 Welcome to Economics and Beyond. I'm Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I'm here today with my longtime friend David Cerroda, an award-winning journalist, an editor-at-large at Jacobin Magazine, and someone who was really at the core of the Bernie Sanders campaign in the primary part of the earlier part of this year. David and I worked together when now Governor Ned Lamont of Connecticut originally challenged Joseph Lieberman for a United States Senate seat in 2006. He wrote a book about the structural manifestation inside the Beltway around that time called Hostile Takeover, which I still recommend to everybody that I know who wants to learn about politics. David, thanks for joining me today. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So here we are amidst a pandemic, amidst big bailouts in a presidential election year. You've seen from the inside the Bernie Sanders campaign, but let's start with what are you seeing in terms of the challenges for all of us now in this country and in this world? What causes you heartburn? What causes you dismay? What do you find inspiring? Or what would you like to suggest that would be inspiring to others? Well, first of all, thanks again for having me. You know, I stay up at night worrying about the things that I think lots of people are worrying about, which is, you know, making sure I can take care of the family. What are the kids going to do for school and their summer, you know, paying the bills, the climate crisis. I mean, it was 100 degrees in the Arctic this week. So there's a lot on my mind. And look, I toggle back and forth between feeling optimistic and feeling incredibly pessimistic and despondent. I feel optimistic about the fact that there are people in the streets protesting. There is a mass mobilization. There is a popular awakening. I feel optimistic from the fact that the Democratic presidential primary, while it did not go the way I certainly wanted it to go. I think there was a mobilization of voters that support an agenda to actually create a political revolution in this country. It wasn't enough to win the nomination, but it's certainly if we look at history in the long view, I believe it was part of that process of getting us out of the dangerous and I might call a societally suicidal set of policies and into something new. So that's my optimism. My pessimism is that we look at these crises around us. It's taught in history that major crises have prompted America to do big things. And that we are, I think it's obvious that we're living through crises that are as big, if not bigger than any that we've faced in the past. And I don't yet see that we are immediately rising to the occasion that if you believe the stories of history and granted a lot of them are somewhat apocryphal or at least reductionist. But if you if you believe those stories there were crises in the past and we as a country rose to those crises. And we are at that moment we are living through that moment right now we are the actors in our in in in the history books that will be written, assuming there still is a civilization after this is this this is over. But we are living through these this historical moment and history would suggest that in the face of a lethal pandemic in the face of a climate crisis that threatens all life on the planet. We have an economic crisis that potentially is a another quasi Great Depression that we would rise to the occasion with the kind of response that our society has has mounted in the past, a new deal on the economic front, a Green New Deal on the climate front, a new civil rights movement on the civil rights and criminal justice front. And while we have seen some of that begin, which is a good thing, I still wonder how has the status quo, nonetheless, been able to persist so strongly. And you can especially see it I think on the on the climate and economic front. I mean, we have a situation where 43 million Americans could lose their health care. 27 million, I believe is the count right now who already have lost their current health care coverage. We have that situation in front of us that is happening in our communities right now. And the idea of Medicare for all, which that is the the branded name of it, but at its core is guaranteeing health care to all of our citizens is still considered some sort of radical pie in the sky idea. Despite the crisis we face, despite the fact that less wealthy countries have been able to do this decades before this moment. It is still considered in our politics to be some kind of insane radical idea and then I'll make a distinction here though, you know, it's considered radical inside of our political class, it is not considered radical among, you know, people in the country, according to polls. But the point is, is that it is it is somewhat surprising how resilient the forces of greed and the status quo really are, even in the face of what we are looking at today. I don't want to sound naive, I'm not I'm not exactly surprised by it. But I think we should step back and marvel that while our society as a whole is clearly not resilient in the sense of these crises came up and you know, suddenly the the foundations of millions of people's economic lives have been have been shaken while our society itself is not as resilient as it should be. The political status quo, the political class, the elite, whatever you want to call it the establishment, that is much more resilient than potentially any prior elite and establishment in our own country's history. That is to say that in the past and the crises we faced in the past, it's not like there weren't greedy people. It's not like there weren't, you know, the equivalent of billionaires, the gilded age, etc. etc. There were, it's not like human nature changed. The point is though is that the establishment and the elites of the past in our history were not able to as effectively stave off real change on the policy front and societal societally as the establishment and the elites of today have been able to stave off at least at this point real systemic change so far. And I think we need to grapple with that. How is the ruling class of this country more resilient, more powerful, more able to do whatever it wants in this age than establishments and elites of the past in our own history? How that happened? We have to grapple with that and understand that because what it says to me is that this right now in the best telling of the story of an optimistic story moving forward if we're going to get out of this. Unless you tell yourself a pessimistic story. But the most optimistic story you can tell yourself is that this has to be the very, very beginning of a battle that will take a lifetime to complete and to see succeed. That the power elite is so powerful at this point that this is not a one or two or three or five year project. This is a project that we are going to deal with all the crises that I've just mentioned. This is a project that is going to take the rest of our lives. And frankly, the rest of the next generation's lives. I have two thoughts. One is, given your work and your writing, I'd like to borrow in to the nodes of what you might call effective resistance by the establishment. And the second thought I'd frame here is there are some people who believe that you have to defeat elites. In order to move forward. I remember Reinhold Niebuhr's famous book, Moral Man and Immoral Society. And he was more of that persuasion. Others would say, in light of the suffering, perhaps the elite can rise to the challenge. Evolve the design out of an element of goodness in their hearts. And how would I kind of a biblical type quote, people say, money's not the root of all evil, but the love of money may well be the root of all evil. So David, I'm kind of I'm swimming around here. But can elites become enlightened? Franklin Eleanor Roosevelt, excuse me, Delano Roosevelt, was viewed as a rather crusty centrist elitist with inherited wealth. And by the time the new deal was over, he looked like he rose to the occasion. He had evolved, so he might be in one camp. But how do you see this challenge and how do you see the role of society in relation to elites? Can they evolve or do they need to be defeated? So I don't have the great man theory of history. I don't believe in that so-called theory of history. And that theory of history posits that the great leaders of history come to a set of values or conclusions in their heart, and they at the top of the of the power pyramid, they make decisions that then change the course of history. It's not to say that there aren't people in power who are pulling the levers of power to make decisions. It's only to say that I don't believe that history, that that's actually how history works. That, for instance, it wasn't that FDR woke up one day or had some sort of evolution and decided, you know what, I'm going to be for the new deal, therefore I'm going to push some buttons, make some calls, and we're going to have a new deal. That is, to me, that is not the way history actually works. I subscribe more to the Howard Zinn theory of history that history is a people's history, that politicians at the top, ultimately, if they change, they are forced to change. They are forced to change because they are trying to stay in power, and that power, that the formula by which they stay in power changes because the reality underneath them changes beneath their feet. And so it's not to say, I think, once we change the set of elites that are in power now, everything will be fixed. I mean, there's the old who song, meet the new boss, same as the old boss. And I think, frankly, that in a lot of ways the Obama administration lived up to and confirmed the theory of that song of the who, which is to say that while the Obama administration was certainly better on many policies than the Bush administration, when you look at the financial policies, there is a continuity from Reagan to Bush to Clinton to Bush to Obama. There's an absolute continuity when it comes to financial policy, Wall Street policy, economic policy. And it really 2008, if you look at that set of policies, I think when the who says meet the new boss, same as the old boss, you look at what happened and you can make an argument that there is some truth to that. And so I think that if there are, that whoever is in power and you want them to be better and you want them to have better values and you want them to have the realizations that we're talking about, but they won't have those realizations. They won't have a different political formula unless they are forced to change formulas, unless reality changes beneath them, unless the, how they stay in power, how they stay in office becomes a different calculus. Now, I think there's some good news. I think that the crises of the pandemic, the larger healthcare crisis, the economic inequality crisis, the bailout bill after the pandemic, which exemplifies the old way of thinking, you know, a trickle down rescue, that kind of thing that we saw back, you know, in the financial crisis as well. I think that reality is overwhelming the formula, the old formula of how you stay relevant, how you stay in power. And I think that's a really good thing. The scary thing is, is it still remains a crossroads that I wrote about in my second book, which was called The Uprising. In that book that I wrote about, the core argument was essentially that we were at a populist moment, by the way, it was about 2007, so right in the midst of when the financial crisis was beginning to brew. And the thesis was, there is a populist outrage at an economic system that is fundamentally unfair and a government that is fundamentally corrupt. And this can be channeled into a progressive populism, or it can be channeled into right-wing nationalist populism. And I think we're obviously at the same crossroads today, that looking out, we are at a fork in the road, and it's not just Donald Trump, but obviously Donald Trump embodies it. Trumpism is right-wing nationalist racist populism. That's what Trumpism is. And the alternative to that is not status quo, quote unquote, centrism. The alternative to that is to channel the righteous and rightful popular discontent into a kind of New Deal-style movement for positive, constructive, progressive change that alters the power dynamic in this country. What scares me, what keeps me up at night, is the fear that the so-called opposition party, the Democrats, have convinced themselves that the alternative, that the most successful alternative to Trumpism is status quoism. The so-called return to normalcy, as Warren Harding famously called it back in the 20s. Joe Bidenism is basically an ideology that promotes a so-called return to normalcy. And I will say that may work in this election because Trump is such a controversial and divisive singular figure. But Trumpism could outlive Trump by a different name if the Democrats only put up status quoism. That discontent is not going anywhere by simply defeating Donald Trump and preserving the status quo. Because the discontent that's out there is based on things that are real and cannot be story told away by media narratives, by spin, or by anything else. I mean, we are at a point in which people are being thrown out of their homes. People cannot get the medical care they need. There's mass unemployment. I mean, there's a certain threshold of pain and suffering and death. That's what we're talking about, pain, suffering, and death. There's a certain threshold that can be papered over with cable TV talk shows and good spin from the White House and sort of the elite narrative. But there's a threshold when the pain, suffering, and death level gets high enough, crosses that threshold in which those stories cannot suppress popular dissent. So all that's a long way of saying what I fear is that if the Democrats have convinced themselves that status quoism and incrementalism is the opposite of Trumpism. And they've come to that conclusion because, of course, that conclusion satiates their donors, the people who bankroll the party, that we may get rid of Trump. But then the question becomes, who comes after Trump? Because the popular discontent is not going away. And if we're really unlucky, that popular discontent will be channeled into a movement that is headed by somebody much smarter, much shrooter, and therefore much more dangerous, even more dangerous than Donald Trump. By the way, the Who song that you cited is titled Won't Get Fooled Again. And I think that I heard those lyrics in my head, as you were speaking, because Trump, in many ways, is the byproduct of a post bailout experience through the Obama administration, whereas Joe Stiglitz often said the polluters got paid on the 2008-09 bailout, and everybody else had to fend for themselves. You saw a change in control in 2010 to the Republicans in the House. You saw a Tea Party on the right occupy on the left, then they took over the Senate in the Republican Party, and then they took the White House, and Trump mowed down 15 Republicans and then beat Hillary Clinton with a mantra. The system is rigged, and with the diseases of despair, with the disruption of the economy related to globalization, related to technology and automation, related to the effective lobbyists who could keep money offshore and then say we can't afford it, or at least not repair and involve the infrastructure and the education systems and the health systems in our society. Trump was elected on a wave of despair. Yes, absolutely. And what's amazing is, for a project I'm working on now, and I went back and I looked at this, that I'll get the dates a little bit wrong, but it was almost in the exact same week. In 2008, October 2008, Obama gave a speech promising to clean house, take on Wall Street, take on the elites, change the power dynamic. That was it. Cooper's Union. I remember watching that speech. And some of the lines are very, very, very similar to the lines that Trump gave in a speech in almost the exact same week in 2016. Now, to be clear, I'm not crediting Trump. What I'm saying is that the similarities between this raises the question, how could those same lines, those same promises, that same analysis of Wall Street power, financial power, economic inequality, how could those same lines from Trump still be powerful, compelling, and relevant eight years after Obama delivered much the same promises? And that, to me, spotlights exactly what we're talking about. Because the answer is, in the interim, the inequality and the power dynamics were not changed. Therefore, Trump could say the same thing after eight years, and the same promises and words and phrases and analysis could be as powerful, if not more powerful, after eight years. Because voters inherently knew that the system had not changed, that they had been let down, that whether the power elite was resilient enough to resist the change, or whether the people who got into power meet the new boss, same as the old boss, whether they simply didn't try to change things. The point is that the voters implicitly knew that the analysis was still relevant and powerful because things had not changed. And I'm not saying that that means Trump should have won. What I'm saying is that we have to grapple with and understand and appreciate the fact that people were rightly not content with that. Again, it's not to justify, they justifiably voted for Trump. I don't believe that. I think people should not have voted for Trump. Obviously, Trump didn't deliver on any of those promises. It was all a ruse. But the point is that we need to create a politics where we are delivering an actual change of the power dynamic in our equal society or we are going to get more Donald Trumps and Donald Trumps who are smarter, shrewder and more dangerous. Let's talk a little bit about why the system doesn't evolve. We have very highly concentrated wealth. We have had legislation like Citizens United and so forth that allows what you might call the freedom of money and to commodify politics, whether it's appointments, regulations, enforcement, legislation with highly concentrated wealth and with the, what you might call personification of corporations, individual people without a high net worth, given the rules of the game, don't feel like they have much influence or leverage. And if you add voter suppression drives, it compounds what you might call failure of representation. Where do you see the nodes in this, what you called it, the outset, the resilience of elites amidst this crisis? Well, I think that obviously there's been a political project to strengthen the power of the ruling class that has gone on for 30, 40 years. But over the course of really 40 years, there has been a systematic dismantling of countervailing power. The most obvious example of that is the hollowing out of the labor movement, which was the critical countervailing power to corporate power in America. I mean, that has not been something dictated by the forces of nature. That has been a set of very clear calculated policy changes, union busting policies, the hollowing out of labor law, the weakening of the NLRB. I could go on, but the point is that if you put a list of things that have happened to reduce the overall countervailing power to corporate power, again, this is not forces of nature. It's electing right-wing politicians who serve their donors. It's a campaign finance system that allows legalized corruption. It's putting in place laws that reduce the power of workers. As you mentioned, it's voter suppression. All of these things mean that the equilibrium between elites and everybody else is now structurally out of whack. That the thumb is now permanently on the scale for the elites because popular power has been systematically reduced. I think that it's taken a long, long time as one example for people, lots of people to appreciate in terms of the popular imagination and popular understanding that unions are important. That's really one thing we can zero in on. I remember working in Congress for Bernie Sanders way back in the late 90s, early 2000s. Unions were seen as complete dinosaurs on their way out. Not by us, not by Bernie's office, but in general. The point is that unions were seen as—if you mentioned unions or the labor movement this or the labor movement that in the halls of Congress, you got eye rolled. I mean, Bill Clinton steamrolled NAFTA and the China trade deal through Congress, making the labor-affiliated part of his own party seem like they were insane and marginal. All of that to say is that now, finally, and only in the last few years, have you seen labor's significance and importance more broadly recognized among the political class. I think there are members of Congress who appreciate the labor movement. I mean, you've seen in media even, which has typically been a pretty anti-union set of institutions in the country. Now you see media, the workers in media organizing unions and thereby understanding the value of the labor movement. Because it's now a personal matter to them. I guess all I'm trying to say on that is that there is, I think, reason for optimism that a lot of the lessons that people like Bernie Sanders have been spouting for decades, I do think there is more of a popular acceptance and appreciation for them now than at any time, certainly in my own life. I mean, the New York Times op-ed page is an example. This is the reflection of elite thinking. I don't care if there's the so-called liberal columnist or the conservative columnist, that op-ed page is a reflection of ruling class thinking. And it was like two weeks ago or three weeks ago, there were a couple of people on that page, good people, Charles Blow, Michelle Alexander and the like. Great writers, good progressives. But saying in the newspaper itself on that page, essentially what Bernie Sanders has been warning about and pushing for is now the obvious set of things that we should be thinking about and doing. And so I look at that as, I'm not thinking that, hey, it's on the New York Times op-ed page, that means there's going to be immediate change right now. But what I'm saying is that one thing to be more optimistic about is the fact that there is an understanding even in parts of the ruling class that the power equilibrium is way out of whack and that it being way out of whack is actually not good necessarily for anybody, including the elites. I mean, here's the thing to really think about, that there has been this theory in politics, right, a sort of underlying and not spoken allowed theory of neoliberalism, you have to give the peasants at least some crumbs to prevent the guillotines from coming out. I mean, this is the basic theory of neoliberalism, that neoliberalism can run wild and rampant, you know, building up a feudal society, feudal, not futile, but feudal, like feudalism. You can build a feudal society, but you can't go too far because you've got to throw some loaves of bread over the palace walls to keep the peasants at least from bringing out a real revolution. And I think right now we're at a moment where even some of the ruling class realizes, you know, things have gotten so out of whack and I'm not saying we're going to have, you know, Robespierre out there, you know, tomorrow. But I think the protests, the social unrest has rattled even parts of the elite to the point where we can now discuss things, union power, Medicare for all, you know, a much more robust social safety net, you know, a welfare state. You can discuss these things in America without being eye rolled in the way that you were 20 years ago at the end of the Clinton administration. And I think that that's a good thing. I mean, again, to go back to one of my fears, though, of course, is that when it comes to something like climate change, we're on a clock. We're on a ticking clock that the process by which these ideas and these much needed policies are normalized. And that's what we should call it normalizing the putting it into the debate as a legitimate set of policies. That process is not moving fast enough. Yeah. So what let's let's talk for a moment about what you might call the deep dive of the Bernie Sanders campaign. I remember watching elite press commentary opponents in the primaries, business leaders taunting the Sanders campaign about socialism. And then we had this massive bailout assistance that people like Jesse Isinger in his article for ProPublica, the bailout is working well for the rich. And it feels like the people who criticized socialism are the beneficiaries of socialism, not not even a few months after they were engaging in the criticism of Sanders. You sat in the cockpit. How do you how do you see it? Well, I would encourage everyone to go back and read Bernie's speech about socialism in the summer of 2019. It's a speech I worked pretty hard on and he actually talked about what he called corporate socialism. In fact, he published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that was essentially an excerpt of that part of the speech and he had pointed out at the time that fundamental hypocrisy that the people berating socialism are the beneficiaries of a different kind of socialism and that really we have a choice between By the way, in any civilization, there is no such thing as a pure free market. The human civilization is essentially the different civilizations that we have and have had in history are choices between different forms of socialism. And America is much more of a corporate socialism than a democratic socialism. And it was high-minded stuff that he was talking about in the course of a campaign and campaigns are not necessarily places for heady kind of stuff. But the core truth remains true that when a society decides to build a road or build a school or put together an army or do any of the things that government does, it is deciding what kind of socialism and what kinds of things in society will be socialized. It is not deciding between a pure free market or socialism. It is deciding about what kind of socialism and what kinds of things will be socialized in its particular civilization. And what we, I think what has become now even more obvious than it was even six months ago, although it was obvious back then too, is that we have a socialism that serves the wealthy and corporations. And that we need to, I would argue, we need to have a socialism that does a better job of serving human beings and the majority of the population. It is not a choice between socialism or no socialism. It is a choice between what kind of socialism that we want. We are now very obviously living in a corporate socialist country. That's essentially what the CARES Act was. There was some stuff for workers that was important, but if you list the stuff for workers with the stuff for corporations and the wealthy, that was a bill that was an almost pure piece of corporate socialist legislation. And I think Americans get twisted up by the terms because socialism can evoke the Soviet Union. It can evoke, I mean, it's been demonized for decades, you know, Cuba, Venezuela. Of course, we don't think of socialism as Denmark or Sweden or Canada or Australia because even though they have parts of their economy that are socialized, that's because the political narrative has been by corporate power, which wants to preserve corporate socialism. Doesn't want stories out there about what a different model would look like because a different model would threaten their power. And corporate power right now controls many of the conduits through which political stories, through which the political narrative is conveyed. And so you don't hear very much about those different models. But I go back to the point that I do think reality is overtaking the storytelling machine. That we may not hear stories about how other countries provide decent healthcare to their people. We may not hear those stories or at least not hear those stories within the frame of do we want socialism or no socialism? But we do hear, for instance, that countries in, for instance, Southeast Asia that have socialized medical systems, they have, at least up until now, seem to do a better job of dealing with the lethal pandemic. And that we have a corporate run healthcare system that has helped deliver 120,000 deaths from that same lethal pandemic. And while, again, that's not necessarily put within the frame of do we want socialism or not socialism, I think inherently it is changing Americans' views of what we can imagine being possible for our own country. And that is a good thing. That is the thing that we have to sustain. That is the thing we have to have to have to water and fertilize to grow, because if we can start to imagine a different society that still is America, that still is our country. I'm not talking about, you know, to turn an America into, you know, Sweden or or Denmark, you know, I mean, I think people struggle with being able to envision, you know, an America when we bring in other countries, you know, how different is Sweden, how different are all these countries. It's still fundamentally America. I mean, the New Deal, by today's standards, was a socialist program. And the New Deal was also fundamentally American. I mean, it's as American now when you think about the New Deal. It's as American as apple pie. And I think I think that sort of withered away. And our job now is to try to imagine in real terms an America that is different. And it's just over the horizon. It's right there. If we can if we can actually get our act together and really focus, it's potentially right there. And I should add, it's not necessarily always going to be over the horizon. This is an important moment of awakening and realization. And it's right there. It's going to take a lot of work to get there. But if we can turn that corner in elections, in local activism, in Congress and state legislatures and city councils when people get into power, if we can have those fights, we'll lose a lot of them, but we'll win some of them two steps forward, one step back. If we can actually turn that corner and we can start to change the paradigm from living in a corporate socialism to living in a country where the socialism that exists does a better job of serving the rest of us. Yes. Well, there are some templates out there. As you were talking, I was thinking about how that what you described as corporate socialism almost promoted what I will call a religious deification of markets like making markets sacred as though they're a benevolent arbiter. But there are a lot of writers now who I'm hoping that our audience and many more will start to embrace. Bernard Harcourt at Columbia University has written a book called The Illusion of Free Markets, which resonated with many of the things you just described. There's a Scandinavian author, Thomas Bjorkman, who has a book called The Market Myth. In his caption related to that book I've written down, we've created market and we can change it. It may not be possible to imagine a world without a market, but it's possible to think of one where the market helps discourage greed, selfishness, cynicism and exploitation rather than positively encouraging them. Like all social constructs, the market could be different. He has another book called The World We Create from God to Markets, and he's a co-author of a book they call The Nordic Secret, which even David Brooks from The New York Times has been featuring in recent articles. So I sense that what you might say hiding in plain sight with this reawakening are a lot of very thoughtful reflections that further unmask the false consciousness that you were describing and perhaps give us a little guidance on the trajectory we must plot. Yeah, and I remember on the campaign there was a moment where we never actually did it, but there was a point where it came up, should Bernie try to differentiate with Elizabeth Warren. You know, I grappled with that myself. I sort of thought about it a lot and how would you effectively differentiate, and ultimately I don't think the political dynamics were such that it was a much more important thing to contrast with by that was a much bigger priority. But people would ask me, what's the difference between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders? Right, and I don't think the answer is obvious because it hadn't been named, it hadn't been spoken, but when I really thought about it, what I realized is that there is a difference, and again it's not to pick on Elizabeth Warren because she's done great work in the Senate. But it is the question of markets. That is a really important question. Elizabeth Warren, I don't think she'd deny it. When she was asked a question about socialism, she said he's a socialist and I believe in markets. And I actually think that that was an honest answer and one that cut to a really important debate and intellectual struggle that a lot of people don't necessarily think about explicitly, but it is actually fundamental to where we can and should and will go in our country. And that is to say that Bernie Sanders essentially argues, without saying it explicitly, that certain things in our society should not be subject to the whims of the market, that the market is not the way to deliver those things to society. An obvious example, healthcare, that's subjecting healthcare to the whims of the market to make healthcare the ability to live or die to get medical care or not get medical care to make that a commodity on the market is not good for society. And Elizabeth Warren has more faith in the idea that if a market is properly regulated, if it's properly confined, if it is properly, there are the right rules that markets work in more cases for society. And I think that is a fundamental dispute and it is a fundamental question separating out those candidates. What do we think the market does best? And what do we think are things that are inappropriate for the market to control? We've already made those decisions in lots of ways that we don't identify necessarily in that way. We've decided that for the most part, up until at least recently, that the market is not a good way to raise an army. I mean, we do now have private mercenary armies and Blackwater and all that kind of thing, but in general, we have basically decided that we're not going to subject the ability to put together a military, raise the manpower for a military to market whims. I mean, there's certainly crossover, there are defense contractors and the like, but basically raising an army is not a market function. We have decided that in a lot of cases with public power, for instance, which is still a big force actually in America, that public power companies, the ability to deliver basic energy to cities with public power, not a market function. That is we're going to have that be a public function. Water systems, infrastructure, roads, I mean, there's crossover with contractors and the like, but we have basically said whether we build a road or not, whether we maintain a road or not. For the most, I mean, there's the Indiana toll road, right, a privatized road, but in general, we've said that's not a market function. And we have said other things should be a market function because the market competition, the innovation, the commodification of things in a market, those are good for society. So for instance, the making of computers or the making of iPhones or the making of apps, you know, the market argument for that is, you know, the more competition, the better the apps, the better the iPhones, the better the electronic products, that's good for society. Great. And I think the fundamental question for us on policy is, okay, have we subjected too many things to the market or are only put it a different way? Are there certain things that we are subjecting to the market and we are commodifying that actually it's not appropriate for them to be market commodities? Is it really appropriate for healthcare to be a pure market commodity? Is it appropriate for energy to be a pure market commodity at a time when if we keep going with the market, we may burn up our entire ecosystem in a climate disaster? Now, yes, there are examples of where, you know, solar power, wind power, renewable power is less expensive than oil and gas. But you get my point. And I think that the intellectual question, the public policy question, the ideological question that public officials and people in policy making positions should be wrestling with is, are the things that we subject to the market, is it appropriate to continue relying on the market or exclusively relying on the market for those things? And I would argue that we have gone so far towards market fundamentalism on so many basic necessities of life that the pendulum has swung way out of whack. Now, interestingly enough, as you allude to, that market fundamentalism has not applied to the things that I, some of the things that I would argue are not necessary to human survival. That market fundamentalism has not applied to the financial sector, which doesn't make anything, which in lots of cases doesn't add any actual value, doesn't produce food, water, shelter, the basic human necessities of life. And we have exempted in a lot of cases that sector from the same market fundamentalism that it preaches for everybody else, bailouts, you know, the Fed buying corporate debt, you know, all of the giveaways and subsidies that we provide to that industry, the industry that is supposed to be itself is literally the industry of a market. We have exempted from market fundamentalism. While we are preaching as a society market fundamentalism for many of the basic necessities of human life, market fundamentalism for healthcare, market fundamentalism for energy, market fundamentalism for housing, shelter, etc., etc. Like that, so it's not only that we have subjected, we have used market fundamentalism and for too many of the basic necessities of life. We have simultaneously exempted one industry from that same market fundamentalism, even though that industry is the least valuable industry to providing the basic necessities of life. It's also the industry that is at the top of the ladder in political contributions and fundraise. Right, the power I have. Yep. Right. The sense that I have, there's a blogger named Ian Welsh, who has written a lot recently about how this system that you're describing, which I've often called the mother of all moral hazards, where we do not engage in prior restraint of the financial sector, but we're increasingly urged to make the bailouts always credible in the event of a crisis, which reduces the funding cost of too big to fail banks relative to others, allows them to gain market share and take more risk, and guarantee that the ultimate bailouts will be even bigger. And as you described with corporate debt and others, this dynamic seems to be evident at the present time. And I think it contributes to the demoralization of the people, and particularly as more and more of our society as this pandemic plays out are suffering from despair. There's a gentleman who's on the board of I net named Richard vague, who wrote a book called the brief history of doom where he analyzed financial crisis, I think 40 some episodes through history. And what he found is that they almost always emanate from the private sector's excess. And they can be seen as they're building. In other words, warning indicators can be seen. But it has been the history of modern capitalism, post industrial revolution capitalism, not to engage in any kind of prior restraint. Even as the guarantees get larger and larger in the financial sectors assets as a ratio to GDP and other things has become even, even, how we say, more gargantuan. So I think I think you're you're right on the on top of something that's very important. And it's very important to the credibility of society going forward. Amidst a crisis, many will argue, well, we just can't let it all collapse and go into a deep depression that takes everybody down with us. But there's a question of when the crisis is no longer acute. What have we learned? And how do we engage in the political economy of changing the structure in the rules so that the kind of excesses you described are not manifests again and again and again. Well, that's and that's the key. That's the key challenge going forward, which is that I now in the context of the election, I think about, you know, not just Trump needs to be defeated. I think about, so there's the November election. There's January 20th, and then there's figuratively there's January 21st. I think after the 2008 election, a lot of people breathe the sigh of relief, thought that Bush was gone, Obama is coming in. We can all go back to sleep, demobilize, and the smart, responsible, good guy elites will fix everything. And I think that was a disaster, an epic disaster that we are still, frankly, living through in lots of ways. And I think now that if there is a political goal beyond the defeat of Trump, it must be, in my view, that Trump is defeated. The new president is sworn in and the new president is given zero deference. There is zero inherent goodwill or good or belief that the president on his own will do the right thing. And that there is pressure and a movement at that president, at that president's throat from the moment that president is sworn in. And I actually think that Joe Biden, who I've done a lot of reporting on, I know the bad record of Joe Biden. Joe Biden has one of the most hideous records of a democratic politician in my lifetime. And I have reported on that and I stipulate all of that. But I actually think that short of somebody like Bernie Sanders winning, that the next best thing is a democratic president who isn't given deference by democratic voters. A relatively weak, non-ideological Democrat in that office is the next best thing. And I actually think that Joe Biden, in a lot of ways, fits that bill in this sense, is that if you look at Joe Biden's career, it is the career of a politician who triangulated against his own party over and over and over again, because he believed that that was the best political formula for himself. There is very little evidence that he did many of the things that he did out of some deeply held ideology or conviction. And that's not to absolve him for his decisions to support the bankruptcy bill or vote for the Iraq War or do any of those things. Ultimately, it's only about results. It's not about what's in the person's heart. But the point that I'm making is that I believe the political dynamics may have changed or are changing to the point now where it's not necessarily a winning formula for a Democrat to triangulate against his own party. And I think Joe Biden, hopefully, is enough of a flexible politician, essentially a machine politician, a thumb in the wind politician, to understand that the dynamics have changed and that doesn't have lots of ideological moorings. And therefore, that actually provides an opportunity to move the new president in a way that we haven't necessarily had in the past. I mean, let's be honest. I don't think there are a lot of people out there who love Joe Biden, who think Joe Biden is the greatest guy ever. I mean, we all remember when Obama was running. I mean, there were a lot of people who loved Obama and got caught up in the whole thing. I mean, I got caught up in the whole thing. A lot of people got caught up in the whole thing. I mean, it was an amazing branding campaign for a guy who I think ultimately was sort of an empty vessel. And that's not me talking. That's not a pejorative. I mean, he himself, Obama himself said, people project onto me like I'm a blank screen. I'm paraphrasing one of his quotes. I don't think that dynamic exists with Joe Biden there. Not a lot of tons of people out there who were just like, I love Joe Biden. He like just want to get once he's elected. I'm sure he's going to do the right thing. I don't think that that's a that's a thing out there right now. And that's a good thing. So I think we're on the potentially on the verge, at least in the electoral process of if Trump gets defeated and Joe Biden wins. And Joe Biden is not given deference because there are not a lot of people who just think that he's going to do the right thing on his own. That that's actually as good an outcome as you can get short of electing somebody like Bernie Sanders. Because then you've got in theory in this hopeful vision, you've got activists, grassroots groups, communities, up and down ballot politicians at his throat to deliver right now. And he's not being given deference that he's not. Oh, he's got it handled. We can just lay back. That is not the way we're going to actually get results. And I think Joe Biden by being sort of underwhelming by by being kind of known as a machine politician by not being super inspiring as a as a politician. He if he has one thing in his mind he wants to be known or remembered as a great president. I think there's a chance he's going to say, you know, I'm getting pressured. I, you know, people aren't giving me deference and I want to be a great president. I want to be remembered. I don't care what I do. I just want to be remembered as a great man. You know what? Maybe things are going to line up to the point where that's a perfect storm where things we can actually get some results here. Well, David, I. I love how you delve into the complexity. You delve into the contradictions. And you. Unmask things. With great clarity and great courage. I've watched you for years. We've known each other for, I think, 15 years or more. Yep. And I'm reminded. Of one of my favorite books. It's called the life of poetry by Muriel Rue Kaiser. And she talks in the opening of the book about how in turbulent times. Where you need guidance. People sometimes become afraid of poetry because it's not solid tangible. What have you. It's it's stirring. And she wrote. I've tried to get behind the resistance, which is often a fear of poetry. To show what might be ahead of this culture and conflict. With its background of strength and antagonism. If we are free, we are free to choose a tradition. And we find in the past as well as the present, our poets of outrage like Melville. And our poets of possibility. Like Whitman. David, I think you're both. A poet of outrage. And a poet. Who is visionary about. What is needed in the future and the possibilities. So I'll go back to the song you chose, given my propensity to music. I'll tip my hat to the new constitution. Take a bow for the new revolution. Smile and grin at the change all around. Pick up my guitar and play. Just like yesterday. Then I'll get on my knees and pray. That we don't get fooled again. Amen, man. Amen. With you standing guard. With you raising. The issues with the power and the clarity that you just share with my audience. We have nothing to blame but ourselves if we get fooled again. Because you shine a beautiful light. Thanks for being with me today. Anytime. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. We'll be back together in a few months. Looking at things around the bed. But for now, I want to say goodbye and thank you again. Thanks, man. And check out more from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at InetEconomics.org.