← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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Sam. Saint gonna change. Welcome friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Our jobs, our debts, our incomes, the prospects for all of those in the years ahead. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life and currently I teach at the New School University in New York City. Here we are in October. The seasons are beginning to change in most parts of the United States and Canada and indeed the rest of the world. And so we are kind of reflective this week and I wanted to look at some of the larger problems we face in a kind of transitional framework. Before I do, I want to make the usual announcements very quickly. Perhaps the most important, to which I am very gratified to say many of you have already responded, is the announcement that we have now partnered we here at Democracy at Work. We've partnered with a new group of friends who are specialists, excuse me, in conversion. And what does that mean? Well, if you're working in a regular enterprise, a store, an office, a factory, and you or your employer or both of you are interested in converting the business from a top down, hierarchical capitalist sort of business to a workers co op, then we now have the skilled lawyers, accountants and others who can and will assist you in that and provide you with the kind of information that we believe will surprise you as much as it surprised us in terms of the attractiveness financially and in every other way of making that kind of conversion. It's much easier than we had understood. If you are interested and you're in such a situation, get in touch with us through our websites once again. Rdwolf with two f's.com and democracy at work, all one word, democracyatwork.info those websites contain a great deal of the kind of information we provide for on this program, indeed a great deal more. They also provide you with ways to communicate to us your interests, your questions, your comments, your criticisms. They also allow you to follow us on Facebook and Twitter by very simply clicking on the icons and so on. Make use of these websites. We update them literally every day. And one last thing that I've been urged to to urge you to do, share what's on this program with your friends. Use social media in any and every way you can to spread the word. If anything on this program interests you, share it in any one of the usual ways with as many people as possible. That makes the impact of what we're trying to do multiply. And you're the partner in making that happen. Let's turn then to this week's updates. We begin with an enormous merger that was announced this last week. Anheuser Busch InBev, that's a monstrous beer company, the largest single beer company in the world, announced that it was buying its competitor. That's one way to overcome competition very popular among corporations, particularly big ones. Anheuser Busch InBev announced it is buying SAB Miller for the humongous price of 104 billion. That's with a B dollars if completed. When completed, this combined company will be the producer of about one third of the beer consumed on this planet. Wow. But this opens a hornet nest, a hornet's nest of trouble and controversy. And I just want to list it to you. Beer companies like to fool the public by having lots of different brands so that you imagine you have lots of choice, when in fact you don't. And with this merger, you'll have much less choice than you had before. You will in fact be moving from one brand to another, but you'll be buying from the same company that will be saving a lot of money by producing the beer in a cheaper way for itself. Whether or not it passes the cheaper costs of production on to you is anybody's guess. But one of the things that happens when, when you reduce the number of producers to a tiny number, the way we're now doing it in beer, is that you create the opportunity for these monopolists, which is what they have become, to jack up the price because there's nowhere else for most people to go. We shall see. When it comes to beer, the other thing that happens when you have a huge multinational company that produces beer and ships it literally to every country on earth one way or another, is that the tax accountants for the company can play all kinds of games. The New York Times on October 20th documented that Anheuser Busch InBev has been playing those games already in this case in Belgium. The normal tax rate in Belgium is 34% on profits. What was the percentage of the beer company's profits that they paid in taxes to Belgium last year? And the New York Times reported under 1%, not the 34% they are supposed to pay, but under 1%. That's a little bit like a couple days later, on 22 October, the New York Times reported that the Starbucks Coffee Company is doing the same thing, only they chose the Netherlands as a place to make their profits show up, because you can do that by internal company accounting very easily. So they could much lower taxes than other companies in Belgium or Netherlands or anywhere else and move their wealth around, basically depriving most countries of the taxes they otherwise would have to pay. The end result is that these companies pay much lower taxes than they're supposed to. And then you and I do. For example, Anheuser Busch, a multibillion dollar corporation, told the securities and exchange commission in 2013 that its effective tax rate that year was 11.1%. That's less than the tax rate being paid by most of the individuals listening to this program as I speak. In 2012, it was 16%. And this is in the United States, where the nominal tax on profits is 35%. Very few corporations, especially the big ones with armies of accountants, pay anything like it. We're watching Monopoly in action. We're watching the tax maneuvers, and we're watching especially how badly we will be gouged when this beer monopoly does what so many other monopolies have done. Time when will tell us and probably be telling us again Next update is very short. It's about a conversation that was held between two billionaires. The first one is named William Ackman, a C K M a n, a famous hedge fund billionaire. And he was in a conversation with another billionaire, Michael Bloomberg, who started the Bloomberg Financial News Service and who served three terms recently as mayor of New York city. Turns out Mr. Ackman believes that the current list of Republican candidates is horrible, and he wants Mr. Bloomberg to jump into the race as a Republican to improve the situation they had a conversation with that was recorded by New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin. And Andrew Ross Sorkin reported in the New York Times of October 20th the following joking conversation between Mr. Ackman and Mr. Bloomberg Joking about the cost of a campaign, Mr. Ackman said to Mr. Bloomberg, quote, and folks, you got to listen to this. It's just one quarter's dividend, end quote. Mr. Ackman is underscoring to Mr. Bloomberg, not that they need to tell each other these things they already know, but he's saying to him, we have enormous companies. It's only one quarter, that's three months, one quarter of a year's dividend that we pay to shareholders that would pay the entire cost of your running for president of the United States. And if you won, of course, you'd be president at least four years, probably eight. So what Mr. Ackman is underscoring is that for them who play in the world of billions, it's pocket change to throw at an election where they could stand to do so well for an investment of so little. You Want to understand why money has corrupted American politics? There it is in a casual joking conversation between two New York billionaires. My next update has to do with the great state of Hawaii. But I have to admit this is hard to report because even though as someone who does this kind of work, I see quite a bit, these kinds of statistics really hit home. Hawaii has the highest number of homeless people per capita of its population of any of the 50 states. Over the last couple of years, the growth in homelessness in Hawaii has been stunning. 23% last year in the number of homeless, 46% increase in the number of homeless families from 2014 to 2015, staggering increase in homelessness. It's another one of those statistics to keep in mind when you hear the phrase recovery. We are experiencing an economic recovery. These kinds of statistics are not what a recovery refers to. Anyway, at the last count in Hawaii, the official number of homeless. And remember, when you get an official number, lots of homeless have not been counted, but the official number, 7260. So bad is it that the governor of Hawaii, David Ije, announced this last couple of weeks a state of emergency, a homelessness state of emergency. Because of the sheer number and what that means, and in an act that you have to stop and gasp to understand, they've assigned $1.3 million to deal with their homelessness. Now, they've already been spending money, but in the light of this crisis, this rapid growth, they have added another $1.3 million to deal with this. Well, I'm an economist, so I said, let's see. If you divide $1.3 million and you assume it's not going to be used to pay for the staff that manages the program, which of course it will, but just make a simple assumption. How much does that come out to for each of the homeless people? Each of those 7,260. Well, here's what it works out. 1.3 million divided among 7,260 people works out to $179.06 per person. Now, that's going to really make a major difference in a homeless person's life that the state of Hawaii has assigned $179 for the year to help them. Well, I looked into it further because these numbers, as I said, made me gasp. Here's what I learned. That Honolulu's latest homeless shelter is being outfitted by using converted shipping containers from seagoing freighters. You put them on a gravel lot on sand island in Hawaii, and you make little rooms out of them. And I looked into it Further. And I discovered that the rooms per couple, two people per couple, have the space of, you ready? 73 square feet. That's smaller than the prison cells we put people into in jails across the United States. I'm aghast. And not only that, there are dozens of these and they get to share 5 toilets in this project. I mean, this is supposed to be the greatest country in the world. This is supposed to be a country committed to family values. This is a country that wants to help people get back on their feet. $179 for homelessness in a 7 by 10 foot cubicle for two people with an occasional access to the toilet. I wish I could say you must be kidding, but I know they're telling the truth. That's what they do and that's what they think is reasonable. And maybe that's the worst of all. Last week was also an important economic event in the form of an election. The election was in Canada. And things have to be said about this election. Why? Because a Conservative government committed to reducing taxes, particularly on the rich, committed to those ideas that somehow if you do what is good for corporations and the rich, it'll all trickle down and, and help the average citizen and all of that. A government committed to that, led by Stephen Harper, was blown out of office with an overwhelming defeat greater than anyone that I know of had foreseen happening. It is a repudiation by the people of Canada, 70% of whom voted for anybody else but Mr. Harper and the Conservatives. The winner was the other major party in Canada, the Liberals. But the New Democratic Party and the Green Party got significant and important votes as well. But the Liberal Party led by Jason Trudeau, got into power and their point of view is really quite different from the Conservatives. So it's interesting that they won. It's interesting that they won because they're committed to raising taxes on corporations and the rich. They're committed to supporting and financially reinforcing the national single payer health system of Canada. They are committed to doing something about global warming and climate change, to holding back at least on the exploitation of the tar sands, of the oil sands, of the fracking dilemma that is racking the United States as well. If there had been proportional representation, the Liberal Party would have won, but it wouldn't have won enough seats to be the dominant party all by itself. But because you, you don't have in Canada a one to one ratio between the percentage of people who vote for a party and the percentage of its seats in the Parliament. The Liberal Party will be able to govern alone without having to form a coalition with the New Democratic Party and or the Greens. Therefore, they will be on their own. And here is the great challenge for the Liberal Party. They were thrown out of office some years ago precisely because what they did didn't match the kind of Liberal, social democratic rhetoric that they have used in their campaigns. And people were angry and bitter and felt betrayed. Now people felt angry, bitter and betrayed because the Conservatives, who did what they said they would do, proved that that is not a way for most Canadians to do very well, contrary to what they had promised. So the test for the Liberals will be, are you going to be true to your rhetoric? Are you really going to do something about global warming? Are you really going to tax corporations and the rich? Are you going to really make a difference for the mass of people? Because the warning for the Liberals, if they are smart enough to heed it, is that if you don't, if you don't go in that direction, you will suffer in a few years exactly what the people did to Mr. Harper and the Conservatives. In fact, it's even possible that you will suffer another kind of political defeat that perhaps by now, four years from now, or whenever the people of Canada decide that the Liberals aren't doing what they said could and would help the Canadian people, that the voting will go not once again for the Conservatives and that endless back and forth between the two major parties, but will decide instead to give a real chance to the New Democratic Party or the Green Party or anybody other than the two conventional parties who have not been adequate to the problems of Canadian society. Okay, we turn now to the questions that you have sent in, at least for those that we have some time to deal with. And I want to deal with a question sent in by Jamie, and a very, very good one. He says something like the that capitalism is often equated with individualism to be contrasted with socialism. That is, somehow capitalism celebrates the individual, whereas socialism celebrates the community or the society as a whole. Is that a fair representation? Says Jamie. And he asks for me to comment. All right, let me comment. This is a matter of history. And like so often in many questions, it's the history that gives us the answer. Here, the history we need is the history of the birth of capitalism. When did capitalism become the dominant economic system? Well, it begins in Great Britain, in England, back in the 17th century, and then moves to Western Europe in the 18th century. The kind of the explosive event being the French Revolution of 1789, when feudalism, the system that existed before very top down rigid system with the king at the top and all of that, it gets overthrown by capitalism. In England and in France and most other places, a good bit of violence attended this overthrow of the old system and, and the establishment of capitalism. But what's interesting and what responds to Jamie's question is that when these fights happened, the fights of the English to overthrow feudalism, there, the fights of the French really like the fights in the United States to get rid of the old feudal King George in our War of Independence. The claim was that capitalism, the new system, would free individuals. They wouldn't be slaves the way they once had been. They wouldn't be serfs the way they had been for a thousand years of feudalism. They would be free individuals. This notion that capitalism brought freedom to the individual, a chance to realize all of his or her potential by their own exertion of mind and body to get to the fullest possible life. Capitalism celebrated the individual. Nice idea, good story. Had some truth to it. They always do, these stories. But here was the problem. As capitalism settled in replacing feudalism in England, in Western Europe, eventually everywhere else in the world, a growing number of people living in capitalism realized that the promise of individualism was not being delivered. Oh sure, a small proportion of individuals were free in the sense of being able to realize their potential, to develop their skills, their brains, their intellect, their understanding, their bodies, to become full human beings. But as they looked around at the mass of people living in capitalism, the mass of employees getting up, going to work each day, eking out a bare living with a wage or a salary that kept them light years from realizing their potential. You know, the kind of people written about in Charles Dickens novels of early capitalist England or Emile Zola's novels of early capitalist France, or Maxim Gorky's novels of early capitalist Russia, when these folks looked around, they realized that what capitalism really did was provide for the individualism of the few and the subordination and the stunted lives and the lost opportunities and the denied potential of the many. And those people's criticisms became known as socialism. That they wanted a society that really did this freedom for everybody. Not just for the rich, not just for the few, not even for those handfuls who could emerge out of awful personal and social conditions and rise above them. Heroes that those people were, they don't substitute for making it better for everybody. The socialists wanted to give everybody a real chance, a real shot at realizing their potential. And so they called themselves socialists. It's not that they don't put the individual first. It's really quite different. It's that they care about all of the individuals. They want the whole community to get a chance, not just those born into wealth or able by good luck and lots of effort to rise out of, of the pulling down that confronts the mass of people. So, yes, capitalism came into the world boasting about an individualism, but it delivered that individualism, as it still does, to a tiny percentage of the population, leaving the rest as critics open to and interested in the socialist alternative, which says you got to do it for everybody. Society is not about the individual. It's about the team. Like in a good sports struggle, you need the team. You need to celebrate what each one contributes, develop each one's ability to, to contribute. You'll do much better than if all you do is focus on a handful of quote, unquote stars. So socialists celebrate individuality, but they do it for everyone. And that's their difference with capitalism. And that's what the debates that we're going to be hearing about more and more as the presidential race in the United States heats up and as government shifts like those in Canada, put these kinds of issues back into the center of people's thinking and debating and arguing. Well, folks, we have come to the end of the first half of today's program. Let me urge you and ask you to stay with us. We will have a short break, then we will be back to deal with a couple of major topics that I think you will find very, very interesting in this electoral season that's heating up and in terms of where the world is today. We will be right back. Stay with. Sam. Don't look ahead. There's stormy weather, another roadblock in our way. But if we go, we go together. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's economic update. I want to devote much of this second half to discussing a major issue, one that has come to the fore here in the United States in a new way that portends really historic shifts in the way this country understands and conducts its political life. And because of the role of the United States in the world, that is going to impact pretty much our entire planet. I'm referring to the fact that a major candidate of one of the two parties, Bernie Sanders, calls himself and accepts the label democratic socialist, so that we have a socialist, and he is the only one of, of all the candidates in the two major parties to accept that name and to be unwilling to get rid of it or back away from it or deny it, et cetera. And I want to Talk about, therefore, what that issue is all about. What is a democratic socialist? What has it got to do with this old debate between socialism and capitalism? Where are we in all of that? And. And how exactly does a candidacy by a socialist become a historic event in American life and indeed in the world's history? To understand that, we must begin by noticing that the United States is indeed unusual in countries in terms of socialism. Every European country has a Socialist party. In many European countries, the Socialist Party is either in the government or. Or it is the government, or it has been in the government. And nobody finds this bizarre, weird, strange, or unusual. The French government today is a government of the Socialist Party. The Socialist Party has been an important part of the government in Germany. And so on and so on and so on and so on across all of Europe. The United States has not had this situation, especially not in the last half century. And so we have to answer the question, why not? Because that'll help us understand why what Bernie Sanders is doing has the importance that it now has. The United States had strong socialist and indeed communist parties in the first half of the 20th century. They grew up in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century. They were important political parties. They got particularly stronger during the Great Depression when millions of Americans were turned off to a capitalism that had plunged them into unemployment and poverty and all the suffering of the 1930s. Huge numbers of these people joined one of two major socialist parties and the Communist Party. Then In World War II, the United States was allied with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. That's right. The United States was allied with socialists in a fight against Germany, Italy and Japan. Since we were allied with socialists and communists in that war, we of course permitted them to function in the United States. So that being a socialist or a communist at that time or was not a badge of anything you had to run away from. But when the war was over, all of that changed, and that's extremely important to understand. During the Great Depression, as I have explained on this program, many times, the condition of the mass of people led them to join unions in a way they had never done before. The socialists and the Communists were the leaders, in many cases, in bringing workers to unions as an organization that would help them. Millions joined unions, the greatest unionizing drive in American history. We've never had anything like it before, and we've never had anything like it since. In that situation, they were successful, the socialists, Communists and the unionists, in becoming a powerful political force. And they put pressure on President Franklin Roosevelt from below to increase Taxes on corporations and the rich, and to use the money to help average people. He created the Social Security system, the unemployment compensation system, the federal jobs program, passed, the first minimum wage, and so on. When the war was over in 1945, corporations and the rich were determined to undo what had happened in the Great Depression. They didn't want to pay these high taxes. They didn't want to see that money flow out of their hands into the families of the country. Whatever they might have said on the 4th of July, they didn't like this kind of economic policy at all. So they went to work to undo Roosevelt's New Deal. The problem was they knew that it was caused by a coalition of forces from below. The socialists, the communists, and the big labor unions organized under the heading of the cio. So they figured out very smartly that the way to undo the New Deal was to destroy the coalition that had brought it into being. So they did that. First thing they did was to identify the weak link in that coalition. That was the Communist party. These were the most militant of everybody, or at least among the most militant of those who had organized politically and organized trade unions and so on. So the attempt to destroy them took the form of what we would nowadays call rebranding. Instead of communists being the most active, the most militant, the most gung ho unionizing organizers, they were portrayed instead as disloyal Americans, spies for the Soviet Union, etc. Etc. There was a kind of demonization of communists that made it possible for them to be separated out, made it possible for them to be looked at as if they were untrustworthy, unreliable, dangerous people you didn't want to be associated with, etc. In a sense, the business and the rich coalition undid the New Deal coalition, starting with the communists. Once they had destroyed the communist party, literally imprisoning its leaders, deporting many of its active leaderships, and so on it went after the two socialist parties, basically saying to the American people, socialists are really no different from communists, they just spell it differently. And so in America you got a kind of view of socialists as just as bad as communists, and if not just as bad, well, so close that the difference didn't matter. Indeed, Americans think that socialists and communists is all one murky same thing. If you go to a European country, everybody understands the difference between socialist and communist, and they have understood that for generations. But not in the United States. It became a toxic word. You had to say to people, I'm not a communist, I'm not a socialist. If they had the Slightest suspicion you might be. It meant that nobody could run for public office who had any association with communist or socialist. It even meant that in many elections, candidates threw those names at one another in the hopes of destroying the electoral opportunity of their opponent by sticking the name on them, even if it was completely fabricated and had no basis in any real history. So bad did it become that for decades now, no one who had any association with the communist or socialist movements in the world would dare to run for office because they would be labeled and then their chances would dwindle down to next to nothing. That's why it's so significant that Bernie Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist, because in a sense, his is an historic breakthrough to reestablish that a person who has that kind of point of view, a socialist perspective, which I'm about to describe to you in some detail, that such a person can and will contest for the highest offices in the United States and expects to be taken seriously to do that, and. And expects his views to be debated and contested, but not to be dismissed in the manner that became commonplace in the last roughly half century of American history. So then, what is democratic socialism? I think the way to get at it is to first review capitalism and socialism as a whole, because clearly democratic socialism is. Is some kind of socialism. That's why you put the adjective democratic in front of the word socialist. Well, capitalism is the dominant system in the world today, as we all know, and it has been for a good 250 to 300 years, spreading from England, as we mentioned earlier today, spreading from England to Western Europe and from there to North America, Japan, and indeed now to the whole world. As capitalism spread, it celebrated itself as the bearer of democracy. Freedom, equality, for example, in the French Revolution, Liberty, equality, fraternity was the slogan. Americans 100 years ago and last week like to think in many cases that capitalism is the same thing as democracy. Or if not, well, then capitalism brings democracy to wherever it settles and becomes the dominant economic system. However, throughout the history of capitalism, there have been people starting in England, then in France, then in the United States, now everywhere in the world, there have been people who have basically said that the promise of capitalism to deliver democracy is largely a promise broken. That the promise of capitalism to bring individualism, the right of each person to be free, to develop, to recognize, to hone his or her skills and talents, to realize the fullness of what they're capable of. That this has not been true for the mass of people anywhere where capitalism has settled. That capitalism is a system that tends to Concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a relatively small number of people who corrupt the politics, do away with democracy in order to protect their unequally concentrated wealth, etc. And those people have looked for a name, a banner, if you like, that solidifies what they find wanting, inadequate, insufficient about capitalism. And the name they took was socialism. We, they said, are the ones who want to actually bring to all of society what capitalism has only brought to a small minority. Wealth, comfort, education, excellent health, brilliant diet, etc. Those things should not be, the socialists say, the province of the few. We shouldn't have. For example, the stunning statistic released over the last two weeks by the Credit Suisse annual wealth report for 2015, namely the milestone of the today's capitalism, that the richest 1% of people on our planet now own more than half of all the financial wealth on this planet. That is a kind of inequality that the socialists say undermines the promise that capitalism would bring equality, fraternity, democracy, or anything else. And so socialist movements criticizing capitalism and proposing various alternatives developed over the last 250 years. It's as though socialism is a kind of shadow that capitalism has never shaken, like you cannot shake your shadow. Where capitalism goes to, so do the socialist critics arise there. Now, interestingly, for a long time, the socialist critics had to snipe at capitalism from their positions as trade unionists, as school teachers, as students and so on, in parties, socialist parties that were formed, but they never took power. And so they developed the idea that the way to go from capitalism to socialism would be to appeal to the mass of people that socialism is more in your interest than capitalism, that capitalism is good for the few, socialism is good for the many. And the hope was that you could get a majority of people to vote for a socialist politician or candidate, and that way you would capture the government, you would become the government by winning the election and then use the power of the government to transform the economy of. From a capitalist economy to a socialist economy. Well, what would that mean? And the socialists, being pressed for an answer, came up with the. We think, and this was developed across the 19th and 20th centuries, we think that the way to go is to have the government take over the enterprises, the factories, the offices, the stores to run them in the interest of the society as a whole. As governmental enterprises, private capitalist enterprises, after all, seek the best interests of whoever owns and runs them. So if you want society to. If you want enterprises to work in the interests of everybody, well, then the society as a whole has to do that. And the government should be the agent of. Of the people as a whole to own and operate enterprises. We should not have market exchange. Because that favors the person with the most money. We don't want that. We want the system to favor everybody equally. So let's have the government plan the distribution of resources and products. Rather than have them be distributed by market exchanges. So the idea of socialism was the government takes over owning and operating enterprises. And the government's planning substitutes for markets. This was the plan. This was the idea. And it led indeed to the growth of socialism. Into very important political movements, Some of which did indeed capture governments. Other socialists captured governments by revolutionary means, as in the Soviet Union. But then something happened that shook socialism to its core. It turned out in Russia, China and elsewhere. That when you gave all of this power to the government to become the owner, operator of all the enterprises, to become the planner of what is done with resources. And what is done with the products that come out of the offices, the stores and the factories, There is a risk you take that the government will become dictatorial, that the government will abuse the power you have given it. And do things that are not good for the society as a whole. Politically, economically, culturally. Socialism discovered that it may have made a mistake. In its focus on the government. And in giving too much power to the government. Or maybe, to put it another way, in not having created in society other sources of power. That could counterbalance the economic power of the government. Create a system of checks and balances, you might say. And so the socialist movement split shortly after the Russian Revolution. It split in one way between those socialists who were not in favor of giving total power to the government. They kept the name socialists. And those who were more comfortable giving the power to the government. That they generally took the name communist. There were other important differences between them, but this is the one I want to stress. And over the 70 years. Odd that the Soviet Union existed. This differentiation became more and more important. Socialists were those who wanted to work sort of within the system, making it better. And communists were the ones who were determined to no, no more private enterprise, state enterprise, Subordinate or destroy the market. And establish instead planning. Then there were those in the socialist camp who felt even their advocacy of a greater role for the government had been too strong. And they became advocates instead for a. A socialism, but one that was married to. Closely intertwined with a real commitment to democracy. The idea here was that whatever powers you gave to the government, they would have to be balanced by making the government genuinely dependent on the mass of people exercising democratic rights. And in order to underscore their difference from communists and their difference even from those socialists who still felt that the government had a pride of place in the economic life of a society. These socialists, with their strong commitment to democracy, put the word democratic in front of the word socialist. They were democratic socialists, that is, they were critical of capitalism. They wanted to move in the direction of having people own and operate collectively enterprises. Not individuals, not families, not groups of big shareholders, but the people in some organic way to own and operate the enterprises and plan the economy. But they were very careful to make that conditional on a genuine democracy that would hold such a government accountable. From below. Bernie Sanders seeks to locate himself in this tradition of democratic socialism in distinction from indifference, from both the communist tradition and even parts of the socialist tradition which don't put quite that much emphasis. One of the places you can see this articulated in Bernie Sanders version of democratic socialism is his interesting proposal, and he's been saying this since he declared his candidacy for the presidency. His interest in worker co ops. He wants to put people in charge of production, the not the government notice, but collectives, groups of workers. He wants workers to be co ops, to be in co ops, to collectively take charge of the enterprises that they wish to work with, that these become not government enterprises. They are private, but they're not individuals who own them, they're not individuals who run them. They are not shareholding enterprises. Instead, the enterprises are owned and operated by the workers who work there, whether they be 22,000 or 200,000, that they work out collective democratic ways to operate their enterprises. In other words, he wants to marry a democracy in where you live, what we call political democracy, together with a democracy in the workplace, and hence his interest in co ops. The point is not to go into further detail. The point is to understand that this is a way of thinking about our society that recognizes that capitalism has serious flaws, that capitalism is producing outcomes. Now we whether it be economic downturns of the sort we've had since 2008, or inequality of the sort that screams at us from the pages every day, whatever they are, capitalism has problems that ought to be acknowledged, ought to be admitted, ought to be exhaustively discussed, debated and investigated. And if there are people who have alternative economic arrangements to propose that wouldn't have these flaws, or at least have them to a lesser extent, then it is fitting and proper that our politics be the place where these alternatives get discussed, debated, argued, defended. That this is not something we should exclude from our political discourse, but something we should include. Part of Bernie Sanders historic Significance is that he's putting these questions and these perspectives back into the political discussion of this country. No one else for decades has dared do that. And Mr. Sanders courage, whatever else you may think of him and whatever position you take on the particulars he puts forward, his courage in doing that is something I believe all Americans ought to respect and appreciate. Let me conclude by talking a little bit about what happens to a society that doesn't allow for socialists to present their criticisms, their alternatives, their proposals. You know, your economic system is exactly like all the other systems that. That make up a society. We have a transportation system and an educational system and a hospital system, and we criticize those as Americans. We find fault with them. We debate the ways we could do things otherwise. My goodness. We're a country that over the last two or three decades, has been debating marriage, something we used to think was beyond discussion. We debate who gets married, who's entitled to. To get married. What even does marriage mean? And indeed, our young people are raising very profound questions, as are those with different sexual preferences and so on. One system in our society we have been afraid to debate is our economic system. We have been afraid to subject capitalism, our economic system, to the kinds of criticism, debate, fault finding, proposal of alternatives that we have taken pride in doing to our marriage system, our school system, our health system, our insurance system, and everything else that's got to stop. That's not a sign of a healthy society. It's a sign of a frightened society. If you don't criticize the systems that make up your society, they rot. They indulge their worst tendencies. You fail as a society to identify their weaknesses and their flaws, and then, of course, you can't improve on them. Part of our economic difficulties, part of our economic suffering these days is precisely because we did not dare to debate the pros and cons of capitalism and the number one alternative so far proposed to it, which is socialism, communism in its various forms. Bernie Sanders is changing that. That's why I call his candidacy historic. Whatever happens to him and whatever the particulars of his proposals, he's bringing us back. He's helping America grow up, get out of the childish fear that prevented us from having a proper discussion and debate in our society for 50 years. Come out of the nighttime into the light. Bernie Sanders is helping us do that. Thank you very much for being with me this program. I want to thank truthout.org, that independent and important source of news and analysis, every day I work with them. I urge you to take a look at what they do. I want to invite you again to take a look@rdwolf.com and democracyatwork.info the two websites that we maintain. Please continue to send us your comments through those websites. Let us know if you'd like me to speak in your area, if that is of interest to you. And remember the announcement I made at the beginning that we are looking to help anyone seeking to convert a business into a worker co op. We are now in a position to provide technical assistance. I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Change. Change. Change. Fam. Sam.