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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, those of our children, those of ourselves looking into the future. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I want to begin by indicating that a few weeks ago we spoke about a strike, or actually an impending strike, of the New York State Nurses association and the decision of the union to forego the strike because of a tentative agreement that had finally been forced out of the hospitals and so on. I reported this as a victory for the workers there, which in part it was. But an alert listener, and indeed several let me know that there was quite a bit of disagreement in and among the nurses about that agreement and about whether they could have and should have struck for a much better agreement that their patients need and that they do. So, please, I want to correct my reportage. There is great division, and the struggle around these issues will continue within the union and between the union and the management. My next Economic Update strikes me as particularly remarkable. The latest Gallup poll results released in April of 2019 have a remarkable statistic. Membership in religious institutions in the United States has dropped to an historic low never seen before. 50% of the American people are members of any sort of religious institution. That's over the last 20 to 25 years, a drop from 76% to 50%. That is a staggering decrease. The new generation of people is clearly less committed to less interested in being members of religious institutions than earlier generations in America were. The reason I bring this up is because despite all of that, we still, as a nation, subsidize organized religion. Religious institutions are exempted in the United States from paying federal or state or local taxes. They use public services, police, fire, public schools, health, maintenance, roads, all of the things that everybody else uses. Everybody both members of religious organizations and not. But the difference is that if you're a member of a religious organization, you get to use these public services, but the religious organization is not required to pay for them. Those who get free services from the government and don't pay for them thereby put a burden on those who must pay for the delivery of services to institutions that don't contribute themselves to paying for it. 50% of Americans who are not members of religious institutions are subsidizing the 50% who are. And you might want to think about that. My next update has to do with a turning point. I mean, a big historical turning point for the United States getting way less attention than it deserves. Over the last few weeks, the head of the German government, Angela Merkel, and One of the biggest car companies in the world, Toyota, have made statements about the United States that every American ought to think about long and hard. Let me begin with Mrs. Merkel. She made a major speech that said that Europe, not just Germany, all of Europe, now has to deal with a world in which there are three great rivals. Her word, Russia, China and the United States. Europe has to go it alone. Europe has to develop the economic, political and cultural power to confront its three rivalsRussia, China and the United States. That's remarkable talk from what once was an ally. We are not an ally. We are a rival. Alongside Russia and China, Europe is a bigger economic unit than the United States. More people, larger gdp. That is big news for the United States, as we will see also over the same period of time, Toyota slammed President Trump and the GOP for issuing a statement which Mr. Trump made that foreign owned companies in the automobile industries constituted a danger to the national security of the United States. Wow. Toyota is a foreign owned automobile company active in the United States. Even the American association of Automobile Manufacturers, which includes both foreign owned and domestic automobile companies, is horrified by this and has spoken against the President. Why? And here's the important Toyota announces it no longer feels welcome in the United States, directly and indirectly. Toyota employs 475,000 people in the United States. If they're not welcome, they will leave. And what happens to American auto workers working for Toyota or VW or Lord knows who else? What are you doing? What are you engaging with? This is economic nationalism of a frightening sort. Is the United States going to become Fortress America? We're only going to produce here. If so. If so, if only American companies are going to get the benefit of the American government, we're going to have a problem. We're going to have a big problem. Why? Because to produce here in the United States is expensive. If you start doing that, prices are going to rise. That's what the Automobile association explains. And if prices rise, workers in America are going to demand more wages to pay the higher prices. This is a serious problem for us. This is a direction we really ought not to go into. It is a serious problem. And that direction may be good politics for Mr. Trump and and the Republicans. It is a disaster. If the rest of the world produces at lower prices, becomes itself a place where new technology is developed, the United States will fall behind. Going it alone with economic nationalism didn't work out real well for Mr. Hitler in Germany some decades ago. It's not going to work out well here either. Next update 40 out of the 50 states in the United States have filed suit against major pharmaceutical firms owning alleging mass price gouging, in some cases raising prices of drugs 1000% after a five year investigation. Leading that charge, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong referred to a multi billion dollar fraud on the American people. 20 firms have been named and over 100 drugs. I find this astonishing. But more astonishing than this kind of fraud is the fact that no systemic solution is being proposed. What are we going to do? Slap them on the hands? That's what we've done in the past and clearly it made no difference. Something much more fundamental has to be changed. Maybe the government and a cooperative of workers ought to run the pharmaceutical industry. So we begin to do something that might slow this down. To give you an idea of what's upsetting people who have to live with this outrageous profiteering, I did some work and I got the average out of pocket cost for insulin, something needed by diabetics, which is a global disease. In Italy, the out of pocket monthly cost for an Italian to get insulin is $19. In the United Kingdom, the monthly cost out of pocket of an individual to get the Same insulin shots, $65. In the United States, the monthly out of pocket cost today, $360. There's no excuse for this. This is called price gouging. Let me give you another example. In the United States, the richest Americans live ready, if they're men, 15 years longer than the poorest, and if they're women, it's 10 years. Put that in a different way. The average difference between rich and poor in the United States who can afford medical care and who can't, is wider. That gap between rich and poor in America is wider than the gap between the average American and the average length of life of a Yemeni or Ethiopian citizen. Think about it. Trump keeps saying that the Chinese will pay the tariff that he's putting on Chinese goods. And Mr. Trump doesn't understand economics. A tariff is a tax. If the government of Mr. Trump puts a tariff on Chinese goods, it means that whoever imports the goods into the United States, whatever American company does that, they will be charged that tax. So the tax is not paid by the Chinese. The tax is paid by American importing companies. And guess what? They don't want to have to pay that tax. So here's the only thing they can do. They can pass that on at a higher price to you and me. So the people who end up paying the tariffs are the American companies and the American consumer. Mr. Trump's tariffs are an immense tax increase. On America, which as a Republican, he's supposed to be against. Remarkable. Don't be fooled. Mother's Day recently passed and it reminded me that there is a bill which has been introduced to the United States Congress called the Raise the wage act of 2019 that has still not been passed. This act would raise the minimum wage in the United States from the current $7.25, one of the lowest in the world, to $15 per hour by 2024. If it were enacted, 7.8 million mothers would get an actual Mother's Day gift. That mattered. It's sitting in the Congress and nothing is happening to it. Meanwhile, Mother's Day cards are being sent in large numbers. Finally, in Russia, a couple was recently. Excuse me, in France, my mistake, A couple, the Balkanis, they are called, were arrested. They were the political leaders, both the man and his wife, for the Center Right Party, the party of Sarkozy and Chirac in the Levallois per suburb of Paris. Here's what they were found. They were accused of tax fraud, taking bribes, using the money to buy mansions in France and the Caribbean. Why do I bring you this? You're wondering, probably. Gee, this happens all the time. And you're right. But it's a lesson nonetheless. Here's how it works. Capitalists have a lot of money. That's what they're in the capitalist business to get. They make profits. They had a lot of people working and they pay them as little as possible and get as much profit as they can. And in order to get even more profit, because they're competing with other profiteers, they use part of their profits to bribe public officials to give them more benefits. And occasionally, very occasionally, they get caught. You know, we had one recently in this country when Conrad Black, who went to jail for bribing politicians, was given a pardon by President Trump. Of course, here's the no end of arrests, no end of this problem. It's not solved by slapping people on the hands, even if they don't get a pardon from a president. The problem is if you allow some people to have this much money and the rest of us, not those people with the money, are going to bribe government to keep the wealth going their way. It's as old a problem as the human race, and it's particularly bad in a system that gives so few people so much money. Well, we've come to the end of the first half of Economic update. Please stay with me for a remarkable interview to follow. But again, please support us on YouTube. It's a big help to us make use of our rdwolff with two Fs com and and democracyatwork.info there. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and communicate directly to us with your questions and suggestions, which we welcome. And finally before our break, one more thanks to the Patreon community for the support, the encouragement and the enthusiasm they show. We are grateful. Stay with us. Will be right back. Welcome back friends, to the second half of today's economic update. It is my pleasure to welcome to the microphone and to the camera Neha Matthew Shah. She is the president of the Progressive Workers Union and currently employed with the Sierra Club as an international environmental justice representative. As a non profit employee for over seven years, NEHA participated actively with the two unions that now represent two thirds of Sierra Club, the PWU and the Sierra Employee Alliance. Because of the importance of nonprofit institutions in the American economy and the relatively new effort to organize them as union members, I thought it was particularly important to talk to NEHA about that whole project. So first of all, let me thank you, neha, for joining us.