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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, debts, incomes, our own and our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I want to begin with good news today from the Rolls Royce Corporation, and I want to share it with you. They are so happy, and they've made me happy too. First of all, let's all remember that Rolls Royce once was a British company, but like so many things that once were British, they aren't anymore. This corporation was purchased by the German automobile company BMW. And it happily announced that in the first quarter of this year, it. It delivered more cars than it ever has in a quarter before. A total of 1,400 cars. The major brands, the Cullinan and the Ghost, sell for a base price of about $330,000 per car. Properly and fully equipped, they go over 400,000 each. They have a number of wonderful interior design features. I will only mention to you one, a starry evening sky projected on the interior ceiling of the automobile. Bentley and Lamborghini also announced good sales. And as an economist, I just want to remind you these numbers are features of what happens in an economy when the rich get richer and the rest of us don't. Resources that might have gone to the goods and services the mass of people need are deflected. Go elsewhere where the money is. That's how capitalism works. So those resources, those workers that steal that paint and that starry sky go into 1,400 cars for the richest amongst us. Let me turn next to not such good news. The effort to unionize Amazon in Alabama was defeated, and soundly so. And there have been lots of obituaries about that effort. Not that it's over. There will be continuing efforts. But there have been comments on what was clever or not in what the Amazon management did and what was clever or not in what the union organizers did. No doubt both of them had their strong points, their weak points, the mistakes they may have made. I'm not interested in those. I want to draw your attention to, to a larger factor that I think played a major role, probably the dominant role in the outcome of that unionization effort. In order to win a battle at a union vote in a workplace, you need to have the mass of the workers there trained, in a sense, to think about the world in. In a different way from the way they do it now. What has to become common sense has to be cultivated. It has been cultivated over the last 75 years in this country, very systematically. In the media, in the movies, on the Radio, on television, in the news, at church, in the school. All of those places, pictures have been painted in which the people who run our big businesses are CEO geniuses worth all that money because, wow, are they super competent. They are all captains of industry. We reward them with top government jobs, accolades from here to tomorrow, and amounts of money to be paid to them, which is the ultimate complement in a capitalist society. In contrast, workers are drones and unions. Wow, they're scary. They're a little bit better than crooks, but not much better. They get the same kind of low appreciation that you give others in our society that don't get much prestige. Interesting. Once upon a time, captains of industry had a different name. We called them robber barons in the literature because they were looked at as people who squeezed the working class, who tried to cheat you at every turn by charging more than what they sold to you and paying less than what your labor was worth, and so on and so on. If you had a different notion of common sense, if the hero was the working man and woman and not the captain of industry living in the mansion, well, then your whole attitude would be different. In Europe, unions are much more successful and much more powerful. Not because they don't make mistakes, not because each of their efforts isn't a genius stroke of strategy. It's because the general culture in European countries is much more progressive. And you know who takes care of that for the unions? Not so much the unions themselves. They do a good bit of it. They have more resources. In Europe, American unions are stretched thin. They can't put the people or the money to work to change the public conversation. They need a partner to do that. In Europe, they have a partner. Those things are called socialist parties and communist parties and even green parties. In many countries, they're out there day by day, cultivating a way of looking at the world that then shows up in a positive vote for for a union at a workplace. The American unions once had that, but it was destroyed after World War II. During the 1930s, you had the closest alliance between the American labor movement and the left politically. And, boy, did that make a difference when the unions really grew like crazy in the 1930s and after the 1930s, after the war was over in World War II, the alliance between labor and the left was smashed. And therein begins the decline of the labor movement. Learn the lesson. You need a partner. If you're in the labor movement. The left is willing and interested. It's a partnership. It's an alliance. It's what labor needs. And it's what labor lacks. And that for me is why those workers lost that union drive in Bessemer, Alabama. My next update has to do with a lot of noise that I'm hearing that I want to comment on and that many of you have asked me to comment on. We are being told that we're about to enter an enormous boom because the new Biden administration is pumping unprecedented amounts of money into the economy, the American rescue plan, the, the infrastructure buildout and so on. We're hearing it's going to be like the end of World War II and so forth. I've commented on this before, but you've asked for more. So let me give you three basic reasons why this boom is not likely to be anything like what it's being hyped up to be. And that's important for the immediate future of all of us. Number one, the business community is able to use its political power to reduce everything that Mr. Biden has promised. The Business Roundtable just released a survey that 98% of the CEOs it surveyed don't want the income, the corporate profits tax to be raised, as Biden has asked, from 21% to 28%. Let's again be clear, raising it from 21 to 28, which is all the President has asked for, is only going halfway back to what it was as late as 2017 when Trump dropped it with the Republicans, from 35 to 21%. So it's only the modest halfway back to what the corporations were doing, to 28%. And the business community won't have it. They don't want it even raised at all. They want to keep it. They want Mr. Biden to be just like Mr. Trump when it comes to taxing corporations, namely not taxing them. He's going to have a lot of problems and therefore he's not going to be able to pay for these spending programs with taxes because the corporations won't allow it and the mass of people can't afford it. So he's going to borrow the money which takes our already huge, unprecedented deficits and makes them larger and makes our already record breaking national debt go up even higher, even faster. And that runs all kinds of economic risks. Second, please keep in mind that all the government spending, or the overwhelming bulk of it for the COVID program, for, for the infrastructure program is federal money going into the hands of corporations. Even when the money goes from the federal government to a state or a locality, they in turn will give it to corporations to contract for all the work to be done, whether it's to provide inoculations or it's to rebuild the bridge or to extend the road. It goes into the hands of corporations. And you know what they're going to do? Well, we do know. We know what they do with all the money they get from all their contracts. Huge amount goes to the shareholders. A huge amount goes to pay packages for people at the top. Some money goes to automation so they don't have to pay high wages to workers. Money goes to consultants to how to beat a union drive. You know the story. That's the story of the United States and the inequality we have. That's not going to be changed by, by giving a lot of money to major corporations. It's going to reproduce the very system that got us to the neglected infrastructure in the first place. There's a bit of a spinning of wheels here. Don't be overtaken by the hype. And then there's the last reason we're not going to have a boom. Back in 1945, we had a much less unequal society. The rich weren't as rich and the mass of people weren't as stretched financially, which meant when the government pumped money in, it spread out more evenly. Because we were a more evenly organized society. We're not now. We are much, much, much more unequal. So a disproportionate amount of this government spending is going to go into the hands of people not likely to spend it again because they are already the richest amongst us. And how many Bentleys and how many ghosts are they going to buy? It's important to keep the perspective in your mind. I want to end with good news, really good news, not the kind that comes from Rolls Royce. The State of New York, often a pioneer like California in social legislation, has issued its and decided and signed its new budget, a $212 billion budget for the State of New York. And in that budget were three things so remarkable that it's a sign of what can happen when a significant group of progressives win elections. People like Alexandria, Ocasio, Cortez. Those are well known because those are federal election level jobs. But socialists like her have also been winning elections in towns, in state senate races, in state representative races, and so on. There's now a significant contingent of them and others not yet there. See the handwriting on the wall. And therefore I can report to you something that's part of the new budget of the State of New York, the budget that will govern 2021 to 2022. Number one, the top tax rate on people who earn over $1 million a person or $2 million per couple was raised. In other words, every dollar over $2 million that a married couple gets will now be taxed not at 8.82%, the old rate, but at 9.65%. Yes, the increase is not very large, but it is a significant increase on the people who can afford it most. That is remarkable in the United States at this time. The corporate profits tax likewise raised from 6.5 to 7.25%. But perhaps the most dramatic thing was was something called the Excluded Workers Fund act for 200,000 undocumented immigrants, there's going to be an unemployment fund to help them out, too. Just imagine Christian charity actually being put into effect. Well, we've come to the end of today's first part of our show. Before we get to the second half, I want to remind you our new book, the Sickness Is the When Capitalism Fails to Save Us From Pandemics or Itself, is available@democracyatwork.info books. I also want to thank our Patreon community for their ongoing and invaluable support. If you haven't already, Please go to patreon.com economicupdate to learn more about how you can get involved. Please stay with us. We will be right back with today's guest, Dr. Jill Stein. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's economic update. It is with genuine pleasure and happiness, I must say that I can welcome to our microphones and our camera Dr. Jill Stein. She probably doesn't need much introduction from me, but let me be brief. She is the United states Green Party's 2016 presidential candidate. She's a leader of the Green Party. She's a physician. She's an organizer. She works on environmental health issues. She is a leader of a third party effort here in the United States. And that in itself is a historic effort. I could say many things about her. I think it's more important for us to get to hear what she has to say. But I am struck with a very good line that she came up with that I would like to repeat talking about her own candidacy. She wants to redevelop or reinvigorate American democracy, she says, by giving everyone a chance to vote for what we want, not against what we fear. And in the era of Trump, that has a particularly powerful ring. So welcome, Jill, to our program, and thank you for taking the time to speak with us. Okay. You and other leaders of the Green Party have described it as an alternative to the parties of war and Wall Street. Tell me what you mean by that and what you think your impact has been.