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Original Zinn
Conversations on History and Politics
By Howard Zinn HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2006 Howard Zinn
All right reserved. ISBN: 0060844256
Chapter One
Can the System be Fixed?
Kgnu, Boulder, Colorado
August 8, 2002
I want to start with something from F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby, a novel about the Roaring Twenties and the excesses that characterized that period just before the Great Depression. Fitzgerald wrote, "They were careless people. . . . they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."
It's interesting that you should quote Fitzgerald. The twenties have much in common with what we are seeing today. Then there were governments in power that insisted on distributing the wealth of the country in such a way that the rich got richer and the poor were stuck where they were or got even poorer. Wild speculation took place. Vast fortunes were made, while people in poor areas of cities were struggling to pay the rent and put food on the table. It was capitalism run amok. Interestingly, Pope John Paul II, in an interview in an Italian newspaper, talked about "savage, unbridled capitalism." That's what we saw in the twenties and that's what we are seeingtoday. Except that today it is even more unbridled, more savage. And it is running amok on a global scale. It is causing havoc in various countries. Here in the United States many people are in desperate circumstances without medical care, adequate housing, and education.
Why is it that crime in the streets has historically attracted much more attention than what Ralph Nader calls crime in the suites, white-collar crime?
There are several reasons. The people who define crime are connected to those in the suites. They are the ones who say what it is. If somebody holds up a store or robs someone on the street, of course those are crimes. If somebody robs consumers of millions of dollars or robs workers of their lives because of unsafe work conditions, that's not crime. That's business. The media constantly focus on mayhem being done by ordinary people. But what is being done by the corporate giants usually doesn't get into the media until it explodes in a wave of scandals as we have now. There are other reasons for the emphasis on street crime over corporate crime. Street crime is overt, whereas the corporate variety is secret. It is therefore important to have some individuals point out what is being done in secret. At the turn of the century, they were called muckrakers. People like Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell exposing the doings of the Standard Oil Company. In the twenties, there was Fiorello LaGuardia, a congressman from East Harlem, who criticized the rich because the poor in his district were struggling to make ends meet. And today we have our muckrakers. There's Jim Hightower and Barbara Ehrenreich. Ralph Nader has long fought corporate crime. We need to seek out the information that the muckrakers of our time are putting out so that they we aren't completely ignorant of what is going on.
To provide more historical context, how would you compare the current era to that of the robber barons in the late nineteenth century? And explain who they were.
There is a remarkable book by Matthew Josephson entitled The Robber Barons. They were the great corporate executives and moguls of the late nineteenth century, such as the Vanderbilts, Hills, and Harrimans who controlled the railroads; the Carnegies and Mellons who controlled steel and aluminum; the J. P. Morgans who worked out deals by merging companies and making huge profits thereby. They were the people who manipulated the money market. The robber barons owned the factories where workers toiled for fourteen hours a day. They were the counterparts of what we have seen in the twentieth and now the twenty-first centuries: the CEOs making enormous sums of money and laying off their workers without taking care of their health insurance; leaving the workers in the lurch when they are fifty or sixty years old, after having lost their retirement benefits. These are the robber barons of today.
One of the fastest-growing groups entering the job market are people in the fifty-five- to seventy-year-old age bracket who have to go back to work to support themselves.
What is interesting to me is how the word security is bandied about by the government. In the name of security, they fingerprint and keep tabs on people and pick them up in the middle of the night, especially noncitizens and even some who are citizens. A large part of our national wealth is being given to the military budget. And it is all being done in the name of security. While the security of people in their daily lives is being taken away from them. Real security is the security people need when they get to the age when they want to stop working. Or the security that all people need to be able to deal with their medical problems without incurring huge bills that they can't pay. The security of having work when you are able to work. And there are things to be done in the country. The security that children need to grow up in healthy environments. That kind of security is simply put aside while the militarization of the country goes on.
Is the current crisis of capitalism a systemic one?
It is systemic in the sense that it is not just an aberration that will pass if and when a few corporate crooks go to prison. The stock market may go up again. But the fundamental sickness of the system remains. By that I mean that even when the stock market is up and even when the worst excesses of the corporate system have been slightly corrected, fundamental problems remain. And those are the maldistribution of wealth, with one percent of the country owning 40 percent of the wealth; huge salaries at the top; people struggling below; homeless people; many Americans living in inadequate housing, unable to pay the rent.
Continues...
Excerpted from Original Zinn by Howard Zinn Copyright © 2006 by Howard Zinn. Excerpted by permission.
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