← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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Sam. Welcome, friends, to a new welcome to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, our jobs, our incomes, our debts, those of our children and those looming down the road. This is a program that looks at these questions in a way that you will not normally find in the mainstream media aspects, angles of approach, interpretations that are different and therefore make this program, we hope, especially interesting and worthwhile. I'm your host, Richard Wolff, professor of economics all my adult life and currently teaching at the New School University in New York City. Before jumping into the updates for this week, I wanted to again welcome the audience that comes to us through Free Speech TV. We are now part of the Free Speech TV family, coming to you Sunday evenings at 7pm Eastern Time and the corresponding hours in Central, Mountain and Pacific times as well. We hope soon to be on a regular 8pm Sunday schedule, but for the current time, 7pm Sunday is our time. And we welcome all of you that want to see this program as a television program through Free Speech tv. Okay, let's jump right into the economic updates for this week. In March 2017, I really can't resist talking about the dilemma that befell Francois Fillon, F I l l o n a leader of the Conservative Party, the Gaulist Conservative Party in France, who made a career for himself explaining that the social model of France, in which all kinds of services are provided to people, taxes charged, but a kind of notion that public health insurance is like a right that everybody has, that people should get five weeks of paid vacation the minute they enter working life as part of what it means to be a healthy working person and citizen of France, to employ people, to maintain public services. All of that was broken. According to Mr. Fillon. One had to be careful. One had to budget wisely. There would have to be cuts in public employment and cuts and cuts, the kinds of things that people should call as they once did, austerity programs. One had to be very careful with the public money. Mr. Fillon has now been charged by the French police with stealing the public money on a pretty massive scale. Four years paying his wife, paying his children for what we in the United States call no show jobs, accepting gifts from wealthy supporters. Yeah, the austerity so often preached by the leaders in Europe, Mr. Fillon, is in no way unique. Usually, I would say, goes along with an exemption for themselves, for the corporations they serve, for the interests they protect. It's austerity for others as the necessary thing for our times. The fall of Mr. Fillon, who had the bad luck of getting caught in this game makes one wonder about other leaders around the world likewise preaching cuts in public employment, cuts in public services, the need to be careful with the government's spending to ask for whom is this austerity intended and who will be exempt from it? Well, we can partly answer the question with the case of Puerto Rico. The commission appointed by Congress, which oversees the sad conditions of Puerto Rico, has reached an agreement with the government of Puerto Rico. Agreement being that the government doesn't have much else that it can do but go along, it requires that government to come up with $800 million towards paying off its debt. It won't pay off the debt, won't even come close. But it will be an enormous burden on Puerto Rico, which is an interesting thing to do for what is already the poorest part of of the United States, what is already an island that has seen 100,000 of its few million citizens leave over the last decade because there's no work, there's no hope. You're now going to make this disaster come up with $800 million a year out of the taxes its people are going to have to pay beyond what they do out of the cuts in public services, so the money that is saved thereby can be sent to a bank in New York. You're going to squeeze dry. You're going to impose austerity on a savaged Puerto Rico. What society behaves like this? And let's remember the message and how it happened for decades. Corrupt. And there's no other word for it. The case of Puerto Rico is stunning. For decades, the leaders of Puerto Rico pretended they had the country's interests at heart, pretended they could do all kinds of things for their crony capitalist supporters and even for the general public. How could they do it without taxing people to death? The answer was they found another way. Sure, they taxed the Puerto Rican people, but that's not how they provided the goodies to themselves, the goodies to the companies, and even a few to the mass of the people. They did that by entering into cozy loan agreements with bankers in the continent of the United States. That's right. Good deals that made the banks a bundle of money that created bonds that the banks could then sell off to investors, some of whom are now going to take a loss because they believed in this system, sort of like the people of Puerto Rico did. They got taken by a cabal of politicians and bankers who made off like bandits, leaving this island with $72 billion of debts that now the mass of people have to Suffer to pay off the politicians who feathered their nests. Long go the bankers who made a bundle. No longer worried about much of this. They've sold off those debts, they've sold off those bonds. The people of Puerto Rico are left and therein lies the tragedy of all of this. And it's not so different from what happens elsewhere. It's happening in Illinois, it's happening in many American states where debts are coming due that were entered into by politicians and bankers and Wall street financiers, all of whom got themselves well paid, well advantaged. That's why these loans were made. And who carries it at the end when the loans become unbearable? Too much of a good thing for the few becomes a burden on the many. You know, all over the world, particularly in Europe, there are movements that claim these debts are illegitimate, that the mass of people have no obligation to honor. Debts that were entered into by politicians seeking their own best interests, by bankers teaching the politicians how to cut a clever deal that would be a change in the system. If the mass of people said, no, no, no, no, no, game over. You're not going to put on us the cost of deals you struck that we were never informed of, never understood, never had a chance to be explained, none of it. But we pretend otherwise. We pretend that this was all some kind of democratically arrived at arrangement. Now that we want the mass of people to pay, it's very important to pretend that they were informed, that they knew, that they understood what the bankers and the politicians did. But most people will not be fooled, especially as the bite on the average person gets worse. This last week, or actually March 10th to be exact, also set an interesting precedent that is so interesting that my guess is you don't know much about it. And so I can bring it to your attention. And that's what one of the services we like to do on this program, this has to do with a judge in Los Angeles who decided that two famous food companies, Nestle, the maker of what is perhaps best known as cocoa and chocolate products, and Cargill, these are two monster corporations, major players in the world of megacorps in the food business. And they had gotten themselves into trouble because it turns out that in Mali, the country Mali and Ivory coast, the countries from which most of the cocoa comes, that goes into the chocolate that we eat and that Nestle and Cargill process, it turns out that many of the people working in the cocoa fields are children. It turns out many of them are slaves. That's right, children bought and sold in or between Mali and the Ivory coast in Africa. So to your wonderment, is there still slavery in Africa? The answer is an unqualified absolutely yes. More than 1 million children, just as background, some as young as 5, pick cocoa pods and then crack them open in the Ivory coast and perform other manual labor under sometimes hazardous conditions. This is the restrained language of the Bloomberg Financial News Service. No radical sheet here screaming about a crime. This is very okay language. Six of them found a lawyer, that's six child slaves. And they told the following story. They were taken to the Ivory coast from Mali. They were sold to plantations in the 1990s. They worked 14 hours a day under armed guard without pay, six days a week. They slept on floors of locked rooms, were given only food scraps. Those caught trying to escape were severely beaten, et cetera, etc. If this sounds familiar, it is. These are the stories of slavery that one has heard if one has not been asleep. Only it happens now. And so a few of these ex slaves got a lawyer and brought suit in the United States claiming that Nestle's and Cargill knowingly did business with provided funding for the local authorities who were running this slave labor operation. These companies were stung, both of them, Nestle's and Cargill, recently, and that is in recent years, the set up offices to monitor and to be concerned about corporate responsibility. And they were proud and advertised their corporate responsibility programs anyway. They insisted that they had nothing to do with it, that they shouldn't be brought up with this. This was not their responsibility. They didn't buy or sell these slaves. The usual. The corporation's defense persuaded the judge. So why am I telling you about this sad outcome in which these abused children were unable to find justice in an American court? The reason is, I want you to understand the logic of the judge and of the victorious corporate lawyers. They wanted the judge to rule the way he did, they argued, because if he didn't, then it would mean that corporations would have no reason to set up corporate reasons responsibility offices because it wouldn't work. It wouldn't protect them from such lawsuits. I found this amazing. The corporate responsibility program clearly didn't prevent these companies from engaging in business with people doing slave labor, about which these companies of course had to know didn't work these corporate responsibility programs very well, did they? So if the court found against these companies and they stopped doing it, what difference would it make? Extraordinary. The way legal reasoning sometimes works. Extraordinary. What is going on in the United States in our court system and the way we earn the money we believe we need As a society. Let me continue. Economic updates the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a very important research institution in Britain, issued reports these last couple of weeks indicating that poverty and inequality in England are going to get worse over the next several years. Worse compared to what they were thought to be years ago, where they would bearound the time of 2020, bad even in relationship to their situation now. These forecasts based on where the economy is now going indicate, for example, that 400,000 pensioners and over 1 million more children are likely to fall into poverty over the three to four years. The benefit cuts that the Conservative government has scheduled will plunge even more in. There may be the worst inequality in Britain in over 70 years with the Brexit vote, the departure of England from the European Community making all of this worse. As in the United States, growing inequality in Britain is a social explosive. It produces anger, tension, bitterness, envy, resentment. It is a very dangerous path upon which a country embarks. The British keep track of of the records, the numbers to show it. There is no excuse for inaction, and yet the Conservative government in England represents that inaction on that problem. Next update. A doozy. The Girl Guides of Canada, Canada's largest organization for girls and women, something on the order of the Girl Scouts, have decided that they're no longer going to organize, plan or operate trips to their neighboring United States, of which there used to be many. And they have clearly indicated why they will not subject particularly young women, girls and young women to the risk at the border with the United States. That brown girls and women, Muslim girls and women, girls and women who come from families that come from countries the United States has put on some list will be turned away, will be detained, will be abusively treated. There have been a whole raft of such examples very widely reported, particularly in the Canadian press, in recent weeks. Enough so that the Girl Guides of Canada have said, that's it. We're not going to a country that treats us this way. We will not subject our people to such experience. We're not going to turn away three girls out of a troop of 20 because it is traumatic for the three. It is traumatic for the remaining 17. It is an indignity and an injustice we will not tolerate. Now multiply this by the thousands of of Canadian groups that will not come to the United States. They won't buy food here or travel in this country or stay overnight or do camping or any of the other things they might have done and multiply them by the other countries that are reaching the same conclusion. Market Watch at the beginning of March had a story in which tourists are not coming to the United States the way they did. They don't want to risk any of these experiences that they read about in the papers. Beware United States. I say, as an economist, have you considered the economic results of undermining your own tourist industry, one of the most successful industries bringing spending in into the United States economy? When foreigners come here to visit to sea, you are making it harder and harder for that to happen and you may well be shooting yourself in the proverbial foot. Have you thought of that? Is that perhaps another reason beside all the others to rethink a policy of such rampant discrimination carried out in the name of national defense? We've come to the end of the first half of Economic Update for this week. Please stay with me after a short break when we will do some important analysis of some major issues here in the United States and in the world economy. Stay with us. We'll be right back. She's impatient cause she wants an hour so it show. Ah, can't be bothered by the ties that bind her. She's looking through the wrong. She's looking through the wrong. She's looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Turn it around. Turn around. Welcome back to the second half of this edition of Economic Update. I'm your host Richard Wolff. And in the second half, we don't do the short kinds of updates we did in the first. We tend to either have an interview or to deal with some major topics in a more extended way. Okay, let's turn then to the major crises and the major issues for today. Well, the Economic Policy Institute in Washington is a very interesting, very well done source of analysis of the American economy. Every year around this time they issue a report called the State of American World Wages. And they've just issued their report dated March 9th of 2017 that covers the state of American wages in 2016. It is a fairly long report, about 25 pages. But for those of you that might be interested in a detailed analysis of what's happening to wages in this country, to the different groups of our people and how they're doing terms of wages, if you really want the basic factual information so that you can make your own interpretation and that you can evaluate the sometimes bizarre statements that are made by people who don't have access to or don't make use of the actual data, then this is the report for you. I am only going to make some comments on a few of them of what I found to be stunning summaries of the reality of our situation. So let's begin with some of the more remarkable we know, and I have done this on this program now more times than I can remember, that the gap between the 1% and the 99% has grown over the last 40 years and has not stopped since the crash of 2008. Inequality, which was partly the cause of that crash, has not been reversed. It has in fact continued and if anything accelerated. So we know that what this report shows us is that for the mass of working people, the 1% are folks who don't live so much off of their wage income, their salary income, which is usually modest. I mean, not modest for most of us, but modest for them. The big bulk of their income comes from the property they own, the shares of stock, the positions at the top of a corporation, their land and other assets they have. But what this EPI Economic Policy Institute report shows us, and let me acknowledge that the author is Elise Gould. She does great work. I make use of it all the time. It's a pleasure to acknowledge her as the author of the State of American Wages 2016. What she shows in her work is precisely that among working people, inequality has also grown. In other words, it's not just inequality worsening between the 1% and and the 99%. But to make it simple, among the 99%, the inequality is also getting worse. Wage growth was consistently higher, she shows, for higher wage workers compared to those in the middle and at the bottom. Inequality worse among men than among women wage earners. Goodness. Inequality worse among African American as opposed to white workers. Listen to this statistic from her. The black white wage gap is larger today than in the year 2000. That is over the last 16 years. Even with, and despite an African American becoming President of the United States, the gap between white and black wages is worse today than it was 16 years ago. What is going on? It is a society that is built into inequality. It is a society we live in whose nature has changed. Having exported an enormous number of well paying jobs out of the country, having robots replaced expensive workers in jobs inside the country, having brought in undocumented immigrants to replace labor inside the society, you have changed the dynamic of this working class. You have made the employers of the United States as much or more interested in in labor conditions in other countries where they are becoming more and more dependent for their profits than they are on conditions here. And everything shows this result of globalization. These statistics are stunning. Listen to this one. The bottom 50% of workers who have a college degree. I stress this because some folks seem to believe that a college degree is some sort of ticket out of what's going on in this economy. It isn't, but let me Continue. The bottom 50% of workers with a college degree still have lower wages than they did in 2000. That's right. Like African American white wage gap. It's worse today. Half of the people with a college degree are worse off today than they were 16 years ago. In the United States, the rising inequality of the 1% versus the 99% is being matched dollar by dollar in this way. It is a kind of catastrophe going on in this society in which inequality gets worse and worse as we move forward. Let me turn next to another major discussion, as we do in this second half of the program, and here I'm responding to comments that many of you have sent in over the last few weeks and months around a basic topic, and that is the relationship between capitalism as an economic system and how we govern ourselves, our politics, the way we relate to the government as citizens. Some of you have posed this question as Is capitalism the same thing as democracy? Or do capitalism and democracy go together, one guaranteeing the other, or at least one producing the other? Do they go together? Are they necessarily partners? And in any case, what's the relationship between the way we organize our economy on the one hand and the way we organize our political life on the other? So let me try to frame a response. First of all, yes, it's possible that a capitalist economic system can go together with a political democracy. Here's what that might mean. We allow the business community to be a minority of people who are employers and the majority of people to be employees. We allow the employers and employees to work together in privately owned and operated enterprises that relate to one another through a market buying and selling. In other words, what we conventionally call a capitalist economic system coexisting with a democratic political system. And by that we typically mean one in which political leaders, presidents, parliamentarians, congresspersons, senators, representatives, mayors, governors, all of that are elected in a regular way, basically on a one person, one vote basis. If that's what you mean by the question can a capitalist system coexist with democracy, then the answer is yes, it can. There have been periods of time in the history of many countries, including the United States, when that was a rough description of what was going on. But if you mean that they must necessarily go together, then clearly that's not the case. For example, in many countries of the world today, you have a capitalist economic system in the sense I just defined. But you do not have a democracy. Everybody doesn't vote, either by law or by fact. Major decisions are made by leaders who are not elected, who are part of a kingdom, a royalty system, who get their positions because they have some relationship to a ruling family or a ruling clan, etc, etc. I won't mention country names, but I'm sure you understand the examples without me doing that. For many years, the Union of South Africa basically excluded the majority of black African citizens from any real democratic participation. But it was a private capitalist economy. But you wouldn't want to call it democratic. Most people didn't. So do you need to have democracy for capitalism or vice versa? And the answer is not at all. Not at all. Well, let's go a little further. Democracy. Let's look at that for a minute. If you mean by democracy just the political system, then you have already in a way, compromised the conversation. This is a very important point. Democracy is a basic idea. And the idea is if you are affected by a decision, if a decision changes your life, then you have a right democracy of firms to participate in making that decision. The absence of democracy is when you have to live with decisions over which you have no influence. The reason we have elections to vote on political leaders like a mayor or a governor or a senator, is the idea that since they make decisions as mayor, governor, etc. That affect us in countless ways, we must have some kind of control over them. Democracy means you have some control. In fact, it means that the people have the ultimate dominant control over the political system, over the leaders. The people can, in a democratic system, change leaders if they are dissatisfied with what those leaders are doing. That's the idea. Well, if that's what you understand by democracy, then there is no particularly logical or necessary or philosophical reason why the principle of democracy having power over those who make decisions that affect your life, should not also apply where you work inside the enterprise, where you work the store, the office, the factory. Do we have democracy inside capitalist enterprises? And here the answer is an unqualified no, we do not. In the vast majority of enterprises, the mass of people called employees do not have the ultimate authority over the employer. They do not vote on a regular basis as to whether or not they approve of what the employer is doing, or to say the same thing as simply as I know how democracy, particularly in places like Western Europe, North America, and so on, has been very limited in its application. It's been limited to the residences where we live, to the political side of our lives. It has been excluded systematically and almost 100% from the economic aspects of our lives, particularly where we work. And that's interesting, isn't it? Because where we work 5 out of 7 days for most of us, the best hours of those days for most of us, if you count the eight hours we typically work with another hour or two for transportation, and then another hour or two to get ready, dressed and all the rest for work. It's the bulk of our lives as adults that is spent in a place from which democracy is excluded. So to say that capitalism is either the same as democracy, or that capitalism and democracy go together simply won't do. That isn't accurate. That isn't acceptable. But the story can be extended. Let's take the socialist economies that have existed over the last century. The kind in Scandinavia, Sweden and so on. The kind in the Soviet Union up until 1989, in China to this day in Cuba, in Vietnam and those places. What have we got there? Well, here's sort of interesting. We have democracy. Well, that's argued whether they really have it in their political system or not. And it's kind of arguable whether they had it in their economic system. Did the workers in a typical Soviet factory have democratic power over the leaders at the workplace? Doesn't look like it, do they? In Sweden today, it doesn't look like it either. Do they have a capitalist structure in which a relatively small number of leaders make all the key decisions without the mass of people having power over them? Yeah, they do that in private corporations in the west, and they do it in Soviet factories and Chinese factories pretty much also there. It's public officials in those socialist countries often who make the decisions. But it's still a minority. And the people over whom they rule do not rule over them, neither by a regular election nor any other means. In Scandinavia, they allow private capitalist enterprises, as they now do more and more in China and in other socialist countries. So even more like the West. Wow. Democracy limited to the political sphere, or maybe not even there. Where did the confusion then arise that looks at capitalism and democracy as if they were synonyms, or as if they kind of were twins, or as if they were partners that always go together, reinforce each other and all the rest? I think the answer there lies in a little bit of history where so often the answer to our questions lies. Where did capitalism come from in the West? It started in the 17th, 18th century in what we now call England. And from there it spread to Western Europe, to North America, to Japan, and is now global. And capitalism didn't come out of nothing. It Came out of another feudalism, a system that didn't have employers and employees, didn't have wages and wage earners. It had lords and serfs. People were born into the one or the other class of people. If you were a serf, you worked on a little piece of land that was assigned to you. You didn't own it, it was assigned to you by the lord, who was the lord of the area where your parents lived, who produced you. And because your parents were serfs, the of that lord, so were you. Very different system. You worked part of the time on your own assigned piece of land and part of the time on the land assigned to the lord. What you produced when you worked on your own land, you kept. And that was how you lived. And what was produced while you worked on the land of the lord he got, and that was what he lived off of. Since there were lots of you doing work on his land and just you doing work on your own, maybe you and your wife or husband or family, you didn't have much and he had a lot, which is why they lived in chateaux and the serfs lived in huts. Capitalism arose out of feudalism. But feudalism at the end of the medieval period, 15th, 16th, 17th century, when capitalism emerged, feudalism had organized itself by then into kingdoms, monarchies, in which a king, particular family ruled a society. And when the king died, his son ruled, and when he died, his son ruled. There was no democracy or anything like was a monarchy. A tiny number of people literally made the decisions. Everybody else was just a subject. Well, the revolution out of which capitalism rejected feudalism in the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Revolutions of 1848, the great struggles that overthrew feudalism were carried out by people who believed then that capitalism emerging from feudalism was married to, tied to, was kind of the same as democracy out of monarchy. Just as capitalism would displace feudalism, universal suffrage would displace monarchy. That's why in the French Revolution, it was liberty, equality, fraternity. That's why the French Revolution built up the notion of a parliament. That's why in the American Revolution, we wanted to get rid of the king as well as allow private enterprises here in the United States to function in what we would now call a capitalist way. Yes, the origin of capitalism was woven together with the transition from monarchy to democracy. The problem is that this marriage quickly dissolved once feudalism was gone, once capitalism had replaced it. Once the basic way we organized production was no longer lord and serf, but had become instead employer and employee. The need for democracy Became, how shall I say, problematic, difficult. How in good name could a capitalist be enthusiastic about democracy? Because, of course, if that principle were upheld, how could he stay in control of his employees? He didn't want any democracy inside the enterprise. He wanted to keep his position unthreatened by control from below. So democracy became something which you allowed in the political sphere to the extent you had to, but not in your own backyard, not inside the enterprise. That's why capitalists have a so so relationship with democracy. Oh, sure, lip Service on the 4th of July, on Bastille Day. Sure, the old ideas are wonderful. You celebrate them a little bit like some folks go to church on Sunday to celebrate behavior and attitudes. You never see them show any other time of the week. But the reality is that capitalists don't allow democracy inside the enterprise and are rather indifferent to how real it is outside. And how do we know? Well, let's take the United States, although I could pick another country too. Over the last century, do we see capitalists buying political leaders all the time? We see it now, perhaps more than ever now. The biggest political leaders usually are major capitalists. They don't have to be bought by them, they are them. Saves a little extra money, maybe. The relationship between capitalism and democracy has therefore always been ambivalent, ambiguous, and in terms of what goes on inside the enterprise, downright hostile. So, no, there's no necessity that capitalism brings democracy. That was a slogan at the time of capitalism's birth, maybe even in its youth. But as it matured, its interest in its support for and its commitment to democracy got weaker and weaker, so that by now it's too faint to be appreciable, to be even visible, even on holidays. In the little time I have left in today's program, I want to begin talking about something many of you have asked me to talk about. And that has to do with the difference in how a capitalist enterprise, one with employers and employees, would work or does work. And how a democratized workplace works would work. That follows from what we've just been discussing. What would it look like? How would it work? What difference would it make if the workers in an enterprise collectively and democratically ran it? Even if they had officers or leaders, if these were accountable to democratic voting, if these had to answer to the workers in the enterprise in a direct and ongoing way, what would democracy in the enterprise, democracy at work? What would it mean? Well, let's begin and we'll continue next week. What about distributing the profits? There's one that can be nicely shown in A capitalist enterprise, typically owned, if it's a corporation, by shareholders. And if you know how a corporation is organized, the shareholders are usually highly concentrated. Roughly 1% of shareholders own 3/4 of the shares in this society of the United States and it typical everywhere else, in other words, a tiny group of people. The shareholders pick the board of directors. They vote on that, and you get as many votes as you have shares. So if you own a million shares, you get a million votes. If you own 10 shares, you get 10 votes. So the people who decide who the board of directors is are the major shareholders. The board of directors, typically 15, 20 people of a modern capitalist corporation. They make all the key decisions. What to produce, how to produce, where to produce. And the one I want to talk with you about today, what to do with the profits. Let's talk about it. The board of directors selected by the major shareholders. Major shareholders, usually 10 or 15 in a big company. Board of directors, 10 or 15 people. We're not talking about large groups, friends. This kingdom inside the enterprise, this board of directors and major shareholders, they make all the decisions. They decide what to do with the profits. And it should come as no big surprise to you that the two things they do that they like the most with most of the profits is give it to themselves and build this enterprise to become bigger. This latter thing we call investment and the giving to themselves, that's the super high salaries for the top executives. That's the dividends paid to the shareholders. All of that. That's why we get inequality in a society, because we allow a tiny group of people to decide what to do with the profits. How would it be different in a democratic enterprise? Well, bear with me for a moment. Who produces the profits in an enterprise? The answer is everybody does his part. The secretary does, the machinist does, the street sweeper who cleans up in front of the factory, does the records keeper, the clerk. You get it? Everybody does their share. And one of the ways we know that is at the annual Christmas party, the CEO gets up and thanks everybody for doing their part to make it a good year. A year in which profits were earned. So in a democratic enterprise, since everybody contributed, everybody would have a vote. It would be one person, one vote to decide what to do with the profits that they all together helped to produce. And guess what, friends? If everybody together decided on the distribution of profits, they wouldn't give a tiny group of people at the top an enormous income, while everybody else has difficulty getting along from day to day. Or to say the same thing in formal language to democratize the enterprise would be the single greatest contribution to overcoming inequality that I can think of in a modern economy. Going from a capitalist enterprise to a worker co, op, a democratized enterprise is a step in direction of that very equality or egalite that the American and French revolutions put on their banners but in the ensuing dominance of capitalism forgotten. To realize the goals of the American and French Revolution, democracy, equality and so on actually requires going beyond capitalism to a democratized workplace. And it stands by itself as one of the major arguments to consider the virtues of going beyond capitalism to a worker co op based society. We're going to continue next week to look at some of the other comparisons to see what the other arguments are to make a move in that direction. The discussion of governance, democracy is always dangerous because where it leads is to a confrontation with the capitalism that lost interest in the reality of democracy that kept only the forms of it. So that when you look for the reality, you discover that capitalism is not the way to get there, but is the obstacle standing in the way. We've come to the end of the time we have for today's program. This is Richard Wolff, your host, thanking you for staying with us through this edition of Economic Update. I want to thank Free Speech TV, a new partner, and truthout.org, that independent source of news and analysis that has been a partner with us for a long time. But mostly I want to thank you and ask you to consider being a partner. Share what you've learned on this program. Share what you find on our websites, particularly democracyatwork.info it's available to you. It's there so that we can be partners in getting the word out about thinking in new and different ways about the economy. I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Gonna be my time, my time baby they ain't gonna change Change, change, change, change, change, change Thing gonna change. Yep, it is it, Sam.