← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Economic Update: Capitalism Invites Deepening Criticism
00:28:59
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- [00:11]
A
Welcome, friends, to Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, debts, incomes, our own, our children's. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and that's how I come to bring these economic updates to you each week. Well, we're approaching Labor Day, and so I wanted to say a few words about that holiday. Typically, our leaders at this time give us fancy phrases about working men and women and how we ought to honor them. It's always a little strange. The rest of the world celebrates Labor Day on May 1, which was a holiday that actually began here in the United States. But we have to be different. And I would like to be different in a new way. I'd like to really honor the working men and women of this society. And the way I would like to do it is to see if we can do something about depriving our society of a situation in which one human being can take away from another human being a job and the income that comes with a job. And to make it clear what I'm trying to say, I'm going to refer to Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation. Our president said at that time it was inconsionable, unconscionable, it was contrary to American values that one human being could own another, that one human being could buy and sell another one, separating her or him from family, from home, from neighborhood. Well, let me say let's do that again, only this time to deprive any person from the right to take another person's job and another person's income. That would be a real freedom and a real honor on Labor Day. A society, you know, could do that. We could say to every person who's an adult, you have to contribute your brains and muscles in work to give back to the community. And the community in turn, has to honor and guarantee to each person to provide a job and the income, a decent income that goes with it. Just like it was right to do away with slavery, it's right to do away with an unconscionable power that no person should have over another. Well, the updates are going to go quickly today. There's so many of them, it's kind of hard for me to choose. My attention was caught back in June, and I wanted to bring it up to you again by a decision of the Democratic National Committee. Here's what it decided. It had earlier decided it would not accept contributions from fossil fuel companies, companies that pollute the air, the water and the earth. They reversed that decision. They are going to accept money from the fossil fuel companies. I'm not going to make the usual comment about how the democracy we have is the best that money can buy. What I want to talk about is the reason given. The Democratic Party said, well, there are unions whose workers work in the fossil fuel industry and it doesn't want them to lose their jobs. This is a basic confusion. You're not choosing between jobs and pollution. We're a society that could have no pollution and preserve everybody's job. Here's a thought for the Democratic National Commit yourself to guaranteed full employment. Make sure that anyone who loses their job in an industry we don't want and need like fossil fuel is given a good job at equal pay somewhere else. Other societies manage that. We could too. Don't give in on that phony excuse. Unions have a bad rep helping their members and not being interested in the broader society. Here's a way to change commit to getting rid of fossil fuels and guarantee jobs. That's how the labor movement would become a leader in our society rather than what it is. My next update has to do with his situation in Turkey. Many of you have been reading about it and asked me about it. Let me tell you what Turkey is not about. It's not about some minister who's being held over there on charges. And it's not about the tit for tariffs that Mr. Erdogan in Turkey and Mr. Trump in the United States slap on each other for photo ops that they can get some support for. Here's what it's about and here's why it's a problem not only in Turkey, but in Indonesia, Colombia and quite a few other countries, a little history will show us what's going on. When world capitalism collapsed, beginning with the dot com crisis in 2000 and really exploding with the mortgage crisis and everything that happened from it in 2008, the response of capitalist governments around the world was not to help the people at the bottom, but first of all to help the people at the top. The big banks that had brought us to crisis and the way they did that was give them vast amounts of money by dropping interest rates the way banks bor very, very low and flooding the economy with new money. Well, when you make interest rates very low, you create a wonderful opportunity for capitalists. In Istanbul and elsewhere in Turkey, we're going to use them as the example because they're in the news. Those capitalists who have wonderful projects to make profits have been held back because they didn't want to use their own money because there are risks they don't want to take. But using other people's money is attractive. And when the interest rates brought down in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, guess what? The Turkish hustlersexcuscuse me businessmen and womenguess what they did. They went to New York, Berlin, London and Paris and borrowed lots of money at very low interest rates. This was their chance. And they invested them in building high rises in Istanbul. Go there, you'll see them. And in investing in all kinds of risky deals. Guess what? A few years later, now those risks don't work out. There are too many capitalists borrowing too much money in order to invest. And when they all do it at the same time, they can't all sell the output. Apartments that can't be rented, businesses that can't sell. So suddenly the Turkish business community can't pay back the loans. That's the problem. And as the banks in Western Europe, who lent them the money, and the banks in New York who lent them the money, and the rich investors who bought shares in these companies begin to real another capitalist crisis emerging they get rid of their holdings and that means they don't want the Turkish lira anymore, so they dump it, so its price goes down. But when the value of the lira goes down, the debts of the Turks, which are in dollars and euros, become unpayable. And you have the collapse. The problem isn't a minister and the problem isn't a tariff. The problem is the irrational, unstable way to capitalism works. The solution to the crisis of 2008 has yet produced a new crisis in 2018. You don't want a system that takes you from crisis to crisis. Then you've got a problem with capitalism, because that's how it's always worked and that's how it's working now. Then there's another story that has to be told about capitalism's problems that keep deepening and spreading, which is why so many people are critical of that system now, not just us. Here on Economic Update, the story I want to turn to next, the collapse of a bridge in Genoa in Italy. It has now cost, as of the Latest, as of August 20, 43 lives, 43 people died in the collapse of that bridge and many more were injured. And this is a major artery, and you might wondering, gee, a major artery running along the south of France into Italy. Is this a private enterprise that runs it? Uh huh. Turns out the Italian government, which once ran this thing, sold it to a private company. Atlantea is the name of the Private company. And pay attention, because Atlantea was owns lots of things. It owns toll roads in India, Brazil, Chile and Poland. And indeed here in the United States. It recently took possession of the Dulles Greenway outside of Washington D.C. so we will have it too. They also run airports in Nice and Cannes. They also run the tunnel under Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in Europe. And they recently took possession of the Channel Tunnel under the English Channel. They're called the Chunnel. Wow. This ought to concern you. Why? Because when a private company runs a road, it has a profit motive. That's its bottom line. They like to tell us that profit is our bottom line. We're going to maximize profit. And it turns out that one of the ways you can maximize profit is not spend so much on the cost of maintenance. Oh, sure, they'll tell you they would never save on maintenance. But if profit is your number one goal, then it isn't your number one goal to be safe. And the Genoa bridge collapse is a terrible sign of where that can go. And by the way, my problem is not with private ownership of roads, for that matter. If you give it back to the public, guess what? Private companies will make it impossible for the public to have enough money, the government, to run it properly. The government will get be upset. We will be angry at the government. They'll sell it to the private company to run it, which it will do until a bridge collapses. We've been here before. This isn't new. This is an old catastrophe. Back and forth. Government, private, doesn't solve anything. You want to do something about this? Have bridges, airports, tunnels, run collectively by the people who use them and the people who work there. Make it safe for a worker who's part of running this thing to stand up and say, I see cracks, I see problems. There's not maintenance. Then we might have a chance to avoid these kinds of collapses. A worker co op running the roads. Much better idea. Maybe we ought to try it. Two more signs of both capitalism falling apart and the beginning of big movements to change it. Fortune magazine, a friend of Business, in its own August 16 issue, points out the difference between what happened to the salaries of the CEOs of the 350 largest companies in America. That's all of our big, big, big businesses. The CEOs of the 350 biggest companies saw an increase in their salary between 2016 and 2017. You ready? CEOs on average earned $18.9 million in 2017, which was a 17.6% increase over the previous year. And what Fortune does is compare that with what happened to the wages of the workers of those companies. Those 350 big companies, how did they fare in going from 2016 to to 2017? They also had an increase 0.3%. So let me do that again. The CEO's salary went up by 17.6% and the workers they employ went up by 0.3%. Capitalism does not reward us equally, does it? And so you shouldn't be surprised by yet another economic update that I think speaks volumes. The Gallup Poll, the most famous old established polling company in America, did its most recent poll from July 30 to August 5 of 2018 and released it in the middle of the month of August. And it shows the following that I think is worth thinking about. Among self identified Democrats, people who support the Democratic Party, 57% said they view socialism positively. 47% said they view capitalism positively. You heard that right. Favorability to socialism in general across Everybody stable since 2010 at 35 to 39% Folks, that's the same percentage who claim that they like Donald Trump. And the favorability to capitalism has dropped since 2010. The American people are looking at their capitalist system and they're concluding what others have too. It's time to move on. That does it for the first part of our show. But before we meet today's guest, I want to remind you to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel and visit our website democracyatwork.info There you can see more of what we do and how you can get involved. And if you listen to this show as a podcast, you can download the new Economic Update app where you can find recent episodes and archived shows. As always, thanks to our Patreon community, your support makes all that we do possible and we enjoy bringing it to you on your mobile device. Please stay tuned. We'll be right back. Welcome back friends, to the second half of Economic Update. At this time, early each month, I have with me Dr. Harriet Fraad. I'm sure many of you who have been listening to this program are familiar with the kinds of discussions we have. Dr. Fraad is a mental health counselor and hypnotherapist in private practice in New York City. Her work explores the intersections of American personal, economic and political life. Her most recent articles have appeared in Alternate in the book Knowledge and Class and Economics. She appears regularly on the radio TV show Economic Update and also appears on such shows as Redacted Tonight with Lee Camp. Her work can be found at her website, Harriet fraud. That's all one word. Harrietfraud.com welcome to the program.
- [15:44]
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Thanks.
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Okay, I want to start today with a kind of enormous question and ask you to use your expertise to explore it. And the question sort of comes out of American history of the last 30, 40 years, sort of the stunning reality that real wages, the average amount of money in terms of what it can buy, real wages in terms of what you can afford, has been stagnant in the United States for the average American worker for decades. Meanwhile, because the workers have become more productive even though their wages aren't going up, what they produce for their employer, that's what productivity is, has been going up. And there explains the growing wealth gap, the growing income gap. The rich are getting richer and the rest of us are watching. So here's the question that I think lurks in everybody's mind. Why, in the face of this growing inequality, why, in the face that workers are more productive but not participating in the benefits of that greater productivity, why is there not more rebellion? Why is there not more of an upsurge of discontent, of opposition, and particularly the kind of opposition where people are able to identify what's their problem and begin to do something, or at least to talk about it. So I want you to tell us, sort of, if you can, psychologically, what's going on? What makes people respond to a situation like this in an active way, and what makes them not do that?
- [17:24]
B
Well, there's two things that I can think of. One is the idea of American exceptionalism. We are the exception in the world. And actually, for 100 and some years between 1820 and 1970s, we were. If you were white and male, you could make it. If you really tried, as the song goes, because there were jobs aplenty before they were mechanized, robotized and exported and outsourced and so on. So that people got used to that for a long time and sat in dazed despair eating junk food and watching television for a long time before they started reacting.
- [18:10]
A
Are you saying that because they were used to it, even though it stopped.
- [18:14]
B
Say, in the 1970s, ideology stayed the same? You can make it if you really try. If you haven't made it, there's something wrong with you. Now we go on to the part two of what I'm going to say, which is very heavily influenced by a brilliant Marxist philosopher called Althusser, who pointed out that the most effective way to keep people down is to make them feel so bad about themselves if they disobey authority, that they won't Rebel. They won't join together. They won't do anything about it. And there are three institutions that really instill the lines of dominance and subordination from the inside, which is far more effective than calling out the cops or the soldiers. Those are authoritarian families, authoritarian schools, and also importantly, authoritarian education and authoritarian religions. And so that if you start with the family, as John Lennon said in his song Working Class Hero, as soon as you're born, they make you feel small by telling you nothing instead of it all. Because a lot of people have children as a rite of passage, and there are background music, and these people are fighting or hitting them in frustration, and they don't have a sense that this is a delicate, vulnerable human. And they enforce their own dominance. You do it because mommy said so or Daddy said so, or you'll get hit. And so children learn you are nothing. You are in a land of omnipotent dictators, and their needs are important and yours aren't. And children grow up in the hall of mirrors of other people's glances. And how they see themselves is usually how the most influential people in their lives see them. Their parents, or in the United States now, since we don't have good public daycare, they're often shoved into the hands of overworked childcare minders who don't really care about them, and they learn that they're not worth caring about, and then they're not much. Who are they to raise their voice? Nobody's interested in what they need anyway.
- [20:36]
A
So in a way, you're saying that the family and some of these other institutions that I assume we're going to talk about, literally are preparing people to be treated in an abusive way and not to find it unacceptable or right?
- [20:54]
B
Absolutely. And the more authoritarian the family, the more likely the child will discipline him or herself from the inside. Parents usually don't say, you have to do this because I made the decision and I'm in charge. You may find me wrong later, but this is what I have to do. And you have to obey. That's the nature of the beast. No, this is right. You are bad. And so children take that in. I am bad. Who am I to raise my head against omnipotent authority? And then it goes on. It's reinforced if you read the child rearing texts of fundamentalists, the most popular being Dare to Discipline and the Strong Willed Child. The idea is break the child's will, show them who's boss. Physical punishment is encouraged, leaving little marks. That's fine. And often the punishment starts in the crib and to make the child feel, you are nobody. I am omnipotent. Don't you dare raise your head. You are no one. And so when injustice is around, just what you feel, depressed. The suicide rate has jumped. Drug rate is wild. Last year it went up. 72,000 people died of overdoses because they can feel better about themselves by taking drugs. Then you have authoritarian schooling where the teacher is boss. You have to shut up and obey. And the worst is the religious homeschooling movement and the religious schooling movement, which Betty devost most champions. Where the religious homeschooling is. You never escape from your parents. You don't go into and learn that other people are different. You don't have different kinds of discipline and different kinds of children.
- [22:54]
A
You're kept in the same.
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Kept in the same hotbed of oppression. And you don't learn different, differently to use proper English. But it's across the board. You know, there are very interesting studies by Hess and Shipman who took African American parents of different income groups and tested them with the same tests. They asked questions like, what do you tell your child on the first day of school, the poorer ones versus the richer ones? The poorer ones said, you obey now that teacher is your boss, and you better obey now you do what she says and don't you get in trouble. Whereas the richer one tended to say, the teacher's there to help you. If you need her or him, please ask a question. This is about you. They're there to help you. And the poorer parents, if given an Etch A Sketch, a little task where the kid has to do something, they'd say, no, no. If the parent, if they did something that the parent felt wasn't helping them create what they wanted, Whereas the wealthier parents would say, no, dear, if you turn it to the right, then it does this, instilling good vocabulary, self power, and so on. It's training for submissive versus stronger power in the society. And this is training that goes inside. And it's very powerful. And I looked at, in trying to answer this question for myself, I looked at the United States and compared it to a country like France where they have at least as much ethnic diversity as we do and children are born into poverty, although the government programs take them out of poverty more frequently, but they're both equally born into poverty. And I thought, what's different? Why are the French in the streets defending their rights?
- [24:51]
A
The French are famous for the minute they get a bit of a provocation of your threatening welfare or standards of living or conditions of work. They go right into the streets to make it clear.
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B
Yeah. Macron, the current Prime Minister, tried to instill cuts in labor rights. Hundreds of thousands poured into the streets. So it was impossible. Pilots at Air France were discriminated against. They wouldn't fly. Taxis were threatened, they parked in the runways, stopped the society. Why?
- [25:26]
A
So how. How do you account for the rebelliousness, let's call it, of working people in France compared to the relative passivity here?
- [25:37]
B
Yes. Well, what I could think of is if you look at the three things that Althusser discovered that police people internally, the first is the family. While preschool education is universal in France by the age of three, and childcare is available before that for a dollar an hour equivalent in euros. So that 100% of French children are in quality child care, most often from 7 in the morning to 7 at night, when they return to their parents fed and in their outfit, they presented themselves in and with a day. They go through their child care with the same children year after year till they finish high school. And their basic bonds are formed with their peers, not necessarily with their parents. They're well behaved. They're much more well behaved than American children, but they relate to their peers as their support group. And they never had the period of prosperity, which meant that you could make it if you really try. If you're white and male, the only way you could change your position in society is if you join with others. And their parenting system by a very excellent quality child daycare system enhanced that also. Religion is a joke in France. Here, everybody has to pretend they believe in God to run for office. And evangelicals capture a lot of publicity and a lot of pressure, which is why we don't have sex education in the schools and why they do. And so that religion's dominance is not the same. If you look at French films, the priest is usually a laughingstock, even though it's ostensibly Catholic country. They made a big deal when the archbishop died in the arms of a prostitute, said he later. He was trying to save her at the time. But the French newspapers all made quite the joke of it. So that they don't have the kind of religious inculcation of obedience in a hierarchy, because we can see from the Catholic Church that if you have an unaccountable hierarchy, those the children are in trouble.
- [28:06]
A
I think what you're saying, if I can condense it, is that the success here of imposing on the working people a difficult life situation for 40 years, the answer is it's been prepared by the authoritarian structure of family, school and religion and that. That's the core of it.
- [28:28]
B
That's right. And that gets you when you're young enough not to even know what's happening to you.
- [28:34]
A
We've come to the end of this conversation. It is something that we'll continue, if you're interested, by going to patreon.com economicupdate where we'll keep the conversation going. Otherwise, I look forward to talking with you again next week.