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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, incomes, debts. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I want to begin today's program to talk to you about the Koch Foods Company. That's right, Koch, as in the Koch brothers. One of their many industries that they own, and in particular Koch Foods operates poultry processors. That's a nice phrase for ripping the feathers off of chickens and so forth and so on. These plants that they run are in Mississippi, particularly in the town of Morton, Mississippi. And in early August, the ICE people, the immigration people, folks, staged the greatest raid in American history against immigrants. They rounded up 600 to 700 immigrants working in those poultry processing plants. Let me give you the picture of what happened. 600 agents of ICE, that's an awful lot of people, got together with helicopters and they were wearing black body armor, they were carrying guns. The staging area was a local National Guard base. Wow. What was this for? It was to arrest people on the job. It meant that those people's children either watched all of this or had no parents when they were expected at home. It separated people from one another. It terrified everybody, which clearly was part of its purpose. You could have arrested those people if indeed you felt you had to on a weekend or in their homes or in the evening. You could have made arrangements so it wouldn't terrify the children. All of the things a sane, decent human being would understand. But it is much worse than that in this made for TV ICE raid to placate perhaps the president or maybe his election base, or who knows. Here's what we found, really. The employers of these 600 undocumented or allegedly undocumented immigrants weren't touched. No employer was arrested. No employer was taken into custody. No employer was affected at all. Their problem was to go find replacements for the people who no longer worked there. Needless to say, these are some of the old worst working conditions and the lowest paid jobs you can imagine. Of course the employer knew. The claim that the employer didn't know that these were undocumented immigrants is as believable as is the person who's trying to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge. But we're supposed to believe this sort of nonsense? I guess that's what patriotism requires of us. Why do employers want undocumented workers? The answer is simple. Because they are afraid to do anything. You don't pay them on time, they're not going to go to the police and complain. You don't pay them at all, they're not going to Go. They'll come back next week and hope next week you will get paid because they're terrified and they're terrorized, which is what this is all about. Eric Schlosser, the famous author of Fast Food Nation, wrote an article in the Atlantic Monthly dated August 16th. If you have a chance, take a look. He documents that raid and all that it means in full, full gory detail. The word shame is not strong enough to describe what is going on. I want to turn next to another specialty of our day, guns. And I want to report to you from the center. It's called the Institute of Health Medicine and Evaluation, maintained by the University of Washington, Washington State. In the Northwest, they keep track of gun deaths per hundred thousand of the population across the world's countries. The United states has the 4.43 gun deaths per hundred thousand American citizens as of 2017, the latest year for which data are available. Let me give you an example. If the United States has 4.43 war, what is the rate in China and Japan? Ready? 0.4. Let me stress that's 100 times less of a rate of gun deaths per hundred thousand people. Canada, a place rather like the United States with lots of people who have guns, how many gun deaths do they have again? We in America have 4.43. The Canadians 0.471.10 the rate of the United States. Let me give you the names of two countries that also have less gun deaths per hundred thousand than we do. One is Afghanistan and the other one is Iraq. Here's the Afghanistan 3.96. They're getting close to us, but they still in a country that is war ridden for the last umpteen years, they still have fewer gun deaths per hundred thousand. And In Iraq, it's 3.54 close, but still less than what we have in the United states. In Britain, 0.06. Denmark 15. Here are some countries that have higher rates of gun death per hundred thousand. El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. In El Salvador, 43.11. That's 10 times worse than the United States. That of course is why those people are coming to the United States. To escape a level of gun violence that ought to make us welcome them seeking safety. But of course, you know what we do instead. My next update has to do with how conservatives in America are responding to the proposals of some of the Democrats running for president, particularly Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, to tax wealth in the United States. Oh, they are getting their passions riled up about it. Let's take a look. I'm going to focus on Elizabeth Warren's plan because it is the most clearly and worked out and detailed plan. Here's her she would require an annual 2% tax. 2% on all portfolios or all net worth individuals who have get ready now more than $50 million. So a lot of you listening and watching can relax because Elizabeth Warren is not after you. If you have 50 million bucks or less, none of what I'm about to describe to you will affect you. You're not part of the story. Ah. And how are they going to be taxed? 2% of what they have above 50 million. The first 50 million nobody gets taxed, including these wealthy people. Only what you have in excess of 50 million will be subject to a 2% tax. And if you have more than 1 billion, you will be subject to get ready a 3% tax per year. Okay, how many families in America are going to be affected by this tax? 75,000 families. That's in a population of 325 million people. I did the arithmetic. Here's the percentage of Americans that will be affected. Ready.0002. Wow. How could you get really excited about this if 99.9999% of the people are not affected by this tax? Well, are conservatives ever ready to defend the 0.00002% are on the job? This tax will raise over 10 years. Excuse me, $2.75 trillion of revenue able to solve many of the most egregious problems of American society. Wow. You could help 325 million people by taxing ready 2% of the money owned by people who have more than 50 million leaving them. Of course, with 98% of what they had, they would still be the richest people in the country. But the conservatives are apoplectic. One of them on Fox News recently referred to this as a confiscation tax. They're taxing our property. That is awful. That's my property. And you know something? It's even worse than awful because I already paid an income tax when I earned that money and now I used it to buy property and they're going to tax my property in. Isn't that awful? And to go even one more step, they said, you know, over 10 years, you multiply 10 years times 2% a year. That's 20% of my money. They really got excited. So let me respond because their excitement is based on a level of ignorance which is so enormous that I don't really believe it. I think they know better, but they think we don't. So I want to deal with that. Let's start taxing twice. You're right. You are taxed when you earn your income. And then if you buy certain kinds of property, you're taxed again. One is a tax on income and the other one is a tax on property. But there is nothing new and nothing exceptional about this. Let me give you an example. If you earn money, you pay an income tax. Suppose you use that money to buy a home. Guess what? There's a property tax on your home in the town where you live. So you're paid income tax. And then you pay a tax on your property. That's not new and that's not exceptional. What you're screaming about, Mr. Conservative. There's nothing new here. If you earn money, you pay an income tax. If you then buy a car, you pay a property tax on that car. Once again, income tax and then property tax. Ironically, what the conservatives don't want you to know is that there is a kind of property that doesn't pay a property tax in the United States. You know what it is? It's property in the form of stocks and bonds. In every community in America, they tax land, they tax buildings, they tax automobiles, but they do not tax stocks and bonds. It's the one kind of property that is exempt through the history of the United States, most of it. Wow. The fact is, it's a highly unjust system, this property tax. It taxes cars or homes and land. That's the property. Average people sometimes have, at least the better half of them in terms of income. 10% of the people own 84% of the shares of stocks and bonds. They're the ones escaping from a property tax on the property they're rich enough to own. And Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are going after that, which should have been done 100 years ago. There's nothing new and nothing confiscatory about it. If you're really worried about confiscating property, you should have been complaining about the tax on homes and the tax on cars, which you conservatives carefully avoid doing it. And now the funny joke about multiplying 10 times 2. And I'll give it to the conservatives, it adds up to 20. You're right. But what you forgot to remember is the wealth grows each year. It's 2%, but not of the same amount. It's 2% of the wealth as it grows. And 2% is a lot less than they're going to make. Because if you have this kind of money, you hire a hedge fund to manage it for you. By the way, you know what hedge funds charge rich people like this? 2% a year of the value of their assets, plus 20% of how much it goes up. It's called the 2 in 20 rule. So rich people are used to paying 2% a year to their hedge fund manager, but plus 20%, the government is only coming and asking for 2%, not 20% of what it goes up. So the joke is it's a fake. They don't want to pay the tax. That's all that's going on. Rich people don't want to pay the tax, which should come as hot news to nobody. All right, folks, we've come to the end of this first half of Economic Update. I want to remind you, please, to become a subscriber to our YouTube channel. It's very, very important for us. It's just a click of the mouse for you and it changes our situation and supports what we do. I also want to invite you, as we always do, to make use of our websites, democracyatwork.info or rdwolff with two Fs com. Through those websites, you can communicate to us with email. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And of course, and this is so important, our special thanks and appreciation to our Patreon community. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. I'm very pleased to be able to welcome again Dr. Harriet Fraad. She is a health counselor, mental health counselor in private practice, a hypnotherapist in New York City. You can find her work, which you're familiar with if you watch or listen to this program at her website, harrietfraudfraad.com recently she has begun to produce a bimonthly podcast called Capitalism Hits Home. I think you'll find this kind of work that we will be talking about available on that podcast and we urge you to take a look at it. It is available on itunes, Google Play, and at our website, democracyatwork.info if you'd like to support it, please go to patreon.com capitalismhitshome welcome again.