BY Lorenzo Maria Pacini

 

Who would ever sit at the table with an enemy about to succumb to implosion?

 

American officials have sacrificed national security for decades in pursuit of national superiority. Further arms supplies to Ukraine will not guarantee victory for Kiev, but will only lead to escalation. This is not in the interest of the U.S., which should first and foremost take care of its own population.

A generational political problem

Some might ask the American political leadership – of whatever faction it is – whether they have realised that the U.S. is no longer the boss of the world. If the answer is no, an extensive update dossier would be needed, to be delivered very quickly to the desk of the president on duty.

There is no more time. We repeat: there is no more time.

The United States is in the midst of a political crisis afflicting the entire West (which happens to be directly influenced by the USA) and has not yet managed to resolve it. This poses a major disadvantage internationally, because all around there is a world that is moving forward, in a multipolar key, with a large number of governments and peoples who no longer want to remain under the heel of the invader and who are rebelling, some through markets, some through partnerships, some through revolutions.

In all of this, the U.S. is in the midst of a social crisis that mirrors the unprecedented political one. The demise of the West, as Oswald Spengler put it, is louder than people think. Nobody cares about Americans any more, because there are basically no politicians who have America at heart any more, while they rather have their own interests at heart. This process of separation of governance-representation-people is one of the most delicate points of a transition phase that will lead the whole of humanity to have to rethink the political processes through which societies organise themselves. The problem is that the U.S. is still an imperialist political system with tentacles all over the world, and the dollar has been the main currency dominating the planet for almost a century, so the consequences of this debacle will be equally unprecedented. The final metastasis of a sick society cannot be avoided.

The American generational problem is very much reflected in the country’s foreign policy: while it is true that there is a masterful consistency with the long-term planning that was established at the beginning of the 20th century, it is equally true that things have not gone as strategists and analysts expected. Reality must now be reckoned with. The U.S. has a very exclusive, lobbying, elitist education system linked to a few power groups, whose dependence on the ‘matrices’ of London and Tel Aviv makes the success of candidates complex. Many are called but few are elected, to paraphrase the well-known gospel verse. Instead, the masses have been fed an education that has resulted in a general impoverishment, a sudden lowering of skills and irreparable cultural damage, starting a process that is self-perpetuating through its own successes (which are actually failures). Who will think about Americans in the future? Not even the current election candidates have managed to find the minimum number of successors.

While the belligerent rhetoric continues, the U.S. is being destabilised by an unprecedented illegal immigration, settling social protests with violence or a few doses of new cheap psychotropic drugs, producing some new mass entertainment to keep the protest within tolerable limits. Perhaps nobody really cares what will happen in the ‘New World’ across the Atlantic Ocean. Or perhaps they care enough to let the murderer die his own death.

Sacrifice must be worth the victory

From a strategic point of view, the situation is quite well-known. The Western Front, ça va sans dire, has never gained any real military advantage. An incalculable amount of money has been spent on supplying Ukraine with weapons of all kinds, from the older ones that were pulled out of the post-Soviet arsenals to the more recently manufactured ones, hand in hand with the (still ongoing) training of Ukrainian commanding officers and special units, which, let us remember, have not yet come into play in the conflict, where instead conscripts and reserves have been sent.

The countries that supported the conflict on the western side came to have to change their state budgets in order to meet Zelensky’s demands and turn their economies into war economies, where it was more or less possible and convenient. The whole of Europe, at the behest of the United States of America, entered a slow phase of rearmament such as has not happened since the Second World War.

The colourful industrial arms machine has given billions of dollars to arms companies. How many F-16s have been supplied to Ukraine? How many F-35s are being prepared? How many ATACMS are being discussed in Congress these days? And from the European Parliament, a perfect obedient vassal, which missile models are on the agenda? We have become accustomed to hearing about weapons as if we were talking about sporting matches with our favourite athletes, cheering and getting excited as we hear the cost of a device capable of killing thousands of people. But war is not a game, not a joke.

Although the possibility of striking further and harder in Russia may lift the morale of the Ukrainians, it is the battle on the ground that will determine the outcome of the conflict, and there Kiev is losing. Even in terms of info-warfare, there are no longer any special results, and by now even the mainstream media realise that something is wrong. The rhetoric of the ideal battle for Ukraine has been rehashed in all sorts of ways, without bringing any meaningful results other than to entice a few young men to go to the front to become cannon fodder.

Even if additional Western weapons would not lead to victory for Kiev, they could expand or intensify the war, and this is not in America’s interest. The allies’ sympathies are understandably with Ukraine, despite NATO’s ill-considered push towards the Russian border. However, their first responsibility is to their own nations, which is why they never kept their infamous 2008 promise to bring Ukraine and Georgia into the transatlantic alliance. No one was willing to go to war with Russia over either country.

The proxy war is blurring the delicate line between war and peace.

How much longer will the patience of other international actors who are watching have to be abused? The conflict will not remain only within the borders of Europe, and if it does, the Second World War and the subsequent Cold War taught us, decades ago, that no war is ‘national’ and confineable any more. European countries have relations with numerous other non-European states, which have every interest in protecting their own affairs and not losing out from an extended conflict at the behest of the overbearing U.S. Lady.

And how would the U.S. benefit from this? The prospect is that of a global escalation in which the majority is no longer on the side of the Americans, and this is now an indisputable fact.

The U.S. faces a number of very serious risks and if it does not take them into account, the damage will be irreparable.

A very serious question: what will be left afterwards?

While it is true that the armaments and manpower provided have managed to slow down, at least partially, the Russian reconquest, it is equally true that there has been no victory. This is understandable if one keeps in mind that the Special Military Operation is not a conventional war and that it was deliberately fought according to the strategic criteria of total hybrid warfare from the very beginning. The Americans never wanted to try to win the conflict immediately, otherwise they would have followed another strategy, more militarily aggressive and involving the European countries in a flash-war from the outset.

What has been done, instead, is a slow work of rearranging the entire West in an anti-multipolar key, going against the initiatives already advanced before February 2022 by Russia, China and other countries that were freeing themselves from Anglo-American hegemony. The U.S. has led Europe into an abyss, more so than before, after almost a century of military occupation, political subservience, economic enslavement and cultural devastation. Now there is no choice: either total revolution or participation in the last act of this macabre theatre, the direction of which will in any case make profits, no matter whether in the short or long term. A very important strategic principle is never to sacrifice something or someone unless you have something to gain from it. And the U.S. knows this very well.

At the time of the U.S. election campaign, we keep hearing about ‘diplomacy’ to try to resolve the conflict in Ukraine… or, perhaps, in truth it is to try to resolve the internal U.S. war? Because to be honest, without a stable nation, no diplomacy makes sense. Who would ever sit at the table with an enemy about to succumb to implosion? With what credibility does the U.S. still allow itself to raise its voice against the ‘rest of the world’?

The question then is: what will be left afterwards? It is a question we are perhaps asking ourselves too late.

https://www.theinteldrop.org/2024/09/23/america-in-collapse-plays-world-leader/

 

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French President Emmanuel Macron has called for reform of the current “unjust” world order so that humans can coexist more peacefully.

He outlined his vision on Sunday as part of the international ‘Imagining Peace’ gathering in Paris, which brought together leading political and religious figures.

Speaking before the Catholic community of Sant’Egidio, Macron said “We must be imaginative enough to think about the peace of tomorrow, a peace in Europe in a new form.”

If the European continent is to become more stable, everyone should acknowledge that it is “neither quite the EU, nor resolutely NATO,” he stated.

“We will have to think of a new form of organization for Europe and rethink our relationship with Russia” after the Ukraine conflict is over, the president added.

https://www.rt.com/news/604484-macron-speech-world-order/

 

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World leaders agree to 'Pact for the Future' amid rising global crises

The UN General Assembly on Monday adopted an ambitous "Pact for the Future" pact to tackle the “rising catastrophic and existential risks” plaguing the world, including climate change, escalating conflicts and poverty. But persistent financial shortcomings, animosities and inequalities among Member States could keep the objectives of the agreement out of reach. 

https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20240924-world-leaders-agree-to-pact-for-the-future-amid-rising-global-crises

 

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has called for Vladimir Zelensky to fire Oksana Markarova, the Ukrainian ambassador in Washington, accusing her of interference in American elections.

“I demand that you immediately fire Ukraine’s Ambassador to the United States, Oksana Markarova,” Johnson wrote in a letter to Zelensky on Wednesday, noting that she organized the Pennsylvania event.

“The facility was in a politically contested battleground state, was led by a top political surrogate for Kamala Harris, and failed to include a single Republican because — on purpose — no Republicans were invited,”Johnson wrote. “The tour was clearly a partisan campaign event designed to help Democrats and is clearly election interference.”

The Louisiana Republican said that his party has lost trust in Markarova’s ability to serve in the US and that she “should be removed from her post immediately.”

While both Republicans and Democrats support Ukraine against Russia, Johnson wrote, “our relationship is unnecessarily tested and needlessly tarnished” when Zelensky and others in Kiev speak ill of Republican candidates in the media.

“These incidents cannot be repeated,” Johnson wrote, urging Zelensky to “take immediate action.”

The Speaker’s letter comes after several Republican lawmakers called for a congressional investigation into Zelensky’s visit, accusing the Democrats of using military assets – namely the plane used to fly the Ukrainian leader to Pennsylvania – to inappropriately support Harris in her presidential campaign.

In an interview with New Yorker magazine published on Sunday, Zelensky claimed Trump “doesn’t really know how to stop the war,” while he described Vance as “too radical”and his outline of a ceasefire proposal as “an awful idea.”

Earlier this month, Vance sketched out a proposal under which the current frontline becomes a “heavily fortified”demilitarized zone, Ukraine gives up the idea of joining NATO, and Kiev gets reconstruction money from the EU.

Zelensky has insisted that peace is only possible if Ukraine recovers all the territories it has claimed, including Crimea and four regions that have voted to join Russia. Moscow has said their status is non-negotiable while dismissing Zelensky’s proposal as ludicrous and divorced from reality.

https://www.rt.com/news/604688-ukraine-ambassador-us-elections-meddling/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

How Deep Does the Deep State Go?

 

In the midst of election season, conversations revolving around the levers of power become more frequent, and in the case of a U.S. presidential election, that often includes debates around the so-called “deep state.” Joining host Robert Scheer on this episode of Scheer Intelligence, Professors Charles Derber and Yale Magrass discuss their new book, “Who Owns Democracy?: The Real Deep State and the Struggle Over Class and Caste in America.”

There are many interpretations of what the ‘deep state’ actually represents in government, but Magrass offers a clear definition, breaking it down into two parts: the official state and the deep state. The official state, according to Magrass, consists of the elected officials people know very well, who are always in the media spotlight and soak in the blame for the issues that arise from their perceived rule. Meanwhile, the deep state operates largely unnoticed, with the official state serving as cover.  “It gives free reign to corporations, free reign to the very rich, and they can more or less do whatever they want, with the official state carrying almost all the blame for what happens,” Magrass says.

The two professors dive into the history of the deep state concept, as Derber describes, “when you look carefully at American history, you see a whole evolution of American fascism, which came at the very beginning of the country and went through evolutionary stages.”

Derber and Magrass argue that the deep state has always been embedded in the power dynamics of the U.S., tracing its roots from the Magna Carta—which they contend was designed to expand the freedoms of the English noble elites. They also invoke the Civil War, which they see as a divorce between “northern capitalism, the capitalist Deep State and the southern proto-fascist deep state.” Today, each of the U.S. political parties represent a further expansion of this subversive ruling elite and Derber and Magrass argue that only an expanded public awareness of this hidden power structure will bring accountability to those who operate behind the scenes.

Scheer summarizes the importance of understanding how real power works in the U.S.: “There’s a reason why we don’t talk about class and caste in America, because the illusion of this egalitarian society is the main cover up of how the system works.”

CreditsHost:

Robert Scheer

Producer:

Joshua Scheer

Introduction:

Diego Ramos

Transcript

This transcript was produced by an automated transcription service. Please refer to the audio interview to ensure accuracy.

Robert Scheer  

Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes to my guests. In their case, two very well known professors of sociology, Charles Derber at Boston College, Yale Magrass was the chancellor Professor of Sociology of University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Between them, they’ve written a total of 26 books, I gather, 27 tremendous output. And what the current book that we’re here to discuss is “Who Owns Democracy?: The Real Deep State and the Struggle Over Class and Caste in America.” And it’s really a central reading to understand where we are in this election, because there’s a simplistic theory. I mean, we have half the nation hates the other half and is afraid the other half or the other leader will destroy the nation. But there seems to be a consensus that everything was once great. Hillary Clinton said, you know, Donald Trump’s wrong. He’s not going to make America great. America was always great. That goes back to the election where she lost to Trump. But nonetheless, that is kind of in the air. It’s the internet. It’s Donald Trump’s particularly horrible person, et cetera. And otherwise, we had a country that was basically a great, bold, wonderful democratic experiment, and suddenly it’s gone awry. And your book, which is a really, a basically well documented research conversation, it’s a different form of a book. It’s two very bright observers of all this, but you know, they they prepared, and they’re having a discussion about, essentially, what was the American democratic experience all about, and why does it seem to be off the rails now? And I’m going to let them explain it, but, but take it back to the beginning, and I guess it’s Charles Derber. I’ll let you, you’ve written more books than your colleague here, so why don’t you tell us what you wanted to accomplish or have accomplished with this book.

Charles Derber  

Okay, well, I’m glad you mentioned the election Bob. And you know, the reason I think this book will interest readers is that correctly, people understand this is one of the most consequential elections we’ve probably had in, certainly in my lifetime and probably most lifetime listeners. So it’s, you know, as you said, people think of Trump as a sui generis, you know, new personality, new political force in America, the forces driving the kind of politics that he represents, is seen as very novel and very different, and the purpose of this book is to put all of this in for the ordinary reader. It’s written in a way that is, it’s a conversation. It’s we wrote it deliberately to be very easy to read. So this is not a highly academic book, but it’s not documented. Yeah, we do document our arguments, that’s true. And basically, as you said, Bob, the real thrust of the book is to show that contemporary issues about democracy, which are being treated as sort of, you know, whether it’s due to the internet or just due to the personality of Trump or whatever, they actually go way back to the very beginning of the country. So what the book does is sort of go through the whole history of the country and look how the kind of politics that is treated as, you know, novel and you know, completely different. And there are novel aspects to it. But what we show in the book is that the kind of very authoritarian, you know, what we call proto fascist, or Neo fascist politics that Trump represents really emerged at the very beginning of the country, among the people who are seen as beacons, and, you know, the sort of inspires of democracy, and to be very specific, and I’ll let Yale add stuff on this. Jefferson, of course, is seen as the great voice of democracy. But, you know, we show in the book, when you look at Jefferson’s letters, what he studied. He was a great stud student of British history, and the thing that kind of inspired his idea about the Declaration of Independence and the foundation of the United States really came from the Magna Carta in Britain, which was a document in 1215 where the nobles basically rebelled against the king. But when they did that, they didn’t create democracy in medieval Britain, they created a system where the nobility mostly rich, white. Men had the ability to exercise much more power relative to the king. Now, I think any listener can almost immediately see that, well, who is Donald Trump? He’s a rich white man. We think, at least he tells us he’s very rich, and he has a lot of rich white friends, other nobility, so to speak. And in a way, the way I present the Trump phenomenon in the book today is that it’s the latest form of the Magna Carta. Basically, Trump is seeking to based on both his wealth and his class buddies, his rich billionaire buddies like Elon Musk and and Peter Thiel and so forth. In Silicon Valley, there’s Trump is basically sort of his the kind of authoritarianism that he represents was really embedded in the founding of the country. These guys who founded the country were not interested. You know, they were not interested. Obviously, slaves were three fifths of a person. Women couldn’t vote or own property. White poor white men could not vote. It took many, many years, even for poor white males to exercise any kind of franchise. These guys were basically following the British nobility saying, We don’t want a king totally ruling us. But we’re not looking for democracy. Despite Jefferson’s flowery words on that, he was simply saying, we are going to set up a country where, in the name of democracy, we’re going to be able to exercise our powers of class, related to our economic fortunes and related to our skin color and our cast, we are going to be able to run a country that is thinking of and being presented to the world as a democracy, but is actually being run as the British nobility ran England for centuries after the Magna Carta by a small elite of rich white men.

Robert Scheer  

Wow, and all the turmoil and aspirations and hopes, beginning with the Bill of Rights, right were an effort of the disenfranchised, disenfranchised by wealth or privilege, caste or so forth to exert some restraining force. Yale, is this…

Yale Magrass  

This is the American definition of freedom. And I’m not sure this applies to any other country. Freedom is freedom from the state. There is the private citizen, the private citizen is free to do anything he wants. Private citizen includes the corporation. Corporation is free to pay sub minimum wage, free to destroy the environment, free to produce consumer goods that deteriorate, free to profit from wars. But this is done by private citizens who are not part of the state. If you look at the actual textable rights, the very first paragraph begins, Congress shall make no law. The bill of American idea of freedom is restraint upon the state. The state is not supposed to interfere the private citizen. Private citizen can do whatever he wants. And as Charles says, this has a direct lineage from Magna Carta. The Magna Carta was a restriction upon the king. The king could not interfere with the rights of nobility. The nobles were free to do as they wished, to the peasant. The capitalist is free to do as he wishes to the worker, to the consumer, the slave owner, for you to do as he wishes to the slave, the private citizen, can do whatever he wants. That’s freedom.

Charles Derber  

The concept that Yale is talking about is negative freedom, the freedom to be left alone. It’s coming back to the election. It’s kind of the idea of freedom that Kamala Harris is offering. It’s a free she says women, and appropriately so, should be free to exercise their reproductive rights independent of control from the state. And she’s making her whole campaign rest on this very traditional American concept of freedom, and it’s not unimportant. On the other hand, I think Yale was leading toward the idea that there is a different concept of freedom which has never really been embodied in America, although in the New Deal, you began to see a little bits of it, which is positive freedom rather than negative, rather than freedom, from its freedom to the freedom. That is, you say I have a right. You know, we’re talking about positive rights or negative rights. Kamala saying she will ensure that your negative rights, rights to be free from control, are going to be guaranteed by her. Trump is going to, presumably not make that possible as a as a noble cast, he will interfere with that. But, but is ignoring the the right for things, the right to eat, the right for health care, the right for education, those are rights that were never embodied in the Constitution or in the concept of democracy in America. So I think the idea of rights that you mentioned, Bob, is it an important thing for people to think about when they’re thinking about the election, is the kind of freedom and rights that they want? Is it the right for certain things, or is it or is it both? And I think Kamala is diminishing many important rights by focusing on negative rights, rights to be free from control that Yale was talking about, but not right so much, which talks a little about childcare and that sort of thing, the right to have enough money and enough public services to raise a family, but she’s pretty limited on that. In contrast to Trump, of course, she looks pretty good.

Yale Magrass  

Harris, interesting enough, is using Republican language. He is using the exact same ideology to defend the right to abortion as Republicans used to attack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Do you want government controlling your body? It is essentially the same question. Interestingly enough, the positive rights that Charlie’s talking about, one of the best statements of them is the UN Declaration of universal rights, which, interestingly enough, was written by American First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. So it is not part of American tradition. It is not American legal theory, but it is something that emerged at least through the New Deal. It was articulated past better than anybody else, by Eleanor Roosevelt, and it became an official document of the United Nations, not part of American legal theory.

Charles Derber  

I want to go back, Bob, if I could just very briefly to you, if want to ask you about the beginning of the country and Trump. And the thing I don’t think either of us is quite clear yet is that we argue in the book, you know, people talk about Trump as a sort of a new embodiment of a kind of American fascism. And this book, which is looking at all of American history, argues that there was a kind of fascism that evolved in the United States from the very beginning. There are a lot of books coming out right now about fascism, and some about fascist tendencies in America. But in our book, we try to make very simple and clear the ways in which we call them fascist ghosts. And in the initial in the beginning of the country, proto fascism, very early forms of fascism began. And that was most clear, as you said, we argue, you know, the book does deal with the concept of the deep state, and we use the term with some overlap from Trump, but what we mean by a deep state is a group of unelected people, largely with wealth and largely people who have the right skin color and the right Gender, and whenever you have people who are not elected, who have enough control or influence over the people who are elected that they have a kind of dominant control. You have a deep state operating. Trump catches a bit of it. There’s an overlap, because he focuses on the CIA, the FBI, DOD and other, you know, pretty aggressive, militaristic elements in the American, you know, in the American state. But that’s in our view, only once. It’s a very important but one sector of the larger Deep State, which in as America, was born in the beginning in the North. The real deep state was sort of an embryonic mercantile capitalist deep state. It was run by merchants who had deep interest in the profits in the slave trade, and who, both before the revolution and after the revolution, were the dominant force in America. The Southern Deep State, which came together with them, was more of what we call not a mercantile capitalist, B state, but in a marriage between the capitalist north and the slave south that we see as clearly a proto American fascist, it was based on, you know, rule, not simply by wealth, but by skin color and by, you know, male. Only white males, much like British mobility nobility, were able to run America. So we think that the kind of idea that Trump represents a kind of American fascism. This book drills down into that concept and argues that when you look carefully at American history, you see a whole evolution of American fascism, which came at the very beginning of the country and went through evolutionary stages through the Civil War, resurfaced the marriage, this very difficult marriage between the north, you know, northern capitalism, the capitalist Deep State, and the southern proto fascist deep state. It led to a divorce of that marriage in the Civil War. But after the Civil War, another kind of uneasy marriage developed in Jim Crow between the South and the West, increasingly, which was still operating on caste power, and then the federal northern capitalist system, which came to be full blown American capitalism.

Yale Magrass  

The deep state is essentially, unseen. It has, perhaps the real power. Most people are vaguely aware of its existence. There is the official state, much of which is elected. It gets the attention of the media. It is what he will focus on. It gets blamed for almost all troubles and the deep state. Rather, the official state allows the deep state to more or less rule and be unnoticed. It gives free reign to corporations, free reign to the very rich, and they can more or less do whatever they want with the official state carrying almost all the blame for that happens. And we hear kamahara saying, Do you want the official state ruling your life? Now the problem is, and we can talk about, for example, healthcare. If the question were asked, Do you want the government controlling your body? The answer would almost certainly be no for most people. But the problem is, the assumption is you are going to control your own body. But that is some the case. This case only for the very, very rich. For the vast majority, medical assistance are made by insurance companies whose primary concern is their own profit, not the well being of the patient. So the question is not, do you want to control your own body yourself, because everybody does, but very if you can. Question is, do you want that control to rest in the hands of a government that has some claim accountability to you or corporation was kind of only to itself.

Robert Scheer  

So let me push back a little bit and defend Kamala Harris in the sense of a more complex figure, because it’s quite right that first of all, she was a prosecutor much of her career, and she basically was protecting the status quo from people challenging, either out of, you know, becoming criminal or desperate or what have you, but when she pushed back, and I want to raise this as a basic question, because what’s so refreshing about your book is it discusses class and and it would seem to me, the pretense of the Democratic Party leaving Kamala aside, and I’ll bring her back, the pretense of the Democratic Party is they represent working people. They represent, you know, the class that’s been denied, poor people and marginalized groups and so forth. Now we know, in the case of American history, Democratic Party was, until quite recently, identified with slavery and through that segregation and so forth. But I just thinking something happened with Bill Clinton relating to class, which is why your book and its assistance on considering class is so important under Bill Clinton’s leadership, it would have happened under Reagan, but he couldn’t pull it off. We had heightened class differences in America. We’ve had growing income inequality. He was the one who deregulated the banks. He was the one that destroyed the New Deal regulation that’s well documented, and he visited and he celebrated the internet’s, you know, they don’t have to be under trust control. They can just random, buy up things and so forth. Kamala Harris, as the attorney general of California, was one of the people like Elia Spitzer. In New York who did push back on that, did say you have to hold Wall Street accountable, right? There was some of that. Whether she sticks to that is another issue, but there is certainly, at least in the Democratic Party, as opposed to the Republican Party. I’m just pushing back here you have people like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, who actually have tried to push back on Wall Street’s power to destroy, you know, the on behalf of the white 1% destroy the other 99%.

Charles Derber  

Yeah, we’re not arguing in this book that because of Kamala Harris’s sort of tilt to the center and embrace of, you know, far right Republicans like Cheney’s and so forth, that you should vote for for Trump or not vote for Harris. Least my perspective on this, and again, we’ve made this a conversation, because Yale and I don’t fully agree on this, but my own perspective, I think Yale agrees with this, is that, I mean, if you vote for Trump, you’re voting for you remember, we’re saying that American history has always been this dual history of class and caste, with caste and the sort of Neo fascism that goes with race and other form gender and caste really extraordinarily frightening. And Trump represents the most modern iteration of that long tradition of caste, kind of power which tends to take a neo-fascist form. Kamala Harris is clearly pushing back against caste. She’s clearly arguing in fact, the Democratic Party in general has become a party more focused within identity politics, with a focus on eradicating or limiting the power of caste division, or whether it’s race or gender identity or other such identities. But the question we raise so they’re not a question, even if you see Kamala Harris as not pushing back on class at all. One would still rather have a class based in my view, I’m not sure I would agree a class based regime, but yes, developed for a long period over the north than the kind of fascist, you know, cast based, caste based regime we have. So, you know, I don’t think anybody would come away from this book saying, Oh, that you should basically because of Kamala Harris’s, you know, cozying up in certain ways her brother in law is, you know, as head of Uber as she’s tied into corporate elite groupings in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. And she’s heavily militaristic, not just on Gaza, but on Ukraine and so forth. So there, there are lots of ways in which she kind of melds the Democratic Party in with the, you know, the modern capitalist, northern deep state. Now, she does make, as you said, Bob, she’s, she’s made sort of steps in the other direction. I mean, she tries to identify and build her labor base. So she’s got a large number of unions that you have people like Sean Fein, the head, UAW head, and a large number of very progressive unions, whether that’s, you know, the service, the SEIU, or the teachers or the nurses, many of whom are very progressive. She has them backing her, and so I’m not we’re not saying that Kamala Harris, you should reject Kamala Harris because she’s so fully in bed with the northern class based powers that have governed America through most of American history, since the Civil War. But we are saying we’re worried because, and here’s where Trump has a little bit of, you know, his his idea, the deep state, you know, focusing on the CIA, the FBI and the military has some important weight to it, not that we I think If Trump were elected, I think he’d send the military into China, around Taiwan, into Iran. He would be perfectly happy to let Netanyahu destroy Gaza altogether. So this is not an argument in any way for Trump. Certainly, my view is that Trump is by far the greater danger. But there is a significant danger that progressives, like the people you mentioned, Sanders and AOC, are endorsing Harris, but they’re doing so out of fear of Trump and believing that they’ll get more leverage with Kamala when they’ve endorsed her and have sort of been on her side, whether, as you said, Bob, whether she will move far enough away from her corporate advisors to really move the Country. I mean, I must say Biden, on the domestic side, he went pretty far, farther than I thought, farther than the Clinton Democrats, who, as you correctly said, fully abandoned the New Deal and jumped into bed with their quote, Third Way centrist politics, which was really a version of the Reagan Revolution. And Biden. Made steps away from, you know, trying to curb class power. And I think that in that sense, there’s whether Kamala Harris will continue that kind of, at least the kind of, you know, modest challenge to class and identification with labor that Biden represents, and then, you know, or whether she’s simply going to perpetuate his class of militarism. We don’t know.

Yale Magrass  

Before I say anything else, let me be clear, I will vote for Harris, having said that, I’m appalled by some of the people who she has accepted as sponsors. She is embracing the Cheney’s. You talk about fascism, here’s a place for Charlie and I probably disagree. I believe Richard Cheney was more of a fascist than Trump. Richard Cheney gave us the Patriot Act, which is very similar to Hitler’s Enabling Act, giving a free range to obliterate all civil liberties, arrest people at random for no apparent Reason, monitor people’s conversations, the books that they borrow. This is a gift from Dick Cheney. Luckily, it was never fully enforced, but these are people with whom Harris is actually trying to build alliances. Is Trump a fascist? You can call him that, but I don’t believe he’s any less fascist than, say, Cheney or even Reagan a Bush Jr.

Charles Derber  

This is why we wrote this book in a conversational form. We wanted to make it as democratic. We’ve written a number of books together, and we kind of compromised our views on this, like what Yale just said, I pretty strongly disagree with that. What he said that is, I think that Kamala is reaching out to these conservative Republicans because she correctly realizes she’s going to need a very wide spectrum of support, and that the left is sufficiently small, is pretty small, and to get a lot of the independent persuadables at this point is probably important. Are getting her elected. But I think that and Cheney, you know, I when Yale and I talk about this, militarism is not the same as fascism. Very often fascists turn focus on the enemy within. Then, which allows, they say if the enemy is within, like those Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio right now, who are eating their dogs and cats, according to Trump, that allows for, you know, stoking the anger and the fear that the people in a country and about, I don’t know if you saw this two days ago, of a poll showed that 54% of the country said they support mass deportation of immigrants. So that’s a kind of very wide, broad legacy of the Neo fascist tradition in America, and it means this election is going to be super close, because the anti immigrant, anti sort of racially driven lines about these black immigrants who are, you know, polluting the country and basically destroying it, has a long history, you know, dating back to the founding of the country, slavery, to the recurrence of Jim Crow, the whole division of the Country by race, has you know, been going on in every stage of American history? So I think Trump, Trump’s authoritarianism, should be taken very seriously, and that every progressive person should be voting for Harris at the same time every progressive person should be recognizing that while she is clearly standing against caste power. Her question about the her relation to class power, how she’s going to relate to the corporate powers that run this country right now is very much in question. She’s got the support of labor, but she’s taking position on a lot of things that’s going to require a lot of mobilization by the people who believe in Bernie Sanders and believe in the even the Progressive Caucus in the House.

Robert Scheer  

So let me defend I’m going to open, want to give more time to Professor Magrass, Yale Magrass, because I think it’s a point we have to consider. How do people get to be reactionaries and racists and so forth. There’s usually a source of discontent, of alienation, of failure, and we’ve had a lot of you know, it’s amazing. We talk about union support for Harris, but the fact is, we know certainly the white working class and maybe increasingly the. Brown and black. Working people do not feel well served by the dominant political structure and the Democratic Party. I mean, the housing meltdown, which basically Bill Clinton was the author of it, the most effective groups were black and brown. College graduates, you know, lost the most. They were targeted with these liars loans and so forth and and you have a situation, I’m going to toss it to Professor magrus, but there’s a real question of whether Democratic Party, jingoism, Visa the world, contempt for the losers in America, which is probably two thirds of the population or been really hurt by their policies, is the basis of the discontent that has supported Trump, including the betrayal by the Republican Party. And one could argue, the refreshing thing about Trump is he actually is less interested in pursuing American Imperial conquests around the world, and the Democrats are just wild for these wars. After all, Vietnam was a democratic war, yeah, the first second President Bush did advance it with Iraq, but the enthusiasm for American dominance, American exceptionalism, the revisal of NATO and even on civil liberties, it was Barack Obama who went used the espionage back more than all previous Presidents combined to oppress people, you know, like Julian Assange and others. So take it Yale, give us we are here. What do you guys disagree about? Yeah.

Yale Magrass  

Hearing Trump is a threat to American national security, American interest. These are not things that are to be questioned. Trump held classified documents he was president when not qualified documents should exist in one question. But if anyone has a right to clarify, documents, should be the president. Trump did not initiate the wolves in Iraq or Afghanistan, although he did not end them. He is accused of wanting to undermine NATO. NATO is a militaristic Alliance originally intended to constrain the Soviet Union, but still its central purpose is to constrain its resident to Russia. He won some kind of withdrawal. The claim, and somewhat legitimate, is that Trump is actually a threat to the so called Deep State. He’s a threat to national security. He’s threat to the military, threat to the CIA. Are these things we ought to oppose. He is personally obnoxious, personally repulsive. But let’s look at his vice president. JD, Vance. JD, Vance before me, the politician wrote a book called Hillbilly Elegy, where he was talking about the appellation white working class. It’s oppression, it’s grievances, it’s poverty, if you assume and a lot of so called democratic, liberal and even leftist rhetoric talks about white privilege. You asked the hillbillies out of which Vance emerged, but their privileges, they’re going to answer what privileges I am as poor as the vast majority of the black population. This emphasis, this cast formation, which we hear from Harris, become Democrats, divides people who are naturally allies. There is a very serious question, what do white poor what do the white working class have to get out of a movement that is entire, that is essentially one of the politics where if you are black, you are oppressed, if you’re female, you’re oppressed, but if you are white, no matter how poor you are, You’re not oppressed. There is legitimately a real concern for police harassment of people of color. There’s no question that goes on, but whites, by some example, have certainly experienced police harassment. And I’ve been told I’m white, I cannot possibly know what police harassment is. I am basically being excluded from such movements. Rather than building alliances of all oppressed people, you divide them and turn them against each other and go ahead, yeah, Trump is somebody’s lousy reaction. Is that a misguided reaction? To be sure, it completely ignores the real source of the issue, but it is based upon legitimate grievances that certain people feel suited have.

Charles Derber  

I mean, the thing is that Yale mentions the hillbillies, you know, JD Vance did not end up, you know, arguing the case despite their the rhetoric in the the Trump Vance ticket about, you know, helping the white working, forgotten working man who was white, presumably, and living in the blue states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, you know, de Vance went to California, got employed as a venture capitalist by Peter Thiel, the billionaire of Silicon Valley, and who is extreme right wing guy who is collecting a group of, you Know, extremely rich billionaires who are promoting Trump’s cause. So Trump and Trump is exploiting the abandonment of white working class people by a Democratic party that has moved to focus on eradicating caste but leaving class alone. And when they do that, as Yale just said, white, poor and working class people, and that’s a huge vote. The percentage of voters who are white, non college people is 40% that’s a huge voting block in the population. Most of them are not unionized because the Democratic Party has since Clinton largely abandoned helping workers organize, and so we’re seeing a working class that is facing enormous job insecurity, you know, AI, and all kinds of outsourcing and technological displacement, which makes their situation extremely vulnerable. And then they’re looking at two political parties where you have a Trumpist party, which is saying we’re representing the forgotten man, but is really actually promoting the corporate interests of the billionaires of the country. And then if they look at the Democrats and Kamala Harris, do they see a party that’s speaking up for the working classes, the white working classes, as well as the Black and Brown working classes. And the answer to that question will shape the outcome of the election, because Kamala Harris is getting union support and building is working hard to try to get even the Teamsters, you know, just today, broke the national teamsters refused to support Harris, but local Teamster unions in California and New York did support Harris, but the Democratic party that has abandoned class issues, which really happened as the new deal fell apart, and we traced the history of this, how Was it possible that the working class, which became solid both, you know, particularly the white working class, so central to the building of the Democratic Party in the 30s and through the 60s, got fully abandoned by the Democratic Party after Reagan and with Clinton and Obama even, because The class power issues. Remember, this country has always been organized by two competing forms of power that intersect, often, class and caste. The Democratic Party in the 30s, with the New Deal, was heavily focused on class, so it won over the working class today, since Clinton, I think, as you were intimating, Bob the Democratic Party is focusing very heavily on caste, what we call identity politics, and has sort of moved away from the Bernie Sanders focus on class. You know, Biden moved away a bit from from Clinton and even from Obama, and pushed labor and class issues a bit more. Kamala seems to be pulling a little bit back from that, and I think the future above both her election and what happens afterward is going to depend on whether labor and you know, cross race and gender coalitions can help move caste politics toward anti class politics, and that’s going to be determined because it’s going to be a few 1000 blue collar voters in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania that are going to determine who wins, and if they come to see Kamala as basically selling out to. To and that if they feel abandoned by the Democratic Party and they’re simply favoring, you know, poor people of race, people of color and women, those are critical constituencies, and to deserve every bit of organization politically we can get. But they can only really gain power when they’re aligned with working class people who are white, which are a huge percentage of the population, and whether Kamala will actually, you know, engineer and help build that kind of coalition is going to shape the future of the world.

Robert Scheer  

Time for a break. We’ll be back in a few minutes. We’re back with Scheer Intelligence and our guest. Okay, so I’m willing to keep going a little, but I want to focus. As long as we took a break, I want to focus this a little more, because most people, they kind of tune out at these words. We haven’t really established class and cast your conversation in the book does a very good job of it. So let me because we don’t have unlimited time here, but I think we’re at a really interesting question here, and for a lot of people listening to this, it’s going to be odd language. What is this caste? What is class and so forth. But I want to cut to the chase on that, because there’s anger in America, and my own view of it very clearly, it’s about ignoring class, class, and that’s what occupy was about, but that got snuffed out primarily by Democratic mayors who called the cops and broke up these demonstrations and so forth. And I don’t think that we can understand the unhappiness, the anger in America if we don’t understand that most people, male and female, black, brown, white and everything, most people feel cut out. However, that does not include influential influencers in the media who are a kind of courtier class. Want to introduce that notion. Let me be a little bit c Wright Mills here. And there’s a courtier class, including guys like you, maybe myself, who have university positions, get security, have at least the illusion of some influence. Are more successful compatriots in this academic and influencer world. Even get jobs in administrations. They get to be lawyers for banks. They get to be PR people. So there’s a class of people who basically have sold out. Who then shape messages, and they shape a message that America is working, and you’re getting that more from the Democrats now than from the Republicans. And it seems to me, the argument in this election is really over the assertion the Democrats are saying it’s basically been working, and now these bad Republicans and Trump are messing it all up, and they’re going to throw us back into evil times. There’s a whole other larger group in America, if you include undecided and so forth, and maybe they’ll even go for Harris, but they’re saying, you know, it’s not really working. I even go to the subway to get a sandwich, and it’s now costing me 40-50 bucks for a couple of sandwiches and chips for the kids and everything as inflation has been terrible. The good jobs are not coming back. And ironically, it was under Trump, during the pandemic that we suddenly what tripled unemployment benefits, that we suddenly were throwing money at the problem of, you know, poor people, working people, and doing what really was sort of New Deal kind of stuff. So I’d like you to address that, because we’ve left the demo, and maybe I was too kind to come Lara’s here. We’ve left the Democrats off the hook, in fact, because they have not shown this, the positive government for people health care has really not dramatically improved, certainly not on the course of health care. Let’s take the remaining time to talk about, you know, how did we get to this place? We’re in trouble now. What is the responsibility of both parties. We know about Trump. What about the Democrats?

Yale Magrass  

I quote Obama’s worst words as president elect. Is there anyone now who can question that in America, all things are possible. Look at me. Look at my skin color. I am black, but I’m about to live in the White House. I have achieved the American dream. The American dream is real. Anybody can achieve it. If you don’t achieve it, if you ain’t got nobody to blame but yourself. Oprah lives now in a 200 Million dollar Alice fine before the Civil Rights Movement, she would not billionaire or not, she would not be allowed to buy it, to buy it. But how does Oprah’s ability to buy a $200 million mansion enhance the lives of the people from the Chicago ghetto which she came. And the emphasis on race, emphasis on caste, completely neglects the real causes of misery, the real causes of poverty, which both people of all cause experience Oprah is clearly of a very different class than the wealth their mothers among whom she grew up. How does she represent their interests? How does she represent them? What in fact, she says is, look, I succeeded. I made it. Why can’t you? There’s something wrong with you. The problem rests with you. Charlie talked about Vance. Vance is a very good example. Vance went to Yale and then came involved in Silicon Valley. Became involved with millionaires, became completely isolated from the hillbillies, out of which he emerged. Instead, we had a hillbilly president, and his name was with Bill Clinton. But the hillbillies are clearly not being given anything by the Democratic Party. Poor whites have good ways to ask. What is in it? For me, what are poor blacks really getting? Or if the so called Glass Ceiling is broken, what are welfare mothers going going to get this emphasis on caste doesn’t look at who’s affected by what and how.

Charles Derber  

We trace this in the book Bob, when you say we’re making class and caste abstract ideas. I mean, I think Yale has just put very clearly, a big discussion we have in the book about what it means for a Democratic Party, which used to focus on the bad wages that led to people, you know, getting massively unemployed in the Depression, people not being able to, you know, make a living. That was a period of American history where the Democratic Party played paid attention to people’s wages, to people’s economic opportunities, and to the whole issue of economic class money and its power in America, that period in American history is really quite unique, because we look before and afterwards and we see that it’s very unusual for any you know, we have two parties of business, unlike in Europe, where you have labor parties, which have been able to express the class interest, the economic interests of people who, as you rightly said, Bob and is a big theme of my book, are being abandoned by both parties. There is no party that for other than in the year of the of the New Deal, whoever represented working class people of both races, people who are poor, people who are struggling to make it, and that’s, you know, 60 about 65% of Americans say they are working paycheck to paycheck. Are those people seeing in the Democratic Party a voice that’s really going to help them get by? Well, Trump says he’s going to represent them, and they believe him because they’ve lost faith the Democratic Party, which they see as simply representing the interests of people of color and women as just not relevant to their problems. Trump seems to be talking to them. The reality is, we do know, and I disagree, Bob with what you said about, you know, significant social welfare going to, you know, poor workers during the first Trump period. I mean, his overwhelming redistribution of wealth was in his tax breaks for the very rich corporate elite. You know, which was the main, the main thing Trump did in his first term was enrich his very rich white friends. Now, the question is, why did the New Deal and the Democratic Party abandon the working class? Why did they turn fully to dealing simply with issues of race and gender, and forget how significant in just the ways he helped very well described, if you forget about class, focusing on race and gender is going to lead to very little change, even for women and black people. I don’t minimize it. It’s not It’s not nothing, but the ability of Kamala Harris to really mobilize an agenda that is truly going to help you know, black workers and women who are working class is going to depend. On a really big change in the Democratic Party that Biden made a first few steps in direction of which is to go back to the New Deal model and say we need a green, much more dramatic new deal, which is a Democratic Party politics that is not focused on identity, issues of race and gender. But says race and gender are part of a complex of, you know, the division of this society into a, you know, a majority of people, white, black and brown, who have no chance.

Robert Scheer  

All right…

Charles Derber  

Unless we deal with that. And the question is, Kamala gonna? Is Kamala gonna really help those people, that’s going to require a big change in the Democratic Party.

Robert Scheer  

Yeah, and okay, so we only at most. We have seven minutes or so ago. I’m not going to let this go over an hour and let me just cut to the chase here your book. I don’t think we’ve given your book enough credit here, because you’re arguing something very disturbing, very disturbing. You’re basically arguing the game is rigged, and what you call shallow democracy is really a hustle, that it really does not portend significant change, that basically it’s become, and always was, really a con job of mass freedom, mass participation, but the game was rigged long before the internet, long before Donald Trump and the title the real deep state and the struggle over class and caste in America. And I read your book. It’s a very interesting book. It’s mercifully as I say, it’s only about 250 pages. 250 huh? 250 That’s what I said. 200 and and, and. But what it suggests, and this is what what we mean by the deep state, and you don’t deny the CIA and the FBI and all that, but really what you’re arguing is that people of wealth and privilege to cast things, but basically of wealth control the system, and that the politicians, both parties, the people we’re going to vote For, are really dangling off a puppeteer’s string. And that and that we shouldn’t kid ourselves about this and and the and that’s what really Clinton came from a poor background. Clinton in new you know, the poverty of hillbillies and others, poor southern whites and everything he betrayed them with great enthusiasm. He betrayed them, and actually, at some point, Democrats are going to have to admit that Bill Clinton did what Ronald Reagan couldn’t pull off. The fact of the matter is, Ronald Reagan did not do as much damage to the ideas of some kind of equality of opportunity, let alone results that Bill Clinton did. Bill Clinton is the one who unleashed Wall Street greed, and you know, Ronald Reagan actually was forced to contain her a little bit with the savings alone. So what’s at play now, and what your book? And we haven’t really addressed that, I’ll let you guys have the last six minutes here, but really it’s a pretty depressing situation. It’s not going to get better anywhere time soon, even though the Democrats have a vice president who seems to care about working people and so forth, because the basic the people who control the media, who control the action, who control the dialog, who control the narrative? Don’t want it to get better. They want their privilege. They want their greed, and they really don’t care about the great mass of people, except to keep them amused or disoriented or something. Isn’t that the really the radical message of your book?

Charles Derber  

No, I don’t think so. I mean, it argues, yes, that has been the power. But this book is not only shows the power of class and caste to you know, run exactly what you said Bob a government that really neglects the great majority of the population and suppresses them, but the book also traces that a real and this is a little bit like Howard Zinn for listeners who know A People’s History of the United States. The book goes deeply into not only the history of proto fascism and all the right wing and corporate movements in America. It looks at a long legacy of progressive, populist, left, populist, socialist labor movements that have had great success in raising consciousness, creating incremental never created revolution in America, never even created European social democracy, which was bought by European social democrats and labor parties. But. So the book is, you know, you portray it as a like a puppeteer book, arguing that that the American people are simply being strung along. And there is real truth to that. But the book also has a very strong message that the history of the country shows that ordinary people have constantly reservist, whether they’re farmers in the 1890s in the face of, you know, extreme economic, you know, control by the early forms of Wall Street, through the New Deal, through the Great Society, through all the way up to Occupy Wall Street that you mentioned. And now to the Bernie Sanders democratic socialists, sort of cars. There’s a lot of people, I think, you know, the hope, if we can really get the kind of message out there, there’s a real hunger. The polls show that about 80% of the population hates the rich people who are running this country. They want a Democratic Party that is really going to stand up to the billionaires and to the people who have long had control in the country. And the book is look, looks at the legacy of those movements, much as Howard Zinn tried to do in A People’s History. And it shows that is real. I mean, it’s always resurfaced in American history. And I think you see, I mean, I think Biden himself for all his militarism and, you know, his relative centrism brought back. You know, he walked in a picket line. He did a lot of public investment in jobs and in healthcare and climate and green New Deal. So the book is not at all hopeless, nor does it…

Robert Scheer  

But the income gap and immiseration of the mass of people is worse than it’s been at the moment. Yeah, and by the way, if you think about occupying everything, it was Barack Obama who had an opportunity to actually do something about Wall Street after the great breakdown of the housing meltdown, and nothing was done. And in fact, what they did under the people that Clinton had brought in, you know, the old the Wall Street people, Robert Rubin and Geithner and Lawrence Summers and all these people, they rewarded the people that destroyed the economy and the well being of people, and they made them whole. They made AIG hole. They made Citigroup hole. And so I’m just, I just, I’m going to put it up to your more radical buddy here, uh, Yale Magrass…

Yale Magrass  

Barack Obama took over General Motors, which was virtually bankrupt, made it solvent, and then gave it back to his former owners. He did not get back to the workers, not get back to the communities of Detroit. You give back to the former owners. I This is a place where the odd differences between me and Charlie, I don’t have Charlie’s optimism. I believe, from the very beginning, the American Revolution was a right wing movement, not a left wing movement. It was a movement of slave owners and people who profited from from the slave trade, who did not want to be interfered with by a parliament 3000 miles across the pond. Uh, account they were fighting for the right to own slaves, there was real fear that slave Britain was about to abolish slavery. Britain had imposed the population of 1763 which essentially protected Native Americans from white settlement. They wanted the freedom to move anywhere they wanted, suppress anyone they wanted, petroleum wanted, and that includes the freedom to own slaves that runs throughout American history. You have the American Dream, which, again, I quote Obama. Can anyone doubt Americans possible if you fail that you ain’t got nobody to blame but yourself. This idea has been indoctrinated in the minds of a very, very large population. We don’t have, as Charlie said earlier Labor Party, we don’t, for the most part, socialism has been a dirty word. It is true Charlie that Sanders made it less dirty for a little while, but is, once again, a quiet is taboo. It’s something you kind of think about to believe in. It is to be un American. And of course, we’ve seen repression, anti pressure, repression, most of whom are very popular. You have in the American population, a very large number of people who really don’t care how well or how badly they do, as long as other people doing work. Yes, it is more important that people of color are poorer than you than if you yourself are barely getting by. How dare these services go to those people? I don’t believe they’re the democratic strains which I talk about are anywhere near as powerful as Charlie implies.

Charles Derber  

Let me give the counterpoint, because the book is really this conversation between me and Yale is reflective of what goes on in the book. Yale being much more pessimistic that any possibility of real change is possible. Let me go back to the beginning very briefly, the thing that was distinctive about the American Revolution, which was definitely not a revolution for democracy it, you know, but it did get cloaked in an ideology of veneer, so to speak, of both civil liberties and of sort of aspirations, the democratic aspirations that became part of the American cultural story. Now that’s not insignificant. So because that can that kind of ideology, while I was never corresponding to the realities of American society, was deeply bred into students when they grew up, they read the Declaration of Independence and the shallow democracy that we talk about, that you referred to Bob, the shallow democracy is means that the capitalists realize they can’t rule with any legitimacy if they shut down elections altogether and eliminate civil liberties altogether. So the civil liberties that always you know existed and grew as an ideal in America and a reality they still exist today. We’re having this conversation without being shot. If we couldn’t have this conversation, I would be sharing Yale’s pessimism, the fact that 1000s of people can have conversations like this and now, not at this stage, Trump might change that might not be shut down and shot or buried or imprisoned, offers the possibility of change. And there are millions of young people. I’m in touch with a lot of these people every day who are having these conversations. I have them in classrooms, even with young people who are planning to go into Wall Street and are sort of being socialized into the corporate ethos. Who have deep, ethical and social concerns they want, they believe that they will change the way Wall Street and private equity operate. Those cultural ideals are a countervailing power that’s real in America, the civil liberties that is a foundation of capitalist rule. If the capitalists take away civil liberties, the way Trump was wants to, capitalism will collapse. It rests on because civil liberties, the freedom for us to have this conversation, or for us to write this book without it being banned or without us being jailed for having this conversation, is very meaningful. And there have been a whole sequence of movements, you know, socialist movements. One of the Yale he rose, is Eugene Debs. He went to jail, but he got over a million votes for president when he ran in, you know, during World War One, against Wilson. So I just think that when you look at the history, what you see is that this enormous power has not created hopelessness in America, and that these movements and the civil liberties and the ideals that people have taken seriously despite their hypocrisy, have made a real difference Historically, if these movements can develop under much more constrained, more repressive circumstances. You know, under slavery, if you look at abolitionism, or if you under the Jim Crow with the Ku Klux Klan, when the populace began calling for public control of Wall Street, we look at American history, I see a lot of movements that had no chance of change, where people rose up, they really expressed their ideals in ways that may had meaning, and they made some change. So I think if anybody reading this book would see two things. One, they would see the enormous power that has always controlled the country to a very large degree. At the same time, they would see that this power had to contend in order to sustain itself, had to contain with political conditions and ideological and cultural ideas that always kept a seedbed of change, both class change and caste change, alive. And I think that is never gone. And I think again, if you read Howard Zinn’s book, you see very, very clear evidence of how these progressive, you know, radical movement changes are. You know, read Noam Chomsky. Chomsky sees these powerful we’re very good friends with Chomsky and written stuff with Chomsky. And you know, Chomsky sees it. Very much the same way. There’s nobody who sees the world as more controlled by the military, the CIA and the corporate class than Noam Chomsky who, by the way, by the way, for people listening, who care about it, is, I think, doing better with his health right now, hopefully we’ll come fully back. But a Chomsky who believes in the enormous power of, you know, the deep corporate state. Is also a person who believes deeply. He spent his whole life, starting with Dan Ellsberg and Howard Zinn and affinity groups, you know, during Vietnam, as you know well Bob and spent his whole life, you know, engaging in change activity outside the Democratic Party, inside the Democratic Party. So I think that the fact that you have a very radical analysis of power does not lead you to give up hope.

Robert Scheer  

No one’s saying that, we could be here for hours and still not conclude.

Charles Derber  

Well, that’s why I say you see some of these contradictions yourself, Bob.

Robert Scheer  

And by the way, it’s not just Marx. I mean, even maybe a more profound thinker, Leonard Cohen, who wrote such great music, and Eric, she said, there’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets through. And I I applaud. Look, I applaud your energy. And look, come on, you guys wrote. What did I say before 28 books and nine? What does it make? 37 books between you? 37 you know, you get you’re fighting a good fight. I and I want people to read the book. Let me get restated. It’s “Who Owns Democracy?: The Real Deep State and the Struggle Over Class and Caste in America.” And the title really suggests what’s, what is really important about this. There’s a reason why we don’t talk about class and cast in America, because the illusion of this egalitarian society is the main cover up of how the system works. So let’s leave it at that note. Want to thank you guys for doing this. I think it’s well spent, and so let me just thank the people who helped put this on, Christopher Ho and Laura Kondourajian at KCRW, the terrific NPR station in Santa Monica for posting these shows, podcast. Joshua Scheer, our executive producer who got me to do this this week. Diego Ramos, who writes the introduction, Max Jones, who does the video. The JKW Foundation, in memory of a very independent writer, Jean Stein. And Integrity Media, which really believes in an alternative media questioning power and provides some support for the show. See you next week with another edition.

https://scheerpost.com/2024/09/27/how-deep-does-the-deep-state-go/

 

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