 Richard, thank you for joining us. I was wondering if you could set the historical context for this social revolt that we are seeing. Okay, let me focus on what I know best, and I'm sure others will have other dimensions that they know better and that they can help us with. You're quite right. This has been building for a very long time, to put it in the broadest historical perspective. One of the most remarkable things about the United States was that from around 1820 to roughly the 1970s, every decade shows a rising level of real wages, that is, the average real wage, what you could afford to buy with whatever money wage you got, went up. Even across the Great Depression, it went up because the wages dropping in dollars were more than matched by the prices of what they had to buy dropping even further. So you've developed in the United States over those 150 years a peculiar mentality, peculiar in the sense that no other capitalist country was able to assemble that kind of record. So Americans began to think that they were exceptional, that God liked them better than everybody else because he was giving them such a wonderful run, that capitalism was a very nice system because their real wages were rising, and finally that it was somehow built into the United States, that every generation would live better than the one before. And if you worked hard and went to school, well, by golly, you will live better than your parents. All of that ended in the 1970s, which is why your use of numbers like 40 or 50 years is actually quite historically appropriate. The last 40 or 50 years have been the time when real wages stopped rising. Now this was not discussed in the United States. The vast majority of people had no idea, and I'm including here politicians, journalists, and academicians. The numbers were there, but they didn't get the attention. And so all that happened was that the mass of the American working class began to notice the obvious, which is their wages weren't going up. Their standard of living wasn't going up. And in the good tradition of individualism, they mostly blamed themselves as if it was an individual problem and not the economy or the society. And so the working class did two things in America. Number one, if you can't get more dollars per hour in real wage, well, then do more hours. And everybody with one job got a second job. And if the members of the household hadn't been working for pay, they were now pressed to do so, creating, for the first time in American history, that spectacular movement of adult white women out of the house and into the paid labor force, because there was no other way for the so-called American dream to be realized, given that real wages were going nowhere. Just a footnote, they have gone nowhere in the last 50 years. Real wages today are not much different from what they were in the late 1970s. The extra work didn't solve the problem. Pushing women out into the labor force didn't solve the problem. So the American working class did the second private individual action to try to cope. They became the working class, willing and able to go into debt on a scale that no working class in any other country had ever done before. We didn't even have credit cards for the massive people before the 1970s. That's when they were invented. Before that, they were something that businessmen and women used. The American Express card and so on. But the Mastercard and Visa, that's a new industry designed to provide massive credit. So when you come to the end of the century, you have a working class staggering under amount of work that is exhausting physically and mentally, and anxiety-ridden because by the turn of the century, they had accumulated a quantity of debt they knew they could never repay. And in 2008, the system crashed. It crashed because on a stale, stable, stagnant real wage, you cannot keep accumulating more and more debt. It doesn't take rocket science to understand eventually, and in 2008 we know, you can't cover your mortgage, you can't make your credit card payments, et cetera, et cetera. One had to develop for the first time in America that the generation of this last 25 years is a generation of students who cannot get a bachelor's degree without going into tens of thousands of dollars of debt. So we have an additional debt category beyond mortgage, auto debt, and credit cards. We now have student debt. That also is unpayable, and that has put an extra burden on young people especially because the decline in the quality and quantity of jobs and incomes make the debt that they incurred to get a BA less supportable than ever. Under these circumstances, you have a working class that I would define as tinder, very dry tinder waiting for a spark, whatever that spark might be, to begin to articulate its bitterness, its rage, its disappointment at being denied the American dream that they had been led to expect would be theirs. And that's what I think has happened now. I think that the racial dimension is the spark, is the trigger, is the event that is bringing it all kind of forward. Let me conclude this historical context with a little bit of history, not of the past, but of what is coming, because I believe that is absolutely crucial to understanding where we are. This crash, the one that happened on top of the pandemic, this crash of capitalism in our country and abroad, is a kind of declaration of war against the American working class. Whatever happened before, it is now about to get much worse. When you have 42 million people unemployed, you are inviting every employer to say to these unemployed people, if and when you come back, I'm going to pay you 20% less, I'm going to give you fewer benefits, I'm going to make you come into work longer, you are going to have to take whatever I dish out. At the same time, the same message will be given to the workers still working. And they too will be assaulted now. So we're in for an extraordinary moment. It has to be put in these terms. The employer class, the capitalist class, having really messed up on the pandemic and on the cycle, is now in a position to be able ironically to go much further in the assault on the working class than they were able to achieve in the last 40 years. And that's the next step. And that means protests far beyond what we have seen already. Richard, any comments, particularly on what Margaret said about the establishment really has up against the wall here. Are they scared in your view? They know what to do. Yes, I think they're scared. They're not that much scared in my judgment yet about the protests. They have the confidence of history that some combination of Democratic Party symbolism, the way Margaret said, coupled with Republican Party harshness will do the job. I think they're wrong about it, but I think that's what they see. But here is what scares them. The economic crash, together with the pandemic, has produced a collapse on a scale they had no idea. It's not just that they didn't prepare for the pandemic, which they clearly messed up. And it's not just that they can't manage it. I mean, let's be honest, there's less than 5% of Americans have been tested as I speak to you. So we don't even know who has a disease. It's utterly unsafe to go back to work because you'll be standing next to people who have the disease but haven't been tested. This is an out of control disaster. That by itself wouldn't have overwhelmed them. But now they see, and by the way, just a footnote, we are now in the worst depression of US capitalism. We have gone beyond the 25% unemployment. If you have 42 to 45 million unemployed, that's more than 25% of the US labor force. The highest point of unemployment in the Great Depression was in 1933, and it was 25%. There is no precedent for this in the last century. And to have it happen at a time when the United States has taken this nationalist turn, cutting off its relationship with the rest of the world, and a pandemic it didn't prepare for and doesn't know how to control, that's too much. And when you add the irresponsible out of control narcissist idiot who we have in office, then it's clear that we don't have any mechanism to get under control, and that's, I think, what terrifies them. The protests then become kind of proof that this situation is indeed as terrible as they know it to be. You have not inspired a lot of confidence in us in terms of how our leaders will deal with this, and that it could only be some more chaos and disintegration rather than a real movement towards progress. That's what I'm afraid of. I see the behavior of the police as a symptom that this problem is far too profound, far too socially encompassing for the police to be able to do anything. They are being asked to do something that is absurd. It's not in their power. They can't do it. It's not a question of this or that protest. They can't keep the lid on a system that's blowing up. Let me give you a couple of examples. During the months of April and May, over one half of all commercial enterprises did not pay their rent. Let me explain that to you again. Over one half of commercial enterprises, including small businesses like Starbucks or Bed Bath and Beyond or dozens of others, did not pay their rent. What that means is that the commercial landlord to whom they normally would pay that rent isn't getting any revenue. That means that that commercial landlord cannot pay back the banks from whom the money was borrowed to build them all, to set up the whole enterprise, which then rented space to Starbucks and all the rest. This is a cascading catastrophe, what we're involved in, with a government that doesn't even understand what is going on so it can't handle it. Here's a second statistic. Half of the daycare arrangements made by the half of the American people who can even afford a little bit of daycare, most of that's gone and it isn't about to come back. What that does is it adds to the already unsustainable pressure in the households that have children. What in the world are they going to do? There's no solution. There's no solution on the horizon. There is this vague nonsense about reopening America. Let me conclude with that. We are saying to the American people an absolutely astonishing thing. We're saying to the working class, we are going to make you go back to work. Remember when Trump ordered the workers in the meat packing plant in the Midwest? He ordered them to go back to work. The interesting thing wasn't that he made that order which he doesn't have the legal right to do. That's not interesting. What's interesting was there was absolutely no accompanying demand that the employer make the workplace safe. Employers don't like to spend money on making places safe. That's why we have OSHA. That's why we had 800 laws over 200 years trying to force the employer to do what they do not want to do because there's no profit in it. They want the workers to work in crappy environments that they haven't spent money for clean air, clean water, clean bathroom. You know the story. You know it from another example. A hundred years ago, children were made to work. Kids as young as five years old were regularly hired until the mass of people said you can't do that to our children anymore. The business community said well we have to, the whole economy will collapse if we don't. Our profits depend on it plus we're doing a good thing for poor families because now they can get a little income from their kid which they otherwise couldn't do. Spectacular. The American people said to them you can go eff yourself. There will be no child labor. They passed the laws that were necessary and businesses had to find their profits somewhere else. I'm hopeful that the American working class will understand they are being herded like animals into workplaces that are unsafe. We haven't done the testing to determine whether the people there do or do not have a virus which could kill you and which you could take home to infect everybody else in your household. The government is not only pressing them to go back to work. Job has already threatened that if you're offered the job and you don't go back to work you may be no longer qualified for the unemployment compensation because you have rejected a job. In other words you either go back to an unsafe workplace or we're going to plunge you into poverty. By the way in the Congress right now a bill is being considered to provide a bribe to find workers that are so desperate that if you give them a bonus they will go back to work. They will only get the bonus if they go back to work in a job where no requirement of safety has yet been enforced. I don't think these are sustainable arrangements. If you think we've built up anger up until this point try to go with me to the level of anger that you're going to see when the failures to handle the pandemic and the failures to manage this economic crash are compounded by making people go back to work and get sick. This is in a way that Margaret said before this is another kind of slavery. People in other countries who did this would be called slave labor. You're forcing your workers back to work in an unsafe environment against their will. That's what slave labor always was. And I think what you're seeing is the slow recognition of white as well as non-white workers that that's the condition they are now being herded into.