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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 those of our kids. I'm your host, Richard Wolff, and and I try to bring these weekly economic updates to you as a window, different kind of window on what's happening in our economic surroundings. Every now and then I encounter a statistic that tells so much in so few words or numbers that I want to bring it to your attention. And this time I take it from Harper's magazine, the June 2019 edition. And here's a simple statistic. People have compared the average amount spent on a pupil's education per year in white schools across America as compared to non white schools, predominantly in terms of the school population. The difference is $2,226 per year. Now, if you wanted to do something about inequality between white and non white people in this society, you wouldn't possibly be able to justify such a difference. Means that young people are not starting out on an equal playing field. It means that you're systematically disenfranchising the education that might be a way forward towards something a little bit less unequal. There is no justification for it. And the number tells us a lot about why we have the different incomes, the different jobs, the different life situation of these two parts of the American population. The next economic update I want to bring to your attention comes from the Consumer Reports on Health of July 2019. And that issue of that important health newsletter is also making use of an earlier bit of research reported in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics here in the United States. The story, the research is about comparing 1986 and 2017 in terms of the quality of fast food here in the United States. What has happened to it in the last 30, 40 years? This is a period of time during which we have as a nation become, we say, more health conscious, more concerned about epidemics of obesity, more concerned about the general health of our population. So what has happened to the fast food that so many of us spend so much of our lives putting into our bodies? Well, you can guess why I brought it to your attention. The following three qualities of fast food have all gone up. Ready calories, sodium and the size of the portion. Here are the numbers for us to think about. Desserts, whether they're provided at a McDonald's or a burger King or a Pizza Hut or whatever. Desserts on average went from 392 calories per back in the 80s and early 90s, 2 in the last year, 572. It's an increase of 46% in terms of the calories. Entrees, major parts of fast food, lunches and dinners, things like burgers went from an average of 430 to an average of 480 calories, a 12% increase in calories. And finally, side dishes went from an average of 238 to 287, a 21% increase. Comparable numbers are about sodium and portions. To make this haul blunt and clear, profit is what drives the definition of a fast food meal, not health. We may talk about health, we may read about health, doctors may talk to us about health, the government may have sessions and conferences about health. But the business community controls what we actually get. And for them, profits were greater by upping the sodium, upping the calories and upping the portions. So that's what the American people get. And when you let profit govern your food industry, that's the outcome. The parallel is the creation of a two class system in food. Generally, those who can afford it buy organic at a higher price. And those who can't, the vast majority buy the food that those with money go out of their way to avoid putting into their bodies. What kind of a system works like this? Next update, I want to give a shout out. Take my hat off if I were wearing one. To the hundreds of workers at the Wayfair Furniture Company a short time ago, they had a big demonstration in downtown Boston protesting the Wayfair Furniture Company's selling of furniture to detention centers. Housing, housing. I'm being polite. Hereimmigrants at our borders in Texas and the south, the workers said they didn't want the fruit of their labor to be used in so awful and inhumane a way. They didn't want it and they weren't going to continue to produce furniture if it was going to be used for such immoral purposes. The shout out I want to stress is what an interesting idea that workers, not just bosses and managers and owners, should decide what is done with the fruits of the labor of working people. They want a say in it. They actually want their morality to be part of the decision about what their work life amounts to. Of course their bosses didn't want to, didn't like it, said they wouldn't listen. For them, apparently the morality of what you do doesn't count. Or maybe we should put it differently. They want their morality, the morality of a minority, to govern what happens, not the morality of a majority. The protest against that is a recognition by workers that they have power that they have responsibility, that they want to be in on the decisions of the workplace and not have it dictated to them by a small minority whose morality, especially in relationship to immigration, is something that the workers don't agree with and are not going to be shut up about. Remarkable initiative worthy of other people copying and thinking about. Then there was a story about the immigrants themselves so grotesque I felt I had to talk about it. An official in charge of the immigration fiasco at the border, at our southern border, was called upon by the press to respond to that remarkable photo. You know, the one you saw, too, of a father and his daughter lying dead at the edges of a river separating Mexico from Texas. They had failed to make it across, and the official in the Trump administration took time out when the press asked about this, to blame the father for the death of both of them. He shouldn't have tried to get across the river, as thousands of people have done. He shouldn't have. It's on him, the trust of his daughter. He killed her, said the Trump official. And it's because we have open borders, you see, he explained, which our good president is closing. But the difficulty the Democrats are putting in the way of closing. Closing the border means the border is open, and people like that endanger their children to get here. This is wrong on so many levels, it kind of takes your breath away. But first, let me explain. People don't become refugees simply because there's an attractive new place to live. If you believe that, you'd have a hard time explaining why the open borders of the United States didn't produce waves of immigrants 20 years ago, 10 years ago, like the ones now. What's really happening is that there are conditions pushing people to leave their countries of origin, their families of origin, their languages of origin, their communities of origin. The push factor is always bigger than the pull factor, because so much is uncertain about the new place you're going, and so much is lost from the place you're leaving. The United States has real responsibility for the climate change, for the warfare, for the economic underdevelopment of the countries being abandoned by these people. We're not pure watchers. The same corporations that make money here are making money there, and under conditions that drive large numbers of people to leave and come here. And to imagine that that father made a bizarre decision shows a level of ignorance. And again, I'm being polite. What should he have done? Tried the legal route that ends up in having your parents separated from the children, or the risk of it? Or encounters nasty vigilantes willing to do all kinds of things at and not interested in the details of your family relationship. He should take the legal road. You've made the legal road very risky, very dangerous and very uncertain, which are the very conditions from which that father and his daughter were trying to flee. Blaming the dead father and his dead daughter. A special moment in the history of of the American society celebrating a fourth of July recently and a Statue of Liberty that says we're the nation that welcomes with open arms the huddled masses yearning to be free. And then my final update for today has to do with the tax cut, the Trump tax cut of the December 2017. You may recall that Mr. Trump and the Republicans gathered the promises of major corporations about how this tax cut, if only they would get it, would lead to job creation and bonuses and wage increases for millions of Americans. Wonderful story of what was in store if only you cut the taxes on of corporations. Leading the charge was the AT&T telephone company which promised that if it got the cut in its profits taxes from 35 to 21%, which is what that tax bill gave them, it would be a windfall and wages would go up. Here's the statistics as of the latest count, keeping track of what actually happened at and T since the tax cut has eliminated 23,328 jobs. That's right, the big tax cut reduced the jobs. They forgot to mention that whether or not a tax cut affects the jobs will be shaped in part by automation, by new technology, by new situation in the market, by all the things that always determine how many people have a job. The they forgot to tell you that they wanted you to believe that if you only cut taxes a miracle will happen and we will all be better off. What percentage of workers have gotten a wage increase, a one time bonus or a wage increase based on the tax cut? 4.3% of the workers. How many? 6.8 million workers out of an American labor force of 157 million. Trivial. Corporations are getting 11 times as much in tax cuts as they are giving to workers in one time bonuses or wage increases. Corporations are spending 154 times as much on buying back their own stock, which is good for people who own shares in the stock as what they are giving to workers. And please remember the basic statistic. 10% of the shareholders in America own 84% of the shares. So when the stock market goes up, it's really good for the top 10%. We've come to the end of the first half of our show. Please stay with us for A remarkable interview coming up. Don't go away. I think you'll find it equally interesting. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. Before jumping into our interview for today, I wanted to remind you please to subscribe to our YouTube channel to follow us on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and finally, as always, a special thanks to our Patreon community for their support. Well, I'm very pleased today to bring back to our microphones and our cameras Lee Carter. He is the current representative representing Virginia's 50th district in the state's House of Delegates, their legislature. His district includes the city of Manassas and western Prince William County. He was inspired to run for office and. And he is a Democrat and a socialist. When he had an injury and was very badly mistreated by the worker compensation system of Virginia and decided to do something about it. He won his first race in November 2017, served in the legislature. The Democratic Party decided to primary him and regretted having made that decision when he defeated his challenger in June of 2019, so that he will go on to run for reelection in the fall of this year. Welcome back, Lee.