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Sam. Saint Gonna change one. Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the jobs, incomes, debts, prospects for our children's future, all of the economic dimensions of our lives. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life. Currently I teach at the New School University in New York City. I want to jump quickly into the updates for this part of November 2015 because they are many and because they need to be talked about and brought into everyone's awareness. Japan, in the last week or so, announced that it had slipped back into a recession. That's right. Two successive quarters of shrinking production of goods and services is what qualifies an economy to be called in recession. In the case of Japan, there are two important things to remember. First, that it is one of the three or four most important economies in the world in terms of the size of its production, its role in international trade, and so forth. So for a country that important to fall into decline is bad news for everyone they deal with. And that, of course, includes Europe, North America, and so on. The second dimension of this story, which is important, is that Japan has had economic trouble for the last 20 to 25 years. It hasn't emerged from a very long, depressed period of time. And to be informed that after all of the hoopla around all of the policies that the current government has has put in place to get out of the problem, to discover they're actually falling further into it, has to give you pause about what's going on. And that brings me to the third dimension. Economics is not like the weather. We are not, in fact, sitting here waiting to see what will happen, whether the clouds will come and bring rain or we'll have a sunny day. The economy is something we have a great deal of influence and control over if we wish to exercise it. But we don't as a people. We allow a tiny number of individuals in our society, the heads of the big corporations that dominate both the Japanese economy and the American economy and so on. We allow ourselves to be dependent on what Whether they're going to make a profit or not. And if they are going to make a profit, is that going to involve hiring more people or is it going to involve firing more people? In other words, the ups and downs of a capitalist economy are above all shaped by the decisions, the investment decisions, the business decisions made by a tiny number of people. And if we don't like the outcome, such as in Japan, 25 years of depression and now another recession on top of it, we really ought to look at an economic system that makes our well being as a society dependent on the decisions of so few. But of course we don't do that. And so the media, as they've covered the decline in Japan, have mainly focused on how the Chinese economy slowing down is having bad effects in Japan. Of course that's true, but that's not the only reason Japan is turning down. And if you wanted to be honest, you'd have to ask why is the Chinese economy slowing down? And then you'd have to face the fact that the widening gap between rich and poor in the United States and Europe is killing the market of the mass of people in those parts of the world for all the stuff they used to buy from China. In other words, we live in a global economy and when it goes down in one part, the causes are everywhere and the consequences are everywhere as well. The second update I want to spend a few moments on is yet another story about so many that I have coming across my desk here. The story is once again, a federal investigation has discovered that an industry has been lying, cheating, gouging for more profits in ways that threaten our health. In this case, it's the nutritional supplements industry, the industry that produces the chemicals, the pills, the potions and the lotions that are supposed to make us stronger, more powerful. The company in question, USP Labs and their products, which I'll mention in case anyone listening deals in these sorts of things. Jack3D and Oxy Elite Pro. The government has arrested one of the leaders, Jacopo Geisler. The military have stopped buying these things. The Defense Department already as far back as 2011, removed the products of his companies, or many of them, from the shelves in army and Navy and Air Force stores, et cetera. And now they've been arrested. And now it turns out it is extremely dangerous to take many of these supplements. And what's claimed to be in them on the label turns out not to be. What's actually the details are not important. What's important here is also not the particular company or the particular industry, because the sad reality of our capitalist system is that the profit motive drives companies sooner or later in virtually every industry, especially when they're faced with economic troubles, to resort to Lord knows what in the search for more profits each time. We think we're going to solve the problem by having the government investigate, and we certainly need the government to investigate, given the sheer frequency with which this kind of illegal, immoral and downright dangerous behavior is found among our business elite. But after so many and this is the latest in what shall I repeat to you? What VW has done? What. What General Motors did, what Toyota did with the cars. Should I repeat the story from last week about Whole Foods overcharging? No. It's endless. And it involves big companies, little companies, medium sized companies. The profit motive that we are taught in economics departments to celebrate as a paragon of efficiency may sometimes be useful to prod companies to be more efficient, but it is likewise extremely complicit in producing dangerous, fraudulent, illegal behavior that causes us to suffer. So that a rational person would have to ask the logical question, is there an alternative system that could produce the goods and services we need and want without an endless progression of crooked, dangerous behavior prompted and stimulated by the same market system? Next update is a report printed in the New York Times of November 19, reporting on the results of a poll, a poll of people in New York City conducted partly by the New York Times and partly by a local higher education institution, Siena College. Basically, while the report is in the New York Times of November 19, I just want to tell you the summary and what it means. I'll read to you from the first sentence of the Half of New York City residents say they are struggling economically, making ends meet just barely, if at all, and most feel sharp uncertainty about the future of the city's next generation. Okay, I couldn't write it any better myself. Half of the people in what is arguably one of the major cities of the United States, half of the people are having trouble making ends meet and are anxious about the future. What kind of society refers to such a condition as economic recovery? Or we are doing quite well, or things are getting better and looking up for everyone? These statements are simply false. And when you actually look at the story, you see an economic system that is producing very nicely for those at the top, continuing for a bunch in the, let's call them in the upper half, but nowhere near the top, continuing to give them the drive, the hope that they too one day will get to that upper top level, even though they never do. But for half the people, the game is over. For half the people, they know that there's no recovery for them, that there's no decent economic existence or prospects. This is a society that is doing, as some politicians have at least had the courage to say, is more and more splitting into two societies, a small one at the top and an immense lower half that is quickly absorbing more, more and more of the upper half as they slip and slide their way down. Well, this is the third annual enrollment period for the Affordable Care act, sometimes called Obamacare, the program that was designed to provide medical insurance to the millions and millions of Americans who didn't have it, and indeed quite a few have signed up over the last few years, two to three years, so that this third period of enrollment is finding large numbers of Americans with medical insurance who didn't have it before. However, the underlying economics of medical care hasn't been fundamentally changed and nothing shows this so clearly as the new problem for people who are signing up and getting medical insurance under the Affordable Care act, the problem they report everywhere and again the New York Times is to be commended for having an excellent story on the 14th of November about this. The new problem are deductibles, the amount of money out of pocket of the individual that has to be paid before the insurance kicks in. It turns out that this is now enormous, that the promises of President Obama and others that the Affordable Care act would make the insurance premium affordable has been reasonably true. But what wasn't discussed and negates the effect of a low cost premium is if you have to pay vast amounts of money out of pocket for the deductible portion. So here are some statistics to give you an idea. The median deductible for the new kinds of policies available to the formerly uninsured range from 3,000 to $5,500 per person. Median deductible. That means half of the deductibles are larger and half are smaller. By comparison, for workers covered by medical policies, medical insurance policies where they work, the deductible is in the neighborhood of $1,300 per individual. Now, of course, these sums of money mean that the real cost to people of medical insurance is staggering and far beyond what it could be, should be and is in most other industrial countries. But it's a bitter reality for the millions who thought that the phrase Affordable Care act meant that care is actually affordable. The rising deductibles, for particularly those who can least afford it, is a slap in the face that proves once again that America's medical industrial complex, that combination of doctors, hospitals, insurance companies and drug and appliance manufacturers, that four part coalition to squeeze more money for medical care than any other medical system in the world squeezes out of its people, is still alive and still well. What it gives with one hand, the Affordable Care act, it takes away with the other in unconscionably high deductibles that are hurting millions of families across the United States. Next update on November 12th in 120 campuses across the United States, something called the Million Student March occurred. In some campuses it was small, in some campuses it was huge. But three demands were being made by these students that show a determination to do something about the absurd conditions imposed on students these days. What are those conditions? Well, to put it bluntly but clearly, never in the history of the United States has the acquisition of a bachelor's degree, the basic degree you get after four years of college, never has it been less useful as a way to get a good job, as a way to get a decent income. At the same time that the bachelor's degree is less of a ticket to a good life than it ever was. The cost of it to young people who are going to college is higher than it has ever been. Higher price, lower value, what you get for it. And of course the students are deeply troubled by this one, two punch where it hurts. And it is made worse by the fact that the economic system is so bad for so many people, as I just reported about the poll in New York City, that an increasing number of students, in order to pay the higher price of an education that that delivers a BA that isn't worth what it was in the past, an ever larger portion of these students have to borrow tens of thousands of dollars to get that degree. Nor is it at all nice to see the political hay being made by right wing conservative governors and mayors across the country, Republican and Democrat alike, who use this disaster situation to impose new kinds of standards. They call them on education, an excuse to further cut the support of the public for the education, shifting more of the burden onto the students to pay the teachers to work without adequate compensation. It is a system disappearing, declining. And you know, we teach in economics that the future of every country, including the United States, in the world economy we now have to survive in depends above all on the quantity and the quality of our trained young people. Colleges and universities are a key part of that. What kind of a society undermines its higher education under these conditions? It's like shooting yourself in the foot. But making the cost rise while the quality of what you get with a degree shrinks. Making people borrow unconscionable and unsustainable amounts of money is outrageous self destructiveness. And the students finally are showing the way to do something about it. Not just to moan about it, not just to turn inward and look for a personal solution, but they're making the decision to build a social movement. And on the 12th of November, in 120 campuses, the Million Student March made three fundamental demands. First cancel student debt. Write it off. Eradicate it. Do for the students the elimination of their debts that the government did for some of the biggest corporations and banks in the big bailouts of 2008 and 2009. Number two, eliminate tuition. Make tuition free. Public schools from kindergarten through the 12th grade are free in the United States. There is no reason not to add the four years of college to the exact same plan and for the exact same reasons. Public education is good for everybody. An educated society works better, thinks better, lives better. It's something that we ought to be doing. Germany this last year, canceled all tuition. Other countries have moved in that direction or have tuition so low that they're not a significant cost. In this country, let's move in that direction. Hats off to the students for doing it. And to show that they weren't only interested in themselves, the students added a third demand. Every person who works on a campus should be entitled to a minimum of $15 an hour. That is, they want to extend the 15 per hour demand from the retail workers and the fast food workers who have been leading that struggle and extend it to the campuses of the United States. Bravo students. Again, as so often, show us which way to go. Well, I want to turn in the time that remains in the first half of the show to make a couple of announcements and then to respond to a question that has been sent in. First, I want to remind everyone that once a month, the second Wednesday of every month, 7:30 in the evening, I give a public talk on the economy at the historic Judson Memorial Church in Washington Square in New York City. For those of you in the New York area and for those of you that may be traveling to the New York area, please consider yourself invited. Second Wednesday of every month, 7:30 in the evening, Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square. The next time will be the 9th of December, 2015. I also want to tip my hat to the three places I visited in the last 10 days, in each case both speaking at a venue in the public and also speaking on behalf of a radio station that carries this program. It began in Tampa, St. Petersburg, Florida, where I was hosted in a wonderful way by wmnf, a really impressive local community radio station with a very large and loyal following. Few days later I went to Houston and there I was brought by the combined efforts of kpft, the local station that carries this program that likewise arranged for for me to speak, arranged for me to talk with a variety of folks, and ended up with a large lecture at the Houston Community College. My hat off to the people, the family of friends and supporters of KPFT Doing a great job of bringing a whole new kind of public radio to that part of the country. And finally, I want to tip my hat to my friends at KHOI in Ames, Iowa. They also brought me to Ames, Iowa. I met with their supporters in their new headquarters. And I likewise gave a lecture in a large lecture hall at Iowa State University. Each of these venues was an opportunity to meet many people to support the radio stations that support this program. It was a pleasure, and I appreciate the invitation. Here then is a question. What is this endless struggle between public and private enterprise? Is it really true, this questioner asks, that private enterprises are efficient and public enterprises are not? The blunt answer to that is no, that isn't true. That's silly. We have had public enterprises and private enterprises that have done well and poorly. We have moved some activities from private to public. For example, we once upon a time had a private passenger rail system. Now we have a public rail system. Once upon a time, we allowed private insurance companies to do their business on their own. Likewise the utility companies. But they did such a bad job that we now have, in every One of the 50 states, a public utility commission and an insurance commission that supervises, controls and monitors the that private industry because they can't be trusted to function on their own. That's been our history. So we have moved things from public to private and vice versa, Often making the decision in an intelligent way. If it isn't working as a private enterprise, let's try it as a public enterprise and vice versa. But to begin before looking at the facts with some kind of dogmatic notion that the one is good and the other one is bad really makes very little sense. There may be many things that individual private groups can do and do well, and we can rely on them, and then we can, and we should. But there are other things that are affecting all of us that are really social enterprises and. And they shouldn't be put in the hands of a small number of people. Let me give you a couple of examples. And the examples will tilt toward the public. Not because I think the public enterprise is good and private enterprise is bad. That's the kind of either or thinking I want to get away from. No, I'm going to give examples. Because we tend in our culture to celebrate the private and demonize the public. And as I said, they. That's just silly. We are in the depths of a crisis now, seven years old, Brought to us by the private banks. They made loans, they shouldn't have to people who couldn't pay them back. They didn't prudently invest. They made every mistake in the book. They've been brought to court. They've been paying billions in fines for their misbehavior. If ever an industry qualified to be questioned as to whether it should be left in private hands, given the social consequences of what they do, it's banking. And since we have an example in the bank of North Dakota of how a public bank works, and we've seen it work for 100 years in that state in such a way that Republicans and Democrats outdo each other in endorsing and celebrating it, we have the evidence we need. Banking should be public because it's a public function. And private management of it in private enterprises has been an unmitigated disaster for much of this country. All the businesses that can't get credit to enable them to function, all the people who have been harmed by all of it. The ability of the big banks to use their private money to twist and contort the political system to. To serve them at everybody else's expense, really, how much more evidence do we need that here's an example of a business better handled as a public than as a private? We make our parks public. We make our police departments public. We understand the fire department. We need social services from social governmental enterprises. And if we don't learn from our past and think about this in either or dogma, we will all be sorry about it. All right, folks, we've come to the end of the first half of today's show. Please stay with me. We will be back in a very short time to deal with a number of major issues that have come up in our economy. This is Richard Wolff, and please, as always, stay with me. I will be right back. Sam, In a world you've grown, few more years to go. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's edition of Economic Update. As I often do before jumping into the major discussions for this program, I wanted to remind you of our two websites, places where we upload all kinds of material that expands on, amplifies and supplements what we do on the radio program. The first one is rdwolf with two Fs, and the second one is Democracy at Work. All one word, democracyatwork.info both of those websites provide you with ways to communicate to us your interests, your concerns, your criticisms. They also allow you, by clicking on the icon, to follow us on Facebook and Twitter. And they also, they also enable you to let us know if you're interested in having a talk that I come out to wherever you are in this country and give a talk. I've been doing a lot of that recently, and it has been very, very exciting and gratifying. It's also a way for those of you that might have a contact at a local radio station, we will pursue those contacts to see whether local public, community, university, national public radio stations, and so on. We pursue that to see if they might be interested in carrying this program. In other words, we do everything we can to expose more people to the kinds of analysis and information we produce on this program every week. You can help us by by arranging a talk, by connecting us to a local radio station, and by sharing any part or all of this program with other people who might be interested. Let them know. Tell them what you find useful about it. Be a partner to what we're trying to do on Economic Update. We will be grateful and I think you will share with us the idea that the more this kind of thinking enters the public discussions in America today, the better off we will all be. I want to spend a little time today talking to you about the question of small business versus big business. Many of you have written to me one way or another about this, and it has become clearly a topic that is of concern to many of you. So I want to take a little time to talk about it. We have an economic system that is divided between a relatively small number of very big enterprises and a huge number of small ones. And the relationships between these two are and I'll be as polite as I know how, rocky big businesses and small businesses are having a very hard time coexisting in the economy. By big business, I mean something with more than two or three hundred employees. And as you know, we have many industries, many businesses in the United States that have tens or hundreds of thousands of employees. Basically the problem is that big businesses have all kinds of advantages in their competition with little businesses, and they systematically take advantage of those opportunities. And they basically crush, destroy, or buy out or absorb small businesses. And they've been doing it for a long time and with little interference. From time to time, small businesses having understood the threat to their survival and to their independence posed by large businesses, perhaps the greatest threat many of them face, they've gotten together sometimes and been able to organize among themselves enough strength to slow the process, to block it. At least in part. When small businesses have done that, it's made a difference. For example, we have in the United States a Small Business Administration, the sba that was the fruit of a struggle by small businesses to survive in the face of the crushing competition from big businesses. The Small Business Administration was set up to. To give, let's call it a leveling of the playing field to small businesses. Give them some help in getting credit, give them some help in getting technical assistance, give them some political strength when it comes to shaping politics. They've never gotten enough to basically stop the enormous power of big businesses, but they have. Sometimes, when they've been militant and, and organized, and when they've had allies among the average people of America, then they've been able to make a big difference with big business. But I thought it might be useful to mention a few of the areas where big business today, as in the past, is really abusing its social position at the expense of small businesses. Let's start with the Trans Pacific Partnership, the new deal that Obama and many others in Washington are pushing through our Congress to make into the law. This is a new writing of international trade rules. It was done in secret over the last many months, mostly by government officials, and you guessed it, the representatives of big business. So guess what? As the rules that they are pushing for become clear once again, we see that the big businesses with the big bucks able to hire the expensive lobbyists and push their own people into positions of power, are writing the rules so that they help big business. And they do that often at the expense of small business. Let me give you another example. During the crisis of 2008 and 9, the effects of which, as I show you every time, are more than still with us, they're literally alive and festering. We were told by some of the biggest businesses in the United States that they were too big to fail and that therefore, since they were too big to fail, there was an implicit threat. If the government doesn't bail them out in the way they want, they will fail. And then they'll take us all down with them. That's what too big to fail means you can't afford. We're being held hostage by huge big businesses. Which were they? The biggest banks, the biggest insurance company, the biggest automobile company, the really monstrous companies were holding us hostage by telling us they were too big to fail. They were blackmailing small businesses and the people to fund the cost of bailing them out so they could continue. And here's the joke of jokes, if you're in a sardonic mood, almost all of the companies that told us they were too big to fail in 2008 are bigger today than they were then. They have become even bigger and therefore put themselves in a position to threaten and blackmail the rest of us next time the economy turns down with even more force than they did in 2008 and 2009. Big businesses get it into their idea, into their minds, to do something that small businesses can't do, and that is to become monopolies, to become so important in their industry, such a big player that they, or alone, or sometimes with two or three other monsters, can get together and control a market, be the only producer. So they can charge pretty much what they want. Yes, sometimes when they're in that position, they have to face government oversight. But given the amount of money they have, the big bucks they gather under their roof, they are able to buy the protection they want from the political system, too. So, yes, there's only one or two cable companies in your area, but they have a cozy relationship with whoever's supervising them, just like the utility companies, just like the banks, and so on. So you can see that big business has a monopolistic tendency and a tendency, let's not be too vague here, to corrupt a democratic political system, to twist it so that it serves the needs of big business and frustrates the public on the one hand, and small businesses on the other, on the other. Then there are the advantages big businesses enjoy through quote, unquote, economies of scale. That is, the fact that they're big so that they can get a lower interest rate when they borrow because they borrow so much money. They can get a better price for an input that they buy because they buy so much of it. And that allows them to get an advantage over small businesses who don't qualify for. For those interest rates and don't qualify for those better prices. The end result is, of course, that big business gets bigger at the expense of small business, which has struggled just to survive. And then the last 30 years of what we've called globalization, well, that's the worst example of all. It's very risky and very expensive to, to move abroad. Big businesses can afford it, both the risk and the money, much more easily than small businesses. Big businesses can buy their way into political favors abroad in a way that small businesses can't in a globalizing economy. The advantages to big over small are gross and obvious. Why do I bring this up? Because a society has the right to decide whether it prefers the. The goods and services it needs to be produced by immense, anonymous, undemocratic institutions called big businesses. Institutions so large that a tiny group of people at the top make all the key Decisions. They decide what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the profits, even if those profits have been produced by the efforts of tens or hundreds of thousands of, of employees. A society dominated by big business is a fundamentally different society from one that says no. We want our factories and stores and offices to be relatively small, where people know each other and know the clientele they serve. That the quality of the service, the quality of the product, the quality of the lives we lead by both as workers and as consumers, is different and preferable to the anonymity and the top down dictatorship exercised inside huge corporations. They can spend all the public relations money they want telling you how friendly they are and how nice they are. The reason they have to pay money to put that image forward is, is because it isn't the actual way they are. And the reason small businesses don't need to do that is they can show you in the little store, in the little office, in the little factory, they can show you honestly, directly how they work, how they function, and we can choose among them in a way that most big businesses prevent us from being able to do. Many societies have decided they will forego the benefits of bigness in order to attract and maintain smallness. In the United States, we recognize that because we have an ideology that celebrates small business within an economy that crushes it most of the time. So we have this big celebration of something that we don't in fact support and encourage anywhere near the way we ought to. That's why we have chains across the country, huge companies that set up in every locale, rather than locally based, locally known, locally responsible enterprises. Other societies have limited big business in a way that the United States has not. And it is something that we as a society ought to be discussing and, and ought to be debating. A big business society is not the only way to go. Capitalism, whether you like it or not, can be a capitalism of big businesses and then it behaves in one way, or a capitalism of small businesses, and then it behaves in important different ways. And whether you're a friend or a critic of capitalism, it matters whether you are big or little. And many of the problems of the United States can be shown to have a lot to do with the fact that we are dominated by big business. We pretend to be a society that is interested in and supportive of small business. And that contradiction and that reality is something that ought to be part of the public discourse. So I appreciate those of you that asked me to talk about it. The next item I want to Talk about in the larger discussions that we have at this part of the program is I want to bring up two ideas that are not part of the presidential campaign, but I believe ought to be. And I want here also to choose in a particular way. One of my examples is an idea that comes from. From another country that ought to be discussed in ours. And the second idea comes from another part of American history and that it too should be discussed now. And the amazing thing to me is that this interesting idea from another country and this interesting idea from our own country at another time are so stunningly absent from the presidential. So I'll begin with Italy. Italy has this thing which I've talked about before on this program and which many of you talk to me about. The Marcora Law, Marco, passed in 1985, attacked by conservatives and big business, but so far unsuccessfully, so that it remains on the books. It gives people who are unemployed through no fault of their own two options. Here in the United States, and indeed in many countries, people who become unemployed through no fault of their own, typically because the employer can't sell whatever it is the employer makes and therefore lays off workers because it makes no sense to pay them to produce what the employer cannot sell. When a person loses their job in that way, despite the fact that they work hard, despite the fact that they have the same skills they had last month and last year, governments around the world have been pressured by working people to provide something called unemployment insurance or compensation. And here's how it works. And it works this way in Italy, just as it works this way in the United States. You go, you fill out some forms, and the government gives you a weekly check for somewhere between a half a year, a year, a year and a half to tide you over, to help you out in your trouble, because you have no job and you have no income from wages and salaries. What the Marcora did, what the Marcora law did in Italy was to give unemployed workers a second option. Instead of standing online once a week or getting a check in the mail once a week, you have another choice. You have a Plan B, you might say. And this exists in Italy and in few other countries, certainly does not exist in the United States. If you can find at least nine other workers in Italy unemployed like yourself, and you can get together with them and make this following decision. All of you, all 10 or more of you, you, +9. If you make the following decision, the government will give you your entire unemployment compensation as a lump sum. Right now, you don't get it every week for the Next year. You get all of it right now. And not only do you get it, but at the minimum of nine other people, you're doing this with, nine other unemployed people, they get it too. So you now have a nice pot of money. The second requirement, besides having nine other people make this decision with you, the second requirement is that the 10 or more of you that do it pool the lump sums to become the startup capital of a cooperative enterprise. And the reasoning behind this law is interesting, isn't it? First, it says it's not good for a country to have people unemployed for 6 12, 18 months getting a weekly check. During that time, you lose contact with your employer. During that time, you lose your skills, you lose your connection to the working world, you feel bad about yourself, you are a burden on your family because of your upset, your worries about the future. There's a lot of bad things that we can avoid if instead of your hanging around for months and months waiting on your weekly unemployment check, you were busy building a new industry, a new enterprise, with other people in the same boat you're in, working very hard to build an enterprise that is not only going to give you a job, but is going to be your future. It's going to be your company, your enterprise. It turns out in Italy that the working people who did this threw themselves into these new enterprises. They got, in a sense, a new lease on life, a new opportunity. The bad thing, unemployment was turned into a good thing. The chance to. To build an enterprise and to build a more solid, secure future as a cooperative enterprise. It's one of the reasons that Italy has more co ops than any other European country. No secret, no mystery, it's because of a law set up this way. It ended up costing the government no more money than they would have spread out over many months of weekly checks. But instead they created a core of people building, very successful, in many cases, industry. Did all of these co ops succeed? Of course not. Did they have a whole bunch of them that didn't make it through the economic hard times? Absolutely. They're not immune. They're part of the larger capitalist system. And when it suffers the kind of meltdown it's had since 2008, little co ops are caught up in that too. But in general, it is a wonderful second option to give unemployed people. They do it in Italy, they've been doing it now for 30 years, as a real track record. It is shameful that in the United States, no discussion of this option and what it might mean for the millions of Americans that are now Unemployed. That's something we should be concerned about. The second thing not being discussed, which I find stunning, is the United States own history. Back in the 1930s, the last time, we had long, deep unemployment, even worse than what we've had the last seven years. But in the same family of unemployment troubles, we had a public employment program. That's right. The government created and filled somewhere around 15 million jobs. 15 million people who weren't unemployed because they got a government job, they got a government paycheck. They therefore didn't lose their home, they didn't have their children suffer from all the consequences of having no job and having little or no support. It made the difference of a lifetime to millions of our fellow citizens. But I wanted to mention what a couple of the programs were because it really defies understanding that we as a nation seem to have a kind of collective amnesia. One of the most popular programs was the wpa. And one of the things it did was to speak to unemployed artists, or in fact, all Americans who had some artistic ability. A singer, a. An actor, a painter, a sculptor, a musician, whatever. And these people were told, come, the government will hire you, pay you a decent salary, and create a troupe of singers, of actors, of opera buffs, of skilled sculptors, of wood. And we'll move you around the country so that you can bring your cultural, your artistic capability to the cities and towns across America that. That don't have that kind of cultural and artistic opportunity and program. You can teach the children, you can teach the adults. You can show what this kind of cultural life is. And they went all around the country, and people around the country got a taste of culture that transformed their lives, that gave their children a sense of an artistic capability, that gave them a new direction. It was a spectacularly successful program for the unemployed and for all the rest of us in that way. It was like other unemployed workers programs in the 1930s, like the programs that gave people jobs building the national parks, particularly in the western part of the United States, parks that millions of Americans have enjoyed and visited and hiked through in the decades since. What a powerful, lasting monument to what creative programs during unemployment can be. We've done since 2008. Exactly none of that. It's not just that we haven't done it, that's bad enough. But worse is that we haven't discussed it, we haven't made it part of our debates, Our presidential candidates have not made or been able to make a major case for this sort of thing. And by the way, for those of you that wonder how Was the government able to pay the salaries and the costs of employing 15 million unemployed? And the answer, again, as I have mentioned it before, is we taxed corporations and the rich. That's what we did. That's not some idea of what we might do. That that's what we did. And Republicans and Democrats voted for that because it was an intelligent way to make those most able to pay contribute to getting us out of the suffering of a Great Depression, that those most able to pay had the most to do with bringing to the United States. It was a fair way in the minds of Republicans and Democrats back then to deal with our problems. The money was there, it was taken from those who had the most to give. And it was used to make unemployment an opportunity to move this society forward. In fundamental ways that we don't even discuss it now, like we don't discuss Italy's experience with the Marcora law. Are fundamental failures of a political system so beholden to profit making capitalist enterprises that it expunges from public awareness, kills the public debate about things from which we as a society could, should and would benefit enormously. It is something to think about the next time you watch or hear a debate in which all kinds of things that don't deserve it are given a lot of attention, whereas these sorts of issues which do deserve it are swept under the proverbial rug. Okay, let me conclude by inviting you, as I often do, to partner with us not only in making this program available to others, but sharing it in any way that you know how, urging others to tune in, to listen to a podcast version of it, and so on. We need your partnership to spread the word, to bring the value of this program, such as it is, to as many people as possible through social media, through all the mechanisms available to us. Now, please take my invitation to become a partner in this program, make use of our websites and let other people know about that as well. Rdwolf with two Fs.com and democracyatwork.info both of those websites allow you to follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Both of those websites allow you with the click of your computer keyboard to get our free newsletter, which will keep you informed of all kinds of things that we do. We ask you also if you are connected in any way to a local radio station that might carry this program, Let us know by means of the websites so that we can and we will follow up so that you can hear us locally on your radio station. We are terribly proud of the 50 stations that now carry us and and we want to become 100 as soon as we can. And finally, a reminder, we have a partnership now with a group of lawyers and accountants and finance specialists. If you are involved in or know of an existing business that is interested in converting over into a democratic workers self directed enterprise wants to become a worker co op. We are not only interested in providing the information and the ideas about why this isn't a good move to make, but we now have the technical expertise to help you do that and to do it in financially advantageous ways in order to access this service. Just let us know that you're interested a little bit about your situation and we will gladly connect you to to this firm of specialists. They've been doing it for 25 years. It's a way to move forward in the transition away from a capitalist economic system that for most of us isn't working anymore. And it's long past time that we face it and begin to move beyond a system that is no longer adequate. Thank you very much for your attention. I really appreciate having this opportunity to speak with you each week and I look forward to doing it again next week. Your time now babe but after a while gonna be my time My time babe they ain't gonna change, change. Things on the change. Sam.