If you haven’t figured it out yet, Collins and Ward demonstrate once again that the game is rigged. And it’s not rigged in favor of working people.
Every since Ronald Reagan sold America a bill of goods called trickle down economics, changing the tax code to lighten (or to sweep away!) federal taxes for the richest among us has become standard, operating procedure.
Their study is shocking enough, so I’ll just get to it:
America hasn’t stopped taxing its wealthiest citizens entirely.
But that’s where we’re headed.
According to a new IPS briefing paper, the richest .01 percent of Americans, about 33,000 lucky souls today, now pay just one-sixth of what they used to pay in tax, when measured as a percentage of their total wealth.
The top .01 percent in America is a phenomenally wealthy group. Even during America’s most egalitarian periods, the average member of the top .01% held over 200 times the wealth of the average American. Today, the wealth of the average top .01 percenter is nearly 1,000 times that of the average American and is closing in on one billion dollars.
Hence, it doesn’t matter to the top .01 percent what type of tax they pay, be it income, sales, property or anything else. Taxes don’t influence their spending decisions or such mundane things as how many hours they work, when they retire, or whether their spouse must work. For a group whose poorest members are worth more than $100 million, the only impact any tax has is its impact on their wealth–and tax payments decrease the rate at which their wealth grows.
America’s radical tax transformation occurred over the last 65 years. The process started slowly between 1953 and 1980. It took 26 years for tax payments by the top .01 percent to fall by one-third from their 1953 peak. But starting in 1980, tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans have followed a clear pattern: When Republicans have held power, tax cuts for those at the top have been slashed; When Democrats have held power, they’ve enacted a few slight tax increases, but mostly have maintained the status quo.
The result has been a systematic shift in America’s tax policy, with taxes on wealth moving inexorably lower and taxes on work moving inexorably higher. As economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman have reported, the country has moved from a progressive tax system to one where the overall tax rate, as a percentage of income, is lowest for the very wealthiest of us. That’s bad enough. When we view the policy shift through the lens of taxation of wealth, as the IPS briefing paper does, it’s far uglier.
Effectively, taxes on the ultra-wealthy have nearly been eliminated. The members of the top 0.1 percent pay only one-sixth of what they paid a half century ago in taxes. What used to be paid every two months is now paid every twelve.
home curled into a ball beneath layers of blankets. He was 11 years old.
Meanwhile, Jerry Jones, billionaire owner of the Dallas Cowboys, declares that his Texas drilling company has “hit the jackpot” as natural gas prices shoot through the roof in Texas.
Jones is only the latest poster child for the evils of crony capitalism.
The rich get richer while the poor suffer, die, and get hit with sky-high price gouging. It’s the American way.
Below is an article by Camila Domonoske at NPR.org. She fills in the details:
The winter storms gripping much of the United States have devastated many families and businesses, with frigid temperatures and power outages causing particularly dire conditions in Texas.
But for oil and gas producers that have managed to keep production going, this is proving to be a big payday. Jerry Jones, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Cowboys, appears to be one of the beneficiaries.
Comstock Resources Inc., a shale driller that operates in Texas and Louisiana,
told investors on an earnings call this week that the surge in natural gas prices was providing it with a major — albeit almost certainly temporary — financial boost. The company is publicly traded but Jones holds a majority of the shares.
“Obviously, this week is like hitting the jackpot,” President and Chief Financial Officer Roland Burns said Wednesday.
The storm has reduced natural gas output at the same time that demand — for both home heating and power generation — has skyrocketed.
That’s resulted in catastrophic shortages, as well as some truly eye-popping prices for natural gas in the affected regions.
Many in the oil and gas industry have taken a blow because wells and pipelines have stopped working in the unexpected cold.
But Comstock was already ramping up production in anticipation that natural gas prices would increase, and now finds itself benefiting from what it described as “super-premium prices” of “anywhere from” $15 per thousand cubic feet to as much as $179 per thousand cubic feet.
For comparison, the company had sold the same gas last quarter for an average of $2.40 per thousand cubic feet.
I am sure that you have already heard or seen examples of the conservative misinformation machine’s attempts to blame the Texas power outages on the inadequacies of wind turbines, solar power, and the Green New Deal.
Texas’ Republican governor, Greg Abbott, gave the game away, however,
when he made two different TV appearances on the same day to discuss the problems Texas is facing.
Chris Hayes of MSNBC broadcast the clips back-to-back, highlighting both the conservative, Republican lies about green energy, but also Gov. Abbott’s close kinship to Pinocchio. You can almost see his nose grow in the clip below.
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First, Abbott spoke on local, Texas television. When talking only to Texans, he explained the power outages accurately, like a reasonable person. The primary issue was a lack of winterized equipment, especially for the natural gas facilities and pipelines. The gas tanks and supply lines were frozen solid.
Then Abbott spoke to a national audience on the Fox network. In this interview, he spewed his conservative hogwash about the failures of wind farms and solar panels, though (strangely enough) he did mention that these sources only supply about 10% of Texas’ power. (He, obviously, was counting on his conservative coconspirators to be so busy cheering his lies that they wouldn’t stop to reflect on the obvious incongruity of his statement.)
Gov. Abbott’s two-faced appearances demonstrate that he is a sock puppet for America’s fossil fuel industry, as are all the other conservatives spewing the same rubbish. They are exploiting the poor people of Texas by balancing their corporate lies about what went wrong on the frozen backsides of suffering people who have no heat or clean water.
But, hey. That’s what selling your soul to corporate power will do to you.
No wonder he can only criticize the Green New Deal.
The real problem in Texas – aside from unscrupulous politicians – is the inhumane economics of deregulated privatization. Neoliberalism strikes again, but his time it’s the conservative fan base of anti-government, pro-laissez faire capitalism that is paying the price. (As opposed to the South American working class and other species of human cannon fodder typically exploited by US corporations around the world.)
Texas had been warned. The CEOs and politicians chose to do nothing.
It’s not hard to figure out what happened. First, the majority of Texas is not connected to the national power grid. Texans pride themselves on their independence. So, they decided to go it alone.
Furthermore, Texan “power independence” is motivated by the conservative hatred of federal regulation. By keeping Texas power separated from the rest of the nation, Texas power companies remained free of regulatory oversight.
Ahem……Sooooo…when federal regulators told Texan power company officials that they were woefully unprepared for future blizzard conditions, Texan politicians remained warm and cozy with their corporate overlords and told the feds to stuff it. No one could force them to do otherwise.
It’s not hard to imagine the decision-making process.
The CEOs and board members of Texas power companies got together and decided that preparing for a “once in a century” winter storm front was not cost effective.
Cost effectiveness is the cold, hard, bottom-line reality that the sycophants of unfettered, global capitalism love to ignore – and what too many of their followers rarely think about. (The economics at play are also known as neoliberalism – check out this good discussion at Jacobin magazine.)
It is ALWAYS a bad idea to hand over control of public services/utilities to private corporations. Private corporations do not work in the public interest, regardless of what the PR department tells you.
Yes, yes, neoliberal propagandists like to talk about the superior services that will supposedly arrive with privatization, and the lower prices made possible by glorious deregulation.
Except, this predictable PR palaver is all smoke and mirrors.
The truth of the matter is that the #1 priority of any corporation is PROFIT, making as much money as possible for its shareholders. Cost effectiveness is judged according to increasing profit margins.
Winterizing Texas was not economically feasible if these corporations were to continue raking in the dough.
Predictably, then, the rich made more money while the majority of Texans were set up to suffer. But, hey, it’s only once a century, right?
Jeff Bezos has gotten considerable attention lately in the MSM lately due to
his decision to step down as Amazon’s CEO.
However, he has not left the company altogether. He has made a lateral move to become Amazon’s Executive Chair. A chair from which you can bet he will continue to rule the roost in both Amazon and the global marketplace.
Jacobin Magazine has published a good article explaining Bezo’s longstanding predatory, exploitative business practices — the obscene practices directly responsible for making Amazon the mammoth monopoly power that it is today.
The last thing Jeff Bezos is is a business genius who deserves admiration. Rather, he is a textbook example of how the rich make themselves richer by exploiting and devouring smaller fry further down the food chain.
excerpt below, or you can find the entire article by clicking on the title above.
Read it and get angry at over the way US predatory, crony capitalism works.
Jeff Bezos is stepping aside as Amazon’s CEO having made a fortune of almost $200 billion. It’s an attempt at reputation rehabilitation — but he can’t escape the legacy of exploitation he leaves behind.
Jeff Bezos, who you might also know as “the richest man in the world” or “that guy who ate a lizard one time,” is stepping down as the CEO of Amazon after twenty-seven years at the helm — or maybe it’s better to say he’s stepping to the side. Bezos will instead take on the title of executive chair, which means he’ll still have an influential role in company decisions, but will no longer be the face of Amazon. Yet there’s no reason to believe that means Amazon will become the friendly monopolist its smiling logo might suggest.
With Bezos at the helm, Amazon grew from an online bookseller started from a garage in Bellevue, Washington to one of the largest publicly traded companies in the world that not only controls key e-commerce and cloud platforms, but has extended its reach into a growing number of sectors. However, it’s important not to get distracted by the triumphalist historicizing of tech companies and their chief executives that’s become far too common since internet businesses exploded in the 1990s.
It’s often said that Amazon was started in Washington so it would be close to Microsoft and try to attract some of its talent, and while that’s partly true, it was hardly the deciding factor. Before founding the company in 1994, Bezos was the senior vice president of a hedge fund, and it’s said he made sure the first house he rented in Bellevue had a garage so he could spin the kind of founding story one would expect of a tech company. He was hardly poor, and he knew how to minimize his tax burden.
The real reason Bezos was drawn to Washington was because the state had no personal income tax and no corporate income tax, and at the time, Amazon only had to charge sales tax on purchases made in whichever state the company was headquartered in. With a population of just over five million in 1994, Washington was the perfect base from which to ship the other 260 million Americans all the books they could buy — not because Bezos had a particular love of books, but because they could be bought wholesale, were easy to ship, and independent bookstores had been decimated, leaving a market to be captured.
As Amazon began to attract customers and expand its product offerings, it took a different approach to growth. Instead of seeking to turn a profit as quickly as possible, Bezos played the long game, reinvesting Amazon’s earnings in the business to such a degree that it didn’t turn its first quarterly profit until 2001 and its first annual profit until 2003. For years to follow, Amazon’s profit margins remained slim as it expanded its empire.
This was undoubtedly a great business strategy, but it came with consequences. By operating at a loss for a decade, Amazon was able to provide goods and services below cost to drive out its competitors and dominate the markets it operated in. This only became easier as it grew, as the case of Diapers.com shows.
In 2009, Bezos saw that Diapers.com was gaining popularity with parents, so Amazon set up a meeting with its founders. When they refused to sell, Amazon set its prices on diapers and other baby products 30 percent below those offered by its competitor, and when Diapers.com adjusted their prices, the ones on Amazon changed accordingly. Amazon was using the profits from its other products to sell baby products below cost so Diapers.com would have to sell itself to Amazon or go out of business. Amazon even launched a service called Amazon Mom to offer baby products at even steeper discounts until, on November 8, 2010, Diapers.com finally sold to Amazon. Not long after, Amazon Mom was terminated, and prices returned to normal. . .
Since the attack on the Congressional building last week, talk about censorship has increased markedly.
The most notable example has been the Parler app which became the conservative alternative to Twitter after that site began to moderate, and sometimes censor, political postings.
After Wednesday’s Trump rally/demonstration, several support platforms (such as Google) that make programs like Twitter and Parler available online, have refused to support the Parler app any longer.
Congress has been calling the CEOs of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram into its chambers for months to give lengthy testimony before comically ill-informed congressional people. Representatives and Senators primarily scold these men and women for not implementing the particular species of censorship that they happen to believe is needed.
The CEOs bow and scrap appropriately and then go home to do as they please.
Now conservatives are whipping themselves into a panic over targeted, corporate censorship directed specifically against them and their movements.
In fact, Joe Biden has already begun to discuss the need for new laws to clamp down on “domestic terrorism,” which will certainly include additional provisions for warrantless surveillance, wiretapping, and censorship for “inappropriate” political speech.
But there is a deep irony in these conservative complaints about corporate giants like Facebook monopolizing online communications, and the growth of government censorship.
Oddly enough, politicians, journalists, and the public commonly discuss these issues as if Facebook and Twitter were public service providers!
They are not.
They are private companies that can do anything they darn well please in the area of content control. Their only real obligation is to make more money for their shareholders.
It’s called capitalism, remember?
And conservatives have always insisted that markets should not be regulated, unless of course it somehow improves the bottom line for the corporations we are now complaining about.
As a result, the American people face a barren, public communications landscape dominated by a few behemoth-sized corporations that have consumed and destroyed all competition.
It’s called unregulated capitalism. The kind conservatives adore.
People forget that all of these companies became the giant monopolies they are today because of government DE-regulation policies going back to the Reagan presidency — deregulation policies dear to the heart of conservatives.
I like Glenn because he is an independent thinker. He does not follow the current of established media but offers “out of step” insights and analysis that we should all take seriously.
I have excerpted the article below. It is a bit long, but well worth your time:
Asserting that Donald Trump is a fascist-like dictator threatening the previously sturdy foundations of U.S. democracy has been a virtual requirement over the last four years to obtain entrance to cable news Green Rooms, sinecures as mainstream newspaper columnists, and popularity in faculty lounges. Yet it has proven to be a preposterous farce.
In 2020 alone, Trump had two perfectly crafted opportunities to seize authoritarian power — a global health pandemic and sprawling protests and sustained riots throughout American cities — and yet did virtually nothing to exploit those opportunities. Actual would-be despots such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán quickly seized on the virus to declare martial law, while even prior U.S. presidents, to say nothing of foreign tyrants, have used the pretext of much less civil unrest than what we saw this summer to deploy the military in the streets to pacify their own citizenry.
But early in the pandemic, Trump was criticized, especially by Democrats, for failing to assert the draconian powers he had, such as commandeering the means of industrial production under the Defense Production Act of 1950, invoked by Truman to force industry to produce materials needed for the Korean War. In March, The Washington Post reported that “Governors, Democrats in Congress and some Senate Republicans have been urging Trump for at least a week to invoke the act, and his potential 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, came out in favor of it, too,” yet “Trump [gave] a variety of reasons for not doing so.” Rejecting demands to exploit a public health pandemic to assert extraordinary powers is not exactly what one expects from a striving dictator. . .
. . . The hysterical Trump-as-despot script was all melodrama, a ploy for profits and ratings, and, most of all, a potent instrument to distract from the neoliberal ideology that gave rise to Trump in the first place by causing so much wreckage. Positing Trump as a grand aberration from U.S. politics and as the prime author of America’s woes — rather than what he was: a perfectly predictable extension of U.S politics and a symptom of preexisting pathologies — enabled those who have so much blood and economic destruction on their hands not only to evade responsibility for what they did, but to rehabilitate themselves as the guardians of freedom and prosperity and, ultimately, catapult themselves back into power. As of January 20, that is exactly where they will reside.
The Trump administration was by no means free of authoritarianism: his Justice Department prosecuted journalists’ sources; his White House often refused basic transparency; War on Terror and immigration detentions continued without due process. But that is largely because, as I wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in late 2016, the U.S. Government itself is authoritarian after decades of bipartisan expansion of executive powers justified by a posture of endless war. With rare exception, the lawless and power-abusing acts over the last four years were ones that inhere in the U.S. Government and long preceded Trump, not ones invented by him. To the extent Trump was an authoritarian, he was one in the way that all U.S. presidents have been since the War on Terror began and, more accurately, since the start of the Cold War and advent of the permanent national security state.
The single most revealing episode exposing this narrative fraud was when journalists and political careerists, including former Obama aides, erupted in outrage on social media upon seeing a photo of immigrant children in cages at the border — only to discover that the photo was not from a Trump concentration camp but an Obama-era detention facility (they were unaccompanied children, not ones separated from their families, but “kids in cages” are “kids in cages” from a moral perspective). And tellingly, the single most actually authoritarian Trump-era event is one that has been largely ignored by the U.S. media: namely, the decision to prosecute Julian Assange under espionage laws (but that, too, is an extension of the unprecedented war on journalism unleashed by the Obama DOJ). . .
. . .Whether the U.S. was a democracy in any meaningful sense prior to Trump had been the subject of substantial scholarly debate. A much-discussed 2014 study concluded that economic power has become so concentrated in the hands of such a small number of U.S. corporate giants and mega-billionaires, and that this concentration in economic power has ushered in virtually unchallengeable political power in their hands and virtually none in anyone else’s, that the U.S. more resembles oligarchy than anything else:
The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
. . . But the premises of pre-Trump debates over how grave a problem this is have been rendered utterly obsolete by the new realities of the COVID era. A combination of sustained lockdowns, massive state-mandated transfers of wealth to corporate elites in the name of legislative “COVID relief,” and a radically increased dependence on online activities has rendered corporate behemoths close to unchallengeable in terms of both economic and political power.
. . . The lockdowns from the pandemic have ushered in a collapse of small businesses across the U.S. that has only further fortified the power of corporate giants. “Billionaires increased their wealth by more than a quarter (27.5%) at the height of the crisis from April to July, just as millions of people around the world lost their jobs or were struggling to get by on government schemes,” reported The Guardian in September. A study from July told part of the story:
“The combined wealth of the world’s super-rich reached a new peak during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a study published by the consulting firm PwC and the Swiss bank UBC on Wednesday. The more than 2,000 billionaires around the world managed to amass fortunes totalling around $10.2 trillion (€8.69 trillion) by July, surpassing the previous record of $8.9 trillion reached in 2017.”
. . . Employees are now almost completely at the mercy of a handful of corporate giants which are thriving, far more trans-national than with any allegiance to the U.S. A Brookings Institution study this week — entitled “Amazon and Walmart have raked in billions in additional profits during the pandemic, and shared almost none of it with their workers” — found that “the COVID-19 pandemic has generated record profits for America’s biggest companies, as well as immense wealth for their founders and largest shareholders—but next to nothing for workers.”
. . . These COVID “winners” are not the Randian victors in free market capitalism. Quite the contrary, they are the recipients of enormous amounts of largesse from the U.S. Government, which they control through armies of lobbyists and donations and which therefore constantly intervenes in the market for their benefit. This is not free market capitalism rewarding innovative titans, but rather crony capitalism that is abusing the power of the state to crush small competitors, lavish corporate giants with ever more wealth and power, and turn millions of Americans into vassals whose best case scenario is working multiple jobs at low hourly wages with no benefits, few rights, and even fewer options.
. . . The dominant strain of U.S. neoliberalism — the ruling coalition that has now consolidated power again — is authoritarianism. They view those who oppose them and reject their pieties not as adversaries to be engaged but as enemies, domestic terrorists, bigots, extremists and violence-inciters to be fired, censored, and silenced. And they have on their side — beyond the bulk of the corporate media, and the intelligence community, and Wall Street — an unprecedentedly powerful consortium of tech monopolies willing and able to exert greater control over a population that has rarely, if ever, been so divided, drained, deprived and anemic.
All of these authoritarian powers will, ironically, be invoked and justified in the name of stopping authoritarianism — not from those who wield power but from the movement that was just removed from power. Those who spent four years shrieking to great profit about the dangers of lurking “fascism” will — without realizing the irony — now use this merger of state and corporate power to consolidate their own authority, control the contours of permissible debate, and silence those who challenge them even further. Those most vocally screaming about growing authoritarianism in the U.S. over the last four years were very right in their core warning, but very wrong about the real source of that danger.
The Daily Poster is the blog of investigative journalist David Sirota. A few
days ago he posted an article reminding his readers of the gross economic inequities that characterize the US. Inequities that have only gotten worse during the pandemic.
For the Old Testament prophets, long-term disparities between the haves and the have-nots — that were ignored or caused by the rich — was a primary identifying trait of a wicked society.
Truly righteous rulers worked to close such economic chasms.
By Old Testament, prophetic standards, the United States (including the majority of its leaders) is an extraordinarily wicked place, heaping more and
more guilt upon itself while racing towards divine judgment.
I have excerpted Sirota’s article below:
As the fight to provide one-time $2,000 survival checks crescendos in Washington, it can be difficult to grasp the size of the figures being thrown around. Can our country afford the proposal? Is the cost worth it?
Let’s look at the economic and social devastation unfolding throughout the country. Even before the pandemic, 40 percent of Americans were struggling to afford at least one basic necessity and a stunning 78 percent of full-time workers were living paycheck-to-paycheck according to figures from 2017. Half a million people were counted as homeless in 2018 alone.
The pandemic has made things worse: In the spring, 22 million jobs were lost which could take as long as four years to recover without significant relief. As of June, roughly 14 million workers and their dependents had lost employer-based health insurance. The number of Americans impacted by food insecurity is now projected to hit 54 million — up from 35 million pre-pandemic. More than 14 million American households are at risk of eviction and more than 336,000 Americans have died from the virus. . .
. . .So, with all of this in mind, can the world’s richest nation afford one-time $2,000 survival checks? Should Congress filibuster the defense bill for as long as it takes to force Mitch McConnell to allow a vote on the aid? Is there a double standard at play when it comes to government largesse for rich people and support for everyone else? Are $2,000 checks good policy? Is Congress even listening to the public?
Read these ten stats and then you decide.
1. The total cost of $2,000 checks ($465 billion) is less than half the amount that American billionaires have made during the pandemic ($1 trillion). The total cost of the checks is less than the amount that just 16 American billionaires increased their net worth by during the pandemic ($471 billion).
2. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk gained more wealth during the pandemic ($158 billion) than Congress just authorized for additional unemployment benefits for millions of Americans ($120 billion).
3. Jeff Bezos’s personal wealth increased more every second of 2020 ($2,800) than Congress is considering giving Americans who are facing eviction, starvation and bankruptcy ($2,000).
4. Congressional lawmakers are being paid $3,300 of government money every week to come up with ways to block $2,000 checks to millions of Americans.
5. It took Congress less than a month to pass legislation giving a $700 billion bailout to bank executives during the financial crisis. It has taken Congress more than 8 months to even seriously consider a far less expensive bill to give $2,000 checks to millions of Americans during this economic crisis.
6. A $2,000 survival check would give the average soldier more money than the proposed 3 percent military pay increase that is included in defense legislation that Sens. Bernie Sanders and Ed Markey are filibustering in order to force a vote on the survival checks.
7. The richest 5 percent of Americans received more in Trump tax cuts in 2020 ($145 billion) than Congress is spending on increased unemployment benefits for millions of Americans during the economic crisis ($120 billion).
8. In 2016, “children, elderly, disabled people, and students made up around 70 percent of the poor,” according to the People’s Policy Project. Unlike unemployment benefits, $2,000 checks would help them.
9. About 60 percent of Georgia households make less than $75,000, meaning Georgia Republican senators allowing $2,000 checks to be blocked would deny aid to roughly 2 million of their state’s households as they run for reelection.
10. As Republicans try to block the $2,000 check legislation, a new national survey found that 78 percent of Americans support it, even as some pundits insist that the proposal is “divisive.”
The article is entitled, “The Ruling Elite’s War on Truth.” The fact is, we are all being scammed on a daily basis by our ruling plutocrats.
Below is an excerpt. You can read the entire article here.
Joe Biden’s victory instantly obliterated the Democratic Party’s longstanding charge that Russia was hijacking and compromising US elections. The Biden victory, the Democratic Party leaders and their courtiers in the media now insist, is evidence that the democratic process is strong and untainted, that the system works. The elections ratified the will of the people.
But imagine if Donald Trump had been reelected. Would the Democrats and pundits at The New York Times, CNN and MSNBC pay homage to a fair electoral process? Or, having spent four years trying to impugn the integrity of the 2016 presidential race, would they once again haul out the blunt instrument of Russian interference to paint Trump as Vladimir Putin’s Manchurian candidate?
Trump and Giuliani are vulgar and buffoonish, but they play the same slimy game as their Democratic opponents. The Republicans scapegoat the deep state, communists and now, bizarrely, Venezuela; the Democrats scapegoat Russia. The widening disconnect from reality by the ruling elite is intended to mask their complicity in the seizure of power by predatory global corporations and billionaires.
Adolph Reed is emeritus professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. He recently appeared with journalists Katie Halper and Matt Taibbi on their pod/video cast Useful Idiots.
Taibbi asks Prof. Reed to discuss the best-selling book White Fragility. Reed then expands his horizons and places the book in the broader context of the “anti-racist” movement currently at work in this country.
Reed discusses ways in which much of the energy invested in liberal anti-racism efforts become a shallow distraction from the far more significant underlying structural issues of class division, neo-liberal economics, and the bi-partisan political hierarchy defending the status quo.