← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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- [00:11]
A
Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Debts, jobs, incomes, the future for us and for our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor all my adult life, a professor of economics, and I hope that has prepared me to offer these updates as to what's happening in the economy we all depend on, and that is in deeper and deeper trouble as we do. I want to begin today with a shout out to something changing America. I'm talking about the wave of strikes. You know, now that the working class of the American society has understood that a sequence of Republicans and Democrats, each one outdoing the other, claiming to be for working people, for the middle class, for the needs of average Americans, have not been able to deliver if even they wanted to. And so they're beginning to understand an ancient historical truth. The only way the working class can assure its own well being and that of its children is if it acts on its own behalf. Striking is a way that workers show their solidarity, get together which is their strongest suit, and fight for what they need. And so it is honorable for us to recognize and appreciate that 53,000 employees of the University of California began a strike May 7th through 9th in order to demand the kinds of decent salaries and decent working conditions that should have been given to them by those in charge of this institution, but wasn't available because the business community and the rich won't pay the taxes and the politicians they put in office will do nothing about it. So the workers themselves have to. The American Federation of State, county and municipal employees, Local 3299, the California Nurses association, and another union under CWA University Professional and Technical Employees organize this strike. Strikes are difficult. Strikes take a long time. Strikes require workers to show solidarity and to become aware that only by their own actions can they make sure that the promises they gave to themselves and their children will not be broken by an economic system that already is broken. I want also to correct a small point I made in my discussions of Uber over recent weeks. Yes, Uber is simply a way to get around the rules governing taxi drivers. Rules designed to protect us, the public, by making sure taxi drivers are vetted, making sure their cars are insured, making sure their cars are in mechanical order so we don't take risks. Uber gets around all of that, as I explained. Nothing new about it. The technology is not what's important. It's getting around the taxi commission in every city and state. That's what's their profit model. But I neglected to mention that Uber doesn't stop at all of that if it can make even more money by pressing down what they actually pay Uber drivers to. They do that too in order to out compete the taxi companies by charging less in some situations because they have fewer costs and because they squeeze drivers more so poor people have a chance to get a ride from an Uber that's cheaper than a taxi company. That has to be acknowledged. But of course if there were the public transportation system that we need and want, it would be a much cheaper way of moving people, giving them the transportation they need and deserve without ripping us off, either by private companies like Uber or by overcharging through the taxi system. It's a sad comment on the second best that this country increasingly imposes on people. Let me turn now to the regular updates that I want to discuss with you briefly today. The first came across my desk this last week and it's so shocking to me that I thought it would be interesting to you. I learned that since 2005, wealthy Americans, or Americans willing to pay the extra price of the expensive insurance, can buy insurance policies covering fire damage to their homes. That includes the provision by the insurance company of a firefighting team that will come to your house or your business if and when you're threatened by fire. In other words, where the average American citizen, you and me, relies on the local fire department to protect us richer people, the very ones who won't pay the taxes to support the fire department, are going around by buying private fire departments through their insurance company. Chubb, one of the high end of the insurance companies in America, is one such company and it had to provide firefighters to to many homes in the Sonoma, California area when they had their bad fires last autumn. And so it struck me that here are the wealthy impoverishing public services for everybody else and then noticing that the quality of the service is not what they want, will not be democratic or patriotic, but by helping improve the surface for everybody. No, no no no, no. Instead they have found a way to save more on taxes than it costs them to have a private fire department just for them. It reminded me also, since I'm an economics professor of a very ancient debate. It happened 5,000 years ago in Greece and it involved Plato and Socrates, often considered founders of Western philosophy. They argued in both cases, both men, against markets. Why? Because markets divide people. In my example, the market, if we allow it to be the way you get fire protection, allows rich people to buy it and poor people not to. It distributes fire protection according to how much money you have, as opposed to distributing fire protection as a civic obligation the community has equally to everyone in the community. Plato and Socrates argued social cohesion, holding a community together, is undone by markets. And on those grounds, they opposed markets as contrary to what society needs. Let me say that again. Plato and Socrates agreed that markets are socially disruptive institutions. Maybe we ought to go back and read that stuff once again. Another shocker this last week, it turns out that the Koch brothers threw their Koch foundation, were exposed giving a lot of money to George Mason University. It turns out that for years they were given in exchange for their money, influence over hiring of professors in the economics department and elsewhere. This is a university that likewise maintains close ties to the Trump administration. Having private corporations give money to universities is a serious problem, and always has been. To imagine that the universities needing this money, wanting this money, do not seek the favor of these wealthy donors is naive and silly. Of course they do. They always have. But to give them direct influence over hiring professors, that kind of takes it another step. It makes a mockery of the claim that academic institutions are open, objective. There's no one on the left comparable in their donations to what the Koch brothers are doing. Unions aren't doing this. Workers can't do it. Big corporations and the super wealthy like the Koch brothers are in a position to do it. And, and they're doing it big time. That controls the curriculum our students learn from. It controls what people understand and how they think. It has nothing to do with a democratic educational system. It is the negation of all of that. Another sign in the wind on the opposite side, for the first time, fast food joint workers have won an election to establish a union of fast food workers. That's right. McDonald's said it couldn't be done. Burger King was sure it wouldn't happen, but it did. Because America is changing. And working people, as the workers at the University of California have understood, have to begin to take their own destiny into their own hands. Thus it was that at the Burgerville fast food joint in Portland, Oregon, workers recently voted 18 to 4 with three abstentions to form a union. This is the first to do that since The Fight for 15 struggle began five years ago. Workers realizing they have to band together to confront their employer as a unified group to get the kind of salaries, working conditions that working people need. Hats off to people with that courage, with that solidarity. Of course, now, having voted to join a union, they must bargain with the employer, allowing the employer all kinds of stalling techniques and other methods. To try to undo this victory of the workers by blocking, postponing, delaying a union contract. But the workers are smart. They've shown by this 18 to 4 victory that they are very strong. Maybe they will be able to bargain with their employer. Maybe they'll have to strike to give the employer the understanding that the days of telling workers will what to do and when to do and how much you're not going to pay them, those are over. Working people are not marching to the tunes that once enthralled them. And this country is changing. My attention this last week was also caught by the results of a poll. And there's almost a kind of sadness that comes over me in reporting this to you. It was released on May 1 by the Cigna Insurance Company, a poll conducted by Cigna and Ipsos, another famous polling company. And they used the UCLA Loneliness Index, an index of how people feel, whether they feel lonely, isolated, alone in life. And they show in their polling just released that over 50% of Americans feel seriously lonely with the mental and physical health effects that go with that. Why am I reporting this to you? This is a program about economics. Yes, well, economics includes what the economy does to people. And economics also includes what happens to an economy when people are in trouble, mentally or physically. What this poll shows us is that the American people are in very deep trouble. You know, when you want to understand whether we have recovered from the crash of 2008 and 9 in our economy, you tend to look at GDP and other numbers that economists like to talk about. But they're not the only numbers that measure, particularly measure what counts. 50% over of Americans find themselves lonely now, many of them lonelier than they have ever felt. That too is a result of the crash of 2008 and and all its consequences. That too is a measurement of the recovery we don't have for most Americans from that crash. And you know, when you take many things away from people so that they feel isolated, alone and lonely, you know, they hold on to what little they have left and they discover maybe that they have to hold on more to the fact that they are white, that they are U.S. citizens, that they are churchgoers. And so the tendency might develop to be hostile and critical towards the people who aren't white, who aren't U.S. citizens and who don't go to your church. It's the little you have to hold onto. It's what makes you feel maybe just for a little bit less lonely. Economic downturns have always threatened large numbers of people with economic decline with Loss with serious depression. Economic, but also mental, physical. That's why economic downturns are associated with the rise of scapegoatism. Turning against your fellow citizen, blaming him or her for the troubles you find difficult to account for in any other way, and that scare you in the news last week was a particularly horrific example of where this can go. This one happened in Great Britain, in England. It's there called the Windrush scandal. And for those of you that don't know about it, let me briefly summarize. Back in 1948, shortly after the end of World War II, Britain had to set around rebuilding itself. The city of London had been bombed by German rockets. England had gone through terrible sufferings and it needed, literally, to rebuild its society. It appealed to and welcomed roughly 50,000 West Indian immigrants who left the Caribbean and went to England to work. They were part of the British Empire, welcomed at the time because their labor was going to help rebuild England. And they've lived in England and worked in England over the last 60 years. In the rush of the British government to serve the capitalist class in England by blaming the collapse of capitalism, not on a system that broke down in 2008, not on a system that has lowered the wages of British people for the last decade, not the system that is now about to implode as a result of Brexit. No, no. Blame it on immigrants was the achievement of the May government. Theresa May was Home Secretary before she became Prime Minister. In both capacities, she has waged a war against West Indian immigrants. It went so far as to say that if one of those were Windrush fellows, men or women, couldn't come up with five or six documents to prove they were in the country illegally. After 50 to 60 years of labor rebuilding England, they would be deported. And some were, and many were threatened with it. The current Home Secretary, or the recently departed Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, went even further and she was forced to resign as the British people rose up and said, this is outrageous. You're going to deport people who helped rebuild England in your rush to blame people whose skin is brown and who can be portrayed as immigrants. Anything to save the system from getting the criticism it so badly deserves. Well, the Windrush scandal is still roiling British politics as the scandal of what Mr. Trump is doing to immigrants here is doing in the United States and will continue to do it should be a warning to everyone. My attention was also caught last week by a speech given by Hillary Clinton. She explained that her endorsement of capitalism and portrayal of her as A capitalist hurt her with Democratic primary voters in 2016. She said, and I'm virtually quoting, capitalism's reputation is pretty much in tatters. Big companies, she even says, are disrupting what she calls the our economy by promoting inequality. And she is in favor of capitalism with, quote, appropriate regulation and quote, appropriate accountability. Hello Mrs. Clinton, we've been having appropriate regulation and appropriate accountability often brought to us by Democratic politicians to just like you for a hundred years and look where we are. It doesn't work. Does, hasn't worked. Our inequality, promoted both by Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump administrations one after the other, is worse than it has been in a century. The instability of our economy, horrific. The inequalities percolating down, the loneliness I just summarized for you. Capitalism is the problem. And Mrs. Clinton, if you really want to suggest that the socialist ideas that led many Democrats to not vote for you is a terrible problem, are you asking them to leave the Democratic Party? Do you think you have a chance? Folks like you, if they did, do you count on them to follow this advice? And true to form, the Republicans immediately seized upon what she said to try to portray the Democrats, her included, as socialists with that care for detail that they typically exhibit. I want to take a moment to thank particularly not only those of you that are watching, but particularly our Patreon community. Each of you keeps this show going. The entire video program is available exclusively for our patrons along with other bonus content you will not find anywhere. We recently completed a four part series on Karl Marx whose 200th anniversary of his birth is this year. And that four part series which will be released quarter after quarter across the month of May. His anniversary attempts to show what the insights were that you get from the Marxian tradition, what the relevance is today, what the meaning is today. It's a special service we produced for our Patreon supporters. Be sure to check us out on Patreon, that's P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com EconomicUpdate or visit us at either of our two websites, rdwolf.com with two Fs or democracyatwork.info and be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube. If you are a fan of this program, be sure to hit the subscribe button below. You will be notified whenever new content is posted on our channel. You can also subscribe on Apple Podcast and Google Play. If you are a station, a radio station, please get in touch with us so that we can list you on our website. And finally, I want to remind you again about Puerto Rico Forward, our newest podcast, available on Apple Podcasts and Google Play. Our last updates have to do with two things. First, Martin Winterkorn, he used to be the CEO of vw. He was indicted this last week by Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General of the United States President, for placing emissions testing evasion devices onto VW diesel and other vehicles, 11 million of them across the world and a large number here in the United States. Of course, this kind of indictment is a bit of theater since Germany will not extradite Mr. Winterkorn, who lives there now. So this is publicity hound hunting and not much else. But there's more to this. Blaming an individual for a problem is bizarre. It's very normal in capitalist society because capitalist society is a kind of religion where God is in the hands of or played by the corporations and they have to be kept free and clear. The system that ties these corporations together, capitalism has to be kept out of the light of any criticism. So we blame individuals, if we blame anybody at all. The first defense of the corporation, we didn't do anything. Second defense, it was a few bad apples. Third defense, it was the leadership. But it's always this individual or that individual. We're not going to solve the problem of these corporations by blaming individuals. If we do, they will resign, as Mr. Winterkorn did, or we even put them in jail, which sometimes rarely happens, and they will be replaced by other people who behave in the same way, because the system has its ways of rewarding you for this bad behavior and punishing you if you don't. Automobiles pollute. They pollute so badly that Germany, like many other countries, installed emissions control devices, made them mandatory to save society from the bad results of automobile pollution. But these companies wanted to profit off of this situation because that's what they're in business to profit. So they came up with defeat devices, ways they could avoid putting in a device that might slow the car down or slow its acceleration down so they could still sell them while pretending to do what the society needed for the profits of the small number of people that are shareholders of vw. All of us suffer more lung disease, more emphysema for lung cancer, and everything else that we know comes from this pollution. The system is no good. If you want to run businesses, the workers in them and the public served by them should together run them, because that's a much better chance that society's concerns, our concerns, get on the table when they make their decisions. The tiny number of people who run corporations now have shown that leaving the running of capitalism in the hands of capitalists is not the way to go. Thank you all. We have come to the end of the first half of Economic Update. I hope you found these updates interesting. I am sure you will find the interview that follows even more interesting and I ask you therefore to stay with us. We will be right back. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. Today's discussion with my usual guest. At the beginning of each month, Dr. Harriet Fraad will focus on families. What is happening to the family? What is the relationship between what's happening to families and what's happening to the capitalist economy we live in? And how all that relates to the so called family values that we claim is a central part of politics in the United States and elsewhere. Let me begin by introducing my guest for those of you who do not already know her. Dr. Harriet 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 appeared in Alternate and in the book Knowledge Class and Marxism Without Guarantees. She appears regularly on TV shows such as this Economic Update and also on programs like Redacted Tonight with lee Camp on RTTV. Her work can also be found on her website, harrietfraud. That's f r a a d harrietfraud.com it is a pleasure to welcome Harriet Fraud to this program this month.
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B
It's a pleasure to be here.
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A
Okay, let's jump right in. Many people have argued that the family is in some sort of trouble. That whether you believe that the family needs to be revived, whether you believe that it has to be rescued from what's happening in society, critics of the family, supporters of the family, everyone seems to agree that there's some sort of problem with families. And the disagreement then comes as to why and what ought to be done about it. So let's begin and have you tell us what's your sense of what's happening to the family, particularly here in the United States these days?
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B
Well, what's happening to the family in the United States is that it's basically failing now. The family is still the most basic emotional unit for support, particularly among children. And children are the most in trouble in the United States. One in six doesn't have enough to eat. They are the poorest Americans. Single mothers are the second poorest. So the family of a single mother and a child is in the deepest trouble of all. Now all families are in trouble for the first time in American history. The majority of people who they consider of prime fertility, age 18, between 18 and 35 years old, are not married now. They're not married because they don't have the security and stability with which to plan. There's a very good book by Jennifer Silva on what has happened, which is that life is too precarious for couples to talk about and think about a future together. Because for the mass of people, even though a lot of people have jobs that didn't used to, they don't have jobs that could earn much of a living for one, no less for a family. And we don't have what other countries do to support families. This is a phenomenon across the board in developed economies. However, America is in the most trouble because we don't help people.
- [31:50]
A
All right, so let me stop you and pick at something which, you know, bear with me, I'm an economist. We know that jobs have become less secure than they have ever been. England, they have something called zero hours work. Large numbers of people in England are under zero hours contract. What that means is the employer is free to give and take hours from one week to the next. Workers have no idea what their situation will be in terms of their time, their energy, their personal life, their income. I mean the level of insecurity built inand we know the same is true in this country, particularly in the mass jobs in retailing, in fast food, in the growth sectors like Amazon type distribution systems. So the very precarity, the very uncertainty, the very irregularity coupled with the stagnant wages that you're telling us has fundamentally disrupted not just the existing family, but the very idea of family in the upcoming generation.
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B
That's right. The biggest employer in the United States is Walmart. There is no guarantee. So that planning a future together when you don't even know if you'll be able to survive very well is terrifying. And people don't do it. They have an instinctual aversion to it. They stay away as they did in the last Great Depression. Certain groups haven't really revived at all. That's single mothers who have the worst credit, so that they have to go to the most risky and usurious overcharging lenders are in the most trouble of all. And those are 42% of American children are born to unmarried parents. So you have a terrible situation, particularly for children who need the family the most. Also, if you look at it, most families, most marriages at any rate, and in separation, if not divorce, legal separation or divorce is 50% people without assets to fight over just Separate. Other people don't get married. So that institution is on life supports and they're taking away the supports. So it's dying.
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A
So it puts children in a particularly vulnerable situation. Because if it's already difficult, as you point out, to plan to have a married life with some stability and security, then the decision to have children on top of being married is doubly problematic.
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B
It is. The most frequent kind of marriage that's still happening is married people without children. That's the biggest new development because it's too hard to afford them. We don't have the childcare, other countries do. We don't have the supports. We don't have maternity and paternity leaves. We just don't have the conditions that would make a family possible.
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A
All right, again, let me draw this out. We live in a society where the bulk of people have a job in the private sector. It is insecure. It has fewer benefits than it always has. It is uncertain. And all the things we've just said, and now you're telling me the same society that subjects the family to this kind of dissolving set of circumstances is also the society that provides the least amount of public support for the family. So we're hitting the family two shots, one through the job in the private sector and the second one from the government services which are not there to, to help them. They're not even there as much as in other societies which don't even have this level of family dissolution. It means we're putting families under an unbelievable pressure. And so we shouldn't in a sense be surprised at your statistics about how the family is disappearing or failing.
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B
Well, what's made people very confused is that the right wing doesn't want to take pay the taxes. They just got a big generous tax cut for the top. They don't want to pay for quality child care, maternity and paternity leaves, family leave, paid vacations, child supports, child nutrition is even being cut back. And so they want to find a ruse. Now they can't have the slogan make us even richer. That won't work. They say family values, just like at the time of Horace Mann when public education was starting. They said, no, that disrupts the family's authority. Ronald Reagan, who started this Republican right wing stuff, said he denied every child in America Head Start, which was going to pass. He vetoed that bill that would have passed Head Start for everyone on the basis that it interfered with the family program so that the family is a cover for right wing accumulation of even more by cutting the Already inadequate existing programs that support families and children. And at the same time as they deny them, they promote family values. Of course it's a failure. The red states have even more divorces than the blue states. They can't sustain marriage even in a worse way. But nonetheless, this is what happens.
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A
Well, you're a psychotherapist, a psychologist, you study that. You're telling us that on the one hand, the system is crushing the family, and the very people most gung ho to let corporations do what they want to relieve wealthy and rich people and corporations from taxes, the same people that are making this crushing of the family happen present themselves publicly as champions of family values. This is extraordinary. You're doing the damage and then become the critic of the damage you just did. How does this work?
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B
Well, you ascribe the damage not to the fact that you've withdrawn crucial life support, but there's something wrong with the patient. This is a sick patient, an immoral. This is immorality. There's a guy named Murray who wrote what Happened to American Families? And he says that white workers have joined their African American brothers and sisters in their immorality, having children outside of marriage and not working enough out of laziness, not out of unemployment.
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A
Aha. So that the breakdown of the family isn't the result of all the economic conditions we've just summarized, but lies instead in the internal moral lacks of individuals.
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Which should be buttressed by fanatical giving, no matter how poor you are, to the evangelical movement because they have family.
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Values, they'll restore the family.
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Even though, you know, Jimmy Swaggart was found twice with prostitutes who reported him because he didn't pay, because he thought what he was doing was immoral. They didn't deserve the money. One of the trustees of Liberty University was found dead, hanging himself because there's an erotic thing out of hanging yourself in a rubber suit and so on. Falwell's wife gave free cell phones to coeds so she could call them at night, you know, notwithstanding, just like Trump, who was the hero of the evangelical movement, who is the pussy grabber in chief and has three wives and doesn't pay his taxes and so on. That there's this disconnect. But people are desperate to somehow think they can be saved from the dissolution of a basic emotional support. Because whether I think it's a great idea to depend so much on a family, I absolutely don't. I know that it needs other supports. That is what most people have. And one of the signs of the dissolution is A huge increase in foster care. 64,000 people died last year of overdoses, opioid overdoses primarily. Many of them were parents. When they're dead, their children go into the foster care system. They take drugs in part because they can't deal with the difficulties of their lives with their children. Then they die and their children are in foster care. Or maybe one out of 10 children lives with a grandparent because their parents can't take care of them. 60% of people of my generation help support their children and grandchildren because we got the American dream if we were white and attached to males and they didn't get it, they don't have that anymore.
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A
Let me ask your comment. As I listen to you, it strikes me that the conservatives and Republicans have hit upon a genius politics. You support big corporations and the rich who give you loads of money for your movements and your politicians, but they destroy the family by their behavior of cutting wages and destroying the benefits and cutting government services. Then you turn around and celebrate the family, the thing that's dissolving, the thing that people miss, the thing that people want to hold on to. You say you will champion bringing it back. So you make the victims of your economic policy still vote for you as the champion of the family so that you can continue to support the tax cuts and the corporate behavior that causes the problem. This is a genius. You hold on to the votes of the very people that you're helping to damage by your economics.
- [42:24]
B
That's right.
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A
Stunning.
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B
They claim that territory. Now, I think that progressives need to claim that territory and say that the family's important, that women's work in the household is important, that as women's liberation has allowed women to have fuller lives, that house domestic labor and menial labor should be well paid and women should be honored, which the right wing does a very clever thing. It's like country music, you know, the woman is revered for being a mother. For all the things you gave me, mom, no charge, and so on. But at the same time, who's supporting mom for all the things you give? No support for you. That. That's the other part. And partly the progressives have not done enough on personal life and emphasizing the importance of supporting families and children.
- [43:18]
A
All right, well, tell us a little bit about, because I know you've discussed this with me, the kinds of support that other countries are already giving, that the United States could give, that all countries could give. Because if capitalism as a system is unable or unwilling to pay the kinds of wages to allow the traditional family to Survive, which clearly you've shown us is the case. Well then, what kinds of alternative family units which are already happening? The couples without children, the people who are not coupling up in the normal ways that we have. I shouldn't call it normal. The traditional ways. What kind of supports do countries have? What kind of supports should we think about to actually help people form and sustain relationships that are important if we're destroying the family upon which they have relied?
- [44:19]
B
Well, we should think about the measures that just about every other country is taking. The United States is at the very bottom, or one higher than the worst among the 30 OECD nations, the wealthier nations that are not all wealthy. It includes Mexico, it includes Hungary and Slovakia. Hardly wealthy countries. However, we're at the bottom, we're one away from the bottom. And that's because these other countries provide services. We are the only ones that do not provide any free maternity leave or paternity leave leaves that are compensated by the government. So the companies are not held back in their profiteering by compensating for this.
- [45:10]
A
In other words, we're the only ones. There's an important point here, though. There are private companies who offer those things in the United States. But what is lacking in this country, if I understand it, is there's no law, there's no mandate mandating that. This is a requirement to give every couple or every young person that is contemplating parenting right that that must be given as a human right, as a right of an adult. Other countries make this mandatory. The United States refuses to do this. It's extraordinary.
- [45:47]
B
We're the only ones without maternity leave or paternity leave, without paid maternity and care without preschool, well, quality preschool. 70% of the countries give preschool to 3 year olds.
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A
Again, mandating that is an availability.
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B
100% of 3 year olds on are given that in France, 98% in places like the Netherlands or Sweden or Denmark or Finland or so on. We are way behind in that. We also don't have the kind of subsidized quality after school and summer programs that these other nations have. So children are playing in the street or left alone because their parents have to work. We also have a very bad welfare system. And the SNAP program, which was supplemental nutrition and food stamps, is being converted to a much more difficult program as it is for welfare. You have to fill out so many different forms that you'd have to have a PhD in form filling to do this. And so people give up. Also they have to report regularly, even if they have a BA and know how to do it, they have to take the same class over and over again about how to fill out a job application, how to write a resume. If their kid is sick and they can't go to it, they're cut. So they can't go to these required classes over and over again that don't get them jobs. There's a level of harassment that is now being extended to food stamp subscribers. And one out of four families in the United States gets food stamps. Things are so bad for families that they need that and they're not getting it. And so now they will be starving. One out of six kids is hungry. They call it food scarcity instead of hunger, but it's hunger.
- [47:51]
A
Tell me what kinds of support in realms like housing and the medical structure exists? And what would you suggest, even if it doesn't exist somewhere, as a way of reconstituting new forms of family to provide what is no longer available because the system capitalism has destroyed the traditional family.
- [48:17]
B
The other wealthy countries have free medical care for everybody. What Bernie Sanders was suggesting, you know, Medicare for everybody. They also have quality child care and after school care. They have maternity and paternity leaves. They have quality public school for kids from three years on and quality childcare before that.
- [48:43]
A
And these are all supports then, either for an individual who wants to have a child without being married or, or for a couple or any combination of adults that take responsibility for children. There's all what you're telling us, all of these kinds of supports, medical, educational, housing structures and so on. And so the question, I guess becomes, what is going to happen here in the United States if you destroy the family, which you describe as the last kind of emotional support network that many people have, and you don't provide alternative supports? You are what, you know, in the first half of this program, I talked about this recent survey that CIGNA and IPSOS did that shows that more than half the American people are very lonely and say so and are aware of it. You're producing a society that is not, not emotionally held together. What does that suggest about where this economic system is taking us?
- [49:51]
B
I think the best suggestion is to look at the opioid crisis where 64,000 people died. And that's not all the users, of course, just the people whose ODS killed them. That is huge. It's the biggest cause of death in the United States. More than heart attacks, car accidents, all of those other things put together, it's cancer. It's because people are desperate and they look for personal solutions. And those personal solutions are for sale and they kill themselves. They're desperate. Also, you know, people who are newly immiserated because of the lack of marriage supports, like the middle aged women in the south, die. The white ones die faster than the black ones because African Americans are used to coping in a situation of women needing to support each other in extended families and the whites are not.
- [50:49]
A
So the family values. I want to get back to that for a moment. The family values is not just a hypocritical push by fundamentalists. It really has a much more important political function, which is probably why it survives so strongly because it gives the conservatives a way to hold on to the votes of the people whose emotional and personal life they're destroying.
- [51:15]
B
Exactly.
- [51:16]
A
It's extraordinary.
- [51:17]
B
They create a terrible problem, they worsen the existing problem and then they pretend that the policies that cause the problem will be the salvation. And they are the only people talking much about families and so they get away with it.
- [51:34]
A
Can you tell us a little bit about what other kinds of family, using that word loosely, might emerge that are different from the traditional one as people try to cope with this situation?
- [51:48]
B
Well, co housing is one kind of family that's a phenomenon in the United States that's also all over the world where people who have children and people who don't have children, old people, young people, all have apartments within a big complex and they have a big collective dining room as well as kitchens in their own apartment. And there's a system of letting people know if you'd like to be visited or not, so kids can go and visit, they can see other people, they have people to take care of them, there's people to babysit, There's a whole collectivity that happens. There are apartment buildings primarily for single people and older people in Sweden, where they're designed with small personal apartments and big collective spaces so that single people won't be so lonely because they have collective. They eat collectively if they want to. They have films and activities and games. The money is put into a collective area, if you have the money. There are those experiments that are very successful in California where people have basically a room but a lot of collective space and they pay to be there for the elderly. There are wonderful developments where not only you're in a mixed area, but also where there are redone old hotels so people have their own little room, but big collective spaces. And those have turned out for the elderly to be a huge saver for the government because the Medicare expenses go way down. When people aren't lonely and miserable, that's one of the reasons that in England they have a cabinet minister on loneliness because they found that with a public health system they saved millions and millions of dollars by helping people be less lonely, connecting with each other, living near one another or together. These are being done all over the world successfully. They're not being done here very much except by private initiatives with private money that people have who can afford it. Pay.
- [54:09]
A
You said in an earlier program as our last point, that we have time for today that the only people getting married and having children in what might be called the traditional way is a small percentage of folks at the upper end of the income distribution that can afford this because it's become a luxury.
- [54:29]
B
Yes, it is. Marriage has become more of a luxury good, at least a stable marriage that lasts. And those the marriages that last longer are marriages where there are at least minimal college educated people with better jobs because then they can hire poorer people to take care of their children, to do their laundry, to do their cooking because they can get takeout or take the kids to a restaurant to they can go on vacations and have someone watch their kids. They can have a nanny. They can use their money to escape.
- [55:03]
A
I wish, as always, we had more time. Thank you very much. We're going to come back to the explore what capitalism is doing to the family because it is a vital part of American politics and of America's future and that of the rest of the world too. Thank you very much for being with us.
- [55:21]
B
Thank you. And we do have to remember that without this basic support, people are even more miserable, lonely and drug addicted than they would be otherwise.
- [55:33]
A
Thank you all for being with us. I hope you found this discussion as interesting and provocative as I did. I want to thank you all for being partners in sharing what we do on this program with your co workers, your relatives, your neighbors. I also want to thank trust truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis that has been a good partner with Economic update for a long time. And most of all, I look forward to speaking with you again next week.