush carried out. Weve seen the executive
branch misinterpret the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force Act as
giving itself the right to assassinate American citizens, including
children. I speak of Anwar al-Awlakis 16-year-old son. We have bailed out
the banks, pushed through programs of austerity. This has been a bipartisan
effort, because theyve both been captured by corporate power. We have
undergone what John Ralston Saul correctly calls a corporate coup détat in
slow motion, and its over.
I just came back from Poland, which is a kind of case study of how
neoliberal poison destroys a society and creates figures like Trump. Poland
has gone, I think we can argue, into a neofascism. First, it dislocated the
working class, deindustrialized the country. Then, in the name of austerity,
it destroyed public institutions, education, public broadcasting. And then
it poisoned the political system. And we are now watching, in Poland, them
create a 30,000 to 40,000 armed militia. You know, they have an army. The
Parliament, nothing works. And I think that this political system in the
United States has seized up in exactly the same form.
So, is Trump a repugnant personality? Yes. Although I would argue that in
terms of megalomania and narcissism, Hillary Clinton is not far behind. But
the point is, weve got to break away fromwhich is exactly the narrative
they want us to focus on. Weve got to break away from political
personalities and understand and examine and critique the structures of
power. And, in fact, the Democratic Party, especially beginning under Bill
Clinton, has carried water for corporate entities as assiduously as the
Republican Party. This is something that Ralph Nader understood long before
the rest of us, and stepped out very courageously in 2000. And I think we
will look back on that period and find Ralph to be an amazingly prophetic
figure. Nobody understands corporate power better than Ralph. And I think
now people have caught up with Ralph.
And this is, of course, why I support Dr. Stein and the Green Party. We have
to remember that 10 years ago, Syriza, which controls the Greek government,
was polling at exactly the same spot that the Green Party is polling
nowabout 4 percent. Weve got to break out of this idea that we can create
systematic change within a particular election cycle. Weve got to be
willing to step out into the political wilderness, perhaps, for a decade.
But on the issues of climate change, on the issue of the destruction of
civil liberties, including our right to privacyand I speak as a former
investigative journalist, which doesnt exist anymore because of wholesale
government surveillancewe have no ability, except for hackers.
I mean, this whole debate over the WikiLeaks is insane. Did Russia? Ive
printed classified material that was given to me by the Mossad. But I never
exposed that Mossad gave it to me. Is what was published true or untrue? And
the fact is, you know, in those long emailsyou should read them. Theyre
appalling, including calling Dr. Cornel West "trash." It isthe wholeit
exposes the way the system was rigged, withinIm talking about the
Democratic Partythe denial of independents, the superdelegates, the
stealing of the caucus in Nevada, the huge amounts of corporate money and
super PACs that flowed into the Clinton campaign.
The fact is, Clinton has a track record, and its one that has abandoned
children. I mean, she and her husband destroyed welfare as we know it, and
70 percent of the original recipients were children. This debate overI
dont like Trump, but Trump is not the phenomenon. Trump is responding to a
phenomenon created by neoliberalism. And we may get rid of Trump, but we
will get something even more vile, maybe Ted Cruz.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Reich, I remember you, on Democracy Now!, talking about
your time as labor secretary when President Clinton signed off on welfare
reform, and you described walking the streets of Washington, D.C., wondering
where the protests were, that you had vigorously objected. And it was also
an issue, a bill that Hillary Clinton had supported. So, can you respond to
Chris Hedges on these three points, including, so, you take a walk in the
political wilderness for a little while?
ROBERT REICH: Well, Amy, its not just taking a walk in the political
wilderness. If Donald Trump becomes president, if thats what youre
referring to, I think it isthere are irrevocable negative changes that will
happen in the United States, including appointments to the Supreme Court,
that will not be just political wilderness, that will actually change and
worsen the structure of this country. I couldnt agree with Chris Hedges
more about his critique, overall, of neoliberalism and a lot of the
structural problems that we face in our political economy today. Ive
written about them. But Ive done more than write about them. Ive actually
been in the center of power, and I have been doing everything I possibly
can, as an individual and also as a mobilizer and organizer of others, to
try to change what we now have.
I think that voting for Donald Trump or equating Hillary Clinton with Donald
Trump is insane. Donald Trump is certainly a product of a kind of system and
a systematic undermining that has occurred in the United States for years
with regard to inequality of income and wealth and political power. But we
dont fight that by simply saying, "All right, lets just have Donald Trump
and hope that the system improves itself and hope that things are so bad
that actually people rise up in armed resistance." Thats insane. Thats
crazy.
What we have to do is beweve got to be very, very strategic as
progressives. Weve got to look at the long term. Weve got to understand
that Bernie Sanders brought us much further along than we were before the
Sanders campaign. We owe a lot to Bernie Sanders, his courage, his
integrity, his power, the fact that most people under 30 voted for Bernie
Sanders. In fact, if you look at the people who voted for Bernie Sanders
under 30, that was more people than voted for Donald Trump and Hillary
Clinton together under the age of 30. We are building a progressive movement
in this country. But over the next four years, I dont want Donald Trump to
irretrievably make it difficult, if not impossible, for us to move forward
with that progressive movement.
Now, I understand Hillary Clinton is not perfect. Ive known her , as I said
before, for 50 years. I met her when she was 19 years old. I know her
strengths, and I know, pretty well, her weaknesses. She is not perfect. And
as Chris says, you know, she is also very much a product of many of the
problems structurally in this country right now. We fight those structural
problems, yes. Hand in hand, Chris, with you, shoulder to shoulderIm very
short, maybe its my shoulder, and its your rib cagebut it doesnt matter,
we continue to fight. I will continue to fight. Many people who are watching
and listening will continue to fight. We must continue to mobilize. I hope
Bernie Sanders does what he implied he would do last nightthat is, carry
the movement forward, lend his name, his energy, his email list. This is not
the end of anything. But we have got to be, at the same time, very practical
about what were doing and very strategic about what were doing. This is
not just a matter of making statements. Its a matter of actually working
with and through, and changing the structure of power in this country.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Chris, Id like to ask youyouve written that liberals are
tolerated by the capitalist elites because they do not question the virtues
of corporate capitalism, only its excesses, and call for tepid and
ineffectual reforms. Could that have also have been said of FDR in the
1930s? Because you were one of the folks who did not back Bernie Sanders
from the beginning.
CHRIS HEDGES: Thats right.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: So, youve
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, I didnt back Bernie Sanders becauseand Kshama Sawant
and I had had a discussion with him beforebecause he said that he would
work within the Democratic structures and support the nominee. And I think
we have now watched Bernie Sanders walk away from his political moment. You
know, heI think he will come to deeply regret what he has done. He has
betrayed these people who believed in this political revolution. We heard
this same kind of rhetoric, by the way, in 2008 around Obama.
A political campaign raises consciousness, but its not a movement. And what
we are seeing now is furious spinI listened to Ben Jealous just do itfrom
the self-identified liberal class. And they are tolerated within a
capitalist system, because, in a moment like this, they are used to speak to
people to get them to betray their own interests in the name of fear. And I
admire Robert and have read much of his stuff and like his stuff, but if you
listen to what hes been saying, the message is the same message of the
Trump campaign, and that his fear. And that is all the Democrats have to
offer now and all the Republicans have to offer now.
And the fact is, from climate change alone, we have no time left. I have
four children. The future of my children, by the day, is being destroyed
because of the fact that the fossil fuel industry, along with the animal
agriculture industry, which is also as important in terms of climate change,
are destroying the ecosystem on which we depend for life. And neither party
has any intention to do anything about it.
AMY GOODMAN: What should Bernie Sanders have done?
CHRIS HEDGES: Bernie Sanders should have walked out and run as an
independent.
AMY GOODMAN: Take
CHRIS HEDGES: And defied the Democratic Party.
AMY GOODMAN: Take up the invitation of Dr. Jill Stein
CHRIS HEDGES: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: and run on a ticket with
CHRIS HEDGES: She offered to let him run on the top of the ticket. Thats
what he should have done. And the fact is, you know, lets not forget that
Bernie has a very checkered past. He campaigned for Clinton in '92. He
campaigned for Clinton again in 96, after NAFTAthe greatest betrayal of
the working class in this country since the Taft-Hartley Act of 1948after
the destruction of welfare, after the omnibus crime bill that exploded the
prison population, and, you know, we now haveI mean, it's just a
monstrosity what weve done; 350,000 to 400,000 people locked in cages in
this country are severely mentally ill. Half of them never committed a
violent crime. Thats all Bill Clinton. And yet he went out and campaigned.
In 2004, he called on Nader not to run, to step down, so he could support a
war candidate like John Kerry. And Im listening to Jealous before talk
about the Iraq War. Sixty percent of the Democratic senators voted for the
war, including Hillary Clinton. The idea that somehow Democrats dont push
us into war defies American history.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Reich?
ROBERT REICH: Well, all I can say is that at this particular point in timeI
mean, again, many of the things that Chris Hedges is saying, I completely
agree with. The real question here is: What do we do right now? And what do
we do to mobilize and organize a lot of people out there who right now are
not mobilized and organized? And how do we keep the energy building? I
disagree with Chris with regard to Bernie Sanders. I think Bernie Sanders
has been a great and is a great leader right now of the progressive cause.
What I think we ought to do is develop a third party outside the Democratic
and Republican parties, maybe the Green Party, so that in the year 2020,
four years from now, we have another candidateit may be Bernie Sanders, I
think hes probably going to be too old by thenbut we have a candidate that
holds the Democrats accountable, that provides a vehicle for a lot of the
energy of the Bernie Sanders movement to continue to develop, that fields
new candidates at the Senate, in Congress, at the state level, that actually
holds Democrats feet to the fire and Republicans feet to the fire, that
develops an agenda of getting big money out of politics and severing the
link between extraordinarily concentrated wealth and political power in this
country. Thats what we ought to be doing.
Now, we canbut in order to do that, we cannot haveand, you know, I think
that Hillary will be a good president, if not a great president. This is not
just trucking in fear, Chris. But I do fear Donald Trump. I fear the polls
that I saw yesterday. Now, polls, again, this early in a campaign
stillwere still months away from the election, but they are indicative.
They show Donald Trump doing exceedingly well, beating Hillary Clinton. And
right now, given our two-party system, given our winner-take-all system with
regard to the Electoral College, its just too much of a risk to go and to
say, "Well, Im going to voteIm not going to vote for the lesser of two
evils, Im going to vote exactly what I want to do." Well, anybody can do
that, obviously. This is a free country. You vote what youyou vote your
conscience. You have to do that. Im just saying that your conscience needs
to be aware that if you do not support Hillary Clinton, you are increasing
the odds of a true, clear and present danger to the United States, a menace
to the United States. And youre increasing the possibility that there will
not be a progressive movement, there will not be anything we believe in in
the future, because the United States will really be changed for the worse.
Thats not athats not a risk Im prepared to take at this point in time.
Im going to moveIm going to do exactly what Ive been doing for the last
40 years: Im going to continue to beat my head against the wall, to build
and contribute to building a progressive movement. The day after Election
Day, I am going to try to work with Bernie Sanders and anybody else who
wants to work in strengthening a third partyand again, maybe its the Green
Partyfor the year 2020, and do everything else I was just talking about.
But right now, as we lead up to Election Day 2016, I must urge everyone who
is listening or who is watching to do whatever they can to make sure that
Hillary Clinton is the next president, and not Donald Trump.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, were going to break and then come back to this debate on
both sides of the United States, as well as of this issue. Chris Hedges is
with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, award-winning author and
activist. Latest book, Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt.
And who you were just listening to is Robert Reich, who is the former labor
secretary under President Clinton and professor at University of California,
Berkeley, his latest book called Saving Capitalism. He was a Bernie Sanders
supporter and now says he will vote for Hillary Clinton. When we come back,
well hear some of the words of Donald Trump and get response. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: "Opening Ceremony" by Laura Ortman. This is Democracy Now!,
democracynow.org. Our special for this two weeks, "Breaking with Convention:
War, Peace and the Presidency." Im Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, in a moment, well return to our debate between Robert
Reich and Chris Hedges, but first lets turn to Donald Trumps nomination
speech at the RNC in Cleveland last Thursday. Trump said Sanders supporters
would vote for him in the fall.
DONALD TRUMP: I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our
citizens, just like it was rigged against Bernie Sanders. He never had a
chance, never had a chance. But his supporters will join our movement,
because we will fix his biggest single issuetrade deals that strip our
country of its jobs and strip us of our wealth as a country. Millions of
Democrats will join our movement, because we are going to fix the system so
it works fairly and justly for each and every American.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Donald Trump talking at the convention in Cleveland.
Robert Reich, interestingly, Donald Trump and Chris Hedges agree on one
thing, that free trade deals that thethat both the Republicans and
Democrats have negotiated over the past few years, especially NAFTA, have
been disastrous for the American people. You were part of the Clinton
administration when NAFTA was passed. Talk about this, the impact that Trump
is utilizing among white workers in America over the issue of free trade.
ROBERT REICH: Well, Donald Trump is clearly using trade and also immigration
as vehicles for making the people who have really been hurt by trade, by
globalization, feel that he is going to somehow be on their side. Hes not
going to be on their side.
Trump is right in a very, very narrow respect, that trade has hurt very
vulnerable people, working-class people. The burdens of trade have been
disproportionately fallen on those people who used to have good unionized
jobs in America. And the failure of NAFTA and also the WTO, the World Trade
Organization, Chinese ascension into the WTO, all of those Clinton-era
programsthe failure was, number one, not to have nearly strong enough and
enforceable enough labor and environmental side agreements; number two, not
to have adjustment mechanisms here in the United States for people who lost
their jobs to help them get good jobs, that were new jobs, for the jobs they
lost. The winners in trade could have compensated the losers and still come
out ahead, but they did not. And that is a structural, political problem in
this country that we have to address.
It is also a problem with regard to technological displacement. Its not
just trade. Technology is displacing and will continue to displace and will
displace even more good jobs in the future, but we have absolutely no
strategy for dealing with that. And right now, the burdens of technological
displacement are falling, once again, on the working middle class,
lower-income people, who have very, very few alternatives, driving a greater
and greater wedge between those who are lucky enough to beto have rich
parents or be well educated or be well connected, and everybody else.
We cannot go on like this. This is unsustainable. And Donald Trump and
Bernie Sanders are symptomatic, their rise, are both symptomatic of this
great wave of antiestablishment anger that is flooding American politics,
although on the one side you have authoritarian populism, and on the Bernie
Sanders side you have a political revolution. I prefer the political
revolution myself. Im going to continue to work for that political
revolution.
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, I think we have to acknowledge two facts. We do not live
in a functioning democracy, and we have to stop pretending that we do. You
cant talk aboutwhen you eviscerate privacy, you cant use the word
"liberty." That is the relationship between a master and a slave. The fact
is, this is capitalism run amok. This whole discussion should be about
capitalism. Capitalism does what its designed to do, when its unfettered
or unregulatedas it isand that is to increase profit and reduce the cost
of labor. And it has done that by deindustrializing the country, and the
Clinton administration, you know, massively enabled this.
And, you know, were sitting here in Philadelphia. The last convention was
in Cleveland. These are Potemkin villages, where the downtowns are
Disneyfied, and three and four blocks away people are living in appalling
poverty. We have responded to surplus labor, as Karl Marx says, in our
deindustrialized internal colonies, to quote Malcolm X, by putting poor
people of color in cages all across the country. Why? Its because surplus
laborcorporate entities cannot make money off of surplus or redundant
labor. But when you lock them in a cage, they make $40,000 or $50,000 a
year. This is the system we live in.
We live in a system where, under Section 1021 of the National Defense
Authorization Act, the executive branch can put the soldiers in the streets,
in clear violation of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, to seecarry out
extraordinary rendition of American citizens who are deemed to be,
quote-unquote, "terrorists," strip them of due process and hold them
indefinitely in military facilities, including in our black sites. We are a
country that engages in torture.
We talkRobert talks about, you know, building movements. You cant build
movements in a political system where money has replaced the vote. Its
impossible. And the Democrats, you know, their bedside manner is different
from the Republicans. You know, Trump is this kind of grotesque figure. Hes
like the used car salesman who rolls back the speedometer. But Hillary
Clinton is like, you know, the managers of Goldman Sachs. They both engage
in criminal activities that haveand Clintons record, like Trump, exposes
thisthat have preyed upon the most vulnerable within this country and are
now destroying the middle class. And to somehow speak as if we are in a
functioning democracy, or speak as if there are any restraints on
capitalism, or speak as if the Democratic Party has not pushed forward this
agendaI mean, Obama has done this. You know, he has been as obsequious to
Wall Street as the Bush administration. Theres no difference.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Reich?
ROBERT REICH: Chris, you know, Iagain, I find this a frustrating
conversation, because I agree with so much of what you have said, but the
question is: What do we do about it? I mean, we are in a better position
today, in the sense that Bernie Sanders has helped mobilize, organize and
energize a lot of Americans, and educated a lot of Americans about the very
issues that you have talked and written about and I have talked and written
about. But it isthe question is: What is the action? What is the actual
political strategy right now?
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, let melet me answer that.
ROBERT REICH: And I think the political
CHRIS HEDGES: Let me answer that.
ROBERT REICH: Well, let me justlet me just put in my two cents. I think
political strategy is not to elect Donald Trump, to elect Hillary Clinton,
and, for four years, to develop an alternative, another Bernie Sanders-type
candidate with an independent party, outside the Democratic Party, that will
take on Hillary Clinton, assuming that she is elected and that she runs for
re-election, and that also develops the infrastructure of a third party that
is a true, new progressive party.
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, thats precisely what were trying to do. There is a
point where you have todo I want to keep quoting Ralph?but where you have
to draw a line in the sand. And thats part of the problem with the left, is
we havent.
I covered the war in Yugoslavia, and I find many parallels between whats
happening in the United States and what happened with the breakdown of
Yugoslavia. What is it that caused this country to disintegrate? It wasnt
ancient ethnic hatreds. It was the economic meltdown of Yugoslavia and a
bankrupt liberal establishment that, after the death of Tito, until 1989 or
1990, spoke in the language of democracy, but proved ineffectual in terms of
dealing with the plight of working men and women who were cast out of state
factories, huge unemployment and, finally, hyperinflation.
And the fact is that these neoliberal policies, which the Democratic Party
is one of the engines for, have created this right-wing fascialism. You can
go backthis proto-fascism. You can go back and look at the Weimar, and
itRepublicwas very much the same. So its completely counterintuitive. Of
course I find Trump a vile and disturbing and disgusting figure, but I dont
believe that voting for the Democratic establishmentand remember that
thisthe two insurgencies, both within the Republican Party and thewere
against figures like Hillary Clinton, who spoke in that traditional
feel-your-pain language of liberalism, while assiduously serving corporate
power and selling out working men and women. And they see through the con,
they see through the game.
I dont actually think Bernie Sanders educated the public. In fact, Bernie
Sanders spoke for the first time as a political candidate about the reality
the public was experiencing, because even Barack Obama, in his State of the
Union address, was talking about economic recovery, and everything was
wonderful, and people know that its not. And when you dispossess
ROBERT REICH: Well, let melet me
CHRIS HEDGES: Let me just finish. Let me finish. When you dispossess that
segment, as large as we havehalf the country now lives in virtual
povertyand you continue to essentially run a government thats been seized
by a cabal, in this case, corporate, which uses all of the machinery of
government for their own enrichment and their own further empowerment at the
expense of the rest of the citizenry, people finally react. And that is how
you get fascism. That is what history has told us. And to sit byevery time,
Robert, you speak, you do exactly what Trump does, which is fear, fear,
fear, fear, fear. And the fact that we are going to build some kind of
ROBERT REICH: Well, let melet me try to
CHRIS HEDGES: amorphous movement after Hillary Clintonits just not they
way it works.
ROBERT REICH: Let me try to injectlet melet me try to inject
AMY GOODMAN: Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich?
ROBERT REICH: Let me try to inject some hope in here, in this discussion,
rather than fear. Ive been traveling around the country for the last two
years, trying to talk to tea partiers and conservatives and many people who
are probably going to vote for Donald Trump, to try to understand what it is
that they are doing and how they view America and why theyre acting in ways
that are so obviously against their self-interest, both economic
self-interest and other self-interest. And heres the interesting thing I
found.
This great antiestablishment wave that is occurring both on the left and the
right has a great overlap, if you will, and that overlap is a deep contempt
for what many people on the right are calling crony capitalismin fact, many
people on the left have called crony capitalism. And those people on the
right, many, many working people, theyre not all white. Many of them are.
Many of them are working-class. Many of them have suffered from trade and
technological displacement and a government that is really turning its back
on them, they feeland to some extent, theyre right. Many of them feel as
angry about the current system and about corporate welfare and about big
money in politics as many of us on the progressive side do.
Now, if it is possible to have a multiracial, multiethnic coalition of the
bottom 90 percent that is ready to fight to get big money out of politics,
for more equality, for a system that is not rigged against average working
people, where there are not going to be all of these redistributions upward
from those of us who have paychecksand we dont even realize that larger
and larger portions of those paychecks are going to big industries,
conglomerates, concentrated industries that have great market power, because
its all hidden from viewwell, the more coalition building we can do, from
right to left, multiethnic, multiracial, left and right, to build a movement
to take back our economy and to take back our democracy, that is
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Robert ReichRobert Reich, Id just like to interrupt you for
a second, because we only have a minute left, and I just wanted to ask Chris
one last question. In less than a minute, if you can, regardless ofyoure
voting for Jill Stein, other folks are going to vote for Clinton and Trump.
Where do you feel this massive movement that has developed over the last few
years, this people movement, would have a better opportunity to grow, under
a Trump presidency or under a Clinton presidency, assuming that one of those
two will eventually be elected?
CHRIS HEDGES: I dont think it makes any difference. The TPP is going to go
through, whether its Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Endless war is going
to be continued, whether its Trump or Clinton. Were not going to get our
privacy back, whether its under Clinton or Trump. The idea that, at this
point, the figure in the executive branch exercises that much power, given
the power of the war industry and Wall Street, is a myth. The fact is
ROBERT REICH: EquatingIm sorry. Im sorry.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Even on immigration?
CHRIS HEDGES: What? On?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Even on immigration?
CHRIS HEDGES: What? On immigration? I mean, lets look at Obamas record on
immigration. Whos worse?
AMY GOODMAN: Weve got 10 seconds.
CHRIS HEDGES: I mean, you know, you cant get worse than Obama.
ROBERT REICH: And can I just say something?
CHRIS HEDGES: I mean, the idea is, the Democrats speak, and the
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Reich, 10 seconds.
CHRIS HEDGES: Yeah.
ROBERT REICH: I just want to say, equating Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton
is absolute nonsense. I justanybody who equates the two of them is not
paying attention. And its dangerous kind of talk.
CHRIS HEDGES: Thats not what Ithats not what I did.
AMY GOODMAN: Were going to have to leave it there, but this is a discussion
that will continue. Chris Hedges, I want to thank you for being with us,
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author of Wages of Rebellion: The Moral
Imperative of Revolt. And former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich,
professor now at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent
book, Saving Capitalism.
That does it for the broadcast. Ill be in Provincetown, Massachusetts and
Marthas Vineyard this weekend, doing a talk back from the conventions.
Special thanks to Laura Deutch, Gretjen Clausing, Ryan Saunders and the
whole team here at PhillyCAM.
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Chris Hedges and Robert Reich. (photo: PBS)
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/7/26/who_should_bernie_voters_support_nowht
tp://www.democracynow.org/2016/7/26/who_should_bernie_voters_support_now
Who Should Bernie Voters Support Now? A Debate Between Robert Reich and
Chris Hedges
By Democracy Now!
27 July 16
he day after Senator Bernie Sanders spoke at the Democratic National
Convention and urged his supporters to work to ensure his former rival wins
the presidential race, we host a debate between Clinton supporter Robert
Reich, who served as labor secretary under President Clinton, and Chris
Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who backs Sanders.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. Our special,
"Breaking with Convention: War, Peace and the Presidency." Im Amy Goodman,
with Juan González.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: As we continue to talk about the Democratic National
Convention, were joined now by two guests. Joining us from Berkeley,
California, is Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary under President
Clinton and is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. And
here in Philadelphia is Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His
most recent book is Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt.
And Id like to begin with Robert Reich. Youre ayou were a Bernie Sanders
supporter. Youre now backing Hillary Clinton. Youre not at the convention,
but your perspective on what you saw last night and the possibility of the
Democratic Party uniting behind Hillary Clinton, or a group of the Sanders
supporters going with Jill Stein?
ROBERT REICH: Well, its very hard to tell what the delegates are going to
do. And its very hard to telleven harder to tell what the electorate is
going to do. You know, this is a very agonizing time for many Bernie Sanders
supporters. I, with a great deal of reluctance initially, because Ive known
Hillary Clinton for 50 years50 yearsendorsed Bernie Sanders and worked my
heart out for him, as many, many people did. And so, at this particular
juncture, you know, theres a great deal of sadness and a great deal of
feeling of regret. But having worked so long and so many years for basically
the progressive ideals that Bernie Sanders stands for, I can tell you that
the movement is going to continue. In fact, its going to grow.
And right now, at this particular point in time, I just dont see any
alternative but to support Hillary. I know Hillary, I know her faults, I
know her strengths. I think she will make a great president. I supported
Bernie Sanders because I thought he would make a better president for the
system we need. But nonetheless, Hillary Clinton is going to be the nominee.
I support her. And I support her not only because she will be a good
president, if not a great president, but also, frankly, because I am
tremendously worried about the alternative. And the alternative, really, as
a practical matter, is somebody who is a megalomaniac and a bigot, somebody
who will set back the progressive movement decades, if not more.
AMY GOODMAN: Chris Hedges?
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, reducing the election to personalities is kind of
infantile at this point. The fact is, we live in a system that Sheldon Wolin
calls inverted totalitarianism. Its a system where corporate power has
seized all of the levers of control. There is no way to vote against the
interests of Goldman Sachs or ExxonMobil or Raytheon. Weve lost our
privacy. Weve seen, under Obama, an assault against civil liberties that
has outstripped what George W. Bush carried out. Weve seen the executive
branch misinterpret the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force Act as
giving itself the right to assassinate American citizens, including
children. I speak of Anwar al-Awlakis 16-year-old son. We have bailed out
the banks, pushed through programs of austerity. This has been a bipartisan
effort, because theyve both been captured by corporate power. We have
undergone what John Ralston Saul correctly calls a corporate coup détat in
slow motion, and its over.
I just came back from Poland, which is a kind of case study of how
neoliberal poison destroys a society and creates figures like Trump. Poland
has gone, I think we can argue, into a neofascism. First, it dislocated the
working class, deindustrialized the country. Then, in the name of austerity,
it destroyed public institutions, education, public broadcasting. And then
it poisoned the political system. And we are now watching, in Poland, them
create a 30,000 to 40,000 armed militia. You know, they have an army. The
Parliament, nothing works. And I think that this political system in the
United States has seized up in exactly the same form.
So, is Trump a repugnant personality? Yes. Although I would argue that in
terms of megalomania and narcissism, Hillary Clinton is not far behind. But
the point is, weve got to break away fromwhich is exactly the narrative
they want us to focus on. Weve got to break away from political
personalities and understand and examine and critique the structures of
power. And, in fact, the Democratic Party, especially beginning under Bill
Clinton, has carried water for corporate entities as assiduously as the
Republican Party. This is something that Ralph Nader understood long before
the rest of us, and stepped out very courageously in 2000. And I think we
will look back on that period and find Ralph to be an amazingly prophetic
figure. Nobody understands corporate power better than Ralph. And I think
now people have caught up with Ralph.
And this is, of course, why I support Dr. Stein and the Green Party. We have
to remember that 10 years ago, Syriza, which controls the Greek government,
was polling at exactly the same spot that the Green Party is polling
nowabout 4 percent. Weve got to break out of this idea that we can create
systematic change within a particular election cycle. Weve got to be
willing to step out into the political wilderness, perhaps, for a decade.
But on the issues of climate change, on the issue of the destruction of
civil liberties, including our right to privacyand I speak as a former
investigative journalist, which doesnt exist anymore because of wholesale
government surveillancewe have no ability, except for hackers.
I mean, this whole debate over the WikiLeaks is insane. Did Russia? Ive
printed classified material that was given to me by the Mossad. But I never
exposed that Mossad gave it to me. Is what was published true or untrue? And
the fact is, you know, in those long emailsyou should read them. Theyre
appalling, including calling Dr. Cornel West "trash." It isthe wholeit
exposes the way the system was rigged, withinIm talking about the
Democratic Partythe denial of independents, the superdelegates, the
stealing of the caucus in Nevada, the huge amounts of corporate money and
super PACs that flowed into the Clinton campaign.
The fact is, Clinton has a track record, and its one that has abandoned
children. I mean, she and her husband destroyed welfare as we know it, and
70 percent of the original recipients were children. This debate overI
dont like Trump, but Trump is not the phenomenon. Trump is responding to a
phenomenon created by neoliberalism. And we may get rid of Trump, but we
will get something even more vile, maybe Ted Cruz.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Reich, I remember you, on Democracy Now!, talking about
your time as labor secretary when President Clinton signed off on welfare
reform, and you described walking the streets of Washington, D.C., wondering
where the protests were, that you had vigorously objected. And it was also
an issue, a bill that Hillary Clinton had supported. So, can you respond to
Chris Hedges on these three points, including, so, you take a walk in the
political wilderness for a little while?
ROBERT REICH: Well, Amy, its not just taking a walk in the political
wilderness. If Donald Trump becomes president, if thats what youre
referring to, I think it isthere are irrevocable negative changes that will
happen in the United States, including appointments to the Supreme Court,
that will not be just political wilderness, that will actually change and
worsen the structure of this country. I couldnt agree with Chris Hedges
more about his critique, overall, of neoliberalism and a lot of the
structural problems that we face in our political economy today. Ive
written about them. But Ive done more than write about them. Ive actually
been in the center of power, and I have been doing everything I possibly
can, as an individual and also as a mobilizer and organizer of others, to
try to change what we now have.
I think that voting for Donald Trump or equating Hillary Clinton with Donald
Trump is insane. Donald Trump is certainly a product of a kind of system and
a systematic undermining that has occurred in the United States for years
with regard to inequality of income and wealth and political power. But we
dont fight that by simply saying, "All right, lets just have Donald Trump
and hope that the system improves itself and hope that things are so bad
that actually people rise up in armed resistance." Thats insane. Thats
crazy.
What we have to do is beweve got to be very, very strategic as
progressives. Weve got to look at the long term. Weve got to understand
that Bernie Sanders brought us much further along than we were before the
Sanders campaign. We owe a lot to Bernie Sanders, his courage, his
integrity, his power, the fact that most people under 30 voted for Bernie
Sanders. In fact, if you look at the people who voted for Bernie Sanders
under 30, that was more people than voted for Donald Trump and Hillary
Clinton together under the age of 30. We are building a progressive movement
in this country. But over the next four years, I dont want Donald Trump to
irretrievably make it difficult, if not impossible, for us to move forward
with that progressive movement.
Now, I understand Hillary Clinton is not perfect. Ive known her , as I said
before, for 50 years. I met her when she was 19 years old. I know her
strengths, and I know, pretty well, her weaknesses. She is not perfect. And
as Chris says, you know, she is also very much a product of many of the
problems structurally in this country right now. We fight those structural
problems, yes. Hand in hand, Chris, with you, shoulder to shoulderIm very
short, maybe its my shoulder, and its your rib cagebut it doesnt matter,
we continue to fight. I will continue to fight. Many people who are watching
and listening will continue to fight. We must continue to mobilize. I hope
Bernie Sanders does what he implied he would do last nightthat is, carry
the movement forward, lend his name, his energy, his email list. This is not
the end of anything. But we have got to be, at the same time, very practical
about what were doing and very strategic about what were doing. This is
not just a matter of making statements. Its a matter of actually working
with and through, and changing the structure of power in this country.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Chris, Id like to ask youyouve written that liberals are
tolerated by the capitalist elites because they do not question the virtues
of corporate capitalism, only its excesses, and call for tepid and
ineffectual reforms. Could that have also have been said of FDR in the
1930s? Because you were one of the folks who did not back Bernie Sanders
from the beginning.
CHRIS HEDGES: Thats right.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: So, youve
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, I didnt back Bernie Sanders becauseand Kshama Sawant
and I had had a discussion with him beforebecause he said that he would
work within the Democratic structures and support the nominee. And I think
we have now watched Bernie Sanders walk away from his political moment. You
know, heI think he will come to deeply regret what he has done. He has
betrayed these people who believed in this political revolution. We heard
this same kind of rhetoric, by the way, in 2008 around Obama.
A political campaign raises consciousness, but its not a movement. And what
we are seeing now is furious spinI listened to Ben Jealous just do itfrom
the self-identified liberal class. And they are tolerated within a
capitalist system, because, in a moment like this, they are used to speak to
people to get them to betray their own interests in the name of fear. And I
admire Robert and have read much of his stuff and like his stuff, but if you
listen to what hes been saying, the message is the same message of the
Trump campaign, and that his fear. And that is all the Democrats have to
offer now and all the Republicans have to offer now.
And the fact is, from climate change alone, we have no time left. I have
four children. The future of my children, by the day, is being destroyed
because of the fact that the fossil fuel industry, along with the animal
agriculture industry, which is also as important in terms of climate change,
are destroying the ecosystem on which we depend for life. And neither party
has any intention to do anything about it.
AMY GOODMAN: What should Bernie Sanders have done?
CHRIS HEDGES: Bernie Sanders should have walked out and run as an
independent.
AMY GOODMAN: Take
CHRIS HEDGES: And defied the Democratic Party.
AMY GOODMAN: Take up the invitation of Dr. Jill Stein
CHRIS HEDGES: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: and run on a ticket with
CHRIS HEDGES: She offered to let him run on the top of the ticket. Thats
what he should have done. And the fact is, you know, lets not forget that
Bernie has a very checkered past. He campaigned for Clinton in '92. He
campaigned for Clinton again in 96, after NAFTAthe greatest betrayal of
the working class in this country since the Taft-Hartley Act of 1948after
the destruction of welfare, after the omnibus crime bill that exploded the
prison population, and, you know, we now haveI mean, it's just a
monstrosity what weve done; 350,000 to 400,000 people locked in cages in
this country are severely mentally ill. Half of them never committed a
violent crime. Thats all Bill Clinton. And yet he went out and campaigned.
In 2004, he called on Nader not to run, to step down, so he could support a
war candidate like John Kerry. And Im listening to Jealous before talk
about the Iraq War. Sixty percent of the Democratic senators voted for the
war, including Hillary Clinton. The idea that somehow Democrats dont push
us into war defies American history.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Reich?
ROBERT REICH: Well, all I can say is that at this particular point in timeI
mean, again, many of the things that Chris Hedges is saying, I completely
agree with. The real question here is: What do we do right now? And what do
we do to mobilize and organize a lot of people out there who right now are
not mobilized and organized? And how do we keep the energy building? I
disagree with Chris with regard to Bernie Sanders. I think Bernie Sanders
has been a great and is a great leader right now of the progressive cause.
What I think we ought to do is develop a third party outside the Democratic
and Republican parties, maybe the Green Party, so that in the year 2020,
four years from now, we have another candidateit may be Bernie Sanders, I
think hes probably going to be too old by thenbut we have a candidate that
holds the Democrats accountable, that provides a vehicle for a lot of the
energy of the Bernie Sanders movement to continue to develop, that fields
new candidates at the Senate, in Congress, at the state level, that actually
holds Democrats feet to the fire and Republicans feet to the fire, that
develops an agenda of getting big money out of politics and severing the
link between extraordinarily concentrated wealth and political power in this
country. Thats what we ought to be doing.
Now, we canbut in order to do that, we cannot haveand, you know, I think
that Hillary will be a good president, if not a great president. This is not
just trucking in fear, Chris. But I do fear Donald Trump. I fear the polls
that I saw yesterday. Now, polls, again, this early in a campaign
stillwere still months away from the election, but they are indicative.
They show Donald Trump doing exceedingly well, beating Hillary Clinton. And
right now, given our two-party system, given our winner-take-all system with
regard to the Electoral College, its just too much of a risk to go and to
say, "Well, Im going to voteIm not going to vote for the lesser of two
evils, Im going to vote exactly what I want to do." Well, anybody can do
that, obviously. This is a free country. You vote what youyou vote your
conscience. You have to do that. Im just saying that your conscience needs
to be aware that if you do not support Hillary Clinton, you are increasing
the odds of a true, clear and present danger to the United States, a menace
to the United States. And youre increasing the possibility that there will
not be a progressive movement, there will not be anything we believe in in
the future, because the United States will really be changed for the worse.
Thats not athats not a risk Im prepared to take at this point in time.
Im going to moveIm going to do exactly what Ive been doing for the last
40 years: Im going to continue to beat my head against the wall, to build
and contribute to building a progressive movement. The day after Election
Day, I am going to try to work with Bernie Sanders and anybody else who
wants to work in strengthening a third partyand again, maybe its the Green
Partyfor the year 2020, and do everything else I was just talking about.
But right now, as we lead up to Election Day 2016, I must urge everyone who
is listening or who is watching to do whatever they can to make sure that
Hillary Clinton is the next president, and not Donald Trump.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, were going to break and then come back to this debate on
both sides of the United States, as well as of this issue. Chris Hedges is
with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, award-winning author and
activist. Latest book, Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt.
And who you were just listening to is Robert Reich, who is the former labor
secretary under President Clinton and professor at University of California,
Berkeley, his latest book called Saving Capitalism. He was a Bernie Sanders
supporter and now says he will vote for Hillary Clinton. When we come back,
well hear some of the words of Donald Trump and get response. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: "Opening Ceremony" by Laura Ortman. This is Democracy Now!,
democracynow.org. Our special for this two weeks, "Breaking with Convention:
War, Peace and the Presidency." Im Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, in a moment, well return to our debate between Robert
Reich and Chris Hedges, but first lets turn to Donald Trumps nomination
speech at the RNC in Cleveland last Thursday. Trump said Sanders supporters
would vote for him in the fall.
DONALD TRUMP: I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our
citizens, just like it was rigged against Bernie Sanders. He never had a
chance, never had a chance. But his supporters will join our movement,
because we will fix his biggest single issuetrade deals that strip our
country of its jobs and strip us of our wealth as a country. Millions of
Democrats will join our movement, because we are going to fix the system so
it works fairly and justly for each and every American.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Donald Trump talking at the convention in Cleveland.
Robert Reich, interestingly, Donald Trump and Chris Hedges agree on one
thing, that free trade deals that thethat both the Republicans and
Democrats have negotiated over the past few years, especially NAFTA, have
been disastrous for the American people. You were part of the Clinton
administration when NAFTA was passed. Talk about this, the impact that Trump
is utilizing among white workers in America over the issue of free trade.
ROBERT REICH: Well, Donald Trump is clearly using trade and also immigration
as vehicles for making the people who have really been hurt by trade, by
globalization, feel that he is going to somehow be on their side. Hes not
going to be on their side.
Trump is right in a very, very narrow respect, that trade has hurt very
vulnerable people, working-class people. The burdens of trade have been
disproportionately fallen on those people who used to have good unionized
jobs in America. And the failure of NAFTA and also the WTO, the World Trade
Organization, Chinese ascension into the WTO, all of those Clinton-era
programsthe failure was, number one, not to have nearly strong enough and
enforceable enough labor and environmental side agreements; number two, not
to have adjustment mechanisms here in the United States for people who lost
their jobs to help them get good jobs, that were new jobs, for the jobs they
lost. The winners in trade could have compensated the losers and still come
out ahead, but they did not. And that is a structural, political problem in
this country that we have to address.
It is also a problem with regard to technological displacement. Its not
just trade. Technology is displacing and will continue to displace and will
displace even more good jobs in the future, but we have absolutely no
strategy for dealing with that. And right now, the burdens of technological
displacement are falling, once again, on the working middle class,
lower-income people, who have very, very few alternatives, driving a greater
and greater wedge between those who are lucky enough to beto have rich
parents or be well educated or be well connected, and everybody else.
We cannot go on like this. This is unsustainable. And Donald Trump and
Bernie Sanders are symptomatic, their rise, are both symptomatic of this
great wave of antiestablishment anger that is flooding American politics,
although on the one side you have authoritarian populism, and on the Bernie
Sanders side you have a political revolution. I prefer the political
revolution myself. Im going to continue to work for that political
revolution.
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, I think we have to acknowledge two facts. We do not live
in a functioning democracy, and we have to stop pretending that we do. You
cant talk aboutwhen you eviscerate privacy, you cant use the word
"liberty." That is the relationship between a master and a slave. The fact
is, this is capitalism run amok. This whole discussion should be about
capitalism. Capitalism does what its designed to do, when its unfettered
or unregulatedas it isand that is to increase profit and reduce the cost
of labor. And it has done that by deindustrializing the country, and the
Clinton administration, you know, massively enabled this.
And, you know, were sitting here in Philadelphia. The last convention was
in Cleveland. These are Potemkin villages, where the downtowns are
Disneyfied, and three and four blocks away people are living in appalling
poverty. We have responded to surplus labor, as Karl Marx says, in our
deindustrialized internal colonies, to quote Malcolm X, by putting poor
people of color in cages all across the country. Why? Its because surplus
laborcorporate entities cannot make money off of surplus or redundant
labor. But when you lock them in a cage, they make $40,000 or $50,000 a
year. This is the system we live in.
We live in a system where, under Section 1021 of the National Defense
Authorization Act, the executive branch can put the soldiers in the streets,
in clear violation of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, to seecarry out
extraordinary rendition of American citizens who are deemed to be,
quote-unquote, "terrorists," strip them of due process and hold them
indefinitely in military facilities, including in our black sites. We are a
country that engages in torture.
We talkRobert talks about, you know, building movements. You cant build
movements in a political system where money has replaced the vote. Its
impossible. And the Democrats, you know, their bedside manner is different
from the Republicans. You know, Trump is this kind of grotesque figure. Hes
like the used car salesman who rolls back the speedometer. But Hillary
Clinton is like, you know, the managers of Goldman Sachs. They both engage
in criminal activities that haveand Clintons record, like Trump, exposes
thisthat have preyed upon the most vulnerable within this country and are
now destroying the middle class. And to somehow speak as if we are in a
functioning democracy, or speak as if there are any restraints on
capitalism, or speak as if the Democratic Party has not pushed forward this
agendaI mean, Obama has done this. You know, he has been as obsequious to
Wall Street as the Bush administration. Theres no difference.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Reich?
ROBERT REICH: Chris, you know, Iagain, I find this a frustrating
conversation, because I agree with so much of what you have said, but the
question is: What do we do about it? I mean, we are in a better position
today, in the sense that Bernie Sanders has helped mobilize, organize and
energize a lot of Americans, and educated a lot of Americans about the very
issues that you have talked and written about and I have talked and written
about. But it isthe question is: What is the action? What is the actual
political strategy right now?
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, let melet me answer that.
ROBERT REICH: And I think the political
CHRIS HEDGES: Let me answer that.
ROBERT REICH: Well, let me justlet me just put in my two cents. I think
political strategy is not to elect Donald Trump, to elect Hillary Clinton,
and, for four years, to develop an alternative, another Bernie Sanders-type
candidate with an independent party, outside the Democratic Party, that will
take on Hillary Clinton, assuming that she is elected and that she runs for
re-election, and that also develops the infrastructure of a third party that
is a true, new progressive party.
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, thats precisely what were trying to do. There is a
point where you have todo I want to keep quoting Ralph?but where you have
to draw a line in the sand. And thats part of the problem with the left, is
we havent.
I covered the war in Yugoslavia, and I find many parallels between whats
happening in the United States and what happened with the breakdown of
Yugoslavia. What is it that caused this country to disintegrate? It wasnt
ancient ethnic hatreds. It was the economic meltdown of Yugoslavia and a
bankrupt liberal establishment that, after the death of Tito, until 1989 or
1990, spoke in the language of democracy, but proved ineffectual in terms of
dealing with the plight of working men and women who were cast out of state
factories, huge unemployment and, finally, hyperinflation.
And the fact is that these neoliberal policies, which the Democratic Party
is one of the engines for, have created this right-wing fascialism. You can
go backthis proto-fascism. You can go back and look at the Weimar, and
itRepublicwas very much the same. So its completely counterintuitive. Of
course I find Trump a vile and disturbing and disgusting figure, but I dont
believe that voting for the Democratic establishmentand remember that
thisthe two insurgencies, both within the Republican Party and thewere
against figures like Hillary Clinton, who spoke in that traditional
feel-your-pain language of liberalism, while assiduously serving corporate
power and selling out working men and women. And they see through the con,
they see through the game.
I dont actually think Bernie Sanders educated the public. In fact, Bernie
Sanders spoke for the first time as a political candidate about the reality
the public was experiencing, because even Barack Obama, in his State of the
Union address, was talking about economic recovery, and everything was
wonderful, and people know that its not. And when you dispossess
ROBERT REICH: Well, let melet me
CHRIS HEDGES: Let me just finish. Let me finish. When you dispossess that
segment, as large as we havehalf the country now lives in virtual
povertyand you continue to essentially run a government thats been seized
by a cabal, in this case, corporate, which uses all of the machinery of
government for their own enrichment and their own further empowerment at the
expense of the rest of the citizenry, people finally react. And that is how
you get fascism. That is what history has told us. And to sit byevery time,
Robert, you speak, you do exactly what Trump does, which is fear, fear,
fear, fear, fear. And the fact that we are going to build some kind of
ROBERT REICH: Well, let melet me try to
CHRIS HEDGES: amorphous movement after Hillary Clintonits just not they
way it works.
ROBERT REICH: Let me try to injectlet melet me try to inject
AMY GOODMAN: Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich?
ROBERT REICH: Let me try to inject some hope in here, in this discussion,
rather than fear. Ive been traveling around the country for the last two
years, trying to talk to tea partiers and conservatives and many people who
are probably going to vote for Donald Trump, to try to understand what it is
that they are doing and how they view America and why theyre acting in ways
that are so obviously against their self-interest, both economic
self-interest and other self-interest. And heres the interesting thing I
found.
This great antiestablishment wave that is occurring both on the left and the
right has a great overlap, if you will, and that overlap is a deep contempt
for what many people on the right are calling crony capitalismin fact, many
people on the left have called crony capitalism. And those people on the
right, many, many working people, theyre not all white. Many of them are.
Many of them are working-class. Many of them have suffered from trade and
technological displacement and a government that is really turning its back
on them, they feeland to some extent, theyre right. Many of them feel as
angry about the current system and about corporate welfare and about big
money in politics as many of us on the progressive side do.
Now, if it is possible to have a multiracial, multiethnic coalition of the
bottom 90 percent that is ready to fight to get big money out of politics,
for more equality, for a system that is not rigged against average working
people, where there are not going to be all of these redistributions upward
from those of us who have paychecksand we dont even realize that larger
and larger portions of those paychecks are going to big industries,
conglomerates, concentrated industries that have great market power, because
its all hidden from viewwell, the more coalition building we can do, from
right to left, multiethnic, multiracial, left and right, to build a movement
to take back our economy and to take back our democracy, that is
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Robert ReichRobert Reich, Id just like to interrupt you for
a second, because we only have a minute left, and I just wanted to ask Chris
one last question. In less than a minute, if you can, regardless ofyoure
voting for Jill Stein, other folks are going to vote for Clinton and Trump.
Where do you feel this massive movement that has developed over the last few
years, this people movement, would have a better opportunity to grow, under
a Trump presidency or under a Clinton presidency, assuming that one of those
two will eventually be elected?
CHRIS HEDGES: I dont think it makes any difference. The TPP is going to go
through, whether its Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Endless war is going
to be continued, whether its Trump or Clinton. Were not going to get our
privacy back, whether its under Clinton or Trump. The idea that, at this
point, the figure in the executive branch exercises that much power, given
the power of the war industry and Wall Street, is a myth. The fact is
ROBERT REICH: EquatingIm sorry. Im sorry.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Even on immigration?
CHRIS HEDGES: What? On?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Even on immigration?
CHRIS HEDGES: What? On immigration? I mean, lets look at Obamas record on
immigration. Whos worse?
AMY GOODMAN: Weve got 10 seconds.
CHRIS HEDGES: I mean, you know, you cant get worse than Obama.
ROBERT REICH: And can I just say something?
CHRIS HEDGES: I mean, the idea is, the Democrats speak, and the
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Reich, 10 seconds.
CHRIS HEDGES: Yeah.
ROBERT REICH: I just want to say, equating Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton
is absolute nonsense. I justanybody who equates the two of them is not
paying attention. And its dangerous kind of talk.
CHRIS HEDGES: Thats not what Ithats not what I did.
AMY GOODMAN: Were going to have to leave it there, but this is a discussion
that will continue. Chris Hedges, I want to thank you for being with us,
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author of Wages of Rebellion: The Moral
Imperative of Revolt. And former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich,
professor now at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent
book, Saving Capitalism.
That does it for the broadcast. Ill be in Provincetown, Massachusetts and
Marthas Vineyard this weekend, doing a talk back from the conventions.
Special thanks to Laura Deutch, Gretjen Clausing, Ryan Saunders and the
whole team here at PhillyCAM.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
Excerpt: "The day after Senator Bernie Sanders spoke at the Democratic
National Convention and urged his supporters to work to ensure his former
rival wins the presidential race, we host a debate between Clinton supporter
Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary under President Clinton, and
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who backs Sanders."
Chris Hedges and Robert Reich. (photo: PBS)
Who Should Bernie Voters Support Now? A Debate Between Robert Reich and
Chris Hedges
By Democracy Now!
27 July 16
he day after Senator Bernie Sanders spoke at the Democratic National
Convention and urged his supporters to work to ensure his former rival wins
the presidential race, we host a debate between Clinton supporter Robert
Reich, who served as labor secretary under President Clinton, and Chris
Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who backs Sanders.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. Our special,
"Breaking with Convention: War, Peace and the Presidency." Im Amy Goodman,
with Juan González.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: As we continue to talk about the Democratic National
Convention, were joined now by two guests. Joining us from Berkeley,
California, is Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary under President
Clinton and is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. And
here in Philadelphia is Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His
most recent book is Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt.
And Id like to begin with Robert Reich. Youre ayou were a Bernie Sanders
supporter. Youre now backing Hillary Clinton. Youre not at the convention,
but your perspective on what you saw last night and the possibility of the
Democratic Party uniting behind Hillary Clinton, or a group of the Sanders
supporters going with Jill Stein?
ROBERT REICH: Well, its very hard to tell what the delegates are going to
do. And its very hard to telleven harder to tell what the electorate is
going to do. You know, this is a very agonizing time for many Bernie Sanders
supporters. I, with a great deal of reluctance initially, because Ive known
Hillary Clinton for 50 years50 yearsendorsed Bernie Sanders and worked my
heart out for him, as many, many people did. And so, at this particular
juncture, you know, theres a great deal of sadness and a great deal of
feeling of regret. But having worked so long and so many years for basically
the progressive ideals that Bernie Sanders stands for, I can tell you that
the movement is going to continue. In fact, its going to grow.
And right now, at this particular point in time, I just dont see any
alternative but to support Hillary. I know Hillary, I know her faults, I
know her strengths. I think she will make a great president. I supported
Bernie Sanders because I thought he would make a better president for the
system we need. But nonetheless, Hillary Clinton is going to be the nominee.
I support her. And I support her not only because she will be a good
president, if not a great president, but also, frankly, because I am
tremendously worried about the alternative. And the alternative, really, as
a practical matter, is somebody who is a megalomaniac and a bigot, somebody
who will set back the progressive movement decades, if not more.
AMY GOODMAN: Chris Hedges?
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, reducing the election to personalities is kind of
infantile at this point. The fact is, we live in a system that Sheldon Wolin
calls inverted totalitarianism. Its a system where corporate power has
seized all of the levers of control. There is no way to vote against the
interests of Goldman Sachs or ExxonMobil or Raytheon. Weve lost our
privacy. Weve seen, under Obama, an assault against civil liberties that
has outstripped what George W. Bush carried out. Weve seen the executive
branch misinterpret the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force Act as
giving itself the right to assassinate American citizens, including
children. I speak of Anwar al-Awlakis 16-year-old son. We have bailed out
the banks, pushed through programs of austerity. This has been a bipartisan
effort, because theyve both been captured by corporate power. We have
undergone what John Ralston Saul correctly calls a corporate coup détat in
slow motion, and its over.
I just came back from Poland, which is a kind of case study of how
neoliberal poison destroys a society and creates figures like Trump. Poland
has gone, I think we can argue, into a neofascism. First, it dislocated the
working class, deindustrialized the country. Then, in the name of austerity,
it destroyed public institutions, education, public broadcasting. And then
it poisoned the political system. And we are now watching, in Poland, them
create a 30,000 to 40,000 armed militia. You know, they have an army. The
Parliament, nothing works. And I think that this political system in the
United States has seized up in exactly the same form.
So, is Trump a repugnant personality? Yes. Although I would argue that in
terms of megalomania and narcissism, Hillary Clinton is not far behind. But
the point is, weve got to break away fromwhich is exactly the narrative
they want us to focus on. Weve got to break away from political
personalities and understand and examine and critique the structures of
power. And, in fact, the Democratic Party, especially beginning under Bill
Clinton, has carried water for corporate entities as assiduously as the
Republican Party. This is something that Ralph Nader understood long before
the rest of us, and stepped out very courageously in 2000. And I think we
will look back on that period and find Ralph to be an amazingly prophetic
figure. Nobody understands corporate power better than Ralph. And I think
now people have caught up with Ralph.
And this is, of course, why I support Dr. Stein and the Green Party. We have
to remember that 10 years ago, Syriza, which controls the Greek government,
was polling at exactly the same spot that the Green Party is polling
nowabout 4 percent. Weve got to break out of this idea that we can create
systematic change within a particular election cycle. Weve got to be
willing to step out into the political wilderness, perhaps, for a decade.
But on the issues of climate change, on the issue of the destruction of
civil liberties, including our right to privacyand I speak as a former
investigative journalist, which doesnt exist anymore because of wholesale
government surveillancewe have no ability, except for hackers.
I mean, this whole debate over the WikiLeaks is insane. Did Russia? Ive
printed classified material that was given to me by the Mossad. But I never
exposed that Mossad gave it to me. Is what was published true or untrue? And
the fact is, you know, in those long emailsyou should read them. Theyre
appalling, including calling Dr. Cornel West "trash." It isthe wholeit
exposes the way the system was rigged, withinIm talking about the
Democratic Partythe denial of independents, the superdelegates, the
stealing of the caucus in Nevada, the huge amounts of corporate money and
super PACs that flowed into the Clinton campaign.
The fact is, Clinton has a track record, and its one that has abandoned
children. I mean, she and her husband destroyed welfare as we know it, and
70 percent of the original recipients were children. This debate overI
dont like Trump, but Trump is not the phenomenon. Trump is responding to a
phenomenon created by neoliberalism. And we may get rid of Trump, but we
will get something even more vile, maybe Ted Cruz.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Reich, I remember you, on Democracy Now!, talking about
your time as labor secretary when President Clinton signed off on welfare
reform, and you described walking the streets of Washington, D.C., wondering
where the protests were, that you had vigorously objected. And it was also
an issue, a bill that Hillary Clinton had supported. So, can you respond to
Chris Hedges on these three points, including, so, you take a walk in the
political wilderness for a little while?
ROBERT REICH: Well, Amy, its not just taking a walk in the political
wilderness. If Donald Trump becomes president, if thats what youre
referring to, I think it isthere are irrevocable negative changes that will
happen in the United States, including appointments to the Supreme Court,
that will not be just political wilderness, that will actually change and
worsen the structure of this country. I couldnt agree with Chris Hedges
more about his critique, overall, of neoliberalism and a lot of the
structural problems that we face in our political economy today. Ive
written about them. But Ive done more than write about them. Ive actually
been in the center of power, and I have been doing everything I possibly
can, as an individual and also as a mobilizer and organizer of others, to
try to change what we now have.
I think that voting for Donald Trump or equating Hillary Clinton with Donald
Trump is insane. Donald Trump is certainly a product of a kind of system and
a systematic undermining that has occurred in the United States for years
with regard to inequality of income and wealth and political power. But we
dont fight that by simply saying, "All right, lets just have Donald Trump
and hope that the system improves itself and hope that things are so bad
that actually people rise up in armed resistance." Thats insane. Thats
crazy.
What we have to do is beweve got to be very, very strategic as
progressives. Weve got to look at the long term. Weve got to understand
that Bernie Sanders brought us much further along than we were before the
Sanders campaign. We owe a lot to Bernie Sanders, his courage, his
integrity, his power, the fact that most people under 30 voted for Bernie
Sanders. In fact, if you look at the people who voted for Bernie Sanders
under 30, that was more people than voted for Donald Trump and Hillary
Clinton together under the age of 30. We are building a progressive movement
in this country. But over the next four years, I dont want Donald Trump to
irretrievably make it difficult, if not impossible, for us to move forward
with that progressive movement.
Now, I understand Hillary Clinton is not perfect. Ive known her , as I said
before, for 50 years. I met her when she was 19 years old. I know her
strengths, and I know, pretty well, her weaknesses. She is not perfect. And
as Chris says, you know, she is also very much a product of many of the
problems structurally in this country right now. We fight those structural
problems, yes. Hand in hand, Chris, with you, shoulder to shoulderIm very
short, maybe its my shoulder, and its your rib cagebut it doesnt matter,
we continue to fight. I will continue to fight. Many people who are watching
and listening will continue to fight. We must continue to mobilize. I hope
Bernie Sanders does what he implied he would do last nightthat is, carry
the movement forward, lend his name, his energy, his email list. This is not
the end of anything. But we have got to be, at the same time, very practical
about what were doing and very strategic about what were doing. This is
not just a matter of making statements. Its a matter of actually working
with and through, and changing the structure of power in this country.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Chris, Id like to ask youyouve written that liberals are
tolerated by the capitalist elites because they do not question the virtues
of corporate capitalism, only its excesses, and call for tepid and
ineffectual reforms. Could that have also have been said of FDR in the
1930s? Because you were one of the folks who did not back Bernie Sanders
from the beginning.
CHRIS HEDGES: Thats right.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: So, youve
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, I didnt back Bernie Sanders becauseand Kshama Sawant
and I had had a discussion with him beforebecause he said that he would
work within the Democratic structures and support the nominee. And I think
we have now watched Bernie Sanders walk away from his political moment. You
know, heI think he will come to deeply regret what he has done. He has
betrayed these people who believed in this political revolution. We heard
this same kind of rhetoric, by the way, in 2008 around Obama.
A political campaign raises consciousness, but its not a movement. And what
we are seeing now is furious spinI listened to Ben Jealous just do itfrom
the self-identified liberal class. And they are tolerated within a
capitalist system, because, in a moment like this, they are used to speak to
people to get them to betray their own interests in the name of fear. And I
admire Robert and have read much of his stuff and like his stuff, but if you
listen to what hes been saying, the message is the same message of the
Trump campaign, and that his fear. And that is all the Democrats have to
offer now and all the Republicans have to offer now.
And the fact is, from climate change alone, we have no time left. I have
four children. The future of my children, by the day, is being destroyed
because of the fact that the fossil fuel industry, along with the animal
agriculture industry, which is also as important in terms of climate change,
are destroying the ecosystem on which we depend for life. And neither party
has any intention to do anything about it.
AMY GOODMAN: What should Bernie Sanders have done?
CHRIS HEDGES: Bernie Sanders should have walked out and run as an
independent.
AMY GOODMAN: Take
CHRIS HEDGES: And defied the Democratic Party.
AMY GOODMAN: Take up the invitation of Dr. Jill Stein
CHRIS HEDGES: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: and run on a ticket with
CHRIS HEDGES: She offered to let him run on the top of the ticket. Thats
what he should have done. And the fact is, you know, lets not forget that
Bernie has a very checkered past. He campaigned for Clinton in '92. He
campaigned for Clinton again in 96, after NAFTAthe greatest betrayal of
the working class in this country since the Taft-Hartley Act of 1948after
the destruction of welfare, after the omnibus crime bill that exploded the
prison population, and, you know, we now haveI mean, it's just a
monstrosity what weve done; 350,000 to 400,000 people locked in cages in
this country are severely mentally ill. Half of them never committed a
violent crime. Thats all Bill Clinton. And yet he went out and campaigned.
In 2004, he called on Nader not to run, to step down, so he could support a
war candidate like John Kerry. And Im listening to Jealous before talk
about the Iraq War. Sixty percent of the Democratic senators voted for the
war, including Hillary Clinton. The idea that somehow Democrats dont push
us into war defies American history.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Reich?
ROBERT REICH: Well, all I can say is that at this particular point in timeI
mean, again, many of the things that Chris Hedges is saying, I completely
agree with. The real question here is: What do we do right now? And what do
we do to mobilize and organize a lot of people out there who right now are
not mobilized and organized? And how do we keep the energy building? I
disagree with Chris with regard to Bernie Sanders. I think Bernie Sanders
has been a great and is a great leader right now of the progressive cause.
What I think we ought to do is develop a third party outside the Democratic
and Republican parties, maybe the Green Party, so that in the year 2020,
four years from now, we have another candidateit may be Bernie Sanders, I
think hes probably going to be too old by thenbut we have a candidate that
holds the Democrats accountable, that provides a vehicle for a lot of the
energy of the Bernie Sanders movement to continue to develop, that fields
new candidates at the Senate, in Congress, at the state level, that actually
holds Democrats feet to the fire and Republicans feet to the fire, that
develops an agenda of getting big money out of politics and severing the
link between extraordinarily concentrated wealth and political power in this
country. Thats what we ought to be doing.
Now, we canbut in order to do that, we cannot haveand, you know, I think
that Hillary will be a good president, if not a great president. This is not
just trucking in fear, Chris. But I do fear Donald Trump. I fear the polls
that I saw yesterday. Now, polls, again, this early in a campaign
stillwere still months away from the election, but they are indicative.
They show Donald Trump doing exceedingly well, beating Hillary Clinton. And
right now, given our two-party system, given our winner-take-all system with
regard to the Electoral College, its just too much of a risk to go and to
say, "Well, Im going to voteIm not going to vote for the lesser of two
evils, Im going to vote exactly what I want to do." Well, anybody can do
that, obviously. This is a free country. You vote what youyou vote your
conscience. You have to do that. Im just saying that your conscience needs
to be aware that if you do not support Hillary Clinton, you are increasing
the odds of a true, clear and present danger to the United States, a menace
to the United States. And youre increasing the possibility that there will
not be a progressive movement, there will not be anything we believe in in
the future, because the United States will really be changed for the worse.
Thats not athats not a risk Im prepared to take at this point in time.
Im going to moveIm going to do exactly what Ive been doing for the last
40 years: Im going to continue to beat my head against the wall, to build
and contribute to building a progressive movement. The day after Election
Day, I am going to try to work with Bernie Sanders and anybody else who
wants to work in strengthening a third partyand again, maybe its the Green
Partyfor the year 2020, and do everything else I was just talking about.
But right now, as we lead up to Election Day 2016, I must urge everyone who
is listening or who is watching to do whatever they can to make sure that
Hillary Clinton is the next president, and not Donald Trump.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, were going to break and then come back to this debate on
both sides of the United States, as well as of this issue. Chris Hedges is
with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, award-winning author and
activist. Latest book, Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt.
And who you were just listening to is Robert Reich, who is the former labor
secretary under President Clinton and professor at University of California,
Berkeley, his latest book called Saving Capitalism. He was a Bernie Sanders
supporter and now says he will vote for Hillary Clinton. When we come back,
well hear some of the words of Donald Trump and get response. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: "Opening Ceremony" by Laura Ortman. This is Democracy Now!,
democracynow.org. Our special for this two weeks, "Breaking with Convention:
War, Peace and the Presidency." Im Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, in a moment, well return to our debate between Robert
Reich and Chris Hedges, but first lets turn to Donald Trumps nomination
speech at the RNC in Cleveland last Thursday. Trump said Sanders supporters
would vote for him in the fall.
DONALD TRUMP: I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our
citizens, just like it was rigged against Bernie Sanders. He never had a
chance, never had a chance. But his supporters will join our movement,
because we will fix his biggest single issuetrade deals that strip our
country of its jobs and strip us of our wealth as a country. Millions of
Democrats will join our movement, because we are going to fix the system so
it works fairly and justly for each and every American.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Donald Trump talking at the convention in Cleveland.
Robert Reich, interestingly, Donald Trump and Chris Hedges agree on one
thing, that free trade deals that thethat both the Republicans and
Democrats have negotiated over the past few years, especially NAFTA, have
been disastrous for the American people. You were part of the Clinton
administration when NAFTA was passed. Talk about this, the impact that Trump
is utilizing among white workers in America over the issue of free trade.
ROBERT REICH: Well, Donald Trump is clearly using trade and also immigration
as vehicles for making the people who have really been hurt by trade, by
globalization, feel that he is going to somehow be on their side. Hes not
going to be on their side.
Trump is right in a very, very narrow respect, that trade has hurt very
vulnerable people, working-class people. The burdens of trade have been
disproportionately fallen on those people who used to have good unionized
jobs in America. And the failure of NAFTA and also the WTO, the World Trade
Organization, Chinese ascension into the WTO, all of those Clinton-era
programsthe failure was, number one, not to have nearly strong enough and
enforceable enough labor and environmental side agreements; number two, not
to have adjustment mechanisms here in the United States for people who lost
their jobs to help them get good jobs, that were new jobs, for the jobs they
lost. The winners in trade could have compensated the losers and still come
out ahead, but they did not. And that is a structural, political problem in
this country that we have to address.
It is also a problem with regard to technological displacement. Its not
just trade. Technology is displacing and will continue to displace and will
displace even more good jobs in the future, but we have absolutely no
strategy for dealing with that. And right now, the burdens of technological
displacement are falling, once again, on the working middle class,
lower-income people, who have very, very few alternatives, driving a greater
and greater wedge between those who are lucky enough to beto have rich
parents or be well educated or be well connected, and everybody else.
We cannot go on like this. This is unsustainable. And Donald Trump and
Bernie Sanders are symptomatic, their rise, are both symptomatic of this
great wave of antiestablishment anger that is flooding American politics,
although on the one side you have authoritarian populism, and on the Bernie
Sanders side you have a political revolution. I prefer the political
revolution myself. Im going to continue to work for that political
revolution.
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, I think we have to acknowledge two facts. We do not live
in a functioning democracy, and we have to stop pretending that we do. You
cant talk aboutwhen you eviscerate privacy, you cant use the word
"liberty." That is the relationship between a master and a slave. The fact
is, this is capitalism run amok. This whole discussion should be about
capitalism. Capitalism does what its designed to do, when its unfettered
or unregulatedas it isand that is to increase profit and reduce the cost
of labor. And it has done that by deindustrializing the country, and the
Clinton administration, you know, massively enabled this.
And, you know, were sitting here in Philadelphia. The last convention was
in Cleveland. These are Potemkin villages, where the downtowns are
Disneyfied, and three and four blocks away people are living in appalling
poverty. We have responded to surplus labor, as Karl Marx says, in our
deindustrialized internal colonies, to quote Malcolm X, by putting poor
people of color in cages all across the country. Why? Its because surplus
laborcorporate entities cannot make money off of surplus or redundant
labor. But when you lock them in a cage, they make $40,000 or $50,000 a
year. This is the system we live in.
We live in a system where, under Section 1021 of the National Defense
Authorization Act, the executive branch can put the soldiers in the streets,
in clear violation of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, to seecarry out
extraordinary rendition of American citizens who are deemed to be,
quote-unquote, "terrorists," strip them of due process and hold them
indefinitely in military facilities, including in our black sites. We are a
country that engages in torture.
We talkRobert talks about, you know, building movements. You cant build
movements in a political system where money has replaced the vote. Its
impossible. And the Democrats, you know, their bedside manner is different
from the Republicans. You know, Trump is this kind of grotesque figure. Hes
like the used car salesman who rolls back the speedometer. But Hillary
Clinton is like, you know, the managers of Goldman Sachs. They both engage
in criminal activities that haveand Clintons record, like Trump, exposes
thisthat have preyed upon the most vulnerable within this country and are
now destroying the middle class. And to somehow speak as if we are in a
functioning democracy, or speak as if there are any restraints on
capitalism, or speak as if the Democratic Party has not pushed forward this
agendaI mean, Obama has done this. You know, he has been as obsequious to
Wall Street as the Bush administration. Theres no difference.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Reich?
ROBERT REICH: Chris, you know, Iagain, I find this a frustrating
conversation, because I agree with so much of what you have said, but the
question is: What do we do about it? I mean, we are in a better position
today, in the sense that Bernie Sanders has helped mobilize, organize and
energize a lot of Americans, and educated a lot of Americans about the very
issues that you have talked and written about and I have talked and written
about. But it isthe question is: What is the action? What is the actual
political strategy right now?
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, let melet me answer that.
ROBERT REICH: And I think the political
CHRIS HEDGES: Let me answer that.
ROBERT REICH: Well, let me justlet me just put in my two cents. I think
political strategy is not to elect Donald Trump, to elect Hillary Clinton,
and, for four years, to develop an alternative, another Bernie Sanders-type
candidate with an independent party, outside the Democratic Party, that will
take on Hillary Clinton, assuming that she is elected and that she runs for
re-election, and that also develops the infrastructure of a third party that
is a true, new progressive party.
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, thats precisely what were trying to do. There is a
point where you have todo I want to keep quoting Ralph?but where you have
to draw a line in the sand. And thats part of the problem with the left, is
we havent.
I covered the war in Yugoslavia, and I find many parallels between whats
happening in the United States and what happened with the breakdown of
Yugoslavia. What is it that caused this country to disintegrate? It wasnt
ancient ethnic hatreds. It was the economic meltdown of Yugoslavia and a
bankrupt liberal establishment that, after the death of Tito, until 1989 or
1990, spoke in the language of democracy, but proved ineffectual in terms of
dealing with the plight of working men and women who were cast out of state
factories, huge unemployment and, finally, hyperinflation.
And the fact is that these neoliberal policies, which the Democratic Party
is one of the engines for, have created this right-wing fascialism. You can
go backthis proto-fascism. You can go back and look at the Weimar, and
itRepublicwas very much the same. So its completely counterintuitive. Of
course I find Trump a vile and disturbing and disgusting figure, but I dont
believe that voting for the Democratic establishmentand remember that
thisthe two insurgencies, both within the Republican Party and thewere
against figures like Hillary Clinton, who spoke in that traditional
feel-your-pain language of liberalism, while assiduously serving corporate
power and selling out working men and women. And they see through the con,
they see through the game.
I dont actually think Bernie Sanders educated the public. In fact, Bernie
Sanders spoke for the first time as a political candidate about the reality
the public was experiencing, because even Barack Obama, in his State of the
Union address, was talking about economic recovery, and everything was
wonderful, and people know that its not. And when you dispossess
ROBERT REICH: Well, let melet me
CHRIS HEDGES: Let me just finish. Let me finish. When you dispossess that
segment, as large as we havehalf the country now lives in virtual
povertyand you continue to essentially run a government thats been seized
by a cabal, in this case, corporate, which uses all of the machinery of
government for their own enrichment and their own further empowerment at the
expense of the rest of the citizenry, people finally react. And that is how
you get fascism. That is what history has told us. And to sit byevery time,
Robert, you speak, you do exactly what Trump does, which is fear, fear,
fear, fear, fear. And the fact that we are going to build some kind of
ROBERT REICH: Well, let melet me try to
CHRIS HEDGES: amorphous movement after Hillary Clintonits just not they
way it works.
ROBERT REICH: Let me try to injectlet melet me try to inject
AMY GOODMAN: Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich?
ROBERT REICH: Let me try to inject some hope in here, in this discussion,
rather than fear. Ive been traveling around the country for the last two
years, trying to talk to tea partiers and conservatives and many people who
are probably going to vote for Donald Trump, to try to understand what it is
that they are doing and how they view America and why theyre acting in ways
that are so obviously against their self-interest, both economic
self-interest and other self-interest. And heres the interesting thing I
found.
This great antiestablishment wave that is occurring both on the left and the
right has a great overlap, if you will, and that overlap is a deep contempt
for what many people on the right are calling crony capitalismin fact, many
people on the left have called crony capitalism. And those people on the
right, many, many working people, theyre not all white. Many of them are.
Many of them are working-class. Many of them have suffered from trade and
technological displacement and a government that is really turning its back
on them, they feeland to some extent, theyre right. Many of them feel as
angry about the current system and about corporate welfare and about big
money in politics as many of us on the progressive side do.
Now, if it is possible to have a multiracial, multiethnic coalition of the
bottom 90 percent that is ready to fight to get big money out of politics,
for more equality, for a system that is not rigged against average working
people, where there are not going to be all of these redistributions upward
from those of us who have paychecksand we dont even realize that larger
and larger portions of those paychecks are going to big industries,
conglomerates, concentrated industries that have great market power, because
its all hidden from viewwell, the more coalition building we can do, from
right to left, multiethnic, multiracial, left and right, to build a movement
to take back our economy and to take back our democracy, that is
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Robert ReichRobert Reich, Id just like to interrupt you for
a second, because we only have a minute left, and I just wanted to ask Chris
one last question. In less than a minute, if you can, regardless ofyoure
voting for Jill Stein, other folks are going to vote for Clinton and Trump.
Where do you feel this massive movement that has developed over the last few
years, this people movement, would have a better opportunity to grow, under
a Trump presidency or under a Clinton presidency, assuming that one of those
two will eventually be elected?
CHRIS HEDGES: I dont think it makes any difference. The TPP is going to go
through, whether its Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Endless war is going
to be continued, whether its Trump or Clinton. Were not going to get our
privacy back, whether its under Clinton or Trump. The idea that, at this
point, the figure in the executive branch exercises that much power, given
the power of the war industry and Wall Street, is a myth. The fact is
ROBERT REICH: EquatingIm sorry. Im sorry.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Even on immigration?
CHRIS HEDGES: What? On?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Even on immigration?
CHRIS HEDGES: What? On immigration? I mean, lets look at Obamas record on
immigration. Whos worse?
AMY GOODMAN: Weve got 10 seconds.
CHRIS HEDGES: I mean, you know, you cant get worse than Obama.
ROBERT REICH: And can I just say something?
CHRIS HEDGES: I mean, the idea is, the Democrats speak, and the
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Reich, 10 seconds.
CHRIS HEDGES: Yeah.
ROBERT REICH: I just want to say, equating Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton
is absolute nonsense. I justanybody who equates the two of them is not
paying attention. And its dangerous kind of talk.
CHRIS HEDGES: Thats not what Ithats not what I did.
AMY GOODMAN: Were going to have to leave it there, but this is a discussion
that will continue. Chris Hedges, I want to thank you for being with us,
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author of Wages of Rebellion: The Moral
Imperative of Revolt. And former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich,
professor now at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent
book, Saving Capitalism.
That does it for the broadcast. Ill be in Provincetown, Massachusetts and
Marthas Vineyard this weekend, doing a talk back from the conventions.
Special thanks to Laura Deutch, Gretjen Clausing, Ryan Saunders and the
whole team here at PhillyCAM.
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Chris Hedges and Robert Reich. (photo: PBS)
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/7/26/who_should_bernie_voters_support_nowht
tp://www.democracynow.org/2016/7/26/who_should_bernie_voters_support_now
Who Should Bernie Voters Support Now? A Debate Between Robert Reich and
Chris Hedges
By Democracy Now!
27 July 16
he day after Senator Bernie Sanders spoke at the Democratic National
Convention and urged his supporters to work to ensure his former rival wins
the presidential race, we host a debate between Clinton supporter Robert
Reich, who served as labor secretary under President Clinton, and Chris
Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who backs Sanders.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. Our special,
"Breaking with Convention: War, Peace and the Presidency." Im Amy Goodman,
with Juan González.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: As we continue to talk about the Democratic National
Convention, were joined now by two guests. Joining us from Berkeley,
California, is Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary under President
Clinton and is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. And
here in Philadelphia is Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His
most recent book is Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt.
And Id like to begin with Robert Reich. Youre ayou were a Bernie Sanders
supporter. Youre now backing Hillary Clinton. Youre not at the convention,
but your perspective on what you saw last night and the possibility of the
Democratic Party uniting behind Hillary Clinton, or a group of the Sanders
supporters going with Jill Stein?
ROBERT REICH: Well, its very hard to tell what the delegates are going to
do. And its very hard to telleven harder to tell what the electorate is
going to do. You know, this is a very agonizing time for many Bernie Sanders
supporters. I, with a great deal of reluctance initially, because Ive known
Hillary Clinton for 50 years50 yearsendorsed Bernie Sanders and worked my
heart out for him, as many, many people did. And so, at this particular
juncture, you know, theres a great deal of sadness and a great deal of
feeling of regret. But having worked so long and so many years for basically
the progressive ideals that Bernie Sanders stands for, I can tell you that
the movement is going to continue. In fact, its going to grow.
And right now, at this particular point in time, I just dont see any
alternative but to support Hillary. I know Hillary, I know her faults, I
know her strengths. I think she will make a great president. I supported
Bernie Sanders because I thought he would make a better president for the
system we need. But nonetheless, Hillary Clinton is going to be the nominee.
I support her. And I support her not only because she will be a good
president, if not a great president, but also, frankly, because I am
tremendously worried about the alternative. And the alternative, really, as
a practical matter, is somebody who is a megalomaniac and a bigot, somebody
who will set back the progressive movement decades, if not more.
AMY GOODMAN: Chris Hedges?
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, reducing the election to personalities is kind of
infantile at this point. The fact is, we live in a system that Sheldon Wolin
calls inverted totalitarianism. Its a system where corporate power has
seized all of the levers of control. There is no way to vote against the
interests of Goldman Sachs or ExxonMobil or Raytheon. Weve lost our
privacy. Weve seen, under Obama, an assault against civil liberties that
has outstripped what George W. Bush carried out. Weve seen the executive
branch misinterpret the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force Act as
giving itself the right to assassinate American citizens, including
children. I speak of Anwar al-Awlakis 16-year-old son. We have bailed out
the banks, pushed through programs of austerity. This has been a bipartisan
effort, because theyve both been captured by corporate power. We have
undergone what John Ralston Saul correctly calls a corporate coup détat in
slow motion, and its over.
I just came back from Poland, which is a kind of case study of how
neoliberal poison destroys a society and creates figures like Trump. Poland
has gone, I think we can argue, into a neofascism. First, it dislocated the
working class, deindustrialized the country. Then, in the name of austerity,
it destroyed public institutions, education, public broadcasting. And then
it poisoned the political system. And we are now watching, in Poland, them
create a 30,000 to 40,000 armed militia. You know, they have an army. The
Parliament, nothing works. And I think that this political system in the
United States has seized up in exactly the same form.
So, is Trump a repugnant personality? Yes. Although I would argue that in
terms of megalomania and narcissism, Hillary Clinton is not far behind. But
the point is, weve got to break away fromwhich is exactly the narrative
they want us to focus on. Weve got to break away from political
personalities and understand and examine and critique the structures of
power. And, in fact, the Democratic Party, especially beginning under Bill
Clinton, has carried water for corporate entities as assiduously as the
Republican Party. This is something that Ralph Nader understood long before
the rest of us, and stepped out very courageously in 2000. And I think we
will look back on that period and find Ralph to be an amazingly prophetic
figure. Nobody understands corporate power better than Ralph. And I think
now people have caught up with Ralph.
And this is, of course, why I support Dr. Stein and the Green Party. We have
to remember that 10 years ago, Syriza, which controls the Greek government,
was polling at exactly the same spot that the Green Party is polling
nowabout 4 percent. Weve got to break out of this idea that we can create
systematic change within a particular election cycle. Weve got to be
willing to step out into the political wilderness, perhaps, for a decade.
But on the issues of climate change, on the issue of the destruction of
civil liberties, including our right to privacyand I speak as a former
investigative journalist, which doesnt exist anymore because of wholesale
government surveillancewe have no ability, except for hackers.
I mean, this whole debate over the WikiLeaks is insane. Did Russia? Ive
printed classified material that was given to me by the Mossad. But I never
exposed that Mossad gave it to me. Is what was published true or untrue? And
the fact is, you know, in those long emailsyou should read them. Theyre
appalling, including calling Dr. Cornel West "trash." It isthe wholeit
exposes the way the system was rigged, withinIm talking about the
Democratic Partythe denial of independents, the superdelegates, the
stealing of the caucus in Nevada, the huge amounts of corporate money and
super PACs that flowed into the Clinton campaign.
The fact is, Clinton has a track record, and its one that has abandoned
children. I mean, she and her husband destroyed welfare as we know it, and
70 percent of the original recipients were children. This debate overI
dont like Trump, but Trump is not the phenomenon. Trump is responding to a
phenomenon created by neoliberalism. And we may get rid of Trump, but we
will get something even more vile, maybe Ted Cruz.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Reich, I remember you, on Democracy Now!, talking about
your time as labor secretary when President Clinton signed off on welfare
reform, and you described walking the streets of Washington, D.C., wondering
where the protests were, that you had vigorously objected. And it was also
an issue, a bill that Hillary Clinton had supported. So, can you respond to
Chris Hedges on these three points, including, so, you take a walk in the
political wilderness for a little while?
ROBERT REICH: Well, Amy, its not just taking a walk in the political
wilderness. If Donald Trump becomes president, if thats what youre
referring to, I think it isthere are irrevocable negative changes that will
happen in the United States, including appointments to the Supreme Court,
that will not be just political wilderness, that will actually change and
worsen the structure of this country. I couldnt agree with Chris Hedges
more about his critique, overall, of neoliberalism and a lot of the
structural problems that we face in our political economy today. Ive
written about them. But Ive done more than write about them. Ive actually
been in the center of power, and I have been doing everything I possibly
can, as an individual and also as a mobilizer and organizer of others, to
try to change what we now have.
I think that voting for Donald Trump or equating Hillary Clinton with Donald
Trump is insane. Donald Trump is certainly a product of a kind of system and
a systematic undermining that has occurred in the United States for years
with regard to inequality of income and wealth and political power. But we
dont fight that by simply saying, "All right, lets just have Donald Trump
and hope that the system improves itself and hope that things are so bad
that actually people rise up in armed resistance." Thats insane. Thats
crazy.
What we have to do is beweve got to be very, very strategic as
progressives. Weve got to look at the long term. Weve got to understand
that Bernie Sanders brought us much further along than we were before the
Sanders campaign. We owe a lot to Bernie Sanders, his courage, his
integrity, his power, the fact that most people under 30 voted for Bernie
Sanders. In fact, if you look at the people who voted for Bernie Sanders
under 30, that was more people than voted for Donald Trump and Hillary
Clinton together under the age of 30. We are building a progressive movement
in this country. But over the next four years, I dont want Donald Trump to
irretrievably make it difficult, if not impossible, for us to move forward
with that progressive movement.
Now, I understand Hillary Clinton is not perfect. Ive known her , as I said
before, for 50 years. I met her when she was 19 years old. I know her
strengths, and I know, pretty well, her weaknesses. She is not perfect. And
as Chris says, you know, she is also very much a product of many of the
problems structurally in this country right now. We fight those structural
problems, yes. Hand in hand, Chris, with you, shoulder to shoulderIm very
short, maybe its my shoulder, and its your rib cagebut it doesnt matter,
we continue to fight. I will continue to fight. Many people who are watching
and listening will continue to fight. We must continue to mobilize. I hope
Bernie Sanders does what he implied he would do last nightthat is, carry
the movement forward, lend his name, his energy, his email list. This is not
the end of anything. But we have got to be, at the same time, very practical
about what were doing and very strategic about what were doing. This is
not just a matter of making statements. Its a matter of actually working
with and through, and changing the structure of power in this country.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Chris, Id like to ask youyouve written that liberals are
tolerated by the capitalist elites because they do not question the virtues
of corporate capitalism, only its excesses, and call for tepid and
ineffectual reforms. Could that have also have been said of FDR in the
1930s? Because you were one of the folks who did not back Bernie Sanders
from the beginning.
CHRIS HEDGES: Thats right.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: So, youve
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, I didnt back Bernie Sanders becauseand Kshama Sawant
and I had had a discussion with him beforebecause he said that he would
work within the Democratic structures and support the nominee. And I think
we have now watched Bernie Sanders walk away from his political moment. You
know, heI think he will come to deeply regret what he has done. He has
betrayed these people who believed in this political revolution. We heard
this same kind of rhetoric, by the way, in 2008 around Obama.
A political campaign raises consciousness, but its not a movement. And what
we are seeing now is furious spinI listened to Ben Jealous just do itfrom
the self-identified liberal class. And they are tolerated within a
capitalist system, because, in a moment like this, they are used to speak to
people to get them to betray their own interests in the name of fear. And I
admire Robert and have read much of his stuff and like his stuff, but if you
listen to what hes been saying, the message is the same message of the
Trump campaign, and that his fear. And that is all the Democrats have to
offer now and all the Republicans have to offer now.
And the fact is, from climate change alone, we have no time left. I have
four children. The future of my children, by the day, is being destroyed
because of the fact that the fossil fuel industry, along with the animal
agriculture industry, which is also as important in terms of climate change,
are destroying the ecosystem on which we depend for life. And neither party
has any intention to do anything about it.
AMY GOODMAN: What should Bernie Sanders have done?
CHRIS HEDGES: Bernie Sanders should have walked out and run as an
independent.
AMY GOODMAN: Take
CHRIS HEDGES: And defied the Democratic Party.
AMY GOODMAN: Take up the invitation of Dr. Jill Stein
CHRIS HEDGES: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: and run on a ticket with
CHRIS HEDGES: She offered to let him run on the top of the ticket. Thats
what he should have done. And the fact is, you know, lets not forget that
Bernie has a very checkered past. He campaigned for Clinton in '92. He
campaigned for Clinton again in 96, after NAFTAthe greatest betrayal of
the working class in this country since the Taft-Hartley Act of 1948after
the destruction of welfare, after the omnibus crime bill that exploded the
prison population, and, you know, we now haveI mean, it's just a
monstrosity what weve done; 350,000 to 400,000 people locked in cages in
this country are severely mentally ill. Half of them never committed a
violent crime. Thats all Bill Clinton. And yet he went out and campaigned.
In 2004, he called on Nader not to run, to step down, so he could support a
war candidate like John Kerry. And Im listening to Jealous before talk
about the Iraq War. Sixty percent of the Democratic senators voted for the
war, including Hillary Clinton. The idea that somehow Democrats dont push
us into war defies American history.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Reich?
ROBERT REICH: Well, all I can say is that at this particular point in timeI
mean, again, many of the things that Chris Hedges is saying, I completely
agree with. The real question here is: What do we do right now? And what do
we do to mobilize and organize a lot of people out there who right now are
not mobilized and organized? And how do we keep the energy building? I
disagree with Chris with regard to Bernie Sanders. I think Bernie Sanders
has been a great and is a great leader right now of the progressive cause.
What I think we ought to do is develop a third party outside the Democratic
and Republican parties, maybe the Green Party, so that in the year 2020,
four years from now, we have another candidateit may be Bernie Sanders, I
think hes probably going to be too old by thenbut we have a candidate that
holds the Democrats accountable, that provides a vehicle for a lot of the
energy of the Bernie Sanders movement to continue to develop, that fields
new candidates at the Senate, in Congress, at the state level, that actually
holds Democrats feet to the fire and Republicans feet to the fire, that
develops an agenda of getting big money out of politics and severing the
link between extraordinarily concentrated wealth and political power in this
country. Thats what we ought to be doing.
Now, we canbut in order to do that, we cannot haveand, you know, I think
that Hillary will be a good president, if not a great president. This is not
just trucking in fear, Chris. But I do fear Donald Trump. I fear the polls
that I saw yesterday. Now, polls, again, this early in a campaign
stillwere still months away from the election, but they are indicative.
They show Donald Trump doing exceedingly well, beating Hillary Clinton. And
right now, given our two-party system, given our winner-take-all system with
regard to the Electoral College, its just too much of a risk to go and to
say, "Well, Im going to voteIm not going to vote for the lesser of two
evils, Im going to vote exactly what I want to do." Well, anybody can do
that, obviously. This is a free country. You vote what youyou vote your
conscience. You have to do that. Im just saying that your conscience needs
to be aware that if you do not support Hillary Clinton, you are increasing
the odds of a true, clear and present danger to the United States, a menace
to the United States. And youre increasing the possibility that there will
not be a progressive movement, there will not be anything we believe in in
the future, because the United States will really be changed for the worse.
Thats not athats not a risk Im prepared to take at this point in time.
Im going to moveIm going to do exactly what Ive been doing for the last
40 years: Im going to continue to beat my head against the wall, to build
and contribute to building a progressive movement. The day after Election
Day, I am going to try to work with Bernie Sanders and anybody else who
wants to work in strengthening a third partyand again, maybe its the Green
Partyfor the year 2020, and do everything else I was just talking about.
But right now, as we lead up to Election Day 2016, I must urge everyone who
is listening or who is watching to do whatever they can to make sure that
Hillary Clinton is the next president, and not Donald Trump.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, were going to break and then come back to this debate on
both sides of the United States, as well as of this issue. Chris Hedges is
with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, award-winning author and
activist. Latest book, Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt.
And who you were just listening to is Robert Reich, who is the former labor
secretary under President Clinton and professor at University of California,
Berkeley, his latest book called Saving Capitalism. He was a Bernie Sanders
supporter and now says he will vote for Hillary Clinton. When we come back,
well hear some of the words of Donald Trump and get response. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: "Opening Ceremony" by Laura Ortman. This is Democracy Now!,
democracynow.org. Our special for this two weeks, "Breaking with Convention:
War, Peace and the Presidency." Im Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, in a moment, well return to our debate between Robert
Reich and Chris Hedges, but first lets turn to Donald Trumps nomination
speech at the RNC in Cleveland last Thursday. Trump said Sanders supporters
would vote for him in the fall.
DONALD TRUMP: I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our
citizens, just like it was rigged against Bernie Sanders. He never had a
chance, never had a chance. But his supporters will join our movement,
because we will fix his biggest single issuetrade deals that strip our
country of its jobs and strip us of our wealth as a country. Millions of
Democrats will join our movement, because we are going to fix the system so
it works fairly and justly for each and every American.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Donald Trump talking at the convention in Cleveland.
Robert Reich, interestingly, Donald Trump and Chris Hedges agree on one
thing, that free trade deals that thethat both the Republicans and
Democrats have negotiated over the past few years, especially NAFTA, have
been disastrous for the American people. You were part of the Clinton
administration when NAFTA was passed. Talk about this, the impact that Trump
is utilizing among white workers in America over the issue of free trade.
ROBERT REICH: Well, Donald Trump is clearly using trade and also immigration
as vehicles for making the people who have really been hurt by trade, by
globalization, feel that he is going to somehow be on their side. Hes not
going to be on their side.
Trump is right in a very, very narrow respect, that trade has hurt very
vulnerable people, working-class people. The burdens of trade have been
disproportionately fallen on those people who used to have good unionized
jobs in America. And the failure of NAFTA and also the WTO, the World Trade
Organization, Chinese ascension into the WTO, all of those Clinton-era
programsthe failure was, number one, not to have nearly strong enough and
enforceable enough labor and environmental side agreements; number two, not
to have adjustment mechanisms here in the United States for people who lost
their jobs to help them get good jobs, that were new jobs, for the jobs they
lost. The winners in trade could have compensated the losers and still come
out ahead, but they did not. And that is a structural, political problem in
this country that we have to address.
It is also a problem with regard to technological displacement. Its not
just trade. Technology is displacing and will continue to displace and will
displace even more good jobs in the future, but we have absolutely no
strategy for dealing with that. And right now, the burdens of technological
displacement are falling, once again, on the working middle class,
lower-income people, who have very, very few alternatives, driving a greater
and greater wedge between those who are lucky enough to beto have rich
parents or be well educated or be well connected, and everybody else.
We cannot go on like this. This is unsustainable. And Donald Trump and
Bernie Sanders are symptomatic, their rise, are both symptomatic of this
great wave of antiestablishment anger that is flooding American politics,
although on the one side you have authoritarian populism, and on the Bernie
Sanders side you have a political revolution. I prefer the political
revolution myself. Im going to continue to work for that political
revolution.
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, I think we have to acknowledge two facts. We do not live
in a functioning democracy, and we have to stop pretending that we do. You
cant talk aboutwhen you eviscerate privacy, you cant use the word
"liberty." That is the relationship between a master and a slave. The fact
is, this is capitalism run amok. This whole discussion should be about
capitalism. Capitalism does what its designed to do, when its unfettered
or unregulatedas it isand that is to increase profit and reduce the cost
of labor. And it has done that by deindustrializing the country, and the
Clinton administration, you know, massively enabled this.
And, you know, were sitting here in Philadelphia. The last convention was
in Cleveland. These are Potemkin villages, where the downtowns are
Disneyfied, and three and four blocks away people are living in appalling
poverty. We have responded to surplus labor, as Karl Marx says, in our
deindustrialized internal colonies, to quote Malcolm X, by putting poor
people of color in cages all across the country. Why? Its because surplus
laborcorporate entities cannot make money off of surplus or redundant
labor. But when you lock them in a cage, they make $40,000 or $50,000 a
year. This is the system we live in.
We live in a system where, under Section 1021 of the National Defense
Authorization Act, the executive branch can put the soldiers in the streets,
in clear violation of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, to seecarry out
extraordinary rendition of American citizens who are deemed to be,
quote-unquote, "terrorists," strip them of due process and hold them
indefinitely in military facilities, including in our black sites. We are a
country that engages in torture.
We talkRobert talks about, you know, building movements. You cant build
movements in a political system where money has replaced the vote. Its
impossible. And the Democrats, you know, their bedside manner is different
from the Republicans. You know, Trump is this kind of grotesque figure. Hes
like the used car salesman who rolls back the speedometer. But Hillary
Clinton is like, you know, the managers of Goldman Sachs. They both engage
in criminal activities that haveand Clintons record, like Trump, exposes
thisthat have preyed upon the most vulnerable within this country and are
now destroying the middle class. And to somehow speak as if we are in a
functioning democracy, or speak as if there are any restraints on
capitalism, or speak as if the Democratic Party has not pushed forward this
agendaI mean, Obama has done this. You know, he has been as obsequious to
Wall Street as the Bush administration. Theres no difference.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Reich?
ROBERT REICH: Chris, you know, Iagain, I find this a frustrating
conversation, because I agree with so much of what you have said, but the
question is: What do we do about it? I mean, we are in a better position
today, in the sense that Bernie Sanders has helped mobilize, organize and
energize a lot of Americans, and educated a lot of Americans about the very
issues that you have talked and written about and I have talked and written
about. But it isthe question is: What is the action? What is the actual
political strategy right now?
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, let melet me answer that.
ROBERT REICH: And I think the political
CHRIS HEDGES: Let me answer that.
ROBERT REICH: Well, let me justlet me just put in my two cents. I think
political strategy is not to elect Donald Trump, to elect Hillary Clinton,
and, for four years, to develop an alternative, another Bernie Sanders-type
candidate with an independent party, outside the Democratic Party, that will
take on Hillary Clinton, assuming that she is elected and that she runs for
re-election, and that also develops the infrastructure of a third party that
is a true, new progressive party.
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, thats precisely what were trying to do. There is a
point where you have todo I want to keep quoting Ralph?but where you have
to draw a line in the sand. And thats part of the problem with the left, is
we havent.
I covered the war in Yugoslavia, and I find many parallels between whats
happening in the United States and what happened with the breakdown of
Yugoslavia. What is it that caused this country to disintegrate? It wasnt
ancient ethnic hatreds. It was the economic meltdown of Yugoslavia and a
bankrupt liberal establishment that, after the death of Tito, until 1989 or
1990, spoke in the language of democracy, but proved ineffectual in terms of
dealing with the plight of working men and women who were cast out of state
factories, huge unemployment and, finally, hyperinflation.
And the fact is that these neoliberal policies, which the Democratic Party
is one of the engines for, have created this right-wing fascialism. You can
go backthis proto-fascism. You can go back and look at the Weimar, and
itRepublicwas very much the same. So its completely counterintuitive. Of
course I find Trump a vile and disturbing and disgusting figure, but I dont
believe that voting for the Democratic establishmentand remember that
thisthe two insurgencies, both within the Republican Party and thewere
against figures like Hillary Clinton, who spoke in that traditional
feel-your-pain language of liberalism, while assiduously serving corporate
power and selling out working men and women. And they see through the con,
they see through the game.
I dont actually think Bernie Sanders educated the public. In fact, Bernie
Sanders spoke for the first time as a political candidate about the reality
the public was experiencing, because even Barack Obama, in his State of the
Union address, was talking about economic recovery, and everything was
wonderful, and people know that its not. And when you dispossess
ROBERT REICH: Well, let melet me
CHRIS HEDGES: Let me just finish. Let me finish. When you dispossess that
segment, as large as we havehalf the country now lives in virtual
povertyand you continue to essentially run a government thats been seized
by a cabal, in this case, corporate, which uses all of the machinery of
government for their own enrichment and their own further empowerment at the
expense of the rest of the citizenry, people finally react. And that is how
you get fascism. That is what history has told us. And to sit byevery time,
Robert, you speak, you do exactly what Trump does, which is fear, fear,
fear, fear, fear. And the fact that we are going to build some kind of
ROBERT REICH: Well, let melet me try to
CHRIS HEDGES: amorphous movement after Hillary Clintonits just not they
way it works.
ROBERT REICH: Let me try to injectlet melet me try to inject
AMY GOODMAN: Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich?
ROBERT REICH: Let me try to inject some hope in here, in this discussion,
rather than fear. Ive been traveling around the country for the last two
years, trying to talk to tea partiers and conservatives and many people who
are probably going to vote for Donald Trump, to try to understand what it is
that they are doing and how they view America and why theyre acting in ways
that are so obviously against their self-interest, both economic
self-interest and other self-interest. And heres the interesting thing I
found.
This great antiestablishment wave that is occurring both on the left and the
right has a great overlap, if you will, and that overlap is a deep contempt
for what many people on the right are calling crony capitalismin fact, many
people on the left have called crony capitalism. And those people on the
right, many, many working people, theyre not all white. Many of them are.
Many of them are working-class. Many of them have suffered from trade and
technological displacement and a government that is really turning its back
on them, they feeland to some extent, theyre right. Many of them feel as
angry about the current system and about corporate welfare and about big
money in politics as many of us on the progressive side do.
Now, if it is possible to have a multiracial, multiethnic coalition of the
bottom 90 percent that is ready to fight to get big money out of politics,
for more equality, for a system that is not rigged against average working
people, where there are not going to be all of these redistributions upward
from those of us who have paychecksand we dont even realize that larger
and larger portions of those paychecks are going to big industries,
conglomerates, concentrated industries that have great market power, because
its all hidden from viewwell, the more coalition building we can do, from
right to left, multiethnic, multiracial, left and right, to build a movement
to take back our economy and to take back our democracy, that is
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Robert ReichRobert Reich, Id just like to interrupt you for
a second, because we only have a minute left, and I just wanted to ask Chris
one last question. In less than a minute, if you can, regardless ofyoure
voting for Jill Stein, other folks are going to vote for Clinton and Trump.
Where do you feel this massive movement that has developed over the last few
years, this people movement, would have a better opportunity to grow, under
a Trump presidency or under a Clinton presidency, assuming that one of those
two will eventually be elected?
CHRIS HEDGES: I dont think it makes any difference. The TPP is going to go
through, whether its Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Endless war is going
to be continued, whether its Trump or Clinton. Were not going to get our
privacy back, whether its under Clinton or Trump. The idea that, at this
point, the figure in the executive branch exercises that much power, given
the power of the war industry and Wall Street, is a myth. The fact is
ROBERT REICH: EquatingIm sorry. Im sorry.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Even on immigration?
CHRIS HEDGES: What? On?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Even on immigration?
CHRIS HEDGES: What? On immigration? I mean, lets look at Obamas record on
immigration. Whos worse?
AMY GOODMAN: Weve got 10 seconds.
CHRIS HEDGES: I mean, you know, you cant get worse than Obama.
ROBERT REICH: And can I just say something?
CHRIS HEDGES: I mean, the idea is, the Democrats speak, and the
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Reich, 10 seconds.
CHRIS HEDGES: Yeah.
ROBERT REICH: I just want to say, equating Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton
is absolute nonsense. I justanybody who equates the two of them is not
paying attention. And its dangerous kind of talk.
CHRIS HEDGES: Thats not what Ithats not what I did.
AMY GOODMAN: Were going to have to leave it there, but this is a discussion
that will continue. Chris Hedges, I want to thank you for being with us,
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author of Wages of Rebellion: The Moral
Imperative of Revolt. And former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich,
professor now at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent
book, Saving Capitalism.
That does it for the broadcast. Ill be in Provincetown, Massachusetts and
Marthas Vineyard this weekend, doing a talk back from the conventions.
Special thanks to Laura Deutch, Gretjen Clausing, Ryan Saunders and the
whole team here at PhillyCAM.
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