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Questioner: Very simply put, there’s a growing movement among young people here in
Europe, in France and in Austria and elsewhere, and they’re arguing very effectively
against Wall Street institutions and they’re also appealing to people on an ethnic and racial
level. And I was just wondering what you would recommend to counteract these
movements, which are growing.
Bannon: One of the reasons that you can understand how they’re being fueled is that
they’re not seeing the benefits of capitalism. I mean particularly — and I think it’s
particularly more advanced in Europe than it is in the United States, but in the United
States it’s getting pretty advanced — is that when you have this kind of crony capitalism,
you have a different set of rules for the people that make the rules. It’s this partnership of
big government and corporatists. I think it starts to fuel, particularly as you start to see
negative job creation. If you go back, in fact, and look at the United States’ GDP, you look
at a bunch of Europe. If you take out government spending, you know, we’ve had negative
growth on a real basis for over a decade.
And that all trickles down to the man in the street. If you look at people’s lives, and
particularly millennials, look at people under 30 — people under 30, there’s 50% really
under employment of people in the United States, which is probably the most advanced
economy in the West, and it gets worse in Europe.
I think in Spain it’s something like 50 or 60% of the youth under 30 are underemployed.
And that means the decade of their twenties, which is where you have to learn a skill,
where you have to learn a craft, where you really start to get comfortable in your
profession, you’re taking that away from the entire generation. That’s only going to fuel
tribalism, that’s only going to fuel [unintelligible]... That’s why to me, it’s incumbent upon
freedom-loving people to make sure that we sort out these governments and make sure
that we sort out particularly this crony capitalism so that the benefits become more of this
entrepreneurial spirit and that can flow back to working-class and middle-class people.
Because if not, we’re going to pay a huge price for this. You can already start to see it.
Questioner: I have a question, because you worked on Wall Street. What is the opinion
there on whether they think bank bailouts are justified? Is there a Christian-centered
[unintelligible] that they think should be bailed out? The crisis starts earlier than 2008.
What was the precedent then? What was the feeling on Wall Street when they bailed out
the banks? How should Christians feel about advocating or being against that?

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