(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - Welcome to "Generation Rising."

I'm Anaridis Rodriguez.

Here at "Generation Rising," we have conversations that explore solutions to the inequities our diverse communities face every day.

Joining us tonight is Greg Brailsford, owner of Company 50 and Uprise RI, a local news organization covering our state's most important issues.

Tonight, he joins us to talk about something he's been very outspoken and a critic of, and that is our country's economic and political system, capitalism.

Greg, thank you so much for being with us tonight.

- Thank you for having me.

It's a pleasure to be here.

- So let's talk about your article, which was titled "The Scam of Capitalism: How We Get Duped Every Day."

And I encourage our readers to read it.

I went through a lot of emotions reading it myself.

And there was one point you wrote, "If you are getting the feeling that capitalism seems more like socialism for corporations and special interest, you hit the jackpot."

- That's true.

And, you know, you realize that, when you think about it, whenever there's a law or legislation that is for the people, you often hear, you know, how we pay for that, or we can't afford to do that, or that's socialism, or that's, you know, whatever, something bad.

But when it's a corporation, you know, with their hand out, it's never an issue.

It's never an issue, you know, as far as cost, or there's no obstacles that can't be overcome to put that legislation through.

And, you know, it's not right, because corporations have money.

They have a lot of money.

They have investors.

They have the ability to pay for stuff like that.

Whereas Americans, a lot of them are, you know, paycheck to paycheck, you know, and worse.

Can't even afford their basic needs.

And, excuse me, they're not getting a subsidy, and that's not right.

But like, when you look at, you know, whether it's oil companies or other industries, you know, there's a lot of subsidies going around.

You know, major agricultural, you know, farm organizations, that these are not small farmers.

These are large organizations getting subsidies that they don't need, but they're getting them.

It seems like, you know, the story you're told about capitalism, you know, the free market, you know, they're on their own, and they're accomplishing these things on their own, is not entirely true.

They're getting a lot of help from the government in the form of subsidies and other forms of corporate welfare.

- How did you get to writing this article?

What motivated you to kind of jot down what to me seemed like a stream of consciousness that a lot of us can relate to?

- It's funny you asked that because I wrote the article about two years ago, and it took me several months to put it all together, because there were just so many examples.

And the article's pretty long.

It could have been a lot longer.

And I mentioned that in the article, how I'm just gonna cut it off here because, you know, I don't wanna ramble on.

But there's so many examples of where, you know, we're told a story, we're told a lie.

You know, capitalism, you know, the American dream.

If you work hard, you know, at this company, wherever you're working, eventually you'll get promoted, and you'll, you know, become rich and well off or what have you.

And it's just not true.

And, you know, so I collected, you know, just over the course of my experience, you know, in observations, seeing how the world actually works.

And, you know, putting that on paper and saying like, "Hey, you know, don't take my word for it.

Here's the facts.

Check it out yourself."

You know, I mentioned how, you know, we're told that, you know, it's a free country.

And, you know, we're not slaves, obviously.

But when you look at it, you know, you and I, and a lot of other people, you had to go to work every day, right?

You have to work your nine-to-five.

If you don't work, if I decide tomorrow I'm just gonna stop working, right, where's the money gonna come in to feed my kids and put a roof over my head?

The government's not providing it, you know.

In other countries, that is something that's provided.

There's a bottom social safety net.

There's guaranteed income that says, "Okay, we're gonna give you enough to meet your basic needs.

Now, if you want to go beyond that, if you wanna start a business, if you want to, you know, invent something, you know, and that's fine.

You're welcome to do that.

You know, it's still capitalism.

You can do that."

But here, it's different.

- You called everyone out, and at one point you compared capitalism as a form of slavery.

Do you think that's too harsh of a comparison?

- Well, no.

I mean, like I said in my, what I just said a minute ago, when you think about it, you know, you're getting compensated for your work, obviously.

We're not slaves in the sense that we're working for free.

But when you look at what our parents and grandparents earned in their jobs, you know, what they did, and a lot of times it was a lot of monotonous, blue-collar stuff.

My grandparents worked in a jewelry place.

But they made, somehow, in a jewelry place, you know, just putting little jewelry together, a pretty monotonous job, made enough money to not only buy a house, but they paid off their mortgage very quickly.

They had cars.

They had things that, today, people struggle to afford.

And they were able to afford it, you know, not by being doctors or attorneys, but by being just a common blue-class worker.

And nowadays that's not the case anymore.

So we are working harder than ever for less money than ever.

You know, the federal minimum wage hasn't changed in over a decade, if not more, you know, and that's not right.

You know, there should be living standards.

You know, in a country like the United States that prides itself, you know, on being, you know, the best country on earth and things like that, you know, I think that a minimum wage that's fair and reasonable should be the cornerstone of something like that.

- You call out everyone.

You call out private health insurance companies.

You even said there was a reason why the McDonald's ice cream machines were out most of the time.

And you say all this is linked to governments catering to corporations.

Talk to us a little bit more about that.

- So yeah.

So as far as the McDonald's thing, I think that's an important thing to talk about.

It sounds like a funny thing, and it doesn't sound relevant, but it's a very important thing to think about when you talk about the messed up stuff about capitalism, what's truly messed up.

So if you've gone to McDonald's anytime, whenever in your life, chances are the ice cream machine wasn't working.

If you wanted to order a sundae or something like that, the ice cream machine wasn't working a lot.

Like, way more often than you'd think an ice cream machine should be broken down.

And so a magazine, I forget which one, looked into this and said, "Why is this happening?"

And it turns out that the manufacturer of these ice cream machines, they have the exclusive, they manufacture all of McDonald's ice cream machines, they overengineered them intentionally so that any little thing will cause it to break down.

And when it breaks down, you, the franchisee, who owns the McDonald's, you're not allowed to fix it.

You have to call in this company who then comes in and fixes it.

And it can get pricey.

So this company sells maintenance contracts to people, so to the franchisee, so that when your machine breaks down, you're covered like that.

But you're paying a pretty penny for this.

Instead of making the machines just work reliably, McDonald's is allowing this to happen.

Why are they allowing it to happen?

Well, it turns out that they're getting kickbacks from the repair of these machines.

So it essentially means that the machines, they don't care if they have to work or not, because McDonald's is making money anyway.

And there's something wrong about that, okay, when it's a good thing when your ice cream machine is not working.

- Obviously, that doesn't sound like good business.

Why does it keep happening?

The term greedflation has been going around in recent years.

We are living through an inflation right now.

There was a study that was published, and it was the largest one, looking at 1,300 corporations and finding that many of them are lying about why they need to raise prices.

So why do they continue these business practices?

And why do consumers continue to support these corporations?

Is that where there needs to be a crack in the system?

- Well, yeah.

During COVID, obviously, there were some supply chain issues that caused prices to fairly increase, you know, because the supply wasn't there.

And I talk about in the article why that whole supply chain crack happened.

But the bottom line is it happened.

And so certain prices had to go up.

But a lot of manufacturers, especially in grocery, took that opportunity to raise prices regardless of their costs actually going up.

One example was Coca-Cola.

Coca-Cola has steadfastly, and they've told their investors as much, raised their prices of their soda over time, over the past couple of years.

And that's short-term thinking.

And the reason it's short-term thinking is because eventually customers are gonna say, "I can't afford this anymore.

I'm gonna go to a store brand."

And they switch to a store brand.

And once they switch to the store brand, they might realize, "Wow, this is close enough to Coke that I'm just not gonna buy Coke anymore."

And Coke realized this now, because in one of their last investor presentations, they said, "We're noticing the consumer is now looking at and switching to store brands."

So their short-term thinking of raising prices now is causing them to permanently lose customers.

These customers are many times not gonna come back when they realize the store brand, you know, at Stop & Shop or Trader Joe or Costco, whatever it is, is similar enough in taste that they like it and say, "Okay, you know what?

Rather than paying, you know, $3 for this, you know, two-liter, I'm gonna pay 99 cents.

You know, and it's almost the same thing."

- Is that going to be enough to move the needle?

When we read about headlines with corporations raking in record profits, what is it going to take to disrupt that trend?

- Well, it's a good question to ask.

And there's two kind of trains of thought here.

The first one is in industries where there is competition, like the soda industry, you know, even though the big majors, Coke and Pepsi, there's still a lot of choice there.

And so consumers have a choice to move to a store brand, which they've been doing.

In which case, Coca-Cola responds by, and in their investor presentation, not raising prices anymore.

They said, "We'll still raise price over time, but it ain't gonna be like it was before.

We're going to stop the rapid increases because we don't wanna lose any more customers."

And you look at other industries where there's a monopoly.

Some industries only have one or two players.

Those industries are probably not going to change much.

You know, look at the defense industry in the United States.

There's only a few players now.

There used to be hundreds of different companies that the US military contracted out to decades ago.

And now there's just a couple.

And so as a result, if there's no competition really, or there's only a few players, they have no incentive to lower their prices.

So it really depends on the industry if this is going to get better or not.

- You also make an interesting connection between climate change and capitalism.

Can you expand more on that?

- Well, capitalism, it doesn't care about climate change.

You know, capitalism, the only goal of capitalism is to make capitalists money.

That's it.

That's the whole point.

And so there's no care about, you know, is this gonna affect the environment?

You know, it doesn't matter, you know.

And you get here and there.

You heard about, you know, ESG with investments, you know, where there is attention paid to, how is this gonna affect the environment?

And it got off to a little bit of start, you know, here and there, but it's kind of, you know, gone away.

And we're back to the whole like, you know, let's just make money no matter what.

And people don't realize, again, short-term thinking, okay?

Short-term thinking is we'll just ignore the whole climate change thing and just keep doing what we were doing.

Long term, as we see more and more weather-related disasters happen, this is going to start affecting these corporations.

You know, it's gonna affect everybody.

So it's definitely gonna affect corporations.

You know, when people don't have a home, don't have, you know, any money at all, you know, they're not gonna be able to buy your product.

And the more these disasters keep happening, and they're happening more rapidly and rapidly, the money's gotta come from somewhere to build the infrastructure back.

And so capitalism, you know, is, eventually, their hand's going to be forced, and they're gonna have to reckon with the fact that unbridled capitalism, without any care to any other stakeholders, you know, employees, climate change, you know, people that aren't necessarily, you know, paying the company money as an investor or as a consumer, it still matters.

And attention needs to be paid to those factors.

- What would you say to critics who would disagree with you?

Who would say capitalism motivates people to be entrepreneurial.

Capitalism, even though we're seeing economic trends where the middle class is shrinking, the lower-wage class, it's actually going up in pay scale.

What would you say to people who say, you know, we have the largest economy in the world with the third largest population?

So it is working in that sense.

- Well, like I said, it's working for some people.

It's not working for a lot of people.

And you just gotta talk to your friends and neighbors to find that out, you know.

Regardless of what, you know, the president or anyone else says about the economy, the fact is that the boots on the ground, the people who are here experiencing life in the United States, the economy isn't doing well, you know, for those people.

And I think in a healthy country, I think even the poorest of people should have their basic needs met.

You know, a lot of these people are not in situations that they created.

They're not.

And that's a whole different conversation.

But the fact is, you know, a lot of people say, "Well, it's decisions they made."

And it's not always decisions they made.

People are put into these situations, and they didn't ask to be put in the situation.

And it is what it is, you know.

We talk about, you know, crime.

You know, we talk about a lot of theft.

Retail theft has been in the news lately.

Well, we know that rich people, for the most part, don't steal.

They don't go into retail stores and steal aftershave or whatever it is and stuff like that.

Why?

'Cause their basic needs are met.

They don't need to risk themselves for that.

Whereas people who need to feed their kids, you know, or can't get a job, or their job's not paying them enough, you know, they have to take extreme measures.

And sometimes that includes, you know, walking into a store and stealing something that they can turn into cash and put food on the table.

And that's an unfortunate side effect of capitalism.

You know, it doesn't have to be that way, but that's how it is.

And you brought up a good point about innovation.

As far as innovation goes, you know, and you brought that up earlier, I'm not against capitalism.

I think that if someone wants to invent something or start a business, or anything like that, they should be able to do that, and they should be able to be compensated for that.

I think that innovation is important.

I think that if everyone was just paid, you know, a stipend or whatever it is and all their needs were met, and they never had to work and everything like that, I think for sure that innovation would suffer.

Because, you know, granted, there's people out there that are gonna do things just for the sake of doing them.

They're gonna invent something nice or create something nice just for the incentive of just doing it.

There's definitely that out there.

But there are also people, very smart people, who need an incentive.

Who need a financial incentive to build something nice.

And they should be compensated accordingly for that.

Now, where I differ is how much they're compensated.

You know, for example, look at Elon Musk, okay?

Now, Elon Musk is a smart guy in certain respects, okay?

He's an engineer.

He knows what he's talking about in a lot of respects.

He helped create Tesla.

He works a lot.

Now, he's worth something like, what, over $100 billion.

Now, is the work he's done equivalent to $100 billion worth of work?

It'd be hard to find someone who's going to say yes.

I think that, you know, helping to create this car company, which you had public investors invest in it, that's why it's worth so much.

Because, you know, the public invested in it, you know, it's public company.

But as a result of the price of Tesla stock, he's worth all this money.

And is it equivalent to that?

Does he deserve to be worth 100, $200 billion just for doing this?

Whereas someone who arguably worked in a coal mine their whole life and suffered, you know, black lung disease and worked 12 hours a day, hard work, you know, every day, 40 hour, 50 hours a week for years, and they made, you know, 40, $50,000 a year.

You know, does that add up?

And that's, you know, my problem, is that, you know, I think that if you're gonna work hard, yeah, sure, you should be compensated, but I don't think anybody out there should have $100 billion worth of wealth.

Because that wealth's coming from somewhere, all right?

It's being taken from one class of people, and it's being migrated to another class of people.

- And those estimates, too, it's interesting that you mentioned that, are also skewed, right?

What they're worth versus what really is a liquid asset.

Or is it what they're worth in borrowing money, right?

There's so many different formulas that kind of inflate that number, and it's not realistic.

What are the solutions?

Let's talk about that.

Where do you find the middle ground?

Is it subsidizing the cost of certain, you know, living expenses for families, like childcare or commuting to work?

How do we make the system, in your opinion, work for everyone?

- Well, COVID was a great example of how things could be.

If you remember, there was a child tax credit.

There was a bunch of incentives for parents during COVID that you saw reduced childhood poverty significantly.

During that period when they were receiving these payments, childhood poverty dropped significantly.

And then it went away.

Then the law expired and the money went away, and all of a sudden it went right back up.

And so I think that a country like the United States should easily be, and we can afford to cover everyone's basic needs, like these Scandinavian countries do, like other countries do.

Covering basic needs.

So hey, if you lost your job, okay, you don't have to, you know, freak out about it.

It's not the end of the world.

You can get another job.

But in the meantime, you know, your basic needs are met.

Or you want to start a business.

You know, it's risky.

You know, if there's no income coming in, you're starting a business, it's definitely risky.

And a lot of people don't want to do it, for that reason.

But having your basic needs met, like, you're gonna get a certain amount of money every month that's gonna cover your food expenses and your housing.

And we can afford to do that.

You know, our priorities as a country are skewed a bit.

We spend an enormous amount of money on our military that I don't believe, and the Pentagon, would be hard to argue that you're getting a value out of that.

You know, that money could be diverted.

Not all of it, but a lot of it could be diverted to solving childhood poverty, to covering people's basic needs, to providing medical insurance coverage to everybody.

And real insurance.

Not this scam-ish kind of private insurance that we have now, you know, where you pay or your employer pays for your health insurance, and then you go to the doctor and you still end up having to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for your treatment.

You know, it can be better.

It can be done too.

It's just a matter of electing people that wanna do it.

For candidates have to run that want to do this.

That's step one.

And step two is when they do run, you have to vote for them, you know?

And that's what's gonna make the difference.

- Is there any legislation happening locally that people could support or that you support that would create pathways to these types of incentives?

- I know there are progressives in the State House, like Representative Morales, Senator Mack, that do usually introduce bills of that nature.

I'm hopeful that they can make some ground, because it's very difficult to do these things in the US Congress, but it's a lot easier to do them at the state level.

Granted, you know, things like, you know, universal healthcare are a little more difficult when you're dealing with Rhode Island versus having the money that the United States Treasury brings in.

But there are other things that Rhode Island can do that can't afford to do if our priorities are shifted.

That can cover a lot of things that I think make people's lives better.

Because money affects a lot of things in people's lives.

It affects their mental health.

It affects their ability to, again, meet basic needs, put food on the table, enjoy some entertainment once in a while, you know, make life worth living.

You know, these things are important.

You know, it's not at all about just being in a never-ending rat race.

- It's gonna take some time to get there, right?

To match the policies to the will of the people.

This is a topic that anyone can talk about for days.

We only have 25, 27 minutes or so.

(laughs) - I know.

- So I am putting you on the spot a bit, but what are some things you do to try to balance it all?

- Well, I mean, unfortunately, I'm not in a situation where I'm living paycheck to paycheck, but I've been in that situation multiple times in my life, both growing up and when I closed a business about 15 years ago.

I was in the situation where I had to penny pinch pretty badly.

So when I speak on these things, I come from a position of, okay, I know what it's like to be a little well off, but I also know what it's like to not have any money.

And it's important to have those experiences.

You know, that's the problem with a lot of our politicians.

A lot of people making decisions, they don't know what it's like.

They have no idea what it's like to be living paycheck to paycheck, or when an expense comes up, saying to themselves like, "What do I have to sacrifice to be able to afford this?"

And I think that our leaders need to really get in the weeds and meet with these people.

Meet with people and talk with people and realize and understand what their lives are like and see what it's like.

And that's powerful.

It's very powerful.

You see all the time when politicians go and do something, you know, want to, you know, be like the people and do something that the people are doing, and they come back and say, "Wow, this has profoundly changed the way that I think about things."

You know?

And whether it's someone voluntarily suffering through in solitary confinement in prison and realizing like, "Wow, this is a lot worse than I thought it was," to, you know, working at a retail store.

You know, you sometimes see the CEOs of these big companies do a shift at the retail store.

And a lot of times you hear them say like, "Wow, we're gonna make some changes.

I didn't know it was this bad."

Or, you know, so it's all about being empathetic to other people's plights and understanding what they're going through.

And I think the more leaders, the people that are involved in making these decisions, especially controlling the money, when they are exposed to how people live, I think that they'll change their tune and realize that, you know, it's something that needs to be addressed.

- Before we go, I want to invite you to tell our viewers how they can stay in touch with you and follow along all of your editorials.

But the editorial we started talking about earlier in the program you wrote two years ago.

And my final question would be, do you still feel the same way?

- Oh, I do.

Absolutely.

I reviewed the article before we came on here, and it all still rings true.

You know, there's nothing really that's changed.

There are, you know, some things that are happening now.

Lina Khan, who's the chairman of the FCC, FTC, sorry, she's really gone hard at antitrust and monopolies.

And you're starting to see that in the news.

You know, whether it's Google or Facebook or some random agricultural company, they're going after them.

Even Pentagon contractors now are under the crosshairs to stop the monopolization from happening.

And that's causing, as a result, prices to come down.

The more competition there is, generally, the more prices are gonna come down, and the better products are going to get.

You know, as an example, look at Google.

Google Search has been the dominant way people find stuff on the internet for a very long time.

And then last year, about a year ago exactly, ChatGPT came out.

And granted, it's not a search engine, but it provides much better answers.

And Google was left flatfooted.

They didn't see it coming, and it took them literally a year.

They just announced the new product that is very similar to ChatGPT.

But it took them a year to come around because they had no competition.

They didn't have things in the pipeline to make things better 'cause there was no incentive to make things better.

Now that it is, all of a sudden you're seeing all this competition in that space all of a sudden.

And that's good for people, you know, to have all these competitors.

So I think that's a big thing.

I think people watching this show need to understand monopolies and how they work and how they crush the consumer in a lot of industries.

When there's few players, whether it's cable television, whether it's internet.

You know, in Rhode Island, internet choices, you pretty much have, you know, Verizon, Cox, and maybe a 5G wireless provider.

That's pretty much it, you know.

And other countries have, you know, 10, 15 different internet providers.

They have a state provider that offers it for free.

A small lower tier, but it's for free.

And so there's a lot of ideas out there I think that could be adopted to make things, to provide a better life for people, you know.

- There is a lot yet to be discovered when it comes to this conversation.

How can folks stay in touch with you to keep up?

- Well, you can visit upriseri.com.

We've got a lot of great tools coming in the coming year to both follow state legislation and also get help.

Get answers to common problems that people run into, whether it's consumer complaints, whether it's, you know, finding housing, whether it's questions about things your landlord can do, things like that.

There's a lot of cool stuff coming, in addition to our editorials and stuff that kind of focus on, you know, things like capitalism and related things that I think people, and monopolies.

We've done an article about monopolies as well.

Just to kind of bring this stuff up, because the mainstream media, a lot of times, they don't care.

They're kind of compensated in a way not to care, 'cause they sell advertising.

And Uprise RI does not sell advertising, so we're free to write how we feel.

And I think these topics are important to cover, and we'll keep at it.

- Well, thank you so much for your insight and for being with us here today.

- Oh, thank you so much for having me on, Anaridis.

I appreciate it.

- We have run out of time.

We would like to thank Greg Brailsford, owner of Company 50 and Uprise RI.

You can watch this episode and all our past episodes anytime at watch.ripbs.org.

And be sure to follow us on these social platforms for the latest updates.

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