The Real News Network has published three parts of this series so far.
David Cay Johnston on Reality Asserts Itself (1/4)
The Deep State and the Power of Billionaires – David Cay Johnston on Reality Asserts Itself (3/4)
I am sputtering in such outrage at the story these interviews tell, that I haven’t go the time to put in the videos into this post the way I usually do for posts like this.
All I can calm down long enough to do is to quote one question and answer from the third video.
JAY: So what’s the consequence of this? We’ve gone from where there was at least some chipping away at some of the big estates–I take your point; it was porous, it wasn’t ever big chipping away. The big estates remain very big. But even that much chipping away is more or less gone now. What does that mean to country?
JOHNSTON: Well, what it means is the reason people don’t have jobs, the reason that the median wage is stuck at the same level since 1998 and the average income of the bottom 90 percent of Americans has fallen back to the level of 1966–look at my gray hair; I was in high school in 1966, and that’s where 90 percent of Americans have fallen back to–is this incredible concentration of wealth in very, very few hands at the top. We have created a system does that isn’t trickle-down. The Democrats invented that to denigrate Nixon, it’ll trickle down. No, it’s Amazon[the river]-up. We take from the many to give to the super-rich.
As Paul Jay said in a video-conference that I participated in today, he has had people tell him that the number of stories that they get on The Real News Network that tell of all these outrages makes them sometimes think that all they can do in reaction is to crawl into a hole and blow their brains out. He promised that The Real News Network would try do more stories along the lines “So here’s what you can do about the situation.”