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- [00:10]
A
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.
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B
Thanks. Pleasure to be back. Honored to be back.
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A
Good. Thank you. All right. You have a new book called Bullet Points and Punchlines. And I've noticed that both Chris Hedges and Jimmy Dore have pointed out that your comedy goes after both Republicans and Democrats pretty much equal measure. Do you agree? And was that intentional and what's your goal with all of that?
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B
Well, whenever, yeah, I've heard that before where people say, oh, I like that you go after both sides. But it's not going after both sides just to go after both sides. It's that I think that the two sides are basically one party. I mean, at least when it comes to the 80, 90% of structural issues and in our country. So I go after them from the left. I don't just trash anybody who walks forward and says anything. So I think there are comedians out there that's just like, screw it all, make fun of everything. And that's not what it is. I actually try and have very substantive points that are below the criticism of this two party system, that it largely isn't serving anyone, I mean, except for the rich, of course.
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A
It's always struck me on that point that it's very clever if you have a one party system to call it two parties.
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B
Absolutely.
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A
That way when people get tired of you, they get the other part of you. And when they get tired of that, they go back to the first part of you. And this way you're always in charge.
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B
Right.
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A
And the Communist Party in Russia ought to have learned that, ought to have had another thing and that they could play musical chairs the way we do.
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B
I mean, it's a brilliant system. It goes with the idea that the Best kind of slave doesn't know they're a slave. The best kind of person locked in this system doesn't know they're locked in the system. Because we think we're steering, we think we're driving. I compare the American electoral system to the little plastic steering wheel that parents get for their infants sitting in the passenger seat of the car. And the infant gets to sit there going, I'm steering. I'm steering the country. That's what we're doing.
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A
It reminds me, Rosa Luxembourg had this wonderful line. It's better in German, but we'll do it in English. You don't feel your chains until you try to move. If you don't try to move, you're not aware that you're chained in. All right, people have asked me this question, so I want to ask you, is your critical edge of your humor, does it come out of a sense that the United States has somehow promised to you and to all of us and then broken the promise that there's a betrayal of something that you have within your humor and as part of it, a need to call out that this has happened?
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B
Yeah, that's interesting. I think it's related. I don't think that I ever believed there was a promise of the American dream, but I bristle, and I'm upset at the idea of being manipulated, at the idea of how much propaganda we're fed out of our mainstream airwaves and from our politicians. And to me, that is kind of a false promise. It is a false truth. And, you know, ever since I discovered, and it maybe took me a little longer than some, but, you know, in my college years and then shortly thereafter, how much we're lied to when we're kids in school and we're told that certain people are heroes or that certain people discovered America when millions of people already lived here and those kind of things, you know, figuring that out just infuriated me. So I think I've always had this anger at being lied to and anger at being manipulated. And, you know, the stuff I hit on the book is some of the biggest topics where I'm like, this is how we're being lied to. This is how we are being, you know, we are being used as a way for them to extract more profit, you know, in the manipulation.
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A
Let me follow up. You talk about eight myths that keep. In the book, you talk about eight myths that keep the United States from collapsing. Tell us a little bit at least about some of them.
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B
Yes, well, some of them are fit with what we've said initially, which is, you know, the idea that we have a democracy, the idea that we have a great electoral system, when in fact, a large Harvard study, we rated it the worst in the Western world. We vote on black box machines that no one's ever allowed to see what goes on inside of them. It's just ridiculous. Also, the myth that if you just work hard enough, you will succeed, you will become rich or at least middle, upper middle class or something. But in fact, there's people working their butts off all across America that are not getting rich. They're just barely able to sustain. And so that is another very powerful myth that, well, they're not working hard enough. Is that true? Does Bloomberg work billions of times harder than your average American? No, it's laughable. And so, yeah, those are some of the important myths, I think, that keep this system going. Because if people understood that these are myths, that these aren't true, that this is an adult fairy tale, I think you would see riots in the street. You would see far more people furious.
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A
Yeah. These myths, like most powerful myths, are social glue that keep a society from falling apart.
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B
Right, right.
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A
Your humor, and that's one of the reasons I like to have you on the show, reminds me of the importance, when I was younger, of the times I saw George Carlin. So I was wondering, just as a person interested in comedy, did he play some role in your development?
- [20:51]
B
He definitely was pivotal in me transforming from a regular observational comedian to someone saying more significant stuff, because I was already into comedy. I got into comedy when I was 12, and I started writing humor columns and things like that. But I was really into the observational guys, the Seinfelds and stuff like that. And then I saw Carlin, and I was. It amazed me that you could say such dark truths about America, about, you know, the humanity, about the way things are and get away with it, really. Like, people were laughing, they were enjoying themselves. He's a great comedian. And so, yeah, it was very pivotal in showing me what the possibilities were. And there were others as well, even writers such as Joseph Heller with Catch 22. I mean, that book is incredibly dark, but also incredibly hysterical, the satire in it. So, yeah, there were some pivotal figures like that. And luckily, I never got to meet George Carlin, but luckily I've gotten to be friends with his daughter, Kelly Carlin, and she's wonderful. Good.
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A
All right. Is Trump worse for you than the.
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B
Others that we've had the past presents? I don't know if I'd say worse. I'D say the reason that our empire doesn't like him, that the establishment, many establishment, even Republicans, didn't like him at first. And the military industrial complex, the intelligence community is. Cuz he's just not a good steward of the American empire. He's accidentally, through his idiocy and his ego, taking the curtain off all of a sudden. You can see the racism, you can see the ego, you can see the narcissism, you can see the way the system works. And so that's why they hate him. And, you know, so he's worse in that regard. But maybe that's better. Maybe people needed to see that the mask come off to see how this system works. So it's possible that he was a required step for people to really understand how horrible this system is for so many people. But of course, now a lot of the establishment are getting behind him because he has given massive tax breaks to the rich. He doesn't touch Wall street, he doesn't really touch the military, although they were afraid of that at first because he said we're bringing troops home and stuff. But then when he says that, it doesn't happen. So, you know, they're largely okay with a lot of that.
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A
All right, and so the strategy of the Democratic establishment is to propose a Biden who gives you everything Trump does without the ugly veneer.
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B
Without the ugly veneer, yes. And I think they're blowing up the Democratic Party by doing it. Like if they wanted to represent some sort of difference from Donald Trump, then you can't put someone who agrees on, like I said, the 80% of core issues. It really is pathetic to see another, you know, another puppet put in there that's just gonna keep going with the same corporate crap that we've had for so many years. I mean, Biden was the center of a lot of this stuff. The drug reform, criminal justice reform that has put millions of people in our jails, making us the largest prison state in the world. He was, you know, pushed Clinton on that regard. He was a big fan of the Iraq war, which we now know, the catastrophe of that, a million people dead. And so you can just go down the list of how horrible he has been in his career and the record is there, and yet that's what they're putting forward, if they put him forward. It's disgusting.
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A
Let me push you on one parallel that some have raised. Trump got in basically by threatening the Republican Party that if they closed him out, kind of like the Democrats are trying to close out Sanders, that he would take away the white supremacists, the Christian fundamentalists, that part of their base, and then the Republican Party would fall apart. It could not survive. Do you think Sanders could make the same demand on the Democrats that if you do this, if you close me out, even though I am the legitimate candidate, assuming he gets to that point, or at least I'm the candidate of an enormous part of this, will the same dialectic play out?
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B
I think he could have made that threat. I think time is running out to make that threat. But I do think it is true that a large number of people see something in Sanders, a change in Sanders that they do not see in Biden, and therefore they probably would not show up in November for a Biden, whereas they would show up for a Sanders. So I think that's absolutely true. However, I do think the one thing, and perhaps the only thing that could allow a senile Joe Biden with a horrible record to beat Donald Trump is an economic crisis, which we very well might get. So that is the one thing where all of a sudden Trump looks like he's out of control, he can't control our economy and he can't do things right for Americans, and all of a sudden you could get a senile Biden as president. But I think that's the only thing, because otherwise Trump is gonna wipe the floor with Biden in that debate stage. It's gonna be ugly.
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A
All right, I'm an economist, I am a critic of capitalism, and therefore I can't but notice that your comedy skewers capitalism. I find that remarkable. Like I find Sanders remarkable. Like I find the acceptability of discussing socialism without hysteria. These are real milestones in an emergence out of the Cold War mentality. Do you feel that? Is that part of your comedy? Is that a goal you have? Because it is remarkable how unafraid of dealing with capitalism, naming the system you're joking about, that's really characteristic of your comedy. And I want to know why you did that.
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B
I mean, I've never been afraid of doing it. I have seen the repercussions of doing it. You know, the suppression online, the attacks I've had. They did full page attack pieces against me in the New York Times cover of the Arts section. NPR's Weekend Edition has done attached smear pieces on me filled with lies and stuff like that. So I've certainly seen the repercussions of it, but I've never been afraid of it. Because like I said, the reason I'm saying these things, the reason I'm a comedian, is to reveal the lies, the manipulation, the propaganda. So I don't know any other way to do it. I don't like. Capitalism is a system that is destroying our planet, destroying our lives. It can't go on like this much longer. We're in a death spiral. And maybe George Carlin said, as you get towards the end, it speeds up and it's speeding up. And so I don't see, I don't think we have a lot of time left to screw around and I don't see any other way to talk about it. And you know, you look at, speaking of capitalism, you look at what's going on with the coronavirus, in an emergency, all of a sudden they start telling everybody, hey, stop doing what you would normally do under capitalism, stop. You know, they tell big pharma guys, work together to come up with a solution for this. They tell people, hey, stay home if you're sick, even though capitalism is telling you you gotta get to work cause you can't pay the bills if you don't show up.
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A
And you got no paid sick leave.
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B
You got no paid sick leave. So they're telling people, hey, in this emergency, for this little window, ignore capitalism. But in fact, what if it's a longer term emergency? What if we have the emergency of climate change, the emergency of people getting ill, that's not a pand, you know, people with broken legs, it's not a pandemic. Then we're supposed to keep behaving the way that is just nonsensical, that is terrible for everyone. So yeah, the criticism of capitalism to me is just a no brainer.
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A
That's something we have in common. Thank you very much, Lee. I really appreciate you joining us.
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B
I appreciate it.
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A
And to all of you, I hope you find both the humor and the insight in Lee camp that we do and that's why we have him here from time to time. And I hope very much that we will have him again in the not too distant future. And I hope also to speak with you again next week.