When I got to Harvard Business School in 1983, a bunch of professors were coming up with a radical idea that’ has had a horrible negative consequence on this country and to the fabric of our society: the maximization of shareholder value; this was preached as High Church theology. The whole thing of the financialization of Wall Street, of looking at people as pure commodities and of outsourcing and globalization, came from the business schools and the financial community that had these radical ideas, and nobody kept them in check … [So] here’s the concept of right-wing populism. If the ’80s and the way we got in this debacle was this radical idea of maximization of shareholder value, here’s what right-wing populism stands for. It’s very simple concept. We’re going to maximize the value of citizenship. We’re going to maximize citizenship value. If you’re an American citizen, you get a special deal. I don’t care if you’re Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, black, white, red, pink, green. I do not care. If you’re an American citizen, you get a better deal. – Steve Bannon

It’s been a trip hearing Jon Stewart jacking Steve Bannon talking points as of late (and, of course, subsequently not giving credit where credit is due) on his new podcast, The Problem with Jon Stewart (ipso facto asking questions that you’ll never hear on mainstream media). His recent conversation with major Democrat Party donor and JP Morgan Chase (a company that received a $25 billion bailout from the Federal Reserve in 2008) CEO Jamie “I think I could beat Trump” Dimon (like Bannon, Dimon is a product of Harvard Business School) is just one example of this. In fact, the episode summary could’ve come straight from Advanced Citizenship:

In the United States, we pride ourselves on having a free market economy—but we don’t actually have one. Corporations are given endless help while workers often struggle to survive. Jon sits down with Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, to discuss these two sides of the economy.

There ain’t nothing ‘free’ about our supposedly ‘free market’, that’s for damn sure. As Bannon always says, in America, “You have socialism in this country for the very wealthy and for the very poor. And you have a brutal form of Darwinian capitalism for everybody else.”

At one point during the dialogue, Stewart asks Dimon the following round of questions: 

Why is it that labor and workers haven’t seen their wages grow? It’s because corporations left to their own devices will, as they should, only be looking out for their profit. Should they [the workers] share in the profits? WalMart makes billions of dollars. Should their workers share in their profits? Should they also get profit sharing? Should they also benefit when the company benefits? Especially since the company benefits from American infrastructure and from the taxpayer subsidizing their workforce with social safety programs? 

You can listen to Dimon’s answer and the entire episode HERE and watch Krystal Ball (who would’ve asked “Don’t you think power has been shifted away from workers and unions and towards major corporations?”) and Saagar Enjeti highlighting some key moments from the conversation on Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar in a segment titled “Jon Stewart EXPOSES Wall Street CEO’s Lies To His Face” HERE.