If you want the economic system to serve the people, you have to put the people in charge,

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"The joke is that if you don’t change the whole system, even when you do change the Wall St. story, it will come back and be undone by the same forces you haven’t changed by not changing this system."



SS: Okay, then tell me where is Bernie Sanders falling short, why are voters choosing Clinton over him? If the economy, like you’ve said, isn’t benefiting common people, surely they should turn to candidates who promise to fix exactly that, or other 3rd party candidates. So why they are choosing Clinton over Sanders?

RW: I think there are two basic reasons. The first one is very-very important for people around the world to understand: for the last half-century at least until 1947-1948, we have been in the U.S. in a condition of an endless demonization of everything that is socialist or communist or anarchist. We have been told as a people in our schools, in our newspapers, by our politicians, that anything that calls itself socialist is evil, is dangerous, is unpatriotic. For a candidate like mr. Sanders to accept the label “socialist” and thereby be seen to commit a political suicide is an earth-shaking change, and that takes time for people. Many people cannot yet vote for something they’ve been taught to believe is so terrible. The very fact that millions of people are doing it despite all of this, that’s the most important factor that will make the rest of them come along. That’s why his ability to do so well now is such an important sign for what’s coming. Number two: ms. Clinton is part of the establishment, ms. Clinton is part of the kind of the politics in both of the Republican and the Democratic party, that has run this society for the last half of the century. Therefore, she holds on to the people who believe that our current problems are temporary, who believe that anything that changes this country will be more troubling and dangerous than holding on. It’s like the devil that you know is less frightening than the devil that you don’t yet know. So, those two forces give ms. Clinton her vote. But if you look, for example, at the statistics about how young people are voting, people between the ages of 19 and 35, mr. Sanders in election after election, when he wins and loses, he gets between 70% and 80% of the young people vote. That tells you where we are going in the U.S.

SS: Now, Sanders, Clinton, even Trump, everyone is pouncing on Wall St., saying how it has to be reigned in, proposing plans to keep it under control. Is big business now seen as a danger to the American society? Or is it just easy to blame everything on it? And can anybody really take on Wall St.?

RW: Well, let me answer the last part first. Of course, one could change Wall St., one could take on Wall St., one could reduce its influence. That’s simply a question of political will. If that will is produced by this election or by what follows, then Wall St. will be changed and perhaps even dramatically. At this point, there isn’t that while, there isn’t that political organisation that can make that happen. Number two: we live in an economic system, it has a financial center in Wall St., but it has all kinds of other dimensions, and you’re absolutely right that part of this attack on Wall St. is because it’s easier to attack a part of this system than to confront the reality that it may indeed be our system and not just one part of it that is the problem. So, there’s a little bit of this hopefulness that we can fix the whole system’s problems by focusing just on the Wall St. part - frankly, as an economist, I think that’s silly, that doesn’t work. We have tried that in the past. If you don’t change this system as a whole, then even if you’re lucky enough to change a part, the unchanged other parts will undo what you’ve done - and I can give you the best example: the last capitalism collapsed in the 1930s here in the U.S., we passed the Banking Act of 1933. When that was finally undone by the banks who didn’t want it and by the rest of the capitalist system, when president Bill Clinton signed the bill that cancelled that Act, 8 years later, we had the same collapse from the same financial behaviour. The joke is that if you don’t change the whole system, even when you do change the Wall St. story, it will come back and be undone by the same forces you haven’t changed by not changing this system. I think we’re seeing a slow learning of that reality, and in the months and years ahead, it will be the system that finally comes into clear view as the problem we have and not just the Wall St. or any other part of it.

https://www.rt.com/shows/sophieco/338877-capitalism-system-americans-elections/

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1. The real primary talk starts a couple of minutes in.

Just too many good quotes to choose from

SS: So you’ve been saying that Americans are becoming more open to these socialist views, so to say. How will the next president manage to keep these left ideas in line and not to lose popular support?

RW: Well, I believe that if any Republican becomes the next President or if ms. Clinton becomes the next President, and that looks like the likely outcome, one or the other of those, then every effort will be made to push socialism off the agenda, to use the metaphor of the genie that comes out of the magic lamp, to take this genie of socialism and push him back into the lamp - that’s what they will try to do. I am firmly convinced they will fail at that effort. This is a genie you cannot put back in the lamp. The younger generation, particularly, in the U.S. is now in huge numbers against the capitalism that has destroyed their job prospects, which has destroyed their income prospect, which has saddled students with tens of thousands of dollars of debt at the time of the increasing economic difficulty. Those people are going to be interested in socialism more and more. So, the real question is, how will a government that wants to prevent socialism from spreading deal with a population that is going exactly in the opposite direction? That will be the key political question in the months and years ahead.