I SEE U, Episode 116: America’s Legalized Corruption with Legal Scholar Mehrsa Baradaran

[00:00:00] Eddie Robinson: Black billionaires exist. Take, for instance, Oprah, rapper Jay Z, or tech investor Robert Smith. But their success stories are exceptions to the rule. What if our economic systems that run our nation were rigged? Not by evil puppet masters or villains. But by law abiding judges, lawyers, policy makers and lobbyists.

[00:00:25] Mehrsa Baradaran: Inequality is just a drag on everybody. It’s not. It’s nobody’s. Nobody wins when we’ve got these levels of inequality.

[00:00:34] Eddie Robinson: I’m Eddie Robinson and stay tuned for an unguarded chat with legal scholar and award winning author Mehrsa Baradaran. How did our political and economic systems become so rigged? To help the rich and powerful while keeping so many poor and disenfranchised. Oh yeah. I feel you. We hear you. I SEE U.

[00:00:59] Eddie Robinson: You’re listening to I SEE U. I’m your host, Eddie Robinson. The “American Dream” trademark pending is deeply rooted in our mythology. The idea that everyone, regardless of your background, has the opportunity for prosperity and upward social mobility. If you work hard enough and have enough gumption, well, all your dreams can come true.

[00:01:24] Eddie Robinson: But is it really true? These days, the dream seems very unattainable. And the research backs that up. Since 1980, wealth inequality and wealth concentration have been steadily increasing, and even surging in the last few years. There are now more billionaires than ever. The U. S. has 737 billionaires with a combined wealth of 5. 5 trillion. Meanwhile, Americans are experiencing homelessness at record numbers. A report by the Department of Housing and Urban Development released last December found that more than 650, 000 people were experiencing homelessness in America. Many of these families work full time and yet still struggle to afford rents that have skyrocketed in every part of the country.

[00:02:19] Eddie Robinson: This is especially the case for Black, native, and Latino families. In fact, the wealth gap between white and Black Americans is nearly as large today as it was in the 1950s. Yeah, that’s before the end of legal segregation. So why are we seeing this persistent wealth gap that’s actually widened in the last four decades?

[00:02:43] Eddie Robinson: And are all Americans affected by the policies that lead to these outcomes? Mehrsa Baradaran is the author of the award- winning book, The Color of Money, Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap. Her latest book is The Quiet Coup, Neoliberalism and the Looting of America, published by W. W. Norton Company. Dr. Baradaran is also a professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and she joins us from the studios of KUCI. Dr. Baradaran, thank you so much for being a guest on I SEE U.

[00:03:20] Mehrsa Baradaran: Thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor.

[00:03:22] Eddie Robinson: Well, you know, last December, CNN released an investigation into the lending practices of Navy Federal Credit Union, which lends to military service members and veterans.

[00:03:35] Eddie Robinson: And they found that They had approved more than 75 percent of white borrowers who applied for a new conventional home purchase mortgage in 2022, but less than 50 percent of Black borrowers were approved.

[00:03:49] Navy Federal News Story: The denial letter listed excessive obligations in relation to income as the reason.

[00:03:55] Navy Federal News Story: When they denied is when we came back and said, Oh man, there’s something else going on.

[00:03:59] Navy Federal News Story: And what did you think that something else was?

[00:04:02] Navy Federal News Story: Discrimination.

[00:04:04] Navy Federal News Story: The data also shows Navy Federal was more than twice as likely to deny Black mortgage applicants than white ones.

[00:04:11] Eddie Robinson: This report really got us thinking about the racial wealth gap here in America today. And what our producers found is not great.

[00:04:19] Eddie Robinson: You know, in 2021, for instance, the typical white household had 9. 2 times as much wealth as the typical Black household. That’s nearly a factor of 10. And that’s an incredible disparity, especially as we’re here 60 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. What’s been happening here, Professor, is eliminating this gap as simple as tackling bank discrimination, or does it go deeper than that?

[00:04:49] Mehrsa Baradaran: Um, yes, the latter. It goes deep. And you know, that was my last book. The Color Of Money was an exploration of that. I actually started the book writing about banks, focusing on the history of Black owned banks and as institutions whose specific aim was to build Black wealth. And by studying these banks, what I saw and hopefully what any reader of that book will see through these banks is how structural and endemic and, and embedded is the forces of inequalities.

[00:05:23] Mehrsa Baradaran: And, you know, the racial wealth gap is one symptom that you see that you can measure, but But really the deep core of it is a, just a disparate topography of access and opportunity. And, you know, I say topography purposefully. It’s not necessarily, you know, where you’re born determines what your outcome, your opportunities are, but it is sort of like that.

[00:05:43] Mehrsa Baradaran: And race has from the beginning of the founding of this country been synonymous with poverty, you know, uh, and, and the lack of freedom and in a way that was, you know, very concrete at first, you know, the written into the document, but over time has become more of a, uh, you have to measure it and you have to see it through these other ways and in The Color Of Money.

[00:06:09] Mehrsa Baradaran: I tried to just show, you know, that’s, that’s, that’s kind of the thesis. The color of money is white and it’s not all white. People have equal opportunity as others. It’s not that at all. It is the fact that if you are Black, the likelihood of, you know, where you’re born, what kind of schools you go to, what kind of neighborhood you live in, the just the overwhelming evidence is that those opportunities are limited.

[00:06:33] Mehrsa Baradaran: And, you know, now we can look at it and it does seem kind of intangible. What are you talking about? What is this? Is this? Do you bank discrimination? Is it, where is the discrimination coming in? And what I try to show in the book is, is you don’t actually even need the discrimination coming in. There weren’t Navy Federal Credit Union people out there trying to be, you know, racist in some way it’s like in the numbers, it’s in the underwriting.

[00:06:56] Mehrsa Baradaran: It’s in what zip code are you coming from, right? What are your, what is the algorithm shooting out? You could have a race neutral AI underwriter produce the same outcome. Given the data, the inputs of history and place and opportunity.

[00:07:12] Eddie Robinson: If we could, you know, I would love to just kind of focus on the history of Black wealth.

[00:07:16] Eddie Robinson: You know, for instance, folks who had been enslaved went from being capital, you know, their bodies capital as being capital to having to become capitalists. Can you tell us a little bit about the history of the Freedman’s Savings Bank? You know, why did the U. S. Congress prefer setting up an institution like this?

[00:07:37] Eddie Robinson: Instead of giving land or direct financial support to the formerly enslaved freemen.

[00:07:42] Mehrsa Baradaran: Yeah. I mean, when you go back into that time in history and look at the records and look at the conversations, you know, Sherman and Grant and Lincoln and all the, you know, it was obvious that land was the only way, not just to create an economy in the South, in which Black former slaves, now Freedman, and white sharecroppers could participate in capitalism and also that the cotton oligarchs who had committed treason against the nation by seceding, who had lost that war would be somehow, you know, punished or at least that we wouldn’t have that same reproduction of the system. And that’s not what happened.

[00:08:21] Mehrsa Baradaran: Lincoln is assassinated and, um, Andrew Johnson, who, you know, comes into office saying this is a white man’s government and so it shall remain. And so he vetoes. Freedman’s Bureau Bill, all but the Freedman’s Bureau Bank. There’s other programs that remained at the Freedman’s Bill and, you know, W. E. B. Du Bois Black Reconstruction is the, the document here, right?

[00:08:39] Mehrsa Baradaran: His just research into this is, is, uh, unmatched. What he shows is that the Freedman’s Bureau Bill wasn’t a failure because it just, you know, was defunct. It was violently overthrown. And there are many instances of this. Any Republican or Black Republican would be basically, you know, just, you know, a killed.

[00:08:58] Mehrsa Baradaran: And the white officeholder would refuse to give up office or, you know, the Klan would show up if you had property. So, so there’s the violence on that side. And then there is the Congressional and the Supreme Courts looking away from those rights that were supposedly guaranteed in the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments.

[00:09:15] Mehrsa Baradaran: And so what you get is this bank and it’s not real. Like it’s not a true thing at the time, you know, instead of land, you can save your money that you’re getting through sharecropping, which is just a completely unfair exploitative system. You’re going to save up those funds and put them in this bank and then you can buy land.

[00:09:33] Mehrsa Baradaran: And people did do that. Not just Black, uh, Freedmen, but also, you know, Irish people who had immigrated and couldn’t get access to a bank account also had accounts at this bank. And what happened with this Pile of money. It was supposed to just stay there. They weren’t giving loans. They weren’t trying to produce wealth.

[00:09:47] Mehrsa Baradaran: They were just trying to hold this money. And Jay Cook is a famous, infamous railroad speculator. His brother, Henry Cook, is put as president of the bank and takes the money and blows it on railroad speculation. And it just disappears. There’s no, you know, congressional, nothing happens. There’s no FDIC at the time.

[00:10:06] Mehrsa Baradaran: And so people just lose half their money. And, you know, Even Du Bois, you know, he briefly mentions the Freedman’s Bank failure and he says, you’re not even 10 additional years of slavery could have done as much damage to throttle the spirit of like thrift and business to the community as that failure, because you have this government institution.

[00:10:27] Mehrsa Baradaran: I mean, the bills had Lincoln’s face on it, you know, and you have this bank account that looks to be growing and all of a sudden it’s gone. So it was a very devastating failure. Then, you know, you have Black banks created by, you know, many just brilliant, um, intrepid, brave entrepreneurs in the South and in the North, starting after the Great Migration.

[00:10:48] Mehrsa Baradaran: And unless you’re connected to the federal government, unless there is money coming out, that the Fed is supporting you, the FDIC is subsidizing you, that the FHA loans that were created, the white homeowner society that we had, Um, from 1930 until 1970, unless those things are coming to your community, and they were explicitly not, you know, like contractually, you could not give to Black homeowners these loans, then you cannot grow wealth in this economy, no matter how many great entrepreneurs you have, who set up banks.

[00:11:17] Mehrsa Baradaran: And that that was a reality that was rough to, you know, swallow.

[00:11:21] Eddie Robinson: Yeah. And that’s what I wanted to find out more. The New Deal, right? The New Deal was a series of programs and regulations and projects passed by Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s to kick start and grow the economy after the stock market crash of 1929.

[00:11:36] Eddie Robinson: But you know what? I mean, Professor, I read in my social studies class that the New Deal helped all citizens.

[00:11:43] PBS News Story: Roosevelt’s presidency is known for the New Deal. A series of programs and reforms aimed at addressing the Great Depression.

[00:11:50] Eddie Robinson: That’s it. End of discussion. Let’s move on to chapter two. But if you look deeper, some historians went all out to call the New Deal affirmative action for whites.

[00:11:59] Mehrsa Baradaran: White affirmative action. It’s not hard to see. You, you really, I mean, like at the time it wasn’t this secret thing, you know, they went around the country and said, you know, this neighborhood gets these subsidized loans, meaning that the government was going to. Like underwrite the loan. So you got a mortgage for 30 years at a 6 percent interest rate.

[00:12:18] Mehrsa Baradaran: You went from living in a tenement in New York city. You know, if you’re Irish, Italian, whatever, white, German, you know, $50 a month you were paying in rent and now you’re moving into the suburbs and you’re paying $35 a month and you have a house that’s growing in equity and value. You get all these tax subsidies and all of that.

[00:12:34] Mehrsa Baradaran: And those. Loans were, you know, where the idea of redlining comes from with this H. O. L. C. maps early on.

[00:12:39] News Story on Redlining: Redlining is a discriminatory lending practice denying access to federally backed mortgages and loans to certain communities based on race and ethnicity.

[00:12:48] Mehrsa Baradaran: And then it’s a program that lasts many decades.

[00:12:51] Mehrsa Baradaran: You had racial covenants in house? This house shall not be sold to anyone who’s not of Caucasian descent, like explicitly. You can find the deeds of any house that was sold during that time. And in the FHA documents, they would go around to the neighborhoods and say, this neighborhood is predominantly Black and therefore is a redlined area.

[00:13:08] Mehrsa Baradaran: You can go to Los Angeles. I’ve looked in Houston, you know, and it’s not just Blacks, this is, this is New Mexican or this is Japanese. And, and, you know, there were different color variations of risk. Based on the race. So the race of the community was exactly the way that they underwrote. It wasn’t like, Oh, you know, there’s anything having to do with the house or the development or the prognosis.

[00:13:30] Mehrsa Baradaran: So, you know, you have a self fulfilling prophecy. You’re saying that’s a risky neighborhood and therefore we’re not going to give these loans that can build wealth in that neighborhood. So you’ve got not just no wealth, you have a sucking out of the businesses. The, you know, there’s not just white flight, it’s business flight.

[00:13:47] Mehrsa Baradaran: Businesses leave the inner cities and go to these suburbs where it’s a car society also. Right. So you’ve got roads and cars out there and in the suburb, in the inner cities where people that were Black couldn’t leave because they weren’t available mortgages out, you have a diminishing of, public transportation.

[00:14:06] Mehrsa Baradaran: You’ve got a tax strain at schools as maybe, you know, are paid for by property taxes. And so you’ve got everything basically linked to those metrics. So for Brown versus Board of Ed, they’re like, you can’t segregate based on race.

[00:14:21] PBS News Story: The court ruled unanimously that racial segregation in public schools violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

[00:14:27] Mehrsa Baradaran: But in the later years, as I talk about in the next book, you had many cases of Black families and, you know, Mexican families in Texas coming to the court and saying, look, this is basically racial segregation, but they’re doing it through the white neighborhoods cordoning their money, their tax money into these white schools.

[00:14:50] Mehrsa Baradaran: It works like disproportionately white. You know, and then right next door is this Black brown school has no money. Right. And so like, this is discrimination or like a violation of the spirit of Brown. Right. And yeah, the court says, no, it just, it’s not unless it’s like explicitly about race, then you don’t.

[00:15:06] Mehrsa Baradaran: So you, you get these patterns recreated through other means, even after Brown.

[00:15:13] Eddie Robinson: I’m Eddie Robinson, and you’re listening to I SEE U. We’re speaking with Mehrsa Baradaran. She’s a professor at the university of California, Irvine. She’s also the author of How The Other Half Banks, The Color Of Money, Black Banks and The Racial Wealth Gap.

[00:15:30] Eddie Robinson: And her newest book entitled The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and The Looting Of America, you know, we usually think about the Civil Rights Era as, you know, beginning in the sixties, even in the fifties, you know, with icons that we learn about in grade school. But some historians would say that the fight for civil rights really started as a reaction to the denial of reparations after the end of the civil war.

[00:15:56] Eddie Robinson: Um, many would argue that, you know, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 wasn’t all that radical. You know, it just recognized the rights of Blacks that they had won in 14th Amendments.

[00:16:08] Mehrsa Baradaran: Absolutely. There was nothing, there was nothing in the civil rights legislation that wasn’t already promised in 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments.

[00:16:15] Eddie Robinson: Yeah.

[00:16:15] Mehrsa Baradaran: And should have been promised in the Constitution in the first place if it had been taken seriously that just all men are created equal, right? It was a deregulation of Jim Crow. Jim Crow was a very complex legal system that was imposed in the South to re oppress Black workers economically where it couldn’t be done through slavery.

[00:16:35] Mehrsa Baradaran: And it was a very, I mean, it was like, uh, enforced by the Top to bottom. It changed Southern society to meet its legal, you know, dictates and all the civil rights laws said is no more Jim Crow, right? You can’t have white water fountains and Black water fountains. You can’t have white cars and Black, you know, like explicitly you cannot put whites only on these things.

[00:16:56] Mehrsa Baradaran: And this is that moment that I, right? Go back to in the, in this quiet coup, um, where I say, look, you’ve got this revolution that is happening, not necessarily by the Civil Rights, not that the nation’s just kind of like blandly sitting on their couch doing nothing. And all of a sudden Martin Luther King comes on the TV and we have this starting of this thing.

[00:17:20] Mehrsa Baradaran: The civil rights struggle had been ongoing since 18, you know, it, there had been, you know, tons and tons of movements, right? It hadn’t stopped the struggle for freedom. And at that moment, the American Civil Rights struggle converges with what’s happening worldwide, which is that empire’s ending. Not just America’s Jim Crow and a lot of the native dispossession laws that we had had, you know, like a reservation system, the way that you can cordon off certain populations were used, copied exactly into the Nuremberg laws and the Nazis.

[00:17:56] PBS News Story: The Nuremberg laws. by studying our Jim Crow laws. And when we protested their treatment of Jews in the thirties, they would look at us and go Mississippi.

[00:18:06] Mehrsa Baradaran: And the same with the British imperialism, their kind of legal system of how do you go into another country, take it over and impose your rule. The Nazis did exactly that in Europe.

[00:18:18] Mehrsa Baradaran: And so that system kind of crumbles after the second world war in the 1950s. And every. Former colony, you know, talking about Africa, India, South America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia has some sort of independent struggle. You have between 1960 and 1970, the time in the U. S. where we just focus on civil rights, look at any place in the world in 1960, 1970 is just complete chaos of power.

[00:18:44] Mehrsa Baradaran: What, what is going to happen, right? France loses all its colonies. There were like five European nations, right? Spain, England. France, Portugal, and Belgium, Germany, a little bit had had colonies across the world. They’d colonized the entire world. And many of those nations relied on, you know, oil from the Middle East and copper and all this stuff from these countries.

[00:19:06] Mehrsa Baradaran: At that point, every country revolts against that system. And that converges into the Civil Rights Movement. And Martin Luther King actually calls the Civil Rights Movement a child of a storm, right? And the civil rights leaders in America. All of them, Martin Luther King goes to, you know, India, Malcolm goes to Mecca, you know, Du Bois is, you know, prohibited from the CIA for traveling to Paris.

[00:19:30] Mehrsa Baradaran: Unfortunately, we, what the Nixon Kissinger administration decided to do with the help of the British and certain European interests is to recreate empire through corporate power. And the cost of that is diminishing of democracy, not just over there. So every country that’s like supposedly gets independence actually doesn’t.

[00:19:51] Mehrsa Baradaran: They don’t get sovereignty over their resources. It’s a pseudo independence. And also America loses a lot of the democratic aims. All the New Deal type help that even the white Americans have gotten through the mortgages, you know, health care rights, just the idea that it was society’s job to, to do this.

[00:20:10] Mehrsa Baradaran: Help with poverty and things like that. They lost that.

[00:20:18] Eddie Robinson: Coming up, we continue our chat with award winning author and legal scholar, Mehrsa Baradaran. What really happened after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964? How did Richard Nixon co opt the language of the Black Power Movement to justify affirmative action programs? I’m Eddie Robinson. All this and more when I SEE U

[00:20:44] Eddie Robinson: returns in just a moment. We’ll be right back.

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[00:21:25] Eddie Robinson: I’m Eddie Robinson. We’re chatting with legal scholar, Mehrsa Baradaran. She’s the author of the award winning book, The Color of Money, Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap. Her latest release is The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism, and the Looting of America. W. W. Norton and Company is the publisher. In many ways, the work of activists like Dr. King and Malcolm X really began in earnest in the late sixties and into the seventies, as they were both addressing economic justice as the real struggle for equality. Were there any advancements as a result of their efforts? Uh, did anything happen to help reduce that wealth gap in this particular era?

[00:22:11] Mehrsa Baradaran: Not really. But what does happen is more white people become poor. So if that’s a win, then maybe, you know, but, um, it used to be pretty, you know, race specific. Sure. And after that era, especially once you follow into Nixon Reagan era, more, Neighborhoods, more towns become like the Black ghetto used to be, which is under resourced.

[00:22:35] Mehrsa Baradaran: You know, you have more vitality sucked out of more places because the same thing that had been done to Black Americans, which is blame them for their own poverty. That was a state choice is done to more Americans. And that’s what I mean by you lose your democratic rights, which is that a share of the profits that we all make as a nation.

[00:22:56] Mehrsa Baradaran: And that spreads. Uh, across most America at this point.

[00:23:02] Eddie Robinson: The sacred rule of American economic policy has become the notion that free markets cannot be touched. They shall not be regulated. But in the last 50 years, the unregulated free market has not led to widespread economic advancement for Americans, no matter how hard they work.

[00:23:19] Eddie Robinson: When did this free market ideology take root?

[00:23:23] Mehrsa Baradaran: Yeah.

[00:23:24] Eddie Robinson: And what does it have to do with race professor?

[00:23:27] Mehrsa Baradaran: Okay. That’s so that lots, lots there in that question. And the book tries to answer that because, um, what I show is that like, you know, the Nixon administration and I show the same color of money basically co ops the language of the Black Power Movement and the Black Power Movement saying like sovereignty.

[00:23:42] Mehrsa Baradaran: We want sovereignty. Sovereignty and power in that we want to make our own decisions. We want, if, if there’s going to be a Black segregated neighborhood, we want to own the banks in that neighborhood, right? That’s what Malcolm is saying. That’s what Martin is saying that becomes kind of Black power, Black sovereignty, and Nixon takes that and says, yes, Black power, Black capitalism.

[00:24:00] Mehrsa Baradaran: That’s what you’re going to get, right? So he’s the first Republican to take the South again on a very covert, you know, dog whistling agenda, which is that they’re not going to get any of the money. They, the Black people, and so it’s he’s using, yes, we’re gonna have Black power, Black capitalism. You should have your own banks, whatever.

[00:24:19] Mehrsa Baradaran: But what that means is they’re going to keep segregation, not do anything and just use the verbiage of capitalism. What do they get? There’s Affirmative Action. That’s Nixon’s program. He asks, you know, GM and GE and these big companies to just hire. 50, 000 Black workers. I mean, it becomes immediately controversial, and it actually feeds Nixon’s agenda later, right?

[00:24:40] Mehrsa Baradaran: Because it’s showing, oh, these are special treatment, it’s special privileges, where it was just a right that was never recognized. I mean, there was like, no Black people hired, and then they’re saying, well, at least, hire a few. And now that looks like special privileges. So that’s one program but, globally and broadly, the very concept of freedom gets co opted. And that’s kind of what I go into in the second book. And I wanted label the book, I wanted to call the book Freedom Fighters. You have this idea of freedom fighters, from Ireland, the IRA to Black Panthers, right, not coordinated among groups, but just similar visions, which is sovereignty, freedom. And then you get this Mont Pelerin society, this group of European intellectuals and Austrian and American intellectuals who are funded by some corporate donors.

[00:25:29] Mehrsa Baradaran: And it’s a small group at that point, but it, it gets infused into the Nixon administration through several of his advisors. And what they say is, um, freedom is only possible through a free market and when they say free market, it is the opposite of a free market. Okay. So what these other countries are saying is, for example, Iran, major oil exporter to Europe, um, to the British, the British came in 1910, took oil for no money and kept it, you know?

[00:25:58] Mehrsa Baradaran: And so in 1953, the Iranians say, look, you can have our oil, but you have to buy it on the market. You can’t just take it. Okay, no matter what this contract that that someone gave you in 1910 says, that’s colonialism. You have to buy our oil. And instead of doing that, the CIA and the British intelligence joined forces quietly to overthrow this president that was democratically elected.

[00:26:21] News Story on Coup in Iran: For the first time now, the CIA has released documents. That show its role in the 1953 coup. That is the coup that toppled Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh had moved to nationalize oil production in Iran. Well, the US was concerned.

[00:26:37] Mehrsa Baradaran: And then put in their person who will just give them the oil that happens over and over again.

[00:26:41] Mehrsa Baradaran: And so a lot of these countries they’re saying, look, you can trade with us. We want free trade. You can buy stuff. You just can’t take it. You can’t take over our governments, et cetera. Then the corporations didn’t want to do it. There was the Seven Sisters Oil companies, right? There was a cartel, basically, you know, if you were trying to impose your prices, it just like a, basically a fight between these countries and these corporations who don’t want to pay fair prices.

[00:27:08] Mehrsa Baradaran: So if it were a free market, if freedom had been the strategy at that point, right. You know, wouldn’t be socialism by any means that was that’s the whole thing is like the free market. People say, Oh, it’s about communism and capitalism has nothing to do with that. We don’t want American empire. We don’t want Soviet empire.

[00:27:25] Mehrsa Baradaran: We just want our own self determination, right? You know, we just want to have our own resources and not have this corporation. Making our political choices and so then market freedom becomes the rhetoric to overwhelm the actual fight for freedom. What happened in America through that ideology of market freedom is just a loss of freedom in that it’s really just freedom for capital and then it becomes a joke.

[00:27:58] Eddie Robinson: I’m Eddie Robinson. This is I SEE U. We’re speaking with Mehrsa Baradaran. She’s one of our leading public intellectuals and a professor at the University of California. She’s also the author of The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America.

[00:28:15] Eddie Robinson: You know, after The Civil Rights Movement in the turbulent seventies, you know, we started seeing these overt white supremacist figures.

[00:28:21] Eddie Robinson: Get a foothold into American politics like, you know, Ku Klux Klan, Grand Wizard, David Duke. Yeah. You know, you get this notion that folks are complaining that, you know, white prosperity was being sacrificed for Black prosperity. The eighties comes into the picture with President Ronald Reagan. You know, You know, with a seemingly race neutral economic message of unregulated markets, so to speak.

[00:28:44] Eddie Robinson: At the end of the day, I’m wondering who, who are the winners and the losers of Reaganomics? And is this what you refer to today with the term neoliberalism?

[00:28:54] Mehrsa Baradaran: Right. So neoliberalism is a term that they use to describe themselves. We’re neoliberal like liberalism, like the classic liberalism of like Adam Smith or whatever, and they’re saying, we’re just reviving that.

[00:29:04] Mehrsa Baradaran: You know, I’ve read Adam Smith and Adam Smith is not saying anything close to what the Neoliberals are saying. Neoliberalism becomes this dominant ideology that does cohere into a, an agenda policy wise, right? So it’s, you know, free, supposedly free markets. What that means though is tax cuts for wealthier people, not freedom in that you actually have market competition because now you’ve got five major firms that control the entire economy in any given sector, it’s trending toward monopolization and that’s what happens in the Reagan administration is just like deregulating all the antitrust rules.

[00:29:39] Mehrsa Baradaran: Finance becomes this. It’s a behemoth that becomes the industry that rules all the rest. First Amendment corporations now get the first amendment rights. You know, um, affirmative action is just for diversity that you cannot correct past racism through new law anymore after Lewis Powell, you know, and he, and this guy was, you know, truly he’s the guy that helped Philip Morris cast doubt on the cancer producing carcinogens and in tobacco.

[00:30:06] Mehrsa Baradaran: And he’s also on the Richmond School District after integration. And so. He’s just a brilliant lawyer and through legal maneuvering makes it such that only three kids have to integrate, you know, so he avoids Brown without having to do like the massive resistance at the South does. He’s saying, like, just chill out.

[00:30:24] Mehrsa Baradaran: Don’t. Let me handle it. That’s kind of the vibe of neoliberalism is don’t bring up race, but get that same thing done through other means. The other means is you have to bankrupt the law and the system of justice in order to do that. And that is what happened slowly over the last several decades is in order to not give Black Americans and global South, you know, people their rights, their equal rights to their own.

[00:30:52] Mehrsa Baradaran: Autonomy, you have to take it away almost from everybody. You have to water down the guarantees that were in the constitution. And so you see with the Supreme Court now, it’s not, you know, you’ve got the big cases like the, you know, um, transgender bathrooms, like the things that people look at, but the cases that people don’t pay attention to are, you know, you’ve, you’re losing your rights to a jury trial.

[00:31:13] Mehrsa Baradaran: Everything is arbitration. You got clicks. You know, you’ve, uh, corporations can basically. do whatever, you know, you can’t regulate, you know, the regulators are losing their power on regulating environmental stuff. So the government is becoming powerless or has already perhaps become powerless to rein in corporations.

[00:31:34] Mehrsa Baradaran: And, you know, to the extent of like taxation, they don’t have to pay taxes to America anymore. They’re not, they’re all chartered in some Cayman Islands, thing. So we, we just lost the cohering threads of our democracy through that process. And that’s why I call it a quiet coup because the coups that were loud were at the time, the sixties, you know, like the Black Panthers, like that was a coup, you know, and then this is like a very quiet coup of, you know, lawyers and judges and not everybody.

[00:32:05] Mehrsa Baradaran: You just needed a few people to go in, change the doctrine. And there were several influential people and they were all funded.

[00:32:10] Eddie Robinson: That’s it.

[00:32:11] Mehrsa Baradaran: By motivated corporations and I follow those also the right wing think tanks that were created at the time and to go into the places of like the academy, you know, and here’s the media and here’s the courts and here’s the regulatory system and you can sort of track it.

[00:32:28] Mehrsa Baradaran: It’s a lot. It’s a lot of change and the ideology of it. Being Oh, free markets are good, which is true, actually, and this is where and the book is like free. There’s no we have no beef. I have no beef with free markets. That’s what we want. We want free markets. That’s what I want. And in order to have free markets, every person has to have freedom.

[00:32:48] Eddie Robinson: That’s what I love about this particular book, because, you know, that quiet coup, it’s being all carried out under the blanket of freedom, under the banner of freedom, when it really, really isn’t. There’s a huge asterisk.

[00:33:01] Mehrsa Baradaran: Yes, there’s no, it’s not freedom. It’s it is bankrupting the word bankrupting liberty, you know, and it’s and that’s too bad because we want those words.

[00:33:09] Mehrsa Baradaran: Those words mean something. The consequences of that aren’t just Oh, we have a free market. Corporations are corrupt and they’re offshore. The real consequence I think is the rise of the conspiracy theorists, because people understand at a gut level, something smells fishy, something’s wrong. And historically, when people have that feeling, they point to some group.

[00:33:33] Mehrsa Baradaran: It’s the Jews. That’s Marjorie Taylor Greene. She, you know, with the PG&E fire, she’s, Oh, it’s a Rothschilds over there. You know, where did she get that name? Oh, some internet thread of just, you know, Nazi residue that’s still there for picking up from the,

[00:33:51] Eddie Robinson: Residue that’s the perfect word.

[00:33:52] Mehrsa Baradaran: From people who are angry and resentful and need to blame somebody.

[00:33:58] United States Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene: Q is a patriot. We know that for sure, but we do not know who Q is. People believe that Q is someone very close to President Trump. According to him, many in our government are actively worshipping Satan.

[00:34:13] Mehrsa Baradaran: And all she has to do is like, look, space lasers and Rothschilds. And that is compelling, more compelling than what I’m saying.

[00:34:19] Mehrsa Baradaran: She’s the highest revenue producing congressperson. And, you know, I don’t want to say that we’re the same, but we probably have the same feeling of injustice happening. And what we do with that is based on all sorts of things. I’m hoping to talk to the Americans also who are compelled by that story. And, and I do worry because that’s exactly what happened in Germany before Hitler took over.

[00:34:47] Mehrsa Baradaran: There was economic devastation. And I come from a country where the same thing happened, where these right wing fascists, Islamo, totalitarian, theocracy, whatever you want to call it was fascism. When I was born 1978, Iran was free, just had a revolution. And by my year one, 1979, they had taken over. And I mean, they killed so many people, jailed the rest.

[00:35:10] Mehrsa Baradaran: Women lost every right they had earned. The marriage age for women changed from 18 to 13. And just, and war, and I mean, it was, Iran went to eight years of war. We still haven’t escaped that totalitarianism.

[00:35:28] Eddie Robinson: Well, that’s what I’m curious. I’m wondering, is this what inspired you to dedicate yourself to this work?

[00:35:34] Eddie Robinson: Perhaps

[00:35:35] Mehrsa Baradaran: I was writing, uh, you know, because I ended up in the seventies. Yeah, I, I understood at the time in Iran, because I was a kid, I was aware, you know, my mom, they sent my mom to prison, you know, and I came to America and I was like, wow, this country is so free. And there was horrible. And I’ve always, I’ve always understood.

[00:35:54] Mehrsa Baradaran: And every Iranian understands that the US played a role in all of it. I mean, all of it. But these people that came up, Those, the Islamic fascists were part of us. They were always there. That’s the thing. They were always there. They just were such a minority. You know, there was always men who wanted to drag women of Iran back to the, you know, 15th century.

[00:36:16] Mehrsa Baradaran: We never had Islamic rule, actually, because Iran, Islam came to Iran in 500 AD. We were like, The Persian empire. We didn’t have Islam. It came. We got the language. We got the religion. We got the mosques. We did not get the sharia law until 1970.

[00:36:32] Eddie Robinson: Wow. What happened to your mother?

[00:36:34] Mehrsa Baradaran: She formed a group of mothers against the war.

[00:36:36] Mehrsa Baradaran: They’re sending these boys like eight year old boys into cannon fodder, you know, and it was against Saddam Hussein. So both sides were being given weapons by Halliburton to throw each other’s boys into war and die for eight years. How like hundreds of thousands of boys and men and my mom formed this group and then they found her whatever, and they took her away and they put her in prison for three and a half years.

[00:37:00] Mehrsa Baradaran: And we got out. Like, just miraculously, my dad, you know, they kind of owned him because he got his medical training through the Shah, like through the army. That was how he paid for it. So he got, he was an army doctor. So he had to go to the front lines and do brain surgeries. And he was the last brain surgeon left in Iran, basically.

[00:37:20] Mehrsa Baradaran: They’re all, all the, you know, like all, anyone who could leave left and he couldn’t leave. Um, yeah. And so he did brain surgery on one of the top guys. And the first thing he says, get my wife out of prison. And then we left like within a couple of days. Um, and then thank goodness, you know, like some diplomat in Germany gave us visas to come. you know, when Trump was elected, I felt like, Oh, this is coming.

[00:37:44] Mehrsa Baradaran: You know, um, this. This, this, you’re blaming this group of, you know, Oh, it’s the Muslim’s fault. We’re just like, gosh, you guys, this is, and I get it. I do understand. I understand that when things are problematic, you go to the outsider, you go to the other. And um, yet that’s not been the driving motive of American society.

[00:38:03] Mehrsa Baradaran: It has been there. Like I’m saying, like these men, these Islamic guys, they were part of us. They were always there. So I feel like I think Americans maybe underplay that element that’s here also, that would resort to violence internally also, you know, often it starts. Just like that. Just they say, Oh, it’s those guys.

[00:38:23] Mehrsa Baradaran: It’s these guys. It’s, you know, yeah, it’s the DEI. It’s the feminists. It’s whatever.

[00:38:38] Eddie Robinson: Coming up, we wrap up our chat with the award winning author, Mehrsa Baradaran. Do you think there’s anything that can be done to course correct the economic policies of our country? Or is it too little, too late or too big to overhaul? Let us know your thoughts. What do you think about the term neoliberalism?

[00:39:01] Eddie Robinson: And do you think there’s such a thing as a free market? Email us your thoughts. Talk at I S E E U show. org. I’m Eddie Robinson. Our final segment of I SEE U comes your way right after this.

[00:39:23] Eddie Robinson: If you’re enjoying this program, be sure to subscribe to our podcast. I SEE U with Eddie Robinson. You can hear all the past episodes and be notified when new episodes are released. Also, please take a minute to give us a review or comment. We love getting feedback from our listeners.

[00:39:46] Eddie Robinson: This. I’m your host, Eddie Robinson. We’re speaking with Mehrsa Baradaran, celebrated legal scholar and author of the award winning book, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap. Her newest book is called The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America, published by W. W. Norton Company.

[00:40:13] Eddie Robinson: So, Dr. Baradaran, we’ve spoken about the rise of neoliberal policies. And how that’s led to an eroding of democratic safeguards and a concentration of wealth that’s affected all Americans. But I think a lot of listeners would say, you know, wait, hold on there. Sure, there is inequality, but there are also a lot of very wealthy Black people, you know, even several billionaires.

[00:40:37] Eddie Robinson: Also, Asian households, according to Pew Research, are overall wealthier than whites. But at the end of the day, Professor, why has Black wealth remained so low despite the successes of some?

[00:40:51] Mehrsa Baradaran: Race is the best political weapon. If you want to split a group of people whose interests are aligned, this is exactly what happened in Reconstruction.

[00:40:59] Mehrsa Baradaran: Du Bois has the same thing. The white sharecroppers and the Black sharecroppers were about to join together to say, Look, there’s these like five guys over there that are forcing us into this cotton debt market. What the Democratic Party was able to do in the South is to take the whites away from that solidarity by giving them white supremacy.

[00:41:18] Mehrsa Baradaran: And it wasn’t much. This is, Du Bois calls it the wages of whiteness. It’s not a lot. The wages of whiteness are very meager, but some people will take them. And this is exactly what Nixon did instead of look worldwide freedom struggle. Let’s go to the South and show them, prove to them that they’re wrong.

[00:41:34] Mehrsa Baradaran: It’s their fault. It’s those guys’s fault. It’s the, it’s the breaking up of coalitions that racism does. And so those things are there. It’s not created, but it’s stoked and it’s easy, you know, because it shouldn’t be. Yeah. And I think now it’s getting harder. Because of our access to each other. And I really do have hope for that in that the market has actually linked us all in different races and places, but we still do this territoriality and we still say, Oh, like.

[00:42:05] Mehrsa Baradaran: Not just Black people in America, but black nations and brown nations are still struggling is because of these ideologies that won’t die because they’re useful to systems of power.

[00:42:18] Eddie Robinson: I was hesitant, but I’m going to go ahead and read. This is a recent news article that I saw from AP that a Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is investigating a key Boeing supplier.

[00:42:29] Eddie Robinson: That has been manufacturing parts linked to, you know, crashes. He’s also asking for a breakdown of their workforce by race, sexual orientation and other factors to determine whether the makeup has changed over time.

[00:42:43] Mehrsa Baradaran: That’s weird. Oh my God.

[00:42:44] Eddie Robinson: Some conservatives have tried to link aviation safety to diversity

[00:42:48] Mehrsa Baradaran: Oh my god.

[00:42:48] Eddie Robinson: In manufacturers.

[00:42:49] News Story: As part of the investigation, Paxton wants the company to hand over documents related to manufacturing defects in their products. He also wants the company to turn over documents related to its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, or DEI. It’s the latest effort by conservatives to target such programs, and Paxton aims to examine if the company’s DEI commitments compromise the quality of its manufacturing.

[00:43:09] Eddie Robinson: Would this be an example,

[00:43:11] Mehrsa Baradaran: Yes exactly! Exactly..

[00:43:11] Eddie Robinson: Professor, of like, the quiet coup?

[00:43:14] Mehrsa Baradaran: Exactly. Because it’s, what’s happened to Boeing is, what’s happened to every corporation is like the forces of finance and monopolization, like you get a private equity firm, you create a corporation that used to make good things. And compete on that.

[00:43:28] Mehrsa Baradaran: Now it’s having to compete on financial levels. Like it has to be revenue every year over in and out. Right. So it, you know, if you’re not producing yield and alpha, you got to squeeze more out and so how, where do you squeeze, you lower your staff, you close down things, you make crappier products. You see it across the board.

[00:43:47] Mehrsa Baradaran: Right. And so capital needs growth on these balance sheets. Just growth at all costs, like cancer. Right. And, you know, shareholders are us. Right. So it’s kind of like a self cannibalizing system where you’ve got the capital needing to grow into our 401k s and where is it coming out of? It’s these private equity firms coming in and squeezing the companies that are still making things like Boeing.

[00:44:09] Mehrsa Baradaran: And then you get all of these things that are not up to par. And also the regulators have lost power to go in there and regulate because people say, oh, that they’re anti government. They’re like that. That’s government access. Let the market handle it, right? Where like airline safety has never been about the market.

[00:44:26] Mehrsa Baradaran: So you had the aviation safety rules and all of this, and those government agencies have become weakened and that’s what’s causing it. And the fact I didn’t realize it, it was blamed on diversity, but I’m not at all surprised.

[00:44:40] Eddie Robinson: The Looting Of America. I mean, like you call it, it’s like an invisible force that makes it feel like economic equality when it’s not, you know?

[00:44:49] Mehrsa Baradaran: And I got that looting phrase. I put it in introduction. Well, during the protests, there were some lootings, I guess.

[00:44:55] Eddie Robinson: Sure.

[00:44:56] Mehrsa Baradaran: The Onion had this article that was titled Protesters Criticized for looting without forming a private equity first. And I like for days I laugh because it’s right. I mean, if it’s legally and you go in and if I teach business association, I taught them a leverage buyout and I’m like, this is, they get this loan, they go in, they saddle debt on this company, and then Fire everybody.

[00:45:19] Mehrsa Baradaran: The company goes bankrupt and they get their money. They’re like, why is this legal? I’m like, exactly. Right. And it’s a, it’s a looting of a company and you know, it’s just the people downstream can’t do that because they don’t have the lawyers that the private equity firms have. And it’s legal, right? It’s legal.

[00:45:34] Mehrsa Baradaran: It’s just, well, if you buy laws, then what is the law?

[00:45:38] Eddie Robinson: You’re listening to I SEE U. I’m Eddie Robinson. We’re speaking with legal scholar, Mehrsa Baradaran, author of The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism, and the Looting of America. Where do we go from here? How can we change the system? Is it too much, too little, too late to correct a system that’s It’s hundreds of years old on some levels, probably, certainly 50 years old when you talk about neoliberalism, but how do we create change?

[00:46:07] Eddie Robinson: And please don’t say vote.

[00:46:08] Mehrsa Baradaran: No, no, I’m not going to actually, I think, because this, like I said, this book was hard for me to write because I didn’t, I did not see in politics the answer because I was the nominee for the highest banking agency during the Biden administration, I was on both the transition team.

[00:46:27] Mehrsa Baradaran: So I was deep into that financial world and I got the nomination. So there was enough forces in the Democratic Party to get a reformer. What happened with my nomination is it just kind of went away after eight months. And then nobody got nominated. There is no Senate confirmed nominee. We couldn’t get the votes on me or on any banking regulator to get that.

[00:46:46] Mehrsa Baradaran: So after that point, that was, you know, in the middle of writing this book, I got really hopeless for a long time about what if I can’t, not just me, but if we can’t get a single nominee after getting the presidency, like this is an executive agency, this is an executive agency. So I have ideas. On this, but I think more than that, it’s my job here is to help people see out of this and see a little bit above it because.

[00:47:13] Mehrsa Baradaran: What, what occurred to me at the end of this book, my 401k money, which I’ve whatever had a job, I put money in, I kind of select, click the button that says diversified fund was invested in companies like Raytheon and Exxon and JP Morgan. Like I didn’t have a choice, but that, that was, we’re all invested in this system that is on our necks.

[00:47:34] Mehrsa Baradaran: And there are a lot of, uh, Ways out and I do think that the market can get to justice faster But we we can’t sacrifice other people and because I think freedom is this calculation that can’t be maneuvered and the calculation for freedom is that either we’re all free or none of us are free. Because the other thing I’m saying about neoliberalism and this free market ideology is not just that it’s immoral and destructive It’s that it’s not profitable We’re not doing our best.

[00:48:03] Mehrsa Baradaran: We’re not producing our best. We’re as a, as a globe, but as a nation, it’s sucked the vitality out of the market as well, this, this ideology we’re not, we’re not competitive. You know, if you’re a small business and you want to go up against a tech firm, you’re either going to get swallowed or litigated.

[00:48:18] Eddie Robinson: Right?

[00:48:18] Mehrsa Baradaran: So, um, that’s not a free market. Uh, and, and I think the law, and I’m, you know, maybe I’m betraying my industry here, but the law is the problem. It’s so impenetrable and so complex, and that complexity is used to shield some just non free market stuff.

[00:48:35] Eddie Robinson: That’s it. And will there ever be reparations for anyone?

[00:48:40] Mehrsa Baradaran: We have to have justice to advance, and justice requires actual factual equality, not just in paper. Even for profits, even for free market, we must get everyone to the same starting point. That’s kind of the basic thing. So absolutely. And reparations, anytime that the government wants to create wealth, it does it.

[00:49:04] Mehrsa Baradaran: It just directs money over there. We could have done reparations at any point without any loss with only upside. Nobody loses. Everyone wins because we have fewer pockets of poverty and the inequality is just a drag on everybody. Nobody wins when we’ve got these levels of inequality.

[00:49:26] Eddie Robinson: The experiences that you’ve gained from, you know, from appearing on TV shows, guest appearing on conferences, symposiums, events across the country.

[00:49:35] Eddie Robinson: Professor, what lessons have you learned about yourself thus far?

[00:49:40] Mehrsa Baradaran: Gosh. Um, I, you know, I think this book taught me that, um, My research agenda was not really something that I consciously was. I think there’s just like a lot going on that I Maybe I was processing my childhood trauma through writing a lot yeah, and it’s not like it’s a bad idea, but maybe you know, it would have been easier to go to therapy or something but you know, I think I think I was chasing an idea.

[00:50:10] Mehrsa Baradaran: I was like, I was looking for like, when did it go wrong? You know, like what, what, you know? And, um, yeah, I think, I think it was just, it became bigger and also, um, smaller, you know, in that I think I wanted just like the basic messages. Like it’s not fair to do that to certain people and that our struggle is the same wherever we are.

[00:50:33] Mehrsa Baradaran: And it’s that we all want the same things. We all want freedom and autonomy and. It’s possible, there’s no scarcity in the world, there’s no scarcity, like I don’t know if people understand that, there’s no scarcity of food, there’s no scarcity of stuff, we can all live and eat and have shelter, what we have a scarcity of is like imagination, hope, and like love.

[00:50:56] Mehrsa Baradaran: You know, of, of, of each other. And those things were manufactured scarcities. Um, they’re not preexisting. They’re not endemic to humans.

[00:51:07] Eddie Robinson: She’s professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, an award winning author. Thank you so much for being a guest on I SEE U.

[00:51:17] Mehrsa Baradaran: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:51:25] Eddie Robinson: Our incredible team includes technical director, Todd Hulslander, producers, Laura Walker and Mincho Jacob. Special thanks to Kevin Stockdale. And K U C I. I SEE U is a production of Houston Public Media. Follow us on Instagram and X we’re at I SEE U show on Facebook and I SEE U radio show, subscribe to our podcast, wherever you listen and download your favorite shows can also catch us on our show page.

[00:51:58] Eddie Robinson: I SEE U show. org. I’m your host and executive producer, Eddie Robinson. And I feel you. We hear you. I SEE U. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time.