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Welcome friends, to another edition of Economic Update weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Incomes, debts, jobs. For ourselves, for us in the future, for our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life and my hope is that that prepared me well to present to you each week this analysis of some of the major events in the economic lives we lead. I want to begin this program by thanking various hosts that I have visited during the month of February 2018. I want to start with the Chapo Trap House. They did a really wonderful interview that was lively and interesting. And for those of you who know the important work that they do, Chapo Trap House, take a look. You might find the interview they did with us as exciting and interesting as we found it. I also want to thank the People in Praxis Peace, a local group in Sonoma, California, on the other side of the country. They were our hosts when we spoke, Dr. Harriet Fraad, who often appears on this program, and myself at the Sonoma Community Center. And finally, I want to thank kpfa, the Pacifica station in the Bay Area of California, where I returned in order to do the annual FundRaiser at the First Congregational Church in Berkeley, as I have done every year for the last quite a few. It's a wonderful experience for me to meet the very people that I try to reach, the people who hear me on the radio and then want to kind of have an in person and close up interaction. Just want to let you know it's as interesting and exciting to me as it is, I hope, to all of you. So let's jump into the economic updates for our time. You must have noticed, as I have, that every time the capitalist political economy that we live in, an enterprise driven economic system of stores, factories and offices on the one hand, and the government, which is dependent on those enterprises from much of its revenue, and. And for the economy to keep going, without which there wouldn't be much toleration for the political system either. And you must have noticed, as I have, that when that economic system breaks down, the place where almost everyone turns real quickly to solve the problem is to the government. That's what happened in the 1930s when we took a real dive. It's what happened again in the bailouts that came right after the crash of 2008. So isn't it interesting that the very corporate leaders who turn to the government to save them when their system doesn't work turn around and blame the government as if it were the source of all the Problems rather than them. Of course, it's very clever, right? Because if we are all afflicted by unemployment and all the difficulties of a capitalist system, it would be dangerous for the people who actually run it if they were the targets of our upset. So it's important to have a scapegoat to make somebody else do it. And the government has been the scapegoat of choice for right wingers and for people who love capitalism and cannot get their heads around the idea that it's a system with a lot of problems. Nothing illustrates this more than the fishing industry. That's right. Something we don't talk about very often, but we need to. Fishing is a dying industry. Not long ago we out fished fresh water, but now we have done what a few years ago would have been thought impossible. We have literally destroyed ocean fishing as well. We've overfished, we've fished in unsustainable ways. Why? Because fishing companies. Here we go. Now. Have profit as the bottom line. Fishing companies are competing with one another all the time. It makes no sense for one fishing company to hold back on grabbing all the fish it can because if it does, it only creates the business for a competitor. So in that kind of a situation, if you let the private enterprise system go so it will do what it has now, fished out the oceans, made fish difficult, made fish often scarce, made fish too expensive for many people to afford and to literally make them disappear. What we have is a failure to use the government to control the failure of the private fishing industry. It's a cautionary tale about how capitalism works. The second economic update for today has to do with malls. That's right. Those either beautiful or hideous collections of stores that we all know about, especially here in the United States. And as I have been telling you in recent broadcasts, huge numbers, thousands of malls are empty now. Weeds are growing up through the asphalt of the parking lot. People don't go anymore. Other uses are being examined for the empty stores that haven't been able to find a tenant for years now. But I was interested to learn in a recent Bloomberg story that some malls are doing just fine. I want to mention some of them to you. The Americana, Manhasset, wealthy North Shore of New York's Long Island. The Forum shops at Caesars in Las Vegas, The Grove Mall in Los Angeles, and perhaps the most elegant of them all, the Bal Harbor Shops in Bal Harbor, Florida. They're doing great. They're expanding. They're cramming more stores into their space. They're renovating to make it Even more elegant and attractive to consumers and local wealthy people. What's remarkable is you often don't have to go more than, oh, a 10 minute drive from one of these malls to see one of the other kind of malls. Bal Harbor. It's literally the mall at 163rd street just up the road, which can show you the abandoned mall, the dead mall. In other words. What we're seeing is a mirror to our economy. A tiny number of high paid, high priced malls doing very well in an economy that has made the rich richer and the vast majority of morals that serve the rest of us are dying. As I say, it's a mirror, but it's a mirror with a certain poetic way of teaching us something. And to show you how profound the mirror is, let me tell you about the most recent expansion of the Bal Harbor Shops Mall. It turns out that right behind the mall was a 70 year old congregational church. Right behind the parking lot it had a famous large sign called Worship this Sunday. The sign for the Church by the sea, as it was called. Wow. Recent months the mall purchased the church, purchased the land on which the church sits and has torn down the church to make room for more wealthy expenditures by the wealthy people who enjoy the wealthy. Bal Harbor Shops Mall. There's something even more poetic about the elimination of a church so that the wealthy can have yet more in the way of an expensive mall. Let's go to the other end of the spectrum for our third economic update. And here I'm indebted to Matt Brunig of the People's Policy Project. They do interesting economic analysis there. And I found this one particularly interesting using the Survey of Consumer Finances, a very important government document giving data about our economy. Matt brooding calculated young families. He took a look at families with heads of the family below the age of 35 years. And he said, I want to look at the young people of America and ask what their situation is. How much wealth do they have? What's their situation? What can we say about them as a particular group? And what he found was so arresting for me that I want to share it with you. He looked into the net worth of these families. The net worth basically means you add up the assets that such families have and you subtract from that the debts they have to see how much their net worth is, what they own, less what they owe. And he made a further decision. He excluded vehicles because vehicles lose their value very quickly and so really aren't part of what you ought to think of as a family's wealth. Okay, 2016. What was the net worth? The median net worth of young families, families below 35 years of age for the head of the family. Well, as I say, this blew my mind. Median means 50% of the families have more than this net worth I'm about to tell you about, and 50% have less. So the median net worth of young families in America in 2016, not counting their vehicles, was. Here we go, $1,250. That's what the media. Half the young families of America have less than $1,250. What does that mean? It means that young people have no fallback, nothing to see them through. An unexpected expense, a sick child, a lost job, a divorce, you name it, all the things that life can throw at you. Half the young families have $1,250 or less to cope with all of that. Nothing better gets across. The lack of a recovery in the United States since 2008 or the failure of a capitalist economic system to provide for the young people that are going to be our future and the children they're bringing into the world than to tell us, as Mr. Brunig's work has done, what they're living on. I've also told you in past broadcasts about the bizarre decisions in the state of Kansas where they cut taxes on business drastically, they cut taxes on the rich drastically. And promised the people of Kansas, the Republican governor did, Mr. Brownback, that by doing this cutting of taxes, they would stimulate the economy of Kansas and provide lots of more jobs. And with the people having more jobs, they'd pay more taxes and the government would be in great shape. Those were the promises. None of that came to pass. Kansas did not undo its unemployment. It has had higher unemployment than most other states in the United States. None of the good things happened. I now want to tell you about a state really nearby Oklahoma. Oklahoma, very like Kansas, governed by a Republican conservative who cuts taxes. And here are some of the consequences of the cut taxes. By the way, cut taxes, particularly for the fracking companies, the oil and gas companies that are the only part of the Oklahoma economy not in deep trouble. And even they have had a rough few years. Oklahoma has taken things to a stage that I need to talk to you about because it is so severe. Here's the first thing. In many parts of the state of Oklahoma, they have cut the length of the school week from five days to four. The weekend in these places continues through Monday. Why? Because they don't have enough money, they say, to pay schoolteachers and the salaries they offer among the lowest in the United States. Very few states offer as little as Oklahoma. The only perks they can give to their teachers for paying them so little is to give them a day off. Let me take that a little bit further with you, if you don't mind. What do the teachers do on the Monday they don't have to go to school in. It turns out they have jobs to fill in their income. Half of them roughly work at Walmarts and the other half in local restaurants. Oh, and what happens to the families whose kids don't go to school on Monday? Well, they just have to make do in whatever way they can. Did that solve the state's problem? No, it turns out it didn't. It turns out that even if you don't make someone work on Monday, giving them a chance to go get paid at Walmart, which has some of the lowest pay scales in the United States, or at a local restaurant, and that doesn't pay well most of the time either, particularly in midwestern states like Oklahoma, that you're still paying your teachers even with that way too little. And guess what? Which should surprise nobody. Teachers who aren't in overabundance in America don't want to teach in Oklahoma. So they have a shortage, despite having shortened the work week for the school kids and the teachers. And how have they handled that? You'll love this. I'll have to read it to you. The shortage of teachers in the school districts have found. Here we go now. 1,850 adults without the necessary qualifications who have been given emergency certifications and placed in classrooms. Penny Risley, the principal of an elementary school in Wagoner, Oklahoma said to the media this year I emergency certified my secretary as an economist. I am required to teach in every university I've ever been that the future and well being of the American economy in the world depends above all else on the quality and the quantity of educated young people that enter the labor market. For us to be responding to the current economic situation by savagely cutting the quality and the quantity of teaching we do to our young people is the equivalent in economics of shooting yourself in the foot. It is irrational. It is damaging in a way that cannot be repaired. For the tens of thousands of young people in Oklahoma going through this kind of experience, it's actually a kind of a stunning demonstration and it needs some explanation. And here's how it works. When the capitalist economic system gets itself into difficulty with economic downturns of the sort for example, we had in 2008, and which are regular occurrences with a capitalist economy. Something has to happen. And what typically happens is that we turn to the government, as I pointed out earlier, and we ask the government to help people out as they suffer with unemployment, with cut work weeks for their kids, schools, and all the other outflow of economic troubles. And then we often see Democrats, liberals come into office because they're the ones who push the government should help out. But of course, the Republicans and the business community don't want the government to do too much for fees. Fear that everybody will get the idea, hmm, maybe we should have the government do more. Maybe the government should prevent these collapses from happening in the first place. So they hold everything back. So the Democrats who try to do something can't do very much because they don't challenge the system. They just try to get a few things done. They're held back. And eventually people say, gee, these Democrats are not doing enough for us. And in their anger, they go back to the Republicans. Great, say the Republicans. The real problem is the government. Let us starve the beast. Let us cut the taxes so the government doesn't do all the bad things it does. So they cut the government, which then what? Throws people back into suffering, deregulates what businesses can do, leading us into the next economic downturn where we repeat the whole game. So we get a politics which is America oscillation between the Republicans for a while until they blow it up. Then we give it to the Democrats for a while until they can't deliver what it is they promised. Then we angrily go back to the Republicans. That's all Mr. Trump is. He's the latest wave in this oscillation. And guess what the Democrats are doing? Waiting for him to cause so much difficulty, so much disruption, so much suffering, that there'll be a wave the other way in one of the next elections. We're not solving our problems this way. We're just kicking the can down the road as we oscillate back and forth. Before I continue, I want to remind you that we maintain two websites that we invite you to make use of. They're open 24 7. They have no charge attached to your using them. One is rdwolf with 2f's.com and the other one is democracy at work. That's all one word, democracyatwork.info. both of these websites allow you to communicate to us and tell us what you like and don't like about this program. Both of these websites allow you with a click of a mouse to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And for those of you that listen to this program as a radio show or a podcast, if you're interested in seeing it as a television program, we invite you to go to patreon.com p a t r e o n patreon.com economicupdate the name of this program, and you can see it as a television program. We maintain and update these websites. They're for you. They're a way for you to partner with us, to share what we provide in the way of analysis and information we with other people. And that's exactly what we try to do. You can do that too. And then we will proceed and be twice as effective as we might otherwise be if we went separately. Okay, let me turn next to a place in the world that I go to nowadays because they are crafting new initiatives. And so once again, I'm in Great Britain and. And once again I want to talk to you about the British Labour Party. They're sort of the rough equivalent of the Democrats over there. And this time I want to talk to you about one of their leaders, not the one who gets all the attention, Jeremy Corbyn, but rather one of his close associates, John McDonnell. He's announced a plan. He says that the people will be better served. The British people with their water needs, their energy needs, their rail systems. He proposes that these are not working real well. They're overpriced by the private companies that run them. They're not well maintained, sometimes not even safe. And we can do better than private capitalist enterprises. What does he propose? Classic. And what's interesting is not that he proposes something new, because this isn't new, but that it's becoming very popular in Britain, which is why the polls there show that if there were an election today, the Labour Party would win. He proposes the re nationalization of water, energy and rail in Great Britain. The government is going to take them over. And he explains in public speeches in it will cost nothing. Here's how it works right now, he says, the water company, just to take them as an example, a private company borrows lots of money, provides water to the British people and charges the British people for the water enough money to pay the cost of delivering the water, to pay the cost of the money borrowed, to do all of it, the interest charges, and on top of that, a profit distributed to the shareholders of the water company. Says Mr. McDonald, if the government takes it over, here's how it'll do it. The government will take over the enterprise and it will pay the private companies in Government bonds, no cash, a debt the government promises to pay over 5, 10 or 15 years. And then, he points out, we will immediately be able to lower the price of the water we deliver to every British home. Why? Because we have to recover with the prices we charge. What it costs to bring the water, like a private company, what it costs to pay off the debt that the government undertook to get the private water company into the government's hands. But we don't have to raise the price to pay anybody, any dividends, shareholders, because there aren't any. So we can lower the price. We don't have to charge as much as a private enterprise does, because our job as the government is to deliver the water, not to make a profit in the way a private enterprise does. We won't have any shareholders to pay off. The point is not whether you agree or disagree, the point is to understand this kind of thinking as a solution to the problems of the British economy is becoming mainstream again. Despite all the efforts, all the efforts to demonize and dismiss this approach, this kind of thinking, both in England and the United States for many decades now, the wind, the economic and political wind is changing. The final economic update that we will have time for today has me listening closely to the budget director for President Trump, a man named Mulvaney. Some of you may have heard some of the things he says. Here's what he admitted over the last few days publicly. Yes, he said it's true we cut taxes dramatically, trillion dollars or more. Yes, it's true, he said on top of that, we're spending more money, 3,400 billion more. And yes, he said if you put together a massive tax cut together with a massive increase in spending, obviously the only way the government can do that is if it borrows the money in, it's no longer raising in taxes to spend even more than it was spending before. And then he makes the interesting admission that I want to make sure you all understand. Speaking as if he were explaining this to children, Mr. Mulvaney says yes, of course. If suddenly the government has to borrow a trillion dollars that it didn't have to borrow before, the tax cut, that's going to drive up interest rates because the government's going to have to persuade people to lend it money, even though the government is more in debt now than it has been for decades, what is Mr. Mulvaney telling us? He's telling us that we can expect to see now his words, interest rate spikes. Well, folks, there's the admission if the interest rates spike up, the cost of buying A home shoots up because that's what shapes a mortgage. The cost of buying a car shoots up because of the interest over the years you take to pay off the car. Ditto for your credit card. Ditto for your students college borrowing. Wow. Turns out that cutting taxes for corporations and the rich and spending more on the Defense Department is going to whack you right in your pocketbook. That part was left out in all the debates and all the discussion. Mr. Mulvaney, after the Fact smilingly lets us know you live in a system that doesn't work for you. And part of my job is to make sure it doesn't blow by you without your being aware of it. We've reached the end of the first half of this program. Thank you very much for listening. Please stay with us as we move to a very interesting interview about a very important part of the global economy. Stay right with us. We'll be right back. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of ECONOMIC update. It is my pleasure today to welcome someone who's been a friend of mine for 30 years, maybe more. We've been friends around a shared interest, and that interest has been the American labor movement, something which was important and big when we were young. And that isn't either of those anymore. And that's indeed what we want to talk about. We want to talk about what happened to the American labor movement, why that happened, what its meanings are, what its consequences have been, and what might turn that around. So let me introduce him. His name is Charles, or as we all call him, Charlie Fabian. He was born many years ago in New York City, the child of partial immigrants. His father was the first member of his family to be born in the United States. He went to school in Indiana, got married, moved to Massachusetts, and began to get involved partly as a student and partly as a young worker in the labor movement. He eventually moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where he spent much of the rest of his life working both politically but also with the Communications Workers of America in one union with the Connecticut State AFL cio, as a director of education for that statewide union of unions, you might say. And then the bulk of his time was spent working for the American Federation of State, county and Municipal Employees, AFSCME Council 4. He worked there in Connecticut for 20 years, and his job was to represent workers in disputes with their employers, working with activists in the union to change the union, make it work better for the people involved in it. Back in 2011, he was hired by Local 1199 of SEIU, the Service Employees International Union In Connecticut, he participated in a number of campaigns fighting back against layoffs and service cuts by the then Republican governor, John Rowland, whose later career included quite some years, if I recall, in jail for his efforts. And he finished his union career, you might say, as a staff person, a staff representative for Local 2001 of SEIU, retiring in February of last year, 2017. So Charlie Fabian has been an activist in the labor movement for much of the last several decades and so is in a wonderful position to talk with me about what happened to the labor movement and why. So I want you all please to join me in welcoming John Charlie Fabian to Economic Update. Welcome, Charlie.