Lobbies, Media, Wall Street: Who Really Has Power in the USA?

This documentary offers an in-depth examination of the United States of America’s governing system, uncovering the behind-the-scenes forces that control the nation. The film portrays two Americas: one where people freely choose their leaders within the constitutional framework, living in the land of freedom, and another where everything is devoted to the ruling 1%, with a hidden network of power including the media, Wall Street, the military, and corporations. This exposé from Danny Schechter (In Debt We Trust, WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception) reveals the true decision-makers behind the world’s self-proclaimed democratic role model.

00:00 The Debate Over Power
Explore the complex nature of power in American society today.
24:08 The History of Democracy in America
This episode turns back the clock to examine the evolution of democracy in the United States.
48:19 The Corporate Takeover
Examine the relationship between powerful corporate entities and power in America in this episode.
01:12:08 The Power of The Media
The media’s role in the American power hierarchy is explored in this episode.
01:36:16 Money Dominates Politics
The position of money in American politics is the subject of this episode.
02:00:14 The Power of Wall Street
In the final episode, take a look at how Wall Street institutions factor into America’s power structure.

Director: Danny Schechter
Production Year: 2012

Welcome to Wall Street, the epicenter of financial power in America. Perhaps the money capital of the world. The globally oriented financial firms based here in the New York Stock Exchange that operates here, have extraordinary influence on the politics and policies of this country. No one has elected them

And in fact, these financial firms are trying to undo the regulations and new laws governing them imposed by Congress. The people on Wall Street are just one of a number of unelected and very powerful forces that operate in the shadows behind the scenes. They’re the media forces,

The military and industrial forces, the corporate forces, and they’re the forces that we’ll be investigating in this television series, which asks a question that most of our media does not. Who rules America? Every four years, Americans go to the polls to elect a president.

It’s a ritual that goes back to the founding of the nation in 1776. Every four years, politics and politicians dominate our television screens, dominate our news and dominate our national discourse. President Barack Obama is running for re-election. Mitt Romney stood with big oil for their tax breaks, attacking higher mileage standards and renewables.

He is attacking and being attacked by Republicans. He said he would turn this economy around in three years or he’d be looking at a one-term proposition. We’re here to collect. All right? The two parties may be fighting a political war, but pundits label it a horse race

Fueled literally by billions of dollars in campaign contributions used for pervasive advertising. Welcome to Grace, where one president’s failed policies really hit home. Welcome to Obama ville. The focus is on political personalities, not the forces they represent. A large industry of commentators

And pollsters are paid to tell us who’s ahead and who’s behind. The focus invariably is on the candidates, not the issues. However, everyone knows the campaigns are run behind the scenes by professional strategists, media experts and political advisers. The political ads are cynical and slick. Almost every word is scripted.

Symbols trump substance, slogans are market-tested, aimed at promoting perception and reinforcing prejudices. Marketing is the mission, selling not telling. On one level, this whole spectacle is presented as a triumph of democracy, as if the candidate who wins will run the country. However, being in office doesn’t necessarily mean being in power.

Americans believe they are determining their future. Are they? Do most know or are they ever told who rules America? I just think that these people, you can’t really see them. That’s what I think. -The people who rule America. -The people who are behind the screen. They are behind the screen.

-Invisible. -To the general public. Do you think people really know what’s going on? To some extent, yes and to some extent, no. To what extent, yes, to what extent, no? About 50, 50. Who rules America? There’s no one right answer. Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian Eric Foner says it’s a question

That raises many more questions about power that works from the shadows. Who rules America? There’s no one single easily defined group who rules America. However, I think, not just now, but I think for a couple of generations we have had what the sociologist C Wright Mills called in the 1950s a power elite.

An interlocking set of connections of people in business, in politics, in the military, who pretty much determine the parameters of possible change. It’s not that they rule America in a conspiratorial way, and of course there are elected officials, but the leeway of those officials

Is constrained by what you might call the permanent government. Presidents come and go, but there’s a kind of a permanent establishment, what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex but now it’s more a military financial complex, that really, as I say, determines the limits. We’re at the left forum, a gathering of progressive intellectuals,

Scholars, and students held every year here in New York City. There are 1400 speakers this year. They don’t agree on everything, but they do agree that America is not the democracy it claims to be. They all want to know who rules America. Professor Stanley Aronowitz writes about the research

Of this man, C. Wright Mills, who a half century ago wrote about the existence of a power elite that activists today refer to as the one percent, the people who run things. His contribution to understanding the nature of power in America is, in the first place to identify three institutional orders

That really together form the power elite. An elite that is, generally speaking, unresponsive to the people, unresponsive to democratic liberties and democratic procedures. He said the three groups were the corporate capitalist institutions, the military, and the third one was the top layer of the political directorate, he called them.

They are the national leaders, like the executive branch of government, not even Congress. He said Congress was in the middle levels of power. It doesn’t really share the decision to make war, the major economic policies and so on. It participates at some level, but basically, it’s out of power.

He said that really has undercut the whole pretense of progressive and of representative government. This may be why in recent surveys, only seven to nine percent of the American people in both parties believe that the Congress, the so-called People’s House of government, is representative and capable of solving the country’s problems.

If politicians are trapped in a polarized and highly partisan stalemate, who does exercise the power to decide what the country’s priorities and policies should be? We asked JK Fowler, an editor of The Mantel, a political magazine. I think it’s extremely complicated. I think there’s not one particular answer for it,

But I think that a lot of the stuff going on in America right now is being led by money and moneyed interests in Washington in particular. I think there’s a bubbling movement from the ground up as well that’s happening. Is there a ruling class in America or is that an outdated concept?

I’m a strong believer that there’s a class. In particular in New York City. However, they’re not hidden away in some room with nefarious deeds in mind. It’s more structural. There are certain clubs they go to, there are certain streets they live on, they’re interacting with one another more.

We put that question to Aaron Crowell, a 30-year-old working-class mother from a small town in Wisconsin who is working two jobs while pursuing her education. If I was to ask you, like, who runs America? Who rules America? What is your perception of that? People who have the money to do so.

People that have the money and the resources to send a lobbyist to Washington. Nobody from my town could afford to send a lobbyist and say, hey, Harley Davidson is threatening to move their plants to China unless everybody takes pay cuts and could literally shut our town down. We can’t afford to defend ourselves.

Do you feel as an American citizen that you have power in our country? Do you feel as if you have the ability to get your dream achieved? I feel like it’s slipping away. I don’t think I do because it feels like the closer

And closer I would get to that just a dream for me is to finish college, and take care of myself and take care of my son. However, even that now, and I understand a lot of people in my position aren’t even able to get that far now.

If the citizens who are supposed to be in charge don’t feel they are, who does? What we found is that by and large, it’s the wealthiest Americans who call the shots through unelected institutions that drive agendas in their own interests. There may be a cabal running things,

But in the end the state and the system merges, argues Canadian political analyst Leo Panitch. I don’t think there’s an external force controlling the American state. The American state is capitalist to its core in the very way it’s organized. It doesn’t do it because there’s too much influence from Wall Street.

It does it because it is structurally embedded with Wall Street. It doesn’t do it because there’s too much influence from the military-industrial complex. It does it because the military-industrial complex is inside the state, is funded by the state, is part of the state.

Sure, there are people who conspire and there are people who act in secret but capitalism is not a conspiracy. The people who have the wealth, they’re not a conspiracy. We know who they are. We know how they collect this money. They take it out of our pocket, they put it in theirs.

It’s not a big mystery. There seems to be corporate forces, in addition to Wall Street, that essentially helped guide our political and economic direction. Leading are America’s top corporations. Political analyst Michael Klare has studied the political economy of oil for 20 years and says a lack of media coverage

Keeps the public in the dark. Does the media cover it? The media doesn’t cover this for the most part. In fact, the media is largely in league because of the advertising dollars that the oil and gas lobby provides. They’re very heavily dependent on advertising revenue, so they’re very careful in what they say.

Who are they accountable to? Are there laws really controlling and regulating what they do? There are laws, but they have been written largely by their lobbyists to favor them. In fact, the laws, for the most part are in their favor not in the favor of most Americans.

Is there an issue where we’ve seen this very clearly, where the interests of the oil industry or the energy industry is in conflict with the interests of Americans? Well, I would give an example that the oil industry has been pushing for drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico

And off the coast of Alaska, for example. They get all kinds of tax benefits for that kind of deepwater drilling. They were able to do so during the Bush period with absolutely no oversight whatsoever, hence the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Most Americans experience the oil industry in two places: at the gas pump,

Where prices often rise because of speculation, not just supply and demand, and also through TV advertising that paints this very profitable business in the most positive of terms here. I’m still here, and so is BP. We’re committed to the Gulf for everyone who loves it and everyone who calls it home.

That’s good for our country’s energy security and our economy. Which brings us to another set of corporations, the media companies. Jeff Cohn has been in the media and written books about its impact in shaping how Americans think about their country and its system of power. He says media companies push propaganda for war.

It’s the same exact media quoting the same exact experts that pushed our country in the world into a war with Iraq. We were told by this media, we’re so sorry, we didn’t know we made a mistake. Next time we’ll be more vigilant. However, here we are next time, 10 years later

And the same media are blowing smoke about a weapons program in Iran that doesn’t exist. There was no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, either. Like when the war drums are beating and I worked in mainstream television news in this country during the run-up to the Iraq war,

When the war drums are beating, they don’t let you put on opposing views. We tried to get opposing views that question the evidence, the intelligence that would justify an attack on Iraq. However, we were kicked off the air and now you’re finding it’s a nightmare. It’s a nightmare that’s happening again.

At the same time, Jeff, most people who work in major media and I, of course, did as well, don’t believe this, they don’t buy this. They feel like they do have the freedom to cover issues and that the networks are much more diverse in their point of view than outsiders like you

And maybe now me would say. The way to rebut that fiction is just to look at what happened in the wake of the Iraq invasion. Those of us who question the evidence that there was a weapons of mass destruction threat, we were totally right.

Most of us got kicked out of the TV networks. The people who got it wrong have promoted up. This idea of diversity in the mainstream media or good journalism will win out certainly hasn’t been proven in the last 10 years, where the journalists who got it right have been punished, sanctioned

Or kicked out of the media and the journalists who got it wrong most of them have more power today to blow smoke at Iran than they had even when they were blowing smoke at Iraq. Those people, the people who own institutions are usually very conscious of their power.

Not just as individuals but as part of a dominant class, says independent TV producer Brian Drolet. There’s a lot of talk here about Democrats and Republicans. Who we vote for the Democrats, who we vote for Republicans. There’s a lot of talk about the rich versus the 99 percent.

However, there’s a certain kind of amnesia about the structure of our society that at one point in this country at least had some currency. In the 30s and even in the 60s, you could talk about the working class. Nobody talks about the working class.

It’s all about there’s a middle class and then there’s the one percent. I guess then there are some poor blacks and Latinos or something, right? I think that word has been sanitized and scrubbed out of the vocabulary of the people of the United States, including out of the vocabulary of the left.

Now, that’s not the entire left, but even the people that use the word class don’t seem to have the ability to phrase it in a way that actually means something to people. To talk about classes, not to talk about a conspiracy, but a complex system that’s evolved over the years.

A system that is stratified and uses campaign contributions and lobbying to ensure that the politicians do the bidding of the companies. These are the building blocks of the analysis will explore in this series on who rules America. The argument is simple but hard for many Americans to comprehend

Because many of us want to believe the myths we learned in school that make us feel superior to other countries and other peoples. This has been called American exceptionalism. Many in America believe that God created this country as the greatest country on earth, and that’s what makes it so special.

You really have to start with that as a basis for how the United States was founded. Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz is one leader of America’s indigenous people. The first Americans. They were the ones to be eliminated because it was their land that was wanted, not even their labor. Like in Latin America,

The indigenous people were enslaved and made into peasants’ peons. However, in North America, the Anglo colonialism in Canada, US, New Zealand and Australia had the motive, essentially, of wiping them out and taking their land. It’s not just that they weren’t included, they were to be eliminated.

Questions about the custodians of a real power and who rules America leads back to debates on how to remake power, how to challenge its distribution and make it more transparent and accountable. These are the issues that the Occupy Wall Street movement is raising as it challenges institutional power

In an attempt to revive grassroots democracy. David DeGraw explains, Occupy’s origins. It was such a confluence of events. Everything was moving in this direction. I was looking around the world. It was protests happening in Egypt and then it moved to the Arab Spring, Tunisia and all throughout Europe, came back

And it was just a matter of time before it hit the United States. If you look at the occupations globally, they became like the thing to do. It was just a natural progression for it to show up here. I feel like it shows up here because even though wealth is so concentrated,

The people have a media system where they’re so propagandized and they feel isolated. However, Occupy shows that people are not suffering alone. They’re coming out and raising awareness and we changed the national discourse. The movement is up against powerful forces with large budgets and the backing of police forces and the political establishment.

While these activists are on the front lines of the fight for the people who ruled America, many of its people share the same hope. You’ve a sense of class being important in this country that there being like an upper class or working class? Absolutely. I’m a waitress at a very nice restaurant,

And it’s very clear to me what my role is and who I am. You can tell just from the dialogue that I have with people. Recently I talked to a general manager of a fairly large business in our town and when I mentioned that I was going to a public school

I got an eye roll and my tax dollars pay for that. Do you feel like all this resentment against working people kind of feeling like they don’t deserve what little they’re getting? Absolutely, especially with the recent attacks on public sector employees like on teachers. People are saying they don’t deserve those benefits.

We all don’t get those benefits. They don’t deserve them either, or why isn’t the conversation, maybe we should all work to get those for everyone instead of taking it away from the few that do have them. When I hear you talking

I realized it’s such a bigger picture here than most people even understand, that we have a country where the dream is slipping away for so many people and they don’t feel particularly powerful. They don’t feel like they can do anything, they can achieve anything, they can make a difference.

I think the dream has shifted to hopefully I wake up tomorrow and I’ll be able to pay my rent and keep a roof over my head, or I’ll work on achieving my dream tomorrow but today I have to go to class,

I have to get my work done, I have to go to work, and I have to try to squeeze a couple hours of sleep. Now you’re here at this conference, with all these brilliant theoreticians, analysts, professors, experts, and leaders, how do you feel about this?

This idea that people have to get together to make a difference? I think it’s wonderful. I feel so blessed to be able to be here with people like that because I want to learn. Somebody had said to me, why don’t you leave where you are? I don’t think that’s the answer.

I think that it’s my job as somebody who cares about these things to learn from these people, and to learn from these brilliant minds. I can take this back to people and show them and explain to them where we don’t have access to this kind of thing every day.

Hopefully, try to enlighten them a little bit. Erin expresses the hopes of many ordinary Americans who want to reshape the nature of power so that the 99 percent, not just the one percent, can rule. However, as you can see in here, it’s not a battle she feels she is winning.

Perhaps that’s why she, like many, want to know who rules America. The question of who rules America has been debated throughout America’s own history. It was originally raised and answered, to some degree, by the American Revolution in the 1770s, which fought for independence from the British crown,

So that at least some Americans could rule themselves, or at least they hoped they could. We’re at Columbia University with Dr. Eric Foner, a historian, writer, and teacher here at the university for a long period of time. I think two things are unusual today. Firstly, the degree of inequality.

Never before has the very top, the 1%, held so much of the national income and wealth in its own hands, resulting in a greater wealth gap than ever before. Secondly, Occupy Wall Street is not primarily a movement of farmers or laborers. It doesn’t have the same base. People need to learn history.

It’s part of our job to know that this issue has been around for a long time. There’s nothing un-American about raising the question of economic plutocracy and economic inequality. It’s as American as apple pie. I think that the Occupy Wall Street people are legitimate heirs

Of a long and venerable tradition in this country. Today, the activists of Occupy Wall Street continue to fight for independence, economic justice, and against domination by a small elite in the name of the majority, the 99% of America. I think what’s been brilliant about the Occupy Wall Street movement

Is the framing of the 1% versus 99%. I think we have an undemocratic power structure that goes across political, economic, social, and cultural lines. What impact has Occupy Wall Street had in raising basic questions about the nature of power in America? We asked sociologist Stanley Aronowitz.

It has an impact on perception and has changed the conversation. The question is whether or not it will be able to change policy. The argument that I would make is that it should not worry about changing policy in the short run. The only way to change policy in the long run,

Is going to create an even bigger movement. In order to create that bigger movement, it has to ask the question, what kind of a life do we want to lead? What is the good life? What is a vision of the way in which we want to live? David DeGraw coined the 99%-1% phrase

And was an early Occupy organizer. He explained why Who Rules America remains an urgent issue. You have big banks and concentrated wealth that’s just rigged the political process. Investigating it, we’ve got a country where US millionaire households have $46 trillion of wealth. It’s just a mind-boggling number.

Over the past generation, all the wealth has gone to the top. It’s one-tenth of 1%, more than 1%. However, breaking it down even further, you have 400 people who have as much wealth as 155 million Americans. That’s 400 people who have as much wealth as half the population. The seeds of the battle

That many of the occupiers see as a new American revolution is not really new. However, deeply rooted in the unresolved history of conflict in the United States. Between those who own and control its resources and those who want economic equality. The question is who rules America?

That’s a funny question because you talk about power. The first thing you’ve to understand is America is a business venture, a land, and a property. Capitalism is just about making money. Many revolutions start at the top. In other words, the people who began the struggle against Great Britain

Were merchants in Boston, New York, and plantation owners in Virginia. Most of the founders in Virginia were slave owners. What happens is as the struggle intensifies they have to generate support among ordinary people. When you do that, you break open the political system

And you open the door for very different kinds of demands. Slaves start demanding their own freedom. Women and Native Americans start demanding greater equality. What happens at the beginning, when a more privileged class begins the resistance, that doesn’t necessarily tell you how the whole process is going to take place.

This conflict between the 1%, actually the 0.001% and the 99%, had its echoes here in the home of America’s anti-colonial uprising. In the back streets of Boston, where a freedom trail today commemorates a massacre by the British and a fight for liberty. That’s where we’ll take you next.

Was the American Revolution really a revolution? The British thought it was so, no question about that. It was not a social upheaval in the way, let us say the French Revolution was, but it certainly overthrew an entire system of government. It replaced the ruling class with another one.

That seems to be what a revolution is about. It raised these questions of equality in the society, not just equality in terms of 1% and 99%, but the role of slavery and the status of women in American life, unleashed a struggle for equality

Among all groups that continued long after the revolution was over. Listen my children and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere. That’s one of the most famous poems of the American Revolution. Here we are in front of the statue of Paul Revere,

The man who alerted all the Massachusetts that the British troops, coming into their communities, we’re on the Freedom Trail in Boston, where the American revolution is remembered. What kind of a revolution was it? What actually happened here in Boston back in the 1700s? What have we learned since then?

Thousands of tourists and students visit these revolutionary monuments every day, but most have only a foggy idea of what really happened, and tend to repeat the mythologies that are taught in their schools. Here was Paul Revere. Paul Revere was one of the great revolutionary heroes.

Are you kids here to see the statue of Paul Revere? -Yes, we are. -Can I ask you a question about it? -Sure. -We’re doing a little TV program here. Who was Paul Revere, what was this all about? -Do you know? -He did the midnight ride. To warn about the British coming.

Did you know that he was a very rich businessman, a silversmith, here in Boston and that he wanted to be in the Continental Army and they wouldn’t let him in? We didn’t know that. Did you know that in Boston there was this merchant class, business leaders, the 1%,

Who were really running the whole show in many ways and that the people were not involved because back then they were slaves, they were indentured servants, and there were a lot of people who didn’t have a say in what was going on. -No idea. -I didn’t know anything about Paul Revere.

-We would love to know more. -Maybe to learn about the revolution. I’m supposed to learn about it in history but thank you. My brother Bill here has taught history to students in Massachusetts for many years, and has followed the various debates about our history. What was it about this revolution?

Was it a popular uprising or was it led by elites here in Boston? Well, both were true, they were popular elements. Did ordinary people resent the British? Ordinary people did participate in riots and boycotts. However, there was a 1% back then. The leaders of the revolution both led it and channeled it.

They were certainly not above using words like, liberty and freedom, to deflect and distract people from their own discontents in the colonies. In their own interests, the business class of Boston didn’t want more taxes on their products. They wanted to compete with the British goods, they felt they shouldn’t be taxed.

As a result, there was the original Tea Party here in Boston. There were merchants like John Hancock who was into smuggling goods. You’re right, they didn’t want to pay British taxes. There were other factors behind the revolution as well. However, when this revolution was codified in 1787 at the Constitutional Convention,

The people who were invited were the large landowners, the slave owners, and the merchant class. There were no women, no Indians, no blacks, and no working people. Actually, there were slaves that were inspired by the revolution to try to get their freedom, some actually did. I think the idea of the revolution

And the idea of democracy were radical, inspiring, and revolutionary in ways that actually might have made the leaders uncomfortable, since some of them themselves owned slaves. They really didn’t want this to go viral in the way it did around the world.

Who ruled America then in a way their grandchildren are ruling it today? Sometimes it’s direct descendants of those people. There was a certain amount of class mobility, indentured servitude disintegrated due to the chaos of the revolution. I don’t think the people who led the revolution really intended a social revolution.

That was really not what they were thinking about. After the revolution, people like Daniel Shays in western Massachusetts, a farmer, a captain in the revolution, did try to inspire and organize another rebellion against those he saw as replacing his British masters. This time they were the colonial leaders.

Here we are, 225 years after the Shays rebellion rocked Western Massachusetts in a challenge to the 1% of those times. We have a memorial for Daniel Shays and the men who fought with him. What’s interesting is we have American flags being put in a sense almost that his tombstone here,

Marking support for the values and the aspirations that he fought for. My name is Dave Wildstein. You’re at the Stagecoach Tavern in Western Massachusetts, town of Sheffield. This is a painting of Daniel Shays, militiaman. Daniel Shays fought in the revolution, they came back from the revolution and found their farms being foreclosed,

And many put in prison because of the same debt crisis that we are experiencing. Now, there are many similarities but essentially, one of the promises of the revolution was to annul the foreign debt. The farmers came home and discovered the debt was even greater. and the banks were even tougher.

Today, the Shays rebellion is mostly forgotten, but it lives on, on YouTube with songs and dramatic recreations. Shays now unsheathed his sword, and ordered the fife and drum players to strike up a tune. The men began marching in cadence. The irony, says historian Eric Foner,

Is that Shays was just a front man for a mass movement. In fact, it was the opponents who said it’s Shays rebellion in order to find a boogeyman they could attack. Let’s forget about Shays as a person and think about the mass movement, the farmers, the ordinary laborers,

Who took to the streets, shut down the courts and said, wait a minute, we had a revolution. We have installed a government that is supposed to represent the people here in Massachusetts, yet it’s the bankers and the landowners, and the merchants who are getting the benefit of everything.

It was the first Occupy Wall Street movement. They petitioned the government in Boston for redress. The government ignored the petitions and still had their arms, they went to these court sites and picked it to prevent the courts from sitting. Succeeded to some extent until private militias were formed,

And the Massachusetts militias were formed to suppress it. It was suppressed right near here. The last battle was fought in Sheffield. It was led by Brigadier Ashley. The Ashley house is still here. His parents were one of the heroes of the revolution. Here we have the same family building independence

But then trying to suppress it. If many white Americans were disappointed by the achievements of the American Revolution, what about blacks and Native Americans? In 1730, when Sheffield was incorporated, there were 30 black families in Sheffield. Half were slaves, half were free. However, the famous story is again at the Ashley House.

One of the servants, Elizabeth Freeman, called Ma Betts, overheard all the talk about the Massachusetts declaration of independence at the dining table, It occurred to her that maybe she might qualify. She actually filed in the court of Great Barrington and won her freedom. Here you have the court giving freedom on one hand,

And suppressing freedom on the other. Years later, a small black community in the area that Daniel Shays made famous, became the home of a young man who would become a leader of the fight for civil rights. He coupled concerns for racial equality with demands for economic justice.

Today, in the center of his hometown of Great Barrington Massachusetts, there is a wall mural celebrating his political and intellectual contributions. It includes quotes from President Barack Obama and Martin Luther King, Dr. W.E.B. Dubois. Dubois was one of the titans, giants of the 20th century.

Well, of course, he was born in the 19th century. Dubois put forward the issues which are still with us, the race issue in America. He said in 1903, the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line. It’s still a problem in this country and around the world.

Dubois talked about economic equality and how to gain that, and he grappled with these questions. He’s a brilliant writer, a brilliant thinker, and much of what he said is still relevant, thinking about American society. What about Native Americans? They were the ones to be eliminated

Because it was their land that was wanted, not even their labor. Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz is part of America’s indigenous movements and says the people we call Indians were being exterminated. We asked her about the American Revolution. It wasn’t a revolution, it was a war of independence from the colonial overpower.

However, it wasn’t an anti-colonial revolution, like the Bolivarian revolutions in South America or the Haitian revolution. There are many different even competing narratives about the origins of the United States. The United States, of course, it was founded as a settler state, as a colonial state, became an imperialist power.

Democracy has always been an oligarchic democracy, the capitalist democracy, with a rhetoric of populism, which is so strongly based on race. That is if you’re not black, if you’re not a slave, and you’re not indigenous. If you’re white and a settler, then everyone could be a king,

Everyone can own land and be a land owner. All these peasants who came as settlers, the dream is to be the king of the hill. It’s a very insidious kind of democracy, because it’s an illusion. Illusion or not? This is a subject that needs to be examined

If we are to understand who rules America, the origins of the 1% and then teach about it. So this is all part of the history and most Americans probably don’t know. Did you find, when you were teaching students here, that many of them just didn’t know much about their own history?

I think there are many students that I taught in one of the towns, that fought at Concord who were never even in the spot we’re standing in now. I think that that’s true, that many kids were not familiar with that history. Beyond local battlefields and so. The other thing about the Revolutionary War,

Which is relevant to today, because we live in a globalized world, is that this revolution started locally here in Boston. However, soon the British were involved, the Dutch, and the French. It became a war of many different countries, all fighting on American soil.

Very true, the French intervention was very critical to our success. It wasn’t all through the force and valor of our arms. There were other people involved. I think the idea itself has played a revolutionary role in history. But the idea itself did not create a deep social revolution in the United States.

To this day, people are distracted by words like; liberty, freedom and justice in the same way that they were back then. Ironically, the original Tea Party, which inspired the modern right-wing Tea Party movement today, was actually a protest against an earlier form of corporate imperialism. Why was tea the issue,

Not corn or whiskey or something like that? It was because the East India Company had gone bankrupt in China and the British crown bailed them out. They wouldn’t lose their assets. The Crown looked around and said what does the company have that we can sell?

It turned out what they had was tea, so they decided to market the tea. That’s why it was tea that was the taxed issue. Here you have a big financial failure and it was global. The implications rippled across the Pacific, rippled across the Atlantic and we have the Boston Tea Party.

Throughout our history there’ve been conspiracy theories about all of this. Today, for example, both the right and the left seems to see the Federal Reserve Bank, as a conspiracy concocted in 1913 without any proper process and running the show. Conspiracy theory and conspiracy thinking is deeply embedded in our political culture.

My PhD supervisor, my mentor Richard Hofstadter, wrote the famous book in the 1960s, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. In which he traced out various conspiratorial thinking. Whether it was Catholics who, before the Civil War, were trying to undermine America or various other groups at various times,

Immigrants, others trying to destroy the American culture or the Trilateral Commission. Remember them in the 1970s, was supposedly ruling the whole world. Now, the Federal Reserve. If we only abolished the Federal Reserve Bank, everything would go back to some utopia of the past. Throughout US history, you see various right-wing movements

Point out scapegoats in the society. They’re usually the folks who are already marginalized in some way or another. What happens is that there comes a moment when it becomes really useful for the elite powers whether they’re in government or corporations to encourage these movements.

You get a Tea Party or you get a militia movement like in the ’90s, or you get the Ku Klux Klan in the 1800s. What this is all about is taking angry, mostly white people, who are mostly somewhat privileged, and convincing them that they’re about to fall down the socioeconomic ladder.

I guess the basic problem with conspiracy theories is that no group can fully determine what happens. Even people with great power launch things and then they lose control of them, and things happen in a way that is unpredictable. When you look back at history and you maybe can see,

Because it’s a longtime ago all of these forces, yet today somehow in the news we never see these forces. What we see are politicians spouting various rhetoric and speeches, but we don’t really know, whose interests they’re serving, who’s behind the scenes. Well, this is why we need research.

We need an understanding of who rules America, because the mythology today is that, it is the people who rule America. Most folks don’t know a great deal in terms of specifics about the role that corporations play, the way politicians are tied to corporate interests.

Change is possible, I think when one talks about who rules America and a power elite, one should not use that to simply fall into a quietism and say, nothing is possible, no change is possible, everything’s under control. Many of the major popular movements in our history have been big surprises.

Nobody expected them to come. The same thing with Occupy Wall Street, nobody expected Occupy Wall Street to come up simply out of nowhere. We have seen that over and over again in our history and we will continue to. People say the 1% and we are the 99%.

However, when I broke down the numbers, it is a couple hundred people in this country that have immense wealth. If you look at our election process, it’s something like 100th of 1% accounts for something like 80% of the campaign finance. That’s insanity, it’s a rigged game.

Now the ball of history has been passed to a new generation, fighting to transform a large and complex country, with many power centers. However, just as in the past, it is determined minorities who make the difference. An elite made the American Revolution. As we will see, a power elite still rules.

When retired World War II General Dwight David Eisenhower ran for president, he was hailed as a military savior and all-American hero from the plains of Kansas. Now is the time for all good Americans to come with the aid of their country. Vote for Eisenhower. No one expected that in his farewell address,

He would identify and oppose the emergence of a new power constellation, the military-industrial complex. Good evening the councils of government. We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. This was a prophetic speech, especially for a military leader who saw that a fusion of government and corporate power could lead to what he called unwarranted influence and misplaced power. Fifty years later on the warnings anniversary,

President Eisenhower’s own granddaughter, Susan documented how the military-industrial complex had grown. She wrote that in less than ten years their military and security expenditures had increased by 119 percent. This new book on the clout of the military-industrial complex by William Hartung details the power it wields. He told me how it works.

Military contractors, uniform military, and the Pentagon are basically pushing their interests at the expense of taxpayers, national security, and sometimes their civil liberties. Is it a description of an actual reality? Well, the military-industrial complex is more real now than it was when Eisenhower coined the phrase.

A company like Lockheed Martin not only they’re building missiles, but they’re building cluster bombs and submarines. At the same time, they’re helping to process your taxes, carrying out the census, running fingerprint databases for the FBI. It’s more from the military-industrial complex to the national security state.

There is surveillance as well as weapons building. Hartung says these companies in effect dictate our foreign policy. They’ve captured our foreign policy and our military policy really for special interest purposes to a large degree. Writer David Swanson believes that this military-industrial complex

Relies on wars, or the threat of wars to stay in business. President Eisenhower pushed war propaganda in the very same speech and throughout his career, but he could not have been more right. He probably did not imagine how huge the problem of what he called the military-industrial complex would become.

I describe it as a banker bailout every year. It is over a trillion dollars every year into the machinery of mass murder. It is over half of federal discretionary spending from the US government. It is as much and more than all other nations of the world put into the military each year.

It is much of it on accountability, the Pentagon routinely loses quantities of money that are as much as most other governmental departments get. It’s not just that more money is being spent on arms, but the rise of the military-industrial complex has been accompanied by an overall rise in corporate power,

And not just in the military sphere. Military contractors now have disproportionate influence, says Sheila Krumholz of the Center for Responsive Politics. There is a huge sum of money coming from defense contractors in particular, and these range from ATNT and Boeing, the largest multinational kind of Goliath.

Their primary source of revenue may be telecommunications or transportation, but they have huge contracts worth a ton of money with the DOD and military. There have been a number of pieces of legislation aimed at both making that connection more transparent and trying to put a lid on the pay-to-play

Method that has ruled earmarks. Have we seen a pattern of military and industrial collusion and industrial companies that do business with the Pentagon giving more and more money to politicians? Many defense contractors were making contributions, spending lots of money to lobby, and in exchange winning contracts

That maybe weren’t the best organizations to benefit from. There has been a lot of research done about how money greases the skids for defense contractors. I’ll also say that the revolving door plays an important role. It’s not just money, it’s other forms of elite influence

Where people in the Department of Defense are lining up their next. They jump to the private industry where they can rake in huge sums of money in lucrative posts in private industry that they used to regulate. Alongside the military are huge intelligence agencies with vast budgets to spy, run covert action operations,

Collect personal data, and conceal how powerful interests operate. Today, the former head of the CIA who runs the Pentagon was replaced by a general. The head of the Navy SEALs runs the Central Command. Secrecy is pervasive in a national security state, even as groups like WikiLeaks try to disseminate hidden information.

WikiLeaks, your baby in the last few years has released more classified documents than the rest of the world’s media combined. Can that possibly be true? Can it possibly be true? It’s a worry, isn’t it? That the rest of the world’s media is doing such a bad job,

That a little group of activists is able to release more of that type of information than the rest of the world press combined. Years earlier, an auto executive defense secretary Charles Wilson, said what’s good for General Motors is good for America. He saw no distinction between an elected government and an unelected corporation.

GM was a car company that became a major defense supplier buoyed by military spending and then years later became a mortgage lender driven by Wall Street-originated and often fraudulent subprime loans until it nearly collapsed, and had to be bailed out by the government. The United States Supreme Court in its citizen’s united decision

Has decided that corporations like GM have the rights of ordinary people, and can openly and sometimes secretly lobby Congress and the public or finance political campaigns to promote their agendas. There are now many criticisms against Citizens United. Many of the arguments can be seen in this video by the Story of Stuff campaign.

We have a democracy in crisis. 85% of Americans feel that corporations have too much power in our democracy and people have too little. Eighty-five percent, hey, that’s the majority. Let’s get together and take our democracy back from the corporations. It’s the first and most important step in making real progress

On all the issues that people care most about. There is also a counter-campaign underway against corporate control of politics, focusing on two billionaire political donors, Charles and Edward Koch. Two brothers, both industrialists, and both funders of conservative campaigns including one to suppress voting by Democrats. Filmmaker Robert Greenwald has distributed this video nationwide.

Folks like the Koch brothers are attempting to ensure that as few people of color and as few young people show up as possible. We’ve undergone a coup d’etat. We live in a corporate state. Chris Hedges is a best-selling author and former reporter for the New York Times.

The people who rule America are the large corporate entities which are supernational, they have no loyalty to the nation-state. They are harvesting the country just as they’re the rest of the globe. They’re implanting a global neo-feudalism where workers around the planet have to be competitive, which means being competitive

With sweatshop workers in Bangladesh who make 22 cents an hour, or prison labor in China. It’s a global neo-feudalism. It’s one that is unassailable, completely untouchable, and more powerful than the host governments that were there nominally based. Hedges is not alone in this view. Professor Michael Klare specializes in studying the country’s

Largest industry, oil and gas. I would say that the oil industry or energy rips large coal, natural gas, uranium is the most powerful lobby in America. The most powerful economic interests. It’s tied to other powerful interests automobile, highway construction, suburbia, and many other industries like tourism are all linked to energy

And they work together to keep America addicted to oil and to avoid the transition to alternative fuels. Do they have an influence on our politics? Do they have an influence on what happens in Washington? What happens in the ballot boxes of America? They’re the biggest contributors to electoral campaigns in general,

Especially to the Republican Party. I think they have a very powerful influence. Do you think most Americans know how powerful they are? Only the people who see this power in their daily lives have grasped the strength of it. For many Americans, the military-industrial complex

Is seen only as a source of jobs, and in fact, military contractors win political support and federal funds by promising to create jobs. There are real jobs. People working in the weapons factories and all the subsidiary subcontractors, but it’s a fraud because you could take those same dollars

And put it into any other industry, infrastructure, green energy, education or even into tax cuts for working people and produce more jobs than you do with the military spending. It’s worse than nothing purely on economic terms. For years there have been protests against America’s wars and the military.

Most of the targeted politicians, not necessarily the corporations profit from making weapons and other products for the military. One of the groups that are most visible and challenging militarism is a women’s group called Pink. Medea Benjamin is a co-founder. I’ve learned that we don’t rule America.

I’ve learned that the Democrats don’t rule America. The corporations rule America. I’ve been doing the work on the wars, and I’ve just been floored at how powerful these weapons manufacturers are, how powerful the contractors are, and that they have the ability to keep wars going. That’s pretty amazing when you think about it.

I’m just doing a lot of work around the drone issue. Do you know there’s a drone caucus in Congress? Instead of having a caucus to feed preschool children, they decided it was more important to have a drone caucus. That’s because all the manufacturers in their districts are funding them. They’re open about it.

In fact, over 50 members of Congress have created a caucus for drones. A court where they openly promote the use and sale of drones at home and abroad. They’ve now authorized the flight of at least of up to 30,000 drones in US skies for whatever purpose.

This is in contrast to the lack of any caucus for senior citizens, children, health coverage, green energy, and human beings. There’s a caucus for robots. Eisenhower was so right when he said that it steals money. It robs us of food for our children, and health care for our parents. He was so right.

It’s just worse and worse. You get the little puppets in Congress. I live in Washington now, so I see these little puppets and wish that they were like the NASCAR drivers who had to have their corporations on their suits, but they don’t rule America. The corporations obviously rule America.

When it comes to war and peace, those corporations are so powerful that they’ve kept us for the last decade in war. If we don’t do something about it they’ll keep us in war for the next decade. Beyond the debates about the role of the military,

There may be a deeper challenge because the United States has evolved from a nation into an empire with a far-flung system of bases, economic interests, and entangled business dealings all around the world. Top political leaders interact with corporate leaders at meetings of elites like the Bilderberg Conference, the Trilateral Commission, and the International

Monetary Fund meetings. It’s all part of a global structure of corporate culture, politics, and power. Some like the billionaire George Soros, told me a while back that the World Economic Forum is more like a networking party than a decision-making venue. Decisions are often made behind the scenes, not at public events.

The Davos meeting is an enormous cocktail party. There are a lot of contacts, people meet, and so on. A lot of things are discussed. It’s very convenient because you can meet a lot of people whom you want to meet in a confined period of time, and it’s also a media event.

Is it also a symbol of growth, economic power, or the political power, and a loss of sovereignty by some countries? Well, it is actually symptomatic of the age because you have presidents and prime ministers courting the financiers and the industrialists. Only a few Americans seem to understand how corporatization

And globalization go hand in hand. Walter Teague was one of the first activists against the Vietnam War. He believes that Americans can’t see the facts because they’re trapped in myths. I asked him how he would explain this situation to people on Mars. I’d have to explain some very crazy things to them.

I’d have to explain it in terms that they would perhaps understand. I’d have to not use some of the terms that Americans commonly use because if you use the language that we’re taught in school about democracy, free will, how the United States is number one Uber alles.

All those terms lead the person to not being capable of understanding what you’re saying, which is that it has been for a long time. A very small percentage, it’s one percent or something like that which makes most of the decisions, but they are smart enough

To make them in a way that keeps most Americans, until recently, from realizing that they’re being ruled. We cannot undo the plutocracy, the kleptocracy, and the lack of representation without dismantling the military-industrial complex. This is the one percent of the one percent. This is where we give a banker bailout every year,

And we don’t get a dime of it back. We borrow it from China, we pay it back with interest. We keep interest rates ridiculously low. We crash Wall Street, we bail it out because we’ve created a war economy without any need for war.

Well, I think if people had a better sense of how these companies, how the uniformed military, how their allies in Congress are running the show, scaring us into spending on weapons we don’t need they’d have the beginnings of a tool to do something about it.

I think the absence of that information there’s nowhere to start. There’s nowhere to plant your feet and try to fight back against it. I’d have to tell the Martians it’s going to be very hard for them to understand why Americans don’t see how they’re being screwed.

They don’t see it except when it gets so bad, or so contradictory, or so blatant, or so personal. Then they wake up one day and say, oh, my God. Does this mean in a way that businesses, Wall Street, defense contractors, and others have disproportionate power?

In other words, are they one of the forces ruling our country that most people don’t even know about? I think that money has great influence across the board, particularly where the issues are cane, and they seem disassociated with the average Americans, where constituents aren’t paying attention, and they’re not being heard

By their representatives in Washington. Where people are paying attention, where there is a hue and cry from regular people it’s hard for the money to beat out the merits of policy. Politicians usually will not risk the political liability of being seen as catering to their interests

Bankrolling their campaign if the voters are paying attention. They’re usually not that unwise. Most of the public doesn’t interface with the military-industrial complex because they participate in the economy as consumers. Even there, they’re being affected by a power shift and economic inequality that drives them deeper and deeper into debt.

George Scribner is an executive with a corporation that advises other corporations. Today, it takes 200,000 dollars a year to feel somewhat affluent. I asked George Scribner how he thinks growing inequality is affecting our politics. Who’s in charge of our country? We keep reading more and more about big money in politics.

There was a great article about the one percent by the one percent for the one percent, and it might have been vanity fair but I’m not positive right now. They made a point in politics that I’ve been making in terms of business.

Since World War Two, it was a head count that made a difference. One person, one vote. You go play to the vote. One person, one dollar. You play to as many people as you can to get the dollars.

Now because the assets are concentrated at the high end in the hands of the few, Actually, money is much more valuable both to politicians and to marketers than the mass of people that comprise the middle class. Is the mass of people being left out now the mass of Americans?

They aren’t being left out, but they’re certainly less important. In a variety of ways you’ll see them being less catered to, and manipulated more in a sense. In politics and in terms of marketing there’ll be fewer products and fewer services. That’s one view from inside the corporate world,

Essentially saying that the majority of Americans have less economic power, and as a result less political power. People with money rule America because people with money can acquire power through that. The great thing about America is that we all live within the myth that each one of us can make a difference.

I think there are enough opportunities for that to happen. That makes me think that the future won’t be as bleak as it seems sometimes. Let’s hope so. Certainly, most Americans believe their future is bright, but given the trends we’ve explored about who’s in power, there certainly are doubts.

Especially because of the danger and threat of new wars that are being planned secretly, according to Professor Stanley Aronowitz. There’ll be a war against Iran. As a matter of fact, unless you refuse to count embargoes, things like that are going on at this very moment. That is to say, in March of 2012.

That is virtually an act of war, that we are saying to the Iranians either you bow to our demand that you do not develop nuclear weapons, and you renounce nuclear weapons or otherwise we will continue to bar your goods from going back and forth. After all, the market is part of the system.

They’re saying you have no market rights. There is a war underway right now, but most Americans don’t really know it, do they? -That’s right. -Do they know about this power elite? -No. -Do they know about what Seawright Mills talked about so many years ago? Why is that, and how can that change?

Because we don’t have a left that continually in an effective way talks about who has power in America. The Occupy movement talked about 99 percent being deprived of economic power and about inequality. It is not even close to being an analysis that can be disseminated throughout the entire society.

We don’t have a system of daily newspapers. We don’t have a weekly newspaper, we have Twitter. We have various other kinds of social media that we have access to, but it does not replace the systematic analysis that could take place as a result of having our own media.

Americans in a way are still in the dark, and I think the left forum and so many other efforts attempt to challenge that, to change that. Yes, that’s right. Even as President Eisenhower exposed the military industrial complex, he also expressed a very American deeply felt desire for peace and justice

That history has largely forgotten. From the earth, and that in the goodness of time, all people will come to live together in a peace-guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love. From the earliest days, freedom of the press was what defined America. Thomas Jefferson helped write the Declaration of Independence

And believed that free media was essential for a free nation, saying, “…were it left to me to decide” “whether we should have a government without newspapers” “or newspapers without a government.” “I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” That was in 1787.

Today, our newspapers seem to be fading in importance in a multimedia world that is largely owned and controlled by a handful of large media corporations. We’re the most media-dominated society in the world, I think. Jeff Cohen worked in major media. He’s now one of the industry’s fiercest critics. Half a dozen corporations

Own and control most of the mainstream media in our country. If you’re looking at Who Rules America or Who Owns America, it’s the same people who propagandize America. The press and the outlets that report news or convey information are just a small slice of vast media empires

Producing entertainment products that also sell a way of life based on consumption. When you look at who’s on the boards of media corporations, they’re also on the boards of US oil companies, and they’re on the boards of US military contractors. When trying to study Who Owns America,

You also see that these are the people who own the media. We don’t have a state media, but in some ways, it’s very much like a state media. It’s the corporate state. If this is true, then we can say that the American media doesn’t just report news.

As we’ll see, it’s not independent of the system but a pillar of it. It reinforces the worldview and defends the interests of those who rule America. Thirty years ago, 50 companies dominated American media. Now it’s down to six. Here are some charts on media ownership that illustrate this concentration.

With new global digital enterprises like Google, Facebook, and Twitter growing in importance worldwide, US-based media has become a transnational force. The US media companies by themselves are owned in large part by hedge funds, mutual funds, and finance companies. Barry James Dyke is an asset manager who has studied media ownership.

The research I’ve done is unequivocal, and I stumbled into this. It’s that the major media companies, i.e., Disney’s, CBS, and the news corporations, all of them are public documents. It’s that they’re all owned by mutual fund companies. The majority of shareholders are owned by mutual fund companies.

They get many of their revenue from these companies, so you won’t see any consistent criticism about these fund companies. Are these companies investigated by the media? No, they’re not. Are they responsible for the public in some way? Are they accountable to the public knowing what they’re doing? The public doesn’t have a clue.

They don’t know what they’re doing. He has documented his findings with charts in his own book, The Pirates of Manhattan. People will not be getting the truth. There is a lot of coverage, especially of politics, that’s often treated as a sporting event with an emphasis on poll numbers and election results.

Mary Boyle follows media coverage of elections for Common Cause. What about the role of the media? Is the media helping to strengthen our democracy, or do you think it’s helping to divide us? I think that’s a great question. There are a couple of things going on there.

You’ve got cable channels that are in different camps, and they are not showing different points of view. You’ve got Fox News on the right, and you’ve got MSNBC on the left. With a setup like that, you have Americans who tune in to the channel.

They want to listen to the one that expresses their views, and you’re not seeing a mix of an opinion, a debate, or anything like that. You’ve also got the shrinkage of the media. You’ve got less coverage of what’s going on. I think this is particularly concerning more in state-based and local politics,

Where there’s even less coverage of what’s going on in politics. Even though the world is known for its diversity, American media is not. Editorially and ideologically, the power elite tends to reflect the views of the government and the people who shape its views. Dissenting politicians like Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr.

Have a hard time getting their views heard. Who owns the media? How is the media translated? Some of the moguls and titans of media in the industry are part of the problem. They shape a narrative for the American people. It’s a narrative that ultimately leads millions of people

To vote for candidates based upon the narrative they shape, based upon the talking heads they control. Those Americans tend to vote and tend to engage the system on the basis of what they hear. The media is a significant part of this problem. Historian Eric Foner agrees.

He says it’s not just political bias at work, but what the media as a business feels it’s forced to focus on to attract ratings and revenues. Somehow, it’s that idea of power behind the people in office. It’s not in our media very much. It’s not in people’s minds very much. They personalize politics.

Their personalities combat each other, but they don’t look at who’s behind the scenes. You’re quite right that the media focuses on personalities, and often the quirks of personality, like Clinton’s sexual escapades, or whether Obama was born in the United States or not, or Romney and his cars, and whatever.

He’s not paying taxes and many other things. Those are not totally unimportant issues, but it’s the nature of the media today in and of itself and that it has to go for the quick news. Deep investigative reporting is not emphasized as much as perhaps it was in the past.

You’ve got to sell papers. Scandal sells papers, personality sells papers, and celebrity sells papers. You’re right that the larger nature of how the system operates tends not to get emphasized as much. It’s not even understood by many people. It’s hard to understand. This is a very large country with over 300 million people

And a very complicated economy and political system. It’s difficult to understand exactly how things operate. In a certain sense, the anti-government sentiment that is rife in this country, which is generally associated with the right wing, is also a response to the feeling. It’s an inchoate feeling. It’s not an analytical feeling,

But it’s a feeling that the government is aloof. It is not responsive. It does not represent the people. It represents some very particular interests, and that sense is pretty widespread in this country. Media watch groups are also concerned about the lack of diversity in the media

That makes it unrepresentative of the country it serves, in racial, ethnic, and gender terms. The unwritten credo of The New York Times is, “Do not alienate those” “for whom we depend on money and access.” Chris Hedges was an award-winning journalist for The New York Times. He’s an American media star.

That means it’s the power elite and the financiers who advertise. It’s expandable. You have, at least in the positions that I was in, the possibility of doing journalism. It’s not that there aren’t restrictions or constrictions, and it’s not that they can’t be punishing. Hedges work is still very respected,

But he believes that much of the press is a charade that covers up for power more than covers it, especially when reporting on elections. Due to the political theater, the personal narrative of the candidate is all irrelevant. It’s meaningless. We still play the game. Look, every totalitarian country I covered had elections.

They all play the charade, and even East Germany did. That’s the charade we play, and when we have compliant corporate media that pretends that that charade is real. I think the problem is that the illusion still remains so powerful. People are changing,

But the illusion is still so powerful that people confuse where power exists. How does The New York Times cover the power centers that many people say “Rule America”? Chris Spanos edits The New York Times eXaminer, which monitors the newspaper’s content every day. He believes the paper has become an accomplice

To the power elite. The New York Times as an institution is almost like a mini-nation. In the correspondence, the op-ed writers, the editors, are almost like diplomats, and they carry themselves in their own self-importance in the way that they communicate with other politicians and diplomats. They are very influential.

Would you say that they’re disseminators of ideology in America and not just other information? Absolutely, they disseminate a very particular ideology, and their readership is primarily managers and people who make over $90,000 a year. They cater to a managerial perspective. They have a pro-management. When they discuss labor relations,

They often have a pro-management or a pro-business view. Financial journalists like Stacy Herbert and Max Kaiser found that many pro-business views in some media outlets were often uninformed, as they told me on a radio show. From December 2008. After the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers,

The markets tumbled a thousand points in a day. The head of BBC World News Business said, and we had a ten-episode contract, “Do you think the financial crisis will last all the way” “through these ten episodes?” In other words, the people in charge to plan the coverage are very uninformed themselves.

The mainstream media themselves are deeply in debt. The news organizations have become entertained, and to compete, they take on enormous amounts of debt. The bankers don’t want to insult their creditors because they might cut off their lines of credit. They’re not unbiased in this regard.

In any stretch of the imagination, you see this most with The New York Times. Their coverage of Wall Street is pitiful. One reason the press is so pro-business is that they are themselves businesses. “The people who run media companies increasingly pay themselves” “huge salaries and bonuses, the same way that bankers do,”

Says Barry Dyke. I couldn’t believe Les Moonves made $59 million in 2009. It was just disclosed the other day that he made close to $70 million in 2010. -That’s the head of CBS. -That’s the head of CBS. You’re saying that all of them are running their businesses as if they were banks.

That’s good. That’s banker pay. So $70 million is a lot of money in anyone’s book, and that’s what they’re getting paid. The media companies are part of this whole system of Who Rules America. They’re part of these interlocking relationships with financial institutions. There’s no question about it.

You get the media companies that are huge. It’s part of the empire. Get the media companies, and you get the bankers. You have your massive unions. You have other factors as well, but the media and the asset managers are definitely part of it. That’s exactly it.

The corporations that own the US media and US television are very wealthy and powerful, and the people at the top of the news networks get paid an awful lot of money. I have never earned anything close to the amount of money I earned in the one year I worked

Where General Electric was my boss at MSNBC. What I think happens is a self-censorship where the people who rise to the top have learned how not to rock any boats, and they know if they do rock boats, they will lose their huge salaries. Newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post,

And The Wall Street Journal tend to frame a deeper narrative that tells us what we should believe matters. They set the agenda that influences what TV news programs also cover. For example, “They don’t focus on inequality and class differences,” says an independent media executive, Brian Drolet. They don’t talk about the working class.

They promote the idea that if you buy a lottery ticket, you could win, so you’re already thinking that maybe you could win. If you’re in the working class or part of the working class that’s unemployed, you still have this hope that somehow you will go into the middle class.

There’s been very little attention paid to class. You were saying that the media doesn’t discuss this. They don’t highlight class differences in America. They’re more comfortable talking about racial or ethnic differences. At the same time, in their business practices, they’re very conscious of demographics. What class they are attracting, maybe upper class,

And how to cater their advertising and sell it. The Internet is a perfect example of that. It’s the only thing where they’re constantly slicing and dicing who you are so they know exactly how much you make so they can pitch what kind of products to you.

However, that’s this whole madness of consumer society that’s been created by modern capitalism. The key thing you’re getting at is that even though there is a reality of class, a working class in this country and a ruling class or bourgeois class, people have been trained not to think in those terms,

So they don’t even know who they are. Some networks, like Fox News, owned by Rupert Murdoch, seemed to be more comfortable presenting a right-wing political line. They have helped shift many media outlets to the right. There is a school of thought that says

We should have given the citizens of Baghdad 48 hours to get out of Dodge and flatten the place. Then the war would be over, and we could have done that in two days. “That may be so,” “but old media is being eclipsed by the new,” says George Scribner, the vice president of Digitas.

It’s a company that comes up with digital strategies for big companies and studies how affluent consumers now drive marketing in an era of growing economic inequality. One thing that’s different now is that the media is owned by everyone. The thing that’s leveling off the dollars to some extent

Is that everyone has access to Twitter, everyone has access to blogging, and there’s this new fast and fluid coalition building. Occupy Wall Street was one example of that. The Arab Spring was an example of that. In some ways, there’s a new check and balance.

I don’t think that’s necessarily changing the restructuring of income and wealth. I do think there’s another trip switch that’d help us when things get too bad. In a way, digital media is where democracy is today. -It’s not in politics. -Yes. It’s not in big business.

-It’s not in big money. -That’s true, I think that’s well said. There is some debate on how free the Internet is, given corporate control over government censorship, but it does make possible more interactivity. At the same time, media attention still tends to revolve around the political elite with authority,

Even if that elite doesn’t have the power to shape priorities or impose policies. When you talk to ordinary Americans, many of them feel it’s totally fair. They see different points of view. They’re seeing people who are critical from time to time. They see the media as the liberal media in some instances.

I was in the Soviet Union, and we were always raised in this country, that that’s pure propaganda. Frankly, it was very ineffective propaganda because they never pretended to have two points of view. They would have one point of view saying how great things are. However, in our country,

Propaganda is effective because it has the appearance of debates. The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us. Jeff Cohen says that just as Americans were misled about Iraq before the war, they are being misled today about Iran.

He pointed to a study about Iraq before the American invasion that found that of the 393 people who were interviewed on all the networks, only three were anti-war. It’s because almost everything we knew about Iraq before the invasion turned out to be false. Almost everything we’re learning today about Iran is not accurate.

We went to The New York Times a couple of months ago, where they said that the International Atomic Energy Association has put out an assessment that the nuclear program in Iran has a military objective. FAIR, this media criticism group, went to the Times and said:

“Which report is that? We’ve never heard of it.” The Times knew they’d made a big error. It was a prominent error. They removed the sentence from their website, but they refused to correct the error. It’s not just wars that get propagandized.

“The media does not often cover the people behind the scenes who run things,” says William Hartung, who has written about the military industrial complex. You would think there would be some independence in the journalism on this issue, but in some cases, reporters have even said to me:

“I can’t go after the Pentagon harder, the companies harder,” “or this nexus of influence harder because this company is a big advertiser” “in the paper.” “We’ll feel pressured if we do those stories.” We’ll do stories about the war in Afghanistan. We’ll repeat what the president has to say on an issue,

But there’s not a lot of interest or resources put into investigating these connections. David Swanson who also writes about military policy agrees. The corporate media in the United States is integrated with the military industrial complex. Some of the same corporations are making profits from both. There are two major political parties

That don’t have much disagreement on this topic, so it’s not a topic for debate. No matter if 90% of the public is upset about it, it’s not acceptable news. Michael Clare, who’s investigated the destructive power of oil and gas companies, says the same is true when it comes to that industry.

The media doesn’t cover this for the most part. In fact, the media is largely in league because of the advertising dollars that the oil and gas lobby provides. They’re very heavily dependent on advertising revenue, so they’re very careful about what they say. Big business, a wealthy and frequent advertiser in the media,

Is often not scrutinized by the media. That was the case in the financial crisis, says Sheila Krumholz, from the Center for Responsive Politics. These are complicated issues. The issues are difficult to understand on a good day, and they seem very arcane and unimportant to the average American.

It’s possible that some media were laboring away trying to explain why this was critical information that the voters needed. I think a lot of blame can be laid at the feet of the media for the financial collapse. Ultimately, what we do know is that it’s critical

If there’s any perfect scenario that shows why transparency and paying attention to scrutinizing the powerful players and what they want and what they’re doing to get their way. The financial crisis is a perfect example. It shows us how important transparency is. Because significant wealth demands significant attention.

Together, we can give you and your wealth the wings to soar. Goldman Sachs Wealth Management. At the same time, media has become so pervasive online and off on TV and on our mobile phones that many Americans say they are becoming victims of information overload. The more they watch, the less they know.

For sure, I think information overload is a serious threat to democracy because it doesn’t work if people aren’t vigilant. Nobody’s going to hold members of Congress accountable for you. You have to make sure that you’re heard. I think there’s also the sense that because there is this tension,

And some would say healthy tension, between concern about protecting the process, democracy, and government from money’s undue influence versus protecting freedom of speech and privacy. Nobody wants to censor information. We want our representatives to have all the information, even if it’s coming from deep-pocketed corporations, unions, or trade associations. Very narrow interests.

We want to make sure they do their job to seek alternative perspectives, even if they come from groups that have no power and no money. Media criticism tends to revolve around what’s covered and not covered, and not on the way media narratives shape how we think and what we think about.

That’s the power of the media, and why it is now among the forces ruling America. Yes, we can. Hello, Chicago. Every school child learns power in Washington is formally divided three ways between the executive branch in the White House, now occupied by Barack Obama and the judicial branch topped by the Supreme Court,

With nine judges, all political appointees and the legislative branch where the Senate has 100 members with two from every state and the House of Representatives 435 drawn from districts across America. This is the formal system of checks and balances that is supposed to keep the country on the stable course of democracy.

Yet, wherever you go in this capital of America and meet the people who are the most informed about how the government really works, you hear that the system isn’t working and that the voters are not in charge. You hear it from a member of Congress. Who controls America?

An elite group of people who function in a stratosphere globally and beyond the Constitution, beyond the reach of government. They have enormous resources. You hear it from an expert on our elections. Our politics are being hijacked. They’re being hijacked by people who are willing

To spend millions of dollars to elect or defeat certain candidates. You hear it from the head of a public interest group. We have a plutocracy, we have a corporate plutocracy. The rules in Washington are written by the corporate lobbyists working on behalf of the biggest corporate interests in the country.

You hear about lobbyists from a veteran former congressional staffer who would only talk to us if his face and voice were altered. Ninety-nine percent of the people that I see lobbying Congress are white men and women who you can tell wear very nice, expensive suits, ties, and dresses,

And they are going into the Republican offices. I rarely see African Americans here, I rarely see Hispanics. I rarely see Asians, I rarely see Muslims. It’s like you see these very well-dressed guys who just came off learjets, and you can tell they’re right out of the country club.

They’re going to the Republican offices asking for a tax cut of some kind. These are not just opinions. This well-researched book by William Domhoff details how the government today is being run by powerful, elite forces outside the government. As we will see, his conclusions are supported by experienced insiders here in Washington, DC.

All of these insiders say that money and special interests are now in control. They too ask, who rules America? In Washington, we spoke with leaders of three respected watchdog organizations that specialize in researching and analyzing hidden forces operating behind the scenes. Public citizen focuses on corruption and accountability issues.

Robert Weissman is their president and described how laws get passed. How does a piece of legislation emerge? How does it become law? How does it get implemented and how does it get enforced? At every step of the way, you really have corporations in whatever industry dominating the process.

Why don’t congressmen, the people we elect, challenge this system? They are products of the system, so they’ve got an inherent bias of favor. They’ve succeeded in the system one way or another. Those who challenge it are going to have to fight really entrenched power.

There are many of them who are very good and who do challenge the system. By and large, people got to Washington because they figured out how to make the system work for them. Even if they came in as insiders, most of them were quickly educated

On the ways that things really do work in Washington if they hope to get things done or get re-elected. They succumb to the corporate interests. Where does the money come from? The top 100 donors have given 77 percent of the money going to super PACs.

That means one percent of the donors are giving 64 percent of the money. This is a tiny elite that can afford to make the contributions that are going to be most influential in this election cycle. This website, OpenSecrets.org documents where all the money in politics originates.

Sheila Krumholz oversees it as the Executive Director of the Center for Responsive Politics. I think many of the people concerned about money’s roll in Washington and how it greases the skids for private, narrow interests to rule the day, believe that members of Congress and policymakers control the levers of power,

But that the donors, the kind of patrons of these people are operating the strings. The politicians are the visible locus of power, but the people behind them really are calling the shots. How do we find out who those people are? We have millions upon millions of records of donations to federal candidates,

Political action committees, including leadership PACs, which are their funds that they control, and the parties. We also can see money going directly to the super PACs. These are the political action committees, which are supposedly or are only giving contributions to groups that are spending money

To run independent expenditures, independent of the campaigns and parties. The problem is, of course, that there’s this secret pot of cash being collected by groups that do not disclose where the money is coming from. They are advertising political ads, which are often quite damning, and nasty, and sometimes irresponsible, but are highly influential.

We have no idea where their money is coming from. She showed us what their data shows. A small minority controlling the process with very few millionaires funding all politics. There are 610 registered super PACs. Ninety-five of them are ponying up the money for the ads so far.

This chart really demonstrates what a dramatic increase we’ve seen in spending on advertising by these groups. In 2012, we’re seeing over 100 million spent. That’s a 100 percent increase over the amount spent in 2008 and a 400 percent increase over last cycle. This is a who’s who of who’s lobbying in Washington

Between 1998 and 2012. The US Chamber of Commerce spent $831 million. The American Medical Association, $269 million. General Electric, $268 million. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America admit to 219 million plus for lobbying and there are many, many more. 2012 could be a turning point in American politics

Because of all the big money that’s literally being invested. Mary Boyle is the vice president of Common Cause. Who is ruling America? You certainly have to look at the people who are giving the most money to political campaigns. They are highly influential people who give a lot of money

To political campaigns, millions of dollars, and want something for return. They tend to be really savvy business people who have made a lot of money because they know what they’re doing, and they don’t make investments without wanting an investment on their return. It’s unfortunate, but obviously, it buys media time.

It also buys constant male efforts. Also, obviously, you support candidates who will ultimately come to the United States Congress who may vote your way. The largest contributors to political campaigns in America are the financial institutions. The second largest contributors are large real estate developers. That means that if you’re running for office,

You have to get elected by promising to support policies that are supported by the real estate sector and by the financial sector that lends to the real estate sector. Doesn’t this really put the democracy under threat? Corporations are free now due to Citizens United and a couple of other court rulings

To give more money than they have ever been allowed before. That is certainly a threat to our democracy because what it does is it drowns out the voices of regular people. It’s discouraging in one sense, in that the election of 2008 showed a tremendous number of people who want change, and yet,

There seems to be at every turn changes being resisted by minorities that are very skillful at undermining change. Certainly, 2008 was the change election. We have been disappointed that there has not been more change coming from the White House. Now that President Obama is running for re-election,

He too is spending most of his time raising money, two billion dollars for political campaigns. That’s why Robert Weissman says this scandal involves both parties. It’s a bipartisan problem for sure. The two billion is just the presidential race. The overall national race will probably be around eight billion.

Obama is an extremely talented fundraiser, so he’s going to be able to raise big money. The massive chunks of outside super-rich money and corporate money, though, look like they’re going to go overwhelmingly to the Republicans. It is so expensive to run for office, whether it’s a presidency or the state legislature,

That you just have to go out and start raising money from people who want something in return to run for office. The money in politics just doesn’t finance candidates. It pays for lobbying. In 2011, there were 12,654 lobbyists spending 3.32 billion dollars on influencing politicians, agencies, and regulators.

I was with a group of 20 women from the Middle East last week, and they wanted to know about CodePink and our work. I said: Come to Congress and meet us. We met in the cafeteria, looked all around and said: All these people are lobbying Congress

And they think they’re going to have some influence, but the influence doesn’t happen here. There’s a special place in the Capitol that special people go to that we can’t go to. That’s where the people who have money go to do the lobbying.

They also have their special parties where they pay a lot of money to have a face-to-face with their congressperson. That’s where things get done. The scholar Frances Fox Piven says that’s because of another problem, not all Americans can or do vote. We have a very developed, very twisted,

And very distorted system of electoral representation. It is distorted, not only by big money, although that’s certainly very, very important because of the advertising and the campaigning that it makes possible. A lot of people do not, in fact, have the franchise, and even those who vote are not represented fairly.

People in smaller states have more representation and so forth. This helps explain why small but well-funded groups like the pro-Israel lobby or pro-military lobby can have so much impact. Joanne Landy has examined who makes foreign policy. It’s an informal network of the people who rule America,

Even though they don’t go around wearing signs saying we rule America. That’s who makes the positive, whether it’s with politicians, or whether it’s with think tanks, or with the military. Do you know what I mean? They’re all interconnected. Landy says these lobbies are more united than divided. There are disagreements among them,

But there are disagreements about methods, not goals. Some people think you should get rid of some nuclear weapons. Other people think you should hold on to them all. The differences are really they cover the gamut from A to B, as they used to say. The day-by-day run-of-the-mill,

Reality is that those who have high positions in politics and strong connections with moneyed interests and the moneyed interests themselves run the country. We are now on the way to Congress, which now enjoys less than a 10 percent approval rating from the public.

You know a Congressperson because not only have a little pin here, but they never carry anything. It’s always an assistant who’s carrying something. All they get is people who are fawning over them. They’re in their bubble and they don’t recognize, I think, that the country is so cynical about them.

The congressmen are cynical too. I literally ran into Representative John Conyers in a dark hallway. He’s the longest-serving member. He complains that they are being deluged by lobbyists. Are you seeing a lot of Wall Street people donating to Congress, trying to stop the reforms?

You don’t see that but you know it’s going on. They haven’t stopped. When the Congress wanted to reform the financial laws, and it seems like they’re being stopped at the regulatory level by all these donations from members of Congress, from big banks, and Wall Street. It shows up on the quarterlies.

I have no reason to believe that there’s been any cessation of that or reduction. You get the same result, stagnation. JPMorgan Chase has shocked the markets by revealing a trading loss of over two billion dollars. Two weeks later, it was reported that the huge bank, JPMorgan Chase,

Lost two billion dollars gambling on exotic derivative products. In what they called a synthetic credit portfolio. If Jamie Dimon makes this mistake because we know he’s good, but what the hell is going on at Citigroup and Bank of America? Thanks to the mistakes by JPMorgan,

Which is the biggest US bank in terms of assets rippled through the financial world. For many, it brings back memories of 2008 when big banks, risky bets, threatened to collapse the financial system. It was later reported that the banks’ lobbyists had fought against the new rule

That if passed would have prevented this giant loss. The Internet buzzed with the bad news. Because this is the derivatives market, this is very important. Could pan out to be nothing. Largest US bank, best buddies with the Fed, and, of course, this is a whole lot of debt.

None of the commentary I saw discussed the lobbying by JPMorgan Chase. You see banks time and time again getting into problems, slipping up, and you’ve got America’s biggest bank, JPMorgan, doing exactly that. Frankly, the banks are their own worst enemy. We know we were sloppy, we know we were stupid.

We know there was bad judgment, we don’t know if any of that’s true yet. Regulators should look at a thing like this. That’s their job. We are totally open with regulators and they’ll come to their own conclusions,

But we intend to fix it, learn from it, and be a better company when it’s done. One of the amazing lessons of everything that led up to the crash is they can’t control themselves, even to the extent that they will destroy their own industry,

Even at the extent they will destroy their own companies. The short-term profit motive seeps in so many pours of individuals, and divisions, and offices and whole companies. They will destroy themselves. We definitely can’t trust them to figure out how to control themselves. Public Citizen later played a role outlawing insider trading

By members of Congress on information they obtained in hearings and investigations. Public Citizen considered it corruption. The notion that the powerful shouldn’t get to create one set of rules for themselves and another set of rules for everybody else. If we expect that to apply to our biggest corporations

And to our most successful citizens, it certainly should apply to our elected officials, especially at a time when there’s a deficit of trust between the city and the rest of the country. Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., the son of the famous civil rights leader, has been representing Chicago’s Second District for 17 years.

He’s consumed with investigating and explaining how the system was set up historically to serve states’ rights and special interests. I filed an amendment to the Constitution to guarantee us the right to a public education of equal high quality. Why? Because every American in a public school ought not be in states rights slavery.

In other words, the lesson of the African-American overcoming the Constitution with respect to states’ rights was not heeded through time by the American people. It is the exact same system that they are stuck in today and they just don’t know it. We asked him why Congress has become so dysfunctional.

I’ve never seen it more polarized. I’ve never seen it more divided along geographical lines, along factional lines, along economic political lines. It’s not what the democracy was conceived to be. It’s not what it was supposed to evolve into. Unfortunately, the American people are the victims of this process.

How would you answer that question, who rules America? There are two types of material power in this country and in the world. One is political and one is economic. We, the people, have the power politically to control and determine the economic system. There is a constant struggle between people power and economic power.

We, the people, control through the political system, our economic destiny, and the economic destiny of the nation. Increasingly, the heavy hand of the economic system is controlling the political system and manipulating the people. Who controls America? An elite group of people who function in a stratosphere

Globally and beyond the Constitution, beyond the reach of government. They have enormous resources. They own the media, the power to investigate. They get to shape the narrative of the stories. They get to model and position candidates for public office and shape an image in front of the American people,

An image that oftentimes does not jive with reality. Yet the American people see this image of leadership and they vote for it, only to find out the human frailties and the shortcomings of the individual at a later date. We met a former Congressional staffer

Who worked on the Hill for a leading legislator for 12 years. He agreed to talk with us only if we blacked out his face and distorted his voice. He was scathing in his description of how decisions get made. This is a great institution,

But unfortunately, you have an untold amount of members of Congress that spend 60 percent of their time raising money. Then because they got to run every two years, which makes no sense, they have to raise millions of dollars just to be competitive,

To go on television, because the CBS, ABC, and NBC, and CNN charge this outrageous amount of money to get TV commercials. It ought to be free or very low cost. What happens is these members of Congress are relying on well-intentioned staffers.

Many of them are just out of college, many of them were interns, to make major decisions on foreign policy, and domestic policy, and health care, and employment, and jobs. They’re not really mature enough. He also told us many of the staffers get bought off by special interests and big donors.

A lot of these young people are just out of college, just out of graduate school. They have to pay back these enormous college loans and graduate school loans. They’re paying unbelievable rent in Washington, D.C., in Northern Virginia, oftentimes more than a third of their income.

A lot of them were taken care of out of work, family members. There’s a pressure on them to go work for the money to interest on K Street. A lot of staffers, even progressive staffers have left the Hill, and worked for the large drug companies, worked for the oil companies.

It’s usually the biggest industry. It’s usually the biggest companies in any industry you’re looking at. If you’re looking at overall national economic policy, Wall Street is the dominant influence. If you know what’s happening in the pharmaceutical industry, they’re the big pharma calls the shots. Within the financial industry, which factions are most important?

It’s still really the biggest institutions that set the agenda. There have been polls on where Americans think our money goes in our government, and just about nobody has a clue that people wildly overestimate how much goes to aid. Of course, part of that is because we talk about weaponizing foreign nations as aid,

And they wildly underestimate how much goes to the military. Yet, says our whistleblowing former Congressional aide, the real problem is not just corporate power. The biggest problem in America is not the corporations. It’s not even necessarily the money for campaigns. The biggest problem is that the American people

Don’t really organize themselves in their Congressional districts to mitigate the power of special interests. They’re not utilizing their democracy since they don’t know how the game works. The donors know exactly how the game works. If you give a member of Congress the money,

They’re going to probably do what they’ve asked them to do. If you’ve got millions and millions of people who voted for Obama or vote for their member of Congress, and then that’s the end of their political involvement, that’s the end of democracy. No series about Who Rules America

Can leave out Wall Street’s financial clout. We’ve left its impact for last, secure in the knowledge that in today’s America, this financial district is a key power center, a hub for the financialization of an economy in which the control of big money is often central to the control of politics and society.

We have spoken with a respected corporate executive who told us point-blank that the rich now rule America. My personal opinion is a large part of what’s happening economically is due to globalization and digitization of business. That can’t be stopped. Professor Stanley Aronowitz quotes the famous sociologist Seawright Mills

On the same theme from 50 years ago. The financial sector is the leading edge of corporate capital, and it was so in the mid-’50s. Of course, today it’s much more accentuated because of the relative decline of industrial corporations. I’ve heard things that will blow your mind.

Now I think it’s time you get the whole story. Many Americans see all this as a conspiracy by an unaccountable secret cabal that operates like a power center beyond democratic control. The Internet is filled with videos about shadowy billionaires in their plots that control everything. It is ongoing right now.

It is a conspiracy of institutional corruption from the highest level. From international bankers to the super-rich, from Washington to Rome. They’re all in it together. Is Wall Street a conspiracy and what role does it play and Who Rules America? Is it an outside job or an inside job?

It’s not a matter of elites outside the state. Of course, they have enormous influence. The reason they have enormous influence is because the state is structured to reproduce their power and authority in the society. Leo Panitch is an economist and analyst, and I think he offered

A perspective that we really haven’t heard before. He’s fighting against the conspiratorial idea, that there’s a small group of people in a room somewhere running things. He’s talking about the structure of society, the values of it, and who really runs things. Wall Street is not only a place,

It’s an industry with thousands of interconnected firms that call themselves a financial services industry. However, they are much more than that. They are deeply involved with how our country is run, says Robert Weissman, the head of the public interest group Public Citizen. When you can’t grasp the country’s situation

In the last 30 years in terms of economic policy and the way the country has evolved politically without understanding how Wall Street has grown in power. It’s grown in economic power and it’s grown in political power, and that’s been synergistic. They use their political power to wipe out a whole range of regulations

That control them. In the past, investors would buy stocks in real companies and industries that generated jobs, provided services, or created products of value. Those days are gone. They became a bigger and bigger portion of the economy. Then we went from an economy of production

Making things to one based on consumption, buying and selling things. Consumers soon drove 70 percent of the economy as banks, private equity companies, and hedge funds grew in size. As they became a bigger portion of the economy, they were able to leverage more and more political power

In a really horrible cycle for the functioning of democracy. What that led us up to, of course, was the crash in 2008. Consumers went deeper and deeper into debt and then bankers bought and sold debt while they changed the rules regulating their activities. A whole series of deregulatory moves that had been enabled

By the political influence of Wall Street led to the actual functioning of the economy to be a disaster. Because as billionaire investor George Soros told me years ago, the capitalist economy is also inherently unstable and prone to bubbles and crashes. I work with the theory that financial markets are inherently unstable.

To prevent excesses, you need some kind of intervention, supervision or regulation. Unfortunately, the prevailing idea is that markets tend towards equilibrium. We work with a false concept of how financial markets operate. We were told by someone, for example, that the beauty of globalization is that no one is in control.

There is a great advantage in that because controls have their own problems. In fact, markets are much more efficient than centralized controls. However, it doesn’t mean that there should be absolutely no control. In fact, if you look at reality, ever since you’ve had capitalism

And ever since you have had financial markets, you have had a crisis. Each time there was a crisis, there was something done to prevent a recurrence. The problem this time is the dramatic surge in debt. Look at this. These are charts showing the debt of the United States,

Page after page illustrating how much money is owed. It’s mind-boggling. It gets even more complicated when you start talking about new financial instruments like derivatives that have turned the industry into a global casino. Derivatives can also be used as insurance betting that alone will or won’t default before a given date.

They become the basis of a big betting system like in a casino. Financial journalist Max Keiser says just a handful of big financial firms now dominate the industry and the global economy. Without a doubt, there’s JP Morgan, which is in bed with the Fed into the central banking system.

Wall Street bets on future values and the performance of practically everything of value. You’ve got Morgan and Goldman Sachs are the two primary players in this global financialized world. Soon, CEOs, financiers, and executives of a small number of investment banks and hedge funds became rich and powerful by controlling specialized high-stakes markets.

They are connected to the central banking system, which is the Fed. The ECB, the Bank of International Settlements in Switzerland is the central bank of the central banks. These are the folks that are keeping their main purpose at this point is to keep interest rates as close to zero as possible,

To make it as cheap as possible for people who are borrowing money to speculate, to be able to speculate freely without having to pay for the money that they’re borrowing to speculate. Even if these financial markets are supposedly open to all, a relatively few traders, investors, and asset managers

Came to structure the markets to increase their own wealth and power. If they ever make a bad bet, then they quickly move to cover their bad bets with austerity programs, some kind of bailout program, or a quantitative easing program. A Swiss study by physicists on the ownership and control

Of stock exchanges in 48 countries examined 24,877 stocks and 106,141 shareholding entities. To their amazement, they found that just ten companies were dominating all stock ownership. Here they are. When we talk about money and we talk about Wall Street, we have to ask this question, where does the money come from

That’s used in the speculation in our financial markets? This man knows, Barry James Dyke. He’s an asset manager and he works with clients. Where does it come from? The money comes from people’s savings, real savings, people’s retirement funds, which are savings for retirement. Do the people who put their money into these accounts,

Know how it’s being invested or spent? They don’t have a clue. It’s only now, as a result of the financial crisis that the public is learning slowly that the self-styled masters of the universe on Wall Street speculated on risky investments and created a crash. Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair,

Wrote, “It can fairly be said that the chain of catastrophic bets” “made over the past decade by a few hundred bankers” “may well turn out to be the greatest nonviolent crime” “against humanity in history.” They brought the world’s economy to its knees, lost tens of millions of people, their jobs, and their homes,

And crashed the retirement plans of a generation. They could drive an estimated 200 million people worldwide into dire poverty. In 2010, before Occupy Wall Street, labor unions were marching to protest Wall Street crimes. On 29th April, this is a march on Wall Street organized by the AFL-CIO,

Which says they’ve organized 200 protests so far, but you’d never know it in terms of the media coverage. Today, the media is out and they’re marching because of a theft. Millions of jobs are missing, 11 million jobs, according to the AFL-CIO. They want payback. They want Wall Street to pay.

They want a new tax on financial transactions. We are trying to recover from a financial crisis that some people say is even worse than the depression in the 1930s. Yet, reforms that have been proposed, very modest reforms, are being fought tooth and nail at the regulatory level by Wall Street firms and financiers.

Do you think that they have a disproportionate power to influence Congress? There’s no doubt about that. Not just the Congress, but state legislatures as well. Their strength and their power, runs the entire gambit of the American political system. I read that the financial services industry had hired 28 lobbyists

Per member of Congress to try to influence their decisions and to try to inform. What happens to you when lobbyists come into your office to try to get you to vote their way? How does that work, that game? It’s very hard to get a meeting with me.

I don’t think that they spent a lot of money trying to lobby me. I’m kind of clear on my ideology, clear on my view of representative government, and very clear on the Constitution. However, suffice it to say, while my district is competitive, there are many more competitive districts than mine,

And every member of Congress to that extent becomes a prisoner to the election process, and to the fundraising process. Sheila Krumholz of the Center for Responsive Politics says Wall Street’s power is well documented. Wall Street, the banks, and the financial industry writ large

Is the single largest source of campaign cash in the United States, and it has been for years if not decades. It is kind of following the Willie Sutton rule of politics. You go where the money is. They have not just political action committees that can pony up,

The maximum amounts to influential members of Congress who have jurisdiction over their industry, but also they can pony up, pass the hat, and pony up hundreds of thousands of dollars just among their partners and vice presidents and executives in their companies. She says their clout will impact the election in 2012.

They can muster a ton of money, and this is also seen specifically in the presidential race in 2012, where Mitt Romney hailed from the private equity industry. Prior to that, Barack Obama had been the darling of Wall Street. Wall Street and banks in particular are an enormously influential part of the US industry.

That power is being shown as Wall Street lobbyists try to sabotage finance reforms passed by Congress. Two years after the passage of the legislation, are the regulators doing the good things that Congress told them to do? The answer to a considerable extent is no.

They’re way behind on issuing, the rules they are supposed to issue. Where they have issued the rules are getting challenged in almost every instance, in court by the Chamber of Commerce or Financial Securities Roundtable or other Wall Street interests. They’re having a tough time

With the judiciary that’s favorable to big business and maintain the rules that they’ve issued. Reforms can be passed, but they can also be sabotaged. They get multiple bites at the apple. They get a bite in Congress where they’ve got enormous power, but at least it’s mostly a public fight.

Then they go to the regulatory agencies where they also have enormous power, but it’s usually below the radar, or off the front pages, and they don’t even have public scrutiny. Recently on a radio show I host, I discussed Wall Street’s power in the financial meltdown with financial journalist Max Keiser

And Stacy Herbert, as well as Andy Stepien, an animal rights activist who led a campaign against the company in the business of painful medical tests on puppies. After his group drove their stock price down, the company went broke, but then the government labeled him a financial terrorist and sent him to prison.

We began by comparing Wall Street to the Titanic, the unsinkable ship that sank. If the Titanic were the story today, the difference would be that Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan would have heavy bets that would pay off when the ship sinks, and Hank Paulson would be down there widening the gash.

It brings me to a new study out just recently. They looked at hundreds of shipwrecks throughout the hundreds of past few hundred years. What they found is that the norm is actually for women and children to die more frequently than men and that the captain usually, didn’t go down with a ship.

Their survival rate was the highest. These guys use derivatives, as Warren Buffett calls them, weapons of mass financial destruction to make situations worse because the bets that they have on these calamities becoming worse, pay off enormously. We see that in the numbers in the bonuses, it’s reflected.

You were nodding before when Max was speaking about all of this. Is this really true that they’re betting against us in a sense, betting against, hoping for bad things to happen? I don’t think that everybody that works on Wall Street has this mentality.

However, there is a culture in place where people have learned to at least accept and justify behavior like looking at these investments, betting investments against things to fail whether be a government, whether be a country, or whether it be a company to fail, and say, “I can justify this.”

You look at it like it’s numbers. You don’t look at the people behind it, the families that suffer. You don’t look at the country that suffers as a result. Here’s what is mind-boggling to me, you are presenting a picture of intentionality, that people did things to further their own interests.

They knew what they were doing. It was calculated, and yet, in most of the media, it seems as if it’s presented as some sort of mistake, as a miscalculation. Gee, we wanted housing to go up, but it went down. You can’t blame us. Everybody was doing it there, therefore nobody was doing it.

Therefore, nobody can be prosecuted. Let’s assume that there was intention. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Some would argue that it’s a good thing to have people who are parasites in an economy because parasites are useful. I have parasites in my intestines, they perform a useful function.

The problem is, the parasites don’t run my heart, lungs, and brain. In America, the parasites write the regulatory framework that’s supposed to be governing them, the parasites run the show. Is Wall Street affecting capital? Is Wall Street affecting our policymaking? They’re becoming our policymakers,

At least for a short period of time and then returning back to the banks. Revolving door kind of thing. They’re in and out of whether it be the Bush administration or the Obama administration, the different positions within the cabinet that are governing finance are individuals that are former CEOs of banks,

Or they might go back to being honorary chair and the board of directors. It’s this incestuous relationship between Wall Street and policymakers. Sounds so corrupt. Danny, you asked who runs America and I say, it’s ignorance. Thomas Jefferson warned of this and that we needed a media

That would inform the population, otherwise, we would lose our democracy. This is ignorance that is being forced upon criminalizing knowledge. This is something that I was startled by when Nasdaq opened up in Times Square, a big studio out front with a big window and then I said, I’d love to tour the exchange.

This was the time that Bernie Madoff was running Nasdaq, and they said you can’t tour the exchange, there is no exchange. It looks like in exchange there’s a building that says Nasdaq, but the actual operations are computers. Algorithmic trading goes well beyond that, as you are alluding to.

It’s not about individuals who are taking any risks personally to make a market as part of a capitalist system. These are computers that have virtually unlimited credit because the cost of credit is now zero, and the ability of a bank like JPMorgan with a $90 trillion balance sheet of derivatives,

They can lend $1 trillion to a computer program to make a bet. If the bet doesn’t work, then they get a federal bailout. If the bet works, then they get a bonus. If it’s head, they win, tails, we lose. This has been going on now for a number of years,

But it’s gotten shockingly more disproportionate and asymmetric. This shift towards super-fast computers is just another example of the deeper shift we’ve seen in power as finance, in effect, takes over with politicians courting Wall Street at global conferences and in private meetings, as George Soros explains.

It is actually symptomatic of the age because you have presidents and prime ministers courting the financiers and the industrialists. It does show a shift in the relative power. However, I don’t believe that business can in any way replace the power of the state because it’s a different kind of power.

The sovereignty is still in the hands of the state. Wall Street sounds like a conspiracy theory, but Wall Street controls everything. They’re the major shareholders of all the major companies. Look at the BP oil spill. Who is the owner of the BP oil spill, the biggest shareholder is JP Morgan.

There’s so much happening now. There’s no stopping what’s happening now. Everyone knows the system is broken, whether you’re a one percenter or a 99 percenter or a Republican or a Democrat, anarchist, communist, or capitalist, everyone knows the system is broken. Now we need to fix it.

We’ll give the last word to a scholar with a longer view. American historian, Eric Foner. I think what we face is a serious democracy deficit, not only in the United States but in many other countries as well. I’m not quite ready to say a plutocracy determines everything

That happens in the United States, but I think the democracy deficit arises from the fact that fundamental issues are now just off limits from democracy. It doesn’t matter who is elected. The basic issues about finance, about deindustrialization, and things like that are about globalization,

About the loss of power of ordinary people over their own lives. That’s not open to discussion. I don’t care if it’s Democrat, Republican, Obama, or Romney. That’s not part of what their debate is. Their debate is at the margins so that the fundamental issues facing ordinary people are not subject to democratic consideration.

Government does not represent the ordinary people, even though people elect the government, the government does not respond at all to the needs and aspirations of ordinary people. In this series, we’ve investigated who rules America examining the history of deep conflicts in this country

Going back to the American Revolution, we’ve dissected the power of the military, corporations, the media, and Wall Street. We have shown that these powerful forces often undermine democracy rather than strengthen it. There is a battle underway for the soul of America,

For who rules America that has put these deeper issues on the agenda. The question, is a fundamental transformation possible? Who will special interests and the wealthiest Americans continue to dominate in a country that says it’s the most dynamic democracy on Earth? The belief in our democracy is almost an article of religious faith.

Even though there’s a separation of church and state, perhaps that’s why the views you’ve heard in this series are rejected by the establishment, rejected by academia, and rejected by the press. They believe only the people have power, if anyone does. However, opinion leaders don’t look into it.

They don’t focus on interests, they focus on ideologies, personalities, not institutions. The idea of a power elite is an anathema to them because if people believed it, that might spur dissatisfaction and dissent. In the age of the Internet and global television, you can’t stop people from being exposed to counter-narratives to official myths.

These issues are debatable, of course, but most political coverage doesn’t debate other ways of looking at the world. It relies on the usual pundits recycling conventional wisdom. They don’t ask who rules America. Members of Congress, I have the high privilege and the distinct honor of presenting to you

The president of the United States.