A. G.: Right.
R.K.: Really long term and really bigger. It's not enough to just look for a little, tiny modification to what we have.
We have really got to challenge the system, the whole big system and we have got to start envisioning big changes. What is real justice? What is...like you described in your article, what was it like in the 40's? What were people supporting then? Opportunities for anybody who wants to work and that's a start. If things had progressed from the 40's to now, it would be a lot better than that rather than so much worse than that now.
A. G.: Right. Exactly.
R.K.: It seems to me that we have to have a conversation which is something that I try to encourage and stimulate at opednews where we look at what things could really be like. I've been trying to get a conversation going that things have gotten too big.
It's not just billionaires, it's corporations. We need to develop an impetus towards coming up with models for small where you don't let corporations gobble up other corporations and get bigger and bigger and bigger until they become international behemoths that no longer have any interest in what's happening in this country.
We need small and local and we need companies that care about people, or better, that are owned by people like Gar Alperovitz describes and talks about a lot, the idea of co-opts and it seems to me that that's where we need to be going and we're not going to get that from the democrats, we're not going to get that from the republicans, we have to make it happen some way and I think that one really important step is to see reality and that's what you're giving us with your article.
Now you said your article was from a book chapter. What's the book?
A.R.: Well it's a book that began as a book about Obama-mania and the animating question was how did so many people who should have known better, not just good hearted people who were not politically sophisticated, but how so many people who should have known better got so completely swept up in the hype about Obama and as I started working on it, it either swallowed or was swallowed by another project that I've had on the back burner for a number of years that I had been calling, What Happens When Compromises Come Home to Roost, and this book is an account basically of the decline and transformation of the left in the US since the end of World War II. That's why my head is stuck back there now.
I'm trying to wrap up the last bit of the penultimate chapter which picks up in the mid-60's and I've decided I've got another chapter to write that I want to write after that. So I'm hoping to have it end, the book is under contract with Verso, they like what I've done so far even though it's not what we originally discussed when they approached me and I want to try to have it in to them by June at the latest.
R.K.: Okay. We've got to wrap. It's been a great conversation.
A.R.: Thank you very much. And you have a new listener and a new fan.
R.K.: Well, thank you.
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