← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
American Style Fascism
00:30:32
This week on Economic Update, Professor Wolff delivers updates on the flight attendants' union strike in Canada, polls show that U.S. Democrats are shifting leftward, with majorities favoring socialism, Nigel Farage discusses Epstein and prominent...
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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I have a couple of announcements. They're important and I think they're worth your attention. It's a plenary session and workshop on how we can make the solidarity economy real. It's presented by the Left Forum, the People's Network for Land and Liberation, the Cooperative Economics alliance of New York City, Scenic and of course, Democracy at Work. It will take place at women building up in Brooklyn, New York, on October 11th. To register again, go to our website, democracyatwork.info and click on the banner at the top of the home page and you will find out all you need to know about it to register for it, and so on. Finally, before jumping into today's session, I need sadly to let you know that we are having a problem where you can help us. The proliferation of fake videos of me presenting some of my ideas is now becoming a major problem. A good number of you have written to us about it, and to those of you, I want to say, first of all, thank you, you're helping us. And no, it's not a project of ours whatsoever. That's why the physical likeness of me is sometimes bizarre. The most recent example, the upper part of my face is actually me, but the lower part has been changed. It is somebody else's mouth, not mine, saying words I don't say, producing a video I never produced nor authorized. It is now happening so often that I need to ask you if you see such a thing or if you're concerned, to find out whether it's genuine or not. Get in touch with us. We will tell you. We report all of this to Google. We try to get them taken down from YouTube. But as you can imagine, we are not the only one suffering from this kind of use or abuse of AI. But it's becoming a serious problem with the proliferation that's going on. People are also, I might mention, charging money for these sorts of things only makes the abuse worse. I also want to catch us up to start with our substance today to a story we covered earlier. It was the strike of the flight attendants at Air Canada and Air Canada Rouge. You may remember, let me help you remember that they went on strike for very, very good reasons. We followed the strike. The Canadian government, which is a part owner of Air Canada, only a little part, but a part. The government ordered these workers, who are also its employees, because the government is a part owner of the airline, ordered them back to work under existing legislation. And here came the important part, why we featured it. The workers said, you're not going to intimidate us and you're not going to deprive us of our right to strike. So they didn't heed the government's demand and Air Canada couldn't run its airplanes. So Air Canada caved in and reached an agreement with with the workers to end the four day strike. And they reached it by a temporary agreement that had to be voted on. And while that did raise some of their wages in some of the ways that they demanded, it wasn't enough. And how do we know that? Because on September 6, when the final votes were counted to see what the members thought of the agreement, 99.1% rejected it. So they have to go back and bargain again. And the reason is simple. For those of you wondering, the last time these workers signed a contract back in 2015, they secured 2% wage increase per year for 10 years. So they went up roughly 20%. A little more prices went up 30%, which meant that many of the workers, after 10 years of work, with all the extra experience they got doing 10 years of work and then therefore the better quality of the work that they did, they were earning less in terms of what they could afford to buy than they were at the beginning. They were outraged. They wanted a bigger wage. That's why the contract was rejected. These are strong unionists and I want to shout out to them, we see you and we admire and respect what you are fighting for. Okay, now to the substance for today. We're going to be talking about recent polls, about what people here in the United States think about socialism. We're going to talk about Epstein briefly. We're going to talk about poverty and we're going to talk about France, where people have been hitting the streets to make the kinds of points we make here. Okay, let's jump in. And one more thing. After the break, we will be interviewing Steve Smith, a lawyer here in New York City who is a co author of a new book about fascism in the United States. Recent polls show that majorities of Democrats have become favorable to socialism. Friends, I did not think in my lifetime I would ever read such a sentence as part of a news or any other kind of program. But here we go. The numbers are right there. In July, 8%. This last July, 8% of Democrats polled supported Israel's war on Gaza. That is a remarkably low percentage of Democrats supporting what the Democratic Party officially endorses. Think about it then. Much more recently, literally a couple of weeks ago, the New York Times Siena College poll early in September showed that Mr. Mamdani, a socialist running for mayor of New York city, was polling 37%. It's now up over 40, if I'm not mistaken, versus his major opponent, Mr. Cuomo, a notorious former governor who was polling 24%. Not even close. I now understand that after much long hesitation, New York Governor Hochel has endorsed Mr. Mamdani. Also, apparently, if you put your finger up and the wind is blowing, you can figure out which way it's going to. On the 10th of September, the Gallup poll, one of the oldest and most respected polling companies in the United States, reported 60% of Democrats view socialism positively. And when asked about whether they view capitalism positively, 42% said, yes, let me do that again. 60% of Democrats polled view socialism positively as against 42% of capitalists. That led a very well known commentator, Harold Meyerson, who writes regularly for the American Prospect magazine, to argue in its latest issue that the old centrists who run the Democratic Party nationally are no longer the mainstream of the Democratic Party, which they constantly invoke as if they were. They aren't. They're trying to hold on to a party whose majority has moved on and that's not a tenable situation and will explode. The American politics soon might lead you to wonder whether the best way to oppose Mr. Trump, for those of you that are interested in that, is to embrace the new direction of the Democratic Party instead of fighting it because it is, or it sure looks like it, the wave of the future for the Democratic Party for most of it, and that remains the largest potential opposition to the Trump government out of conventional politics. Unless and until that's changed, I want to turn next to Nigel Farage. He's the head of a new right wing political party in Britain that's polling very high in that country. He commented on the Epstein case, and I want to read it to you because I can't do better than this. Here it is, Mr. Nigel Farage trying to replace Keir Starmer as the Prime Minister of Great Britain. So the idea that you're guilty by association because you knew Epstein, I mean, you would put the whole of America in jail. Who were prominent people in business or media in the 1980s. I have no comment on Mr. Farage's insight. I will add that one of Mr. Epstein's apparently many close friends who became later the ambassador of Great Britain to the United States, Peter Mendelssohn, was fired in the middle of September from his job as ambassador of Great Britain because of his closeness to Mr. Epstein, which included encouraging Epstein to fight the charges against him later proved of child molestation, sexual activity and all the rest of the. Okay, final items we have time for. I want to bring to your attention the remarkable activities in France that reached a Peak on 10th September. I had mentioned before that that they would be worth looking at. They were Hundreds of thousands of French people went into the streets, not just of Paris, their capital city, but of many other cities across France, east, west, north and south. They were protesting what they called the government's austerity program. And in particular, here are the things that they pointed the government wanted to cancel two national holidays in France. And by cancel, I mean everybody would have to go to work on those two days instead of have a holiday but for no extra pay. Think about that. Number two, to cut the pensions for the French, the elderly that are on a pension, and finally to cut massively the National Health Service to cut the money that basically takes care of the medical needs of the French. And they have a very good National Health Service that covers you from birth to death for anything that happens to you. I've actually used it myself when I was a visiting professor there. And the people said, we will not tolerate it. The government collapsed. A new prime minister had to be named. Mr. Macron picked somebody who's going to try to do the same thing. And guess what? The French people said, you do it again, we will do it again. Do. Their slogan was let's block everything. And that's what they did on September 10th. And that's what's coming again to a Macron government in France that cannot learn from its ever larger mistakes. We've come to the end of the first half of today's show. Stay with us. We will be right back with Michael Smith on American Fascism. Before we jump into the second half of today's show, I wanted to thank you for your very generous response to our fundraising efforts this year and in particular in the last couple of months. And in part responding to that, we are extending the availability of our limited edition, linen covered hardcover version of Understanding Capitalism, the book I wrote and that we have been making available now for quite a while. If you are interested, I will be signing copies of that hardcover and they will be available to you as they have been over the last few weeks. Just simply send an email to us@infodemocracyatwork.info and put in the subject line limited edition. We will send you all the information you need to order and receive your copy signed copy of Understanding Capitalism in its hardback. And thank you again for your kind attention to the fundraising dimension of what we do. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's economic update. I am very happy, proud indeed to bring to my microphones Michael Stephen Smith. He is a New York City attorney, a former board member of the center for Constitutional Rights, and the co host of the nationally broadcast radio show Law and Disorder. Together with his co host and co author, Michael Ratner, they wrote a book some years ago called who Killed Che? So first of all, Michael Smith, thank you very much for giving us a little bit of your time today.
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Nice to be with you, Rick, my old friend and colleague and comrade. Good to be on your show.
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Thank you. Okay, I want to jump right in. You recently released a co authored, edited book entitled from the Flag to the Cross. Fascism, American Style. Fascism has come into the common conversations across America in recent months, recent years more than ever. So yours is clearly a timely book. But I wanted to begin by asking you why you chose at this point to produce a volume like that.
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I was inspired by a pamphlet written by the great socialist leader Leon Trotsky, who wrote it in the 30s, the era of fascism, the beginning era of fascism. Trotsky's pamphlet was called what It Is and How to Fight It. What It Is and How to Fight It. I wanted to do something along that line because I wanted to be able to educate people about the nature of fascism and what they could do about it. And I was guided by two people, Bertolt Brech, who said, how can anyone tell the truth about fascism unless he is willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it forth. And the other person that inspired me was the American novelist. Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel in 1935 called It Can Happen Here. And Lewis was awarded a Nobel Prize. He was a great author in the 20s and 30s. And he said, when fascism comes to America, it'll be wrapped in the flag and carry a cross. And that's what our book is about. We see it now and we're trying to educate people about what it is and what they can do about it.
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Okay, let me push to you a question that I know many of my audience members have sent in because I know it's on their mind. What exactly do you mean by American fascism? What? Why is that word in your book title and on your mind to talk about?
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Well, what are the qualities of American fascism? For one thing, it's anti democratic. You can't have A democratic country with 1100 billionaires. It's impossible. The Supreme Court has recently ruled that money is protected by the First Amendment, so elections are rigged and fixed. It costs a billion dollars to run for president. Secondly, fascism is racist. Third, it's misogynist. It's totally masculine. One of the authors, Diane Feely, told a story about how she turned on the television on Canadian tv. She lives in Detroit. She gets Canadian tv. She's hoping to get away from American tv. And what she saw was the Trump inauguration, and the first speaker took off his shirt. He was a wrestler. How more hyper masculine can it be? It's misogynist. It's hyper masculine. It looks for scapegoats. In Germany, you had the Jews as scapegoats. In America, you have immigrants as scapegoats. Trump and the people around him are trying to deflect from the anger and frustration and despair that people feel, they're trying to deflect that onto scapegoats, and that's why they're going after immigrants.
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Would you, Michael, would you say that the fascism is coming and you're worried about its arrival, or would you say it's already here?
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I would say that it's coming. Part of it's here. They're taking baby steps. In fact, little more than baby steps. I think they've rounded second base and they're heading for third. And I think that unless we mobilize a population, particularly the unions and particularly the working class, because they have the power to stop it, unless we do that, we're not going to be able to stop it. They're making great progress.
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Okay. Would you think that fascism in America is a project you associate with Mr. Trump or you associate with the Republican Party, or you associate with the Democratic Party? Or should we rather think of it as a project of the corporate big shots, the billionaires, as you put it? How do you understand who is making the fascism happening? Who is making it come in the way that you think it's coming?
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Well, Trump is a symptom of the disease. He's not the disease. The disease is capitalism. We have. 200 years ago, you had an invigorating capitalism that brought about the American Revolution, brought about the First Amendment and Democratic rights. You have now what we call a geriatric capitalism. And I think that what we have in fascism is kind of a preemption. And I think what the ruling class is afraid of is a huge uprising. And they're taking steps now in anticipation to quell that uprising. I think that the Initial steps they've taken, most alarmingly, the use of the National Guard to take over Washington, D.C. two weeks ago, Trump and his people behind him figured out a way to get around the Posse Comitatus act, which says you can't use the military for domestic law enforcement. They got around it by going through Washington, D.C. and because Washington, D.C. doesn't have a governor, the Posse Comitas act said you can't use troops in one state and send them to another state without the permission of both governors. But if you send troops into Washington, D.C. which is run by the federal government, you can do that. So they've got troops now from places like South Carolina, Mississippi. They can take those troops and they can send them anywhere. Trump recently threatened to send them to Chicago. He backed off. Why? Because Chicago is a city of 758,000 black people. And I think Trump had second thoughts about taking on that kind of population. By the very nature of black oppression, black people will be in the vanguard in the fight against fascism. They always have been. And I think Trump had second thoughts about it. But he did post a very scary post called chocopalypse. He said, we're sending troops into Chicago. This is the reason we renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War. And then he put these little emojis in the bottom of helicopters, which is suggestive by the right wing of the helicopters. Pinochet, the fascist dictator in Chile, used to throw people out of. He put that into his post. Trump is a very scary man, but it's not Trump. It's the whole system. Trump is just a representative of it. He's being used, in a sense. But Trump is more than just a politician. He's a cult figure. Trump said when he was running the first time that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. And that's true. He probably could. I have an example to show. And he's just not a political figure, but a cult figure. Way back in 1988, a hapless politician named Gary Hart was running for president, and he got caught on a yacht with a lovely woman named Donna Rice. The photographer took a picture of the two of them. Now, Hart was likable, handsome, articulate. He was probably a good candidate. But what happened was when the photographer took the picture, took a picture of the yacht, and the name of the yacht was the Monkey Business. After that, Hart was dead in the water. Compare that to Trump and Stormy Daniels. Trump was messing around with Stormy Daniels. What happened to him? Absolutely nothing. And then he wrote off the payment that he made to Stormy Daniels. What happened to him about that? Nothing. He. He's got a lot of support. Chris Hedges says that Trump got 74 million votes in 2024. 74 million votes. It's a lot of people, and a lot of those people are Christian fascists. And they revere Trump. They think that he's some kind of godlike figure. And that's our problem. We've got a guy who's more than just a politician. He's a godlike figure. And we've got to counter that. The only way that we can counter that is by the power of the working class. What we need is a vast socialist movement, and that's what we need to build. The unions in our country were pretty much de radicalized when they were busted up in 1947. They're not quite dead. They're coming back. We used to have one third of the population in unions. We now have 11% and 6% of those, our public unions. So they've been weakened, but they're not entirely dead. They're coming back, and we have to support that. I wanted to say one other thing. The way we counter Trump and cultism is by offering to the working class a program that connect with them. We have to reintegrate them back into society. They're estranged. They're totally despairing. Half the population in this country doesn't have the accumulated wealth of the top three people in America. The top three people in America have more money, more wealth than the bottom one half of the population. They work from hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck. They've got a $7.25 minimum wage that hasn't gone up in years. The Democrats could have raised it, but they haven't. So we're very weak. We have to come back. And the way to do that is the way that Mamdani in New York is doing it, by offering people a solution to their problems. He's saying free buses, childcare, grocery stores, rent frees. It's what Kwame Sawant, one of the authors in our book. We finish up with a chapter on her campaigns. She was the city councilwoman in Seattle for seven years, for 10 years. And she was able to gain a minimum wage in seattle of over $20 an hour. $20 an hour. She got a rent freeze in Seattle. She got a tax on big corporations like Amazon and raised $400 million. That's the kind of program we need. She didn't back off when she was confronted by the Democrats. She stood up to them. And that's what we're hoping that Mondaghi will do in New York City. And we should remember that Mondaghi doesn't have any support from the top Democratic leadership. None at all. None of them will endorse him. None of them will support him. Cuomo, his opponent, is getting secret support from Trump. So that's what we're up against. We're up against big money organized and the think tanks in Washington, D.C. trump doesn't dream up these legislations. He's not even capable of that. The legislation that he's doing is written by Project 2025. They put it across his desk and he signs it. That's our problem. Trump is a tool and he's a very effective one. So that's what we're up against.
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A
Michael, we're running out of time, but before we lose our final minute here, you've been very eloquent, very clear. I really want to thank you, but I do want to tease out of you, are you optimistic? Are you pessimistic? How do you feel about where we're about to head as a nation?
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Chris Hedges wrote the first chapter in our book on Christian nationalism, and he said it's been a slow coup d' etat by the capitalists. It's all over. They've won. Jim Lafferty, who's my co host on the radio show and who wrote the introduction of the book, doesn't agree. I'm not sure. I think they probably have won. But I think, like Chris says, I fight fascism not because I think we can win, but but because it's the right thing to do. And I think that we've got some current possibilities now. The Mamdani campaign is very hopeful sign. 5 million people in the streets on the demonstration on the no Kings Day is a very hopeful sign. As Ernest Mandel, the great economist who you admire, said, we're at the foot of the Himalayas. We don't have adequate tools, but we've got to climb up that mountain. And that's how I feel.
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A
Michael, you've been doing this kind of work all of your life. I've known you for many years. It's an honor to have you join us. And your eloquence on this subject could not be more timely at this moment. Thank you very, very much. And let's see whether in a short time we can bring you back and take a look at what has happened to American fascism. Again, the title of the book, from the Flag to the Cross Fascism American Style. And to my audience as always. I say I look forward to speaking with you again next week.