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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, our weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, debts, incomes, our own and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I want to begin today with a perennial issue and bring you up to date because of new statistical work. The issue is what exactly is the unemployment rate? It comes up often on this program and in the news media all the time. It has become recently and over the last two or three decades a regular political football. Whatever political party is in power tries to represent that unemployment is low. And whatever political party is trying to get into power argues the reverse. And each of them has their numbers just like they have their different polling data and the different worlds they increasingly seem to live in. So I wanted to cut through this and talk about unemployment a little bit with you so that you get a handle on how serious this problem actually is. So let's start. The official rate these days is listed as 7.9%. And here's what that 1 in 12, that's what it means. 1 in 12Americans that are in the labor force are out of work but looking for a job. That's what that number counts. But unfortunately, if you're working part time and you're not earning very much money, you're considered employed. If you've stopped looking for work because you're disappointed or you're upset or you're living in some way off illegally gotten income, and we're not talking about small numbers here. We well, you're also then kind of not counted. You're not part of the unemployed. This has led people, and the government is doing this, I'm going to assume, in reasonably good faith when it does this kind of counting with qualifications. So some people have said let's ask the question differently. And it's the results here that I want you to think about. Now, here's the first step these folks took. Let us ask who's unemployed and count everybody who's either not working or given up looking or not earning very much because they work haphazardly a few hours here, a few there, who's really kind of virtually out of work. And the number zooms from 7.9% right now to 26.1%, which puts it right at the worst of The Great Depression, 1933, when we peaked at 25% of the labor force. But they've gone on, these folks, I'm gonna give you their name in a minute to ask another question. And this is the one that struck me. They asked, let's look at all Americans over the age of 16. Right. And who have a full time job paying more, more than $20,000 a year. Okay, so all Americans over 16 adults who are working full time and are earning more than $20,000 because you really don't want to count the ones that are working full time and, and earning $20,000 because those people are in trouble. They are not really employed in the sense of a decent job and a decent income. What are the numbers? 46% of white Americans in America right now over 16 are earning more than $20,000 a year. 46%. That means the majority of white Americans over 16, the majority are not doing a full time job earning $20,000 or more. And among black Americans it's 40.8%. So the majority of whites and blacks in our country that are over 16 don't have a full time job earning $20,000. You know what? Those people are functionally unemployed. They are not being used to their capacity. They are not earning a decent living. They cannot live a decent life. That's the level of problem and it's been these numbers for a long time. If you're interested in taking a look, the Ludwig Institute for shared economic prosperity lisep.org will give you the information in detail. The International Monetary Fund for our second update has issued its forecast for the year 2021. Here's what they the recovery from the pandemic and the crash will be long and uneven. It will not be quick and it will not be a tide that lifts all boats. And I want to expand on it because there's a particular reason I want everyone to understand. The pandemic and the crash have hit poor people worse than rich people, employees much worse than employers, and black and brown people much worse than white people. In a simple because of the way our economy works, this virus is making our society more unequal than it was before. And you can't blame the virus really, can you? Because we don't have a society that spreads the pain equally. We have a society that exacerbates the already existing inequality by unequally preparing for and unequally containing the virus. The long term consequences of the growing economic divisions worsened during this pandemic, worsened during this economic crisis. They will be with us for a long time. And this is an important issue far beyond the elections. Coming up will be this question of the inequality worsened by this pandemic because the elections are coming up. My third economic update for today is a kind of perennial. I wanted to look again at how the numbers Shape up in terms of who's giving money to the political process, who's investing in this or that candidate, this or that party. For all the usual reasons and because it's not well known, here are the basic 3/4 of all money given. Senate races, House races, presidential race, everything. Three quarters of it comes from less than 1% of the American people. These are people who give. This is the way the statistics are set up. $200 or more into the election. Less than 1% of Americans. Good. Bit less than 1% give $200 or more. And that makes up three quarters of all the money. So right away you can see that the 99% of us who don't have that kind of money to give $200 or more, we're kind of out of it. We're not relevant to the money raising. And by the way, the estimate this year is that the money raised for this election will be a record in excess of $11 billion with a B. I'm going to come back to that. I then looked at the tiny 100th of 1%. So we're not talking about the top 1%. We're talking about the top.001%. Them. I'm sorry, 0.01%. The top people. These are folks who give $10,000 or more to the political process. This year it's roughly 44,000 people and they are giving roughly a third of the money. So now we're getting to the people who give a third one out of every three bucks to the politicians are people who can give $10,000 or more. And obviously most of you, like me, can't do that. And then here's the last number. I thought you'd be interested in the United Kingdom. I'm comparing the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States, their last national elections. Okay, the last one in the United States, 2016, when Mr. Trump won and defeated Hillary Clinton. The last national election in Canada was a year before 2015. And the last national election in the United kingdom was in 2017. So I'm now going to tell you how how much money was donated in each of these three countries. Start with the United Kingdom. The most recent 2017, they spent ready $50 million. Five Zero Canada, 2015, they spent $90 million. The United States between those two years, 2016, spent ready $1,450,000,000 on their national election. We are not even close. We spend more than every we have. Therefore, the honor to say we have the best government money can buy. My next update has to do with a Small matter that if you think about it, turns out not to be small. There are 10 states in the United States out of 50, 10 that celebrate on October 12th something called indigenous Peoples Day. It is a celebration of the people who lived for many, many, many millennia here in what we now call the United States before the Europeans arrived. It's a remembrance this day that they were here, that they had very elaborate cultures and societies and histories, and that what the Europeans did when they came to this country was one of the greatest examples of, and I use great in a loose way of ethnic cleansing that we have in world history. And there ought to be a recognition that something strange happens to a society that begins its first three centuries, the 17th, the 18th and the 19th centuries. The bulk of the history of the European colonization of the United States was a protracted 3 century long slaughter of the people who were here. And that does something to a culture and a society. And we're still seeing some of what it does. My last update that we'll have time for is is a small item, which again, isn't so small. The People's Republic of China has unveiled what they believe now will be their next new currency. It's a digital currency. It's not money as we know it. It's the new form of money, electronic money, digital money that is much more easy to pay between businesses and people, to settle debts among people, to settle the debts that we have to the government for our taxes. It's a much quicker, much cheaper and much more efficient system. And why are the Chinese rolling it out? Because it's being blocked in the west by the big banks who see it as a threat to the stranglehold they had on our monetary system. Another way in which capitalism self destructs. We've come to the end of the first part of today's show. Before we move on, I want to remind you that we recently published my third book with democracy at work. It's called the Sickness is the System When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or itself. It's a compilation of essays that aims to explain how and why capitalism is the sickness of underlying all those symptoms. Get your copy today at our website, democracyatwork.info books. I want to thank our Patreon community, as always, for their ongoing and invaluable support. It helps make this show possible each week. So if you haven't Already, go to patreon.com economicupdate and sign up today for access to to exclusive content and more. Please stay with us. We will be right back with today's guest, author and activist, Camilla Pinero Harnecker. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update for today. It is with great pleasure that I welcome to our microphones and to our camera a friend and an associate who does the kind of work I want us to have more of on this program. She's a professor at the university in Havana, Cuba. Her name is Camilla Pinero Harnecker. She's a researcher and consultant and her work focuses on economic democracy with special interest in worker cooperatives and public policy towards enterprises, in this case on the part of the government in Cuba. She's the author of many articles and book chapters, three books on cooperatives, and she edited a very important volume which for those of you that are interested in the topic, I would recommend in English. It's called Cooperatives and A View from Cuba, and it was published in 2012 by Palgrave Publishers. So first of all, thank you very much. I'm going to call you Camilla because we know each other, but I want to introduce you to my audience. Okay, let's jump right in. You are an expert on Cuba. You live in Cuba, you work in Cuba. And Cuba is very important for this program, for the work that we do, because it took a remarkable step. It made a decision some years ago to shift from the reliance it had had on state owned and operated enterprises, typical of what had happened earlier in, in Russia and China and many other places, and to shift over to a different economic structure of enterprises, namely worker co ops owned and operated by independent groups of private Cuban citizens. So I want to begin by asking you how big a worker co op sector was created in Cuba? How is it doing? Has it been able to reproduce itself? Has it grown? Bring us up to date, if you will, on this remarkable strategic innovation, let's call it, for socialism in Cuba.