It's great that Donald Trump has gone I mean he was a menace,
he was a very, very dangerous man with autocratic tendencies.
"Don't talk to me that way I'm the president of the United States,
don't ever talk to the president that way."
Prepared to carry out a kind of coup to remain in the White House,
but it's essential that we understand how he got there in the first place,
and how he got there was through mainstream political failure.
You might have hoped when Barack Obama came to power,
that things were really going to change.
And he talked about change and he talked about hope,
and he had a big political movement backing him.
But in office he was supremely disappointing he completely folded in the face of financial power,
he bailed out the banks at the expense of ordinary homeowners.
He failed to sustain the big social movement that got him into power in the first place,
he thought he could govern without them in fact he cut them loose and he became presidential.
He tried to play the game within the political system and it swallowed him.
And because of that political failure and the much wider political failure
which long predated Obama of the convergence between the Democrats and the Republicans
just as we've seen elsewhere in the world around a set of neo-liberal prescriptions.
Remove a lot of regulations you cut taxes for the rich,
you allow wealth and power really to overcome democracy.
People began to see politics as not delivering for them,
they saw it as the yabber of a detached elite above their heads.
It was into that vacuum of political effectiveness that Trump stormed in,
and said look I'm anti-politics I'm the opposite of all that yammer
I'm the guy who talks direct to you the ordinary person I'm on your side.
Never mind the fact that this guy is one of the
most exploitative and fraudulent people in U.S. business.
Trump could just rip through the ordinary political fabric,
and establish himself as this demagogue this autocrat.
And in a way and I know this sounds strange we were really lucky to get Trump.
Because he was a really useless autocrat he was a lousy would-be dictator,
he was all over the place, he was chaotic, he was impetuous.
And what trump's presidency exposed is that the checks and balances,
which are supposed to exist in U.S politics aren't actually there.
On the contrary the country is constitutionally padlocked,
it's locked into a whole load of totally dysfunctional political arrangements.
Like the composition of the senate where every state sends two senators,
regardless of whether it's got 60 million people or 600,000 people.
You've got the citizens united decision which says there should be no limit,
to the amount of money that political lobbyists can spend,
which means that the U.S has effectively been captured,
by the money of billionaires and other oligarchs.
You've got the totally politicised nature of the supreme court,
which means that a sitting president can determine political outcomes,
for many years after that person has left office.
And all these constitutional lock-ins far from acting as checks and balances,
against a demagogue in the White House actually helped to give that person their power.
And so my fear is this that even though it's clear that Biden is better than Trump,
because he is such a centrist, because he is so timid,
because he plays the Washington game, because he goes along with financial power.
Biden could pave the way for something much worse than Trump,
for someone who wins a second term for someone who then sets in motion,
a completely new politics in the U.S. a politics which starts with democracy
and ends up with dictatorship.
What this is about is about the power of money,
a fight between the people and the money.
We need a new kind of politician which actually rises from the people,
and speaks directly for the people a politician like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
or like Corey Bush these new Democrats who have come from the grassroots.
Who are not part of the elite people who don't represent the money,
but represent democracy in its true form.
The way our governments want us to understand democracy is something we do,
once every four or five years we cast a vote and then they have a mandate
to do whatever they want for their whole term of office.
If you challenge them they say well you voted for us we've got your consent to do what we want.
"Thank you very much everybody."
Well (A) I might not have voted for you at all,
(B) If I did vote for you it probably wasn't for that,
and (C) since when was the concept of presumed consent in any way legitimate.
We don't accept it in sex why should we accept it in politics?
Democracy in its true form is about something we do every day,
it's about the way we live it's about the way we engage with each other,
it's about the society that we create.
Now I'm not against a representative system I think we need representative politics,
But I think it's not enough alongside that representative system,
where we send people to a distant institution supposedly to speak on our behalf,
we need to speak for ourselves.
We need participatory forums, citizens assemblies, constitutional conventions.
One of the most powerful potential tools in politics is participatory budgeting,
where you get the people of the the town or the city or even potentially of the whole nation,
deciding for themselves how their money should be spent.
So for instance if you want to get to work in the morning,
you can buy a banged up old car for two thousand dollars
and spend a few hundred dollars a year maintaining it,
and you get stuck in a traffic jam for two hours each way but you get to work.
Alternatively part of your tax a hundred dollars a year could go on a monorail system,
which gets you to work in 20 minutes.
It's far more efficient to spend that money together than it is to spend it alone.
And when people are in charge of the budgeting process they recognise that,
and so they want more of their money to go into the public pocket,
than to stay in their private pockets isn't that an amazing thing!
We need a new politics which allow us to exercise direct control,
over the decisions that affect our lives not once every four or five years,
but every day to actually return politics to the people,
only then does democracy become a meaningful proposition.
Do you get these stories on the mainstream media do you hell.
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