← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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Sam. Saint Gonna change one.
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Welcome friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, our jobs, our incomes, our debts, the prospects for our children, all of the economic parts of a modern lifetime. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics at several universities in the United States all my adult life and I currently teach at the New School University in New York City. Before jumping into the Updates for this early week in December, I wanted to remind you, please, that we produce a public event every month on the second Wednesday of the month here in New York City, to which I would like to invite all of you, those who live in the greater metropolitan area, but also those who who might be visiting, particularly in this holiday time. Next Wednesday, 9th December, we will have our usual monthly evening. It takes place at 7:30 in the evening at the Judson Memorial Church, a historic old church on New York City's Washington Square, which is itself a historic.
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Part of the city.
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You are invited and it's a chance for me to meet you and like vice versa as well, and a chance for you to see me go into some of the greater detail in the time and space that is allowed there that is somewhat different from a radio program. So if you're in the area. Wednesday, December 9, 7:30, Judson Memorial Church, Washington Square Let me also reiterate an invitation that many of you have written to us about. Yes, we are interested in hearing from those of you who are either employees or employers in a business that is thinking about converting from a top down, hierarchical, undemocratic, capitalist enterprise into a worker operated, worker directed, worker owned enterprise. More and more enterprises are making that kind of conversion. We have partnered with a specialist firm of lawyers and accountants that are friends of ours and friends of this program to be able to offer those of you that might be interested in making such a conversion a connection to this group so that they can help you with the financing, the legal aspects, the credit you need and so on, if that's something that's in your horizon. If you would like to speak to specialist firms that we're working with, please get in touch with us by using our rdwolf.com with two Fs or democracyatwork.info all one word, democracyatwork.info. i will have more announcements about those websites and what they can do for you a little later in the program. Let's begin with then the updates that we have for this week.
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And, and there are so many.
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It has been hard for me to focus on which ones are the most.
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Important to bring to your attention.
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So let's go in no particular order other than trying to cope with the welter of events that deserve our attention. There have been big events in two European countries for many of the last 12, 15 months. I have spoken to you about Greece, which was for a while the only country in which you could see a sustained, massive popular and political opposition to austerity. And by that I mean opposition to having the burdens of the collapse of capitalism in the 20089 period be shifted onto the backs of average people, as if they were the responsible ones for bringing that crisis, rather than the banks and the investors and all of the rest of it that provoked that breakdown. Austerity is the name of the policy that shifts the cost of the crisis onto the backs of the mass of people so that not only did they.
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Suffer the unemployment and the lost livelihoods.
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Of that crisis since 2008, but now they have to suffer a government policy that burdens them either with higher taxes they cannot afford or or a cutback of public services when they need them most. The Greeks took the lead. They had general strikes, they had political rallies, they supported a left wing political party, Syriza brought them into the government to fight austerity. When the leader of Syriza in power called a referendum this last year to see what the people thought they were overwhelming in in their opposition to austerity.
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And their demand for a change, the.
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Syriza government felt it had no choice but to continue the austerity that it had campaigned so long and so hard against. Have the Greek people accepted this decision? Well, the answer is yes and no. The government is still in power, the Syriza government. But the agitation of the mass of the working people in is not stopping. They don't want the austerity this has been shown in the last month by two, count them, two general strikes. The last one this last very week in Athens and around Greece. Public transport stopped, public buses of all kinds stopped, storekeepers went out on strike.
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Factory workers went out on strike.
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Demonstrations in major Greek cities twice in the last month. And the message is always the we resent, we oppose and we will not tolerate shifting the burden of a crisis of capitalism onto the mass of people who don't deserve it, didn't cause this crisis and should not be penalized on.
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Top of what they have already suffered.
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But Greece is no longer alone. Another country has now made a formal public, massive democratic shift. The country, Portugal and over the last week and a half, a new government took over in Portugal, despite the efforts, illegal in part, by the existing conservative government, to prevent it. Under the laws of the Portuguese government, under their constitution, they had to change government and give the government over to the three political parties in coalition now who command a majority of the votes of the Portuguese people. I want to tell you who the three parties are and to point out that what they are committed to is an end to austerity. Exactly the same thing that the Syriza government and now the mass of Greek people have made clear is their preferred wish as well. The three parties that now govern Portugal as a the Socialist Party, that's the largest of the three, the Communist Party of Portugal second. And the Green Party of Portugal third. Communist, Socialist Green Coalition is governing Portugal. The tide of opposition to austerity keeps growing. It is only a matter of time before governments in the rest of Europe will be facing very similar challenges. And it shows a popular determination to end austerity that ought to be of concern on this side of the Atlantic as well. Staying with this topic, let me talk about austerity here in the United States, because what is not happening here is the opposition yet that is forming in Europe.
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But what is the same here as.
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In Europe is an official policy of the government to create austerity, to impose austerity. Here's how it works in the United States, with a brief thumbnail economic history. From the 1970s to the crash of 2008, wages in this country, the United States, stagnated. They didn't go up anymore.
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That was great for profits because workers.
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Became more productive year in and year out. That is, workers produced more for their employer each year from the 70s to 2008. But the employer didn't have to increase their wages. So of course, profits went crazy. The second thing that happened between the 70s and 2008 was the export of jobs. More and more American employers moved more and more of their production of goods and services out of the country to take advantage of, you guessed it, lower wages in the rest of the world. Another way to make more profits. Stagnate the wages of your workers here and find cheaper workers abroad. Two ways to boost profits, but not content with that business. And the richest people who live off of business also succeeded in cutting the tax burden on themselves year in and year out. Explaining that you had to cut taxes to create jobs. Well, they didn't do much in the way of creating jobs, but. But they did at least cut their taxes. And that was a third way they Boosted profits well along the way. This was great for the rich and corporations.
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They have become much richer, as everyone knows, over the last 30 years.
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But along the way it bankrupted the government.
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Why?
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Because the government gets less and less taxes from corporations and the rich and at the same time it can't get more taxes from the mass of people because their wages are going nowhere and, and unemployment has been a problem and jobs keep being sent out of the country. So the government gets itself into deeper and deeper difficulty. Then when the crisis came, when this unstable economic system blew up on everybody in 2008 and 09, the business community went to the government and got trillions of new dollars to bail them out, making an already troubled economic balance sheet for the government even worse. This was the bankruptcy of the government. Okay, now what's going to happen? The government, if it can't get money, has to do one of two things. It has to either find new sources of money when corporations in the business have been cutting their taxes, or burden the mass of people who are not going to take kindly to it since they've just gone through an economic downturn and, and their wages haven't been going up for 30 years. So what governments tend to do is not touch that side of the balance sheet because it's too dangerous and instead cut government programs one after the other. And that's what they've been doing. So the mass of people, having had 30 years of stagnant wages, now confront a bankrupt government that keeps cutting services to them on top of their not going anywhere wage situation. This is a recipe for a political explosion. Why? Because the governments are not being helped. As they cut services and as they therefore try to cope, they make people angry. They slow down the so called economic recovery. That in turn deepens the crisis of government and the call goes up. The government can't afford even basic services, even to keep their promises. I'm going to give only two of many examples of how this economic absurdity.
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Is playing itself out.
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One example is the government of Puerto Rico and the three and a half million people involved there. And the other is the government of the state of Illinois and the much.
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Larger number of millions of Americans that are stuck in a situation there.
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Briefly in Puerto Rico, excuse me, we have had 30 years of a cozy relationship between big businesses that went to Puerto Rico to take advantage of cheap wages, to take advantage of special tax exempt laws that were created for this purpose in a cozy relationship with the government there. The companies made a ton of money. They took that money out of Puerto Rico to expand on a global scale.
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This is particularly the case with the.
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Pharmaceutical industry that took advantage of these tax laws in Puerto Rico. The government of Puerto Rico sat on top of this arrangement, got very nice.
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Benefits from for the few people who.
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Served those corporations, lawyers, architects, political facilitators. But the mass of Puerto Rican people got little or nothing. The country remained mired in poverty. The arrival of the big corporations didn't lift Puerto Rico out of poverty. For example, today almost half the people of Puerto Rico live below the official poverty line. A statement of failure of a capitalist.
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System imposed by on Puerto Rico if you ever needed one.
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And now the government of Puerto Rico, faced with the effects of the tax.
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Laws moving companies out of Puerto Rico to even more profitable places elsewhere in the world, the Puerto Rican government is.
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Unable to pay off all the debts.
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It incurred to facilitate the corporations coming in who never developed the country in.
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The first place and have now left. They can't pay their bills. And what are they proposing to do? Well, they want to stop paying some of the interest and principal for all.
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Those loans they got from the banks who wanted to make a lot of.
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Money and didn't make a lot of money in Puerto Rico over these last 30 years. But those lenders don't want to do it. So what is the Puerto Rican government thinking of cutting pensions, cutting public programs. And here you see austerity, the crisis of a system that doesn't work, being resolved on the backs of the mass of people who are not responsible for this system, who are not responsible for the breakdown of this system in 2008, but are yet being the ones victimized by all that is being done. And let me turn then to Illinois. It's exactly the same situation. Illinois borrowed money because it was unwilling and unable to tax corporations and the rich.
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It cut taxes on them.
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Now it says, well, we don't have enough money to pay off our debts. Well, say the very same corporations who got the tax cut, since they're the ones who also lent to to the government instead of paying their taxes, they want to be paid off. Okay, says the Illinois government, if that happens, if you have to be paid off, we're either going to have to raise taxes on the only people left to raise them on businesses and rich.
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People because nobody else can pay, or we're going to have to cut services.
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And, and particularly the services people rely.
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Schools, fire services, social work, and we're.
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Going to have to break our promises.
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To decades of workers now on pensions.
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Or looking to get pensions by cutting Them drastically plunging these people into an.
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Old age of economic desperation.
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So what happened in Illinois? Wealthy corporations and big businesses realized where this situation that they are most responsible for creating where it's going. They fear that a rising of the people like in Greece and Portugal, may make the government of Illinois solve this absurd dilemma. It's been pushed into by finally going back to corporations and the rich, saying to them, you've gotten wildly richer in the last 30 years. This is a desperate situation. You helped to produce it by the tax cuts you wrung out of the government.
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So now you're going to have to.
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Pay up a bit in order to.
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Get us through this crisis.
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They don't want to pay. So the richest among them, led by the current governor, Bruce Rauner, have literally taken their own moneytens of millions of dollars to buy their way into political control. Mr. Rauner is now the governor. He spent $27.5 million in 2014 on his own campaign. It was more money than any candidate for governor of Illinois has ever spent before, period. He bought the government. Most of the money he had came from a dozen or so wealthy men and women like himself. They're going to make sure that what the government does is cut workers pensions, cut government services, rather than tax people like them. It's worth it to spend millions to capture the politics because they'll save many millions more by burdening average people. That's austerity perfectly illustrated in the United States. And the stories I could tell about the rest of the country only make the story grimmer. We suffer austerity without the massive pushback by the people that Portugal and that Greece show us the way toward.
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Next economic update.
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I want to mention the behavior of Governor Cuomo here in New York. Andrew Cuomo.
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I almost said Mario Cuomo, that was.
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His father, who was also an important politician in New York, a forerunner of.
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His son and a very different kind of politician. To be as polite about this as.
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I can, Andrew Cuomo has called in the last week for new rules to be imposed, laws to be passed to limit the money laundering activity of the big banks in New York that in his words, find their way that those monies do that get laundered by those banks into the hands of militants or criminals or both. Well, this is a joke. Not a good one and not a funny one, but.
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But a joke.
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Why? We have a dozen laws governing money laundering. They've been put into place over many years. They don't work over the last two or three years, most of the major banks in New York City have been found guilty either in court or by administrative hearings of doing the very money laundering that all the laws and rules were designed to prevent and they've paid hefty fines for doing it. What this shows is that the laws on the books don't work, did not succeed, that the banks have every profit incentive to get around to fake it, to lie to evade these laws, and have been doing so to the tunes of many, many billions of dollars. The slap on the wrist fines they got are unlikely to change it and.
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It islet's be polite here.
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It is unpersuasive of Governor Cuomo to look at this situation and do no better than to come up with another set of rules. The banks know how to get around them that they've proven to us. The real issue ought to be do we allow banking to be a private enterprise when it has proved itself to to be unethical and illegal over and over again, not just in money laundering, but in the fees it sets in its manipulations of foreign exchange rates in the Libor scandals that occurred over the last couple years. And on and on and on. The real debate, if we had a courageous governor, would be whether public banking controlled by the government where we can make sure that this kind of illegal activity is stopped. That ought to be the discussion. Another set of faked failed laws is.
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Hardly an adequate response. Next update.
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There's been much attention paid to the gathering of nations around the world in Paris this last week for the climate summit. All these leaders, President Obama included, gathering in the elegant city of Paris to discuss what to do to stop global.
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Warming, to stop climate change, to stop.
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The rising of temperature that threatens almost.
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Everybody on this planet.
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But as a recent Oxfam report showed.
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Particularly threatens most those who can resist least those who are most vulnerable. Or in a word, the poorest half of the population.
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Well, there were a lot of glowing.
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Words by government leaders. What there isn't is action. And that's been the story now for 25 years.
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First the people with money to lose.
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Question whether the climate is changing.
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Then they produce real and phony science to suggest it's not as bad as the critics say. Then they finally concede, oh yes, it's happening. But now this can't be done, that can't be done, this mustn't be done. So they control the politicians, so we get from them words but no action. And here's the the big push to keep the world the way it israising the temperature raising, risking our lives is capitalist enterprises who don't want to forego their profits. That's the truth. That's what ought to be debated and.
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Discussed and that's the problem to be solved.
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But that's so scary for the capitalists involved.
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They work overtime to keep the very.
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Idea off the table. I'm going to give you just two illustrations. One of the biggest wasteful uses of fossil fuels, oil and gas, is the private automobile. That is not the way to continue to move people and goods around the world. Public transportation is a much, much better way. It doesn't hurt as many people in accidents.
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It doesn't use the same amount of scarce material from the soil and the mines of the earth, and it doesn't.
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Use anywhere near as much fossil fuel. If you're serious, make a public transportation system. We are not serious. That is, our capitalist automobile companies and oil companies don't want to see a.
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Collapse in the demand for what they.
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Produce because that's their profits and they're making sure we don't move forward.
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The same is true with the companies.
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At Explore for Bring up and Refine Oil.
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It's an old, old story.
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They're not sure where they will end.
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Up in a new world that isn't wasting and polluting.
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And so they don't want to see us move anytime too soon. It's profits and capitalism versus the environment that's the problem. And pretending otherwise only postpones the solution. The next update is about an interesting company in which workers are given a systematic ownership role. This is not worker self directed enterprises. This is not workers taking over the enterprise. But it is an important story because it's an unusual company that gives workers a large share of both the ownership and the profits. And it does so in a systematic departure from from normal capitalist enterprises. And therefore I want to show you that when that is done, when a small step in the direction that we champion on this program is taken, the end results are very good for the company and not the kinds of disaster scenario that those afraid of going beyond.
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Capitalism like to suggest.
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The company in question is Publix. Publix, it's a major grocery chain supermarket.
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Chain started in Florida where it's very.
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Big and has been expanding ever since. It has been more profitable than Walmart.
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Or Kroger or Whole Foods.
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And it gives all workers after 1,000 hours of work and one year of.
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Employment a share of the stocks in the company.
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It gives them a share, 8.5% of of their take home pay is a bonus at the end of the year.
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In terms of ownership.
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According to Forbes magazine, 58,000 of 159,000.
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Total employees are on track to become owners.
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This is an important example of how giving workers more control, more involvement, more at stake in an enterprise, makes it.
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More successful and and more profitable than others. It's a sign of the direction of.
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Positivity that comes from giving workers a.
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Greater share We've come to the end.
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Of the first half of this program. Let me invite you please to make use of our websites rdwolf.com and democracyatwork.info not only for the purposes we normally.
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Talk about, to communicate with us, to to follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
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To share what we do on this.
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Program with those you think will find.
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It interesting, but also to sign up.
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For our free newsletter to contact us.
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If you know folks at a local.
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Radio station that we could speak to.
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About carrying this program, and finally to arrange with us for a speaking trip by me to your area as I have been doing more and more of.
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In the last few years.
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This is the first half. Please stay with us.
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After a short interlude we will be right back.
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So tired trying to see some behind the red in my eyes no better looking than me I could pretend to be tonight so deep in his will with the most familiar swine for reasons wretched and divine she blows out of nowhere on the candle of the wild Laughing away through my feeble disguise no other version of me I would rather be tonight and Lord she found me just in time Cause with my mid youth crisis all said and done I need to be youthfully felt Cause God I never felt young she's gonna save me call me baby from her head to my head she'll know me Crazy soothing daily but yet she wouldn't care.
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I welcome back friends, to the second half of Economic Update. I'm your host Richard Wolff, and I'm.
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Going to take you now through three or four topics of a more major sustained discussion.
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A little bit unlike the shorter updates of the first half of our programs, normally we had so many this week that responding to your questions had to be postponed. We'll do more of that next week.
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Okay, I want to begin by talking.
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A little bit about the just passed Thanksgiving holiday. And much of what I have to say is a comment on the economics of our holidays, Thanksgiving among them. It's not about the other dimensions of.
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These holidays, but I'm an economist and you will allow me to talk about them.
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The idea of Thanksgiving as a holiday.
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Has always been one of stopping the.
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Normal way we live and work to get together with friends and family, to have a time of sharing, of appreciating one another, of giving thanks, as the holiday itself says, for the community, for the solidarity we have with one another.
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It's a nice idea. It is something that many cultures have.
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More or less around harvest time when we all get together to enjoy what our work has produced in our culture. However, it is subordinated our holiday to our economic system in ways I think it's important to face and talk about. And I'm only going to pick two ways, but you'll get the basic idea. I'm going to begin with the airlines in order to be with friends and family. Millions of Americans enjoy Thanksgiving by getting on an airplane in order to be with their loved ones and their friends and so on, to make a Thanksgiving holiday. The airlines respond by seeing an opportunity for profit. How does this work? You know, they don't allow you to use your accumulated miles, they jack up the prices. They play all kinds of games to cram even more of us into even more sardine type seats to make money off of it. They try not to hire more people as needed to accommodate the crowds that are trying to get to and from a Thanksgiving get together. It's a way of diminishing the holiday. It's a way of making the cost of it so expensive that large numbers of Americans cannot have a holiday with their relatives and friends because they cannot afford. The exaggerated costs of an airplane trip and the other kinds of transportation may take too long in given their work obligations. You see the story. It is a chance to get us together that is hampered, reduced, undermined, compromised by the profit driven needs of capitalist enterprises which trump the holiday even if their glitzy ads wish us a good one. I want to turn next to the turkey, perhaps the emblem of the Thanksgiving holiday, the turkey. The idea that we get together and make a meal together and enjoy the meal together. A classic way for people to share something and to be bonding in that way, one with the other. But here again, the opportunity to get together with another person in a kind of solidarity, a giving thanks together, is undermined by profit driven capitalism. First of all, turkeys are commodities in our society. They are produced by enterprises that try to make money off of them. One particularly ugly form of that in our current society is the decision by certain turkey producers to produce a quote unquote organic turkey, A turkey that hasn't been stuffed with dangerous chemicals, that has been allowed perhaps to run free in a non polluted environment, etc.
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Etc.
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This is a costly activity. And so the turkey capitalist entrepreneur jacks up the price of an organic turkey way beyond what a regular turkey that isn't organic costs. What does this mean?
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It means that if you want a.
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Thanksgiving where you give thanks not only for your friends, your family and so forth, but for the bounty that is now before us, if you actually want that bounty to to be healthy, to not damage your body and that of the people you've gathered together with, you're going to have to spend a bundle of money which large numbers of Americans cannot do. So they are condemned by the high price of organic turkey to settle instead, for an inorganic turkey that is one which has gotten knows what feed inside of it, God knows what pesticides it roamed among, God knows what hormones have been added to its diet, etc. Etc. What a comment on a time when what ought to happen is that we all get together for an equally healthy Happy Thanksgiving. We are in fact confronted with an economic system that immediately separates those of us who can afford to have a healthy turkey from those of us who cannot. Nor will I comment on the millions who can't buy a turkey at all because of their economic difficulties, and who have to settle for, I don't know, maybe a frozen turkey dinner, maybe standing on a long line in front of a church that makes a turkey dinner for folks who have no money. You get the picture. What would it take in a society that took Thanksgiving seriously to suspend capitalism just for a day so that we could all get together with a healthy turkey in a subsidized transportation that would allow us to have what Thanksgiving was supposed to be, what it should mean rather than the compromised letdown that capitalism makes it be.
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Let me turn now to some other.
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Topics that deserve our attention at this time of the year, but also that deserve the kind of extended discussion we don't normally have time for. I want to begin with some something much in the news. Germany and Refugees Germany is the strongest and biggest economy in Europe. It has enjoyed falling unemployment throughout this crisis right after the immediate hit. It has done much better than any other country in Europe, economically speaking, over the last six or seven years. Done much better than the United States by example, in terms of its economic well being and growth. But it is suffering from problems of its own. Number one, it has an aging population like many European countries, and it is so successful economically that it could use more laborers, particularly young people with a decent education, who can get right to work. It wants those people and it needs them, number one. Number two, it has Raised terrible memories of suffering at the hands of the Germans, particularly during their Nazi period, when it did a number of things recently, crunching down on the Greek people who wanted not to suffer austerity and anymore. But had the Germans thrust it down their throats unwillingly. Number two, it has gotten itself into a terrible reputation when it was exposed that one of their largest companies, Volkswagen vw, had been systematically lying and cheating to government inspectors to get away with dumping much more air pollution that causes asthma and lung cancer on the people of Europe just to make more money. And that this was unaware, according to the German government, of anything about it. This is not doing well for Germany. Last, it was decided by the French and the British and the Americans to start bombing Syria. Having failed in the previous several years to get rid of a government they don't like there something they are expressly forbidden to do by international law, they started bombing Syria. It didn't seem to do much to undo that government which is sitting in power now, just as it did before the bombing started. And it certainly provoked the ISIS movement to do what it does does. But it also had another effect. It terrorized the population of Syria. And for the first time in many, many years, an enormous number of their citizens, more than a million, began leaving Syria because between the bad government they suffered from and now the terrorizing bombing coming from the United States, Britain and France, which Germany did nothing to prevent or oppose, they're moving out of Syria and they're going to Europe in the hope of escaping the whole mess of the Middle east that they find so fearful. The Germans would like to see them settle in large numbers in Germany. Why? First of all, it solves the labor shortage problem for Germany or at least goes a good distance in. In that direction. It makes Germany grow even more economically because of the arrival of these people and gives Germany then a future, larger dominance of Europe than it already has. Next, it solves Germany's problem that it's looking charitable after the VW scandal, after the horror of what it did to Greece, after it now looks like it has not just an iron fist and a boot, but maybe a little bit of a heart. That's good for something, too. So Mrs. Merkel, the leader in Germany, is bringing in people. But of course, it frightens the German working class because they know that these people coming in are used to much lower wages and that there will be no question that. That German employers will take advantage of the desperate needs of burdened refugee communities gathering inside Germany to get lower wages on everybody in Germany. So there's a growing question and a growing hostility. Well, it's all nice and good if you take in refugees, but where is the protection for Germans already there from the consequences that capitalism usually dumps on local working classes? And the answer is there's no protection offered by the German government. So there's opposition. And Mrs. Merkel is discovering it's not so easy to pull this off. In terms of her own popularity inside Germany, this struggle is therefore far from over. She will paint everybody who opposes refugees coming in as some sort of anti humane human being. That's a cheap shot, especially for someone who presided over the anti humane Volkswagen activity, the anti humane crushing of Greece with austerity and so on. But she'll try, because that's what politicians of her sort normally do do. It is a big question now how this will play out not only in Germany, but in every other European country as they struggle with this refugee onslaught. But let's never lose sight of the fact that with a difficult government in Syria for many, many years there was no refugee exodus. The refugee exodus begins with with the bombing of Syria by the United States, Britain, France, now Russia added to it. That has produced the terrorization of an entire nation's population, leading millions of people to leave their jobs, leave their homes, leave their neighborhoods, their families, their friends, their language, and go to a strange part of the world where. Where they have no idea what kind of reception they will get. This is a terrible result and the Europeans are now deciding what to do. But demonizing the refugees is a kind of ethical nightmare that it is painful to observe. Staying with this same topic for a moment, let's look at France. France was this site on 13th November of a horrific behavior on the part of local people enraged about a whole set of issues that have to do with how immigrant communities are treated in places like France. They took it into their own hands to kill innocent people who had really very little to do with any of this. As an act of grotesque desperation. No words are necessary. We've discussed this in this country for the last ten days, unremittingly. You don't need more from me, but what I want to talk about is the reaction of the socialist government of France to those horrific and criminal behavior events of 13th November. The government led by Francois Hollande, a socialist, and supported by the socialist majorities in both the Senate and the national assembly, the two houses of the French Parliament, have been grotesque. Number one, hit with more bombs. Syria. There's no evidence that any Syrian had anything to do with. With anything that happened on the 13th of November. This is simply a government having been caught, unable to protect its citizens from this kind of action, trying to look tough and mean by doing something that is both stupid and counterproductive, as well as murderous for the people that suffer from it. Bombing somebody. And in Syria, especially, if you're honest and know that bombs don't discriminate very well between the innocent and the guilty, which is why we have a million and a half refugees from Syria in the first place. But to look tough. Rather like George Bush landing on that aircraft carrier wearing a flak jacket did after the invasion of Iraq by the United States. This tough guy attitude is supposed to win you votes. And boy, does Francois Hollande need them. Like Bush, he was really low in the opinion polls. Most Americans thought little of him. Most French people thought little of Francois Hollande. He had disappointed the French badly, and let's see why. Because it matters. He had promised to prevent austerity in France. He had promised to tax the rich in order to be able to do that.
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B
He failed on all counts.
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A
He's done nothing about the unemployment in France. He's done nothing about taxing the rich. All those things disappeared. And that's why he lost the support of the French people who had voted him in for to do what he then failed to do. That's why his popularity collapsed. The people who always opposed him didn't like him, and the people who voted for him to stop austerity turned away from him when he proved to be unequal to the task, unable to mobilize, too fearful of the political consequences, to be anything like the leader he asked them to vote him in to be. So here was his chance when it turned out he couldn't protect the French people from an attack having promised after the Charlie Hebdo massacres earlier this year, to quote, unquote, make sure this doesn't happen again. Having failed, he did what failed leaders often distract attention from your failure by being Mr. Tough Guy immediately after the failure. You know it's closing the barn door after all the horses got out.
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B
So he's running around gathering international support.
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For another violent assault on whoever he thinks ISIS is, wherever he thinks they are. Let me remind everyone that the previous bombing campaign made matters worse for the French people, not better. Here he goes doing all this again. It makes one wonder whether these kinds of leaders ever learn from their mistakes or whether they're so programmed that they can only follow a small mistake by making it again on an even bigger scale. It is a catastrophe. It is using money that the French can ill afford to do something that will make them suffer more. The larger problem that the Germans and the French and the Americans and the British face is you cannot expect in a world in which a small part is extraordinarily wealthy and a mass part is extraordinarily poor, you are not going to solve the problem that reasonable people become very unreasonable, maybe even crazy, by observing the injustice and the suffering that that kind of inequality imposes. You sooner or later have to deal with that problem or else you're going to fail in your effort to bomb it or kill it or imprison it, just like the people who commit these awful crimes are not going to solve the problems of their society that way either. Will we continue to have tit for tat solving nothing, or are we finally going to deal with an economic system that so unevenly distributes what everybody works to produce that it throws itself into these kinds of quagmires? I don't have the answer to the question, but I know that it's a question that has to be asked. The last topic for today comes from.
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B
A story in the Los Angeles Times.
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A
It caught my attention not so much for the details, which I'll give you in a moment, but for the larger lesson that these details can teach us if we're willing to learn. Well, let's go first, the details. A new study as reported by the Los Angeles Times about 10 days ago, shows that most American airlines have been manipulating the fly times that they attach to to certain of the trips their airlines take.
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B
In other words, they have been increasing.
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The number of minutes they claim it takes to fly from, I don't know, Boston to Cincinnati or Los Angeles to Philadelphia or Minneapolis to Dallas or whatever the trajectory they noticed, they studied and they asked themselves the question. The people who wrote this report that the Los Angeles Times reported on, they asked themselves the question, why was this happening when there was no evidence they checked that the actual flights took any longer? Nothing had happened to make them take longer? Well, they came up with the only answer their research made. You're going to love this. By lengthening the amount of time you claim the trip takes, you reduce the number of your flights that you have to report to the FAA as having been late. In other why? In other words, airlines can improve their quote unquote on time performance not by.
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B
In fact being late less often, but rather making the determination of what counts.
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As late in their favor.
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B
They're late by three minutes, but it.
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Doesn'T count as late because they jocked up the time they associate with the flight by four minutes. So they're being three minutes late is still one minute less than they say it takes to make the trip. This is fakery, this is phony, this is dishonest, this is unethical. Why would an airline play such a game? Airlines compete with one another and one of the ways they compete to get your and my business is by publishing, you guessed it, on time performance statistics. They want us to believe that the statistics are a reliable way to decide which airline is going to get you there on time relative to which airline is not going to be so successful. Rather than play by the rules that these statistics were supposed to enforce, the companies play with, manipulate the rules. They evade them, they change them.
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B
They.
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A
You know what I'm talking about, don't you? You really don't need me to explain. Well, what is the lesson here? Airlines are not in the business of doing anything other than making money. They are not in the business of getting us from point A to point B quickly and safely. Sure, that's a part of their business, but their priority, what they like to call their bottom line, is profitability.
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B
And so if that takes faking on.
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Time performance, if it takes dishonesty, so what? We live in a system that permits, that provokes, that creates the incentive to this behavior. Are we forever going to be shocked when it turns out profit driven enterprises do what they do for their priority and their bottom line at our expense? Not if we're adults. I want to remind you before we.
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Close that this is a program economic.
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There you will be able to sign.
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B
So to get this program broadcast on.
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More than the nearly 50 stations that broadcast it now. And finally, if you'd like me to come to an institution in your area and give a public talk, I am more than willing to do that and would like the opportunity. We want you to partner with us. We will be a good partner to you in bringing this kind of news and analysis into the public discussion now when it is so needed. Thank you very much. I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Sam.