Laura Flanders: What difference does a party make? This week on The Lara Flanders Show, we talk about what's happening in the UK, where one of the two parties, in what is basically a two party system, is picking up many of the radical demands coming out of movement groups seeking to transform the economy. Will they take that agenda with them into office? Nobody knows, but they're having meetings with activists, like this one, all across the country. From Imperial College London, this is the Lara Flanders show, the place where the people who say it can't be done take a backseat to the people who are doing it. Welcome.

Laura Flanders: In June 2017, mainstream media predicted that the Labour Party would be crushed in the UK's general election. Instead, it won its best result in 20 years, getting more than 40% of the vote, under the leadership of a lifelong socialist anti-war campaigner, Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn didn't become Prime Minister, but he did come close to unseating conservative Theresa May, after just two years as Labour Party leader. You could almost hear the reporter's surprise.

Supporters: Labour in! [inaudible 00:01:05] out! Labour in ...

Reporter: Well, he has not won the election, but this has been a nice vindication for Jeremy Corbyn, defying his critics with Labour's best result for almost 20 years.

John McDonnell: It gives me great pleasure, it gives me great pleasure to invite the lead of the Labour Party, the person who's gonna take us into number 10, Jeremy Corbyn.

Jeremy Corbyn: Last time we were here, I talked about the dire state of our economy under the Tory's, and that was two years ago. Sadly, in the two years since then, things have got even worse. Wages are lower than they were in 2016 at the time of the last conference, and lower than they were in real terms a decade ago. The Tory's have shown they have no response to these deep structural problems, and they are very, very deep. They continue instead to subscribe to the highly discredited theory that economic growth will mean trickle down and help those at the bottom. It didn't work under Thatcher, it isn't working under May.

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Monopoly capitalism may be on its last legs! This week, economist Michael Hudson joins us to say his predictions on the Trump budget have come true and seem to suggest, more than ever, that capitalism is not only a disservice to the people, but it's also unsuccessful.

Then, Stacy Mitchell and Joe Maxwell join us at the Progressive Caucus Strategy Summit in Baltimore. Monopoly capitalism, they say, translates to monopolized power.

Read the excerpt below.

Super Bowl 2018 drew the smallest audience of any national championship game since 2009 but that didn’t quell the ruckus stoked by one of the mid-game ads. Listen carefully and there it was: Dr. Martin Luther King, pitching for trucks by RAM.

What next, muttered the critics: Rosa Parks shilling for Uber? James Baldwin hawking the Firestone next time?

What really got my goat - no pun intended -  was fact that sermon in question was all about the dangers of hucksterism, extreme materialism and greed, and those - ahem- huckster leaders who use their power to drive people into desperation, and distract them from what’s really going on, in no small part by  selling people things they don’t need and can’t afford.

Delivered fifty years ago to the day, Dr. King talked about people “taken by advertisers”.

Today it’s even more true than it was then.  The money media’s obsessing over the stock market this week, but the real market’s what really demands attention.

There, household debt stands at a record high: just under $13 TRILLION. And the one area of consumer debt that really stands out are auto loans.  The New York Fed estimates that 23 million consumers hold subprime auto loans, which are based on super low credit scores.

Like subprime mortgages, subprime auto loans aren’t made by traditional banks or credit unions, but by auto finance companies such as car dealers, reports the Fed, which is to say, hucksters. And one-fifth of those, or 20 percent are in default today.

Read that King speech in full - (Drum Major it's called) look it up. Don’t be taken in by advertisers, don’t compete yourself into greed and hate, and bankruptcy, he says. In other words, probably, don’t buy that RAM.  But his bigger point is about extreme materialism, just one of the triple evils King was calling out in his final year. There’s something spiritually wrong, he said, with an economy that prizes things over people, and spends hand over fist on wars and ads when families can’t afford a car.

Whatever’s happening on Wall Street, Main Street’s in trouble. The same sort of trouble we saw just before the 2008 financial crash. In fact, family debt’s is up — $280 billion above its peak in the third quarter of that dangerous year. I suspect that that, not the Super Bowl fracas, is what we need to be paying attention to today.

What could paths to a just recovery in Puerto Rico look like? David Galarza Santa, a labor and community activist, on a Puerto Rican plan to recover, revitalize and resist calls for electricity privatization by building back different.

Laura Flanders: So, we've heard it over and over again. This is a humanitarian crisis. The electricity needs to come back on. The next sentence depends on where your interests lie. What do you say about what needs to happen right now with respect to the electrical grid?

David G. S.: Well, what needs to happen right now is to make sure that we don't go back to the Puerto Rico that existed before this storm. We're weathering an economic storm of epic proportions, which is the bill that was enacted by Congress. Supposedly the people in Puerto Rico owe billions and billions of dollar to these hedge fund vultures and so forth, and so people were already being strapped in terms of their economic situation. Now comes this storm and it's literally the perfect storm to try and do the kinds of things that this initially was pledged to do, or PROMESA bill was pledged to do.

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Laura Flanders: Not long ago former Vice President Al Gore called for the impeachment of Donald Trump. He's not the first to call for impeachment nor will he be the last, but what would it take to impeach not a person but the system of which he is a product? That's the question activist-philanthropist Ed Whitfield, co-director of the Fund for Democratic Communities in Greensboro, North Carolina was raising a few months back when we had a chance to connect at a meeting of the New Economy Coalition in Chicago.

Ed Whitfield: I have been a political activist pretty much all of my life. I've spent a lot of time reading, studying. I've worked 35 years in industry, kind of self-funding the political activity that I did when I got off work. That included runs for political office. It included community organizing, spending a lot of time talking to working class people, and I found in the course of talking to people that a number of people are kind of eager to hear kind of refreshing ideas of how we can understand the world and how we can behave in the world.

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When you think of the Protestants, anarchist politics might not spring to mind. But for the 17th-century diggers, direct action was a divine mandate. Planting vegetables on public land as food prices surged, they sought to create a new sort of economy, one that advanced collaboration and equity in a fundamental sense. Their calls for land redistribution quickly irked local landowners, who called on the army to intervene. The anti-gentrification movement of their time, they suffered beatings, attacks from local gangs, and arson attempts -- all at the behest of the lords and landowners who were right then busily enclosing and privatizing public land. As these relentless attacks carried on, the diggers split off and were ultimately evicted. But their legacy continues.

Fast forward 3 centuries, to the 1960’s, and the Diggers in San Francisco were distributing free food to the people who needed it. As Danny Goldberg reminds us in his book, In Search of the Lost Chord, the diggers participated in the Be-In’s that took place 50 years ago this summer. Inspired by the 17th century radical Brits, they didn’t believe in money or commercialism - and they also provided free legal aid and a healthcare clinic that’s still around today. The same period saw the Panthers run free breakfast, health, and dental clinics. An integral part of their plan to meet peoples’ needs while changing the world. Which all leads me back to New Economics. For the first diggers it was a spade, for the second a spoon; what’s our new politics serving up for the people today?

"In this particular moment, where we see that union density is on the decline, and we see that this culture of fear is permeating every workplace, we need organization that can hold space for the trauma that workers are experiencing and we need organizations to have the kind of slack that's required to test new membership models and to test new organizing campaigns..."

- Sophia Zaman, Executive Director of the Raise the Floor Alliance on this week's show.

Laura Flanders: A new world based on community and collaboration is closer than you think. We can steward resources together. In fact, millions of people are doing just that and not in the history books. This week, David Bollier, activist, co-founder of The Commons Strategy Group, explains what it means to think like a commoner. And two activists engaged in Commons projects right now, talk about two very distinct, but complementary strategies. One digital in Barcelona, the other rural in Mozambique. It's all coming up on the Laura Flanders show, the place where the people who say it can't be done take a back seat to the ones who are doing it.

Laura Flanders: So David, thanks for joining us. It's great to have you with us.

David Bollier: Great to be here.

Laura Flanders: The first time I said the "commons," that I was going to be talking to you about The Commons ... a friend of mine said, "Isn't that old, ancient history?" You've heard that before.

David Bollier: I've heard it all the time. People think it's either associated with a strip mall, the such and such commons, or English history. In fact, it's a very contemporary phenomena, and I would even go further, it's part of human history. We've always been cooperators. It's what we're hardwired to do. The whole idea of homo-economic is that we're utility maximizing, selfish, materialistic creatures, is an aberration in history. What's happening is I think we're rediscovering a lot of these roots of humanity, partly through the Internet, which has encouraged and facilitated sharing and collaboration and shown how artificial property rights are. So it's opening up a new exploration of both the economy as well as our inner lives.

Laura Flanders: What about the tragedy of The Commons? If you went through an economic school any time in the last 40 years, you would've heard about the tragedy of The Commons.

David Bollier: This is kind of both a fable and a smear of collective action by a famous biologist of the late 60s, Garrett Hardin, who wrote an essay by that title, "The Tragedy of the Commons." And he said, "Imagine you have a pasture where you can put any number of cattle or sheep on, it will result in the overgrazing and ruination of The Commons, and it will be a tragedy." Really, what he was describing was more akin to the tragedy of the market, where there's no community, no rules, no punishment for violators. A commons is a managed system, where social community gets together and says, "We're gonna manage this resource sustainably for the future," and in fact, empirically, that happens all around the world throughout history.

Laura Flanders: We've had Peter Linebaugh on the show, the historian of The Commons, and he talks about common-ing as a verb. In fact, he says you can't have commons without common-ing, that it's an active engagement of people.

David Bollier: This is one reason economists like to ignore, because how do you put activities and practices into a spreadsheet? They like precise quantitative mathematical models and predictions. They don't like to acknowledge that the economy is socially embedded, that we actually have a role in co-creating the economy. And The Commons is about giving a vehicle and mechanisms and governance for managing our own economy. Not to meet maximum profit or financial speculation, but to meet every day needs. And that, too, is somewhat seen as beneath the grand aspirations of economics.

Laura Flanders: You talk about self-provision-ing. How is that different from subsistence? Or is it?

We’re living in a time of economic babble, where politicians and economists throw out words like “reform,” “privatize,” and “austerity” to prop up corrupt capitalist opportunists. So says our guest this week, economist Michael Hudson, author of J is for Junk Economics.

Laura Flanders:Okay. We're going to start. The intro is about the book. The book is a wonderful thing. We're really glad to be here talking about it. I'm really excited to have you back on the program, Michael. It's great to see you.

Michael:It's good to be back.

Laura Flanders:This book was 10 years in the making. In that period, have you seen any new, exciting, or terrifying obfuscations, lies, and ways of talking about the economy?

Michael:Fortunately, things got worse and worse since 2008. As a result, I greatly expanded it, made it a completely different book. Also, it made the whole focus on the vocabulary because economics has turned into an Orwellian vocabulary where words mean exactly the opposite of what they used to mean.

Laura Flanders:Give us an example.

Barack Obama spent the Dr. King holiday doing service. Donald Trump, let's just say, did not. While the one fed the homeless, the other attacked civil rights leader, Congressman John Lewis. The contrast between the two men could keep us entertained, or aghast, for weeks. But the longer we stay focused on the individuals, the later we'll focus on what's really going on. Namely, a long time incoming crisis in our institutions of government.

Who governs is important, but what we really need to be talking about is government itself. Let's remember that least discussed statistic, 49% of eligible voters, some 117 million Americans, didn't even cast a vote in a country where registering is pretty darn difficult. That level of nonparticipation reflects an alienation that should be setting off alarm bells. What is happening to our democracy? Take some distance from the every four or six-year cycle that keeps our money media so obsessed and so well-funded, and we're looking at a historic crisis playing out on our watch. Let's remember, the only reason people of property ever agreed to share power in the first place was because they feared what would happen if they didn't. Parties of property extended the franchise to the landless and workers as a way to keep their system ticking over, and because they were forced to do it. Government persuaded the owners of corporations and capital to agree to share some goods and services with the public to even out a fairly uneven system. That was all well and good, while those owners were into sharing and the public was well-organized and united enough to keep them worried about disturbance.

For years now though, the owners of private capital and Wall Street have been hoarding, not sharing, and buying influence over our government. With Trump's election, energy company CEOs, bankers, and people who have become billionaires off things that used to be public services like education are literally taking over government. They're going into office. The compromised cobble together between private capital and the people is broken. Private capital, cruel and crude, without a conscience, has won. Trump is draining the swamp all right, of every last drop of public service juice. That's the downside. The upside is we get to reimagine government. Let's face it, the system I've just described was never meant for most of us. That's why strategies to resist oppression need to be coupled with those we talk about here to expand participation and community governance. Projects like the Southern Assemblies Movement, which grew out of the failed federal response to Hurricane Katrina; Participatory budgeting, which is spreading across the country; or community development and investment projects, like the Ujima Project in Boston. You can watch my interview with Aaron Tanaka about Ujima this week on the Laura Flanders Show on KCET, Link TV, Free Speech TV, and our own YouTube channel.

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