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Terrence McNally:
Hello, I’m Terrence McNally. Welcome to Free Forum, A World That Just Might Work. And I’m going to be speaking today with Rob Johnson. He’s president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking and host of the podcast, Economics & Beyond. And you can learn more at, okay, this is all one word, INET. I-N-E-T, that’s Institute for New Economic Thinking, ineteconomics.org.
On Free Forum, we explore the lives, the work, the ideas of individuals that I suspect have pieces of the puzzle of a world that just might work. We look at politics, economics, science, environment, health, business, and more, but all because I believe we can do better, and I want to find out how. The show airs as specials on KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles and streams weekly on the Progressive Voices network on TuneIn. And podcasts are available anytime, anywhere on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, most major podcast sites, and at my site, terrancemcnally.net. T-E-R-R-E-N-C-E-M-C-N-A-L-L-Y. Terrancemcnally, one word, .net.
The last time that Rob Johnson and I spoke for this show was November 5th 2020, 2 days after the polls had closed, but before the presidential election had been called. And when I anticipated that the presidential election might not be resolved by the time we were set to have this conversation back then, I emailed Rob, offering the possibility we postpone till we knew who’d won. And he very directly declined, pointing out that our challenges as a nation, both proceed and go beyond the election of Donald Trump or Joe Biden.
I’m going to read you now, some of what I wrote on election night in 2020, prior to that conversation, and a year prior to this one. So that we can just sort of set a context of what we were expecting, what we were hoping, what we were fearing, that sort of thing. So we can do a little bit of a, how are we doing?
So this is what I had written before going to bed election night; Biden may win, but it saddens and sickens me that this election can be close, and I feel the dread weight, at that point, of the possibility of Trump’s winning bearing down on me. Trump, the Republican Senate, the Republican governors have for the most part, proven unfit. The economy and any semblance of normality, such as kids going to school, depend on getting the upper hand on the virus. Europe is showing that in the best of circumstances, that’s hard to do, but there’s nothing to suggest that Trump will be any more willing or able to take responsibility at the federal level for our national response. We face some big challenges, global health of humans and the rest of nature, climate change, nuclear war, gross inequality, and for the four years of Trump, we’ve ignored or aggravated most of them. And we’re going to go through more tough times.
Remember, I’m writing this the night of the election in 2020, even just in terms of the pandemic and the economy, but add natural disasters, fires, police brutality, urban unrest, and the survival of democracy itself. We need to come together to deal with both our existential crisis and our tough times. Obama was elected to lead the nation and the economy out of the crash. Biden, if he triumphs, will be asked to lead the economy out of the pandemic. But Biden fails, if the best he can do is deliver Obama 2.0.
I found this quote on the website of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, “When the economic system breaks, it spares no one, but such as crisis can provide an opportunity to work together to create real lasting change. This is one of those times, a once in a lifetime opportunity to transform economics as we know it.” Now, that quote was referring to the Great Recession of 2008, 2009. Well, it turns out that we actually had another once in a lifetime opportunity present itself, and that was the pandemic. Two once in a lifetime opportunities in less than a decade.
Under Obama, we did not transform economics. Not only that, we didn’t respond in any meaningful way to most of the people who were hurting. Many of these people had felt left behind long before the crash. And enough of them turned out at the polls in the Rust Belt in 2016 to elect Donald Trump.
So those were words written election night, 2020. I read them now to set the context for today’s conversation, recorded when Biden has been president for just over a year. I want to talk with Rob, not so much about how the administration is doing, though that matters and we’ll touch on it. But even more about how society is doing, how much better or worse are we at dealing with the crises we face? What have we learned even in the last year about what it’s going to take to turn things around?
The U.S. as a society seems broken to me, if broken means unable to solve critical problems. And it’s bigger than politics, it’s bigger than economics. And some of what I want to talk about with Rob is how deep is it, how broad is it, how did it get broken, and what will it take to fix it.
Rob Johnson has been a player among the elites, but he’s also a plain spoken, passionate critic of an economic, financial and political system that leaves too many behind. He previously served as chief economist of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, was an executive producer of the Oscar winning documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side, was a management director at Soros Fund Management. And is now the president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking and host of the podcast, Economics & Beyond. Welcome, Rob Johnson, again, to Free Forum, A World That Just Might Work.
Rob Johnson:
Well, Terrence, it’s a pleasure to be here with you. And I was delighted to look through your crystal ball from November of 2020 and see how much foresight you brought to the table. I’m looking forward to more of it today.
Terrence McNally:
You know I like listeners to get a feel for the people. I say, we don’t interview books or projects, we talk to people. So people behind the ideas and the work. And I’m going to throw you a curve. I know there’s a segment of your life and career that doesn’t show up in the bio very often. And that’s your time in the music business. I want you to just tell me a little bit about your time in the business, what you did, and what you learned that stays with you in the work you do today.
Rob Johnson:
Okay. Well, that’s a fascinating challenge. I’ll start with, in growing up in Detroit, I had a father, his name was Arthur Johnson, who was a jazz pianist and a physician. He had various patients, famous Motown artists and so forth. He was very involved in the jazz scene. My mother was a choral singer for holidays and so forth with the Detroit Symphony, and became their development director.
So if you said to me, what did I learn, when I came home from sports practice, I’d take a shower. And I’d sit at the top of the steps. Dad’s on the piano, mom’s in the kitchen. She’s singing along. “Can I ask for an increase in my allowance? The car keys?” Report a bad test or report card, I could feel from the music where we were and the music was more truthful than words. And so that, what you might call spirit compass, was a very, very big part of my childhood. And I got very involved in the music scene.
Obviously, Motown music was there in Detroit, but even the British invasion in rock, I’m talking about late ’60s, early ’70s, and you would harken back to the blues. So a little bit later in my life, when I left the financial industry, I set up a blues label and I was very fortunate to meet and work with a man named Jim O’Neal, who founded Living Blues magazine. He had founded Rooster Blues, and I could work with him. I bought some masters from him, and then we worked on a whole variety of things. Some new artists at the time, Willie King, who won all kinds of W. C. Handy awards for best new artist. And his song, Terrorized, was written as he watched 9/11, but it was a song about how his people had been terrorized. And we didn’t have the sympathetic reaction that you were seeing for the people that were victimized in the buildings. And there were all kinds of dilemmas in that.
I worked with a genius artist, who was a very controversial creature, Ike Turner, in his comeback. And he made a record, which we called Here and Now. And then, he made a subsequent record. Some of the masters came from us, where he won a Grammy just in 2007 for best traditional blues record. It was on another label because I had closed my label by the time.
But what I learned about that was redemption. This is a guy, I’m not apologizing for what he did or denying anything. But I watched him take the gifts that God gave him, what he could impart, put himself together and get back out there. So he went through some tough times and for some reason, God willing, he won a Grammy in the last year of his life.
I’ve been involved with a wonderful project in 2018, the film, Amazing Grace. Aretha Franklin made it in 1972, but came back to life, reconnected with Detroit. Saw her a few months before she passed away, when she thought her cancer was in remission. And what I can say to you to summarize all of this is, my father was an atheist, my mother was a devout Scottish Presbyterian. I don’t know where I sit on the father and the son, but when it comes still the Holy Ghost, you got Jimmy Hendrick’s guitar, you got Aretha’s voice, you got Bob Dylan’s lyrics, you got Marvin Gaye’s social conscious, you got John Coltrane’s horn. There are more. But I think there is a Holy Ghost. I think there is a spiritual dimension that rides right along with this guy who got trained as an economist and worked in, which I call the mechanics of government and finance. And so, it changed my lens in ways that are very powerful.
Terrence McNally:
So let me ask you, any response to my introduction? You already said that you think it’s a good starting point, but any more specifics?
Rob Johnson:
I think what you perceived was that on election, there might be a lesser of two evils, but there was a systemic structure that was largely broken and there are enormous challenges on the horizon, albeit the pandemic was emerging then, but it’s been more persistent than either you have, or I might have expected. Climate change has reared its head. And what I would say is that it reared its head long before. My friend, David Fenton and all kinds of other people, Naomi Klein, others have been telling us.
But what happened was with the turmoil, and I’ll add January 6th to that though, that’s not in your night. But with the turmoil in the politics, with the disservice to large portions of the country during globalization, automation, machine learning and so forth, the stresses were accumulating. And once you become afraid, you become more sensitive to that which makes you more afraid. So the awareness of climate change is heightened. The prescient ones that I mentioned were already there. The merchants of doubt were working the media channels for the fossil fuel industry. But everybody now, I think, is on deck and alert. The pandemic, in some ways, was an unmasking of all the structural flaws that we see.
Terrence McNally:
And as I said, and we said that it does create an opportunity. And the question is, who attempts to take advantage of that opportunity? And are we able to reach deeper than usual because of the break to, as we reimagine how we come out of this, do we make enough of a difference to make a difference?
Rob Johnson:
Let me take us back a little bit. What I perceive is that there was a time when people on the left believed in government. I’ll talk about the New Deal FDR era through Lyndon Johnson, his faith in the Kennedy administration early on. And there were people who disagreed with that, were largely in the Republican party. And they believed in the market. So you had what you might call a romantic faith in government on the left and a romantic faith in markets on the right.
What’s happened in recent years as the role, I’ll start with approximately the Carter administration, as the role of money in politics has become enormous, and my research director, Tom Ferguson, Benjamin Page, Martin Gilens, a lot of these scholars have really codified this. The role of money in politics led to something. There’s a gentleman, a former musical artist named Stuart Zechman, who gave a prescient podcast in 2010. Where he said, “An unnamed Obama official said, ‘We can’t go back to be like the New Deal. People don’t believe in that anymore.’” And he dug into the Gallup polls that this anonymous Obama official put on a interview, I think on Politico or something.
And in the Gallup polls, what did he find? He found that the people on the left didn’t trust the government because they thought it was captured. That the role of money in politics had overridden the legitimacy of governance. And that has really scrambled our deck, bringing it closer to the present. Now you have a left-
Terrence McNally:
Let me jump in, if I may. Don’t lose your train of thought, but two thoughts that have come to me so far. One is, that one of the things that we were told was that president elections, that the influence of television in presidential elections happened in 1960 when the debate between Kennedy and Nixon were televised. I think the real revolution of television happened a bit later, when television advertising became the key component of campaigns because that skyrocketed the money. And you had Republicans whose platforms, when they used to have them, were aligned with their funders. So the Republicans could go for touchdowns. They were doing their funder’s bidding.
Democrats, funders became the same. Clinton was the strongest one to go in that direction. Although, as you say, once the price of campaigns changed, all Democrats began leaning in that direction. And yet, they espouse principles, and this is very much that thing that we both have noticed, and we’ll talk about more, they espouse principles that weren’t necessarily their funder’s, but were more the people. But if you’re split that way, you don’t go for touchdowns. You satisfy yourself with getting to the 20 yard line and kicking a field goal. And you end up losing. Go ahead.
Rob Johnson:
Yes. I think you’re right on target. I’ll cite my friend, Tom Ferguson, again. His book with Joel Rogers, Right Turn. The form of the Democratic Leadership Council, the move which Clinton eventually became, which you might call the candidate of their choice. And people can lament, which you might call the immoral nature of that. But you’re talking about something that’s true. The structural change meant if you’re going to thrive, you have to raise money. Now, you got to find donors. And that transformed the very nature of politics.
So when you come forward, a person like Barack Obama, there was a certain magic about him when he was a candidate in 2007 and 2008. I had a son who was in college at the time, at Pomona College in California. And he said, “Dad, your generation makes sure that Obama’s going to win.” I said, “Why is that?” He said, “Because you guys all talk romantically about the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. He’s anti-Iraq war. He sounds like a preacher. This guy’s going to get elected. The young people are really going to flock to it. And so will your generation.”
We did, but then the money concentration of Wall Street and the bailouts, as David Sirota has recently articulated beautifully in his podcast that he made with my old friend, Alex Gibney, called Meltdown, which you can get on Audible for free, that changed us into an environment where, as you’re saying, you try to kick a field goal, but you got the tea party on one side and occupy Wall Street spawn on the other. Nobody’s happy with field goals. And then it continues on, Republican control of the house, role of the Senate, Donald Trump elected.
I was in Detroit the night before the election in 2016, preparing for a conference that we were doing on the Friday after the election. And I talked to a man who used to work in a building as a security officer, where my father worked. And I asked him, “What do you think’s going to happen in the election?” He said, “Mr. Johnson, when there is nothing on the menu anybody wants to order, they don’t go out to dinner. There’s not going to be turnout.” And I said, “Well, you got Trump in this.” He said, “Well, Trump’s telling everybody the system is rigged. And the big three have lost all the jobs. Very few people have talked that kind of truth.” I said, “Okay, why don’t you come out for him?” “Well, I’m scared of him.” “What about on the Clinton side?” “Well, they did NAFTA. They did criminal justice reform. They did welfare reform. That’s not going to sell in Michigan.” That is, you know Donald Trump won, I think by 13,000 votes in the city.
Terrence McNally:
Why didn’t the bailout of the auto companies play bigger in that vote? I’ve always wondered that, and you may know.
Rob Johnson:
I don’t know, but I heard from people who stayed there, I have a lot of friends who gone to law school, gone to MBAs and stuff, that work in southeastern Michigan. And what they said was that the bailout of the auto industry took care of the white collar workers, but allowed some of the money to be used to build new plants in China and Mexico. Now, I don’t have a zoom lens on that, but that is what I kept hearing over and over and over.
When Trump got nominated in Cleveland, he came to Detroit, to the Economic Club of Detroit, and he took on top management. He didn’t pander to donors in that theatrical episode. Obviously, you might say in the subsequent years, because that structural system we’re talking about is there, he seduced and abandoned the people that he got to support him, with his tax cuts and support for the fossil fuel industry, and what have you. And how would I say? It felt to a lot of people like Obama had gone to Wall Street and Trump had gone to plutocracy, both engendered a hope, neither delivered on the hope.
Terrence McNally:
Right. Well, the way I had thought about it last night was Obama didn’t try, and Trump did bait and switch.
Rob Johnson:
Hell, that’s right.
Terrence McNally:
And if we can, let’s deal just a little bit with the Biden administration, because my third thing is the Biden platform did seem to speak to some of the pain of both, not just people of color, but also white working class. The working class and the middle class, if you could snap your fingers and the Biden platform were enacted, they would benefit.
However, from my perspective, and then I’ll toss it to you, the precariousness of the Senate majority, if you will, 50/50 with the vice president, is a result of the past two decades of everything we’ve been talking about, of the Democrats not delivering for those people. So now when you come 20 years later and you say, “Now, I’m going to deliver for you.” You haven’t got the backing that allows you to do it. And now, that feeling that government is rigged and incompetent or insufficient is now reinforced. And I feel that’s the moment we’re kind of in now. Your thoughts on where we stand a year after where we started?
Rob Johnson:
I think that’s right. I mean, my own intuition at the time was that someone like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren put a progressive platform out there, but nobody trusted that they could navigate the rapids of this system. Biden gave the feel of an awareness and caring, particularly for what you might call white middle class, what they used to call Reagan Democrats. So people thought he may be the guy that can take the Reagan Democrats back from Trump and win.
But once he won, he inherited the system that you talked about. And what you might call the stalemates, Build Back Better, can’t change the filibuster, all the kind of things that are taking place, it’s demoralizing the public. This current debate about whether congressional officials working on policy ought to be able to buy stocks in the realm where they are the architects of what will be the rules of the game or the enforcement is also, it’s extremely demoralizing. And it also makes you feel almost like the politicians are tone deaf about what angst is out there. And-
Terrence McNally:
But what kills me, Rob, is that the people like Pelosi, let’s say, and others, the people in power in the Democratic Party, they’ve made enough damn money. They’re old, they’ve made plenty. To right now come out for that policy full force would be such a smart thing to do.
Rob Johnson:
No, it’s a restoration of ethical balance… How about I say, it’s what the doctor ordered in part, it’s not sufficient, but it’s a dimension of it. And it’s symbolic of a healthier sense of governance.
And the other thing that I find very, very painful, coming from Detroit creates some of the echoes here. I always tell people, I grew up in the city that America divorced when it needed help. But when I see evidence that INET has fostered in some of its research about, let’s call the geography of up and down in the economy. In the localities where there’s a downturn, obviously surveys of anxiety about health and future economic prosperity, concern for your children rises up in the surveys. When you look at the geographic map in the United States, and I’ll go beyond that in a moment, but when you look at that geographic map, what you see is the places where people are anxious about employment security are also the places where racial animosity explodes.
People blame others when they’re scared. And the destruction, my friend and scholar, Peter Temin wrote a book about the decline of the middle class. And what he essentially said is because of automation, other things, we transformed to a service based economy. With a service based economy, there are two kinds of services; low margin services, what they call flipping hamburgers or whatever, and high margin services that require an education. So in the old days, people like the great Nobel Laureate, W. Arthur Lewis talked about the migration from the farm to the cities and the plants. The Wizard of Oz is a parable of that whole thing. But you were moving to high productivity.
Terrence McNally:
That’s right.
Rob Johnson:
Today, the movement from low to high productivity services is through the education system. But when you had all this racial animosity, all of the turmoil impeded the formulation of a national education platform, what we call public schools. So that everybody could have a chance to go up that escalator. And this was very interesting to Dr. Peter Temin, because as he said in some panels and wrote what INET was working on, he said, “This is really a problem because about 70% of the population is going to be in these low margin services. And these White people are destroying their own ladder, because they’re distracted,” in a way that you and I’ve talked about. Nancy Fraser, in a wonderful, illuminating pamphlet, talked about the substitution of identity politics for focus on economic structure, of which the education system is a part.
Terrence McNally:
Yeah, let’s jump to Nancy Fraser. There’s no telling what we’ll end up missing and what we’ll end up covering in this hour. But you recommended Nancy Fraser’s, you call it a pamphlet, because it’s a 63 page book. It’s called The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born. And I in turn recommend it to listeners and viewers, because I feel she clarifies and names some aspects of our political and economic situation, which I’d been talking about sort of in rougher terms. And she very specifically coins the term progressive neoliberalism, and that’s what came with Clinton and Blair in the UK and so on. And Gore and the Democratic Leadership Council. And what you did was, going back to what we said before, your funders are now Wall Street and big corporations and wealthy individuals, but the-
Rob Johnson:
And Silicon Valley.
Terrence McNally:
And Silicon Valley, exactly. Hollywood.
Rob Johnson:
Well, and Hollywood. Yeah, exactly.
Terrence McNally:
And yet, you speak, as you said, identity politics; women, gender issues, and race, and so on. But it means that you can make progress socially, you can make progress culturally, but you won’t really change the money issues. And at the same time, you’re not changing the money issues for the White working in lower middle class. And they see that you are making gains for the other. And that goes back to Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, in which she has that wonderful image of the deep story that she discovered in southern Louisiana, which is that I’m in line for the American dream. I’m not getting anywhere and, you, Obama, Democrats, et cetera, are helping other people break in front of me. Well, on the one hand, I look at it, you look at it, and we say, “This is such a losing strategy.” And yet, it completely took over the democratic leadership for two decades.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. There’s also a book that I thought illuminated this very well, Sarah Kendzior, book, I think it was called The View from Flyover America, where the coastal regions were prospering in the Midwest, the core, the mid-south were migrating towards Donald Trump out of despair.
Terrence McNally:
Yeah. And I suppose you take it one step further and you go to the folks who wrote about the deaths of despair, the ones who didn’t just vote for Trump, but died of obesity and opioid addiction, and alcoholism from the same disappointment, desperation, and just a feeling that you no longer matter, you no longer belong. And the media has been no help at all in this. But let’s talk just a little-
Rob Johnson:
No, some Angus Deaton, Anne Case-
Terrence McNally:
That’s right.
Rob Johnson:
A woman named Shannon Monnat, who was at Syracuse for a time. By the way, I said I’d take this a little bit internationally. When I look at these geographic studies of despair, where the economies suffer largely because of machine learning, automation, globalization, or austere state and local budgets, you see things happen like Brexit in the UK, Marie Le Pen in France, the AfD party in Germany, or a comparison of how Donald Trump did against Hillary Clinton, versus the last time that two challengers were running against each other. And that was when George W. Bush was running against Al Gore. And the places where Trump’s Delta was biggest were the same places that were suffering from the diseases of despair. And the analog in the other countries fits like a glove too.
Terrence McNally:
And the thing is, despair can lead to suicide. It can lead to self-destruction. But if you think that the only time you get to express your despair is in an election, it leads to anger. You don’t take it out on yourself on that one election day that comes up every two to four years, you take it out and you vote for Trump.
When Nancy Fraser analyzes, she says, “What we’ve been saddled with on the democratic side is progressive neoliberalism.” And neoliberalism, I’ll let you give us a quick definition, and then let me return to what I’m saying. You’re the economist among us.
Rob Johnson:
Well, I guess, when people talk about neoliberalism, it’s joining the market romance. It’s not like we’re looking at the ends that people experience. We’re looking at the means, which is the use of the market, the illusions that it creates freedom, where those in poverty are not entirely responsible. There’s a notion they call economic justice. Economic justice says in the literature, you have a certain level of productivity for which you are responsible to cultivate through education, disciplines, good nutrition, all the elements of it. And you get paid. Economists call you a marginal product. And that’s economic justice. If you get paid more than your marginal product, that’s called a subsidy. If you get paid less than your marginal product, it’s called exploitation.
Now, there’s a problem. Your marginal product is grown in the context of social institutions for which we are all collectively responsible. And so, it’s not as if you can blame the victim when certain regions of the country get devastated, while the wealthiest winners, who used to be accused of tax evasion have lobbied, and now keep their money offshore and we call it tax avoidance. And then we say, “We can’t afford it in the United States.” So the collective systemic design has an awful lot to do with whether your position of productivity and economic justice allows you to support a family, your health, your life, et cetera. In other words, the illusion that neoliberalism fosters or contributes to-
Terrence McNally:
And promotes and relies on.
Rob Johnson:
… is that the market is providing that vitality and efficiency, and that there is no collective responsibility. And that’s a convenient ideology for a progressive Democrat who needs to go raise money in order to get reelected.
Terrence McNally:
Right. And I think offline I’ve shared this with you, I recently interviewed, in the last few months, Branko Milanović, economist who’s a great focus on inequality.
Rob Johnson:
[crosstalk 00:36:49] done a lot of work with him. Yeah, he’s great.
Terrence McNally:
And Rebecca Henderson at the Business School at Harvard, and both of them said that when the raising of stockholder value becomes the primary goal of corporate action, rather than in other countries, and in other times, it’s been much broader than other than that. But Milton Friedman suggested in 1970 that it should just be the stock price. When you do that, it becomes logical in pursuit of that goal to rig the rules you play by. The return for the stock holder is going to be improved if you can use your wealth and your influence to rig the rules, and that’s what corporations have done. It was of course accelerated with Citizens United. But at that point, capitalism has no chance of fulfilling an illusion of fairness.
Rob Johnson:
Well, the idea of capitalism is that it is embedded in a democracy that governs it to give it its moral legitimacy. And when the servant becomes the master, when you have the inversion. I guess, Sting had that song, Wrapped Around Your Finger, then the moral legitimacy of the system breaks down and the side effects, the results, the despair, the unresponsiveness of the system becomes rampant. And I think that’s-
Terrence McNally:
We’re a little past the midpoint here. Let me tell people, this is Free Forum, A world That Just Might Work. I’m Terrence McNally. I’m speaking today with Rob Johnson. He’s president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking and host of the podcast, Economics & Beyond. And you can learn more about all of what we’ve been talking about and more at ineteconomics.org. INET, Institute for New Economic Thinking. Ineteconomics, all one word, .org.
I was going to say, what Nancy Frazer says is, “There’s progressive neoliberalism,” which we’ve kind of… You may even deliver on social and cultural aspects to, as we said, people on gender issues, on Latino, Black, women and so on, all of that stuff, but you don’t deliver where it really matters. And then, the rival is reactionary neoliberalism. The old fashioned one that makes no bones about what it’s vision is and what it’s trying to do. And she says that what can deliver us from this current situation we’re in, and she says, she doesn’t think that reactionary neoliberalism could ever bring along the folks that the Democrats are serving with their identity politics, but that if you had a transformed and revitalized, progressive set of policies, you might be able to bring people who were the Trump voters, the Reagan Democrats over. Can you talk just a little bit about that?
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. Let me start with something that really sticks in my craw. 400 years in slavery in the United States is the absolute contradiction of our founding principles, that’s most vivid. And repairing that, whether you call it reparations or what, is necessary to our rebalancing. But we are in an era where while that mission is essential, when I look at our prison industrial system and all that, it’s a nightmare. And my friend, Peter Temin, has a book coming out shortly, INET series, Cambridge University Press, called Never Together, about all of the pushback to refute racial progress that’s taken place since the reconstruction after the Civil War. It’s really a haunting manuscript to read, but what I want to bring this to, is all of that is part of justice. But when everybody else’s ship is sinking too, they’re not going to say, “You can take care of them while I drown.”
You’ve got to do something much more broad based, which includes that necessary condition. And what I don’t like on what I’ll call the hard right, is how they demonize people who’ve suffered, because they’re not being carried by the agenda that relates to the necessary reparation of 400 years of crime. As a friend of mine, former NBA basketball player, Isaiah Thomas said, “We shouldn’t be talking about human rights. We should be talking about birth rights that all humans have, regardless of their ethnic or racial background.” And my sense is that we are in this place, where the pain and the fear is so large that we’re splitting further rather than healing. And the danger that I see now with the U.S. at the center of a world system, with China growing up in terms of its prosperity, in its power, in its military, when I see all of these tensions related to environments and everything else, the danger of fear leading to an authoritarian alternative rather than the healing and an inclusive democratic alternative is upon us.
And I think as you and I have focused on in the earlier parts of this conversation, the role of money in politics, the role in money and who gets appointed to the courts, and whether you’re dealing with Argentine sovereign debt in New York courts by judges who were appointed because hedge fund managers wanted them, or whether you’re talking about anything related to voter representation, what’s okay about gerrymandering or not. The struggle to disenfranchise for concentrated powerful interest and benefit is terrifying. And people can see this struggle going on in plain sight.
So I do think that the fear, and we got a taste of it from Donald Trump, the fear when that man runs around the country and says, “The system is rigged.” If you look at the ads, you can find them on YouTube, of his last message that was played during that Cubs versus Cleveland World Series, when the Cubs finally won the World Series. And the next day, which was right before election day, it was a Sunday and a Monday. And he is saying, and the American people are the only ones that can rise up to defeat this rigged system, as he’s showing pictures of the Chinese with Hillary Clinton, of people like George Soros, people like Goldman Sachs executives. And he is painting a picture of him being their warrior. And then as you said, when he got acclimated to the system, he seduced and abandoned the people he inspired. So he found a taste of the disease to surf on, but he didn’t heal it.
And if we don’t get into the healing business now with climate change requiring us to both heal and massively transform the economy… And what I want to say one last piece, when you have to do something as large as climate change, the scale of the transformation terrifies people. People from West Virginia say, “I saw what happened to Cleveland and Detroit. Why should I join this romance when you guys are going to leave us behind and crush us?” In other words, the resistance to the obvious dangers of climate come from the people who don’t trust the system to create transformational energy so that we’re all better off.
Terrence McNally:
Yeah. Couple of reflections from what you said, one was that, well, it all comes down to the same sort of thing really, is that I’ve often felt that we now, as I said in the intro, face crises that range from the really critical to the existential. And I enumerate them previously in these conversations; climate change, pandemic and future pandemics, economic injustice, racial injustice, nuclear weapons, and the fragility of democracy itself. The bigger the crisis, the more we need to come together. And yet, the crises are feeding tribalism, fear, all of that sort of thing. And this tension between how people are responding to what they feel and what’s needed to actually respond as a nation or as a global society to what we face are pulling apart.
I wanted to say just one other thing that I’d realized as you were speaking, and then let’s talk about what might help, what might begin to move us in the right direction. And one was that as difficult as the civil rights advances of the 1960s were, and we know the pictures we saw, we know the mistreatment, we know the divides in society that were taking place. The country was doing pretty well. The middle class was living a good life. You felt your kids were going to have a better life than you did. Your kids were going to have more education than you did you. And so, the fact that we could handle a huge problem like that in as much as we did partly rested in the fact that the need to scapegoat the African American was less felt by less people. You know what I’m saying, of less-
Rob Johnson:
They didn’t see it as a zero sum game.
Terrence McNally:
That’s right.
Rob Johnson:
They saw us on an escalator.
Terrence McNally:
Right. And those were the biggest advances we made in the 20th century, were because… And now, when the last 50 years have hollowed out the possibilities for those people, now you try to solve critical problems and you run into what we’re talking about; resignation, anger, tribalism, fear, et cetera. I think about this a lot, you think about this a lot, how are we going to be able to move together to solve some of this? We’re talking about systemic change; political, economic, social, and cultural, yes. But political and economic, it seems to me hand in glove are working against our best fortunes rather than for them at this point.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah, I think there are lots of dimensions to this. One, which you’re a wonderful counterweight to, is what kind of information do people get about the possibilities and the dangers? If you say universities are dependent on big corporate laboratories and wealthy donors, if you say the mainstream media is dependent upon advertisers, if you say the arts are dependent upon big institutional companies that sponsor tours, because people don’t make monies from CDs and stuff anymore, they make it from their live act and being on the road, and selling their merchandise. When you have this unbridled, non-disclosed thing called a Super PAC that the courts have legitimated, and the legislature as you described earlier, because of TV advertising and so forth, has to go forward.
I started on Capitol Hill working with Pete Domenici in the Republican Senate Budget Committee. And I remember sitting one day with the late Bob Dole, talking.
And I talked about whether there should be campaign contributions on the public budget for anybody running for president or Senate, and whether or not the people who have licenses for television, cable television, radio ought to have public service space allocated. And where I to in this conversation was not about freedom and democracy, it was about concern about fiscal discipline, because if everybody had to sell all kinds of boondoggle projects in order to raise money for their election, the public going to get billed more than they would if they [inaudible 00:51:20] collectively, the sponsors of the election. And it’s very thoughtful, but didn’t think we could pull it off. He thought that the lobbyists and others could kill it, and it’s not a bill that we could ever create.
But these structural things that you talked about, this was in 1984, ‘85, ‘86 kind of window, are saying to me, money in politics, money in the media, [inaudible 00:51:48] education towards credentializing-
Terrence McNally:
I just want to jump in on the edge. One thing that people may not realize, although if you have kids in college, you may, is that the percentage of what public colleges get from the taxpayer as a part of their budget has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk. The heyday under Clark Kerr of the California system as the model for the world, those were public systems and between tuition, which was almost nothing, it was mostly paid for by the taxpayers. And now, a majority of the budget of public schools is from corporations. That changes the institution. That changes what students are getting. That changes what we can hope for from education.
Rob Johnson:
I think the California system in its vitality is now being replaced by California administrators and so forth saying, “We have to go take out of state students, and we got to take foreign students, because they get paid enough to help us down the tracks. So the pressure’s on deans and board of these universities.
Terrence McNally:
Well, and also just that much of the research is funded by the people that you would hope would not have their hands in that research. So that research could be unbiased really and move us forward. And if a great deal of the research is funded by the people that it might have to tinker with, or it might have to change their way of doing business, we’re in trouble. So it’s interesting. So what you’ve said is money in politics, money in education, money in the arts creates its own self-fulfilling sort of system, which has taken us to where we are today.
Rob Johnson:
I’d say correcting that, number one, and even before that, I’d go after the Super PACs and Citizen United decision. We’ve got to get to the place where we disclose what the money’s doing so it can be monitored, and revealed, and debated. And allowing that hidden power seems to prevail, is which Michael [inaudible 00:54:13] the degree of corruption.
Terrence McNally:
If incumbents are funded by these structures we want to change or do away with, how will we be able to do that? And I’m sure that’s what Bob Dole was saying when he said, “I don’t think it’ll happen.”
Rob Johnson:
That’s very tricky, because what you’re saying is an incumbent has an advantage. They have policy they can sell. So a [inaudible 00:54:39] comes in and you’re saying, “Let’s change the law, and you guys got to vote for it.” That puts you at more risk of [inaudible 00:54:47]. That’s not likely to succeed. But the alternatives we’ve talked about; dread, authoritarian, all kinds of ways of suppressing representation and suppressing voting participation. I don’t know where those things lead.
Terrence McNally:
So we are pretty much near the end of this, Rob, but we’ve opened up a lot of problems and put forward a very challenging solution. What is either, I mean, your kind of where you come down to as you go to sleep each night thinking about this stuff, or as you get up in the morning and think, in your gut, in your heart, where do you think where is our path to actually solving some of this? Which given the crises we’ve talked about is serious business for us, for our children, and for the rest of the planet.
Rob Johnson:
I think that we are in a place where each individual in our republic has to start with resisting their own temptation to rage from fear. That’s a building block. I think that we have to collectively, including the very powerful, look at the role of money in politics and in what type of information we’re exposed to.
And I think we have to collectively explore the dangers, which you cited earlier, nuclear war. Daniel Ellsberg’s book, The Doomsday Machine is a beautiful portrait of an unnecessary risk to life on Earth. The areas related to the pandemic and health. One of the things that haunts me about the pandemic is I have friends who are in the anti-vaccine camp. I’m saying, and you and I might agree, “I don’t want you to hurt me and me to hurt you.” They’re saying, “I’m not going to let the pharma industry make money hurting my body when they never tell me what the side effects are until somebody gets damaged. They control the politics.” So I think there’s a lot of diagnosis, I’m a doctor’s son, before remedy, but we have to come at it constructively, in the spirit of the lives of our children and grandchildren.
Climate, nuclear war, the allocation of money for elder care, the allocation of money for domestic broad based prosperity, and vitality, and education. And the coercive role of money sits at the center of all of this. What I often say in my own podcast is, we suffer from the commodification of social design, enforcement, and implementation. These are not commodities. They are public goods in a healthy Republic.
Terrence McNally:
Yeah. And necessities for a healthy republic.
Rob Johnson:
Yes, absolutely.
Terrence McNally:
I think.
Rob Johnson:
Absolutely.
Terrence McNally:
Yeah. Oh, God. Okay. [crosstalk 00:58:31].
Rob Johnson:
It’s a formidable challenge. I’m not talking about some fantasy, that’s an easy road out, but I think we have to embrace it now because the dangers, vis-à-vis climate, nuclear war, social unrest, authoritarian alternative are very, very powerful.
Terrence McNally:
And let me throw just one other thing out there, and then I’m going to wrap this up, which is that given the existential crises we may face in terms of climate change, if democracy and democratic countries prove unable to deal with it, and China, because of its authoritarian ability to pivot and mobilize on a dime is who we all end up relying on to save us, then what have we done as the stewards of democracy? I think there’s a level of this that people just don’t get, of how precarious a position we’re in.
Rob Johnson:
There’s a wonderful debate going on in British Columbia, Joel Wainwright and Geoffrey Mann have written a book called Climate Leviathan, which I would recommend. And Seth Klein, Naomi Klein’s brother, wrote a book called The Good War, and what they have gotten into in their explorations and conversations is something like war preparation, overriding the market, setting the incentive, using the market ingredients. Meaning, companies and firms and knowledge and engineering may be necessary, but it’s got to be guided by government.
The other side of the debate is the fear, that is a conduit to an authoritarian transformation. So that those dilemmas, these three individuals I mentioned are exploring in a very deep and vivid and serious way. And it’s worthy of paying attention to their thinking.
Terrence McNally:
Okay. We could obviously go on for a long time, but we’ll bring it to a close.
Again, Rob is president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking and host the podcast Economics & Beyond. And you can learn more at ineteconomics, all one word. I-N-E-T economics.org.
For this conversation and many other interviews and articles, to join me in pursuit of a world that just might work, go to terrencemcnally.net. T-E-R-R-E-N-C-E-M-C-N-A-L-L-Y, Terrencemcnally, one word, .net. Or aworldthatjustmightwork.com. They’re the same website. If you want to get my weekly email announcement telling you who’s going to be on and what we’re going to talk about, and I usually put in about 10 relevant, timely articles, not necessarily of that week’s conversation, but of what we cover on this program, you can email me at [email protected] or sign up at my site. You can also sign up to subscribe to it on most of the podcast sites; Apple Podcasts, and so on. You can sign up there. And you can find years of podcasts at my site or at any of the major podcast sites, as I said, Michael Lewis, Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben and Van Jones, Connie Rice, Greg Boyle, George Packer, you name it.
You can also follow me on Twitter @mcnallyterrence. And thanks to Keana Williams in production, George Vasilopoulos at Progressive Voices. And most of all, to you, my listeners and viewers, please enjoy this and share this widely. Thank you.
And Rob Johnson, thank you, and keep up your good work.
