Films and Commentary from Saul Landau

"They (the Mayan Indians) have a lot to teach us. My experience down there filming was a very humbling experience for me," Landau said. "There is no electricity. You are totally deprived of your biological comforts."

Speaking to Press TV's U.S. Desk on Sunday, Landau said, "President Obama has made very minor cuts in military budget but nothing that basically alters the fundamental position of the United States abroad."

Landau: "Well I think it started really in the early 1970's when wages began to freeze and then actually real wages went down and in order to keep Americans; everybody uses the word middle class, now people forgot about working people. 

Anyway, whatever we call them, the people who do most of the work in this country had their wages begin to decline 38 years ago and to make up for that so that they can continue consuming, there was an expansion of credit. This came not just in availability of credit cards but in the inflation of home values."

Landau: I think what it demonstrated here in Oakland is that majority of the population clearly support the occupiers. And they have rallied around them in one form and another to force the mayor and the city council and even the media, to begin to react in a more rational and reasonable way, now what the police do and what some of the provocateur do is a different stories.

The fact is if one break down this whole idea of occupation, well people are occupying cities across the US and indeed across the world, because they cannot go to their regular occupations, their jobs have been eroded, vanished, lost, gone, they are gone somewhere else, or just disappeared.

Occupy? They can't even occupy their own homes, because they are foreclosed or evicted, after they lost their jobs and could not pay their rents, so they are occupying. What they really saying is that the government the political system and economic system are illegitimate.

They no longer can serve the cause and the purpose that they have been set up for. And this has resonated around the world. They are no channels through which to mediate the grievances of millions and millions of people who are homeless, who are jobless, who are at bay, who have all kinds of qualification that should give them good jobs, but cannot get them.

So something is fundamentally wrong and this is what this movement is talking about, and I think it is done so in a very dramatic way. And it has mobilized discontent as we have not seen since the 1960s.

The people who are suffering certainly cannot turn to the Republicans who are contemptuous of the poor and contemptuous of human suffering really. They cannot now turn to the Democrats who are led by a man who is always in the middle.

“I think you could argue that [U.S. President Barack] Obama inherited a legacy from George Bush, and part of that he's stuck with,” Landau told Press TV's U.S. Desk in a Sunday interview.

“What George Bush really did was make a much better life for people who had lots and lots of money and a worse life for people who had little money, that is the working people and the middle class of the United Sates,” he went on to say.

Vice Chair of the Institute for Policy Studies Saul Landau says keeping U.S. troops in Iraq would lead to "a constant spark of irritation for the people who just don't want invaders."

Landau told Press TV's U.S. Desk on Wednesday that the U.S. presence in Iraq "is a permanent irritant as it would be in any country when you have a foreign occupying army. So the best thing the United States can do is just get out and get out quickly."

Landau said, "When you send in a massive technologically superior army and wipe out the institutions that held this country together, you are going to create a disintegration."

It's very clear that the winners are the billionaires, the oil companies and the other large corporations, who are really going to get at least the same, if not more, than they were before. 

The losers of course are the majority of the American public, and it's not just that they are losers in the sense that they are going to be paying more, way more, than their fair share. 

It's that they're losers in another way. Its' become quite clear that they are the only people in this country that don't have a lobby. 

Every single special interest group has a very good lobby that gets what it wants, but the American public has none and it doesn't get what it wants and needs.