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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 and viruses as they come along and shape our lives, those of our children and the world at large. And I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I want to talk to you today about the coronavirus and about the Democratic primary for president, because those two topics have been enormously important now for quite a while and deserve attention that many of you have asked us to provide using the kinds of perspectives that characterize this program. So let me begin with the coronavirus. I'm not here to repeat the kind of news, real and imaginary, that is flying everywhere. It's a bit of a testimony to the private enterprise system in which competing media outlets try to outdo one another for audience and for income rather than for public information, which ought to be their primary objective usually, but especially at a time of national health emergency. So let me begin by indicating what some of the problems are that a capitalist medical system of the sort we have in the United States presents to dealing with something as big of an epidemic as the Coronavirus already is. 30 million Americans have no insurance, no medical insurance. They have a long history of not going to the doctor when they have something they think is a passing flu, viral or bacterial, because they can't afford to pay the astronomic cost that confronts someone without insurance. Likewise, for such a person to go to the emergency room, which would be an option under other circumstances, becomes something you don't want to do in the face of a crisis. Since all the other people who have no other way of getting health are rushing to the emergency room. If there are likely to be people infected by this virus, you're going to find them in an emergency room. And people figure that out. And so we have a walking time bomb. But it would be nothing if it weren't added to by the 100 million Americans have insurance, but with huge deductibles and or sizable co pays. They don't want to have to shell that money out because they don't have it. They will hesitate to be tested and therefore they will hesitate to be identified. And therefore they will spread the disease if they have it, in ways that that a properly covered insurance program would be able to avoid. Millions more American workers have no paid sick leave from their job, and they will stay at their job as long as possible because they have no paid sick leave. And then I come to the undocumented immigrants afraid of going to any medical facility because it will subject them to dangers from ICE or other Immigration authorities. This is a collection that amounts to at least half of the population so managed in our medical profit system that they are colluding with this epidemic. They don't want to, but the system forces it on them. We have a law in the United States that allows mandatory quarantining of people, but it doesn't cover the costs of a quarantine when a person loses his or her income. This is crazy. If you're going to quarantine people who have the disease and you're not going to cover the cost of it, you're giving them an incentive not to be tested so they avoid the quarantine. I noticed that the Trump administration has made statements about tax relief and aid for airlines and travel companies affected by this crisis. Once again, we see where the priorities in a capitalist system go to the corporations and not to the mass of people whose health is threatened. To give you an idea of how things could be otherwise, I'm gonna pick one country. South Korea. It's handling their situation there, which is more extreme than ours, yet in the United States, as follows. South Korea has a universal health insurance program. On top of that, corona testing is free for every single person in South Korea, and that includes immigrants who are specifically guaranteed no information about their treatment will be shared by any other government institution. And you do not have to be a South Korean citizen to get the free testing. Nothing like that is being done in the United States. And I leave it to you to imagine why. And then we have the market system, our proud market system that is distributing scarce testing kits, scarce masks, scarce equipment to people who can pay. That's right. If you have a lot of money, you can go on to the Internet and go find these rare health items. And they're distributed according to how much money you have, not according to what the need is. For example, for medical personnel to be safe in treating those who come for testing. They obviously should get the equipment, the testing equipment and the mask and anything else that might help first. But not in a market system. No, no, no. It goes first to those with the most money. On March 8, the New York Times regaled us with a list of all the things rich people are doing to escape the virus. The yachts that they are moving onto, the bunkers they have created on their property to hide in, the expensive masks that they are able to get that cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars. It's charming to watch how the system works. In the United Kingdom, the competition and market authority is monitoring the situation and may ask the government to impose price controls. In other words, it's a recognition, at least in England, that the market is a failed institution for dealing with such situations. And as you know from this program, it isn't very good at lots of other things either. I want to turn next to the Super Tuesday election, the one that we are supposed to believe made the decision that Mr. Biden will be the Democratic candidate over Mr. Sanders, even though Mr. Biden only has a few more delegate seats. I want to stress something to everybody so that they don't miss it. Much of the objectives that led Bernie Sanders to run, he has already achieved. Millions upon millions of Americans have voted for a socialist. That's right. They decided that faced with a dozen candidates over the last months who proudly said they weren't socialists, he beat all of them except Mr. Biden, every one of them. And they all folded because they could not appeal against the power of a socialist. That's the end of the Cold War. It didn't end in 1989. It didn't. It took another 30 years to die. It's now the case that particularly young people, because if you didn't notice, let me remind you, even in the Southern states that Mr. Biden won, he lost the vote of people 35 to 40 years and younger. Mr. Sanders cleaned up with all the youth, all the future of the Democratic Party. It's extraordinary what has been accomplished, and that has been accomplished no matter what happens in the rest of this race or at the convention. It's even gotten some capitalists thinking. Let me quote to you from a partner in the firm Menlo Ventures, a venture capital firm in California. Venki Ganessan is their partner, and here's his. I'm trying to balance what socialism means versus four more years of Trump. And honestly, it feels like which is the worst of two evils. What an interesting approach for a capitalist. Mr. Sanders has shown Americans that there are millions of people, especially majorities among the young, who find socialism an increasingly attractive alternative to a capitalism that works like the one we live in. My next economic update is about, well, let's call it the Vanishing American Dream. The World Economic Forum released a report this last week or so in Davos that ranked the United States 27th in the world in terms of social mobility. Top five Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Iceland. Here's what social mobility means. It means the chance you have in if you're born poor, to end up not poor, to move up in the scale in your life. What are the chances, the real opportunities. Yeah. The United States ranks 27th. But that's not the important news. Here comes the important news. A recent study conducted at the University of Pennsylvania in partnership with Northwestern and the University of Nebraska and working with the Census Bureau, looked back as far as 1850 and concluded that socioeconomic mobility in the United States is at its worst ever. Let me say that again, at its worst ever, according to this study. Here's the number I found so revealing. According to this study, 60% of people born in the 1940s did better than their parents, compared to the 1980s, when the number had dropped to 40%. That's right, well under half the people born in the 1980s are doing better than their parents. A majority are doing worse. That's not mobility up, that's mobility down. And that's the reality facing the American economy as we speak. And when you hear Mr. Trump or Mr. Mnuchin talking about how great the economy is, remember these numbers, because they're really about the situation and they're not pretend, self promoting make believe. My last economic update has to do with updating you all on events in France. Mr. Macron, the president of France, faced a general strike. We spoke about it on this program repeatedly for a month or two, starting in early December, across both the Christmas and New Year holidays. The general strike was a protest of virtually the entire unionized labor force, plus the yellow vest movement, against the effort of the Macron government to solve the economic problems of French capitalism by depriving people of the pension system that they had laboriously created in the 20th century and into which they had contributed vast sums of what otherwise would have been their wages. And the working class protested, and Mr. Macron backed down. But something has to help the French capitalists. And so he's back at it. And on March 3, Mr. Macron invoked Article 49.3 of the French constitution to bypass Parliament with his pension reform. That word reform is wonderful. It covers such a multitude of sins. The pension reform is now going to be voted on without discussion. It's going to be imposed by government decree. That part of the constitution was designed to deal with genuine national emergencies, which this isn't. But it's an effort to slide and slither through what the mass of the French people have opposed. Shame on Mr. Macron and the type of undemocratic policymaking he exemplifies. We've come to the end of the first half of today's program. Please remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Be sure to visit democracyatwork.info to learn more about our programs, our shows, our our union co op store and our two big books, Understanding Socialism and Understanding Marxism. And lastly, a special thanks to our Patreon community whose invaluable support helps make this show possible. We'll be right back with our special guest, Lee Camp. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's economic update. It is with great pleasure that I welcome back to our cameras and our microphones, Lee Camp. Lee is the host and head writer of the hit comedy news show redacted tonight on RT America. He's also an activist, a touring standup comedian, which is a nice way to put it, a contributor to Truthdig and a former for the Onion, a newspaper that many of us remember and like for all the humor that it injects into our culture now that it badly needs it. So, Lee, thank you.