Recent presidential primary results have been disappointing for supporters of Bernie Sanders. The corporate media and mainstream pundits say that Bernie’s weakness is his failure to attract Black voters. Steve’s guest, Glen Ford, executive editor of Black Agenda Report, tells us that, in fact, Bernie’s agenda is quite popular among blacks, especially the younger generation. The problem lies elsewhere.
Our two-party system of governing reflects the realities of our capitalist and racist nation. One side of the duopoly is always the party of white supremacists — the white man’s party — which must be kept out of power. In the past the Democrats had been the white man’s party, switching roles in 1968.
For Black voters, the presidential primaries are about choosing the candidate who can defeat the Republican. Most Blacks understand Joe Biden’s culpability in the murder and mayhem caused by police in their communities. They know the part he played in the passing of the crime bill. Many would prefer a Sanders presidency, but they see that Biden has the support of the corporate media and the ruling class. Under capitalism, that means that Biden will be the nominee. The powerful elite will oppose Sanders; if he were to be nominated they would undermine his candidacy, making way for another term with the white man’s party in power.
Glen talks about the Blacks who hold elite positions within the Democratic party and serve as gate-keepers between the Black community and the corridors of power. He refers to them as the “mis-leadership” class, calling them a profoundly reactionary element within the community. Their fortunes are tied to the party establishment, making them unwilling to upset the status quo. Consider the effects of Representative Jim Clyburn’s endorsement of Biden prior to the S. Carolina primaries.
“We have two governance parties,” Glen says, “and both are capitalist.” People are pressured to fashion their politics accordingly.
Electoral politics can be important; politicians pass laws and enact programs. However, the duopoly serves as a cage for Black America because of the critical need to oppose the white man’s party. In fact, the duopoly suppresses all anti-corporate politics, making it difficult to build a left movement via the electoral route.
Glen and Steve look at the acute crisis in capitalism. Young people of all races know this, which is why they favor Bernie. The contradictions are evident all around them, as reality butts up against the false narrative of neoliberalism.
There has been a 40-year race to the bottom as wages, working conditions, and security are being systematically degraded by the oligarchy. The youth, especially, have no illusions about their bleak future under capitalism.
Without mentioning MMT, Glen is crystal clear on the reasons behind the shredding of the social safety net. It has nothing to do with affordability or budget deficits. Destroying social programs serve the capitalist class by creating desperation and precarity among the working class, so they will be forced to accept lower-quality jobs and paltry wages. They are deprived of all other options.
Bernie’s platform is the antithesis of the race to the bottom — universal childcare, a minimum wage, affordable housing, and national healthcare, all create conditions in which workers can turn down inadequate jobs. He has been the biggest threat to the ruling duopoly in the postwar era.
Glen has fascinating insights into the real reasons behind Mike Bloomberg’s recent candidacy. It had nothing to do with buying the presidency. Listen to the episode for more on this as well as the catch-22 in the handling of the coronavirus!
Glen Ford is the Founder and Executive Editor of Black Agenda Report.
See his full bio here:
https://blackagendareport.com/about-us
@GlenFordBAR on Twitter
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Episode Transcript
[music]
[excerpt] Glen Ford: We have two governance parties and they’re both capitalist, and you will fashion your politics accordingly. That’s why we don’t have left electoral politics in this country.
[music]
[excerpt] Glen Ford: We are experiencing an acute crisis of capitalism, and the younger folks of all races know it. That’s why they favor Bernie Sanders – because they don’t see any future in this system. That’s why they have no problem with the word socialism. Because they’ve had too damn much of capitalism, and they don’t like it.
[intro music compilation]
Geoff Ginter (intro): Now let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro n Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.
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Grumbine: And yes, this is Steve with Macro n Cheese. Folks, we’re taking a different path today. I normally talk about economics, as you know, in the political economy. Today we’re going to touch on something I feel very passionately about, and yet at the same time, don’t feel I have the proper station to be able to speak to this. So, in looking around and trying to find a way to address this, this incredible article comes out from Black Agenda Report. And I’m reading it, and I’m reading it, and it’s talking about the way that Black people work within the Democratic Party and how the vote [inaudible] and so forth and I’m reading this and I’m like “my goodness, I’ve never read anything so well put together”. And then I look, and sure enough, it’s my guest who is Glen Ford, who is the founder and executive editor of Black Agenda Report. He’s been a journalist since the 70s, and just a phenomenal voice. In speaking with Ajamu Baraka, he couldn’t say enough good things about Glen. So I reached out to him and he was happy to come on. So with that, Glen, thank you so much for joining us today.
Ford: Well, thank you so much for the invitation. And I of course, apologize to you and to your listeners for the lack of quality in my voice, but this is the best I can do. The voice is ailing.
Grumbine: Well, let me tell you, it’s the content that I’m concerned with, because you’ve got so much information and so much knowledge. I’m just so thankful that you’ve taken the time to be with us today. This most recent bout of Bernie Sanders part 2 if you will… We saw part 1 where Bernie tried to create this revolution and it seemed like people were kinda wishy-washy and they weren’t quite sure what to make of him. He did not connect with the African-American community, and was absolutely shut down by the “Clinton firewall”, if you will, of the south. We thought over the years you’re watching him make inroads, you’re seeing people like Nina Turner and Killer Mike and others that are working with him and trying to help him expand his reach. He’s got some great guys in Cornell West and others that have spoken out and joined forces with him. And you look, and down in the south you’ve got Clyburn who basically says “shut this thing down” and goes right there for Joe Biden. And it just fell apart. For myself, I was crushed. Looking back it’s like, how could we have prevented this? Then I read your article, and it’s like wow. Can you tell me a little bit about the history of the Democratic Party and how it became the home, if you will, of African Americans?
Ford: Well, first of all, it’s only been these last two election cycles that we’ve seen such intense scrutiny of Black folks and their voting patterns. The Democratic Party has always taken for granted the Black vote and assumed that the Black vote would be on its side in any kind of contest with the republicans. But, nobody’s asked why Black folks vote the way they do. But now because there is a profound split in the Democratic Party occasioned by Bernie Sanders in his 2016 race and now again four years later. Now we see that Black people are being described in the corporate media as moderates or even conservative democratic voters, which is crazy – just plain crazy – to describe Black politics as in any way conservative or even moderate.
In fact, Black folks are the most left leaning political constituency in the country, and every poll, ever since they have been including Black people in national polling, has shown this to be the case. The problem is, that Black folks do not vote their actual ideology, they don’t vote their perceived political interests when they participate in primaries in the Democratic Party. And the reason has everything to do with the duopoly system. The reason is not based on Black folks ideology, not based on some conservatism on the part of Black people, but based on the way the electoral system is structured in the United States. When you have a duopoly system in which only two parties are allowed to participate, only two governing parties which play tag team with each other, take turns governing, but only two are allowed. In a racist society like the United States, one of those parties is going to be what we at Black Agenda Report call the White Man’s Party, that is, a party whose organizing principle is white supremacy.
In the United States, there has always been a White Man’s Party, even before the civil war, before emancipation. One of the two parties was always the more pro-slavery party. That was the White Man’s Party of that time. After the Civil War, the Democratic Party was the White Man’s Party and then they switched places around 1968 and the republicans became the White Man’s Party. With Donald Trump we have the most raw version of a White Man’s Party with an overt racist at the helm. When you have this duopoly system and one party is the White Man’s Party, then there is no place else for Black people to participate in this very narrow and restricted American political game, except in the Democratic Party.
So when Black folks go to the polls to pick who the democratic presidential candidate is going to be, what they are most concerned about is picking somebody that they believe will beat the nominee of the White Man’s Party. That is the overarching concern. So they pick the candidate they think is strongest. But in this capitalist society, the candidate who seems to be strongest is the one who is backed by the corporate media. The one who gets favorable press. He’s the one, or she’s the one, that has the most money in their campaign coffers, which they get of course from rich people. That candidate would be the corporate party. So in every single recent democratic primary race, we see Black folks, despite the fact that they are the most left wing constituency in the country, backing the corporate candidate in the primaries. Thereby being labeled conservatives. They’re not conservatives, their attention is on electability, electability, electability and that’s all.
Grumbine: Wow. I look back and we’ve seen so many times where we’ve watched African-Americans gunned down in the streets. We see the drug war and how it’s been absolutely ravaging African-American community when they use the drugs no more than the white man does. You see the absolute disparity of treatment at every level. It’s no wonder that people desperate to find a way to maintain some level of power, some level of control in their lives, even if it is incorrect. Even if it is in this case as you say, because of the powers-that-be, because of the corporate media, because of the capitalist society we’re in. It leaves people on the outside looking in.
Ford: And believe me, Black folks do know that Joe Biden is partially responsible for that mayhem and murder by cops on the streets. They’re aware of his role in the crime bill, they know who he is, but they also know he’s not Trump. And that seems to trump all the other considerations. But there’s another factor involved here because I think that the masses of Black folks could be persuaded. Bernie Sanders has a better chance of beating Trump than Joe Biden does, and in fact that is the truth and I think most polls show that. But standing in the way of having a rational discussion about electability is the Black “misleadership” class – that’s the Black political class. We call them Misleadership Class as a kind of weaponizing the discussion as somebody we have to beat. Anyway, this not entirely democratic Black political class has a vested interest in this party. The Democratic Party is so pervasive in the Black community, there really is no comparison with political parties and any other community in the country.
The Democratic Party was the one that opened itself up after the great struggles and victories of the 1960s and said “you can now come and play full-citizen politics in this party”, and so Black folks, many of them, believed that it was really their party. And so, today, basically all the civic organizations in the Black community, the NAACP, the Urban League, are annexes – at least every election cycle – of the Democratic Party. The fraternities and sororities are outposts of the Democratic Party in Black America. The churches, most of them – even pentecostal churches that say they don’t want to get involved in earthly things – do get involved, many of them, in earthly politics as democrats every election cycle. So the pervasiveness, the permeatedness of the Black community with this Democratic Party, there is no comparison with any other community. So throwing off this yoke is gonna be a very, very difficult struggle, but an internal struggle that the Black community must engage in. Because half of Black America, the half – the younger half, isn’t buying into this sacredness, this sanctity of the Democratic Party; and they are in favor of Bernie Sanders. But they are not as likely to vote as the older Black folks, and that’s what tipped the scales for Biden in these last two Super Tuesdays.
Grumbine: I used to go to a church in Clinton, Maryland, called From the Heart Christian Church. It was an AME church, 25,000 strong. I was brought by a friend from work. She was like “it’s gonna be weird for you Steve, I know you’re a white boy coming into an all Black church, but I’m telling you you’re gonna love it.” And I’m from DC, so I was like “OK, I’m coming.” And I came, and I absolutely fell in love. Pastor Cherry, God rest his soul, he gave some of the best sermons I’ve ever heard in my life. And then all of a sudden came politics time, and it was like the Bill Clinton show. I couldn’t quite understand it, it didn’t make any sense to me. I said “hey, Pastor Cherry, you talked about this in sermon – this is where Clinton stands on the… what’s up? What’s going on?” and he said “Oh, the Lord…” and I just said oh, ok, man, this is beyond me, this is too much. I couldn’t understand. And believe me when I say this, I wanted to, but I have no perspective. What you’ve just said, it’s both frightening and awe inspiring that at least I’m getting a crack behind the curtain to see.
Ford: Among older Black folks, there still is that feeling. That what is good for the Democratic Party is good for Black America, but more importantly for the Black Misleadership Class, what is good for the Democratic Party is good for them personally because their upward mobility, their jobs, their prospects for business advancement – all of that is wrapped up in the Democratic Party. So they use their influence to do the party’s bidding in Black America. So, in many ways, Black America is not just captive to the democrats by the duopoly system, but has a whole cadre of Democratic Party operatives masquerading as defenders of Black people’s rights within it, and that is the Black Misleadership Class.
Grumbine: So these are like gatekeepers into these communities, and the power brokers, if you will, and they don’t wanna let go of that, huh? That’s what I’m hearing you say anyway, I think.
Ford: That’s right. Their whole fortunes are tied up with the institutional Democratic Party. They don’t see any future without it. They certainly aren’t going to join any kind of revolution that upsets the two capitalist corporate party governance, because that’s where their bread and butter is. So they are the profoundly reactionary element in the Black community. Not Black folks as a whole, but this element that is wedded to a corporate institution. That is the Democratic Party – a corporate institution. And there are many, many, tens of thousands of these folks and people call them our leaders.
Grumbine: You had a quote in there saying that “the hand that picked the cotton picks the president” and I was like wow, that is almost too deep, but that resonated with me. Can you explain the genesis of that?
Ford: Well, in fact, that’s been out there in Black democratic political circles for a long time. The problem with hands that picked cotton will pick presidents is that it basically celebrates Black folks playing a big role in whoever that president is. That’s part of a so-called strategy, it’s really not worthy of the name, but what passes for an electoral strategy among these Black democrats and that is that all the Black folks need to get together behind a candidate, whoever that candidate is. The theory that if there are enough Black folks, if there is enough unity among the Black voters behind a particular candidate, that candidate will have no choice but to listen to Black people’s demands. Whenever we get around to making any demands. But all that really means is that whichever candidate has the most money in the Democratic Party, who has the most institutional clout can gather the most Black votes. Then those Black folks who don’t go along with that candidate can be bullied into joining the rest of the herd on pain of being called someone who’s disrupting the necessary unity of Black America. We need to put forward a unified face, and if you don’t support the candidate that most of us are supporting, well you’re showing our weakness. You’re putting us at a disadvantage. You’re going against the race. That’s the kind of game that they play, and they’re playing it already in trying to beat down these young supporters of Bernie.
Grumbine: I watched as Cornel West spoke truth to power about Barack Obama, and he was eviscerated and castigated and kicked out of the club so to speak and pushed out of society. It was kind of amazing to me because everything he said he documented. It wasn’t like he made anything up, and he was just destroyed. Is this kind of the outsider thing? They make you “the other” they give you this “otherness.” Is that what I’m hearing?
Ford: Well, you know, let me say this about Cornel West. Cornel West was no way destroyed. If you try to walk one block down the street with Cornel West, you’d better have about an hour’s time on your hands. Cause that’s how long it will take you to get one block walking down the street with Cornel West. People stop their cars and get out to talk to Cornel West. Black folks and white people from all walks of life. Cornel West is an icon. He is broadly and deeply loved and appreciated in Black America. And as an icon, he could not be destroyed. Now, Tavis Smiley, who shared a program with Cornel West and also got on the wrong side of the Obama crowd, he was essentially destroyed in terms of his relationship with the Black community. But not Cornel West. He is indestructible, he’s an icon. He’ll last as an icon longer than Obama.
Grumbine: I love the guy, he’s just amazing, but I just watched how vicious the attacks from the establishment were on him. I mean, they tried to do everything they could to discredit him. I’m so glad to hear the man’s just taller… I mean, he’s taller than heck to me, you know, but who am I? That really gives me a lot of hope.
Ford: Yes, and folks understand that Cornel West is a man of principle, so when he was slimed and maligned, folks said that he’d turned against Obama because he couldn’t get enough tickets to the white house. People didn’t believe that, because they saw that this genius of an intellectual who has had posts at Harvard and Princeton and is back at Harvard again that he has put his own financial future and professional future on the line to speak truth to power, as you said. So people don’t believe it when he’s accused of breaking with Obama for some narrow personal reasons.
Grumbine: Let me ask you a question. Obviously, as someone that’s interested, but not part of the community. When you hear people talk about the Black community, does that bother you? They’re speaking as a collective – is it a collective? Or, what is the actual movement, is there a movement? What is going on behind the scenes that people like myself aren’t seeing?
Ford: Well I’m a revolutionary nationalist and also a socialist, and if you’re a revolutionary nationalist you believe that Black Americans are a nation. And I believe that Black Americans are a nation of people, and nations of people have lefts and rights and centers and various different tendencies like any other nation. So when you ask a question like “what is going on with Black folks?” – a whole lot is going on with Black folks, some of it quite contradictory, just like with white folks.
Grumbine: Every time you watch television, they speak as if they’re speaking about one person. Like this one thing, this static constant, that is not diverse, that is not of differing values and differing priorities and so forth. They speak as a block, and this is usually the corporate media of course. So this is the pervasive narrative. And that’s why I’m asking you. In your own words, what does this look like? Get rid of this mainstream narrative, this nonsense that corporate America is trying to sell us. What is the real story?
Ford: Well, first of all, the phenomenon that you just described comes from two quarters. One is just plain white supremacy which refuses to see other people as people, so they’ve got to be just some faceless mask. What do the Chinese think? Chinese are inscrutable, or whatever kind of description you want to put on folks that you don’t really recognize as people. But for the Black Misleadership Class, which is the gatekeepers, and would like to get paid for their services to the powers that be, it’s in their interest to say that they have the pulse of Black America, they know what Black people want and if you just pay me nicely I’ll tell you what it is. There are various currents in Black America, but as I said at the beginning of our talk, basically the Black political spectrum is far to the left of the white political spectrum. I did a study about 15 years ago and found that Black folks who self-select in surveys and call themselves conservatives are actually, certainly in bread and butter issues, to the left of white people who call themselves liberal.
What Black people who call themselves conservatives are really referring to is they are conservative compared to other Black people. They’re conservative in terms of their perception of morals and decorum, not necessarily in terms of medicare for all and unemployment insurance and the right of people to housing. They’re just as left leaning as other folks, and so that has to be first of all understood. That the Black political spectrum is a leftist one. The problem is, and I have to keep on going back to the structure – the problem is that in this duopoly system, that leftish polity cannot express itself because it cannot be expressed in the Democratic Party, being a corporate party. And it cannot be expressed if Black folks main fear is the election of the white supremacist candidate from the White Man’s Party. So you censor yourself, you censor your own vote. You say I’m not gonna vote for the guy who I agree with. I’m not gonna vote for him because those mean white people will gang up on him and call him a socialist and a communist and a radical and he’s gonna lose. So I’m gonna go and support this mild-mannered business-friendly democrat that most of the white people will line up behind. Just for the sake of beating that demonic candidate that the White Man’s Party is gonna run. And that’s why Black people didn’t support Barack Obama in 2008 until he won the Iowa primary and proved that white people would vote for him. So all of a sudden his support among Black folks, rank and file, went from 50% to damn near 90% overnight.
Grumbine: I look back, I remember when Bill Clinton was losing. He was not the front-runner in his first run, and all of a sudden he played the saxophone and different things started happening and Bill Clinton suddenly leapt to the front of the pack. It was kind of a strange scenario, but a lot of people joked around that he was the first Black president. I still don’t quite understand that. Can you talk a little bit about …?
Ford: That of course was nonsense. I am not gonna engage in this psychobabble that goes on and passes for political commentary that compares Bill Clinton and his background, his childhood in poverty in Hope, Arkansas, and how even the fact that he’s a hustler appeals to some Black people. That’s a bunch of crap. I’ll tell you when Bill Clinton became popular, at least among the Black political class. That was when Newt Gingrich got his Contract on America forces out and Black people across the board saw that as the rise of the new confederacy. We’d already been through Reagan who was confederate like, but here’s the real thing – Newt Gingrich and the Contract on America. And the perception among lots of Black people was that all that stood between … and of course Gingrich won the Congress. So the perception was that all that stood between the confederates and Black folks was Bill Clinton. They invested their trust in him, and to the extent that Gingrich and the confederates did not have their way with us, whatever that was supposed to be, they thanked Bill Clinton. Clinton used that situation in which Black folks were dependent on him to beat back Newt Gingrich to in fact join the republicans and pass the crime bill and get rid of welfare as we knew it which was his democratic leadership council right-wing corporate agenda all along. But by that time, the myth had been already successfully promulgated that Black people loved Clinton, and all you gotta do is come to our churches and act like you like the music and you become an honorary Black. But I just told you what the real adventure and drama was – it was Bill Clinton triangulating himself between the hard core racist right Newt Gingrich and his legions and Black folks and acting like he’s the one who will be their defender.
[music, intermission]
Grumbine: I look back at this and to me the third way that whole idea of how do we break away these right-wing Dixiecrat democrats – the Reagan democrats and they have been getting their butt handed to them and all of a sudden you’ve got a rather weak George Sr., you’ve got a weak Bush coming in there trying to tread on the heels of Reagan and then you’ve got the recession and so forth and the time for democrats, they’ve been wandering the desert for a long time and they figured well hell, let’s become republicans but with better bedside manners and really is shocking to me to see. You look at all the horrors, the reinventing government in and of itself was such an atrocity to everybody, minority communities in particular. I’veread so much about the welfare reform and how that kind of stuff really devastated the communities, and then you look. I cannot get past the idea of him [inaudible]
Ford: And here is one of the ways that being so wedded to the democratic party and being under the thumb of our own Black misleadership democratic party class is so debilitating politically for the community. Because, note that none of these Black democratic establishment politicians have fought to bring back welfare, better than as we knew it. It’s as if they have acquiesced in all of these abominations that Clinton and the Gingrich-ites together committed against Black America. Nowadays they don’t even call for a Marshall Plan for the cities. Ever since 1970, every four years that used to be the mantra of the Black politicos. Marshall Plan for the city, Marshall Plan for the city, but once Barack Obama, the first Black presidential candidate was out there, the Black Misleadership class didn’t even ask for a Marshall Plan for the cities. So, no restoration of that which these neoliberal democrats took from Black people, and now not even a call for a Marshall Plan for the cities. They are absolutely totally useless. Their only game is to get their party elected so that the money keeps flowing.
Grumbine: So let me ask you – I tread in independent territories. Obviously with the duopoly large-and-in-charge in the United States, and it failing us so miserably, what is the go forward plan?
Ford: Ask Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders is actually the biggest threat to the duopoly yet, and certainly in the post-war era. I don’t know if he knows that, I don’t know if he intends to be that. The conditions that have been created by this, his second run on a social democratic, and therefore unacceptable platform for the democratic party – these are new conditions that do threaten to split the party. I was anticipating that there would be a split coming from the left, that Bernie would do much much better in the primaries, and they would by hook or crook deny him the nomination, causing a wholesale exit by his folks. But I think that there is as much chance of the split coming within the democratic party from the right, because Michael Bloomberg didn’t get in this race in order to win the nomination.
Michael Bloomberg knew that this party would never nominate him for president. He did it in order to legitimize his democratic credentials so that he could then proceed to buy the party with his billions of dollars. To take over the democratic national committee. To be the financial backbone of these neoliberal right-wing corporate democratic office holders. To be the financial sugar daddy to primary any of these kind-of leftish AOC type democrats that might get in. But he needed to legitimize himself as a democrat to do that, because you don’t move millions of dollars to take over a party in secret, that can’t be done. So in a sense, Bloomberg’s democratic presidential campaign, his expenditure of 500 million dollars on it, was a way to launder the money that he has already been using to take over the democratic national committee. And when he does, he’s going to make it a totally inhospitable, a very hostile environment for leftish politics of any kind. That’s what’s coming, and that’s going to force even the most mildly radical folks out of the democratic party. That split is coming, and that split is coming from both the left and the right.
Grumbine: Wow, now that is some deep stuff there. I saw this coming, but I didn’t think of it quite like that cause you saw that happen in the last election where the Clinton Foundation basically put the finances directly in.
Ford: They owned it, they owned it. And it’s Bloomberg and his cronies’ turn. Clinton is a phony ruling class person. She’s a hustler and a thief, you dig? And some of her money is unusable, because it’s illegal or becomes illegal when she uses it for those political purposes. But the real oligarchy, Bloomberg and his friends – and he’ll be joined in this venture reshaping the democratic party – their money’s legal, and it’s infinite. It’s limitless.
Grumbine: Wow, that’s chilling. That’s absolutely chilling. What do you see as the go forward with this, Glen?
Ford: Well, there is no going forward. The duopoly has not just been a cage for Black America, a particular cage for Black America because there’s already a White Man’s Party, as I explained. But the duopoly party is a cage for all non-corporate politics. It basically says we have two governance parties and they’re both capitalist, and you will fashion your politics accordingly. That’s why we don’t have a left electoral politics in this country. People want to be part of the game, so they want to be part of electoral politics. They understand, lots of folks understand, that street politics is important too, but people want to elect folks who vote for actual laws that can create actual programs. So they acquiesce and try to conform enough to the corporate agenda and language to pass muster in the democratic party.
But we are experiencing an acute crisis of capitalism and the younger folks of all races know it. That’s why they favor Bernie Sanders, because they don’t see any future in this system. That’s why they have no problem with the word “socialism” – because they’ve had too damn much of capitalism, and they don’t like it. They understand that what this system has embarked on and has been on for forty years is a race to the bottom. That’s what austerity really is. I wish people would stop using that term. Nobody uses it, nobody likes it. What people understand is a race to the bottom, in which wages and working conditions and security for workers all over the world is being systematically degraded by the oligarchy. And that’s why the oligarchy gets richer and richer. The transfer of wealth is direct and quite dramatic. That’s why we have three billionaires who own as much as half of the US population. And young people know that. And they can’t carry on a politics that’s worthy of the name or that’s worth participating in and stay within those narrow capitalist corporatist boundaries of the democratic party.
Grumbine: It’s just amazing. The word austerity, ironically, that’s been my twitter handle forever is Austerity is Murder. And I looked out there at the UK and they had a study not too long ago that showed 120,000 suicides. Basically social murder. Austerity is murder, literally murder. And I’ve been harping on this ever since that time. My focus is largely economic policy, and looking at this, theUnited States is steeped in private debt, steeped in all kinds of contraptions and debt traps. For regular people, poverty is damned expensive. You look around and we are trapped. We can’t go out and be revolutionaries because we can’t feed our families. Teeth rotting out of our mouths, mortgages in arrears and people knocking on the doors to foreclose and it’s a real struggle for everyone. I can only imagine as we go through this – how in the world do they expect us to survive, or do they care?
Ford: Austerity, the race to the bottom is not just about greed. It’s not just about I’m going to gobble up all the wealth and I don’t care that you folks are deprived of necessities. I don’t care what you think of it. That’s part of it, but that doesn’t describe the system. It doesn’t describe the policy. The race to the bottom is a policy of the ruling capitalist class. The policy is to make workers so precarious, so insecure, so desperate that they will take any job under any terms. To do that, you have to remove all of the social safety net props. Those props are removed not to save money for the federal government to stave off debt. That has nothing to do with it. The same people who remove the social safety net add more and more money to the US debt for the military. They remove the social safety net to create precarity. Precarity is the desired result. Desperation is the desired result. So that they can lower the quality of the jobs as needed in order to squeeze more and more profit up to themselves.
Grumbine: It sounds to me like a ginormous power play. This is about creating a new form of slavery. One that has the veneer of legitimacy. One that makes you feel like you made a choice, but you really didn’t make a choice. You had no choice in it. It’s a new form of serfdom.
Ford: It is nothing more than capitalism in the raw at this stage of the concentration of monopoly capital. It is the way it was predicted it would work.
Grumbine: With that said, you’ve come out and said you’re a socialist. I’m a socialist. We’re all socialists on this side. What in your mind is a socialist play in this capitalist end-stage very dire times? What is our play here? Do we have the power that we think we have? Do we not have enough power? Where are we at in this continuum?
Ford: There is no socialist play because we don’t have any socialist parties, not really. We don’t have the numbers. What we are just getting, after an ideological drought so to speak of more than half a century, is some consciousness, especially among younger people, that the capitalist system is the enemy. What is the play? There are lots of constituencies in this country; all of whom have contradictions with the ruling class. A ruling class that gets small and smaller, although richer and more bloatedly rich all of the time. The first stage in this struggle, and we are way behind – we are quite backward politically as a society – the first stage is to get a common language that we can speak, where we understand each other. We have coalitions that are only coalitions in terms of backing the democratic party. That’s it. These are not real working coalitions for change. They are coalitions for a corporate party’s election. We’ve got a great deal of work to do at the 101 kind of level. Advising our fellow folks what a socialist would do if they were in your situation.
Grumbine: I look at neoliberalism, which is I guess where we are in this thing, and you look at the way that it permeates our sitcoms, the newspaper, even sporting events. Every aspect of our society is infected with this view, this schism, this way of thinking and talking and coming up with “there is no alternative” mindset. It’s not just political, it’s every aspect of our lives. This is incredibly massive.
Ford: That’s right, but the real reality assaults that false reality every day. Here we are with this Coronavirus, and the United States is the most backward, the least prepared of any of the rich countries for this epidemic. And the reason that they are the least prepared is that they are the most thoroughly ideologically capitalist. That privatization is the watch word. With privatization you basically cut up the existing health structures that we did have and you privatized them. You do that methodically. I get my healthcare from the VA. The Veteran’s Administration, which has the only socialized medicine in this country, really. It’s basically much like the British National Health Service, but it’s been under assault by Congress, by corporate Congresspeople of both parties to peel this national health service for veterans year by year, parceling it out to private firms. Well, this happens all over the country, not just with the VA, but with health services in general. So that we get to the point where the CDC says that there are 2.5 million kits for testing Coronavirus in the country. They know because those kits were sold to various folks, but nobody can tell us where they are, and so only 10,000 Americans have been tested for Coronavirus. There is no central clearing house that can tell us where the rest of the 2.5 million kits are. That is a totally defenseless population, and it’s been rendered defenseless by the rule of capital.
Grumbine: That’s absolutely chilling. Chilling! They’re watching as people are panicking, people are stocking up, people are freaking out. The long term effects of people that are already paycheck to paycheck getting laid off, and this could go way beyond the threat of just the virus. This could really truly destroy millions of lives.
Ford: And the contradictions that it will point out. If, for example, people get compensated for Coronavirus or the treatment they might have to undergo for several days in a hospital, which is many thousands of dollars – for Coronavirus, if the feds can pick up the tab for that, why can’t they pick up the tab for my cancer or my mother’s cancer. You see?
Grumbine: That is right on money right there. This is busting the whole myth right out of the water. This is exactly what it’s doing. You’re square on, perfect. We watched – Bernie Sanders put forward what amounts to be the most robust progressive platform. Every day he would come out with some new Universal Childcare, a Job Guarantee in the form of MLK’s style. We had every step along the way this incredible thing, and people all they could do was say “how you gonna pay for it? it’s crazy”. We’ve been snowed. This is a fiat system. We could spend money like…
Ford: We have a corporate media owned by five or six corporations. They speak with one voice,and their reach is such that they provide the talking points that so many regular folks then parrot. In terms of Bernie Sanders platform – it is the antithesis of the race to the bottom, and that’s why they would rather have him assassinated than let him become the nominee for president. Universal childcare, minimum wages, all of these – affordable housing, national healthcare – all of these rightful things create a situation in which a worker can say “I don’t want that job”, “no I’m not going to take this crap that you just handed me on the job, I quit” – you see what I’m saying? It gives workers options. The whole point of the race to the bottom, the austerity regime, is to methodically deprive the working class of any option. So, Bernie, although not a socialist, represents a mortal threat to capitalism as it presently is – that is, the capitalists have no other policy or rather they have no other vision but this austerity regime. That’s all there is. There’s nothing else that they can provide, and Bernie’s platform, if it became popular, would destroy that vision and leave them. I think they’d have to revert to some other kind of rule.
Grumbine: It’s interesting – you see the racism come out the minute you think about black and brown people suddenly being able to take care of themselves without having to worry about these ridiculous measures. You can tell because all of a sudden people start worrying about spending money. You never see them flinch with the raising of the military – I mean, what was it like $750B and not one nickel raised in taxes. In fact they had a huge tax cut to go along with it, which should’ve told us everything we needed to know. But the minute we talk about healthcare, the minute we talk about housing as a right, the minute we talk about healthcare as a right, all of a sudden we’ve got to be responsible. It’s ridiculous. We don’t see through it, it’s like there’s some cognitive dissonance in we the people that can’t quite put this together.
Ford: Well, you know, it’s because the political classes are certainly not going to tell on themselves. Bill Clinton passed on to George W Bush a huge budget surplus. He amassed that surplus because he didn’t want to give poor people fully financed programs. So he had plenty of money. He passed that surplus on to George Bush. George Bush was supposed to be the great conservative, worried about budget deficits. He ran through the surplus that Clinton passed on to him within the first year.
Grumbine: It’s funny you say that. Stephanie Kelton, who is Bernie Sanders economic advisor, is one of my heroes and is one of the reasons why I do what I do. She did this great interview in Business Insider where they discussed the Clinton surplus. You’ve got to think about the surplus as a split on the ledger. The public surplus is actually a private sector deficit. When you flip it around it’s just a mirror. So what they did was take money out of the economy and starved it of fuel. When the government spends on the people, that’s when we thrive. They’ve turned this all around to make it seem like the government’s got to be responsible. We think “oh yeah, the government’s gotta be responsible” while we simultaneously put a gun to our own heads, not realizing the government creates the damned currency. It doesn’t have to have that problem there. It’s just astounding to me that we would ask them to somehow or another take away from the little people. You spend at the bottom and it’s going to rise anyway, right? I mean, for god sake, why in the world do they keep starting at the top and thinking that the rain coming down is somehow good for us? It just doesn’t make sense!
Ford: You know, we get told by this capitalist class that deficits are bad and yet we know that this capitalist class is in hock for $200T dollars of speculative dirivatives and other instruments. Two hundred trillion! Which is many times the gross economic product of the entire world.
Grumbine: It’s amazing. I don’t really want to dive too far into this, but you look at the Panama Papers. That came out, and for about 13 seconds we paid attention to it and it was swept under the rug. It’s just insane. There’s two different worlds going on and we ain’t part of it, that’s for damn sure. Absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Ford: That’s right. This is why the corporate media plays such an important role in legitimizing the regime. In making defensible, that which is indefensible. They simply don’t print the bad news. That’s why – and I’m sure you’ve noticed this as well – as I grow older, the New York Times and the Washington Post become progressively less interesting. There’s less news in there. There’s a reason for that – there’s less news because there’s less good stuff to put out there, and they don’t put out the bad stuff. Pretty soon, there’ll be nothing but human interest stories in these newspapers because all the real news will be bad.
Grumbine: It’s funny, every time I hear people talking about fundraising to fix cancer and fundraising for the cities, and let’s go ahead and do some donations, I think to myself, this could all be … Flint’s water problems, right now for example, could be solved with a flick of a switch. Just simply write the damn check. Puerto Rico – we don’t need to turn them into a [inaudible] – fix it. It doesn’t make sense to me why we didn’t fix New Orleans. Why don’t we just fix the shit?
Ford: They thought they had fixed New Orleans. The fix that they wanted in New Orleans was to get rid of 100,000 poor black people. They celebrated, and they still celebrate the new New Orleans. The fix for Detroit is to get rid of a similar number, maybe more, black folks in Detroit. Until that happens, they will not remove the vice that makes Detroit almost unlivable except for a small downtown section that’s run by a billionaire. But the rest of Detroit is purposefully unlivable in order to drive out that black population.
Grumbine: That’s just awful. Look, Glen, I want to thank you so much. I hope that I can talk to you again cause we were just getting going there and I absolutely find you fascinating. Thank you so much for joining me. Tell our listeners how we can find you.
Ford: That’s easy. BlackAgendaReport.com and we have a new issue every Wednesday.
Grumbine: Very good. With that, Glen, thank you so much for joining me. This is Glen Ford and Steve Grumbine, Macro N Cheese. everyone have a great day – we’re outta here.
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