← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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Welcome friends, to another edition of Economic Update, weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, debts, incomes, going up, going down for us, for our kids. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life and I hope that it has prepared me well to present these weekly updates to you. So let's jump right in. Filling the airways confronting us at every turn is news these days of a so called tax reform. President Trump, the House and the Senate are all busily writing tax laws and the way that works in the United States. The President talks a lot about it, but he doesn't do much. The work of defining what we pay in taxes is done by the House of Representatives and the Senate and they do it separately. So two groups of politicians writing laws about how taxes will change. And of course, every single one of those politicians is besieged year round, but especially now by highly paid lobbyists, begging, pleading, threatening them to do what their payers want them to do. And of course, who can afford to send a lobbyist to Washington to play games there all day, every day, year round? It's the biggest, richest corporations and associations of corporations and specialty interests of all kind that can afford the lobbyist. You can't. And the results are very predictable. I won't bore you by going over what the media already teaches us, that the winners from this tax reform are the usual winners, the biggest corporations number one, and the richest people number two. And everybody else stands further down the line to get what little crumbs may be left. What you may not know besides all of this, is that the law is very complicated. It has many, many details, details that can make a difference of millions of dollars for a company, for an industry, for a region. That's why the lobbyists are there, to take care of the interests who pay them to be there. And here are a couple you may not have heard about. One plan, which seems to be agreed by both the House and Senate, although they differ on the details, is to eliminate the estate tax. There's only two or three thousand people in America rich enough to pay the estate tax these days because it exempts everybody who leaves less than 10, 11 or $12 million to their heirs, which means you and me. So these two or three thousand families that are super rich who are leaving so much that they actually have to pay some tax, don't want to pay it. And being as rich as they are, they can afford the lobbyists. And so I have to report to you that the estate tax is sure to be reduced or eliminate it altogether. Wonderful news for two or three thousand of the richest families in America. Bad news, of course, for the rest of us, because if they don't pay their taxes, the government has three it can either cut spending on government programs because it doesn't have the money from these rich people who don't pay estate taxes anymore, or it can raise our taxes to make up for the government what they're not getting from from these rich families, or they can borrow the money that they're no longer raising from these rich families. And here's the wonderful joke there. When the government borrows because it hasn't taxed rich people, it's typically the rich people who lend to the government the money they don't have to pay in taxes anymore. This either makes you smile by the sheer horror of it or cry because we are the victims of any way this plays out. Here's a couple more you may not have heard about. The version of tax reform passed by the House of Representatives has a wonderful gift. This time of year, gifts are big for graduate students going to school in America. In many American graduate programs at universities, it is the custom to give graduate students who need financial help, which is most of them, the following benefit. It's called a tuition waiver. You don't have to pay the tuition that is high at these schools, and they give you a stipend. It's usually in the neighborhood of six to $12,000 per year. That's level poverty, below poverty level for a graduate student. So the graduate student has two benefits, a low amount of money and a waiver on the tuition. The House of Representatives, which has proposed massive cuts in taxes for corporations and the rich, has proposed taking away from graduate students the tuition waiver so that they will get it, but they'll have to declare it on their income tax because it's like an income. And so they will be required to pay a tax on it, making the cost of a graduate education more expensive to a graduate student than it was before. Around the world, particularly in Europe, college costs are being brought down. Here in the United States, we're going the other way. Basically, the tax rewrite is a scandal. And let me close on this by quoting to you, Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, who referred to the tax bills working their way through Congress as a war of the rich against the poor. End quote. Much of today's material, let's call it, is about the big corporate leaders to whom we entrust such enormous power in future programs. I'll be talking about the merger wave that is bringing huge companies to get together with one another and become even huger. But even before we get to that, I want to talk about what it means to give such extraordinary wealth and power to such a relatively tiny proportion of the American people who therefore have economic power which they use to get poor political power, etc. But it helps, I think, to be specific. So let's start. Majorities of workers who are polled say they would like more say on the job. They would like to have more input on what goes on at the workplace where they spend most of their adult lives. You know that on this program we often advocate for real democracy at the workplace to give workers what they want by making it a democratic arrangement. The workplace, one person, one vote. No matter what you do, you have a stake in what goes on. You have to live with the consequences. And democracy says you ought to have a right to participate. But of course, that's not the way capitalist corporations work. So let's see some examples of what that means. I want to start with Joe Ricketts. R I C K E T T S if you haven't heard of him, let me introduce you. He is the founder of TD Ameritrade, one of the largest discount stock brokerages in the United States. His family owns the Chicago Cubs baseball team. You know, just like your neighbor, he's worth more than $2 billion. A few years ago he started a very interesting local news site in New York City called DNA Info. He did something similar in Chicago. Was really interesting way to bring local news to an urban area. He's also a major right wing donor to political activities. During the presidential primary, he spent millions of dollars denouncing Donald Trump as an untrustworthy, dangerous misogynist. Once Mr. Trump was secured in his nomination, Mr. Ricketts spent a million dollars to support him. I mention these details because they are not unusual. Six months ago, the reporters who work at DNA Info in New York City and at the Gothamist, a website that he also owns and operates in New York City, announced their intention, the reporters and editors did, to join the Writers Guild of America, a trade union. This is something that has been done by the reporters at Huffington Post, Vice Media, Slate and Thrillist, major well known websites. In response, Joe Ricketts, the owner of these things, shut them down. He fired the entire crew, closed the service. The public doesn't have access to these websites anymore and these people all lost their jobs. I don't have much more to say. One person made a decision and that's the result for the public and for the employees. Case closed. Think about it. Here's another story about what large corporate executives to whom we entrust enormous power, what they can do and do do with that power. I want to talk to you briefly about Jeffrey Immelt. I M M E L T. You may not know him, but you should. Because he was until recently and for many years the president of the General Electric Corporation, one of the most important and largest corporations in the United States. He isn't anymore. And what often happens when an executive retires with hundreds of millions of dollars in pay and of incredible retirement package and all the rest. But after he's gone, things can be revealed about him that somehow managed not to get so well revealed while he was in power. And Mr. Immelt really got revealed with a doozy. It turns out that much of his activity involved flying all over the world because General Electric is a multinational corporation and has activities across the five continents. Well, that isn't unusual. But here's what was. When Mr. Immelt flew a second equivalent jet, empty flew behind him, just in case something might have gone wrong at some point in the flight and Mr. Immelt would have needed another plane. The cost of maintaining a second plane that that was most of the time empty is staggering. Runs into the millions of dollars. But that's what Mr. Immelt wanted. Oh, he said he didn't know anything about it. This was in the hands of the flight director for GE, the man who has replaced Mr. Immelt, deeply embarrassed by the stunning self indulgent luxury. Imagine, Mr. Immelt's plane might have had a problem. He would have had to get on a first class flight to finish his trip. He didn't want that. He wanted his own airplane, probably with his own teddy bear, so he could complete the flight. He used the money of General Electric to pay for it. And so I want you all to understand that, that when you bought that electric toaster for your grandma or the electric clock to wake up in the morning, part of the price you paid was to enable Jeffrey Immelt to have an empty plane trailing him all over the world. You put your faith in the people who run these corporations as individuals. That's what you get. Nothing has been in the news more besides the tax bill than the issue of sexual harassment by people in power over those who depend on them, those who want to get a job, those who want their career to move up, those who want to keep a job, etc. And we have seen unbelievable examples across the spectrum left Right, right. Business, politics, it really doesn't seem to matter. You put a few people in positions of power that other people depend on and you've created the incentive and the situation which can turn out as we have seen. And I want to give you one particular example because it illustrates it. This has to do with the highest secretary minister in the government of Theresa May in the United Kingdom, a man by the name of Damien Greene. He's gotten himself into trouble. First, he was accused by a subordinate of sexual harassment and intimidation. Number two, one of the highest police officials in London reported that when they raided his office, they found large amounts of pornography on his computer, etc. Etc. This is a big embarrassment for the government of Theresa May. It comes a short time after Britain's Defense Minister, Michael Fallon resigned from his job as Minister of Defense. I should parenthetically explain to my American audience that in other countries, when you get caught doing this sort of thing, you're out. We here in America don't move so quickly, at least much of the time. Now Mr. Green has defended himself. He didn't do anything. He said it was not true that he had done what the wife and the others of the people involved have suggested. And what was that? Apparently he was in a bar with a young woman who worked for him and they discussed. This is the testimony given her career aspirations and gossiped about sexual affairs in Parliament. Then he was alleged to have done the deed. I don't want to reiterate the details. You all know many more details than you probably want to already. I want to drive home a particular point. While there are many things that cause particularly men to be sexual predators, particularly towards women, there is something that has to be said here about the economics of it. And those have to do with a situation of hierarchy. If you make a few people in a position to give or not give you a job, to let you move up or down in the career path, to let you keep the job, you are creating a structure that fosters this problem. And you're not going to solve the problem unless you deal with that structure. Here's another argument for worker co op as a better way to organize an enterprise. Everybody participates in hiring everybody. The workers collectively are their own boss. Everybody is on both sides of that game. And. And therefore you will not see these kinds of shenanigans, at least nowhere near as often or as regularly that has to be addressed. Otherwise we end up telling people, just don't do that, men, you shouldn't do that. That's likely to be about as successful as telling people, don't do drugs. We've been doing that for decades and we all know how successful that's been. Some short ones, but before I get to them, let me remind you we maintain two websites where we add material, where we provide you with all kinds of additional services, and we would like you to partner with us in making use of these items. The first website is rdwolff with 2f's.com and the second one is democracyatwork.info these are websites through which you can communicate to us what you like and would like us to do or don't like about the program. They allow you to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. For those of you that are listeners to this program on the radio, but might like to see it in television form, please go to patreon.com that's P A T R E O N patreon.com economicupdate where you can do precisely that. Make use of these websites. All the facilities they have partner with us. It's a way of extending the effect and the usefulness that this program seeks to have. I want to go back to Detroit, a city I go back to a lot because it's like an emblem of what's going on in America. Recently, some big businesses have bought parts of downtown Detroit and rebuilt it up a bit with hotels and expensive restaurants and a convention center. And that's fine. That's better than doing nothing. I get that. But out of it has come a language about the renaissance of Detroit and how the system has built back Detroit. This is simply not true. And I wanted to find, and I have found a statistic that can summarize it. Before 2007 and the crash, the annual number of mortgages written for people in Detroit was between 6,000 and 8,500. The number of mortgages for homes bought in Detroit since 2009, that is. Once the crash hit, the average number is a few hundred or less. Bank America and JPMorgan Chase have made claims to be helping to Detroit turnaround in 2016. With Detroit's population of 637,000, the bank of America did exactly 18 mortgages and JP Morgan did six. The two bigger bank in the mortgage business did a total of 24 mortgages when before the annual was in the neighborhood of 6,000 to 8,500. There is no rebuilding of Detroit except for the money making downtown that will mostly service tourists and other conventions and leave the vast majority of Detroit in the condition that we know it to have. Next item, there's been a lot of attention paid to the really disaster. Across America's malls. Huge retail giants, Macy's, Sears, Nordstrom, all announced huge numbers of store closings in 2017. Many of them did it in 2016 too. It is, in short, a disaster because these malls employed many people. Because these malls pay taxes to the local community they will no longer pay. And because it isn't beautiful for a town to have an empty mall with weeds growing up through the cracks in the asphalt. And so the question has been raised what's happening? And the answer, because people don't want to face what's going on in America, the answer's been given. Well, everybody's going to the Internet. They're not going to the mall, they're staying home and buying, etc. Of course, that's part of the story, but there's economics behind this. One of the reason they're going to the Internet is they can get the things cheaper that way than going to the mall. And the proof that cheapness is the issue is when you discover that while Macy's and Nordstrom's and Sears are in trouble, TJ Maxx the stores that are in malls box are very much cheaper, are doing much better than those more expensive stores. The bottom line being Americans can't afford anymore. And they're going where their cheapness is because their incomes are lagging. They've had no raises for 10 or 20 years. And it's showing up as it worsens the economic scenario. Next item, tenants in America. We keep track in America of tenants and how much of their income are they required to pay for their rental every month. It's an index of how well people are doing or not. Here's a statistic for you to think about. In 1960, tenants who spent more than a third of their income on rent numbered about 25%. Roughly a quarter of renters had to pay more than a third of their income just for rent. In 2015, it had doubled. Half of the people in America who rent had to pay more than a third of their income in rent. That's a sign of being fundamentally pinched in your economic situation in terms of the life you can live and the level of life you can afford. And here's something that staggered me even more last year, 2016, Black renters. Black renters, which are the overwhelming majority of black families in America, 12% of them were threatened at one time or another with eviction because they couldn't make the rent. One in eight black families were went through the experience the Terror, the anxiety, the fear that the mother, the father, the kids, the children would be thrown out on the street, evicted because they couldn't make enough money to make the rent. Economic recovery. No, these are not statistics about recovery. These are statistics about a disaster that keeps unfolding. The final economic update that we will have time for has to do with another one of these corporations to whom we have entrusted not just our general welfare, but literally our lives and health. I'm talking about AstraZeneca, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. I'm going to read to you just a few of the achievements of this very profitable, huge Multinational Pharmaceutical. In April 2010, AstraZeneca settled a lawsuit brought by an American for $520 million. Oh, they must have done bad things. Here's what they they defrauded ready Medicare, Medicaid and other government funded health care programs in connection with marketing and promotion of of their blockbuster antipsychotic drug Seroquel. In March 2011, that's basically a year later, it settled another lawsuit in the United States totaling $69 million divided up among 38 states. AstraZeneca is the producer of a drug you may know, called Nexium. Nexium, it's for gastric distress, in your guts, etc. In 2007, Dr. Marcia Angell, formerly editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and a lecturer in social medicine at the Harvard Medical School, denounced AstraZeneca for fraudulent reporting on the effects of Nexium to get it sold in the United States. They make billions off that drug. To give you an idea that this is a really fine group of folks here at the top. In February of 1998, Astra USA, a subsidiary, sued Lars Bildman, its former president and chief executive officer, seeking $15 million from Mr. Bildman for defrauding the company. The sum included money he allegedly used to fix up three of his homes and plus money the company paid as a result of an EEOC investigation. Astra's lawsuit alleges against their own president that he sexually harassed and intimidated employees, used company funds for yachts and for prostitutes, and so on and so on. The mixture of profit making corporations and health, as we have shown on this program over and over again, is literally a lethal combination. Profit making leads people to make decisions that are not good for much of the world we live in, whether it's climate crises, whether it's health crises, wherever it's time to face that, the solution to many of our problems goes beyond this or that rule and regulation system change is on the agenda and we should get on with an honest debate about whether we can do better than capitalism and how to go about it. We've come to the end of the first half of today's program. Thank you very much for staying with us. Please continue. We will be right back. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's Economic Update. Well, I'm very pleased to welcome back because she's been with us before, a very well known media personality phrase I don't use that often, Laura Flanders. She's a best selling authority. She's a broadcaster. I got to know her by watching her program years ago. She tries to bring progressive minded people before the audience that they don't often get. And she has a wonderful phrase about what she wants her program to be. I'm going to read it to you. The people who say it can't be done take a back seat on her program to the people who are actually doing it. And I wish I could have thought of that motto for this program. The Laura Flanders show is available on LingQ TV, Free Speech TV, CUNY TV, as well as on Laura's own YouTube channel and as a free podcast. She's written many books and you can find out about all of her activities by following her on Twitter@grit Laura and particularly visiting Laura Flanders.com, the website that she maintains precisely for such purposes. So with that, let me turn to Laura and say welcome to the program.
- [29:12]
B
Well, it's great to be back with you, Rick. You know, you didn't just watch my show. You were our economics correspondent at the height of, of the financial crash. Yes, I was very happy to have you.
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A
Good. The crash is still with us, so.
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B
We can still crash.
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A
All right. I want to talk to you a little bit about mass media in the United States and public media because you're part of it and you're a critic at the same time. And that's, that's the specialty I want to probe. So my first question is this. I increasingly see comments to the effect of that the mass media in America are becoming divided in some sense into hostile camps. Tribalism has even been used recently to describe the two opposing centers, each of whom hurls the phrase fake news at the other one and tries to cultivate an audience that listens only to it and excludes any other. Do you, does this make sense to you? Do you see that?
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B
Yeah, I mean, I think we have an atomization of American society in lots of different ways and certainly with respect to the media. The one quibble I would make is, I don't think it's into just two easily bifurcated sections. I actually think that whereas when you were coming, you and I were coming up, there was, you know, the nightly news and everybody would watch the network of their choice. There were three. Whether you liked it or not, you would debate what you heard on the news the next day. They called it locker, you know, they called it water cooler talk right today. And it was very hard for those of us on the outside to make an impact when it came to the newspapers. You only had the choice basically of writing a letter to the editor. Very few options in terms of communicating. And I don't know whether you remember, but I was at Fair, the media Watch group, at the beginning of the first. And the only way we could find out what was happening in other countries was to wait for a big manila envelope of clippings to come with the Guardian and all the rest. So on the one level, the fact that we have many, many outlets now and almost everyone can find an audience online or on a, as you do with a web streamed radio program that can then be picked up by radio stations or what I do the same on TV is great. Everybody can have their own platform. What we're missing are the places of coming together. And I think that that is what has truly changed. We have more possibilities for everyone to have a voice, but fewer places where those voices can connect, communicate, exchange, and frankly, where we can learn how it sounds to have one person's version of reality challenged by another one, ideally a trained reporter or somebody who knows something to the contrary. So, yes, we have audiences dividing up. We have political groups cultivating those divides. But I don't think it's just down the middle. I think there are many, many divides. And the rise of the Trump administration revealed how powerful some of them have become.
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A
Do you think there's a way in this, the way you've described it, for social movements, movements of people who think society needs change? Does this development create opportunities for them that they need to tell us how you think it could or should go now?
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B
Well, I mean, in terms of how you can use the situation as it is at the present. Look at what Black Lives Matter did. Look what Occupy Wall street did. I mean, we were covering Occupy Wall street as independent media outlets for two weeks, really before, 10 days before the New York Times ever went down there.
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A
I remember running around streets of lower Manhattan with you.
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B
Exactly right. So we were able to make a story where there might not have been a story. Black Lives Matter, a hashtag made a movement. Maybe not made the movement, but it gave expression to the sort of inchoate makings of a movement that then came together and were helped by that hashtag. So I think there's all sorts of opportunities, even just with the status quo in terms of media. But what we're facing is maybe change on the horizon. This world that we had imagined of the Internet, this World Wide Web. If you'd asked people in the early 90s what was its promise, they would have said exactly that social movements can build, we can have democracy, diversity, decentralization. It's not turned out that way. And in fact, centralization of a whole new kind is taking place.
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A
Tell us a little bit about that. I mean, I want to cover it and I will in future programs. But the AT&T merger, Sinclair and what they're doing, you're getting this coming together of the content producer and the distributor broadcaster into a handful of unbelievable power. How will that shape the openings that were created?
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B
Well, you know, I want. I'm so excited that we're having this conversation because I so dearly appreciate your analysis of economic change over the centuries. And I think apply that exact same lens to what happens with the media industry and you see the very same thing happening as you see in other industries. So first you have experimentation, you have some new openings, and then increasingly this sort of graduation towards monopoly, this creation of monopoly systems that become extractive systems. And that's exactly what's happening on the Internet and outside of it. So the Sinclair Broadcasting merger with Tribune, the largest television owning company in the country, Sinclair, with one of the most troubled, would create a media monster of 233 stations that would reach three quarters of the American public. It hasn't gone through yet. There are some pesky regulations still in place going back to the, frankly, the 1940s, that the Trump administration is very eager to do away with. And FCC Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has expressed his opinion on this many times. A meeting of the FCC will probably take place at the beginning of December, at which they will vote on doing away with the last of those regulations, those limits on how many, how much influence one owner or one company can have over our news. Once that's done, then, yeah, you can see the Sinclair Tribune merger happen. You can see the AT&T time Warner merger happen. So those are bricks and mortar stations and radio channels. We can talk about that. Regulated by the fcc. On the other hand, remember, we all fought net neutrality and we wanted to keep the net giving equal access to any participant and not have kind of coded front page placement on your Facebook page or whatever. It turns out that that whole system of concentrated power is taking place within the corporations. So Facebook now is the lens, is the portal through which 70% of people get their news. So wherever their news comes from, whether it's the New York Times or the Guardian, it's getting to those sites through the portal of Facebook 70% of the time. So they have a kind of lock, control, gatekeeper control over our news. And frankly, they are now, in the name of fighting fake news, censoring what they don't like, algorithms have been put in place that particularly pick up anything that seems like opinion. And strangely enough, it is selecting out a progressive opinion as well as every other kind. And a lot of our progressive independent movement, particularly our independent media sites like Alternate and others, have seen a major drop off in their news. Alternate the other day reported 40% drop off since Facebook had instituted new algorithms. So they have both the power and they have the ability to make huge decisions as to what we're going to see. And if you had a. Just imagine, I mean, if you think of Ronald Reagan is the president that came out of television, right? He had made his name as a TV advertiser for cbs. Then you think of Donald Trump as, you know, the president that we got from reality television. Imagine if you had the head of Facebook decide to run for president. He would be running as the first Internet president with control over pretty much all of the newspapers because they have to go along with him. If he's the gatekeeper to their content, he would be controlling our social media feed through his algorithms. We would have no access to how they work. And we can be screaming all we like about net neutrality and governance, but unless we figure out how to regulate some of these companies, you know, it has been done before, and I think it should be done again.
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A
Yeah, it takes an upheaval. You're reminding me of the whole antitrust. You go back to 1890, the Sherman act, the Clayton Act. It's as if people don't want to recognize that capitalism has tended toward monopoly over and over again until it was stopped by a mass upheaval. And then as soon as that mass upheaval is over, the old tendency resumes so that a smart person would eventually conclude either you change the system or you're ever in the same boat having the same game played on you again. And now you have it with media that are so important. And I think it merits saying, I just finished reading that the Koch brothers are part of a group that are about to buy Time magazine. So between Sinclair and the Koch brothers, you can see that the folks with the money can now control politics, not only by the lobbyists and the campaign donations, but by literally controlling everything in the environment. So it all fits to produce the.
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B
Kind of tax reform I mean, we talked about Sinclair. You know, this is not just any company. This is a company that is very close to the Trump agenda. I wrote about them recently in a commentary. I do a commentary every week on the show called the F word. And you can find them@lauraflanders.com or at our SoundCloud channel. And you know, my point there was this is a company that has hired many of Trump's top aides and campaign managers, made them commentators on their channel, and, and impose this must carry rule on all the local stations. So every day you have a guy who was a minute ago writing speeches for Donald Trump, opining about everything from black laziness to predatory behavior, and it must be carried on all those local stations. So this is a propaganda machine, no question about it. But to go back to the history for a second, the thing about journalism is journalism is both the way that we diagnose what ails us and the way that we fix it and the way this is why it's so important. So you think of how did Standard Oil get broken up? It got broken up in part because of Ida Tarbell's reporting. Her reporting helped create the atmosphere, create the public opinion into which the presidential actions like the Sherman act were able to play. And you need to create a context. The politicians need to feel the heat. If we can't create that heat, then the politicians aren't going to act. But we've seen regular action, both on antitrust and on government media regulation every 50 years or so. We're just due for one overdue. I would say at this moment, there's.
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A
A beautiful dynamic of capitalism. It has no intrinsic limits. It reminds me of certain species of dog that where the dog doesn't know to stop eating, its anatomy is such that it keeps eating until it can't handle it, then regurgitates it and starts again. Capitalism is like, it keeps pushing so far that it produces the backlash that threatens it. And it's always seeming to be surprised by it. Let me turn the conversation then to a big question for me, as a critic of capitalism most of my life, I have had to be pretty much on the edge of what's allowable to be said, it's clear to me that over the last six years there has been a radical change. It is now possible to question capitalism, to criticize the very word capitalism appears in the language of people. A day or two ago in the New York Times was an op ed that really amazed me by a professor from Arizona explaining that the climate crisis, the fault of that is capitalism, writing it as if it were the most natural thought one could have. Which it is indeed. Tell me whether you see it that way and how it might be, to take your metaphor, the development of a discourse like the one against trusts and monopolies. Do you see that emerging as a possible vehicle for change?
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B
I think we have a way to go. I mean, you are right that there's been a shift. I mean, there's no question you Google capitalism. It's one of the most googled words in the dictionary these days. You have moved to the center whether you like it or not. But in terms of our media, our most influential media, I would say still will cover the personal before the political, and we'll still cover the idiosyncratic before the systemic. So we will still hear about flaws in the system, not about the system being flawed. So if you can find the channel or the show that is really doing, you know, hard cutting analysis of capitalism and how it operates, you know, I'll take you out for a drink. I don't see it every night or anywhere close to that on television.
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A
That would then mean a gap between mainstream and other.
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B
Absolutely.
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A
And you and I are clearly other.
- [43:23]
B
And what is exciting is that we're getting is that there's company. And in the same way that the forum is failing to serve everybody, the industry is serving is failing to serve everybody, there is corporate failure in areas of the country where there is not enough population to justify the big box stores going in. So too in television where there's, or radio or the Internet where there's not enough population to justify the big cable companies or the big broadband companies going in. They're just not serving the people. So whether you're talking, you know, Rust belt Detroit, just outside the gap, the city center people are still on dial up. 70% of school kids, Appalachia, the southeast, rural regions without enough people, corporate failure means they're not getting the broadband that they need to keep people in the community. And what's happening, communities are responding by creating their own municipal broadband. So too with the conversation, I think there's failure to discuss the things that people want discussed. And I think that's where your show's coming in. My show's coming in. I wrote a long piece for the next Systems project not so long ago. You can find it@nextsystems.net I think saying, okay, well, what media demands are we going to make? What are our social movement demands of our media structures and what might we imagine as if you will, worker determined media enterprises? Because absolutely, there's a gap both in the form and the content. And people are figuring out how to fill the gap form wise. Some fascinating things I write about in the paper where people are learning how to create Internet meshed Internet networks, whether the big cable companies will come or not, doing it themselves. And we've been figuring out how to make the broadcasting, make the content. I think our job is how do we mesh our content into a player that is big enough, into a platform perhaps that is big enough, or a hub of content that is big enough to have real impact. And I think that's the search that we're on. What would that look like?
- [45:23]
A
Anything on the horizon that could play that role?
- [45:26]
B
Well, I don't see why we couldn't have our own channel. I really don't. I think we have enough content. I think we have the credible growth of podcasts in this area. What we haven't figured out quite is how do we get over the individualism and the finance dominated competition in which we find ourselves looking for funding and having to always say we're unique and the only ones doing a thing. How do we get beyond that to figure out, you know, what we actually do have to figure out how to work together. Could we not create some channel structure? I mean, it's not unlike free speech TV or link tv, but the next generation of that in which all of our programming would be featured in a curated way, so that if you wanted a progressive podcast list at the push of a button on your iPhone, you would get it.
- [46:12]
A
Yeah, you don't see that yet.
- [46:14]
B
Oh, I don't see it yet. But hey, I think we can make it. I really do. The big challenge always is where's the capital gonna come from for our anti capitalist communications network?
- [46:25]
A
Yes, that's always been the issue. Maybe crowdsourcing, But I always thought that one of the stunning achievements, and there were several in the Bernie Sanders campaign, was his demonstration that if an awful lot of people think this is worth doing, then $27 per person adds up to being able to actually make a play that would otherwise require you to serve the companies that have the money.
- [46:50]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think that we're minutes away. It's happening in lots of different countries. There are conversations happening now about possibly cooperating cooperatively owned media networks. There was a newspaper again, I wrote about this for the next systems project. A newspaper in Switzerland was just crowdsourced, got something like 10 times the amount of money that they thought they were going to be able to raise in the first month. All the people that bought subscriptions are now part of the worker owner circle. Editors, consumers, writers, all part of the same ownership structure. We've seen it in Canada. Would that work? Would something similar work? I think there's a lot of experimentation going on. It's exciting. I think we don't want to be peasants in the plantations of Facebook and Google anymore. They are an extractive industry, extracting our data and selling it back to ourselves. This is landlordism to the nth degree. Time for a workers revolt. I say yes.
- [47:45]
A
If we're going to provide the basis of the news, we have some vested stake in all of this. Look, It's America, it's 2017, Thanksgiving and Christmas. I need to ask you a question. You're an activist in the media, you're a female and you must have been affected by all of these revelations of sexual abuse, of sexual predation. I want to ask you whether you see that as another area of corporate failure. It's a failure not to be an Appalachian. It's a failure not to serve the children who, who need an access to the Internet. But it's also a failure to have cultivated, sustained, looked the other way at a cultural apparatus that has had devastating effects on countless people, deprived us of the talents of women who couldn't tolerate it and left. And we've heard those stories. What's your feeling? You're in the middle of all of this?
- [48:42]
B
Well, I think again you've got a failure to talk about systems. We have not talked about patriarchal power in the way that these so called sex scandals are really power scandals. And to me they are scandals of concentration of power. I mean, think of where the abuse happens. It happens in the church, it happens in Congress. It happens in very powerful corporations, in places where men feel like they can basically get away with whatever they want because of the huge gradient difference between their amount of power and the usually young women power that they're pursuing. Young women, women of color, vulnerable women of different kinds. It's not just any women these people pick on. And I think that that is what's breaking through now is that people are saying, actually, you know what, if we work in tandem, we can call out this abuse and call it by its real name, which is an abuse of power. And I've been saying, again, one of my commentaries the other day, I said, you know, remember how we used to have sweat free products and it would have a little logo on the packet. I think we need like shared power products that give us a little indicator on the label what is the nature of the power relations in the company that produce the product. Because I wouldn't want to go work somewhere where I know I'm working for somebody with predatory type power. But I do think that we're still seeing, I mean, there are so many allegations now that it has gone beyond the personal to the structural. And I think that's what's exciting about this moment. We need to keep it there before we get numb to all of this. And that's my fear, is that because the allegations are coming out so hot and heavy so fast that we'll begin to get numb to it before we make change. The legal change isn't so necessary. We have the laws on the books. We need to educate people about what those laws are. And we need to have people, I think, speak peer to peer about how they've confronted this kind of power. I don't know how much time we have, Rick, but I heard the best story yesterday from a woman whose daughter was in high school in New York. And when the daughter was in her, I think she's in 12th grade now and she has a dear friend who was clearly raped during high school but didn't know what it was called, didn't know what it was. And it turned out there were two serial rapists in the high school and nobody had really done anything about this because the girls didn't know what to call it. Not nobody was looking into it. The girls asked if they could organize a peer to peer training for all the classes in the school to talk about what they'd been through, what it was called, what they could do about it. And they consulted with the health and education departments of the school to make sure what they were doing was kosher. And they had these peer to peer meetings, including in an eighth grade class where a young boy stood up and said, this has happened to me. I mean, this is extraordinary. I think the leadership is going to come from the people who are going through it and has to start at the school level. My one concern is that we've seen this MeToo discussion happen right after the Black Lives Matter conversation, as if the two are totally unrelated. But what about Power relations and police. What about power relations of the patriarchal kind and the white supremacist kind? What's the relationship between race and gender in all this? And why are we hearing mostly so far, stories about well known men and fairly well known women? We need to continue this to hear about the restaurant workers and the school workers.
- [52:11]
A
The retail clerks.
- [52:12]
B
The retail clerks. And make sure that we understand power is power, even if it isn't in a high profile.
- [52:19]
A
I can't let go my project, too. Imagine a workplace where the employer and the employee are not different people, that we don't have this structured hierarchy that has always, in those countless named situations that will never get publicity because it's not a famous actress or it's not a famous politician. All those moments that are indefinable, that are happening because we allow a small group of people to be in the position of giving or taking a job, giving or taking a promotion that will transform the life of the subordinate person and all those that depend on him or her. That's the systemic, impossible thing. As long as you leave that, then the education gets dangerously close to telling people, just don't do bad things. And we know, don't get caught. Yeah. Don't do drugs. Right. We make fun of Mrs. Nixon or whoever it was. Who, whose idea was. That's how you. Oh, Mrs. Reagan. We don't want to be left. That will make it be an explosion that then fades away because you haven't dealt with the structure.
- [53:32]
B
You know, it's interesting just talking about this with you, Rick. I'm realizing, you know, it's been a pretty numbing year, I think since Trump got elected. A lot of us, I think, felt like, okay, well, we weren't entirely surprised. Many of us thought this could easily happen. If you actually talk to people before the election as opposed to looking at the polls, you weren't too surprised. On election night, none of us were that excited about Hillary Clinton for a bazillion reasons. While the Sanders campaign had been invigorating, it too, you know, had its flaws then. To see Trump get elected, to see what happens so predictably playing out to see the insanity of the last few years. I mean, the last few months, it feels like years. There's something about this moment where people's stories are taking down big power that has me feeling like we're coming back to life, like we're beginning to get back in touch with our own power and the reality of things. Like we're naming things that we've been told not to name and getting out maybe of a kind of alienation from our bodies, from the reality reality of our existence way beyond the workplace kind of alienation. But that's part of it too. We've been living in a world of fake friends and, you know, fake reality. And this is kind of real. And I think men are feeling it. Oh, this could get really real and women are feeling it. I think it's interesting. I think a year after the election maybe this is a little bit of a turning point of actually we know what we need to know to take down some of this power and change it.
- [55:05]
A
Let's hope. Well, it's a perfect ending. Thank you very much. You're a professional at this. Thank you really for coming. Laura, it's a pleasure and thanks all of you for joining us. I think you will agree that this was a remarkable interview and I look forward to speaking with you again next week.