So especially through the 20th century, actually it goes back to the founding of the country, but particularly in the 20th century, there has been a very self-conscious, explicit effort. I mean, you can make it nothing speculative, but the leaders say so. Business leaders, intellectuals, academic social scientists and others say that it is important to keep the public out of things. It's important to ensure that the public remain what are called spectators, not participants. They're supposed to be directed to other concerns and not to interfere with policy formation.

And it was recognized early on that if you can't control people by force or poverty or some other means, you are going to have to control them by what was quite openly called propaganda at the time. People don't like the term propaganda anymore, but that was used public relations industry grows out of these experiences and this understanding, and it is very explicit.

Well, maybe I'm naive, but I have more faith in the public than that. My feeling is that the general public is rather well aware of this, and I think it shows up in public opinion study in the United States, mainly because business wants to keep its finger on the public pulse. They want to know what people are thinking. So we have a pretty trustworthy and very extensive bully industry. And what comes out of public attitudes, I think, is kind of revealing. So for the last 20 years or so, about 80% of the population, when they're asked, what do you think the country, you know, who runs the government or what does it do? The answer that they pick out of a set of choices is the government works for the few and the special interests, not the people.

Could be, but I think my own feeling is the roots go back farther. It's either back again to the bed of the 1920s, approximately. That's when this stuff really takes off. Madison Avenue. Yeah, that's when the relations industry really exploded.

And it grew on the basis of the very sensible assumption that was pretty clearly articulated that we have to somehow make sure that the general public does not make use of the democratic opportunities that are available to them and leaves us to run the place as we've been doing. And the way to do it was you read the business leaders are saying, look, we have to induce what's called a philosophy of utility. They actually use the phrase, we have to just kind of direct people to superficial things like fashionable consumption. We have to regiment something, anything that doesn't bother us. Bread and circus, just anything like that.

So, like, for example, the free trade area of the Americas, which is an enormous agreement with a lot of consequences, that has yet to be discussed in the media. It's been negotiated for three years. It finally broke through at the Summit of the Americas meeting in Quebec. There was such a fur over it, had to be mentioned. But it's been under negotiation for a couple of years by corporate managers, by trade ministers of governments who are basically corporate representatives. The media know all about it, but they don't want the public to know. It did not come up in the political campaign. The nature of these arrangements has yet to be made public. I mean, you can sort of figure it out if you do a research project. But these things are not made available to the public, and that's for a very clear reason.

But it's been under negotiation for a couple of years by corporate managers, by trade ministers of governments who are basically corporate representatives. The media know all about it, but they don't want the public to know. It did not come up in the political campaign. The nature of these arrangements has yet to be made public. I mean, you can sort of figure it out if you do a research project. But these things are not made available to the public, and that's for a very clear reason.

Yeah, and if you watch, I mean, I sometimes watch this television with my grandchildren. What they are subjected to is criminal. I mean, they're barraged by propaganda, teaching them from infancy that the only thing in life is getting those tennis shoes or those Pokemon cards or whatever it may be. And that's really a way to control people in a very ugly fashion.

Take, say, these trade agreements are coming along. One crucial part of them is to take what are called services and hand them over to private power. Well, services are just about anything that people would care about. Health, education, water, anything that would be in the public arena where people would want to make decisions. That has to be taken out of the public arena, put into private hands, unaccountable private hands, and then what's left for the public is which kind of shoes I buy.

I mean, the distinction between republic and democracy that you're describing was not really what concerned the founding fathers. What they were concerned about, you read, say, James Madison, the main framer, what he was concerned about, but he wanted to have a system in which power would lie in the hands of what he called the wealth of the nation, the more capable class of men. And the reason was because the goal of government, this phrase, is to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. So the system was designed to try to ensure that the wealth of the nation would essentially be in control and that the general public would be fragmented and marginalized and so on.

Well, you know, that's not what they meant back at that time. What they meant is you read the Second Amendment, they said never in the context of raising militias, people should have the right to bear arms.

I mean, in fact, here the United States is off-spectrum of international society.

But if you want my opinion, I think guns are much too easy to get in the United States.

The one real difference between the United States and other countries is killings with guns.

See, I don't think guns were always out, but even the police didn't have guns in England until very recently. Oh, people had guns. No, look, in England, even the police were not armed with guns until fairly recently.