Jonathan Tasini, who is challenging New York U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand in the Democratic primary for the 2010 U.S. Senate special election in New York, is a union leader and organizer, a social activist, and a commentator and writer on work, labor and the economy.  In this interview he talks about his new book, The Audacity of Greed: Free Markets, Corporate Thieves, and the Looting of America.

In the introduction to your book you refer to a “vast robbery” that began in the late 1970s and has extended to the present day. What do you mean by that?

The great robbery that The Audacity of Greed addresses is a robbery of two kinds. One is the looting of corporate treasuries–mostly legal–pensions and pay, unbelievable riches that the main CEOs and top executives walked away with, billions and billions of dollars. There’s only so much money in a company, so that money that was taken by the few was then not available for the many–the workers.

The larger robbery was what happened to American workers in that they weren’t paid in relation to how hard they’d worked. Over the last 30 years productivity has skyrocketed, and yet wages have been flat. And so the robbery is of workers who were not paid for a fair share of their productivity. This is the notion of the American Dream–that you worked hard and kept your nose clean, you would get a fair day’s pay. And that just vanished from the American scene.

How different was the period before this?

I don’t want to romanticize the time before the 1970s, but it is true that after the Second World War, up until about the mid-1970s, there was a general thought that when workers did well, America did well. It wasn’t that companies loved workers and unions, but there was an understanding that they could live together. But then things shifted. Ronald Reagan was elected. You had a conservative assault on government. The free market became the dominant theory, one that was bought on a bipartisan basis. Conservatism won, though we had Democratic presidents in this period. The idea that the free market should decide how things were done in our country really became a philosophy that was shared by both political parties. And that affected workers’ ability to get decent pay.

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Here’s our latest video — an interview with Max Blumenthal, author of Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party. In the book–a rollicking tour through the culture of personal crisis and resentment that is the modern conservative movement–Blumenthal draws on his own firsthand reporting to tell the lurid story of how an extreme anti-government fringe became the Republican Party mainstream. Here he talks about how the recent upsurge in violent rhetoric and anti-Obama hysteria, recently on vivid display at a right-wing march on Washington on September 12, fit in (perfectly, as it happens) with this larger story.