Hello and welcome to Navarra FM. My name is Eleanor Penny.

In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on

either side of the Atlantic were busy smashing unions and deregulating financial markets

to unleash the power of the finance sector. This was the era of Gordon Gecko and power suits and

Greed is Good messaging, the era that crystallised

the economic common sense that regulation and collective ownership stifled growth,

and that unshackled finance capitalism would lift us all into prosperity.

Decades later, and that hasn't exactly happened. In fact, finance increasingly dominates other sectors of the economy,

transforming public wealth and non-financial industries into loglines on the balance sheet

of a hedge fund manager domiciled for tax purposes somewhere in the Cayman Islands.

And the dominance of this sector in every area of public life and politics

is chipping away at democracy,

at ways we could otherwise be collectively deciding how the economy is run,

where money from pensions, taxes and investment goes.

Academic and writer Michael A. McCarthy thinks there has to be a better way.

Mike is an associate professor of sociology and a director of community studies at the University

of California, Santa Cruz. His book, Dismantling Solidarity, Capitalist Politics and American

Pension since the Green New

Deal was awarded the Paul Sweezy Book Award. He's written for the Boston Review, Jacobin,

Noema and The Washington Post. His latest book is The Master's Tools, How Finance Wrecked Democracy

and a radical plan to rebuild it.

He charts a history of class war between unions and finances from the 20th century to the present day, examining the relationship between the banking sector and the state, the real-life

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