Guest or Commentator (5:58)

It is an invention.

Richard Wolff (5:59)

It isn't something useful that makes a person a billionaire. Quite the opposite.

Guest or Commentator (6:04)

It's capitalism as a system.

Richard Wolff (6:07)

And particularly the ability capitalism gives some people to cash in on the way this system works, to become a billionaire, not to invent anything. Let me give you again some examples. We all know stores, you know, the hardware store and the grocery store and the drugstore and the produce store and so on. And we once lived in a society where there were lots of stores. And each of them sold us something. And along came some people, oh, I.

Guest or Commentator (6:38)

Don'T know, let's call them, I don't.

Richard Wolff (6:39)

Know, Sears and Roebuck. And they said, you know, let's get it all together in one store. And people only have to go to one place. And they. Now, that's not a mental breakthrough, folks.

Guest or Commentator (6:50)

That's not the equivalent of a new music or a new artistic style or.

Richard Wolff (6:55)

A new way of understanding the world.

Guest or Commentator (6:57)

Or a new source of power for powering.

Richard Wolff (7:01)

No, no, no.

Guest or Commentator (7:02)

It's a little thing, isn't it? But Sears and Roebuck became multimillionaires by doing that. And, you know, somebody else figured out, you know, something better than Sears and Roebuck with just the stuff they have. We're going to have a department store.

Richard Wolff (7:17)

That has everything what Sears had and lots of other things. With the Walton family, we're going to set up these huge stores that have everything in there, and we're going to.

Guest or Commentator (7:26)

Be able to buy everything in big quantity, lower the price. That's not a breakthrough, folks. That's exactly what Sears, Roebuck did, only one step larger. The Walton family is the richest family.

Richard Wolff (7:37)

On Earth, not because they invented something.

Guest or Commentator (7:41)

That was a breakthrough, but because they could be the first on the block. And capitalism gives the first one the a ridiculous reward so long as they can be the only ones doing it. Walton and the Walmart people are now.

Richard Wolff (7:55)

In trouble because of the next step, Amazon. Jeff Bezos. Everything not only in one place, but no place at all. We'll bring it to you again. You want to call that a breakthrough.

Guest or Commentator (8:09)

That'S on a par with a major medical discovery or astronomy discovery or a new way of solving our economic problems, the way Mr. Tried to do for capitalism. No, it's a little thing. You don't get to be a billionaire because you did something great for human society. You get there because you can play the game of capitalism and grab a lot of the money before the next one comes along and does to you what you did to everybody else.

Richard Wolff (8:40)

And the last thing that's wrong with.

Guest or Commentator (8:42)

Obscene wealth is it's fundamentally undemocratic. And you and I both know that the richer you are, the more of your money you are going to have to spend to continue to be the richest one around, because everybody else will be gunning for you and the money that you're grabbing into yourself. So the first thing rich people do is corrupt democracy. Buy off the senators, the congresspeople, the political parties, army of lobbyists paid by these rich people to make sure, they stay that way. I'm going to give you just one example.

Richard Wolff (9:23)

Once upon a time, before we had this kind of obscene wealth, people had the idea we all should start on a level playing field. Every child born should have a roughly equal chance to develop their skills, to develop their abilities, and to do well in life. And it's unfair if some have enormous wealth when they're born and others don't. And so we had what was a serious estate tax system. When you die, your money kind of goes back into the general pot, most of it, so that your child isn't that much more ahead than the child of someone who isn't rich. So, for example, from 1940s to the 1950s, the estate tax in the United States, as I have reported to you in the past, was everything over $60,000. First $60,000 you could leave to your children or your descendants. But anything above 60,000, the government taxed 77% in this country, the federal government, 77%. Today, after rich people have done their work, it's everything. After the first ready $23.4 million. The first 23.4 million, you don't pay any federal estate tax. And every dollar after that, not 77% as we once did, 40%. Wow, that's rich people making sure we don't get back the wealth they've accumulated in their life. We don't have a level playing field. We don't give all our kids an equal chance, and we deprive the government of many billions of dollars. Which means what? Either the government doesn't provide the services we need because it isn't getting those billions from the biggest states, or we have to pay more taxes because they're paying less. Either way, we're screwed. And that's how this system works. There's a reason why people who have advocated for democracy usually put the word equality in there. When Mr. Bezos decides he wants something, he can make millions of people go to work producing it because he has that money. We can't. You and I can't. We may need something doesn't get produced because we don't have the money. So the very jobs we have, the work we do, the things we produce, are shaped by these billionaires in a wildly disproportionate way. Given that it's unjust to start with, it's unnecessary as well. Obscene wealth deserves the name obscene. My next update is tragic. It's about rape, the crime of rape. The average in the last few years in the United states has been 460,000 people are victims of rape or attempted rape every year. That's what's reported. Many of them go unreported. That's a higher rate of that horrid crime than the people we've lost to Covid in the last two years. But is it a crisis? Understood that way. Is everybody working on it? No. And that's why I'm talking about it. You know, when rapes happen, most to victims who are between 12 and 34 years of age, young people, and they suffer the rest of their lives. They get depressed more often, they need more medication, they need more therapy. Their lives are a mess in many cases. It's a horrible burden and cost on their system on top of being a horrible violation of decent human rights. In the United Kingdom, it spawned a new program. Everyone's invited as women, particularly since they are the major victims of rape 10 times more than men are. It's a crisis. It deserves the attention of a crisis. And imagine if we taxed the obscene wealthy and we used it to deal with this crisis. What a contribution we could make. We've come to the end of the first part of today's Economic Update. And as always, I want to thank all of you whose support makes this show possible each week. To learn more about the different ways you can support Economic Update, Please go to patreon.com economicupdate or visit democracyatwork.info We've also recently released a new hardcover edition of Of Understanding Marxism that is available now. To get your copy of this new edition or other books, go to democracyatwork.info books. Please stay with us. We'll be right back with today's special guest, investigative reporter Bob Henley. Welcome back friends to the second half of today's Economic Update. And it is with great pleasure that I welcome back my favorite investigative reporter, Mr. Robert Henley. But I'm going to call him Bob as I always do. And though you know him, I'm going to remind you he's an award winning print and broadcast journalist, a staff reporter for the Chief Leader, a New York City based labor focused newspaper since 1897. On the Chief Leader, Bob has been covering U.S. labor issues nationally for several years. He's also a regular contributor to Salon magazine where he writes about economics and politics. Over the years he has done reporting for the following quite a CBS's 60 Minutes, the new York Times, the Village Voice, the Christian Science Monitor, CBS Money Watch, National Public Radio, WNYC and the Pacifica Network. He's been dedicated more recently to covering the pandemic through the perspective of healthcare workers, first responders and the entire so called essential workforce. And he's the author of his new book just released and published by Democracy at Work, called called Stuck can the United States Change Course on Our history of Choosing profits over people? So, Bob, welcome again to our microphones and our cameras.

Bob Henley (16:06)

Thanks for inviting me.

Richard Wolff (16:07)

All right, let's jump right in. We're at the second. We're coming to the end of the second year of a global viral pandemic. And we know that here in the United States we have lost tens of thousands of workers who are part of the essential workforce in the sectors like healthcare, transport emergencies and so on. And yet, ironically, unions and workers in those industries have in significant numbers been pushing against the vaccine that has been going around or, and this is the key point, they've been pushing back against mandates to get vaccines. And so in the public mind, with the assistance of mainstream media, there's a bit of a collapse or a confusion between being anti vaccine, which is one issue, and being anti mandate, which is another. Can you give us a little background and to understand how this happened and.

Bob Henley (17:07)

What'S at stake, first and foremost, it's important to keep in mind that the highest crime and misdemeanor of former President Trump was to pit each state of the United States against each other, which was unprecedented. It's very important to understand that a time of a once in a century public health crisis, he did something very cynical, which is still haunting President Joe Biden today, which was to pit red states versus blue states, to the point that a Republican Governor Hogan from Maryland had to assign armed state troopers to protect the ppe, protective protection equipment for the workers that he was trying to distribute in Maryland. So that said, what's happened here is that we've seen the conversation shift from the failure of the government to protect and anticipate this, which was something that was widely known and discussed. Indeed, the Obama administration had plans that were on the shelf that could have been utilized to this question of whether or not workers are going to submit to vaccination. It's important to know that under labor law, something like this that's determined condition of employment is to be negotiated. I will tell you that labor leaders like Sarah Nelson, who I just interviewed from the flight attendant union with the CWA describes a different model than we're seeing in some jurisdictions like New York City, where it was mandated under coercion by Mayor de Blasio. In that setting, airlines like United worked with the union to develop A plan the union had a role in, formulated in those places without coercion, they got well over 90% participation. So I would say this is just smokescreen by certain kind of opportunist political people like Mr. Dubois, who wants to run for governor, who are trying to strike a kind of pet go thing where they appear to be more acting in the public interest than the unions themselves.

Richard Wolff (18:55)

So in fact, is it correct, as I have been told by several union leaders, that they are against mandates but are very much for vaccination, have done so, have themselves been vaccinated, have encouraged their members to be vaccinated? In other words, it's really wrong to equate anti mandate with anti vaccine.

Bob Henley (19:19)

Absolutely. And one of the things about this that capital probably loves is this does fracture the labor movement. It's very important to understand that. I know of no union, none, that has opposed the vaccine as a scientific matter. I do know of many unions who feel that we need to be skeptical about the state apparatus, because let's remember, the same pharma complex that now we see as being our saviors were defendants in cases and still are defenses in cases regarding the opioid epidemic that was documented, at least in civil trial that they promoted. So I think the unions here once again see themselves as a backstop for future generations because the reality is, in a world of global warming, pandemics is going to be a further notice thing. Even as we speak today, we're preparing for yet another wave. So it's very important that unions go to the mat to protect workers, to make sure that they hold the government accountable. I mean, let's remember that the nurses here were saying at the very beginning of the pandemic, and this is not remembered, but it's cost many people their lives. By some estimates, 4,000 nurses in the United States and healthcare workers have died from this pandemic because of things like what the CDC did originally, where at the beginning of this, because there was not sufficient supply of N95 masks, told these health professionals to not do the things they learned about basics in medical school and nursing school, which is to remove an N95 mask after each clinical encounter. That's very important to understand, that is every time you see a patient that might be infected. What the CDC did to manage inventory during the Trump administration was tell people to forget their training and to wear their mask sometimes for a week at a time. And at the time, the unions in this country predicted that two things would happen, that they would spread the disease and that they themselves would die. And the third thing, the hospitals, which were the front lines, would become vectors for the disease. And I submit to you, Rick, that because we did not heed the labor unions, that's what exactly happened. Scroll forward to May of just this year when the CDC said let's roll back the universal mask mandate for people that are vaccinated in interior settings. And at the time you didn't see this reported, but it happened. The unions warned this will spread the disease. There is not sufficient enough vaccination. Moreover, you're put in a position of being the vaccination police. And what's going to happen is you're going to spawn a variant. And that's exactly what happened because workers and their unions were not at the table.

Richard Wolff (22:05)

It's also important to remind everyone that we have 150 years of struggle to in this country to get unions and to get workers a seat at the table to work out how to deal with work problems, whether they are local, in the factory or the office, or they're national like this crisis. And there is no reason to ask unions to simply step aside and give away what they fought so hard to achieve. And there's something sleazy about employers using a pandemic to kind of sneak in the ability to mandate something they should have negotiated. And I think it's very important that your work puts that forward. I wanna switch now and I wanna draw your brain to focus a little bit on a political problem. There were recent elections, November of this year in Virginia and New Jersey particularly. And I know you are a longtime New Jersey reporter as well as resident, and the argument was made that the Democratic Party was lost a lot of ground or appeared to in those two states as well as elsewhere. And the argument was made very quickly by the establishment Democratic Party, the centrists, that this was because of some association of voters with the progressive wing of the party, Bernie Ocasio, Cortez and all of that. And I think you've taken the position in your writing exactly the opposite. And I'd like you to expand on how you see the election results and what sense you make of them.

Bob Henley (23:43)

So I would say that watching very closely what was happening in New Jersey with Governor Phil Murphy, who was going up against what had been basically a jinx because we'd not elected a reelected Democrat going back to Brendan Byrne to like the 1980s, and he originally had like a double digit lead. Now my reporting indicated that his decision to go to his villa in Italy in August, in the middle of a wave, when the state Department advised against US people traveling there was when Republican former Senator Jack Cittarelli closed that gap because he is a journeyman politician Republican tried to distance himself for Trump and he just was laying out what was the hypocrisy. And so as a result the combination of Murphy did not galvanize the urban base. So we did not have the typical turnout that we had in 2020 that gave Biden historic margins here in New Jersey. And so it was very much like what happened in 2016. People forget this. This is how the Democrats lost. There was a demobilization of 700,000 African American households. It did 700,000 African Americans. And part of that was because Obama had not addressed the foreclosure crisis on Martin Luther King Boulevard and a surge in the reactionary white supremacist vote that Trump managed to galvanize. So it's the combination of things. I will tell you that actually the failure to excite what Dr. Reverend Barber calls the sleeping giant of the tens of millions of working class Americans was the reason why it was so close. And actually what you see here is the same thing. They're on a glide path for failure in 2022 because the Democrats, the establishment, they have President Biden in the middle of this inflationary run up going to Nantucket to spend time in the estate of the co founder of Carlyle and then disconnected from the struggle Americans are having with things like gasoline prices and the price of Turkey. Similarly, President Obama accepts $100 million for his foundation from Jeff Bezos. These people don't blink about this. This is an incoherent message. If you're saying that you represent something different, that you want to flip the unfair and oppressive oppressive tax pyramid of America that has destroyed working class families ambitions for generations, then you have to stand up to this kind of dynastic wealth, not cater to it, which is what we've seen with the way they hollowed out build back better which must be pass bric. I don't say it shouldn't but remember it started at some three point some odd trillion and it was cut only when the mansions and the cinemas got weak kneed about imposing a dynastic wealth tax which is what originally the more progressive element of the Biden White House wanted to do.

Richard Wolff (26:43)

You know it leaves me with the impression you're reporting and now what you have just said to us, that the Democratic party's refusal to cash in, if I can put it that way on the mass feeling in this country that big business and the billionaires are running away with the entire game here and have been doing it for 30, 40 years. The refusal of the Democratic Party to make that the central message means they have given up on any chance to have the political power not to be in the corner of giving up everything the way you just described caving in on the build back, better tax point.

Bob Henley (27:28)

And the reality here is that also it's bad economic policy. One of the problems that all economists recognize is that there's a labor force problem going on. There's many reasons for it. We're having people spontaneously reassess their life because of an existential crisis where tens of thousands of people they knew died merely from working at the grocery store, driving a truck or interacting in the world. And so if you wanted to have people encourage them to come back to the workforce, you should make work pay. But what this country has done is, and my father, I think, felt this his whole life trying to raise six kids was that you never got ahead because they tax work at a higher rate of taxation than idle capital. That is the central moral sin of this country. And if it's not reversed, it'll never achieve its potential. It will always be about the accumulation of capital to the disadvantage of working families.

Richard Wolff (28:24)

And that, Bob Henley, is why you are my favorite reporter and are on this program. Thank you very much, Bob, for your insights, for the reporting you do and the analysis that you pull out of your reporting. One is as important and valuable as the other. And to my audience, I hope you will agree with me. It's a special time when we hear from Bob, get a depth kind of reporting beyond the norm. Thank you for listening and I look forward, as always, to speaking with you again next week.