Professor john a. powell, Executive Director at the Kirwan Institute gives the historical evidence of the a direct relationship between racial discrimination and corporate power in America. After the civil war, the14th amendment was passed to provide equal protection for freed black slaves. Since then the 14th amendment has been repeatedly used to give corporations power and most recently "personhood" and the ability to spend endless money on political campaigns because it is money is constitutionally protected "free speech". powell says this has let to today's situation where minorities become the scapegoats for our economic woes and banks won't lend to them, even though the banks were saved with $13 trillion dollars of taxpayer money. powell spoke at the Summit For A Fair Economy in Minneapolis on September 10, 2011. Transcript of highlights: If banks aren't serving democracy then we shouldn't have them. (UpTake Open) So a lot of people assumed that having Obama in the White House was the end of racial discrimination. We're in a post-racial society. We can all sing Kumbayah. (laughter) Except I don't know the words. (laughter) But they were wrong. Franklin Roosevelt was in the White House. He understood that in order to protect the country, in order to protect democracy, he had to do something. And his notion was you could not sustain the economy by having all the money in one percent of the population. You needed a population?you needed consumers, because (Robert) Reich talked about this last night, and then?And Henry Ford understood this. He actually raised workers wages. And the shareholders sued. They said the purpose of the corporation was to not to pay higher wages, it was to make as much profit as possible. And so they called it against the law to pay wages higher to workers. So what Roosevelt did, is he went to corporations and to the public and he said 'look, if I'm going to save the country, if I'm going to save capital, we're going to have to do something. We have people on the streets demanding a change. We need to do something.' He also said we need consumers. We need a middle class that can buy and sustain the economy. So those were the two conditions that allowed Roosevelt, gave Roosevelt some room. Today, the Middle class, at least from the corporate perspective, is in China, is in India, is in Brazil. So the assumption is we don't need, we need a middle class but it doesn't have to be in America. It can be anywhere. So there's been a global shift. And so we have to think about a global strategy that actually meets that shift. And we have to be in the streets as we were in the 1930s. I just came from the Federal Reserve meeting and I was probably one of forty speakers and I would say there were three of us that had similar views. The dominant view there was that the problem that took us to this financial crisis is that we made loans to blacks and latinos that they couldn't afford. And then the banking community, and they are talking about developing new ergs (regulations), the banking community has argued that the solution to the problem is to stop forcing banks to loan to the black and latino community. To let the market do what the market does. They said all these civil rights, all this concern about environment is distorting the market. And I asked the question when I spoke, 'what are we supporting banks for? Why do we have banks? If banks aren't serving democracy, then we shouldn't have them. (applause) And the administration, whom I've worked closely with, is in the process of giving the banking community 13 trillion dollars. I'm sure all of you've seen that cartoon where the little kid is in his crib and his parents say 'Johnny, so what do you want to be when you grow up?' and he says 'too big to fail.' (laughter) So we say banks are too big to fail, so we give them 13 trillion dollars. With that 13 trillion dollars you could pay off every sub-prime loan, every underwater loan, every person in the United State's mortgage could be paid off and every person in the United States who doesn't have a house we buy them a house. But we didn't do that. Instead we gave the money to the banks. And we said 'we hope you will loan, we hope you will put the money out there, and they haven't. In fact when we looked at? they're not loaning to anyone, but to particularly the black and latino community are being devastated by the banks refusal to loan. Instead they're sitting on money. And it's our money! So what we're doing, is we're seeing the government being in line with business and not in line with people. We have to change that. So we need a new story. And this story? you know there's a structure to stories. You know often times there's a hero and there's a challenge, there's a villain. Sometimes there's love. Sometimes there's sex. But our story, in our story, in the American story, in the Tea party story, too often the villain are people of color. Too often the villain are immigrants. And now the villain is even turning to be struggling working class America. And I don't know if we really need a villain, but if we do we have a very good one. It's called corporate America. (applause) Now I want to be clear, that this is not saying corporations are all bad. And I'll say this in my talk. Corporations may make a good servant, but they make a terrible master. So this is? this is the challenge. Because much of the discussion is an attack on government, an attack on the public, with the assumption being that the benefit will rebound back to us as individuals. It will not. We are actually enhancing corporations and corporations understand in terms of their unlimited prerogative that things like civil rights, things like environmental rights, things like women's rights creates a cramp on their style. It limits their prerogative. And they don't like that. Plus they understand that if we ever get together across these dimensions we will have a real democracy that would have serious implications for how corporations are aligned. I'm sure many of you know that history and we often talk about the working class whites voting against their interests. And I want to suggest that's not quite right. They may voting against or working against their economic interests, but they're actually voting for some version of their white interests. And in fact, it's not even just interests. They're actually voting for, or fighting for what I would call their racial identity. So part of what's needed is a new identity. It's not simply? it's not simply interest. Because people's identities are being threatened. They've been caught up by this huge migration of the racial other. And we need to address that in much more sophisticated ways. So diversity is creating tremendous anxiety. So what does Jeffrey Sachs, Robert Putnam and Tim Wise have in common? OK, they're all white men, but I was talking about something else. They all have been saying for the last two years that one of the greatest things threatening the United States and the world is diversity. Because as Europe and the United States become more diverse, it creates anxiety and support then for public space, for pubic institutions, for public infrastructure, for schools actually start to decline. So the racial anxiety, the other anxiety, is fundamental in terms of withdrawing support for public space? supposedly favor of private space, but instead in favor of corporate. space. They're saying the poor are not been paying their fair share. (laughter) I'm serious. I'm serious. So the hostility toward the poor is palpable. The poor in a sense is the racial other, whether they're they're white or otherwise. And so part of it is we have to expand this notion of who we are, and our circle of what I call human concern. And in terms of doing that, we also must make sure that the circle includes all humans, but not corporations. Thank you. (applause) Less