A (0:20)

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. Now that we're heading back into the autumn, I want to let you know about the events that we have developed and the new items that might interest you. Most of these are available on our website, democracyatwork.info so please remember to go there for the details. If there's additional information, I will give it to you. Now. First, I want to tell you, and I'm very proud of this, that Democracy at Work is now partnering with the Left Forum, which has been around for many, many years. And one of the things we're doing with the Left Forum is something called the Left Education Project. It's a series of activities that I think will interest many of you. The first one is a class, four sessions, four Mondays in a row starting September 15th. It's available to anyone anywhere in the world who can connect to us via the Internet, which is what allows us to do this sort of thing. This is a four session course called Understanding Capitalism and it's designed for academics, activists and just concerned citizens anywhere in the world. The teachers are three of us, Myself, Professor Clara Matei from the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, and Professor Shahram Azer from Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. All three of us will be presenting this material to you. I really urge you to think about registering, but you would need to go to the website in order to do that. And in this case the website is that of the Left Forum. And here it is so that you can sign up if you're interested. Leftforum.org leftforum.org LepForLeft Education Project Second event is the release of a new book. It's published by or publishers. It's called from the Flag to the Fascism American Style. Just released a book of essays has essays by Chris Hedges, Kishama Sawant, Margaret Kimberly, myself and others on a topic so urgent that I don't need to say more about it. There will also be a book launch if you're interested. If you're in the New York area Sept. 24 at 6pm at the Francis Kite Club, East Village, 40 Avenue C. But you will need to RSVP and so go to democracyatwork.info and see the banner there and you can follow the instructions. Democracy at Work is also running a special sale of the Understanding series of book published by Democracy at Work. That's Understanding Marxism, Understanding Socialism and the third and final book of this series, Understanding Capitalism, a special discounted price, and you get them all. The sale is on until September 29th. You go again to our website, democracyatwork.info books, and you can get that. And finally, we have two events in October, and we'll be telling you about them as that date gets closer, one on October 9th and one on October 11th. And there again, it's cooperation between Democracy at Work and the Left Forum producing both of these events. The first one, John Jay College at the City University of New York, October 9, will feature Cornel West, Chris Hedges, Laura Flanders and myself talking about where we go from here in the era of Trump. And then on October 11, together with left Forum, but also with the People's Network for Land and Liberation, the Cooperative Economics alliance of New York City, we have a workshop and an event on solidarity economics, that whole movement and where it is going in the United States, being hosted by the Women Building up in Brooklyn, New York, on October 11th. And again, go to democracyatwork.info for details on all of that. Sorry for all the events, but we have been busy and I hope you will find one or more of them worthy of pursuing. Okay, Today's program is in honor of Labor Day. It happens at this time of year in the United States. And I wanted to make a presentation on that theme. And in particular, I want to make the case for the whole program today of my idea, my feelingand I'm among many who feel this wayI know thatthat it is timemaybe it's past time for there to be a new political party organized as a labor party here in the United States. We need to break the duopoly that is abusing us as citizens. By that I mean the Republicans and the Democrats and have a party that responds to the needs of working people, a neglected and silenced majority that doesn't want to be neglected or silenced anymore. So here's the argument. It begins with a little bit of a history to explain how and why the Democrats and the Republicans are so inadequate for the needs of this country and its majority at this time. The Democratic Party became the party of working people in the United States in the depths of the Great Depression, the collapse of capitalism, the worst in its history that went from 1929 to 1941, 11 years and counting. During that time, the mass of the American people, the working class, went quickly, dramatically, far to the left in its political thinking and in its organizing and and strategizing. The leadership was in the labor movement. It started with the miners union but it quickly expanded to include many of the great industrial unions that we have come to know in the United States. But they were born in the 1930s. Together they formed the CIO, the Congress of Industrial Organizations. And in a few short years, they organized tens of millions of American workers who had never been in a union before and whose parents had never been in a union ever. And they were very powerful, and they were allied with militants who were members of two socialists and one Communist party that had tens of thousands. All of those parties, and they worked together with the CIO and they organized those millions of workers. And what did they get from their organizations? Well, first they established unions, they got contracts. They improved the wages and salaries and working conditions of millions Americans. Not only the millions they organized, but all the others who got better deals from their employers because the employers hoped thereby to avoid the unions coming. But they got more than that. They went to the President Roosevelt at the time and they said, you got to give us improvements here. You got to help us through this terrible depression. And if you don't, we won't vote for you and you won't be dog catcher, let alone President. Mr. Roosevelt wasn't stupid. He understood what they were telling him and he knew they were not BSing him. So in a very short time, we had Social Security. Every person after working a full lifetime, retires, 65 and older, gets a check for his or her rest of her life every month. And that would be paid for by taxes on corporations and the rich. Yeah, that's how it worked. And they passed unemployment compensation. If you lose your job through no fault of your own, you get a check every week for many months to help you out. And where did the money come from? They taxed corporations and the rich. And finally the government hired 15 million unemployed people, giving them a job, giving them income, allowing them to pay for their mortgages. It was a massive program to help the average person. We never had anything like it before, and we've never had anything like it since. Wow. No wonder that at the end of World War II, when Mr. Roosevelt died, having been re elected three times, this man who taxed corporations and the rich to deliver to the mass of Americans a real improvement in their life, was the most popular president this country has ever seen. But the corporations were angry. Not only had they been taxed, not only had the money gone not into their pockets, but for the mass of people. But During World War II, Mr. Roosevelt had an alliance with Joseph Stalin of Russia to fight German and Japanese fascism. The business community was horrified you shouldn't do anything with Communists. You shouldn't tax us. And for average people. So they went to work after the war to undo the New Deal. What they called all those things they did in the 1930s, and they chose the Republican Party to lead the way, which it has done ever since 1945. Leading the way started with the Taft Hartley act in 1947. It started with the anti communism mantra, repeated in every school and every newspaper by every politician who could talk. Why did they do that? Because they didn't like Communism? No, because they wanted to get rid of what they thought was the weakest link in that alliance of unions, socialists and communists that won the New Deal. So they turned the communists from militants who helped win it into evil agents of a foreign power. Very clever. And so you smashed the communists, then you smashed the socialists, then you went after the labor unions who have been declining in social power ever since. It's like a line that never varies from going down. One third of Americans were in unions back then, one tenth are in unions now. The Democrats could not withstand this flood. So you know what they became Republicans liked. They didn't do it as bad as the Republicans did. They didn't go after the unions the way the Republicans did, but they did it almost. They became the party that said, we're not as bad as those Republicans. And by the way, if you look at what the leadership of the Democratic Party does now, it's the same story. We're not as bad as Trump. Are they leading in a different direction? Are they up there mobilizing? No. So we had, for most of the period after World War II, two parties, Republican and Democrat, both working to undo the New Deal, which got undone. No government has hired unemployed people since, even though we've had terrible unemployment. The minimum wage passed in the 30s is now worth less than it was then when you adjusted for prices. Social Security is being squeezed and likewise unemployment. Everything that was gotten has been reduced or eliminated. It's time for a political party for. For labor. Because we've been betrayed by the two parties who work for the corporations, not for us. We've come to the end of the first half of today's show. When we return, I'm going to talk about the argument why now and what a Labour Party could and should do. 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 for your kind attention to the fundraising dimension of what we do. Welcome back friends, to the second half of today's economic update. In the first half we talked about the history that brought us here to the early part of the 21st century with a duopoly of politics, two parties that conveniently alternate. Few years you're in office, a few years I'm in office. Very comfortable, very nice program for the last 70 years, rolling back the New Deal. And it might have continued on that way for who knows how long, except history and reality intervened. How did it do that? With the great crash of 2000. This shook up everything. The collapse of global capitalism, the worst one, the 1930s as I mentioned to you, but the second worst one, 2008. And that shook up this system because it showed that the mechanisms that came out of the first crash that were supposed to help us prevent future crashes were obviously inadequate. They hadn't prevented quite a few of them. And then now this terrible one in 2008. And what else 2008 showed was that the American dominance of world capitalism was over. 2008 was a crash that started here that was terrible here that ramified out from here. But it was those subprime mortgages written here for American housing market and hustled by American banks to their comprador banks around the world that caused all the trouble that made it break out into a total collapse. And the world, including Americans, even though they didn't admit it to themselves, began to understand that the dominance of the United States was being challenged, being challenged by Germany and Japan, who had come roaring back from their defeats in World War II. But even more by a newcomer, China, which had grown spectacularly quickly from the end of the 20th right across the first quarter of the 21st century, and its allies in the BRICS, now a richer, bigger economic unit than the United States or even the United States as one of the G7. So it was a new world. Real competitors, and they were winning the competition. Wow what did American capitalists do? They turned inward. You see that now with Mr. Trump, who's doing it at a rapid scale. Put up tariff walls against the competitors, don't let them in to our little economy. Meanwhile, our little economy isn't doing that well. And when the economy goes down, when an empire declines, the same thing always happens. And it's happening to us now. The people at the top, the rich, the powerful, they're the ones who hold on to their wealth the longest because that's what their power positions allow them to do. The rest of us, the middle class, the poor, the working class, they have to bear the price. Over the last 12 months, as I'm speaking to you, the price of coffee has gone up 60%. My prediction for the next rest of 2025, it'll go up another 20 to 30% because the tariffs big against Brazil, which is where most of our coffee comes from. In other words, your daily life is being squeezed. You're going to have to pay more for that latte than you ever imagined. Or do without. And that's the message from the people who run this. Do without. Do without. We're cutting back social safety net. We're cutting back government programs. We're cutting, we're cutting, we're cutting, we're making promises. It's all going to work out, but it's not happening. It's not gonna either. Well, the Republicans are leading the charge to do it and the Democrats are awol. They're gonna do their old shtick. We're not as bad as them here. We need a party that can do better than that. We're desperately in need of it or otherwise. We will continue to watch our lives be beyond what we can afford. What would a Labor Party, a party that genuinely represented our interests, what would it be about? What would it do? Well, the answer is it would put the needs of the vast majority of people first. Not this abstraction, America first. Because that allows you to be putting first the top 10%, which is all that America first has ever meant for Mr. Trump. That's who he is. That's who he's always been. That's who all his friends are. Look who was lined up behind him when the inauguration happened back on January 20th. All the billionaires. He's literally telling us who America first is for him. But here comes a Labour Party that could do something. Put the mass of people first so wealth would be redistributed in America. Not from the middle and the bottom to the top. That's what we've had for 40 years. But the other way, from the top to the middle and the bottom. Taxes could be changed to do that. Wages and salaries could be changed to do that. We could say that our goal is no longer profit maximization. Why are we maximizing profit? Profit is what goes to the top 10%. They're the ones who are the top executives. They're the ones who own the bulk of the shares. The profit goes to them. To have a business system driven by profit maximization is a system driven to maximize the portion of wealth created by all of us that goes to the richest amongst us. That's what has to go. Job creation becomes the bottom line. Keep people working, give them a decent income. So we won't have a housing problem to solve. We won't need one. Because between the prices we charge for housing and the income we pay, people who work, they'll buy their own housing just like they buy their own ice cream cone. Wow. Other societies manage this. Every country in Europe has a better medical insurance program than we do. The major countries in Europe charge much less for higher education than we do. These are economies that aren't even as rich as we are. They do more because they have to take care of their people. They have powerful unions. They have powerful socialist, anti capitalist parties. We don't. And so we don't have what they do. It's time to build a party in order to make sure, in the realm of politics, that we have proportional representation. What does that mean? That means if there's a political party that gets 20% of the vote, it gets 20% of the seats in the state legislature in the federal government. That's how Europe works. Friends, why don't we. We even have some of our primaries that work like that. We know that if you want the democracy, if 20% of the people want a particular party, then they ought to have the voice in the Parliament too. Because 20% of the people want that. That's what democracy means. We don't do that. And we allow money to run our politics. Why are we doing that? But of course, if we redistributed the wealth, that wouldn't be a problem anymore. Because you wouldn't have Elon Musk giving somebody $200 million while the rest of us can't imagine what that is, let alone give it to somebody. You know what I'm talking about is right. And you know that we need a political party to do that. You know, there have been experiments around the world. The Germans had one during what they call their Weimar Period after World War I. And they set up a bicameral legislature. That's a legislature with two houses. You know, like we have the House of Representatives and we have this Senate. Ah, but they did it differently. They had one legislative thing where you voted depending on where you live, like we do. But the other house of the Parliament was a vote you got depending on where you work. Oh, two houses. One representing your interests as a member of the community, where you reside, where you go to school, where you shop, where you have friendships. And the other one, a place where you vote based on your needs and interests as a working person interested in your industry, in your enterprise, in your relationship with fellow workers. And the two have to agree for anything to happen. Wow. I'm not saying we have to do it that way, but we have to be willing to ask. What an interesting arrangement. Two houses of Parliament, one controlled by the people in a neighborhood, the other one controlled by a people in a workplace. How different it would be. Laws can be done to do pretty much anything you want. Let's put the priority where we know the mass of people, have them on a proper work life balance. That you have time to do your work by all means on the job, but you also have time for your family, for yourself, for your own dreams and hobbies, for your own skills, for your friendships, for your love life. Come on. Why are we all working for the man? It's long overdue that we have a political party that represents our needs and desires for a different system. Not one that only gives us supports from the government coming out of the great crash of the 1930s, but one that does that for us all the time. We don't just want it when the economy tanks. We want it all the time. And here's a final thing a Labour Party could do. It's to take a look at the Republicans and Democrats with their endless screeching against China and Russia and all those other countries. Yeah, you don't have to be like them. We can be different, but we don't have to be at loggerheads and we don't have to terrorize each other with war and nuclear weapons. Why don't we sit down and work out a live and let live approach? Why isn't that what we are doing? If we hadn't pushed NATO towards the Russians, would they have invaded Ukraine? If we weren't arguing with China over Taiwan, would we be at risk of a war? Come on. You know the British tried to stop us from having our own country in the war of 1770. 6. We defeated Britain over that issue in 1815. We fought another war with Britain over that issue. After that. The British understood, you're not going to defeat the Americans, or if you try, it'll be too costly for everybody. So they sat down and worked something out. We can do that with Russia and we can do that with China. And we ought to have a political party that advocates that and makes the people who are always brandishing the swords defend what they're doing rather than assuming nobody dares stand up. It's time for a Labour Party that allows us, as the working people, to. To stand up. And it's time now. Thank you for your attention. Best of the Labor Day holiday to you and I look forward to speaking with you again.