WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 58:01 — 41.4MB)
With President-elect Trump soon to take office, America is faced with a grim irony: many voters with economic grievances about a “rigged system” helped Trump win office, and yet given his major appointments so far, it seems unlikely that our next president will do anything to fundamentally address those problems — and it seems likely he’ll make them worse.
Assuming the next president has no ability, vision, or desire to combat the staggering inequality of our new “gilded age,” we’re left with the question of how to move forward without the help of government.
In conversation with two people interested in solutions to inequality, we’ll look at two models for economic change:
The first, with Chuck Collins, inequality activist, author of Born on Third Base, and former one-percenter: an heir of the Oscar Mayer fortune who gave away his wealth — Collins advocates reaching out to the amenable millionaires and billionaires to form a cross-class coalition for change. Patriotic wealthy people concerned about the health of our economic system exist — insists Collins — in a spectrum of awareness, much like everyone else. And for those wealthy people who aren’t already fully allied with the shrinking middle and grinding lower classes of America, Collins argues for consciousness raising… teaching the 1% about the ways in which they owe the system, and its inhabitants of all classes, for their privileged lives.
In the second half of the show, we’ll look to Scandinavia for other ideas on how to advance equality. Author of Viking Economics George Lakey will show us how 100 years ago Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and others experienced their own gilded age and stultifying inequality, and how they threw off the economic elite, rethought how real democracy should shape the economy, and over the last century, have grown into some of the most productive, free, and equal societies in the industrialized world.
GUESTS
Chuck Collins, author of Born on Third Base, is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and directs IPS’s Program on Inequality and the Common Good. He is an expert on U.S. inequality and author of several books, including Economic Apartheid in America: A Primer on Economic Inequality and Insecurity, co-authored with Felice Yeskel. (New Press, 2005). He co-authored with Bill Gates Sr. Wealth and Our Commonwealth, (Beacon Press, 2003), a case for taxing inherited fortunes.
George Lakey, author of Viking Economics, is Visiting Professor at Swarthmore College and a Quaker. He has led 1,500 workshops on five continents and led activist projects on local, national, and international levels. Among many other books and articles, he is author of “Strategizing for a Living Revolution” in David Solnit’s book Globalize Liberation (City Lights, 2004). His first arrest was for a civil rights sit-in and most recent was with Earth Quaker Action Team while protesting mountain top removal coal mining.
RELATED
Articles by Chuck Collins on Inequality.org
Resource Generation
“Living Revolution” column by George Lakey at Waging NonViolence
1974 Nobel Prize in Economics Press Release
MUSIC
“Fortunate Son” by Creedence Clearwater Revival
“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” performed by Tom Waits
“Hunter” by Björk
“The New Improved Hypocrisy” by The Radio Dept.
NEXT UP
Prostitution and Pornography. I’m joined by Meghan Murphy, founder and editor of Feminist Current, to discuss the neoliberal capture of Feminism which places Individual “freedom” over the Collective “good.” It’s the neoliberal dream of sex as a marketplace. We’ll look at the Nordic Model (sometimes called the Sex Buyer Law) as an approach to prostitution, which decriminalizes the selling of sex and focuses on social services and exit strategies for women, and keeps the buying of sex illegal in an attempt to change the cultural perception that women exist, by and large, only for the use of men.
Main Photo Source: Spiegel Online
Credits
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon
Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks
Executive Producer: Joe Crawford
