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Welcome, friends, to another edition of 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, and I hope that that has prepared me to offer you these updates. You know, we talk a lot about capitalism, the system we live with and under on this program. And I want to stress today in our program how capitalism has lots of problems, like all economic systems always did, and that it solves those problems most of the time. But again, like all economic system, the way it solves its problems often provoke even bigger problems. And eventually that process produces a set of problems it can't solve and then the system passes out of existence. That's what happened to slavery, what happened to feudalism, what happened to all the systems before. And it's reasonable to look at capitalism as likely repeating that process. So here are some examples of how that plays out in our concrete world. I want to start with something that may surprise you. Marijuana. Marijuana use has been legal the longest time in two states, Colorado and Washington. And that has allowed some studies to be done about what the effects are of legalizing marijuana since the rest of the country, or most of the rest of the country either hasn't done it yet or did it later than Colorado and Washington. And so my attention was caught by a report in the police journal, certainly a well structured and believable Source, that from 2010 to 2015, this is the period of time they studied things in Colorado and Washington changed dramatically. And here's what it was that caught my attention. The number of arrests for marijuana basically disappeared because it was legalized, which allowed the police to do all kinds of other work so that the arrests for burglary and auto theft, particularly things that really do annoy people and shake up your life if you get burgled or if you lose your car, were much more in evidence in those two states. That is, the police went from marijuana to, to other things that the Police Journal thought were more important. Then another study was done. And in this one, in the year 2016, about 600,000 people were arrested. In other states where it isn't legal yet, 600,000 people were arrested for simple marijuana possession. Now here's what I want everyone to think. 600,000 people arrested for simple marijuana possession. That is more people arrested than were arrested for all violent crimes in 2016. So imagine if the rest of the country had done what Colorado and Washington had. Stop criminalizing simple possession and have Those cops work on the issues of violent crime, which for almost everyone I know, is a much more serious concern. As I looked into it more, I discovered something else. The big surges in arrests for simple possession happened at two interesting times, as a result of the Nixon administration, which has since admitted that it criminalized marijuana in order to throw the maximum number of people of color and young radical people who were the smokers in those days in jail so they couldn't vote, so they were out of political action. And the second time there was a surge was when President Clinton got rid of the welfare system. You notice the attempts of the system to avoid taxing rich people for all kinds of socially useful purposes, to allow Republicans who are against taxing rich people more than anybody else, to stay in power under Nixon and to curry favor with them. Which is why Clinton got rid of welfare, had the peculiar effect of incarcerating huge numbers of people, distracting police from the jobs we need them more to do. And here comes the kicker. What do we do with all the people we arrested? We put them in jails. And that costs 30,000 to $40,000 a year per inmate. And there's why the taxes went up so badly for many of us. You notice the system shoots itself in the foot. It solves its contradictions, but often by making them worse. Here's another way the system works that kind of undercuts itself. I wanted to bring you into a familiarity with a company. My guess is you never heard of Jab Holding. Well, why would you not have heard of it? Because it's based in Luxembourg in Europe, and the name means kind of nothing. I'm now going to read to you some of the companies that you are familiar with that are owned by this Luxembourg capitalist. Here we go. Ready? Krispy Kreme doughnut shops. 1400 in the US and in 32 other countries. It just bought Insomnia Cookies. That's 135 shops across America. What else does Jab holding own? Here we go. Pete's Coffee, Panera Sandwich Shop, Snapple Beverages, Dr. Pepper Beverages, Au Bon Pain, a sandwich shop. And Pret au Manger, another sandwich shop. What is going on here? Is the conglomeration. Huge corporations buying up smaller ones. We used to call that monopolizing. And then they can play off workers in one place after another. If workers in one of these businesses fight for a decent wage, say $15 an hour, they can say, well, we'll close those shops. We'll put our investment in another shop in another country, in another place, and wait out These workers till they have no job at all and then are willing to work for less money, etc. Workers have no comparable organization that can fight that. And that's why wages don't go up. No mystery there. That's why we have economic recovery. That leaves most people out because of the conglomeration of capitalism. It produces tensions and conflicts between capitalists and workers because of the unequal way they go about in their antagonistic relationship, trying to survive and trying to grow. As if to illustrate it in another way, my attention was caught by an article in the British newspaper the Guardian July 19 to be particular about how efforts by workers in India in clothing factories particularly, have been fought with beatings. Really a terrible story, but I'm not interested so much in the details. It's not about India or even about clothing. It's about the way this system works, that the advantage to profits is if you can keep your wages down. And the advantage to the worker is, of course, to take care of his or her family by having more wages to afford a decent home, to afford a proper diet, send your kids to school. So what the workers need confronts the employer as a problem. And what the employer wants more of profit confronts the worker as a problem. And if they're not nice and if they get on each other's nerves, they treat each other in a horrible way. But the problem is the capitalist has much more resources at his disposal to fight this fight than workers do. It's the way this system works, and it produces anger and bitterness. From India to the Krispy Kreme parlor in your neighborhood. There's another way capitalism works. Capitalists need financing, and so they turn to banks. Banks need corporations because that's the most lucrative lender relationship they can have. So there's a cozying up between them. And that, of course, builds out of control when the profits make them behave in ways that are, if not illegal, certainly unethical. And I wanted to give you an example that you might find interesting. Perhaps you've never heard of the Signature bank in New York City. Let me introduce it to you. What's famous about relatively small bank, big enough deals in hundreds of millions of dollars, but not one that you've heard of. Well, let's go through some of the things you might find interesting. It is a major lender to the Donald Trump family. It is a major lender to the Kushner family, father and son. Kushner is Trump's son in law. It has also lent significant amount of money to Mr. Cohen, who used to be Mr. Trump's lawyer, including for his $17 million apartment in 2015. Sitting on the board of directors of the Signature bank, it turns out from 2011 to 2013 was one in Ivanka Trump. Current board members include Alphonse D', Amato, former Republican senator from New York. That might not surprise you. He's a friend of Trump's. But Barney Frank, that might surprise you. He was the author of the Dodd Frank bill to rein in banks from doing illegal and unethical things. Mr. Frank sits on the board of the Signature bank, and he received $280,000 in stock for joining the board, plus annual fees of $60,000 from the bank. The chairman of the board, Scott Shea, was a former director of the bank Hapo Alim, that is an Israeli bank that has been involved in all kinds of real estate deals, problems with Palestinian land, problems being taken from Palestinians. You get the picture. Close ties between the government and a private bank. Between a private bank and real estate dealings and holdings. You get the picture. I think that's what Mr. Trump meant when he talked about draining the swamp. He's not draining it, he's filling it up. But I don't want to leave the impression that in all of these contradictions and internal problems solved creating new problems that capitalism displays, that there aren't also the kinds of problems that produce a pushback from people who demand something better than capitalism. And I want to conclude the first half of today's program by telling you about one of those. The country of New Zealand recently passed a law, and the law provides 10 days of paid leave for victims of domestic violence. That's right. Any victim of domestic violence can go to. I was about to say his or her, but it's mostly hers that are involved here as victims to her employer and must be given 10 days of paid leave to move to find psychological and other supports for children and herself and so on. The members of Parliament in New Zealand voted 63 to 57 to pass this law. It was led by the Green Party Member of Parliament, Jan Logie. New Zealand is not the only country to do that. It does exist in a few others. Indeed, in Canada, Manitoba and Ontario have similar laws. They don't provide as many days, but they're close. Even in Australia, there was a bill to give five days. Okay, what's going on here? Well, domestic violence is a tragedy, but it's also something that really hampers the productivity of the victim in terms of what job she can perform. And it leaves scars on the children that will affect their productivity throughout a lifetime. It is a very bad thing for capitalism. And yet it took a long time now to deal with this, to try to cope with this, to give women, who are the victims, a chance to fix the damage or at least limit it from what it might others have been. And I was struck in conclusion by all those who voted against it. And here's where the arguments they gave, I found them stunning. One, that the cost of this would be too big a burden on middle and small businesses. Notice the interesting assumption that the cost of this would have to be borne by the small businesses. If you had any courage, Mr. Member of Parliament, you could pass a tax on the big businesses to compensate the small businesses for doing something that the whole society needs. But you can't even think like that, can you? You think anything done for people who need it is going to be a burden on people, little people, because you're protecting the big ones, even though you don't seem to know it. In any case, it wasn't enough. And the people of New Zealand, through their elected representatives, said, this has to stop. We have to help these people. It's a little bit like outlawing child labor. We've come to the end of the first half of today's Economic Update. I want to remind you that you will continue in the second half with our guest. Please remember also to go to the YouTube channel. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Check out democracyatwork.info and a particular thanks to our Patreon community for the support they give us. Stay tuned. We'll be right back. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's Economic Update. I'm very pleased today to have as my guests two people whose work I've admired and on occasion, even participated in. The first is Matt Christman, and the second is Will Menaker. And they are both key folks in making a phenomena happen that I think many of you have probably heard about. Chapel Trap House, a remarkable kind of mixture which they're going to explain to us, that puts together comedy but serious social criticism all at the same time in a remarkable mix. And I want to talk about what they do, why it's grown the way it has, and what it tells us about what's happening here in the United States. So welcome, gentlemen.