 Good morning, everybody, and happy May Day. Welcome to the Economic Policy Institute. My name is Thea Lee. I am president of the Economic Policy Institute. I am delighted to see you all here today and to host this wonderful event. Bob Kutner has written a brilliant, incisive book that spans decades of political and economic history and culminates with conclusions that illuminate and explain our current political moment. And then, all for the same low price of $27.95, offers optimism and a guide for where we go next, with a deep and abiding faith in the potential for democracy to triumph. And that's something we all need. I have a couple of quotes from the book that I like that I'm just going to start with. One has to be an optimist to believe that a new democratic movement could contain both corporate excess and the neo-fascist reaction to it. And yet, we do have that optimist here with us today. And the second quote is that a mixed economy is like combining oil and water. The capitalist parts keep trying to turn everything into a market commodity, and rich people keep trying to buy political influence. So combining oil and water is a difficult task. And as Bob says, history shows a mixed economy works better than the command economy or an unregulated market. But what I would propose to you is what we need here is a recipe for mayonnaise, which can combine oil and lemon juice into a beautiful and tasty dip. And we are confident that Bob Kutner is the guy to do that for us today. So Bob, you all know, is the co-founder and the co-editor of the American Prospect. He's also a co-founder of the Economic Policy Institute. So for that, we are all grateful that it was Bob's vision, along with a few other folks back in 1986 that got EPI off the ground when it became clear that the right-wing think tanks were growing and dominating the political discourse. The centrist think tanks were moving to the right and that there was a gaping hole in the need for the Economic Policy Institute. And Bob was one of the people, along with Jeff Foe, and a few others who put that together. He's now a professor at Brandeis University's Heller School. His latest book, as you all know, is Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? So we're really looking forward to Bob's presentation. And we have two fantastic panelists to comment on the book. We have E.J. Dionne. Thank you. Welcome, E.J. Thank you. I am sorry. I'm a Catholic, so I'm a traditionalist. I went to the old EPI address. I apologize for being late. We glad you made it, and you're barely late. Thank God you moved close. Yes. If we moved across town, this would be more dramatic. But please to have E.J. a senior fellow at Brookings and Washington Post columnist. And Bill Spriggs, my old colleague from EPI. Bill and I were both here in the 90s together. And also an economics professor at Howard University and a chief economist, the chief economist at the AFL-CIO, where we were also colleagues a while ago. So we have a terrific panel for you today. And without further ado, I will turn it over to Bob Cutner to talk about his fabulous book. Thanks to all of you for coming, and thanks so much to Thea and EPI for hosting. And I have to say, this is such a great panel. I would have come to this even if I weren't the speaker. E.J. and I are wearing our red May Day ties. So about 2006, 2007, after really spending a lifetime taking a hard look at how it's possible to reconcile a dynamic economy, a just society, and a strong democracy, I began focusing on the role of globalization as defined really post-1980 something and codified in the Uruguay around and the WTO, the role of globalization in making it harder and harder and harder for the nation state to house break capitalism. And there's a statue, a favorite statue of mine in front of the FTC. And it's progressive here, a statuary. It's a rider breaking a wild horse. And I keep wondering whether we're going to see a changed statue where the horse is dragging the rider up Constitution Avenue. Because that was the spirit of the progressive era. The horse was capitalism. And governments had to break it in the public interest and not just break it in the sense of destroy it, no, to turn it to advantage, to purge it of its unsavory tendencies and make it work for everybody. And in thinking how we got away from the era in which a market economy was harnessed for the broad public interest, the more I looked at it, the more this new version of globalization, what Danny Roderick calls hyper-globalization, seems to be not the prime driver, but certainly an intensifier and a vector of neoliberal ideas. And once that process gets set in motion, it's cumulative. Because the people who believe in hyper-globalization, who profit from hyper-globalization, become more and more influential politically and ideologically. So what happened? So let me do about 10 or 15 minutes on the economic history of how we got a social contract that folks at EPI relentlessly talk about the social contract of the post-war era and how it got away from us. And this history starts with the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, where not only did the Allies make the mistake of thinking that Germany could pay the whole cost of the war through so-called reparations. But they made the mistake of punishing their own people as well by trying to turn the clock back to before 1914 and restore currency values and use very high interest rates to keep those currencies at parity and, at the same time, liberate finance to do whatever it wanted. So you had this crazy roller coaster decade that was one part speculation, one part austerity, and it ends with Hitler. And it ends with the crash of 1929. But then in the United States, we got lucky. We got Roosevelt. And if you think about what was happening in January of 1933, there's Hitler and the chance for him putting together his government. And there's Roosevelt in Washington putting together his government. And if you think there was anything inevitable about the New Deal, just imagine what would have happened if one Giuseppe Joe Zangara, who got within about 10 feet of the president and fired five shots at him point blank in Miami in February of 1933, had hit Roosevelt instead of missing Roosevelt and hitting the mayor of Chicago, we would have gotten Cactus Jack Garner and probably would not have gotten the New Deal. So the New Deal regulates finance, turns finance almost into a public utility. It empowers labor. And then we double down on all of this with the war, which produces an immense amount of public investment. Unemployment goes from 14% to under 2% in about a year because of all those war production orders. And the popular faith in the state, in a country that's normally fairly skeptical of the state, is reinforced. The power of the labor movement as a social partner is reinforced by the War Labor Board and other entities that recognize labor as a legitimate social partner. And we also double down on constraining capital. There's a bargain between the Fed and the Treasury, where the Fed basically says, you float as many bonds as you need to to pay for the war. We partly pay for the war with surtaxes on rich people. We partly pay for the war with borrowing. And we, the Fed, will peg the interest rate at something like 2.5% as much as you need us to do. This is kind of the forerunner of quantitative easing, really. Quantitative easing was invented during the war. And then along comes the Cold War. And the Cold War allows the Pentagon to function as a kind of closet industrial policy and requires the government to keep tax rates, marginal tax rates, very, very high. And the international version of all of this at Bretton Woods basically begins with a premise that we need an international system such that we never duplicate the experience of the interwar period. And that means constraining finance, not just domestically, but constraining it globally. And so you have a period of capital controls, fixed exchange rates. Bretton Woods, in practice, was not what Keynes or even Harry Dexter White imagined in theory. But it was a good enough functional equivalent until the 1970s. And the proof of the pudding is a little subsection of this book called A Tale of Two Socialists. And the two socialists in question are Clement Attlee and Francois Mitterrand. So it's July of 1945. Attlee has been elected a labor prime minister, first labor prime minister with a real working majority. And the British debt to GDP ratio is 240%. Bretton has gone broke, literally broke, paying for the war. It's lost about a quarter of its total national wealth. Now, if our good friends at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation were advising Attlee, they would have said, well, you have to go into austerity mode to reassure the creditors so that private capital flows to Britain. That's not what Attlee did. Attlee invented the welfare state. And he doubled down on public investment. And why was it that private speculators were not able to crash the pound? Very simple. The ground rules of global finance in that era prohibited it. The pound was pegged. And the Bretton Woods system obligated company countries to defend the peg. Now, fast forward, 35 years later, Mitterrand has also become the first socialist in France elected with a working majority in the Chamber of Deputies. And he also proposes a very robust left-wing program. Nationalized the banks have a lot of public investment. 35-hour workweek takes about a year and a half for international finance to crash the bank. What changed? Well, the ground rules changed. Ground rules changed. And there in a nutshell is the story of the influence of speculative finance in undermining the ability of nation states to have managed forms of capitalism. Now, the 70s are the period when this transition occurs and one can spend a lot of time. I always get this question. Was it inevitable that the Bretton Woods system collapse? Was it inevitable that growth would slow down? Productivity growth would slow down? That the right would get another turn at bat? And while the dollar was not destined to be the world's currency indefinitely, things could have been done that were not done. Professor Tobin proposed his famous Tobin tax for the first time in 1972 as the Bretton Woods system is collapsing in the hope of slowing down speculative finance. A number of economists had proposed much more robust special drawing rights as a kind of surrogate for the international currency that Keynes imagined. And the US Treasury wasn't buying that. So there were some things that could have been done. And EPI is a very good place to tell this story because when Volcker, Volcker I, as opposed to Volcker II, who was something of a good guy in the Obama era, but when Volcker I puts interest rates up to 21.5%, the alternative to using a cold bath cure to get rid of stagflation was being proposed by people like Jeff Foe, who talked about the foreign necessities and the fact that inflation in the 70s was not macroeconomic, it was structural. You had structural sources of inflation and energy with the OPEC oil increase. You had structural sources of inflation and housing because people are putting money in housing as a shelter against inflation and in medicine because Medicare 10 years earlier with no controls on anything, pay whatever the doctor orders. That triggers inflation in health care and then you had several years of bad harvest so you have inflation in food prices. And so the proper cure for sectoral, structural inflation was not macroeconomic, but Volcker believed otherwise. And so the right wing, both the intellectual right wing and the political right wing, which had been completely discredited by events, by the crash of 1929, by the fact that government rescued a mixed economy and really created a mixed economy, the right gets another turn at bat. And they not only try to deregulate everything domestically, but they change the definition of what a trade deal is so that trade deals really are used as anti-regulation deals. And unlike the original international trade organization envisioned at Bretton Woods and actually a charter was written in 1947 at Havana, the original ITO had labor standards in it. The original ITO gave countries the right to discriminate against the exports of countries that didn't have social standards. But by the time we get to the WTO, we're back to more of a laissez-faire vision. And people who believe that there is a different way of running an economy get marginalized. Dick Gephart, who was only telling the truth in the 80s when he was talking about all the barriers to American exports, was vilified as a protectionist as if having policies to countervail other people's protectionism makes you a protectionist. And I think the whole protectionism free trade debate is completely misleading because the real issue is, how do you run a managed form of capitalism? And how does that intersect with international commerce? In 1944 at Bretton Woods, Keynes-White and Company had figured out a formula to do that. You restart normal commerce. You do not let international finance take down the whole system. By the 90s, financiers, multinational corporations are very deliberately using the new rules of globalization, hyper-globalization, to really dismantle the mixed economy. Thea, how much more time do I have? 10 more minutes, that's great. So the Democratic Party at this point ceases being a Roosevelt Party in many respects, still is a Roosevelt Party in some respects, but joins the globalist consensus. And there are a number of unforced errors, both under Clinton and under Obama. One unforced error that really split the Democratic Party was NAFTA. This was a brainchild of Wall Street and George H. W. Bush. Clinton comes in, and with the support of only about a third of the Democrats in the House, horses the thing through Congress, mostly with the support of Republicans in the House anyway. The other thing that Clinton embraced, which was completely gratuitous, was the idea that budget balance is a good in and of itself. And unfortunately, the Clinton Easters who went on to work for Barack Obama carried that view along with them, and I'm going to get to that story in a moment. So you have the center-left party embracing laissez-faire trade, and laissez-faire is a misnomer. Dean Baker has pointed this out, and he's right. It's not laissez-faire. It's privatization of rules. It's very much a rule-based economy, but it's rules written by and for private finance and private corporations, and that's what most of the trade deals since the Uruguay Round have been. Now, this is happening not just in the United States, and one of my favorite chapters in this book is a chapter called The Disgrace of the Center-left. Because meanwhile, Blair, who's prime minister in Britain, first labor prime minister since the Thatcher era, has really copied the Clinton playbook. He even calls the Labor Party New Labor, copied from the Clintonian New Democrats. And he really is at war with the trade unions. He keeps almost all of the Thatcher era constraints on unions, not without some reason. I mean, it was labor fractiousness in 1979, the so-called Winter of Discontent that really brought down the last labor government of James Callaghan. But there were people in the labor movement who believed in a continental kind of corporatism. And Blair did not trust them. John Monks, my friend, who was head of the TUC at the time, later became head of the ETUC or ITUC, great guy. And Blair, newly elected prime minister, pays a call on Monks. Monks tells this story. And goes to the office of the TUC. And there in the office of the TUC are portraits of past labor prime ministers. And Blair looks at Monks and says, you're not going to have my picture on that platter, meaning that the TUC, by being fractious, had destroyed previous labor governments in the view of Blair. And so Blair, I think, goes so far in accommodating to Thatcherism, makes the same kind of alliance with the city of London, the financial community, that Clinton, through Reuben, did with Wall Street, that when Margaret Thatcher retires and she's asked by a reporter, what do you think your greatest accomplishment was? She thinks for a minute, and she says, my greatest accomplishment was Tony Blair. And exactly the same thing is happening in Germany, where Gerrit Schroeder, the SPD chancellor, deregulates finance so that we get rid of the famous long termism of German finance and passes the Hartz reforms to introduce low wage labor to Germany. And the three stooges here really compare each other's playbooks. And Schroeder and Blair even publish a joint manifesto in a British edition and a German edition of sort of the Neue Mitte, the third way. And if you look at it now in retrospect, most of it is hogwash in terms of what it diagnoses as the problem and what it proposes as the remedy. So sooner or later comes the backlash. And I guess I'll close on this note, because this is what is so troubling and so reminiscent of the 1920s. Marx got some things right, he got some things wrong. One of the things he got very wrong is that when faced with a degradation of their livelihoods, workers of the world don't unite. Workers of the world look to their nations and ultra-nationalists and neo-fascists. And it took a while, I mean, we've really had 30 or 40 years of declining prospects for ordinary people. But for a while we got lucky. Bill Clinton draws as an opponent Bob Dole, who doesn't have a populist bone in his body. Barack Obama both times draws opponents who are the antithesis of populists. And so it takes a moment, and we've all thought about this ad nauseam, where you have a Democrat who's made a bunch of mistakes, one of which was getting into bed with Goldman Sachs and a lot of other mistakes. And you also have Trump as the ultimate pseudo-populist. There's a statistic in the book that is just devastating. In the election of 1996, if you look at counties that are at least 85% white and have incomes below the national median income, in the 96 election Clinton and Dole split those counties about evenly. In the 2016 election, Donald Trump carries, I think, 658, Hillary carries two. So we can talk about how much of this is race, how much of this is culture, how much of it is economics. Obviously, it's a witch's brew of all of the above. But I would argue that at the heart of this is an economic deterioration in the life chances and the conditions and the perceived status of ordinary working people, white people, but also it harms black people. And the genius or the evil genius of my friend Steve Bannon and of Donald Trump was to racialize grievances from the point of view of white people. So instead of blaming Wall Street, they're blaming others. They're blaming African-Americans. They're blaming Latinos. They're blaming immigrants. So if you'd imagine a Midwestern city that used to have a union meatpacking plant, and now it and a lot of other industries left town and your house is worthless because nobody wants to move there and your kids don't have opportunities and you're working at Walmart and the plant's been reopened. It's been reopened and the people who are working there are Latino immigrants and they're making eight bucks an hour. So, and they're taking over your town, they're in your schools, the bar that you used to go to is now a Latino bar. So who do you blame? Do you blame what you see in front of your nose or do you blame Bob Rubin? And I think too many people are inclined to blame what they see in front of their nose. And so the potential alliance of working class and middle class, black people, white people, Latinos, Asians, who could be on the same side if there were the right leadership and the right policy is sundered. And so in the last chapter of the book, mainly because my editor said, Bob, what are you gonna write as the last chapter? He could leave us with a little bit of hope. So I thought really hard and came up with some hope. You know, what if you had, this all starts in the World War II area. What if you had World War II without the war? What if you had a multi-trillion dollar infrastructure program, then you fund half of it with money we get from reversing the tax cut. You fund half of it with bonds that the Federal Reserve floats. If the Fed could spend $3 trillion bailing out Wall Street, it could spend $3 trillion buying bonds to rebuild infrastructure. And my God, if you take Amtrak to New York, you go through a museum of 19th century infrastructure. It's just astonishing. And if you go to Berlin and you look at the Hopanhof, what it's called, the Central Railway Station, you're about two centuries ahead of anything in the United States and these guys lost the war. So you need World War II without the war. It's a positive form of economic nationalism. You could even say it's a way to make America great again. So I think if our side doesn't seize a positive form of economic nationalism, which bridges racial divides, which offers something hopeful to workers, we are at dire risk of getting more and more Trump and people like Trump because the European story, which I haven't gone into in detail but I go into it in the book, is essentially the same story changing some particulars. So I actually feel hopeful. I feel hopeful because I think the blue wave is real. I think the activism on the part of young people, on the part of all shades of the rainbow is the most encouraging thing I've seen since the 60s. If you look at the average off-year election, the swing from Republic of the Democrat has been 21 or 22 points, meaning that the antipathy toward Trump is rubbing off on a lot of Trump's enablers in the Republican Congress. And I'm also optimistic because I think it's very likely that a progressive is the odds on favor to be the nominee because I think the Wall Street Democrats, there are too many of them. And maybe if we do a homework, they're gonna crowd each other out. So I think in the same way that you had to be an optimist when Britain was standing alone against Hitler to believe that this would come out okay, you have to be an optimist to believe that the current situation is gonna come out okay. But I do think there's a fighting chance that it will. And the fact that, and I'll close on this, the fact that we had an era that lasted for 30 years that house broke capitalism in the broad public interest shows that it's possible. It's not easy because the unsavory capital, tendencies of capitalism are huge, but it's possible. It takes leadership, it takes movements, it takes luck and maybe we'll get there. So thank you. Thanks, Bob. And now we hear from Jay Dion. I wanna thank Bob and thank API for having this event. It's good to be here. Before I begin, I just wanna say one of the reasons I'm here, which is not simply about this book which I wanna praise and also argue with a little bit, but about Bob and the life he's lived. I was thinking about this coming over here if you buy the book, which you all should. You will see all the list of Bob's books in the front and he has really spent his life developing an intellectual project that is designed to make our society more democratic and our economy more just. You'll see his very first book there, Revolt of the Haves. And if progressives have paid more attention to Bob's insights about the tax revolt many, many years ago, I think we'd be in a better place. But the other thing I wanna pay tribute to Bob for is a virtue that my Jesuit friend, David Hollenbach, described. In a room like this, we use the word solidarity a lot. David Hollenbach talked about intellectual solidarity. And I think it's very important to pay tribute to what Bob has done. First, a magazine, some people are old enough to remember working papers through a new society. And then with the American prospect. And the American prospect has brought people together who wanted to think about these problems. And when you think of the list of journalists out there whom we rely on now, I'll just name a few, as reclined Michelle Goldberg, Josh Green, Alexandra Gutierrez, Josh Marshall, John Chate, John Cohn, Kate Shepherd. These are all people who started early in their careers either working for or writing for the American prospect. And so we have a real debt to my friend Harold Myerson who is here somewhere. And to Bob Kuttner and Paul Starr, I think we should all sign a petition to accredit the Kuttner Starr School of Journalism in America or perhaps the Kuttner Starr School of Journalism and Justice in America. Because this has been a huge contribution to our country. I want to begin as is appropriate with a John Kenneth Galbraith quotation faced with a choice of changing one's mind, improving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof. And I think this book comes along at a time, after a period of time, sort of incited by the economic collapse, where a lot of people have had to rethink some of their assumptions that they held before in 2008. And so I think in principle, the world is more open to the argument Bob makes here and some of the arguments he's made than it was some years ago. I also appreciated his mention of Hitler's Germany. Now I'm very strongly of the view that you never analogize a person to Hitler until that person commits genocide against six million Jews and five million other people. But the circumstances that led to Hitler's rise to power, which include a total loss of nerve on the part of the German ruling class, but also economic policies that led to the demand for something radically different, even if it was that, should remind us of the dangers to democracy. So I salute Bob for focusing this book on democracy. A few weeks before a book came out, I ran into former Secretary of State, Mallon Albright, and she said, oh, I have a new book coming out. It's got a very subtle title. And I said, oh yeah, what's that? And she said, fascism, a warning. And that's the title of the book. And I don't think, I think we can have a nice historical argument about what's similar and what's different about our time in the 1930s. But I think all of us sense, and I think this is true of some of our responsible friends on the right, all of us sense that democracy faces dangers that it hasn't faced before. So this is the right conversation to be having. First thing I wanna do is, because I want you all to buy this book, is to focus on a few things, Bob says, that I think we should take away from this book and think about and act on. He says early on, to the extent that democracy requires a taming of the market, globalization weakens that endeavor. Today, globalization undermines national regulatory authority. It tends to alter the political distribution of power domestically and to increase the influence of elites who favor more or less a fair and more globalization. So the process feeds on itself. I don't care where people stand on the rest of Bob's book, I just think that is a reality that everyone in politics needs to come to terms with. Related to that, he said, he writes, one key avenue of democratic decay was financial, campaign money increasingly crowded out, civic participation, creating a vicious cycle that granted the wealthy and their corporate allies increasing influence and energy and left ordinary voters cynical and disconnected. And then he notes that in 2010, the right wing Supreme Court supercharged the trend in Citizens United. I would only add to that that they also issued a ruling gutting the Voting Rights Act. So you actually had a Supreme Court of the United States strengthening power at the top, weakening power at the bottom of our society simultaneously. We need to take that into account. I have recently written a book with my friends, Norm Ornstein and Tom Mann, and we are very concerned, all of us have been about the fact that polarization in our country is asymmetric, our Republicans move much farther to the right than Democrats have moved to the left. And people in this room would certainly testify to that whenever someone criticized Barack Obama as a socialist, I would always say, I know socialists, they're insulted when they hear that. And Bob writes, so the true gridlock of Washington was extreme Republican hardball, so the true gridlock of Washington was extreme Republican hardball, and they take no prisoner's approach to politics since Democrats represent the proposition that affirmative government is needed to serve the people. This was a double setback for them and a win for Republican ideology that government is a waste of money because the process denied Democrats the successes where they could prove that, and I wanna get back to that. And then I'll just go to one other line, two other lines. He quotes the economist Danny Roderick, whom many of us admire, democracies have the right to protect their social arrangements, and when this right clashes with the requirements of the global economy, it is the latter that should give way. I could have a big conversation about the word nationalism. I have a certain aversion to it. I prefer the word patriotism. Some people say that's simply a semantic issue. I'd argue there may be other things underneath that, but I very much agree that if we, on the progressive side, do not stand up for the idea that yes, we believe passionately that democratic governments should be able to influence the shape of their societies. If we sort of give all of that power up to the global market, then we really will endanger our democracies fundamentally. And then there is the heart of cutleryism right at the end of the book. He writes, a history shows that a mixed economy works better than either a command economy or an unregulated market. The challenge is for public institutions to be as resilient as commercial ones and to mobilize the latent power of popular democracy to keep finance in its proper place as servant of the rest of the economy. And I like this sentence. This is difficult, but not impossible. And that's really what the book is about. So I just wanna say a few things that are, it's, I'll take a bit of issue with a few things in the book, but really they are designed in the spirit of intellectual solidarity because I think we do share, if I can call it that a common social democratic vision. I think we have to grapple not only with failures on the left, but also with the decline of a socially oriented democratic right. The mixed economy that Bob so rightly praises is in Europe, the result of an alliance and healthy competition between social democracy and Christian democracy. In the Anglo-Saxon countries, it's the product of a New Deal inflected right, a right that came to terms with the New Deal, at least for a while, politicians, and also with the damage of the Great Depression. So politicians like Dwight Eisenhower and Harold MacMillan in Britain represented a very different kind of right. And of course here, this shared view of the social obligations of government is what allowed us to build a very successful and fairer economy in the post-war period up to about 1973. Bob critiques the left. I think we really need an understanding of why the right at the moment mostly offers a choice between either a radical market orientation or extreme nationalism, neither of which is very appealing. Without going into detail, I think we really do have to talk about the declining social base for social democracy and the fragmentation of the left that we are seeing really all over the democratic world. These are, there are big forces at work in this. And I don't think we can simply replicate the social democratic model that works so well for a significant period of time. I worry about the increasingly elastic meaning of the word neo-liberalism. And this is probably why Bob has a somewhat harsher view of Hillary Clinton and her campaign than I do. I very much agree with him that the Clinton campaign failed to understand the urgency of class that she did not package her economic program in an effective way. I wish she hadn't given those paid speeches. I also think there are other factors that helped elect Donald Trump, some of which are being investigated by Mr. Mueller and some of which Mr. Comey has had to explain in recent days. So there is certainly a critique to be made of that campaign. But I would maintain that it was, her program was indeed a broadly progressive program that in fact reflected a certain amount of social, of learning since the great crash. I think Hillary Clinton of 2016 was actually to the left of Hillary Clinton earlier on. It's always been rumored actually that she was a NAFTA skeptic, as you know. And I'd maintain that if her program had been enacted, it would have left workers of all races better off and that as I say, it reflected this general shift to the left. We have to deal with the simple fact that the global economy has added about a billion to two billion workers to the global workforce. I think that is a very difficult problem for us all to deal with. The global economy hurts the least advantaged workers in the wealthiest economies. And that is, I think they carry one of the biggest loads from globalization. We've got to deal with that. One other point, two other quick points. Guy Molano, a friend to many of ours, wrote a great piece for the American prospect called Mapping the White Working Class. He made an essential point which is just as other social groups are not a monolith, neither is the White Working Class. It's sort of about half conservative, many of those conservatives Southern whites were voting as along racial lines. About 15% are liberal, they vote reliably democratic, but 30%, 5% occupy a center, if you will, or a middle position. They tend to agree with progressive and democratic proposals, but they are very skeptical of government's capacity to carry them out. And I think progressives, and Bob alludes to this in the book, but I think progressives need to do a lot of work in this area. Bob Reich wrote many years ago that government after the Great Depression and World War II really was held in quite high esteem by the American people. The government helped get us out of the depression at one of war. Since 1970, since Vietnam and Watergate, we have never recovered, government has never recovered its standing. And lastly, I'll just mention the word immigration. Even in wealthy economies, immigration has created a rise, even in relatively egalitarian economies compared to ours. Immigration has been an extraordinary issue. But I wanna close with one of Bob's heroes, and he is in this book at several key moments, Carl Polanyi. Carl Polanyi wrote, to allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings in their natural environment would result in the demolition of society. Polanyi was right about this, Bob is right about this. And I think we can be grateful that he is pushing us all hard to face up to the dangers confronting democracy while we still have the opportunity to save it and advance it. Thank you very much. Thank you, E.J. Thank you, E.J. And now we'll hear from Bill Spriggs. And there's a couple of seats up front. There's three seats up front. If anybody in the back wants to move on up. Thank you, and thank you for having me. I'm gonna begin like E.J. When I came to Washington, it was to come here to the Economic Policy Institute. Larry Michelle was then the director of research. Larry and I had been office mates all during graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And he takes responsibility for stopping my commuter marriage and therefore my son, who's 23. So, and you can do the clock and the math and that all works out. But I think it was the third day I was here or the fourth day I was here. Anyway, it was the first week I was here. Bob was engaged in a debate and I was still trying to figure out where the bathrooms were. So he says, come, we're gonna go to this debate and he was doing the debate. That was my quick introduction to Bob. So again, we've been friends over 25 years. So I love his work and to reiterate by the book. To understand why Bob may have had a difficult time writing the final chapter, I'm gonna highlight the cause for pessimism. Bob spends a lot of time in the book explaining international finance and international financial regimes. And he explains why they are at the core of what we're experiencing. They are essential to understand why nation states can't just suddenly revolt against this framework. And we experienced that not here in the US as much as we saw in Europe with Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and others as they struggled with this new global financial order and still have failed to restore prosperity and the result has been a very right-wing fascist government in Hungary that continues to grow in strength and we have other countries that are on the same verge. The reason for the pessimism and the difficulty in my view of how do you write this last chapter that he struggled with is precisely that. When Trump won, one of my jobs at the AFL-CIO is to participate in meetings with the OECD which Bob goes through giving people an explanation of what the OECD does. But constantly their fear of Trump winning was all about Trump's stance on international finance and free trade. And I would say to them, so you understand he's anti-Semitic, he's racist, he's a xenophobe, he's a misogynist, he's not mentally stable when he controls a nuclear arsenal bigger than anything in the world. And you're concerned because you're nervous about him on trade, but that is their fear. And constantly these nations that have people who are suffering, who still want a recovery, have in their minds, it has nothing to do with globalism, it has nothing to do with financial machinations, it has nothing to do with this new order that we have. And they don't even seem to want the power to reign them in. It's not like, oh gee, we wish we could or can't we engage in a conversation where we can. So I'm pessimistic because the book points out how central this is and how essential it is to what made the recovery of the post-war era possible. And I think many of us on the left tend to ignore that. And I think his book is vital for getting you back to, no, you needed the ability to run inflation so that you could have full employment and it was possible to have inflation so that you could reduce debts during certain periods when inflation would run unexpectedly high. This is necessary. And the current situation, it's not just the US that wishes to defend this. So again, for a US president to come along and try and transform it, it's gonna be a very difficult path and it will be necessary to get the order that we need back in place. So I think the order is pretty tall and you should read his book so you can get the details because I think so many of us kind of glossed past how important low interest rates, inflation and this commitment to nation-states being able to run their economies at full employment was to what made the post-war era possible. Now, to get the conversation going, I'm not quite as optimistic as he is on what the final solution is for several reasons. One, I think the book touches on and mentions that yeah, you have this problem with racism in the US but it is a far deeper problem. And it is the hope of those of us on the left that this isn't true, but unfortunately it is. And in the US, it isn't just racism but it is that in the US racism is deeply tied to what caused our civil war and that is two different views of what is democracy. Is democracy the landed gentry and a government that serves the oligarchs and leaves everybody else alone? Or is it truly a democracy? And of course, Lincoln gave his famous Gettysburg address to say no, we're fighting this war because it has to be government of the people, by the people and for the people. Unfortunately, not all Americans believe this. So consequently, racism in the US is deeply tied to this distrust in true democracy. It actually allies itself with this oligarch view. And it is hard to disentangle attacks against workers and attacks against blacks for this very reason. So when you look at the fight that's going on in Virginia right now over extending Medicaid, this is in the Senate of Virginia where only one Republican state senator is in favor of expanding Medicaid. They are from Northern Virginia. The counties that would benefit the most, the districts that would actually get 13,000, 12,000 people Medicaid that would shore up the hospitals in their district that would guarantee that those jobs at those hospitals would be stable are Republicans in districts that are mostly white. But their mentality is so tied to this view that they elect people. This isn't the Democrats in the national level. This isn't about Goldman Sachs. This is about, is the state gonna take my side? And extend Medicaid to me and to my county? And the answer is no. And I'm gonna elect this person forever. It was denying me access to medical insurance. The tragedy in the Roosevelt resolution that people don't really follow. Yes, when we did the New Deal, everybody recognizes, yes, we know it excluded blacks, blacks voted for it anyway because blacks born in the North were able to get enough education that they could get good union jobs and they actually benefited. And it created a black middle class in the upper Midwest, which was the black middle class for the longest. But what you don't get is this. So it is true that by excluding agricultural workers in domestics, that was the bulk of the black workforce. It is not true that blacks were the bulk of agricultural and domestic workers. The bulk of agricultural and domestic workers were white. Now, those whites were the minority of whites. What the New Deal was was, we will screw these white people because we wanna get at those black people. So the bulk of people who got hurt were white. All black people got hurt. But a lot of white people had to get hurt in the process. This is a real challenge because it means that people you think ought to vote a certain way really do have a different ideology. The challenge that we're trying to get over at the AFL-CIO is too many progressives now want to say, oh, well, we need to move away from identity politics. But when the majority of the workforce are people of color, it's not identity politics. And it actually divides the classes to identify things that way. So when we say mass incarceration is a worker issue, it is a worker issue. It's not identity politics. It's not black people. They're not locking up people from Goldman Sachs. When they mean mass incarceration, they mean workers. Now, they happen to be black disproportionately, but get straight, they mean workers. When we say police are gonna shoot somebody, Eric Garner was choked to death because he was claimed to have evaded cigarette taxes. He was choked to death because we must have order. We cannot have people evading taxes. He evaded maybe $15 in cigarette tax. They're not going onto Wall Street and choking to death those hedge fund operators, and they're not cheating us out of $15. So it's getting workers to understand, no, these are worker issues. You can't take them apart. You can't call that identity politics. That's workers politics. Ferguson involved the murder of the son of a UFCW member. What President Trumpka did, Trumpka did when he talked to St. Louis was to explain to white workers in St. Louis, you understand this is the son of a union member that just got shot. You represent people like this. You can't separate them. It's not okay to shoot workers, period, full stop. We can't get into its identity politics because black workers raise the issue. We all have to raise the issue. It's not okay to shoot workers. It's not okay to lock us up. It's not okay to deny us the right to vote. So it's gonna take a bigger vision, but that's a difficult vision to sell and it's gonna be a more difficult vision to sell when we have someone who is selling to people if we're in a zero-sum game, which is what globalism has done. It has turned our economy into a zero-sum game. In a zero-sum game, then that means somebody has to lose. And we have to come to the reality that an assertion of white privilege works in that setting because I'm choosing somebody else to lose. That's a viable answer. And we have to have a stronger way of talking to them. I gotta close. Let me say just one little thing. The left has lost its soul is my final thing. A reason why I believe there is this extra hold is a religious reason, again, terminology. We talk about the Christian right and as everybody has said before, they're not Christian and they're not right. They actually are secularists. Their faith is in the invisible hand. They worship the invisible hand. That is their God. That is why they can deny people Medicaid because they are feeding the invisible hand and the great job creator. This is their religion. We should call them out on it. They are secular. We have embraced this sense of secularism. They are morally wrong. They are morally bankrupt. And we need to assert our faith. We need to assert our sense of faith. There is a moral correctness and a moral incorrectness. They are morally bankrupt. And we need to not give them a free ride. They don't deserve it. Thank you so much, Bill and E.J. and Bob. Bob, I'm just gonna give you a couple of minutes if you wanted to respond to some of the things that are on the table from E.J. and Bill. And then we'll go to the audience for Q and A. I think what Bill has reminded us of, among many other things, is the absolute centrality of a labor movement because when the labor movement was 30-something percent of American workers, you had a venue where black workers, white workers, Latino workers could come together with a class understanding of what afflicts America. And when you have private sector unionism, 6. something percent, you are denying working people the chance to have that venue where affinities of class, affinities of being taken advantage of by Wall Street can be narrated, can be understood, can be lived so that you don't end up with racial scapegoats. And that, by the way, even though it took until the 70s to undo much of the new deal, that really begins with Taft-Hartley in 1947. And labor movement has had a long half-life, but the attack on labor is a big part of the attack on a form of just mixed economy. I'll say to E.J., one other thing, the moments when we have made racial progress in this country have required two things, great leaders and great social movements. And it also helps if you have something close to full employment, so that it's less of a zero-sum game. That's why we made progress in the 60s. In the case of Lincoln, it was the abolitionist movement combined with the leadership of Lincoln. So a big part of whether I am proved to be a fool in my optimism depends on whether we get a rendezvous of a social movement and a leader going into the next two and a half years. Now, E.J., yes, the collapse of the moderate right, crucial part of the story. In the book, I talk about how the European welfare state, with the exception of the UK, was built by Christian Democrats. Now, you had communist labor movements, labor unions and socialist labor movements pushing on those governments, and you had the threat of the Cold War, so it was complicated. But the leadership, the government leadership that helped define the post-war global social contract were Christian Democrats. And of course, the same thing in the U.S. You used to actually have, not just moderate Republicans, but liberal Republicans who basically accepted the new deal and wanted to tweak it around the edges. Now, on neoliberalism, we could spend all day. Neoliberalism has a very simple meaning. I can do it in one sentence. It means the verities of the free market were accurate after all. That's all that it means. And you have various politicians in various countries acting in that spirit. And there's a complete contradiction between the acceptance of the fact, domestically, that you gotta have some financial regulation or you're gonna have panics and depressions. And you have to have some environmental regulation or you're gonna pollute your entire earth. And yet somehow, oh, and you gotta have public support for education because the market misprices education and misprices R&D and misprices a whole bunch of other things. But somehow, when commerce crosses borders, the free market becomes perfectly efficient after all. How in the hell does that work? It's a complete case of cognitive dissonance on the part of elites. And when the center left is oblivious to the negative effects of free trade, which basically means no regulation once commerce crosses borders. On regular people, Trump seizes the vacuum, which is why it's incumbent on us to define a progressive form. Let's call it patriotism. Let's call it mixed economy that looks at some kind of buffer between a global system where you have two billion new workers with no social standards, whatever. And as per Danny Roderick, the social standards that we fought for 100 years to define and protect in the United States. Okay, great. On that note, let's open it up to Q&A. There are mics out there. Please wait for the mic and please state your name and your organization if you have one and keep it nice and concise so we can get more, we can hear from more folks. Chancellor Volo, our revolution, Northern Virginia. My question involves a question about optimism and the possibility of a solution from the standpoint of the Democratic Party. As everybody knows, there is a fight within the party around bank deregulation. This involves Glass-Steagall and the recent vote on the Dodd-Frank rollback to further deregulate Wall Street. Where 14 Democrats allowed it to pass by supporting the Republicans. My question is, is that unless we free the Democratic Party from Wall Street, as you indicated, we are not gonna be the party of Franklin Roosevelt. Democratic Party is not that party right now. And we are at a crossroads. Like 1933, I will also make the argument about 1968. We know what happened then and I would like you to address your support for Glass-Steagall and for what you think about Senate Bill 2155. Thank you. Well, first of all, I endorse everything you said and the real travesty of Democrats from states that are allegedly purple or more conservative, thinking that you attract the affection of ordinary working people by defending Wall Street is just insane. Now, maybe you need to have views that would not be popular in this room on guns. And maybe you need to say, well, if you're attacking Nancy Pelosi, I'm not gonna vote for her speaker. Maybe you need to do some things like Connor Lamb did that we would not applaud, but being in bed with Wall Street is not one of them. And just a short personal anecdote, I spent three years as chief investigator for the Senate Banking Committee in the mid-70s. And by the mid-70s, my hero, Senator Proxmire, my boss, my immediate boss, Ken McLean, the staff director, they were already in favor of punching big holes in Glass-Steagall. That's the mid-70s. And I was the only guy on the senior staff who said, you know, I really don't think this is a good idea. So I have been passionate about Glass-Steagall, about tough banking regulation, as long as I've been involved with the issue. So thank you for the question. Thanks. Back there. My name is David Jimenez. My question for you, Robert, is I guess in more of a European context. In terms of going from here, would you kind of recommend, as the European Left approaches, the question of integration, should they kind of go the route embraced by Janus Verifakis that says, for better or worse, you know, the nation-state is pretty much over, so let's embrace kind of pan-European social democratic movements, really embrace federalism head-on, or those, I guess, Mel and Sean, more left-wing supporters of Brexit who would say, we kind of have to return to the nation-state and try to embrace as much as we can kind of social democracy in a more limited, sovereign-to-context. It's a very good question. Friedrich Hayek, in 1939, explained why he was for European Federation. And he basically, I'm paraphrasing, but only slightly, he said, well, if you have European Federation, neither the Federation nor the nation-state will be able to regulate capitalism. And since the Maastricht Treaty, the EU has been used as an engine to defeat the ability to regulate capital, to regulate labor, the four principles, the four pillars of Maastricht, are a completely free movement of capital, goods, services, and persons, which was, by the way, rather risky. I mean, if you look at the Brexit backlash, it's not a backlash against Jamaicans. It's a backlash against Hungarians and Poles. And so this was, they attempted too much too soon. Verifakis is very provocative. I think he's wrong on this. I think taking back some power for the nation-state, so the nation-state can regulate capitalism again, which was the bargain of the early post-war era, that's the way I would go. I think expanding the euro to whatever it's up to now, 18 or 19 countries, I think that was a mistake. I think Greece would be much better off if it quit the euro, because the euro has become, combined with the austerity policies of Mrs. Merkel, the euro has become a straitjacket. And I wanna come back to my last chapter again. Europe is so fragmented and so captured by austerity mongers that if we're going to reverse this at all, the reversal needs to start in the United States, with a progressive Democrat who sounds like Bill Spriggs, who can talk to black and white and Latino and other working people and point out how they are getting a common screwing by the people who run the country. And we hear some of that in Bernie, we hear some of it in Elizabeth Warren, it's Sherrod Brown, it's a possible politics. I don't see how, even though Corbin is kind of the interesting outlier, the European left-left, as opposed to the Tony Blair or Garrett Schroeder left, is so divided, so weakened now. I don't see how this starts in Europe, at least in America, there's the possibility of electing a radical progressive. What you invited me in, so I will accept the invitation. I'm pressing the wrong button here. I am of the view that busting Europe entirely would be a catastrophe and that the strategy of trying to create a social Europe again, the euro is a real problem. It was entered into early on, Gordon Brown should have made more of the fact that he chose not to go into the euro and had good reason for it. But I think busting up Europe would create far more problems and that pooled sovereignty. I know Macron is not a popular figure in this room, but I think he made a very powerful case in passing before Congress that the only way nation states can actually get a handle on the global economy is through actions taken in common. That's what Europe is supposed to do. I just wanna, can I underscore a couple of points Bill made. First, I'm grateful for your shout out to religion because I really do, I've always thought that if Hillary Clinton had talked more about her Methodist background and how much that meant to her, it might have made a difference in the election, partly because it was one of the most important authentic pieces of who she was and she could do it well. She did it well in South Carolina and that's because as somebody on the campaign explained to me, she spent a lot of time in African American churches and go back and look, I think one of her best speeches was her victory speech out of South Carolina. Second on race, also we have Pope Francis, by the way, who is laying out very much a Bill Sprig's critique. I wanna underscore also what Bill said about race and what it actually means in electoral terms. I agree with Bob that everything that happens on race happens in an economic context and that it is clearly the case that when everyone is doing well, it is easier to make progress. It's no accident that we got the civil rights bills and the civil rights and voting rights bills in 64 and 65. Understanding the role of race with Trump, I think is something that we really have to struggle with. Bill, by the way, is absolutely right about the New Deal, our friend, the friend of many of ours, Ira Katz Nelson who's blurb this book, wrote a book called When Affirmative Action Was White, which was about the racial exclusions in the New Deal. And I think the idea that Democrats need to, or progressives just need to abandon identity politics and all will be well, that doesn't work on a number level. One is the very words, white working class are a form of identity politics. Second, the working class itself, as both Bill and Bob pointed out, is heavily African-American and Latino. And thirdly, this would mean progressives walking away from some of their deepest commitments. On the other hand, what I do think is correct is that it is immoral for progressives to walk away from the white working class that is struggling, that faces very serious problems. And politically, I think we have to be very realistic about what has been done and can be done, one of my favorite pieces of data. And I just, I take Wisconsin as an example. Barack Obama got 45% of the non-college white vote in Wisconsin in 2016. Hillary Clinton got 34%. What we are talking about is a shift within the white working class of about 10 or 15 points in key states. And this is where I agree with Bob that we need a politics of class that talks about what has happened in communities like Redding or Erie, Pennsylvania, which is exactly what Bill Wilson, somebody so many of us admire, described in his book When Work Disappears, it happened to the inner city earlier on. But we cannot walk away from the progressive commitments that the progressive commitments to racial equality, gender equality, or LGBT equality. We've got to figure out how to bring these together in a far more effective way than we have in the past. Do you have anything to add right there? Actually, I wanted to add something on Europe. And that is to remind us that, I mean, this new discussion that's taking place is how do you have shared risk? And my interpretation of the downfall is that the Europeans did not agree to a unified safety net. And therefore you had nation states have to absorb all the downside risk. And Germany wants to walk away from that and assume nothing when it comes to the downside risk for other nations of their huge surplus within the Union. And precisely Bob's point, the only solution is for those nations to adjust their relative wages since they can't adjust their currency. So you have the downward pressure against wages and therefore against labor movements weakening democracy in Greece, Portugal, and Spain. And Italy can't form a government. It is interesting that they don't have the political on Germany to do it the reverse. Because you could also solve this problem by just paying Germans a lot more money. And it's fascinating that the way of balancing this out was not, or the Germans should get twice as much money. And that didn't happen. So I think this new move is necessary. The forces that want to break up the nations are exactly what E.J. was alluding to. They are the bad nationalists. And again, a shout out to what Bob has done. We tend not to want to say fascist because it means that you're talking about Mussolini and Hitler. But in that we don't warn ourselves sufficiently of how do you get there? And you wake up one morning and suddenly you're there. And then it's too late. So I think walking a thin line, we nonetheless have to do that. I hate in Europe that they keep calling people populist. Trump is not a populist. Right. Okay, we have about 10 minutes. I saw three hands. So they're there and they already had their hands up. So let me take all three. I'm gonna take all three, bundle it, be quick, and then we'll get some quick answers. Thanks. Okay, thanks. Jesse Lovell from DC for Democracy. I wanted to get all of your thoughts sort of on, you know, we know there's some major differences around a lot of banking regulations, some of these big structural changes within the National Democratic Party. How much of this do you think is gonna have to be done at the states? Because when you talk about inter-country commerce, I mean, I think of inter-state commerce, and I think of such radical differences in different states, you know, things like, you know, usury laws, things like paid leave, major things. How much of this do you really think there's gonna have to be a big state push to actually get a national push? And then right here, yes. Yeah, I was just looking, the hands that have been up for a while. The question that sort of- Identify yourself. Oh, my name's Randy Ihara. I'm with Our Revolution, Northern Virginia. And the question I have has to be, which has been sort of begged up to this point, I think, is what are the prospects for the Democratic Party becoming a vehicle for bringing this change? I've been a Democrat since 68, when I got clean for Jean, and it's been a fight ever since then. And so do you see any prospects for moving the Democratic Party in the right direction? Or are we kidding ourselves that the inside, outside strategy is futile and we need to do something else? Okay, thanks. And Pat, up here, thanks. Yeah, I'm a Pat Maloy, I'm a trade lawyer, but I had good fortune like Bob did to work for Senator Proxmire and Ken McClain. When I was on the staff of the Senate Banking Committee in the 80s, early 80s, we saw the movement from stakeholder to shareholder capitalism. And I think this corporate government, and this is an issue that Ralph Comrie always talked about, the corporation's interests have diverged from the national interest, well outsourced anything in order to increase their profits and the CEOs. Secondly, the thing that happened, Congress tried to protect itself from money. They passed laws to limit campaign contributions and the Supreme Court overturned those efforts in Buckley v. Vallejo and said money is speech. I think dealing with corporate governance and dealing with that money in politics has to be part of any progressive reform. And I just wanted to offer those thoughts and what you thought of them. We're gonna take those three and see what time we have left. You wanna let Bob close or open? Well, whatever you prefer. I think it would be better for the book because you can do a real appeal for people to buy the book. E.J., Bill, and then Bob. And we've got three good questions on how much happens at the state level? Can the Democratic Party be the vehicle? And how do we deal with corporate governance and campaign finance? Louis Brandeis, when he talked about laboratories and democracy, was not thinking of Southern states' rights. He was thinking of states taking progressive action on the whole. And so I think it's entirely the case and it's happening right now that states can take us some distance toward reform and states can also model reforms that can be adopted nationally. The great progressive states from, and also popular states created models that were later picked up nationally. But for the same reasons, I think busting up Europe would not work for progressives. I also think that there are certain issues that can only be dealt with on the national level. We would not want Social Security to become a state program. We don't want Medicaid to be block-branded and so on, there are a lot of reasons for that. So yes, to state experimentation, yes to acting where the federal government is not acting, California is doing a lot of that, but it is not, I think, an alternative in many spheres to national action when you have a national and global market. On the Democratic Party, I think that we have to face the fact that electoral victories on the left side of politics are won largely by coalitions of voters in the center and on the left. The left, all by itself, does not have a majority in the country. And that's why the Conor Lamb race is interesting. He was better on guns, by the way, than the Republicans portrayed. And the Republicans were against him until the day after when they said, actually, he's a conservative, but he wasn't a conservative. He was a labor Democrat. And I think that there is, the Democratic Party has been, since the New Deal, the vehicle for progressive reform. And there have been battles in Democratic Party. I wish those 14 senators had not voted the way they did on banking, on getting rid of those banking regulations. But I see no alternative, and I see a particular problem in this election because I think there is just an absolute obligation to put some kind of check on Donald Trump. And I think that if there were, I mean, a center left is really good at sectarianism if there were ever a time to avoid beating each other's brains in. It strikes me, it is this one. We can have, in a less dangerous time, we can beat each other's brains in all over again and enjoy it. And the last question was- Corporate governance. Corporate governance. Stakeholders versus shareholders. No, I just agree with your need on democratization. What strikes me on that question, in our book, actually, we write a lot about this stakeholder shareholder problem. My friend, Steve Perlstein, who is a very pro-capitalist guy, he's been a friend of the market. He probably had arguments with Bob over the years. Has a new book coming out that and has also written about this. He's been very tough on shareholder value as the sole judge of corporate behavior. And it just strikes me that, you know, Steve is saying a bunch of things that I think Bob Cutner would agree with and I think that suggests possibility of learning. And I can't resist saying this just to be provocative. If I have to pick a Goldman Sachs banker, I still pick Bob Rubin over Steve Bannon. But you don't have to make that choice. I was waiting for that, Bob, but I- Thank you for the high-hanging curse. It was when you said my friend Steve Bannon. I knew there was something arch about it, but I couldn't resist. I think progressives have to lose their fetish with state and local things. It's wonderful that in some states you can do these progressive things. Not in his book, but probably needed to be, were like two or three chapters on the 1873 crisis, which was the Great Depression before the Great Depression. And the response in the U.S. was different because what that led to was the great compromise of 1876 and the withdrawal of the federal troops from the South. The last time the South ever did anything progressive. So it should serve to us as a forever warning that these states will be those states forever. And progressives have to get used to, you have to rein that in. The growth of non-union manufacturing has been like to edge up a little bit. All of the loss of manufacturing in the U.S. has been union manufacturing. And why? Because those plants are in the South. You can't easily dismiss the problem of having the South in this equation of why we can't get progressive forces and why some workers don't like unions because in their minds we lost auto jobs in Michigan to Mississippi because of the UAW. That's in their mind, that's what they think. So I think we have to lose the fetishism. On our Democrats' disappointing yes, but I warned people last time, there really are lessers of two evils and the world moves sometimes on that. Politics is path dependent. We made a huge mistake in the United States putting this idiot in the White House. He must be resoundingly sent a message and the Republican Party has to be sent a message that punishes them for that. And their acquiescence to him is the danger that can tip the path that the United States takes unless they are sent a resounding message. No. Then you're gonna have to live with politicians voting for banking deregulation. Again, because in the minds of the racist oligarchy, that vote, even if I'm working class, is a vote for business, which those voters perceive as good. So even though you and I can go, why are you for hedge funds? And their minds, that's the way the world works. So you're gonna have to deal with politicians who are gonna go that way until you punish, absolutely punish them for what they just did. And we say corporations are citizens, but there is nowhere in the Constitution a definition of a corporate citizen. A human being is a citizen for being born in the United States. Corporations are not physical beings. They are not born in the United States. We need legislation that says, what is a citizen when it comes to a non-human? If you're gonna assert that they have the rights of human beings, then we have to assert, well, what does that mean? If you tell me 90% of my revenue comes from Ireland, I'm sorry, you look Irish to me. And if Ireland is getting 90% of your taxes, you're Irish. And so we need legislation that says what makes them American in the polity. And we gotta get serious about that. Further, unions, if we collect dues and we spend it on politics, we have to have the approval of that union member. Corporations spend millions of dollars lobbying. They don't ask any of us, many of us are stakeholders in those corporations. Nobody says, do you want your money spent on this lobbying? They have to ask for my permission to lobby, just like unions have to get the permission of their members to lobby. So we need to pull them in line and they have to operate by the same rules. And that has to be the other part of it. I just have to share because of what Bill said on lesser evil politics, there is one great line on this. It came from Barney Frank. And Barney Frank said, the only candidate I ever voted for without any qualms was myself the first time I ran. And then he went on to say, when I ran for reelection, I decided I had done some things wrong, but I decided to vote for myself again. Who said, I'll believe that corporations are people when one goes to jail? States. I think a lot of the really good organizing that's going on is going on at the state level, Virginia being an obvious case. The progressive governing coalitions in LA and the New York City are the result of a ton of organizing. So it's healthy that a lot of stuff that's happening is bottom up and there are some issues that operate at the state level. The fact that California is a whole other country is a tribute to a lot of organizing, a lot of progressive politics at the state level. And that said, the big issues need to be decided by national policy in part and substantial part because of racism. That's why it took the federal government to enact civil rights laws because the states that most needed them were run by, as Bill says, racial oligarchs and we're never gonna pass anti-lynching laws or any other kind of civil rights laws. On the Democratic Party, whenever somebody says, are you for a third party? I always respond that I'd be for a second party. And the way to get a second party back is to take it over, very simple. And so if you get a working majority in Congress and you get a progressive president, you can do really amazing stuff. Look what Roosevelt did, look what Johnson did before he destroyed it all with a war. He would have been comparable to Roosevelt had he gone the other way on the war. And so we in this room could devise a whole progressive set of policies on corporate governance, on money and politics, on full employment, on infrastructure, you name it. If we just had a progressive president and a working majority, it's the politics that's hard. Yeah, I mean, you just put EPI in charge. EPI would figure out the economics, everything from corporate governance to banking regulation to labor law and the rest of it. And so that's why I think of myself as a political economist and not an economist. Because so much of what the economy boils down to is really about politics. It's about who makes the rules. Before Donald Trump said the rules are rigged, Elizabeth Warren said the rules are rigged. And that speaks to the lived experience of regular people. Regular people know the rules are rigged. And progressive leaders like Bernie or Elizabeth Warren or Sherrod Brown know how to narrate that story in terms of the real lived experience of ordinary people. And I thank you, E.J., for the prompt to plug the book. You know, we all read when we studied history that Roosevelt took the country off the gold standard so that he could pursue domestic recovery. That's what we got to do again. Trade policy, trade as a supposed good is secondary to rebuilding your own country. And to take a cue from E.J. again, if we want to call that patriotism rather than economic nationalism, that's great. The way you defeat bananism is to have a version of progressivism that talks about making the country great. And that's what we have to do and buy the book. Thank you. Well, thank you so much, Bob, E.J. and Bill, for your deep and far-reaching conversation. As you can see, we just barely scratched the surface in an hour and a half, so you do need to go buy the book, which is for sale out there. We've also, please join us for lunch. And hopefully Bob, E.J. and Bill can stick around to answer some of your questions. I'm sorry we didn't get to all of them. But thanks again. Thanks for joining us. And please give another round of applause to our great panelists. Thank you, E.J. You're welcome.