(George W Bush): On September 11, 2001 we were attacked in an unprovoked fashion.

I really do think it is important to think about what we were talking about before September 11th, because it is an important measure of how much ground we've lost. And we were talking about empire. Not about one country's empire but about the global network of empire and identifying those institutions that advance it and lock it in.

The World Trade Organization
The International Monetary Fund
The World Bank
The Free Trade agreements.
That's what we were going after.

At times of crisis, at times when the world is shifting beneath our feet and people are panicked and focused on our daily emergencies, we wanna look for strong leaders. And you know, those can be leaders that we love like crazy, by the way. It isn't just this authoritarian leader phenomenon that we recognized in what happened after September 11th, in sort of trusting Bush and Cheney and Juliani. It's any desire to just be led in a child-like manner, any desire to project these Messianic powers onto political leaders. So I think we're seeing a more benign form of that.

And when people are in a state of shock and when they're willing to delegate power to a small group of people that's a time when you can get things done very quickly if you have an unpopular agenda. Unlike these previous crises that have been exploited to advance this ideology, we understand that this crisis was created by that ideology.

From a public relations perspective, that makes it much harder to use that crisis to push forth more privatization. But what we have been living is a counterrevolution, a revolt of the elite against the gains of The New Deal. It's been funded and driven by the entrusted elites who have benefited from it enormously.

So, what can we be doing in the face of this?
What would resistance look like?

I think it is so much less about whether you have a government that you like or not, than whether that government is facing real pressure from below. But right now the pressure is coming from Wall Street, which is continuing to lobby despite the fact that it's now being paid for by taxpayers. And they continue to win victories defeating progressive legislation.

So that's the dynamic that has to change. Ummm, I think this is a moment right now, where you have a crisis that is clearly sending us a message that the system is broken. And you have a dramatic electoral mandate to do something about it.

If they nationalized the auto industry, they could have forced this deal through that had employee ownership. I think there should be a zero tolerance for factory closures. These factories could be turned into workers cooperatives. They could be brought into a real Green New Deal. Before any factory closes, there could be a green audit to see what sort of technological upgrades need to happen to transform an auto parts factory into a factory that can be making public transit, that can be making technology for wind and solar. And they should be subsidized for it and if the bosses don't wanna run that factory then the workers who are creditors in every single one of these cases, should be given the opportunity to run the factory for themselves.

That's..........I'm gonna end there because I got applause, so good night.