 Hi, this is Professor Gerald Friedman at the Department of Economics, UMass Amherst, talking today about where and when things went wrong. Years ago, and talk to old folks like me, you can still get people talking, waxing, nostalgic about, oh, when I was young, we thought the whole world was going to change, da-da-da-da-da. But people usually will talk about, oh, 1971, everything went wrong, 1972, Nixon was re-elected, everything went wrong, da-da-da. Well, the timing's off because the diagnosis of what happened is off. But let's start at the beginning. Come out of World War II, the United States had fought a remarkable war. If you were looking in 1930 at which countries in the world are most likely to have a racist, reactionary, anti-democratic government, then the United States would have been at the top of the list, honestly. We had the South, which was already undemocratic. Almost nobody had the right to vote down there. The Ku Klux Klan was regularly going around lynching people who protested. We already had a quarter of the country run by a neo-fascist, neo-Nazi political movement. And then we had vicious, racist, anti-Semitic movements. There were more members of the Ku Klux Klan in 1925 in Indiana than in any other state in the country. You would think the United States would be a good candidate for a Nazi-type political figure. Instead it was Germany. And instead of fighting a war on behalf of fascism and racism, the United States fought a war on behalf of democratic values, the best values of our heritage. And it was a war fought in alliance with the communists, our great allies, the Soviet Union, and the Red Army. We came out of that war embarrassed at some of our own politics and national legislation. 1947, two years after the war, desegregation came to the U.S. Army and to Major League Baseball. This campaign to make America live up to the values we fought for in World War II, the values we fought for in the Civil War, the values we fought for in the American Revolution, this campaign continued into the 1960s. Read carefully the speech Martin Luther King gave at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 at the March on Washington. He says, when the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. A promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. King and the Civil Rights Movement called us back to the values of our national revolution. And after King, the feminists said, not just all men, but all people, men includes women. The Native Americans who occupied Wounded Knee in 1973 were calling us to the values of our founding fathers and mothers. Not the values that led Jefferson, etc., to go and slaughter Native Americans, obviously, but the values that all are created equal. This rising tide of protests by Chicanos, by Asians, by Jews, by blacks, by our Native peoples, by women, by gays, by lesbians, by transgender people, I mean this rising tide of demands for democracy was scary. By 1975, Time Magazine had our cover story of Adam Smith and the story was, is this the end of capitalism? Miners, teamsters, steel workers, were demanding change. They wanted to take control of their own union and they wanted to use that control to transform capitalism, just as women, blacks, etc., were demanding change in our social order. Environmentalists were demanding that we start respecting the planet itself. Rising tide of protests through the 1970s and then it all changed so quickly that people were whiplashed. By 2077, Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as President of the United States, Democrat. Democrats controlled close to two-thirds of the majorities in both houses of Congress. Expectation was this is going to be the next new deal. Democrats have larger majorities than they've had for 15 years, real majorities because Southern Democrats are much more progressive than they were under Roosevelt or under Johnson. We're not fighting a war. It's time for major social change. Nothing happened. Carter proposed income tax reform, changes in campaign finance, a rise in the minimum wage, consumer protection agency, environmental changes. Fuel economy standards for automobiles were raised. That's about it. Instead, this rising tide of protests that carried through from the 60s into the 70s was met by a rising tide of business opposition. It's a truly remarkable moment in American history and world history that has not been well chronicled, but there are some data on it. The number of lobbyists of business lobbyists in Washington is massive. Number of corporations with public affairs offices in Washington under 100 in the early 1970s grew to 500 by 1978. There were 175 firms with registered lobbyists in Washington in 1971. By 1982, that number had grown over tenfold to over 2,500. Number of corporate PACs, corporate political action committees, 300 in 1976, 1,200 by 1980. On every dimension of corporate political activity, a dramatic increase. And this increase was effective. When the Consumer Protection Agency came up in the House of Representatives, Democratic congressmen were amazed. They report the absolutely flabbergous at the number of telephone calls that they were getting from businesses in their constituencies, protesting about it. Business, American business, scared, frightened, fearful, worried about the future, took its future in its own hands. Business mobilized and they haven't stopped mobilizing. They brought down the Carter administration. They brought in Reagan. Later they brought in George W. Bush. They took a beating for a little while. When Obama was elected, they've been back with a vengeance. American business learned to do politics in the mid-1970s. The question I leave you with is, will the American people learn to do politics back? Well, it's been a pleasure being with you. Thank you very much for your attention and have a nice day. Bye-bye.