 Thank you for coming to EPI this afternoon for this excellent event. Can we settle down a little bit? Thank you. I am Thea Lee, President of the Economic Policy Institute. I am delighted to host today's event and welcome today's speaker, Bob Kuttner, is not just a friend and executive committee member for EPI, but he is also one of our founders, one of the visionaries, along with Jeff Faux, Barry Bluestone, Lester Thoreau, Robert Reich, and Ray Marshall, who established the Economic Policy Institute in 1986 when Washington was being overrun by right-wing think tanks and there really was no voice for working people in the economic policy debate. And so we are forever grateful to Bob and his co-founders for that effort. He is also, of course, the co-founder and the co-editor of the American Prospect, which is EPI's neighbor and, I guess, roommate, I would say, from the economic relationships. But we like to think of it as roommates. And the American Prospect has been a wonderful partner for EPI and another outlet for some of EPI's work. So we are delighted to do that. So Bob, I think you all know Bob because he has written, I think this is your dozen. This book makes an equal dozen for you. So a dozen books, which is pretty extraordinary. But Bob is prolific. He's incisive. He is visionary. And he is helping us to make sense of the particular insanity of the moment. But he cuts right through, I think, some of the distractions and the craziness to keep us focused on what should be our principles, our spine, our North Star, the mix of about a million metaphors all at once, but to provide us the tools and the compass that we need to navigate the 2020 election with clarity, with principle, and taking into account some of the lessons from history, both recent and not so recent. So the book is an extraordinarily useful and insightful book. It is very helpful to make sense of where we need to go and what we're thinking about the current political situation and the current economic situation and the state of American democracy right now. But without further ado, I'd like to offer the stage to Bob Cutner. Thank you. And there are a couple of seats up here in the front if people want to move down. Welcome to. Just fill in the empty seats there. Well, thanks to Thea and thanks to EPI for offering the proverbial free lunch. And thanks to all of you for coming. I think all of my books in one way or another talk about the link between the economics and the politics. And this is supremely one of those moments. The book is one part alarm, one part hope. So let's do the alarm first. Obviously, certainly to this audience, if Donald Trump is reelected, it really is the end of American democracy. American democracy will become like one of those countries that has the forms of democracy without the substance, where the opposition party and the press gets to make noise, but never gets to come to power. And the rule of law is altered at the convenience of the regime, and the leader governs mainly by decree. I don't want to belabor all of the ways that Trump has destroyed our democracy or has tried to destroy our democracy, because you know them. You witness them every day. And in case you need a compendium, it's spelled out in one chapter of the book. And then the next chapter of the book talks about all of the things that Trump could do in a second term with an even more compliant judiciary that he either has been stymied or hasn't thought of or hasn't quite gotten around to doing in his first term. He hasn't quite taken over the IRS or the FBI or the CIA. And one thing the dictators do is they take police agencies and they make them instruments of their own will. He has been blocked, in some respects, still by the courts and by the so-called deep state. And yet he's gotten actually better in office at shaking off his more mainstream minders. If you look at Trump's first two years, there were minders from the military, kind of keeping him in line. There were White House chiefs of staff sort of constraining his more lunatic impulses. There were even Jeff Sessions, who was an out-and-out racist, but who had some sense of the dignity of the institution and some sense of turf consciousness resisting Trump's efforts to make the Justice Department his own personal instrument. Well, after two years, the generals are gone. The mainstream minders are gone. And you've got Mulvaney and equally crazy people closest to Trump. And instead of calming him down, their job is to inflame him. So in a bizarre way, even though Trump has made a number of blunders, he's gotten better at seizing control of the machinery of the state. And I think if he is re-elected and if he takes the House with him, it really is the end of what's left of democracy. However, it turns out that there's a lot left of democracy. And of course, the emblematic moment that proved that was the 2018 elections, where the Democrats not only took back 43 Republican House seats, they lost three of their own for a net gain of 40. But they took them back in some wonderfully improbable places. My favorite is Lauren Underwood of Exurban Chicago, who is an African-American nurse, age 32, who was not even on the radar screen of any of the national groups that were trying to flip seats. And this is a district that's 3% African-American. And she won. And you've got eight African-American candidates, all progressives, who won districts in Trump country that were overwhelmingly white. And the other remarkable statistic about 2018, even more remarkable, given all of the efforts at suppression and gerrymandering, was that turnout broke, actually, a century-old record for turnout in the midterm. Turnout was 49.3% way up from the previous midterm, 2014, when it was just 37.6%. There were inroads with rural voters. And the fact that this could happen tells you that a big part of American democracy is still resilient. And obviously, we need even more of a mobilization in 2020. I have a chapter called Suppression Meets Mobilization, where I tick off all of the voter suppression strategies and how these were countered by mobilization. Very good news from North Carolina yesterday. We're a three-panel court. Two Democrats, one Republican, threw out the gerrymandered state districting plan, which, under the Supreme Court ruling, the federal government doesn't get to do this, but state governments do. Pennsylvania did it. And it means that we actually have a shot at a fair allocation of state legislative seats next time in North Carolina. Now, Trump did not just come out of nowhere, either as a matter of the state of American democracy or as a matter of the state of the American economy. And so part of the book talks about all of the weakening of American democracy in the 50 years before Trump. Some of this had to do with cultural trends that really had nothing to do with either party. Television crowding out live civic activity. The Scotch poll famously tallied 53 organizations a century ago that had at least a million dues paying members each that were organized, according to Robert's rules of order, where local chapters elected leaders of state chapters, elected leaders of national chapters. It was a real school room for democracy. And that's gone. Most so-called groups, membership groups are not really membership groups at all. They're letterhead groups with a professional staff. And the way you become a member is to write a check. So in that respect, a democracy has been weakened. Television, as Robert Putnam has written, has crowded out live gatherings, has crowded out people going to zoning board hearings, and the other Norman Rockwell-esque elements of civic life on which democracy is built. And then if you thought television was bad for democracy, then we have social media, where you not only get to ingest news, but you get to create news. And real factual discourse becomes completely muddled. So all of that is independent of either party, as is the seizure of executive power, beginning with World War II and then emphatically with the Cold War, and then even more so with 9-11, where executives have irrigated more and more and more and more power to themselves. And then on top of that, you have the Gingrich Revolution followed by the McConnell Revolution, where the Republicans just decide to railroad everything or block everything, depending on who's in power, with no normal legitimate role for the political opposition. So if Trump, getting elected in 2016, had some aspects of an accident, it was also an accident waiting to happen that the roots of democracy had been weakened. And we all know what Trump has done. OK, full stop, pause. The other dimension of this is the economic dimension. And this is EPI's wheelhouse. The only reason someone like Donald Trump could have gotten elected, and EPI has documented this better than everybody else put together, is because the living standards of ordinary Americans and the life chances of ordinary Americans have been going down the drain for four decades with the complicity of both parties, at least at the presidential level of the party. There are some great progressive Democrats in Congress. But when you have the President of the United States, whether it's Carter or Clinton or Obama, being enablers of Wall Street, it confuses regular people as to what the Democratic Party stands for. And the worst of the deregulation of finance, which is something that I pay particular attention to, happened under Bill Clinton. And Clinton's economic team went on to colonize Obama's economic team. And so although Obama was exemplary in many respects, the single worst aspect of his presidency was reflected in the people he appointed to run economics. So instead of the collapse of 2008, resulting in Wall Street being cleaned out, it resulted in Wall Street being bailed out. So based on this history, you then have Hillary Clinton coming to be the candidate of that wing of the party and taking, in case anybody doubted whether she was in bed with Wall Street, she decided to make it very clear by taking $500,000 speaking fees from Wall Street investment banks in which you didn't even need the money. And then to position herself as some kind of lefty, position yourself as a cultural lefty. So if you had a computer design a candidate to make possible the election of Donald Trump, you could not have done much better than the way Hillary Clinton ran in 2016. So full stop number two, how do we take this back? Well, it will come as no surprise to an EPI audience that I argue that we take this back by running on progressive economics. And we do this for two reasons. One, ordinary people know that they have been getting the short end of the stick to the point where they are so frustrated that in 2016, they could vote for someone as crazy as Donald Trump because the mentality was they're all a bunch of scoundrels and let's just blow it up. The other reason, and I want to speak very, very carefully and precisely here, the other reason we need to make pocketbook populism, the main appeal, is the vulnerability of the Democratic Party to schisms of race. There's really a three way argument among strategists and commentators about what kind of a campaign the Democrats ought to run. You have the people who say, well, we need to elect a centrist like Joe Biden because that way the moderates will cross over to our side and Biden is saying that things will return to normal. The problem with that among many other problems is that economically normal was not acceptable. Normal was leaving working class people and middle class people and young people feeling that the economy had gotten away from them and somebody else was rigging the rules and the Democratic Party was part of the rigging. Then you have the people who say that I'm going to caricature this a little bit and I have to be very careful as a white guy of a certain age. You have people saying, the white working class is hopelessly racist and we should not pander to them and this is becoming a majority minority country and let's just mobilize every possible member of every possible minority and we can take over the country. Now, there are two things wrong with that. First of all, the arithmetic is wrong. There just are not enough voters of color to pursue that policy and win a convincing majority. The other thing that's wrong with it is of course black lives matter but lives of working class white people matter too. And it also happens that white working class voters defined by pollsters as non-college educated white voters are distributed with great electoral efficiency. They are more than 50% of the electorate in every major Midwestern state that Hillary Clinton lost. And furthermore, if you think the white working class is hopelessly racist, keep in mind that 40% of the white working class in 2008 voted for a guy named Barack Obama. The thing that makes this even more complicated is that the hopefulness generated by Obama and then the whiplash of Trump succeeding Obama and trying to expunge every trace of Obama has stimulated a long overdue reckoning on the subject of race. And we have to be immensely respectful of that. We cannot dismiss that, at least of all people like me. And I want to quote, if I can find it, something that The New York Times published. And it's just stunning, entire Sunday magazine of three weekends ago on 1619, the 400th anniversary of the importation of slaves to America. And the fact that slavery and racism are so fundamental to the American experience, so that times in the introductory essay wrote that slavery is the country's very origin. And then the essay went on, I want to quote this verbatim. Out of slavery and the anti-Black racism it required, grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional. Its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, diet, and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its astonishing pension for violence, its income inequality, its slang, its legal system, and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it to this day. End of quote. Now, I suspect that most of us in this room might read that unflinching summary with some discomfort, but would ruefully agree that racism is in fact at the heart of the American experience. Yet if you poll tested that statement with white working class voters in the Midwest, you would be shouted down. And so how do you square this circle? How do you accord the overdue reckoning of race that decent white people and people of color are finally beginning to engage without having it be raw meat to the Trump electorate? And I think there's a way to do that. There's a way to talk about both race and class. Another progressive organization, Demos, has done just fantastic work on what it calls the race-class narrative. Elizabeth Warren just intuitively knows how to do this. At Net Roots Nation last year, she said, and I quote, according to Trump, the problem is other working people, people who are black or brown or people born somewhere else. They want us pointing our fingers at each other so that we won't notice that their hands are in our pockets. Warren, speaking at the commencement last December at Morgan State, Historically Black University, talked about the financial crisis, how the financial crisis was devastating to working people generally, but was particularly devastating to African-Americans. In speaking about child care, she talked about how the absence of decent, affordable child care is harming working families generally, particularly devastating to black families, particularly devastating to the workforce of child care people who tend to be overwhelmingly of color. So the point here is that you can mobilize more people. You can win back more Trump voters. You are more likely to bridge over potentially disabling schisms of race if you talk about all the common interests that black people and white people who are not rich have. And I was having this conversation last week with my old and close friend, Randy Kennedy, who teaches at Harvard Law School, author of eight books on race and racism, including a wonderful book called Four Discrimination, long before reparations became a thing, kind of making the case that we still had such a long way to go that we'd need all kinds of compensatory policies and shouldn't apologize for that. And I was asking Randy, who was Thurgood Marshall's last law clerk, so he has some credentials here, what did you think of the time's special issue? And how do we square this circle of race in class? And Randy said, you know, I'm a race man. But if we do something, he said most black people are working people. And if we do something for working people, it's likely to do something good for black people. And so this, I think, has to be the narrative and the strategy and the program. I also talk in the book about what it's going to take to govern. And I think this kind of large-tent coalition makes it more likely that the Democrat will win by a margin beyond the margin of theft. It makes it more likely that we will take back the Senate, depending on how you count. There are between eight and 11 Republican seats that are winnable and only one Democratic seat in Alabama that is seriously at risk. Now, it's hard to write a book about the 2020 election without talking about the candidates. And for the most part, I don't talk about the candidates because, number one, that's what everybody else talks about. Number two, the field keeps changing by the week. And number three, the book went to press in May, and it was taking a rather big risk, as it was, to publish a book in September that had gone to bed in May without trying to handicap the field. That said, because I know it's on your mind, if I were, how to put this politely, if I were corporate Democrats, if I were no labels or a third way or the new Democratic caucus, and my horse was Joe Biden, and I didn't really have another horse, I would really be nervous. Because it's kind of like, what was that Malaysia flight where it just very gradually sinks over a period of time? And although in some polls he's standing up pretty well, if you take a good look at the shallowness of his support, it's pretty shallow. So I may have lived to see a day when the two front runners are both progressives. Who would have thunk it? Because the rest of the field doesn't seem to be going anywhere. We can talk about this more in the Q&A. So to conclude, the oft-repeated contention, the Democrats are torn between their hearts, which is progressive programs and policies, and their heads, which is winning the 2020 election, has it exactly backwards. It is precisely by embracing pocketbook reforms, at least as radical as those of Franklin Roosevelt, that the Democratic candidate can bridge over potentially disabling schisms of race and identity, win back some Trump voters, and decisively win the election and begin the process of taking back our country. Thank you. Hi. Thank you, Bob. And of course, I love your book because it fits exactly into EPI's philosophy of the world, which is that if we bring the good economic policies and if Democrats had the guts and the backbone to stick with them, that they would win. And you give a lot of examples in the book, people like Sherrod Brown in Ohio, who won in a very red state many times without compromising his principles and without trying to move into the center, so finding that elusive center. And you make an interesting point in the book, too, about that you have a mathematical distance between two points. You've got the right, and you've got the left, and then a lot of political scientists and so on think, maybe you should just look for the centerpiece and that that must be the best place to be, but that one of the points you make and maybe you can elaborate on it a little bit is that sometimes that center position is just not that attractive. Well, I think Jacob Hacker in his book, Off Center, gave the lie to the conventional wisdom that the reason that the polity is gridlocked is that Democrats have moved left and Republicans have moved right, and there's no middle ground. The fact is, if you compare the average Democratic member of Congress, certainly pre-2018, today, with the average Democratic member of Congress in the Great Society era, they were substantively well to the left. There were no austerity Democrats. They were all for universal health insurance. They were all for universal daycare. There were gung-ho trade unions, and it was a more progressive party. It was a Roosevelt party. Today, I think thanks to the DLC, thanks to the whole New Democrat conceit, the party with some noble exceptions has moved more to the center on economic issues. It's moved somewhat to the left on cultural issues, but so is the country, certainly on LGBT rights, and the country is as steadfast as it ever was on abortion rights, despite some of what you read, whereas the Republicans have moved far right across the board. So, you've had a widening of the gaps between the two parties, but it's not because there's been a symmetrical scuttling to the extremes, and to echo your point, nor does that make centrism smart policy. One of the things I point out in the book is what actual centrists do, and how hard it is to find a principled centrist. The correct term is not centrist Democrat, it's corporate Democrat. And when 15 Democratic senators in March of 2018 voted with Republicans, March 2018, when we're all sort of on guard against Trump, voted with Republicans to weaken the Dodd-Frank Act, and what's his name from Delaware, all these Carper, all these noble centrists, this was not because their constituents had studied, you know, all 3,000 pages of the regs and were clamoring to weaken Dodd-Frank, this was about corporate alliances and campaign money. And you look at who the centrists are, I don't think the cure for whatever else the Democratic Party is, more people like Joe Lieberman, who's now a paid lobbyist for the Chinese, or Max Baucus, the largest landowner in Montana, who was Mr. Austerity. No, that kind of centrism excites nobody, other than Wall Street. And I think one thing that we've learned is that the Austerity is a little bit fake, too. Yes. That the idea that we have to be fiscally conservative and we can't run big budget deficits and so on is something that works very well for the Republican Party. And then as soon, when a Democrat is in office, and as soon as they have the presidency, we don't hear much about deficit spending anymore. No, and the notion that, well, we can't afford all this. So you start out by taking back the $2 trillion that Trump bestowed in tax cuts that are completely perverse. And you can increase taxes on rich people. I think Stephanie Kelton in Modern Monetary Theory overstates its sum, but in a situation where there is work to be done and new technologies to be deployed, you can actually borrow a fair amount of money if you invest it responsibly. And so between the options of taxing the very, very rich and having deficit spending to finance something defensible, there's plenty of money to do what needs to be done. So in the book, you talk about how the Chicago Economic School introduced this idea of maximizing shareholder value that in an earlier era of capitalism, it was more understood that companies had many stakeholders, communities, and workers and consumers, and then at some point we shifted towards that maximizing shareholder value. And I'm sure you saw recently this business round table pronouncement that, hey, maybe it's not just maximizing shareholder value, that we need to be a little bit more thoughtful. Apart from how sincere that particular statement was, do you think that the corporate class is starting to get worried? And if so, are there things that can help us in terms of messaging and the election? I don't think the corporate class is ever gonna be any kind of ally. And if they are worried, it's because our side has given them good reason to worry. I'll believe it when they sign up and support the War on Accountable Capitalism Act, which really would make a difference. And if the new deal proves anything, it proves that you succeed in regulating the abuses of capitalism, not by finding allies on Wall Street, but by beating them bloody. We can work with that. And actually, I'm gonna ask one more question, then I'll open it up to you all. So start thinking about what question you wanna ask. You talked in your presentation in the book about the executive branch usurping power. And one of the examples you give is Oira, the office of something regulatory. Information and regulatory. Regulatory authority. And that is an example that you actually talked about the Obama administration and Cass Sunstein who was put in charge of Oira under Obama, where under a Democrat president, we saw this sort of anti-regulatory move around worker safety and environmental regulations and so on. I guess, I don't know what the question is, but that was in some ways one of the most telling in terms of how Democrats make themselves over to be corporate servants as opposed to responding to the actual interests that are out there. And we've learned some lessons, but we probably haven't learned them all at this point. Well, Obama was determined to be a racial healer and a bridger of divides, but he taught at the University of Chicago. And a lot of his friends were University of Chicago people, including Sunstein, who has this just bizarre career of trying to reconcile Chicago economics with progressivism and it can't be done. And the whole nudge movement, of which he is a prime progenitor, is just fraudulent. Here is capitalism in its most predatory period since the 1920s. And Sunstein is talking about little discreet, subtle nudges that won't interfere with the market very much, but will just help people make the right decision if they were as smart as Chicago economists. And I did a long takedown of Sunstein and Harper's a few years ago, kind of going through several of his books, but one of the most charming mistakes howlers really, that Sunstein makes, is he talks about how the campaign to get people to use seat belts is a sublime example of nudges. And he mentions billboards that say, click it or tick it. And it's like, Cass, the only reason that these billboards have any effect at all is because of prior command and control regulation. The automaker has to install seat belts. You have to use seat belts. And a lot of what he celebrates as subtle market signals, product labeling, gas mileage labeling, these are required by laws, good old command and control. And the nudge is like the last 1%. And then he combines that with using Oira as a kind of all purpose killer of regulations that are pursuant to statutory law that originated EPI or one of the labor agencies. And this guy's a Democrat who thinks he's a liberal. And the fact that Democrats think they have to pledge allegiance to the genius of the free market has been an absolute scourge. And I think the wonderful thing about Warren and Sanders kind of battling for the number one spot is that the next Democratic president, unless I'm completely wrong about Biden, is probably not gonna be of that stripe. On that note, that's a hopeful note. Let's open it up for questions from the audience. And why don't we take a couple at once? And I think there are some microphones out there. Okay, great. And what we'll do is please say your name and your organization if you have one and keep it nice and short so we can get a bunch of questions in, right up here in the, yeah. Hi, I'm Martha Solt. I'm a vice president of National Treasury Employees Union. I'm wondering, given that there is this working class for 40 years that has been disappointed and has legitimate grievances, some of which comes from globalization that's not going away. They've been promised year after year after year that things would change. Why should folks like that believe anything from either party? Well, globalization is going away if we elect Warren or Sanders. It's not globalization. It's a particular kind of globalization, which is the use of trade treaties to deregulate capitalism in one country and to let Wall Street in particular run wild. So that's not the only possible kind of globalization. The globalization that we had at Bretton Woods after World War II, and if you want to read a book about this, that was the subject of my previous book, which is called Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? You can regulate global capitalism in a very different way. And I think one of the mistakes that Democrats made, it's not just a mistake in the sense of a tactical error, it's a function of the Democrats being in bed with Wall Street, was to think that a particular kind of global trade deal whose real purpose is to weaken the ability of the nation state as a democratic enterprise to regulate capitalism was somehow necessary policy or smart policy. And I think the related tactical mistake that they made was to think that there was something wrong with economic nationalism. We really need economic nationalism, defined as taking back industry, taking back the ability of the country to have industrial policies without falling afoul of trade laws, building social standards into trade law and understanding, as the Chinese do, that our ultimate responsibility is to our own people. And the least patriotic players in America are multinational corporations who will make separate deals with the Chinese if they can get a subsidy for a factory or they can get cheap workers and complain about theft of intellectual property but really treat it as a cost of doing business and have supply chains all over the world with the most benighted labor conditions. So taking back some of that economic patriotism from the whole myth of globalization is a necessary thing. And the fact that good progressives think that globalization is like gravity, we're just stuck with it. That's not true, it doesn't have to be that way. I think the real challenge is to persuade people that it doesn't have to be that way and that's what takes leadership. Hi, I'm Mark McCarthy with Georgetown. Great talk. I have a question about electoral tactics or strategy. Some people think the best way to go is to find the people who voted the wrong way last time and convince them to vote the right way this time and other people and I think this is where Sandra and AOC are. The only way we're gonna really succeed is to get out of the vast new group of people who didn't vote at all. Which one do you think is more likely to succeed? Obviously it'd be nice to do both but where would you put your emphasis? Oh, I would do both. I mean, I think obviously we need to mobilize non-voters and some time voters and new voters and the fact that you've got leaders like AOC really pressing for that, that's a good thing. At the same time, we have to win back defectors, particularly working class defectors who voted for Trump because they didn't see the Democratic Party addressing their life situation and I think if we have to choose between the one or the other we lose. If there's one take away from this book it's that we have to do both. Thank you. I'm a retired economics professor from Old Dominion University. You mentioned the two major front runners who are progressives, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. And I see very big differences between the two. I'm very much in favor of Elizabeth Warren, largely because she deals with these things in a very rational way. Her statement that she constantly makes, I have a plan, I think she really does have a plan. I think she really thinks through the issues as opposed to the angry leftist that Bernie Sanders is. Could you describe what you see is the difference? Because I'm afraid that Bernie Sanders really frightens people. Well, can you hear me? I'm still on it. So let me tell you my nightmare and I think you know what this is going to be. Right now, Warren and Sanders have a kind of uneasy truce where neither of them attacks the other. This is almost like a game theory exercise, almost like a prisoner's dilemma. At some point, one of them is gonna perceive that the other is their mortal enemy. And I think as Warren keeps gaining and as Warren keeps looking more and more like the front runner, you're gonna start getting some sniping. Maybe not from Bernie, but from Bernie Brose that she's not the real deal. She doesn't call herself a socialist and Bernie did this first and then I really worry about how this is gonna end because whoever gets the nomination if it happens to be Sanders or Warren desperately needs the support of the other so that the progressive wing of the party doesn't split and God knows who gets nominated. Now, if you parse the differences between Warren and Sanders, I'm a huge surprise Elizabeth Warren fan. I like Bernie enormously. I think what Bernie did in 2016 and before was absolutely heroic. One of the political scientists who I've learned the most from, a guy named Walter Dean Burnham, talks about a politics of excluded alternatives where things that people wanted to be on the menu, gee, they just weren't on the menu. And here comes Sanders and puts them on the menu and lo and behold, he almost beats Hillary Clinton. So he deserves an enormous amount of credit for that. That said, I think Elizabeth Warren is the more profound student of American capitalism and I think better at narrating the connection between the lived lives of ordinary people and the political and policy changes that are necessary. She's also better at articulating commonalities of race. And the story of, well, she's just a Harvard professor. As people get to know her better, they realize that she's a working class kid from Oklahoma who made it the hard way. So I don't, there are people, including many good friends of mine who say that she's too shrill and she's gotta stop waving her hand. Well, maybe yes, maybe no. So we can talk about who talks too loud and who talks too much. They're both admirable in many ways. My guess is that Warren is gonna slowly keep gaining and maybe even overtaking Bernie. And I wish I could think of a happy scenario short of Bernie saying, well, I am a historic figure and all of you people, please support Elizabeth, which I don't think is gonna happen. I wish I could think of a happy scenario where one of them decides to urge is there her supporters to back the other and drops out of the race. This could get very, very, very nasty. It keeps me up at night more than Trump does. Jim Lardner, you've talked about building a campaign around progressive economics. You have not explicitly talked about corruption, kleptocracy and defining this as a, as not a normal election year. And I'm wondering whether that is not a tough challenge also for the Democratic Party. Are there forces that will make it appear to voters that it is just another election year and how do you deal with that? Well, glad you asked that. Chapter five in this handy book is called The Two Faces of Corruption. And by that I mean, the one kind of corruption is just plain old corruption. The deeper corruption is the rigging of the rules at the expense of ordinary people. And it's interesting, I do a little riff on the progressive era where a lot of the reformers were process reformers. And there is a famous anecdote that Lincoln Stephens tells on himself where he is interviewing a big city boss named Martin Lamasny in the old East End of Boston. And he's trying to understand whether an urban boss of that era is a good guy or a bad guy. And in his memoir, which is written in 1930 and this anecdote happened in about 1910, he quotes, he tells a story on himself at his own expense. And he quotes Lamasny saying, what the people need is none of your law and your justice but help. And this kind of rough hewn urban populism of machines in many ways was better than the reformism that the high minded reformers from uptown like Lincoln Stephens were preaching. My point is that both versions of reform only come together under Franklin Roosevelt. That Roosevelt is dealing both with a deeper corruption of the American capitalist system and he's providing practical help. And you don't need to go to the ward healer to get your mortgage approved from the FHA. He's running a clean show. So the question is, and I'm glad you asked it, corruption needs to be front and center of the campaign in 2020, but it needs to be the deeper corruption of the rigging of the rules at the expense of regular people and the fact that if you look at all of Obama's economic team, every one of these batches went to Wall Street with the exception of our alum, Jared Bernstein. But all the ones who came from Wall Street went back to Wall Street. And this is a deeper corruption and what Trump did brilliantly and with complete hypocrisy when he talked about draining the swamp is he identified with people's perception that the whole system was rotten, but then he turned out to be the epitome of the swamp. So this time, we need to drain the swamp for real. This is a great man, Pat Maloy. Yeah, Pat Maloy, I'm a trade lawyer, but I'm on the Central Committee of the Democratic Party of Virginia. And what I, Rich Trumka was on television with Chris Wallace last Sunday. And the worry for me on both Elizabeth and Bernie is the healthcare proposal, which I think requires people to give up present plans in order to merge into some new plan. And in the last debate, I saw Bennett and Tim Ryan warn about that. And I thought Rich Trumka was warning about it in his talk on Sunday. And particularly since we need to win Pennsylvania where I'm from and Michigan and Wisconsin where a lot of labor people don't want to give up their healthcare plans. How do we cut that with Elizabeth to get her off that onto something that we can get the labor people behind? Let me address both parts of that because there's a tactical question here and there's a policy design question here. So I think this is mostly a red herring that has been trumped up, no pun intended, by the corporate wing of the Democratic Party and by the press with some reality when it comes to trade unionists who have really good plans that they value. So part of this is just figuring out the right transition. And part of this is rebutting some of the myths. So myth number one, people just love their employer provided health insurance. Well, they don't love the premiums, they don't love the co-pays, they don't love the deductibles, they don't love the intense management that says, well in principle you have the right to the treatment you need, you can't go to this hospital, you can't go to that doctor and by the way you have job lock-in. So if you tell that story right, people say, yeah, you know, wouldn't it be better if I just had universal healthcare that covered followed me everywhere? I think there are lots of smart transitional strategies out there where you grandfather, some trade union plans, Rosa DeLauro and Jan Czakowski have a particularly smart version of this where you say to an employer, you have to cover your employees. And by the way, do we have a deal for you? You pay into the Medicare trust fund and then you satisfy that requirement by giving all of your employees Medicare. That way you solve the fiscal problem. Instead of having a trillion dollar tax increase, you're just taking money that is now paid by employers and that goes into the Medicare trust fund. You need a transitional period so that people can phase out of employer provided plans into universal Medicare. But what everybody forgets is that universal Medicare done properly is better than any employer provided health plan. So now the subtle tactical question here is how do we get Elizabeth off of this? I think as long as this tacit treaty that we are not going to attack each other between the Warren camp and the Sanders camp continues, she is not going to let any daylight grow between her position and Sanders position lest the Bernie Bros start sniping that she is not the real deal. So that's going to come later in the campaign. One more thing I would just say in terms of the union position. It's not monolithic. I think it's too simple to say unions don't like Medicare for all. Some unions do, some union members do. And I think a lot of union members also understand that they've given up a lot at the bargaining table because healthcare has gotten so expensive and so inefficient. So I just wanted to add that little caveat. Frank Clementi. Hi, about Frank Clementi Americans for tax fairness, just to switch the direction slightly. Trump winning was horrible. I was always concerned though with Hillary Clinton, it was kind of arresting the swing of history in a more progressive direction that she was a corporate Democrat and was going to just continue the same policies. I were the same about Biden. So my question really is, if Biden is elected, let's say he gets through and he's the nominee and he actually beats Trump. What kind of, how much do you see that retarding? I mean, we have this tremendous movement that is happening out here across the country. People waking up and Bernie really, I think started a lot, crystallized a lot of it in 2016. But from your historical perspective, how much would Biden winning arrest the progressive swing? This is what in technical economics we call a high hanging curve ball. Obviously it would be disastrous because one of the things that could happen is that you would reinfect Trumpism in the sense that Biden would not deliver anything that would fundamentally change the trajectory of the economy as far as working families is concerned. And then you might, God forbid, when Biden is really doddering, in the next election have a more competent version of Trump. So, but I don't think you have to worry. I will be astonished if Biden is still viable by the middle of the primary season. I just see all signs that he is gonna continue to crater. But thank you for the question. I'm Dr. Caroline Pomplin. I'm sorry, I'm late. I was driving and I was hit by a truck. Fortunately, I was driving in a union built Volvo. So I was able to walk away. Healthcare, I just wrote a piece in the progressive on the web that explains exactly what you just said that the transition is a distraction. It is easy to fix. I'm a physician. What I, you may have talked about this before I got here, but the Affordable Care Act, the Affordable Care Act is a corporate thing designed to keep the insurance companies and the for-profit companies in to preserve their share of the 18% of GDP. That they take. No one seems to be making that argument. Is it because it's too radical? I mean, they're just saying this is gonna be fairer and it's gonna be cheaper. I think, question. Has anyone talking about that? We have lots of advocacy. We have no analysis. Well, I think how to put this. So I think democratic candidates are going out of their way not to attack Barack Obama. That's thing one. I think your analysis, excuse me, he's absolutely right. I mean, the Affordable Care Act covers what? Eight or 9% of Americans. So it's a blip and the whole hospital and health industry has become more and more concentrated as has the insurance industry. So the whole naive premise of managed markets that people are gonna shop around for the best possible plan. You have a choice of plan A or plan A and it's one more reason why market competition doesn't work in healthcare. I don't think you have to trash the Affordable Care Act and just among friends here, I completely agree that it's lousy legislation in order to advocate Medicare for all. I do think, and I plan to read your piece in the progressive even though it's a competing magazine. I do think getting the transition right and disarming some of these arguments about, oh my God, there's 165 million Americans who just love their crappy employer-provided healthcare. We have to put that away. Back wall there. Thank you. I'm Carl Polzer and I have a little project called the Center on Capital and Social Equity where I explore wealth concentration and I try to advocate for including people at the bottom to the middle. And I look at it from all sides. So the question, you talked about economic nationalism and it's one of the background. Where Trump I think has can capture their mind of the working class especially toward the bottom is on jobs, the wall and entertainment. He provides them with moral uplifting because he's not calling them a basket of deplorables. He's so deplorably makes them feel good about themselves. So I mean he's constantly entertaining. So the one substantive thing is the wall. He's keeping away competition that's keeping up wages and increasing jobs for them. And I see this around here. So how can the Democrats counter and you talked about economic nationalism. So you're kind of entering that territory. Would you favor sort of a deal, immigration deal with a little more restriction? A little more Trump-esque. How does the Democrats counter that? Right. So I had this little run in with Steve Bannon where he thought I was some kind of a soulmate because we both were talking critically of China and both were talking about economic nationalism. His economic nationalism is white nationalism. It's racist. Mine is industrial policy nationalism that brings back industries and takes back the leadership and new technologies and rebuilds subways so that you could have taken a subway rather than driving your Volvo and all that good stuff. So I think, and also by the way, I was interviewing Sherrod Brown the other day and he said what Democrats need to say to working class voters is Trump has betrayed you. He talked a good game about making America great but he hasn't brought back jobs and very little of the growth in the economy has trickled down to ordinary people. So I don't think that's tough but you put your finger on something that really is tough and that's immigration in the following sense. So on the one hand, when Trump's policy puts three-year-olds in concentration camps and separates families, he loses American public opinion. When a DSA, Democratic Socialist of America, passes a resolution saying we need open borders, that hands Trump a gift. So how do you square that circle? And I think on the one hand, you need humane policies for refugees which is not difficult but on the other hand, you can't have open borders. And Jeff Foe and other EPI alum wrote a wonderful piece in the prospect about the importance of a regional development plan for Central America where most of these people would rather stay home and you create jobs in the region, that's a better way of slowing down immigration flows than the wall. Most Americans, by the way, are not in favor of the wall. So I think if you can really deliver the goods for working class voters, it takes the spotlight off of immigration. That said, I think you're right, immigration's a very tricky issue for Democrats. And every time I hear an interview with an immigrant rights advocate group and the interviewer says, yeah, but what do you do about this flow of people wanting to come into the country? I haven't heard a good answer. So this, I mean, let's admit it, all issues are not easy. This is probably the most difficult. Thank you. Hey, Bob. Rob Scott from EPI. I'm gonna go back to the other piece of economic nationalism again, the trade question. I think you're right. Trump is certainly portrayed as working class voters. Things are not getting better. He's not creating jobs, manufacturing is. Seems to be tipping into possibly into recession. On the other hand, I think labor progressives in particular are tied to some of his aggressive trade policies. They're staying in the game to negotiate the NAFTA 2 deal. They're staying involved in the China negotiations in part because their members care. So how do we break this logjam? Right. Let's separate the China negotiations from NAFTA. I don't think we have to worry about the China negotiations because Trump is screwing them up so royally that this is gonna blow up on him. And if Trump had just let Bob Lighthizer do his job, Lighthizer probably being Trump's single best appointee, maybe his only good appointee, there was maybe a one in four chance that we could have had a modus vivendi with China. We're China agrees to cut back on some of its more egregious mercantilism and buys a whole bunch of stuff. And we split the difference on which technologies we view as strategic and we shake hands and kick the can down the road. Could have done that. But Trump's style of vacillating between flattery and insults has just led the Chinese to conclude, well, you know, we just need to diversify our trading partners that much quicker and we need to become a world leader in every possible technology that much quicker and time is on our side. And they play a long game, measured in thousands of years. So I think this might have been a winner for Trump, but I think it's gonna backfire on him. The Greeks had a wonderful saying, character is fate. And in this case, the fact that he bungled us possibly winning opportunity is a reflection of his character, his craziness, his impulsivity. Now, NAFTA too, USMCA, that's really trickier because there are, we spend the whole rest of the day and then some on this, but to do the headlines, there are some things in the working draft that help labor, not a whole hell of a lot. They help Mexican labor more than they help American labor, but there is this tug of war going on between the democratic progressives who have drawn some lines in the sand saying, the deal has to be included in the following respects or we're not gonna vote for it. And then you've got 40, 50, 60 corporate Democrats saying, hey, let's vote for the thing. So this is gonna go down to the wire. I think it's so technical and so intricate and the benefits are so modest and distant that the worst case from the progressive point of view is maybe they get the votes and it helps a small number of union workers in a modest way and the risk is it peels off a little bit of our base. But then you have to ask compared to what? There are 20 other things where he hasn't delivered for union workers. I'm Steve Johnson. I have a website I call americaunstuck.com. I would like to ask you to reach higher. I think that it's okay to be as good as we can at aspirational incremental populism. But incremental populism, even if we do it really well, isn't enough. We're in a larger system crisis where I think the Democratic Party ought to be branding itself as the party of systemic well-being, not just on economics, but on the environment and other areas as well. And that should also be supported by a brand message on the economy. We had an economy that we should be branding as the economy of prosperity capitalism from 1945 to 1981 and we've had an economy since 1981 that has been the economy of enrichment capitalism. Question. Yep. Wouldn't it be better for us to have aspirational brands for systemic change than just have aspirations for better incrementalism? Well, it's been a long time since anybody has called me an incrementalist. No, I mean, I think the book calls for really fundamental systemic change, including obviously on the environment, which is the existential crisis and also is an opportunity to create green technologies and green jobs. So happily, I mean, this is an opportunity for Democrats to be as fundamentally transformative, I think is the word, as we've seen since Roosevelt. And I think if the right nominee gets nominated, that's the kind of election we're gonna see. So I sympathize with what you're saying, but I plead innocent. And let's take one more question right up here. From 1942, at the Fontana Steel Plant in California, until the 1980s, Kaiser was a comprehensive single payer system, and I worked for it. And it worked, and it was premised on union contracts so that any time a worker was hired and it went from north to south throughout the state of California, the family automatically with the worker accessed the highest quality medical care the doctors run salaries. GAO reports, at least two of them, indicate that by eliminating the insurance industry, that savings alone will pay for everyone. Can you comment on that? Cause no one's talking about the GAO studies or Kaiser. Thank you. There was a period in American history where one version of how to go forward with healthcare was what were then known as prepaid group health plans of which Kaiser was one. They were nonprofits, they were salaried, and so there was no incentive for doctors to get rich by overtreating or undertreating, and there were no commercial incentives in it. When Richard Nixon became president, he branded, rebranded prepaid group health as HMOs in a way that would enable the insurance companies to take this over and turn it into managed care where the insurance company prospers to the extent that care is denied. So that was another road not taken. It was a path to universal health coverage, non-commercial, and there are other surviving examples of this approach, the health wonks call it staff model non-profit HMOs or prepaid plans. My favorite example I've written about this is the health plan of local six hotel and restaurant workers in New York where it's a staff model plan, doctors are salaried, completely non-commercial, first dollar coverage, no deductibles, no co-pays, and it costs one third the cost of any other health plan in New York City because it's stripped out all the commercialism. And I'm glad you raised this for another reason. All of the focuses on Medicare for All and on single payer, how the insurance is paid is only one part of the challenge. The other part of the challenge is getting all of the commercialism out of the system because if you have Medicare for All co-existing with commercial providers, it's gonna go broke. So even as we go to a universal system, we have to go to some kind of a model where there are no commercial players and physicians are mostly salaried. So this is an even heavier lift than we think but the history of Kaiser or the history of other original prepaid group plans like the co-op of Puget Sound and the original hip plan in New York just shows what kind of high quality care, what kind of savings, what kind of comprehensive coverage is possible. So thank you for the question. Alrighty, thanks to all of you for coming today. Thanks to those of you who joined us live stream. I wanna encourage everybody who's here to go buy the book right outside the door if you're online, you can buy it online. You know how to do that, but please join me in thanking Bob Cutner.