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One of these days I ain't gonna change One of these days welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the income, the jobs, the spending, the debts, all the economic dimensions of our lives. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life. I now teach at the New School University in New York City. Later in the program, we'll tell you about the websites and other supporting materials that you have access to if this program interests you. But for now, let's jump right in to what's been recently happening in and around our economic system and in our economic dimensions of our lives, and talk about some important items. The first thing I want to talk about briefly is the upcoming May 7 election in the United Kingdom, and I want to talk about what's happening there in the light of what has already happened in places like Greece and Spain. To quickly remind you, for many, many decades, in Greece and Spain, as in England, as in Great Britain, as in the United Kingdom, two parties dominated the electoral field. It was a cozy relationship in England between the United Kingdom, between the Conservatives and the Labour Party, as in Greece, for example, between the New Democracy and the Greek Socialist Party, and so on. People voted for the two traditional parties. They didn't have much incentive, apparently, to break from those parties. They didn't get angry at those parties, they didn't get disgusted at those parties. But. But that's all changed in the light of the economic crisis since 2007 and 08, as in fact, the condition of most people has continued to deteriorate. Despite all the silly talk about recovery. The reality is that people are angry and increasingly recognize that the traditional parties are part of the problem and not the solution, that those parties are in bed with the very businesses, banks and others that brought the crisis, that they clearly were the ones who bailed out the very people who brought the crisis, leaving the mass of people in the lurch. And the mass of people is beginning to repay the kindness. In Greece, for example, the two major parties that regularly got more than two thirds of the vote together can no longer get even a third of the vote in Spain, the new left wing equivalent there of what Syriza is in Greece is threatening to run away with the next election. So is the disaffection of the mass of the Spanish people with the traditional parties. And in the upcoming May 7 election, we're watching the same thing play out in the United Kingdom. The cozy control of the government there passed between Conservatives and Labour Party alternatives from time to Time is breaking down. Polls suggest that the two parties will get fewer votes together on the 7th of May than they have in a long time. People are looking for alternatives. They don't see the Conservatives, the current government of Mr. Cameron, or the labor opposition of Mr. Miliband as offering any basic change from business as usual, which for the mass of the British people is, is way below what's acceptable. So where are they going? Well, they're going to the right and to the left. Typically we see both things in Great Britain. It takes an unusual form because Great Britain is a combination of different subsocieties, let's call them. So we see an enormous interest in the Independence Party, the Scottish National Party, which is expected to do very, very well following up on the extraordinarily good vote they got just a few months ago. People are having more faith that maybe they can get something in the way of change from the Scottish National Party that they can't expect or get from the two traditional parties. To the right, the United Kingdom Independence Party, Ukip is drawing, particularly from the Conservative side, people who are wanting to break from Europe, people who are hostile to immigrants. A typical right wing move when times begin to disintegrate. But I also want to mention, let people know that there's also a growing interest in the Green Party, because that's yet another alternative. And in the Independence Party for Wales, what's beginning to suggest itself is that people are willing to see the breakup of the United Kingdom. That's how upset they are with the traditional parties, the traditional business as usual. How ironic then, that over the last week, the Finance Minister in Germany, Wolfgang Schauble, was giving advice to the British people on how they should support David Cameron, the Conservative, because he has provided jobs. This is the same sort of silly idiocy that we see here in the United States a great deal of the time when there's very little to point to, when an economic system is hurting most people, it becomes desperate time for the justifiers, for the apologists, for the PR folks, for keeping things from changing. So here's what they can point. There's an uptick in the number of jobs people are getting. This is a nice way of deflecting attention from the fact the following facts about those jobs. A they have much less security than they did five and six years ago before this crisis hit. They have many fewer benefits than they used to have before this crisis hit. That the actual wage, when you calculated the real wage, what they can actually buy with the money they get is less than what it was six and seven years ago. In other words, the austerity program of cutting back has hurt the mass of people, has hurt them badly, and that's what they're showing by thumbing their nose at the traditional parties. It started in Greece, it spread to Spain. It's now clearly evident in the United Kingdom. Where next can we expect this to happen? Well, wherever. Business as usual is the name of the game. And that's everywhere in Europe and that's in North America and that's in Japan and so on and so on. Next update. This comes from a very good research group, the CBPP center for Budget and Policy Priorities, cbpp.org They did a very good report on the 14th of April talking about the 50 states in the United States and taking a look at their budgetary situation. And here's what they teach us. 2015 the states, the 50 states of the United States are just barely back getting the kind of revenue from their citizens that they got back in 2007, the last year before the crisis really hit. And that means the last seven or eight years have been a historic lost, nearly a lost decade, a decade during which billions of dollars needed by the states to provide services for their people went missing. And what the states did in those seven or eight years is a long lasting disaster for the United States. I'm just going to give you a couple of indices so that no one takes the headline states get their revenue back to where it was before the crisis, as if somehow we have escaped from this crisis, as if somehow we no longer suffer from this crisis. So here's a couple of facts. One, over the last seven or eight years that the states were pinched, the number of young people entering the elementary and secondary school system, the public schools in our 50 states went up by 485,000 children. That's right, 485,000 more people are in the public schools than were before the crisis hit. However, Today there are 288,000 fewer teachers and other school personnel in the schools, elementary and secondary in the 50 states. Roughly half a million more children being served by 300,000 fewer teaching personnel. Wow. You know what the impact of that is? Poorer education. And you know how long that impact lasts. All the lives of the affected children, this little crisis of seven or eight years is going to impact us for the rest of our lives. Didn't have to be that way. Decisions could have gone otherwise. You could have gone and taxed corporations and the rich, the ones who brought the crisis, the ones with the money to pay for doing something about the damage. But you didn't, did you? I'm talking to the 50 governors and the 50 legislatures of the 50 states. No, no. They allowed a half a million more children into the schools at the same time that they cut 300,000 personnel to work. And I want to single out six states. Six states went even further. These are the six states that cut public education funding the most and at the same time lowered the taxes on corporations and or their richest citizens. I want to mention those six because they are the leaders in this dubious fraternity. The worst performer, Oklahoma. And then come Arizona, Idaho, Wisconsin, Kansas, North Carolina. And not to mention it, even though it's number seven, Alaska. Wow. Leading the way in the long term damage of an economic crisis made worse by the failure of political leadership to do much other than to make matters worse. Wouldn't be surprising here, would it? If we as a people turned away from the Republicans and Democrats the way our fellow citizens in Greece, Spain and now the United Kingdom are turning away from their traditional political misleaders. While we're on Kansas, let me mention something to you. In the last program I talked about Missouri, Missouri, which was about to pass a law when we spoke that said that people on public assistance could not use the money they got to buy cookies. That is, the legislators of Missouri decided to demonize poor people, to deprive poor people of the right to buy what they see fit. The rights that the rest of us have to punish them, to make them appear to be people who fritter away the money that the state gives them on things they shouldn't who have to be treated like children rather than the adults that they are. Well, Kansas went them one better. Kansas and its governor Brownback passed legislation this last week that really demonizes the poor. It keeps saying in this legislation that they're not allowed to go to the racetrack, they're not allowed to buy alcohol, they're not allowed to use their public assistance to view, quote, unquote adult entertainment. It's telling the people who are on public assistance how to live their lives. It's portraying them as sub human. They're not like the rest of us. They have to be controlled. They can't be allowed to buy cookies in Missouri or go to the racetrack in Kansas. The law even specifies they cannot use the money to take a cruise. That's right in the minds of the people of Kansas, who are about as far away from any water to take a cruise on as is imaginable. They think that the cruise ships of the world are Just filled with people getting food stamps the rest of the time in their lives. What's going on here? Well, Mr. Brownback, the governor tells us he doesn't really mean to punish the poor. He says. He says it's just better that they have jobs than that they get a handout. Well, for the education of Mr. Brownback, likely a hopeless quest, but let's try. The majority of people getting public assistance already have jobs, Governor Brownback. It's just that the jobs they have pay so poorly because their employers take advantage of the opportunity to that unemployed people present to pay them badly. That's why they're on public assistance. So don't tell them you would rather have them have a job. They already do. And for the minority that don't have a job, what have you done, Governor Brownback, to provide jobs? The answer? Nothing. Here's a way to provide jobs. Have the state hire people to do all the things that the state needs that the private sector isn't doing right now. Good programs for the elderly, good preschool programs, good daycare programs that would free up young parents to have jobs and so on and so on. You haven't done those things. You've cut back on most things. Kansas is among the six states I just mentioned who cut back on education. You want to do something for the long term job prospects of people, give them a good education. You are a hypocrite, Governor Brownback, and you know it. You're pandering to people who want their taxes reduced because they're in trouble. And you're doing it by making the lives of those even less fortunate than the average working person as miserable as you know how. And all that so that you don't have to run the risk of, as a politician of taxing the corporations and the rich who fund you and your party, don't they, Governor Brownback? Final A war is shaping up, not the military kind. We'll have to talk about that in a few minutes. The trade war kind of war. And it's a war between two combatants that most of you know. One is the company that makes 62% of all the ketchup we consume each year. That's right. The Heinz Corporation, which recently merged with the Kraft Corporation to become a food purveyor mega giant Heinz Ketchup has decided to go into the mustard business. And that puts them right up against the leading mustard producer, which is called French's Mustard. They have a 40% share of the mustard market. And not to be outdone, the French's company Announced this last week that they're going into the ketchup business. French's the mustard giant, is going to compete with Heinz on ketchup. And Heinz, the ketchup giant, is going to compete with French's mustard. What's going on here? Well, let me put on my hat as an economist and explain it. The demand for these things is shrinking. People's difficulties. That's right. No recovery. People's economic difficulties are eating into, pardon the pun, the amount of ketchup and mustard they consume, along with the amount of hot dogs and hamburgers and so on that they consume. Sales of mustard and ketchup have been flat. So each of the companies looking to find some other way to make money is pouncing on the other one's market. What do the PR people that they have are say? What are they saying about it? And what are the newspapers who mostly take what the PR agencies deliver to them? What are they saying? Well, they're saying some economic nonsense. So silly I had to say something on this program. They said this increases consumer choice. Instead of just buying Heinz ketchup, we will now confront French's ketchup. And instead of just buying French's mustard, we will confront Heinz mustard. And we're supposed to think of this as choice? We don't have much choice, do we? You know why not? Because Heinz and French decide when, how and whatever choice we get. That's not freedom of choice. That's like having someone come up to you in the street and say to you, I'm going to give you freedom of choice. You could choose between my hitting you over the head with a shovel or by hitting you over the head with a stick. You have choice. I just gave you choice. What? That's not choice. You made the decision about what I can choose among. I don't want you to be in that position. I want my choice to cover a whole wide range, much wider than the choices you've decided to present to me. The fact is we don't have choice about ketchup, mustard or most anything else in our society, do we? Because little companies can't compete. They can't spend the money on the advertising. They can't spend the money on the distribution system. We, we've allowed a few companies to dominate in most areas of our lives. Suddenly we're going to have a choice of ketchups because it conveniences Heinz and French to have a little trade war between them. They'll deliver us whatever choice we get to make and God knows what they will put in to those commodities, those foods, those to get us to switch from one to the other and then to discover two, four, six years later that they did something that was grossly unhealthy to get that to happen in the first place. Okay, let's turn to the second part of our program, questions that you've sent in. The first one has to do with that horrible, horrible event some weeks ago where a young African American, Walter Scott, was killed by a South Carolina police officer, shooting him in the back as he was many, many feet away, running in the opposite direction. I don't want to talk about the illegality, the immorality, the horror and the outrage of what that picture conveyed. The entitlement of that officer, who was white, to shoot an unarmed black man far from him and running away from him in the back. More ink has been spilled on that. I don't have much to add to that. I want to talk about the economics. Here's what turned out to happen. It turned out that Walter Scott was behind on some of his payments for child support. And that led me to want to say a few words, as one of you asked me to do, about the economics of child support. It is very bizarre how we handle that in this country, isn't it? If it's clear who's innocent in the child support story, the answer is it's the child. The first obligation society has is to the nurturance of the child. The child has to be supported. The child has to be supported. Whether the father is or is not able or willing to do it. To make the support of the child depend on the father is first and foremost unfair to the child. There is no excuse for it. Society, if we weren't blinded by an ideology of individualism beyond all reckoning, society wants, should ought to, by everything that has ever been meant by the term family value, Christian value, or anything else that's moral or ethical has to support that child because the child deserves it as a fellow human being. That's then a separate matter from deciding who is to be pressured, forced by law to come up with the money, take care of the child, then worry about where the money and if you need to follow the parent, father, mother, whoever, then take into account their capacity to pay and how this society treats those people whom it wants to part with their money to help pay for child care. The way we handle it, the to make the ability of the child depend on prosecuting and persecuting the father or the mother is a strange idea of what moral behavior is all about. Next Item, I have talked often here about the problem of enterprises, capitalist enterprises leaving the United States, decimating the country because they leave simply to make more profits for their shareholders. To make therefore more profits that can go to paying sky high multimillion dollar salaries to their top executives, etc. And when they do that, leaving behind the thousands without work, the devastated communities. And to illustrate it, I have often talked about the story of the automobile industry and the city of Detroit, a city devastated, currently the largest urban bankruptcy in the history of the United states. Devastated when 2 million people, the population of 1970 is now 700,000 people. That is the majority of people driven out of the city to abandon its housing stock in large percentage, etc. That decision was made by automobile companies, three of them, Ford, General Motors and Chrysler by name, who decided they could make more money by moving production abroad. They did it. They made a lot of money. They paid it to their shareholders, they paid it to their executives. And when they went bankrupt, despite all that, in the case of General Motors, they, they got the rest of us as taxpayers to kick in as well. Well, I wanted to let you know, in response to a question, is at least that process now over, that the answer is an unqualified no. Mexico is increasingly becoming the go to country for American and foreign car companies to build. They're scheduled to build 5 more huge auto plants, auto plants that in the past would have been built in Canada or the United States. They're going from the seventh largest to the fifth largest auto producer. And the explanation is the same, that it was all those decades that Detroit was abandoned. Let me give you just the numbers. The German automaker vw, Volkswagen and Audi, they're now the same company, explains that it will save $6,000 per vehicle if it produces in Mexico. Wow. The average cost, when you add up everything of an hour of labor for a Mexican worker is $8. That compares, according to an independent research agency that studies this, to $58 in the US $38 at Volkswagen's factory in Tennessee, 58 in the US for General Motors, 38 for Volkswagen in Tennessee, which is the lowest in the United States, and so on. All of this is reported in a story by the Associated Press by Tom Krisher and Christopher Sherman, dated April 21, 2015. The movement of car producers Mexico means fewer and fewer jobs or job increases in the United States. That process that devastated Detroit and other American cities continues. Nothing has happened to change the incentive of American companies to abandon the country in which they grew up, to abandon the communities that subsidized them with countless supportive programs all over the decades and go where they can make more money, leaving the debris and the disaster, the pain and the suffering behind and probably blessing us, if that's the right word, by blaming the poor the way they do in Kansas and Missouri, rather than looking to where the problem really lies. Well, folks, we've come to the end of the first half of today's program. The first half, as usual, contains the updates, the short analytical updates and responses to questions and comments that you've sent in. Please do me the favor of staying with this program. We're going to take a short break, and when we're done, we will come back and we will have the second half of the program in which we're going to be dealing with a number of major topics of interest that I think you will find interesting and educational. We'll be back in a very short time. Welcome back to the second half of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. I'm your host, Richard Wolff, and I want to begin by reminding you of the two websites that we maintain where the kinds of analysis we do on this radio program are expanded with all kinds of audio, video and written materials that you will find of interest. The two websites I'm about to give you are open 247 without any charge whatsoever. This is material we update literally every day to make it as useful as possible for you. The first website is called rdwolff with two f's.com and the second one, democracyatwork.info that's all one word, democracyatwork.info. either of those websites is available to you, as I said, all the time at no charge. Both websites also allow you to follow us on Facebook and Twitter, just click on the icon. They also enable you to communicate with us. Your thoughts, your questions, your criticisms come directly to us and help us to shape the program. Okay, let's turn to major topics at the behest of a very, very kind and welcoming group of listeners and viewers of this program in the state of New Jersey. I gave a talk at the New Jersey peace Action Annual 58th Annual Dinner very recently, and they had asked me to talk a little bit about the relationship of economics and war and violence. Very important topic. And I thought that having prepared my remarks for them, that I would do a brief summary in the hopes that it would interest many of you as well. What is the relationship, in short, between the economic system? We have capitalism, a system of private enterprises that hire Workers to produce goods and services that they sell in the market. That system, capitalism, what's its relationship to war and violence? And I guess the central theme I want to convey is that capitalism, war and violence have been very close partners, very densely intertwined throughout the history of capitalism. Let me illustrate that to drive the point home. Capitalism emerged from a prior system called feudalism, at least in Europe. That's how history developed the feudal system that existed in Europe for a thousand years before the 17th and 18th centuries gave way, we say politely, to capitalism. The system that began in England back in the 18th century spread to Western Europe, to North America, to Japan, and eventually became the dominant system in the entire world. But the important first part of our discussion today is to explain that capitalism didn't emerge out of feudalism peacefully. It did it violently. It did it by means of violent revolutions that often involved wars. I'm just going to mention three because they are the standard three that prove the point. The first are often called the English or the British Civil Wars in the 18th century, wars associated with names like Oliver Cromwell, in which the old feudal system was revolted against by new groups in British society who ended up becoming the farmers, the craftsmen, the merchants who built the capitalist alternative. Those were bloody, violent birth pangs of capitalism, if you like, coming out of feudalism. The second example is the French Revolution of 1789, in which the businessmen and women of the time, the beginnings of French capitalism, overthrew King Louis, who was the leader of the feudal establishment in France that had been dominant for centuries. And that revolution was violent and led not only to the beheading of all the feudal kings through the guillotine, famous instrument of the time, but it also led to the development of a new kind of army under the leadership of Napoleon, who took that army and fought dozens of wars across Europe, wars against the old feudal leaders and opening the space for capitalism to emerge in Spain, in Italy, and so on. And the third example is the American Revolution, likewise at the end of the 18th century, in which we in the United States went to war. We revolted against the feudal king of England at the time, and we conducted a revolutionary war to become free of England, free of the feudal restrictions that the king of England saw fit to impose and a freedom to develop a capitalism here in the United States. So the very birth of capitalism was associated with war and violence. And, you know, how you're born has a little something to do with how you evolve. Let's continue the story. The development of capitalism bumped it up against pre existing Systems, just like the emerging capitalism, had to destroy the feudalism out of which it emerged. Once it was going, it discovered all kinds of other people that had different ways of organizing their lives. And against these people, war and violence were often the answer. The beginnings of capitalism in the United States along the Eastern seaboard, which was the basic place that the United States begins. New England has that name for a reason. As American capitalism grew, it needed certain things. It needed space and land for people, capitalists to do their business for the people capitalists brought to the United States to work, a place for them to expand into, whether that be to grow crops, whether that be to have housing, and so on. To make a long story short, they discovered that there were people already in what we now call the United States. Native Americans, not Europeans. And then a war began. Back in the 18th century, across the 19th and into the 20th century, a hundred years or more of war against Native Americans to expand the room for capitalism to grow in the United States. Our growth wrapped up with violence. Here's a second example. One of the ways American capitalism grew was by seeing that the number one capitalist country in the world in the 19th century, 18th, end of 18th and 19th, was Great Britain. And the number one product of Great Britain that was making it a global power was cotton textiles, which the British could produce and sell around the world. The problem was that you need cotton to make a cotton textile, to make a cotton shirt. And cotton doesn't grow in England. Wrong climate, wrong soil. But it grows in the United States. Oh, does it grow in the southern parts of the United States? The problem was having made war against the Native Americans, who's going to work picking the cotton, planting the cotton, cultivating the cotton. Solution that was found, black slavery. And that entailed a great deal of violence. Violence to get the people out of Africa, violence to keep them under slavery conditions in the United States. Violence. As capitalism grew in Western Europe, North America, and Japan, it needed food and raw materials, and it went further and further afield. It created colonial possessions, it in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and so on to feed its growing power, its growing success, its need for more food for the workers crowded into the urban areas for more raw materials for the factories to process. It needed workers to come from those parts of the world to feed its growth. And when the local people in Asia, Africa and Latin America resisted, violence was often used to impose colonial governments, and violence was used to maintain them. Capitalism's growth, like its birth, had a lot to do with violence. If I had more time, I could Continue the story, but I really only have time for a couple of highlights. The greatest wars, the most catastrophic so far in human history, were World War I and World War II. The gift, if I can be ironic, of the 20th century to modern human society are two literally global wars. Those wars were fought by capitalist economies, that is, by countries. For example, Britain, Germany, Japan, the United States, France. These were countries in which capitalism had become the dominant system. And capitalists in these countries found themselves competing for markets, for raw materials, for all of the basics of keeping a business going with one another. And they didn't hesitate to call on their governments to help them. And that's when the wars happened. So the most catastrophic wars we have were wars driven by, pushed by, shaped by capitalism and the competition that capitalism produces. Excuse me, final part of the story. Over the last 30 to 40 years, the capitalists of Western Europe, North America and Japan made a new decision about how to become profitable. They were going to leave the areas they had grown up in, Western Europe, North America and Japan, and move production to areas where they could get away with paying lower wages. I just finished a few moments ago talking to you about Detroit and the car industry as prime examples. But when the factories were closed in Europe, in North America and Japan, and they opened instead in China, India, Brazil and so on, it became much more complicated, the world economy, because stuff had to be produced far away and then brought tens of thousands of miles across oceans, et cetera, to find a customer. The problem of producing for capitalists became global. And so they were needy of more and more military protection for their now extended supply lines across the ocean. Americans clothed themselves on Chinese and Bangladesh shirts and pants. The stuff has to come a long way. It's very vulnerable as it comes a long way. You need a global military to protect you. And not only that, as you produce in these Third World countries like China, they become the new economic powers and they become capable of threatening the growing dependence of Western Europe, North America and Japan on production in that part of the world. And that creates clashes of the sort that have always made the transition from economic warfare to trade war, to hot war to military capitalism and war, an old established partnership, and that should never be forgotten. If you want to put an end to war, if you want to put an end to violence as a means of solving human problems, then one of the places you surely have to look is the economic system you are permitting to govern your life. If that economic system is in significant ways leading to violence and war, then one way to avoid violence, violence and War is to at least ask the question whether a different economic system would at the very least, improve our odds of avoiding those catastrophes for ourselves and for the generations to come. The next major topic I want to deal with is the opening to Cuba. The United States, after half a century, took the step of recognizing what the rest of the world had already understood, that the embargo, the blockade, the relentless hostility of the United States was not enough to unseat the Cuban revolution, its leader, Fidel Castro, and all that has been done and accomplished in Cuba, and having tried through intimidation, through attacks, military and otherwise, to overthrow that government, and having failed for half a century, it was decided enough. We will reopen diplomatic relations. That's been done. I think that was a wise decision. I of recognizing the obvious on the part of the Obama administration. And now the question is, what will happen? The United States has made no secret of its hope that having failed to overthrow the socialist government and the socialist economy of Cuba with 50 years of animosity, that now it's going to try to. To use peaceful means, not absence of diplomatic recognition, not implacable hostility, but use instead peaceful means to achieve the same objective, to make Cuba a capitalist country rather than the kind of socialism it now has. So the real question is, will the new strategy of the United States work? Will Cuba become the kind of economic capitalism that the United States has wanted from the beginning and now has a new way of trying to achieve? And here the answer is very interesting, and that's why we're talking about it in other socialist countries where the United States was an enemy who stopped being an enemy. The strategy of the United States seems to have worked in Vietnam, for example, a country with which the United States waged a terrible war for many years, causing unspeakable destruction in that country, bombing on a scale even world war hadn't seen. And yet, when the war is over, finally, that there's a development in the Vietnamese economy with which the United States now is quite pleased. More and more American companies settling in Vietnam, producing in Vietnam as part of the Asian production that then is brought back for consumption in the United States. But in Cuba, something is happening that maybe suggests we're going to have a different outcome. The Cubans made their own criticism of the kind of socialism they had for most of the last 50 years. The criticism was we relied too much on the state. The state as an employer, the state as a regulator, the the state as an economic planner and decision maker. So what we wanted to do, and this is something they began before the United States changed its policies, the Cuban government began to reorganize its economy by giving real power to workers in the form of a major program of creating and empowering workers worker co ops. Cuba is now the country of Latin America with the most worker co ops relative to its economic size. The Cuban socialism is changing from a top down hierarchical state focused socialism to a bottom based worker getting together with worker to form their own enterprises. The these are not state enterprises. These are collectively owned and operated co op enterprises. So here's what the question of the next years will show. Will the Cubans be able to preserve and prevail with a worker co op based socialism in the face of the effort of the United States with whom they have now normal diplomatic relations and presumably in the near future normal commercial and economic relations? Will the United States be able to use that opening to make them become capitalists? Or will Cuban socialism survive in its new formal focus on worker co ops? This is an important historical experiment that will affect people around the world, not just the folks in Cuba and not just the folks hoping that the United States can produce in Cuba the kinds of economic system that are so flourishing in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and the other fellow members of the Caribbean. The final topic for which we have time, major topic is another look, we haven't done this for a few weeks at what is going on in Greece. I have not talked about that because most of the last several months has been theater. The theater in which the Europeans led by the Germans shout that they're going to make the Greeks pay. And the counter theater of the Greek government saying no you won't, we can't, you mustn't, and so on. Much of this is verbiage designed by play. All this out in the media and we don't really learn much about what is actually going to happen. So I wanted to cut through all that and say to you where I think the conditions in Europe vis a vis Greece are going. There is in effect, even though it's not organized this way, an alliance between the leaders of Europe, mostly the Germans, organized in the European Central bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund, the three institutions that either go by the name Troika or the institutions a funny language that they are using. More and more in Europe there's an alliance between them and the rich top 5% and the big corporations in Greece. And here's how this works from the outside. The institutions, the Europeans, the Germans press the Greeks to pay off the debts incurred by previous governments which the current government rightly considers, to use the technical term, odious, that is debts that should never have been made and debts that went to fatten the pockets of the banks that arranged them and that were used in an inappropriate way, not serving the interests of the Greek people and therefore not deserving to be paid back. So there's one struggle between those creditors and a Greek government that says it can't pay and it will not pay. But the second struggle and the alliance that I'm talking about has to do with the corporations and the rich in Greece. They are afraid of this new left wing government that is finally standing up to the Europeans. They like that their government stands up even though they're the rich in the corporations. They are Greeks and they feel it. But they're worried that if this doesn't work out that something bad will happen to them. And what are they worried about? They're worried that in a pinch, if the Europeans really push too hard, the new left wing Greek government will go to the only place it can go to get the resources with which to survive. And that place is corporations, big ones, and the rich. So what the rich and the corporations have been doing is moving their money out of Greece since the victory of Syriza in January up to this very moment. What this does is weaken Greece. It means more and more resources leave Greece. Remember, Greece has the same unit of currency, the Euro, that everybody else practically in Europe does, except the British. So it's easy, convenient and easy to move your euros out of Greece into Germany, France, Switzerland or wherever else you might want to go with your money. So the rich are making Greece poorer inside while the Europeans are trying to make them poorer from the outside. My point, Greece has a two front war. That is the Syriza government has to understand, which I'm sure they do, that they really have two enemies, the internal and the external, and that right now the two enemies are squeezing them. One to pay the debts from outside and one to weaken them by moving their wealth out of the country from the inside. Even if Greece lowers its external debt, it will sooner or later have to confront the need for a fundamental change at home to provide the resources to deliver on the promises it made to the Greek people. This is a two front struggle and it means that the stakes for Europe are even higher than you might have thought. Because the problem isn't just that if the Greeks don't pay their debts, other countries that have big, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Italians and so on, they may also do that. That's what you hear about in the press, that risk of contagion, it's called. But that's not the big risk. The big risk for the Europeans is if they push Greece too hard, they will have provided Syriza with the reason and the rationale to go to their own people. Syriza is very popular in Greece right now, overwhelmingly. And say we have to go after our own upper classes because Europe gives us no option. And the Europeans may rue the day that they squeeze Syriza and the Greeks so hard that they foment a revolution led by the government inside Greece, because that will be a model for other Europeans. Far more dangerous than the model of not paying your external debts. Europe is reaching a crisis. It's the crisis that has been produced by the capitalist Systems collapse in 2008, coupled with the austerity programs imposed on the European societies ever since. An austerity program that basically said having suffered a crisis brought on by capitalism, having bailed out the big banks and corporations, the cost of the crisis and the cost of the bailout will now be borne by the average citizen in high unemployment rates, in a deterioration in the quality of jobs, fewer benefits, lower real wages, less job security. Austerity is a program that shifts the cost of capitalism's failures onto the mass of people. And the mass of people are pushing back. And that's what we see in all the different forms that it can and does take. Well, folks, I hope these discussions have been of interest to you. That's why we do them. We've come to the end of another program and at the end, I want to invite you to make use again of our websites. RD Wolf. That's Wolf with two Fs and democracyatwork.info they are available 24 7. They allow you by clicking on an icon to follow us on Facebook and Twitter. They allow you to communicate to us your thoughts, your questions, your criticisms. We read them all and we use them to shape the program. I want to also thank truthout.org that remarkable independent source of news and analysis every day. Check them out. They are a way of learning about what's going on from a perspective you will not otherwise encounter. Thank you very much. I'll be with you again next week. But after a while, gonna be my time, my time baby thing gonna change, change, change, change, change, change they ain't gonna change. Sam.