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Sam. Welcome friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, incomes, debts, those we have, those coming down the road, and those facing our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and I'm ready and willing to go where the information takes me. Before we start, I want to make a few brief announcements. If you're interested in following this program and seeing the entire show as a television program, please go to website patreon.com that's P A T R E O N patreon.com economicupdate and it's available to you whenever you want to see it. Likewise, please make use of our websites. These are ways for you to follow what we do to communicate to us what you like and don't like, what you'd like us to cover in the weeks and months ahead. It's also the way to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and so on. It's a way also to partner with us to share what we do with others. It's available. Both these websites are available 247 and no charge whatsoever. The first is rdwolf with two Fs.com and the second one is Democracy at Work. That's all one word, democracyatwork.info info. Finally, we are now represented by a speaker's bureau called Speak out now. And you can find out more about us and them@speakoutnow.org and if you want to communicate with them about arranging for a time and date for me to come to where you are to give a talk, etc. Just contact them through email@infospeakoutnow.org so let's turn to our updates. The first one is a remarkable piece of work and I am really happy to be able to share it with you. It was a study, an in depth study of 3066 workers here in the United States drawn from all kinds of jobs in all parts of the country. The research was put together by the RAND Corporation, a famous research outfit, Harvard Medical School and the University of California at Los Angeles. It's called the American Working Conditions Survey. And boy did it come up with some results. And it's important to understand. These are results based on direct discussions, questionnaires and follow ups with over 3,000American workers. I'm going to go through the conditions and then talk about what they mean. One in five American workers said the that they face a hostile or threatening environment at work that could include sexual harassment and bullying Workers who have to face customers endure even more abuse than those who don't. Nearly 55% of American workers in this survey said that they face unpleasant and potentially hazardous conditions. Three quarters say they spend at least a fourth of their time on the job in intense or repetitive physical labor. Telecommuting is rare, even though you hear a good bit about it. 78% of the workers said they were required to be physically present in their workplace throughout working hours. Only 38% say their jobs offer good prospects for advancement. And the older they get, the smaller the percentage say they have any chance for advancement. Half of American workers say that they work on their own time because they have to to meet the demands of their job. And more than a third of workers have absolutely no control over the schedule of the tasks they are assigned to do. The lead author of the study is Professor Nicole Meistas. I hope I am pronouncing her name correctly, who is an economist at the Harvard Medical School. She added some more information that I want to share with you. It's a very interesting set of results here. Fewer than half the men without a college degree can take a break when they want to. Fewer than half. Whereas men with a college degree can take a break when they want to 76% of the time. Here's another 68% of men without a degree spend at least a fourth of their time moving heavy loads. This is really extraordinary, and it's extraordinary in a number of ways. I want to bring to your attention. For the 300 years that the capitalist system has been the dominant way we go about producing goods and services. We have had a really impressive list of technical changes, technical progress. We have machines now that can do the labor that used to be drudge work for human beings. Lots of those developments over 300 years. Every one of them was justified and often intended by the inventor to be exactly that. A way to make less work necessary and to make the work we do less arduous, less demanding, less stressful. But the reality is, at the end of 300 years in the country that's one of the most industrial and technologically advanced, we have results of the sort I just talked to you about. That's itself perhaps the most important implication of these studies. But there are more. One of the most stunning things about the collapse of our economy in 2008 and nine that we're still working our way out of. The one of the most stunning results has been the decline in what is called labor force participation. What this simply means is the percentage of adults that are either working or looking for work, as opposed to people who are not working and are not anymore looking, if they ever did. We have seen a remarkable and historically unusual dispute drop in labor force participation. Millions of American workers who nine or ten years ago were either working or looking for work are today neither working nor looking for work. And the question has befuddled economists, psychologists and others. Why is this happening? Well, as the Harvard professor says, it's probably because the quality of the job has deteriorated. The demands on you, the time pressures, the stressors, the physical and mental arduousness of the work is getting worse, not better, defying not only the technical advances that could relieve us of this, but also the basic humanity of what it means to go to work. So maybe, says the Harvard professor, that's why millions of people have decided to do something else or to try to find a way to live that doesn't involve an engagement in workplaces that have the conditions discovered by this survey. In her closing comment, the lead author of this study, Professor Meisthus, said, there's a message for employers here. Working conditions really do matter. To which my response is, well, I'm sure they do. But in a society and in a system that makes profit the number one objective that says that the bottom line is how much profit you make. Is it really surprising that if you can earn more money by squeezing your employees, you will do so? I'm reminded of my latest airline trip. I came back from Canada a few days ago and discovered once again what airlines are really good at. Squeezing the human body into an ever smaller and less comfortable space than we had six months or six years ago. The bottom line. The bottom line. I want to turn next to a story that may alarm you, and if it does, well, I'll admit it. That's part of the purpose. The capitalist economy that we live in has been around, as I said, about 300 years. And whenever it arrives in a place where we didn't have capitalism before, it not only organizes production in its distinctive way. Not with masters and slaves, not with lords and serfs, but instead with employers and employees. Wherever capitalism comes, it displays this remarkable pattern. Every four to seven years on average, it goes through a cycle. We call it the business cycle, a period of time when economy is working well, jobs are being filled, incomes are rising, followed by the downturn, the recession, the depression. We have a lot of words for this because it's so recurring. And it goes on, as I say, every four to seven years. That doesn't mean every one is four to seven. Years. Some are shorter and some are longer. Four to seven is the average. Well, if you use that average, and you remember that the last downturn in this economy was in 2008 and 9, well, then, if you do the math, we're kind of due. And economists are more and more coming out with predictions that we are going to see an economic downturn really soon. Soon can mean six months, soon can mean 18 months. It's in that range, and it's being expected in the middle of August. The bank of America, one of the leading researchers into this question, issued an alarm, a warning that the signs were there as far as they were concerned that an economic downturn was coming. But it's not about the downturn that I want to talk to you today. I've talked about the instability, this cyclical bouncing around of the capitalist economy in the past. No, this time I want to talk to you about what is emerging as a strategy for what the government should do when that downturn comes. And the big signal was given by a professor at Harvard, Rogoff, and he wrote that what he thinks we would have to do is we have to become comfortable with using a tool we haven't wanted to use and have very rarely used so far in American history. And that tool is negative interest rates. So I need to talk to you briefly to make sure we all understand what it means, what it is, and what effects it will have. So first, what is a negative interest rate? Well, it's the opposite of a positive interest rate. Here's how that works. If you have a positive interest rate, let's say you lend $100 to somebody, they have to pay you back at the end of the year. For example, they have to give you back the principal. That's the hundred you len to them, plus an interest payment, say 5%, for the sake of argument. So you get back $105 at the end of the year, that's $100 of loan plus 5% positive interest rate. What then would a negative interest rate mean? Well, let's assume it's negative 5%. It would mean that I lent you $100, and at the end of the year you give me back. In other words, a negative interest rate means you get back less than you lent to the person. Why would a government impose a negative interest rate on the economy? Or why would banks reduce interest not just to zero, but further into negative territory? The answer is the the government wants people to take their money out of the bank where it sits and does nobody any good and not In a loan. They want that money to be spent on building things, buying things, hiring people. They want to get the economy going again, especially in an economic downturn. So the hope is by lowering interest rates so that keeping your money in the bank literally makes you lose, that slowly but steadily, that people will be so horrified at the thought that they're not only not earning interest, they're losing money that they will spend it instead. Here are the two implications of all of this I want you to think about besides trying to digest the idea. First, the logic is flawed. Because if people think that the economic situations that we face are so bad that the economy is going to go down, down, down, they are not going to take their money out of the bank and use it to hire people to make more goods because they don't believe they can sell those goods when they get ready to be sold. That's how bad they think the economy is. It would be better for people like that to leave the money in the bank losing 5% than to take all that money, throw it into production and lose, or risk losing a great deal more than 5%. So if the view of investors and of businessmen and women is that the economy is in trouble, they're not going to borrow that money and spend it even if the interest rates are negative. That's one problem with this idea. Second problem. Millions, millions of Americans, especially in a country like ours, where the age of our population is rising, millions of people in their elderly period of time can't possibly live on what Social Security pays them and therefore rely on whatever savings they've accumulated in their lifetime to pay them some interest by being invested in a savings account or a certificate of deposit or things like that. If we have negative interest rates, all of those people will not only not earn anything by the savings they've accumulated and deposited in a savings bank or a certificate of deposit, not only will they earn nothing, they will see the value of what they've saved diminish year in and year out, because that's what a negative interest rate does. What in the world are we saying and doing to the elderly part of our population by seriously entertaining a regime of negative interest rates to deal with the instability of the capitalist system? I won't answer the question. It kind of answers itself. My next economic update is very brief, and before I tell you what it is, I want to tell you what it means. We usually do it in the reverse order. What it means is that more and more, as a number of people have noticed, we are splitting into the haves and the have nots in a way that this country hasn't seen for a century. A relatively small part of the population gathering into its hands, a disproportionate amount of the wealth, and everybody else scrambling, some desperate, some not yet desperate, some hoping not to become desperate. And as that split deepens, it shows up in a million little places. And one such place I want to tell you about because it erupted earlier in the month of August. Where did it erupt? In the relatively small town of Lakeland, Florida. And here's how it worked. The schools there, I suppose it's the county. I'm not sure. Someone can let us know through the website what it is. They're called the Polk Schools, after the president P O L K. The Polk schools in Lakeland, Florida came up with a fundraising letter that was sent to the parents of the children in this public school. Turns out that the children line up for lunch every day to get their lunch in the middle of the day. And they line up in the normal way. Children line up and they wait in line in turn to get their lunch. But they were offered a new deal. If the children's parents kick in $100 for the fundraiser, their children will not have to wait in line. They will go to the front of the line and get their lunch ahead of all the other kids. That way it'll become really clear to the children who's got the money or whose parents do and who doesn't. We can have those children who have to wait because they don't have enough money to get lunch and in the normal way. Well, I'm happy to tell you that the parents, led by a few courageous parents, went ballistic. Thought this was the worst conceivable way to divide humiliate students that they had ever heard of. They fought it and it was defeated. And I'm very glad of the defeat and I'm proud of those parents. But besides shouting out, good for you, I do want you all to think about what it means that a perfectly reasonable group of administrators and parents and teachers could have come up with the idea that if you've got money, your kid gets to eat lunch by being bounced in front of all the other kids waiting, just like your child used to do. In the time we have left, I want to spend time on something that's becoming more and more an article of conversation where I think I can perhaps be of some use, probably mostly out of the confrontation in Virginia earlier in August, the confrontation that saw a young woman tragically killed by a right Wing extremist driving his car intentionally into a crowd of people. And in reaction, the remarkable statements of the President of the United States. There has become interest in who were the people who committed this crime? Why were they there? And I'm not going to go over the details. I'm sure you're all quite familiar with them. But in that conversation, what we got was also a discussion of white supremacy, of neo Nazi, and therefore of the term fascism. Now, there are lots of different definitions of fascism. It's a word that was, of course, very important in the middle of the last century, when there were two, two or three or four governments in the world that were controlled by, run by people who took the name fascism as a complement. I'm thinking of Adolf Hitler in Germany, Benito Mussolini in Italy, the leaders of Japan and Spain and so on. Portugal also belongs in this list. And so some people mean fascism when there are uniformed gangs in the street fighting each other. Some people mean it as a kind of general political extremism, authoritarianism and so on. I'm not quarreling with or discussing those definitions, but I want to talk to you about what the term means in economics. Fascism is a particular way, whatever else it is, of organizing an economy. So I'm going to give you a summary so you can have it in your mind and make your own judgments about whether what is emerging in the United States is a genuine movement for fascism, and if you believe it, who's doing it, and in what way, and for what ends. So let me tell you about fascism, using as the classical example that in Germany, the government under Adolf Hitler, which runs roughly from 1933, when he ascends to the position of power in Germany, to 1945, when he loses World War II and either takes his own life or is killed, no one will ever know for sure. Fascism is the name of a system that is capitalist in its core. That is, it is organized by enterprises that produce goods and services that are owned and operated by investors. A relatively tiny minority of the population, which employs the vast majority as workers in these enterprises, should be quite familiar to all of you. But what happens to make a capitalist system go fascist become fascist is that it can't reproduce itself and in the usual way. It can't rely on workers coming to work every morning. It can't rely on the interaction among companies being such that they can reproduce themselves and keep going. It can't function in the normal market exchange system. It's run out of gas. It has encountered severe problems. Just to give you an idea, suppose the mass of workers in a capitalist economic system decided for whatever reason that they were not satisfied with being employees, that they didn't accept the wages they were offered, the working conditions they lived under, the power they did or didn't have, and they simply said, we're not going to work for you anymore. The system comes to a complete stop. It can only work if working people come to work each morning and do their thing and go home in the evening and reproduce themselves and sleep and eat and come back the next day and do it all again. If something were to block those workers or undermine those workers, the system couldn't work. The same applies if the companies can't sell what they produce, if there isn't a market for it, they die. When the conditions of a capitalist system become unmanageable, then sometimes not necessarily, but sometimes, the solution found is to have the business community in effect merge with the government, make the government the enforcer, have the government play the role of making sure all the different parts are needed. So let's take the German example. In the years leading up to 1933, the working class in Germany more and more joined and supported both the socialist and communist parties in Germany. They were very powerful. And it was becoming clear to the business community that they faced a danger, that the socialist and communist parties, and remember Germany is quite close geographically to Russia, which had already had this kind of revolution just a few years before that. The fear of the German business community, particularly the biggest businesses, was that they were running into an impossibility for continuing because they had a working class that was committed to their end, who were socialists and communists, didn't want capitalism to survive. The business community therefore decided to make common cause with the only large organization that had masses of people in it that they thought could give them enough political clout to force the system to work. And that organization was the Nazi party organized by Adolf Hitler. And so a deal was struck between Mr. Hitler and his political party and the big business community. We will create a merged government, a government in which business and the government work hand in hand. Hitler comes to power, the first thing he does is go after the communists and the socialists, transforms all the trade unions into government run unions, so that none of those forces can block the reproduction of the capitalist system. Fascism is that coming together of the business community and the government to together dictate, and I mean the word dictate, exactly what happens in the economy, because they can't see any other way of getting the system to survive. So I leave it to you to ask whether you see in our society movements in that direction and coming from where and going where. We will be returning to this question as it becomes relevant to American life. We've come to the end of the first half of this program. Please stay with me. We will be back in a very short time. Now I've heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord but you don't really care for music, do you? It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall the major lift the baffled king composing Hallelujah, Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's economic update program. In this second half, I want to do something that a number of you have asked me to do and that I've put together as a topic that I'd like to call the irony of today's economic situation. Here's what I mean. We are now living through the second worst collapse of capitalism in its history. The greatest collapse was still the 1930s. We have not surpassed that, although we yet may so that 2008 to today is the second worst after the Great Depression. But something is very, very different in how Americans reacted to the 29 crash and how they have reacted to the 2008 crash. I want to talk about that difference. I want to explain it to you, and I'd like to tease out of it the very important lesson of why they're different and what we can learn from that difference. So let's start with 1929 and the 1930s, what we now call the Great Depression. Everything collapsed. We'd had a period of growth after World War I was over. We called this rapid economic growth of America the Roaring Twenties. And it was an exciting time of economic growth, but it was also a time when capitalists made risky investments, which it turned out, were reckless, were unthought through, and were dangerous. And what proved it was very clear it was the collapse in 1929 when the economic growth came to a dead stop and reversed itself into becoming economic decline. Just to remind everyone, by 1933, a bare four years into this economic downturn, the unemployment rate in the United States, the official rate, was 25%. One out of four workers was without a job. And what that meant was every single American family, with an insignificant number of exceptions, was touched by this mother or father, uncle or grandma was out of job, which meant the remaining members of the family had to share their income with the one who had lost his or hers. It was a terrible time of Difficulty. It was a time that we remember if we read books like Of Mice and Men and other staggering studies, the Grapes of Wrath. Many come to mind that describe what America was like in the Great War Depression. But now let's talk about the reaction of the American people to the suffering, to the unemployment, to the loss of income and so on. Americans reacted at first with surprise and shock, not so hard to understand. But very quickly, the surprise and the shock turned to anger and to action. And here already we're going to begin to see something different from what has happened since 2008. Anger at whom? Anger at the business community who was blamed for the banking decisions, the lending decisions, the investment decisions that had plunged the economy into disaster. Stopped calling them captains of industry and called them what they had been called earlier, robber barons, things like that. The mood darkened and the blame was clear where it was headed. But people didn't just blame, they also acted. And they acted in ways that are, again, remarkable. They did three things in particular. Number one, they joined labor unions. Millions of Americans who had never been in a labor union, whose parents had never been in a labor union, joined. Why? Simple reason. They felt they had a better chance to get through the hard times of a depression in the union than if they weren't in one. It was the greatest unionization drive in American history. We had never had anything like it before. We've never had anything like it since. But not only did millions of Americans join labor unions, but tens, even hundreds of thousands joined two socialist parties and a Communist party here in the United States, parties that said that the problem wasn't just a business cycle downturn. The problem was the system itself, capitalism. And whether they, as socialists or as communists, disagreed on many things, but they thought that capitalism had come to a screeching halt, that it was not acceptable, and that the United States could and should do better again. Remarkable was the cooperation between the communists, the socialists and the labor unions to organize people into unions and to demand that. That the government of the United States help the masses of people in a dramatic way at a time when the government had no money. Why? Because if you have 25% of your people unemployed, they're not earning anything and they don't pay income taxes because they don't have an income. So notice this condition. Masses of people mobilized and organized by communists, socialists and labor unions, demanding that the government do something for them when the government didn't have much money. And now perhaps the most remarkable thing at they got what they wanted, they fought for it, and they got It. Let me explain. The socialists, communists and trade unions asked for and got a meeting with the then president of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt. They basically said to him in so many, you've got to do something for the mass of the American people, the millions, the tens of millions suffering through the worst collapse of capitalism in its history, and we're not going to wait. And they didn't say it because they didn't have to, but the implicit message was, Mr. President, if you don't do something, we're not going to vote for you anymore and you're not going to be president much longer under these circumstances. And the socialists and communists added another hint. And if you don't do something, there may well be a revolution in this country because the people are not going to tolerate being left to live with a disaster imposed on them by the business community. Well, Mr. Roosevelt was a smart guy, good politician. He understood that this was serious. He knew that these forces represented tens of millions of voters and citizens, and you could not simply ignore them. So he went back to the business community and the wealthy people he knew well because he was from that community himself. And he told them what he had just heard from, from the unions and the communists and the socialists, and he said to them, we have got to do something for these people or else. And nobody knew how to finish that sentence, but it was ominous. Roosevelt persuaded, let's say half of the people he spoke to, businessmen and women, wealthy folks, not the other half, who were never convinced. But he had enough with half since he could go back then to the unions, communists and socialists, which he did. And he said, okay, here's the deal I can make. We will give the mass of the American people real help, tangible help to get them through this depression. But you, in exchange, have to stop talking about revolution, socialism, communism, be satisfied with getting help for the mass of people, and we have a deal. The socialists, communists, and unions accepted that deal. Not everyone. There were some dissenters, but basically they bought the deal. And Roosevelt was good to his word. In the few years starting 1933, the next few years, here's what he did. Just to remind you all. Number one, he created the Social Security system, something most of you take for granted. We had never had a Social Security system. We'd never had a government program that said, when you reach age 65, we're going to give you a check every month for the rest of your life, however long that is. Social Security was a spectacular help to all Americans, not just the old who got the money, but all of their children, the young and the middle age who suddenly had the government helping them Rather than leaving the full responsibility for their elderly parents on their shoulders during a time of depression when they couldn't possibly carry that burden, they had a hard enough time taking care of themselves. No sooner had he created Social Security than he created the unemployment program. We had never done this in America before either. You get unemployed through no fault of your own. The government's going to give you a check every week for a year or two to see you through, to help you get along while you're looking for another job. And remember, this was at a time when there were tens of millions of unemployed people. The third thing he did was to create for the first time in American history, a minimum wage to make sure that if you had a job, you couldn't be paid poverty level wages. And the final thing, the government employment program. Between 1934 and 1941, Roosevelt hired the government of the United States, hired and paid 15 million unemployed people who stopped being unemployed because they had that job. Who built the national parks many of us now enjoy. Who reclaimed land for ecological reasons for the first time in our history, who, because they earned income, were able to maintain their mortgage payments and stay in their homes. Roosevelt did for the mass of people more than had been asked of him. And you all should be wondering, where did the money come from to do all this? It was fiendishly expensive. The answer? Roosevelt taxed the rich and he taxed the big corporations. And what he couldn't get from them in taxes, he basically borrowed from them. One of those loans that they didn't have all that much choice about. That's right. A president of the United States taxed corporations and the rich to pay for a massive program of help to ordinary citizens. No wonder Roosevelt became a hero for the American people. No wonder Roosevelt was reelected three times. No wonder that had never happened to any president before. He was the most popular president in the United States. Taxing corporations and the rich to help average people is not a losing political proposition. It's the exact opposite. Stunning, but all the more stunning what happened afterwards. When the depression is over, when World War II, which comes toward the end of the depression, is over, it's 1945, the war is over. President Roosevelt dies. The American business community is, with some exceptions, enraged by what has happened. They have had to pay huge taxes they didn't want to to support the living standards of millions of Americans. They didn't want that. And they fought against it. And they fought in two ways. That are crucial for everyone listening and watching to understand. The first thing the business community did, very smart, was to say to the American people, you know, the security you now feel, the job you now have, the income you now earn. Isn't it wonderful that capitalism can produce such a middle class as we now have in America? Families in their own homes, families with a secure job. You get the picture. The genius here was to turn something won by the struggle of unionists, socialists and communists from the business community to turn it instead into some gift that the business community had given to the working class. I remember myself sitting in classrooms with teachers waxing poetic about what a wonderful system capitalism was. Why? Because look at the standard of living of the American worker in the 1950s and 60s. Able to own a home, able to buy a car. The only reason Americans could own a home was in the depths of the depression. The government decided to create the federal housing authority, which made loans available to American working people to buy a home, without which they could not have done it. But this was all turned around as if it were the gift of the capitalist class, as if capitalism provides a middle class income. It was over the opposition of the capitalists that that income and those securities and those supports for people had been won. But the second thing the business community did was just as smart. They wanted to get rid of the ability of masses of workers to have organizations that could get any future president to do what Roosevelt had done. They knew the problem wasn't Roosevelt. It was the political power of the unions, the socialists and the communists that had gotten Roosevelt to do it. So the name of the game for them was destroy that coalition. Get rid of it, make sure it isn't there. And they did that. First, they demonized the communists. That was the easiest group to point a finger at. They became not leaders who advocated joining unions in the 30s. Instead, they were rebranded as agents of a foreign power seeking to overthrow America, et cetera, et cetera. You know the story, you don't need me to repeat it. As soon as the communists had been basically squashed, the government turned around and said, the socialists are basically the same thing. They just spelled the thing differently and they got rid of them. And then they went after the third part of the coalition, organized labor, the unions. And as all of you I think know, over the last 50 years, the unions have been on a steady downward decline. That coalition was destroyed. But please understand, it was that coalition that produced the American middle class, and not only produced the middle class by getting the government suddenly to step in with Minimum wages and jobs and supports for the elderly. Just as important, just as important was the fact that that coalition was able to save us from what might have happened in the Great Depression. You know, other countries that collapsed, just like America, they went in a different direction. They reproduced that capitalism by going fascist, not creating a middle class. I'm thinking of Germany and Italy and Japan and Spain and Portugal. They reacted to the Great Depression by having a fascist dictator. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and so on. We didn't have to go through that in this country. And that's also to the credit of the communists, socialists and labor unions. That allowed us to get out of the Great Depression by not relying on, on a dictator and not relying on trickle down economics where you help the folks at the top and hope that it helps everybody else. No, what we had in the 30s in America was trickle up. We gave money to the bottom, to the poor, to the working class. And with what they could then spend from the money they got, through a minimum wage and unemployment and Social Security and a government job, we kept our economy from collapsing further. Remarkable. And that's what's so remarkable about the crash. Since 2008, we again plunged millions of people into unemployment. I believe the number now is 6 to 7 million people lost their homes in the last eight years in this country. Staggering. But here's what we don't have this year in this case. We don't have a Communist party, we don't have socialist parties, and we don't have a labor movement able or willing to fight in the way that they did in the 1930s. And so we don't have trickle up from below. All we have is bailing out the biggest banks, boosting the stock market, and the trickle down we're all waiting for because it hasn't trickled yet and there's no sign that it will. Here's the irony I don't want anyone to lose sight of. The irony is the business community took the lead in destroying that coalition after World War II that had won all those benefits, creating a middle class in America. We destroyed the only political force that could have helped us now after 2008, to benefit the mass of people now, when the rich at the top could better afford it than they could in the 30s. We don't have anything to make that happen. We are without strength. We who might want an outcome that says help the mass of people as the focus of what you do in an economic downturn, which is what we did in the 30s. And yet the irony has yet another level. Our Economy today is spinning out of control. The people at the top continue to live as though they don't have to worry about what the masses of people think or feel. They didn't have that luxury the 1930s because the mass of people were organized and said exactly what they wanted and said exactly how they felt. But they have no voice to do that now. So the economic system is rushing ahead with the people in charge, unaware of what's building. That's why they're surprised when the British people vote to leave the euro, when the American people vote for Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders or others who are saying this system is rigged. It doesn't work, we don't want it. We lack the organized way to make the kind of response to the crash of 2008 look and feel and work like the reaction that we did win. After 1929's crash. We permitted, we, the American people, permitted after World War II, for the destruction of those organizations and social forces who had together created that middle class. Everybody now whines about the disappearing middle class. Everybody Mrs. Clinton did during the election campaign. Donald Trump did, Bush did, all of them. The middle class declined as if this were some kind of natural phenomena, like a rainstorm. There's nothing natural about it. The middle class didn't disappear by some accident or by some mystery. You destroyed the middle class by destroying the political coalition that made it possible. And the danger now is that we will have a capitalist system plunging forward, unable to hold itself back because there's no social force to do it, making mistake after mistake and provoking what? The surprise? It's no surprise there are neo Nazis amongst us. Of course there are. Because the fascist solution to a capitalism that is not working, that threatens to unravel, is always lurking, hoping for its chance to have another day in the sun. Of course, we encounter them in Virginia and elsewhere, and it doesn't matter whether they're gathered around tearing down Confederate statues or whatever the other specific thing is, there's something much bigger going on here. There's a capitalism that's once again worked its way into a dead end, and it's risking dissolving itself, but this time without the social forces. Socialist, communist unions that showed what they could do in the 1930s, but having destroyed them, they're not here now. Well, is that the end of the story? Not quite, because that could be forming again. People are learning slowly to reconstruct what once was. It's now only a matter of time. Here was the first step, Occupy Wall street. Suddenly, apparently out of nowhere, in 300 plus cities across America, people angry about economic development. We know that because their number one slogan was the 1% versus everybody else. They got it. That's where we are. It's 1% against the 99%. They put that forward as their number one issue, their overwhelming concern, the object of all their efforts. That was remarkable. Not quite as remarkable as seeing 300 cities sprouting tent colonies in their downtown parks. Not as surprising as having a majority of people polled in Gallup poll after Gallup poll saying they sympathize with these demonstrators. They too think the economy is for 1% at the expense of 99%. So that's the beginning of the reconstruction of something like what we had in the 1930s. And the next step is the amazing phenomena that a man who accepted the term socialist for the first time since the destruction of that coalition after World War II, a man who accepts the label socialist, is able to get millions upon millions of Americans to vote for him in the Democratic primary. Obviously, I'm talking about Bernie Sanders. We're beginning to see the steps, the slow reconstruction, it's awful slow. It's painfully slow. It's dangerously slow. But it's coming as the inability of this capitalism to hold itself back, to recognize that it's spinning out of control to make any meaningful reforms after what collapsed in 2008, thereby assuring we're going to go right back into that situation again. So I'm hopeful that the lessons in some way have been learned. But my final point is perhaps my most important. However successful, the legacy of Occupy Wall street and Bernie's campaign and so on, however successful that legacy may be, it will not succeed unless it learns a fundamental lesson from what happened in the 1930s. The socialists, the communists and the unions had been very successful in getting Social Security, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, government jobs. All the things I mentioned and many more, I didn't have time to. But what they didn't succeed in was getting those reforms, those changes, secure. They didn't make them endure. They couldn't keep them, which is why we lost them. And the reason we lost them is they left in positions of power, the people who run the big industries of this country, who used their wealth and used their power to, after 1945, to destroy that coalition. The lesson we have to learn this time is you can't make that mistake again. Otherwise you will struggle again to achieve another set of reforms which will be just as temporary as those that they won in the 1930s. That's why we talk about worker co ops on this program. You have to change who owns and runs the businesses so that they are run for the people as a whole. Otherwise the sad instability of the history of capitalism will play itself out yet again. Thank you for paying attention. I want to thank you all for being partners of this program. I want to thank truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis. And I mean it when I thank them, and I mean it when I thank you. Partner with us. Use what we do on this program. That's why we do it. And I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Sam.