 Hi, Professor George Friedman, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. And we're here today to talk about the decline of the labor accord, the power memo, the rise of the right in America after the long decade of the 1960s. I say long decade because the 60s spilled over into the 1970s, which is kind of where we'll begin. Actually, we're getting to a time that I can tell you my own personal memories. And one of my earliest memories was from 1968. After the assassination of Martin Luther King, there were riots in Washington D.C. and many other places. We were getting used to riots. There were riots in 65 in Watts. There were riots in 66 in Newark. There were riots in the summer of 67 in Detroit. Just kind of think of it as, okay, another year, another major riots, army occupation of another group of American cities, whatever. But this was different, 68, April 68. And I couldn't find a picture of this to put on the website, but maybe I'll be able to dig it up. Or maybe one of you guys will find it and send it to me. But I remember New York Times front page picture of the 82nd Airborne Division, soldiers from that division, setting up a machine gun nest on the front steps of the U.S. Capitol. That's where things were going. 1971, Lewis Powell, who was shortly after appointed to the Supreme Court by President Nixon, and he served reasonably distinguished career on the court for 20 years or so, Powell wrote a memo to the head of the education department of the Department of Commerce warning that American capitalism was under siege. It was being attacked not only by the traditional enemies, the communists, the trade unionists, the radicals, the socialists, but it was being attacked by academics, being attacked by students, being attacked by television personalities. All these people lacked respect for capitalism and free enterprise, didn't understand how important it was. And it was necessary, Powell warned, for members of the Chamber of Commerce, for companies like General Motors to stand up and defend capitalism, speak up in defense of free enterprise. Powell's memo was buried for a long time. And I'm not sure whether it really mattered. But what we did see, starting in the mid-1970s, a couple years after Powell, was the establishment of new institutions to promote capitalism, including a whole new set of foundations dedicated to spreading the word among academics and the general public, but especially in academia, in defense of capitalism. This shows up in statistics for registered lobbyists. In the early 1970s, a bill on consumer safety or automobile safety or environmental regulation would come up in Congress. There'd be some lobbyists from the AFL-CIO, the trade union movement, there'd be maybe somebody from Common Core, there'd be maybe a couple people from industry, maybe somebody from the Chamber of Commerce, and that was about it. By the late 1970s, there was this explosion. This whole business of the K Street crowd, all these registered lobbyists walking around with their corporate credit cards, overpaying at lunch and looking for a chance to talk to somebody from a congressman's office and drop a big check in somebody's campaign fund. That became a phenomenon of the late 1970s. People from the public interest side, the Ralph Nader consumer protection crowd, were caught completely off guard in 1977 when they brought forward a bill that had already passed before and had been vetoed by President Ford, a bill for consumer protection agency. The bill came up and all of a sudden there were hundreds of lobbyists from corporations. This is a new phenomenon. The business roundtable, which is now one of the leading lobbying groups in the United States, was established in this time, the mid-1970s. We saw the rise of the new foundation, of a new set of foundations. There are 12 right-wing foundations that have been identified that have, on average, since the mid-1970s contributed $70 million a year to subsidizing right-wing pro-capitalist causes on campuses throughout the United States. Scholarships, grants to fund groups like the Dartmouth Review, this right-wing student paper in Dartmouth that kind of became famous, to subsidize the writing of books like Charles Murray's Losing Ground, which was subsidized by the William Simon Foundation, I believe. The Hudson Institute, most states have right-wing think tanks. All this came out of the revival of the American right sponsored by corporations in the mid-1970s and it's continued ever since. And they've won. Doesn't mean it's an irreversible win, but there's no question that they have won. You look at tax rates for the richest Americans, they've plummeted. The top marginal tax rate, which was 91% under President Eisenhower, that famous left winger, 70% under President Nixon. Now we're fighting over whether it's to be 38% or 35%. On average, the richest Americans pay half as much in taxes as in the early 1970s, while everybody else, everybody below the 90th percentile, is basically paying a little more or the same. The rich have enormously increased their share of national income. Back up to about, for the top 10%, they now have about half of national income. Almost all the increase in national income over the last 25 years has gone to the wealthiest 20%, with the lion's share going to the wealthiest 1%. This is a result of the economic policies developed and pushed by those lobbyists and those corporations in the mid-1970s. I don't want to blame Lewis Powell for everything, but he was one of the first to sound the call. So blame or credit? He definitely deserves some. Okay, thank you very much, and we'll pick up next time. And when we talk about the 1% and the 99%.