 In their slogan, basically of Occupy Wall Street, the fact that Wall Street was the target in there for finance capital. Coming back to the Obama elections, you know, looking from outside, it's very difficult how one can even think of Mitt Romney as a serious candidate with whatever it's there, whatever it's past record is, and what he says, what he said during the preliminaries in which he faced up with Centaurab and others. How is it that he still remains a serious candidate, you know, from outside, we can't really figure this out? Well, let me tell you that I think a very large section of people inside the United States is baffled by the nature of the Republican Party. I mean, the Republicans, it's a very clever form of, as it were, political, right wing, you know, politics. You have a party which is fundamentally committed to the 1%. You know, they have no commitment to any social welfare policies, you know, they come out of a rigorous kind of, you know, heartless conservatism, where every position basically has massive social costs for the population. That's their politics. The fact is, they understand that if you reveal yourself as that kind of party, you are not going to be able to appeal to anybody. So very cannily, there are some positions that allow mass support, you know, on questions of so-called social conservatism, religious positions, on abortion, questions of homosexuality, you know, these become the so-called wedge issues, where they're able to create a mass base, which is not going to go anywhere, because they've taken such strong positions on homosexuality, on, you know, abortion, on even simple questions like, you know, on simple questions like race, which is to say, questions that should be settled, they keep open through discussions on immigration, you know, in the immigration and welfare. And welfare. Because welfare for a lot of the people is also a race issue. Exactly. And, you know, they keep it very carefully to bubble along, so they will say things like America, you know, when we get all these people to come in, they don't integrate. So they keep alive the idea that America is a white country. And that's their fundamental base, a racially coded, it's a conservative base that they've managed. So their nominee is always going to be bizarre, because on the one side, you have to be the nominee of the 1%. On the other side, you have to appeal to these fractions, which have very strong commitment to a certain kind of plebeian idea of what it is to be America. The perfect candidate was George Bush. George Bush was a creature of the 1%. Yet he spoke in broken English. He would portray himself cutting wood, breaking brush, wearing cowboy hat, you know, being this macho guy who appealed to that white male perspective, you know, which was the actual base of the Democratic Party. Republican. I mean, if George Bush stood there and spoke like the graduate of Yale University that he is, Harvard, Yale, that kind of pedigree, very fancy public, you know, private schools, if he spoke from that pedigree, people would say he's a 1% egghead. We don't want him. So the Republicans always have to find this very peculiar person to lead the party. You know, when John McCain was the candidate against Obama, he didn't fit the bill. He was plain speaking all that. So he brings in somebody to fit the bill, which is Sarah Palin, you know, who has guns ready to kill the moose that she sees, you know, has this macho kind of attitude to the world. She's a reload, you know, the way we're going to fight you politically is reload. It's all about guns and religion. That's how they create their base. She also had a direct access to God. She had a direct hotline to God and she had a way of speaking to people as if she was transacting that, by the way, it's not a trivial thing. There were videos of her, you know, having these kind of religious scenes where the spirit of God comes in and they're very proud to depict themselves in that way. So this is the character Mitt Romney has had a hard time becoming that person. You know, I mean, in a sense, he's utterly wooden. He doesn't have the capacity to be a populist who is actually the candidate of the 1%. So that profile is very hard to actually hold together. Republicans have a harder time finding that candidate because you really have to come out of central casting and the best candidate in recent memory, the best two candidates, one was Ronald Reagan and the other was George W. Bush. People see George W. Bush and say, junior, they say George W. Bush was an idiot. Actually he was the most spectacular candidate to hold together this complicated coalition of the radical right. That's the right thing. And you know, Romney comes in, he's still going to command 47% of the electorate. That's something, as I said, it was very difficult for us to understand because he's so obviously a candidate of the 1%. And that's really, as you said, his populist image. That's the one which is going to be really hard for him. And it has been hard for him till date. When it comes to Obama, as you said earlier, Obama has been a disappointment for the left liberal in the United States. He's not delivered either in foreign policy or in welfare. Limited, yes, health care is about the only achievement that you can see in what Obama has done. Do you think the second term is going to be any different? Do you think because now he will not have electoral compulsions if he wins? And I probably think he will. Do you think there is going to be any change or is it going to be the same? Well, the first thing to say is that Obama's first term was a term. If Obama had been doing these policies 35, 40 years ago, he would be a president with, after his name, Republican. Because essentially, he operated as a moderate Republican in terms of domestic policy. In terms of foreign policy, in fact, he was in some ways very much more radical than George W. Bush. I mean, look, after all, George W. Bush went to the battlefields of Afghanistan and at least grabbed people by the scruff of their neck, threw them in Guantanamo, and then threw up in his hands in the air and said, well, I don't know how to try them. Obama didn't even do that. He sends drones over the battlefields of Afghanistan and just kills them. I mean, extrajudicial killing has increased under Obama. Bush had a different approach. The Bush had the same approach. He didn't have as many drones. He didn't have as many drones. Don't forget, he's the one who advises Obama. This is a damn good thing. Absolutely. Just keep on it. Exactly. So in that sense, Obama pursues a policy that's very much like a Bush policy, very much like extrajudicial killing, disregard for world opinion, a kind of machismo in terms of world affairs. I mean, Obama, after all, is sending troops to Australia. He's increasing the encirclement of China. He's intensifying a push on Iran. And everybody said, actually, he's trying to be moderate in all this. The Israelis are at fault. Somebody else is at fault. Fact is, he's the president of the United States. He's pursuing policies which are creating tensions in West Asia, tensions in East Asia. And in fact, the pressure, even the limited pressure George Bush had put on Israel, even that with Obama hasn't put. It's nothing. I mean, it at least appears to be nothing. So if we're frank about the first term, the record shows that in all things, including health care, because health care, the health care law that Obama pushed through and that the Supreme Court, by a very narrow margin, validated, is not really a health care that is going to help the majority of the population. It's not a social good. Health was not provided as a social good. It was insurance reform. It was a way to bring in big firms to rationalize health delivery via private companies. Nonetheless, it's seen as a kind of victory. At least it forces people now to buy health care. Otherwise, they have to be fined. So it's not really universal coverage. In all these things, Obama governed from the right. Very little that he provided the left liberals, except a certain temperamental move to left liberalism. I mean, he's a cooler guy. He's a hipper guy. On gay rights, he was much more open-minded. On questions of women's rights, much more open-minded. And these are important things. These are very important places where his orientation was completely different from the right wing. It's limited if you look at his whole record. It's always the case in the United States when a Democrat is coming up for re-election. I saw this with Bill Clinton when he came up for re-election. It's always the case that from the left wing of liberalism out to the far left, a debate will break out that will last from, say, somewhere around March or April of the re-election year and go all the way to November, where a very large section of people will say, look, in the second term, this fellow will not any longer have the constraints of re-election and will, therefore, govern from the left. It's a kind of Manchurian candidate thing in the second term. In the second term, his liberalism will kick in. That's been a perennial kind of hope of the left liberal onward. And it's always betrayed. Because the fact is, Obama is not a left liberal. Obama is certainly not a left wing guy. He is a pragmatist. And a pragmatist in a party that is rooted itself in neoliberal policies. So if you're a pragmatist in that kind of party, you will govern from a neoliberal direction. In the other argument has been the absence of movements on the left except the Occupy movement. If the people do not put pressure, there's no particular reason why the president of the United States will move in a particular direction. Particularly if the right is putting a certain kind of pressure. Do you think that absence of movements except the Occupy movement has been one of the reasons why the polity in the US has shifted so much to the right? Oh, absolutely. I mean, if you take the case of the labor unions, just as one example, labor unions very early in the election cycle through themselves with Obama, very early. They made almost no demands. I mean, let's just take this a little back. When Obama was running for election, was running against Hillary Clinton, he made a lot of noises that what he was going to fight for once in office was something called the Employee Free Choice Act, which meant essentially to ease the ability of trade unions to organize workers. It was their core demand coming into the election. So they backed Obama in the election and he wins the election. Now, from the day of his inauguration in 2009 to the present, Obama has done nothing to push the Employee Free Choice Act. And no movement has taken place on that item. No movement has taken. I mean, in a sense, if I was to say, if I was left liberal and voted into office, I'd say the one place to shore up my base, to build my base, actually, would be to fight for the Employee Free Choice Act. It would strengthen the percentage of people in unions. And therefore, you'd have a bigger, organized force capable of fighting not only for my reelection, but for my party in the future. If you'd think organizationally in the long term, that's the one thing you'd put your eggs into, not health care, not education reform, none of those. You'd say, how do I build the actual bricks of my coalition for the future? But he did none of that. And yet, the labor unions, very early in the election cycle, having not had their core demand fulfilled, even in a minimal way, not one major speech, not one major legislation going to be voted down, even none of that. Yet they said, we are for the reelection of Obama. Now, why should Obama, therefore, take their opinion seriously? Because they are not even willing to push him. People say, you know, you have to build a movement to push them. If you're not even bothering as the one major organized force to push them, why would the Democrats take the movement seriously? There is a story about FDR that used to say, OK, you've come to me, I agree with you. Now go to the streets and make me do it. Do you think that a similar logic would apply here also? I mean, you know, if we, again, go a little back, after the Carter presidency, there was a very strong move in the Democratic Party by the young neoliberals to take over the party itself. You know, the Democratic Party that appears in the 1990s is a very different kind of party than the larger coalition where people like Jesse Jackson ran to, as a standard bearer of the so-called rainbow coalition of the left. In the 1990s, early 1990s, and actually, this begins in the late 1980s, people formed something called the Democratic Leadership Council, where they pushed neoliberal policies. They said, no longer should the Democrats be in a vulnerable position. America is a right-leaning country. We're going to go in this direction. We're not going to defend the social goods argument, welfare, things like that. We're going to go for security, prisons, police, things like that, harder right-wing policies. And their standard bearer was Bill Clinton. And Clinton enters and brings those Democratic Leadership Council, the neolip, into all sections of the Democratic Party. So he fought in his thing to end welfare, to bring in a crime bill which was deeply draconian. He fought alongside the Republicans to break the so-called Glass-Steagall Bill of 1933, which allows banks to enter finance and breaks the Chinese wall between retail banking and investment banking. So this was the way in which the neoliberals captured the Democratic Party. Today, to say, can you push that party from outside, I think, is a bad tactic. Because there is no space inside the Democratic Party to actually be pushed. It has been taken over and saturated by neoliberals. The challenge actually would be either you say, can we create a new political force, which is another perennial dream in the United States? Or can you create a left poll, institutional poll, to fight the neoliberals in that party directly? The left has no institutional basis. There's nothing comparable to the Democratic Leadership Council. There's no comparable social democratic left wing which wants to fight to reclaim the institutions of the Democratic Party. And unless you create that, unless you create a new ideological footing, the Democratic Party is not capable today of listening to forces outside that are pushing them. FDR's party is long gone. So effectively, a new poll needs to be created, whether it's within the Democratic Party or outside. That's basically the task before the left and the left liberals in the United States. Thank you very much, Vijay. Hope to hear more from you as you come back to us either through Skype or physically. Sure, thank you.