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by GRITtv was published on November 11th, 2009
How much control does the President really have, anyway? Americans voted for change and are getting frustrated with the lack of it, but our guests have both written about the powerful forces holding the status quo in place.
John Perkins is the author of
Hoodwinked
and
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
, and has written about how corporations push politicians around and even threaten them with violence.
Russ Baker, meanwhile, is the author of
Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America
and has written extensively about the military-industrial complex.
In the new film
Collapse, filmmaker
Chris Smith follows Michael Ruppert as he raises the alarm again and again on the financial crisis, energy, the environment, and more. Is he a genius, or just paranoid? And with all this scary information out there, what can citizen activists do?
NOTICE: GRITtv and GRITradio are not affiliated with Ogden Publications, Inc., and are in no way associated with, or authorized or sponsored by, Ogden Publications Inc. or GRIT Magazine.
For information on GRIT magazine, go to
www.grit.com.
Thanks Laura
By egregious on November 11th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Great interview – i like perkins. baker is right – we have no understanding of history
By winston99 on November 11th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
I read Baker’s book this summer and it was riveting!
He weaves together bits of info you may already know with things you don’t to create this mosaic which clarifies everything, very good.
By valletta on November 11th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Not just 30 yrs. 1880s they were well on their way with this and some of the same families are backing it today. Scaife, Koch… Hearst started the Spanish American war. There’s always been a war on to bolster the laissez-faire economy since the Civil War, since it will never generate full-employment.
We can fix the capitalist system by strengthening democratic institutions in the real spirit of the constitution and the enlightenment, dismantling Madisonian advantages to shareholder class in the regs and case law, and enforcing real open competition in every marketplace.
They got more balance in Europe because these same guys made sure they neutered the industrialists in the democracies they set up with the Marshall Plan, so they’d have no competition and those guys would be saddled with social costs.
Look at what one European country has the same Plutocratic wealth distribution we do? That would be the UK. The only country that didn’t get restructured parliament to give advantages to our corporations after WWII. And the one with the lowest social investment and worker productivity of any European country.
That is the only way. Otherwise, the young people, the “formerly middle-class”, and disenfranchised military people will change it their way! And they like the sounds of the word “socialism”.
By AlbyFlugzeug on November 11th, 2009 at 4:34 pm