In fact, for the majority of the population, wages and incomes have stagnated and conditions have gotten worse. So they are asking, "what did I do wrong?" And the answer that the talk show host is giving them is convincing, in it's internal logic. It's saying, "what's wrong is the rich liberals own everything, run everything, they don't care about you; therefore, distrust them" and so on.

You've just got to get people organized and tell them the truth. There aren't any magic tricks to it. You know, sometimes it's pretty amazing. Actually, I mentioned a pretty striking case of this in "Crisis and Hope," which was the Caterpillar case in the early 1990s.

The more there is a need to talk about the ideals of democracy, the less democratic the system usually is.

They [unions] used straight Marxist rhetoric [in 1930s] - just the values were changed.

In the US, there is basically one party - the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to those policies. As is most of the population.

For the past century or so that's [ Monroe Doctrine] actually been true, but it's declining very significantly.

Silicon Valley benefits, as all of industry, from highly protectionist policy - patent policies and things like that - which come out of the government.