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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic update. It's kind of warm here in New York City, and I commiserate with you if you have that problem where you are. This is a program that every week looks at our incomes, our debts, our jobs, what's coming down the road. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and now I bring whatever it is I've learned over that time to this program each week to present what's going on in the broad economic situation we all have to live with. Before jumping in, I need to make a few very short announcements. The first is that if you ever miss this program, we are archived by iheartradio.com Letter I then heart as in your chest. Radio iheartradio.com Go there, look for Economic Update, and you can catch any program that you may have missed. We're very grateful to iHeartRadio for partnering with us in this way. Second, I want to remind you that if you would like to see this program as a television program in video form, please visit us at. That's P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com economicupdate. There you will be able to see this program as effectively a television program, and we would appreciate your giving that a look. And finally, as I announced last week, we are now represented in terms of my speaking around the country by a great outfit from California called speakoutnow.org that's all one word, speakoutnow.org you can go to their website and see me listed there. And if you're interested in pursuing a possible visit to your area, please get in touch with them via email@infospeakoutnow.org all right, let's jump right in. The big item these last few days has been the health care struggles. The whole Senate had to postpone dealing with it because there's such tension, such disagreement, not only between Republicans and Democrats, but among both of them about what ought to be done. It is, after all, shameful that the United States, one of the richest countries in the world, is unable to provide decent medical insurance to its people the way literally all of the other advanced industrial countries have been doing for decades. It's also doubly shameful that we have the most expensive health care in the world, partly because of that first thing I said, because we don't have comprehensive, government managed, or indeed government run health care the way they do in so many other countries. So we spend almost twice what other countries do for our health care that is our doctors, our hospitals, our drugs, our medical devices, and the insurance to cover all of that. And that is being ripped off in our country in a way that no other country permits. Well, what's the fight about? Well, on the one hand, we have Obamacare, the health change that was passed during the Obama administration. The good news about that was it extended health insurance to millions of people who had been without it. And that's certainly a step in the right direction. It even went further by paying for a good part of that by taxing wealthy people and a few of the health care corporations raking in the big bucks. Well, that was more than enough to get the Republicans to turn against it. But the Obamacare also had flaws, failures which the Republicans could and did take advantage of. And the biggest one goes right back to the monopoly arrangement of our medical industrial industries. The problem was Obamacare did nothing to prevent or stop private medical care companies, the doctors and the hospitals and, and the drug and medical device makers and the insurers from either opting out of markets when they didn't make enough profit or jacking up their prices. There were some notorious examples that we all read about in the newspaper. So that many Americans were angry about the Obamacare, not because it extended coverage to poor people, which for sure there is mass support for, I'm happy to say, but rather because their premiums were going up faster than even before and they felt, correctly, that they were being ripped off. Great. The GOP and Trump could use that could say over and over again, it's a disaster. It's failing. That wasn't true, but it captured the anger of people facing ever higher prices to produce ever higher profits. So in come the Trump GOP folks. The first thing they do is propose to get rid of the taxes on rich people and, and even on the corporations, because, of course, that's always their first priority. And second, to reduce the coverage for poor people, since there wouldn't be the money coming in from the tax on the rich and the corporations, modest though that was. But that proved to be too much for the gop. Moderates, they're called. They were getting screaming calls from their constituents who were telling them, if you cut out Obamacare, it's going to be even worse for us in these following ways. And then they explained what it means if you cut health insurance for all kinds of poor people, for all kinds of people who aren't normally poor but suffer a particular disease or suffer a cutback in employment. You see the picture. So here they are, the Democrats and Republicans, those who are in both parties, worried about what will happen if you get rid of Obamacare and substitute the lame Republican alternative. But here's what upsets me and I hope upsets you. Throughout all these debates, nobody questions the status quo of the medical industrial monopoly. That's right, the doctors and hospitals, the drug companies, the insurersthey struggle amongst themselves. But they present a common face to the rest of pay up. Pay more than anywhere else in the world to give us higher profits than than anywhere else in the world for people doing the work we do. As long as we don't question that, we will be struggling and choosing between one inadequate plan and another. The bottom line is the two political parties protect the medical industrial monopoly because they're afraid to confront them. Next update. The United States has one of the lowest minimum wages in the advanced industrial world, another shameful reality. The World Economic Forum did a recent table that I find useful. They took the minimum wage, the cash money a worker gets at the bottom minimum, and they subtracted from it the amount of taxes that worker has to pay on that minimum he or she earns. And then they ranked the countries. Where do workers get more and where do they get less in their minimum wage after taxes? The United States didn't show well, as you might imagine. So I'm going to give you a list now of the countries that pay more of a minimum wage after taxes than the United States. Just you can see that way where we rank in the world economic picture when it comes to how we treat those at the minimum wage. Here are the countries who pay Australia, Luxembourg, Belgium, Ireland, France, Netherlands, New Zealand, Germany, Canada, and the United Kingdom. That we fall below all of those. Well, there's nothing I can say that would be adequate to what that's about. The next update has to do with a kind of straw in the wind. Two unions at opposite ends of the United States, one in Canada, excuse me one in California and the other one in Mississippi, are doing something that unions haven't done enough of. And I'm wondering whether these are straws in the wind. In the case of California, it's the workers at AT&T, the telephone company, who were given a contract which proposed on the one hand to give them an 11% increase over four years. That works out to about 2.5% a year. Hardly a fortune. And remember, if you get 2.5% a year and prices go up 2.5% a year, which many people think they will over the next four years, you've got nothing in the way of an advanced that would be bad enough. But the 11% over four years was coupled by the company with an increase in how much the workers have to pay out of their own medical insurance. And indeed the workers were now going to be asked to pay 29% of the cost of the medical insurance that comes with their job. In effect, that increase in what they have to pay for for the same medical care they've been getting would take away the benefit of the wage increase or most of it. In other words, they were offered next to nothing. And with rising prices in this economy, it could literally have been negative over the next four years. The union and the company agreed to this contract, presented it to, I believe it's 17,000 workers at AT&T in California and I think also Nevada. And the workers have just recently rejected the contract as inadequate. It's very interesting because it shows that the workers understand there they are, the bottom line in the end. And if they don't go along, everybody else has to scurry and come up with another solution. That's interesting that those workers had that sense to vote that way and to force a better deal to come down the pike. The second example is United Auto Workers in Mississippi, which is culminating a 15, 14 or 15 year effort to unionize a Nissan automobile plant in Mississippi. They're very hopeful. They have filed for an election within the next month. And that too may be a straw in the wind for the unionization. Remember in the Great Depression, the American working class decided to join unions as a way to defend against the falling incomes and falling wages that a depression always means. In this catastrophe. Since 2008, the second worst collapse of capitalism in its history, workers have not yet made that decision. So it's an interesting question whether it's a straw in the wind that the auto workers in Mississippi may in fact lead the way to a resumption of that kind of response. My next short update, I wish it could be longer, takes me back to something I have done over the last year more than once, and that's to talk about the behavior, because it's important for economics of the new Pope. He's not so new now, Pope Francis, but he continues to do remarkable things. Things. And I want to talk about two of them that have economic impacts. The first has to do with a conference held in Rome from 28 June to 1 July, just passed by the Confederation of Trade Unions in Italy. That's roughly the equivalent of the AFL CIO here in the United States, it is the major trade Union. Union organization. It's already interesting that the Pope addresses them as he has before. But I want to read to you a few of the sentences that come directly from that speech, which I read with enormous interest. He says, for example, we must think. I'm quoting now from Pope Francis. We must also think of a healthy, healthy culture of idleness, of knowing how to rest. This is not laziness, it is a human need. When I ask a man or woman with two or three children, tell me, do you play with your children? Do you allow yourself this idleness? Well, you know, when I go to work, they are still asleep, and when I return, they are ready in bed. When a worker says that, according to Pope Francis, here's his this is inhuman. Along with work, there must also be other culture, because a person is not only formed by labor, because we do not always work and we must not work always. A good job is one that gives you time to be a human being, says the Pope. I'm now quoting again. And when the right to a fair pension is not always recognized, and not to all, then it is bad. A pension that is fair is neither too poor nor too rich. Golden pensions are no less an offense to labor than pensions that are too low. Wow. The Pope is against too much as well as too little. I wonder how Roman Catholics in the United States are going to digest process, think about what their Pope is telling them. Let me go on with some of the other things he says. He talks explicitly about unions and what he thinks unions should do. We believe the unions are prophetic. That's the word he uses, and here's what he means by such. The union risks losing its prophetic nature and becoming too similar to the institutions and powers that it should instead criticize the words of Pope Francis. Here we go more. The union, with the passing of time, has ended up resembling politics, or rather political parties. Their language, their style. And instead, if this typical and diverse dimension is lacking, its action within businesses will lose strength and effectiveness. The unions movement has its great seasons when it is prophesy, when it helps not only to. To unmask the powerful, who trample the rights of the most vulnerable workers, but who also defend the foreigner the least, the discarded. Pope Francis is urging the unions to represent not only their members, but especially those who don't have work, who are discriminated against, who are the outsiders. The union has to bring change. It's quote, and now I'm quoting again. It's like a watchman who guards and protects those who are inside the city of labor, but also guarding and protecting those who are outside the walls. It is not enough to protect only your members. Now, a couple of sentences that really need to be repeated. I don't have the time, but I want you to hear them at least once. Quote Pope Francis a couple of weeks ago. The capitalism of our time does not understand the value of the trade union because it has forgotten the social nature of the economy of the business. This is one of the greatest sins. Pope Francis is really clear, and his support for the union as a central part of a good society ought to make people sit up and think about what he's saying. But to be fair, the Pope also does things that raise more than a few eyebrows. I want to bring one of those. But because of its economic content to your attention, He made a decision in a letter to bishops. Bread can be low gluten. Excuse me, it cannot be low gluten or gluten. Free bread cannot be used in church ceremonies. However, genetically modified wheat and other materials in the bread is okay. Everything is mixed in this world. And that applies to all the churches too. The final short update for today is a shout out, a shout out of approval. And this one goes to the City of Seattle. Why? Because in recent days, the City of Seattle's City Council, its legislative body, has taken a remarkable step. It has passed a bill unanimously and with the enthusiastic support of the mayor of Seattle, both the past mayor and the sitting mayor. And this bill provides for an income tax to be applied to Residents of Seattle. 2.25% on all income. Over $250,000 for an individual, or over $500,000 per year for a married couple who file together. Let me stop and let that sink in. The City of Seattle has decided to tax its wealthiest citizens nine to zero, was the vote of the City Council to do this. So it's not only happening in Seattle, it's happening unanimously, enthusiastically. What is this about? The State of Washington, where Seattle is located, is notorious across the 50 states for having one of the most regressive tax structures in the country. What does that mean, regressive taxes? That's simply a term. Means a tax that makes no effort to take account of the person's ability to pay. Who's required to pay the tax. In other words, think of a sales tax. If everybody who buys a shirt for fifty dollars has to pay the same five dollar tax or whatever it might be, then that's a tax that makes no effort to discriminate. Rockefeller or Bill Gates or Warren Buffett buys the shirt Pays the same tax as does a person on welfare who buys the shirt. We have in the United States many such regressive taxes. Washington relies on regressive taxes. It doesn't have an income tax. Income taxes have often, not always, but have often been progressive. That is, the rate of tax you pay goes up with the higher income you may be earning. So people who earn at the top pay a higher rate than people who earn at the bottom. That's a progressive tax. In other words, the tax you're asked to pay takes account of your ability to pay. Okay, so what the city council of Seattle is doing is saying, we're not happy living in a state that taxes people without regard to their ability to pay. We believe that to be fundamentally unjust and unfair, which is what many members of the city council said in their comments about this decision they've reached. We would like to correct the unfairly regressive structure of taxes in Seattle by having an income tax, a progressive income tax, because the rate below $250,000 a year is zero, and the rate above $250,000 a year is 2.25%. That's a progressive income tax. For those of you who may not know it, when the progressive income tax for the country as a whole was passed back in 1910, or over 100 years ago, it too was an income tax that exempted the vast majority of Americans from any tax on their income and was only intended to be a tax on those at the top. Over the last hundred years, those at the top worked very hard to use their money to move the burden of taxation, of income taxation off of themselves and onto the middle class, which the middle class permitted them to do. Since the middle class are the vast majority and those above who were taxed in 1910 were a tiny minority, it was clear that the way the minority got the middle class to buy it was to buy the politicians. So it was difficult, or if not impossible, to push against it. We'll see what the future holds in Seattle if the income tax passes. But, of course, immediately a cry went up from the Republicans, from the business community, from all those who stand to lose. And they are going to fight it in court, and they're going to make propaganda against it. They've already begun to do that. So it will be a fight. The people in Seattle who've pushed for this know it. But a unanimous city council and a supportive mayor, which are now settled matters, indicate that the majority of people in Seattle want this, which is one major reason why all of these Politicians support it. And that means the courts will be under all kinds of pressure to go along with this change. To allow the sovereignty of the city of Seattle, the major urban area in the state of Washington, to be played out in this way that the majority of people want it is, in a way, an enormous step. One of the things it ought to do is to inspire, motivate, to create an incentive to cities and towns across the United States, many of whom live, are situated, excuse me, in states without the restrictive laws that Washington has about such things. In other words, it's easier in other states to pass such a law, to get such a law effective in the society and think how it would change. The city of Seattle estimates that the tax would raise about $140 million a year, allowing that city to improve its schools, its parks, to relieve the burden of taxation on those least able to pay. To make the city of Seattle a much better place than it is now. And what and how? By taking 2.25% of the money, over $250,000 that a person earns, or over 500,000, a minimal burden on those at the top. For a maximum benefit for the vast majority of Seattle residents, in fact, including those at the top who will also get benefits from a better school system, a better park system and a less divided by income community. The question is whether this fight will be won or lost. But our hats must go off to the people and to the city Council and to the mayor of Seattle, who've taken an important step in correcting a fundamentally unjust tax system, not only in Seattle and Washington, but in many other parts of the United States as well. We've come to the end of the first half of this program. Please stay with us. In the second half, we're going to deal with some other issues of interest to you. This is a program that is designed to have you get as much as I can do it. An insight into the current economic shifts and struggles. Not only to inform you, but also to give you ammunition to make the kinds of changes the country needs. Thank you very much for listening. Stay with us. We will be right back.
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How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man? How many seas must the white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand? Guessing how many times must the cannonballs fly the four they forever band her? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. The answer is a blowing in the wind. Yes, and how many years can a mountain exist for it is washed to.
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The sea.
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Yes, and how many years can some people exist before they're allowed to be free.
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Yes.
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And how many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. The answer is blowing in the wind. Guessing how many times must a man look up before he can see the sky?
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Yes.
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And how many ears must one man have before he can hear people cry?
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Yes.
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And how many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. The answer is blowing in the wind.
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Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's economic update. Before jumping into the analyses of some bigger topics that need a bit more time each than I can devote to the topics done in the first half, I want to remind you that we maintain two websites whose basic purpose is to enable us to partner with you. The first one is democracyatwork.info. that's all one word, democracyatwork.inf O and the second one is rdwolff with two Fs.com rdwolf.com both of these websites are available to you without any charge 24 7. They enable you to communicate with us what you would like us to cover. Not cover what's pleasing, what's displeasing to you about what we're doing. We read every single one and we use your comments and suggestions in designing the programs week after week. The two websites also allow you to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. They allow you to see what we post on YouTube and elsewhere. They are also very important places where we post work that we do. There's a blog that has all kinds of important information, articles, snippets of information that anyone interested in the economy of the United States in changing it. In the worker co op project that is so important to us, all of that information is gathered all the time. You will see fascinating articles, videos, audio recordings. When I do a media event, for example, I make a comment on the Tom Hartman show on a regular basis. Those are posted so you can see them. These are repositories for information, for video, audio and written materials. Use it. That's why we put it up there. Partner with us. Help it reach still other audiences. That's a way of working with us to make this program even more useful to more people than it already is. And I have great hopes that in the next few weeks I will be making announcements of our reaching yet more people across the United States. Okay, let's turn then to some of the larger topics I'M going to do something slightly unusual for me. I'm going to comment about individuals and in this case, the leaders of the G20. They just had a big meeting. You may have read about it in the newspapers or seen it elsewhere on the media. The 20 arguably richest or most influential in some sense countries in the world have been getting together since 1999. This was their 12th meeting, particularly the 12th of the leaders, so that Donald Trump went, Vladimir Putin of Russia went and Angela Merkel of Germany went and so on. They gathered in Hamburg, Germany. Germany was the host, and they were there to discuss whatever issues they felt, particularly economic issues, but not only were important. So they discussed world trade, they discussed climate change and how to deal with it, they discussed immigration and so on. There's been plenty of reporting on what they discussed, not so much on the programs of austerity that every single one of them has imposed on their people, whether it's the Republicans and Democrats in this country or Merkel in Germany, or fill in the blank. They didn't discuss that so much. That's just an assumption that they all feel they ought to do. And it's something which makes the mass of the world suffer. That's not what I'm talking about today. I want to bring you to an attention on the kinds of people that are leaders of the 20 richest countries meeting last week in Hamburg, because this is a collection of leaders that that tells you something, perhaps something scary about where we are in the world. So I won't say much about who we sent from the United States that speaks for itself. And you kind of all understand what that quality of leadership is. So let me begin rather with the host, Angela Merkel, who's pretty popular these days with people. Well, I don't want to puncture the balloon. Well, to be honest, maybe a bit. So let me tell you about a meeting at the Parliament of Germany, literally days before these leaders gathered. Mrs. Merkel is the head of a coalition of two parties, the Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union, two clearly very Christian parties. They had a meeting and they had a meeting to decide how they would vote on a bill working its way through the upper and lower house of the German Parliament. That bill was to legalize same sex marriage, something which is happening all over the world and has happened in Germany now, too. The two Christian parties voted against the legalization of same sex marriage. Angela Merkel, as a member of those parties, also did and made public that she did so for a whole host of reasons. A majority of the members of Both houses in Germany disagreed with Angela Merkel and with many in the Christian parties. And so same sex marriage was legalized. But you have to wonder about a leader of a country claiming to be the modern leader type, who in her own political life functions that way. Representing Japan was Mr. Abe. He has just lost a major election in Tokyo and is accused of levels of corruption that are genuinely staggering. His last name is spelled A, B, E. And so the joke in Japan is he's not honest. And Abe, like our Abraham Lincoln, he's dishonest Abe. Then we have France's Macron, or as his critics in France like to say, macaroon. He is only the President of France because the leading conservative was up to his eyeballs in levels of corruption. That destroyed his candidacy. So Mr. Macron slithered in. He seems to be some kind of former socialist, since he got into a government position thanks to the Socialist Party led by Francois Hollande. But his first acts were to appoint a conservative prime minister and to support that conservative prime minister in lowering taxes on the rich. I'll have more to say about Mr. Macron. Then we have Mr. Temer of Brazil, whose level of corruption accused and already demonstrated is literally off the charts. We have Mr. Zuma from South Africa, who gets the same Mr. Nieto from Mexico. Likewise, we have a level of people with crippling deficits. This system puts them in the position of leadership. Well, nothing would further summarize this than to give you a famous German quote. In German, it goes fetch. Schwimpt Oben, the English translation. The fat as in a soup or the scum as in a pond, rises to the top. My next discussion has to do with the city of Detroit that I have discussed with you in the past. Detroit, the largest bankrupt city in American history. A catastrophe of unspeakable dimensions. I will summarize again, because we've done it in the past. Simply the basics. In the 1960s and 70s, it was the picture city of modern capitalism, the automobile center. The place to which American presidents brought foreign visitors to see how capitalism worked. Three huge automobile companies, huge job stories, good pay. One won by the United Auto Workers, then arguably the biggest and most powerful union, or certainly one of them, here in the United States. A city that had managed not only to attract, but to provide decent jobs to African Americans when that had been a rarity in American history. They too got to be UAW workers, earning decent incomes, putting their kids to college and all the rest of population just shy of 2 million people. And here we are, a decade or two into the 21st century. 40, 50 years later, what have we got? A city that is one of the poorest in the United States. A city that drove out of itself more than half its population. Today the population of Detroit is under 700,000 people, down from nearly 2 million. Those people left because there was no work. And there was no work because Ford, Chrysler and General Motors decided they could make more profits, that's it. By moving somewhere else where they could pay workers much less. First to the American south and then to Canada and Mexico and now to China and India, leaving behind a city of disaster. High murder rates, high abandoned housing rates. Unbelievable story. 40, 50 years during which the mayors and the governors and the presidents, Republicans and Democrats alike, stood there looking at this long term decay and doing nothing to stop it, let alone to reverse it until finally total bankruptcy and a devastated city. That's the old story. In the last few years, there's been a lot of publicity, a really lot of it. Speaking about Detroit's renaissance. Detroit's coming back at, and I want to talk to you about that. There's something to it. There are buildings going up in the business district in the midtown area, restaurants, office towers. Something is going on. A great deal of it has to do with a man named Dan Gilbert. He's the owner, operator of Quicken Loans. He owns the basketball team, the Cleveland Cavaliers. He's a millionaire or billionaire. What difference really does that make? He owns over 90 buildings in the business district. He is bringing it back. And so there is a recovery of sorts. But it is like the recovery of the American economy since 2008. It's a recovery for the few. Let me remind you, 60% of the children of, of Detroit today continue to live in poverty. Right? 40% of residents live below the official poverty line. So what is Detroit becoming? It's continuing to be an emblem of the United states. From the 1970s to 2010, let's say it was an emblem of decline and decay. Now it is a different emblem. It's an emblem of the United States reconstitution as a place in which there are glitzy, comfortable, wealthy enclaves, they're called in other parts of the world, little protected areas, and I mean protected by how the roads are run, how the police are deployed, where the building codes go. A glitzy center and a vast, impoverished hinterland. That's what Detroit is becoming. That's what the recovery of Detroit is. It's being reorganized into a rich, comfortable, glitzy center and a vast sea of impoverished Excluded others. And it isn't just Detroit for which that is the story that we tell. The next update which deserves some attention has to do with something that happened over the last few weeks in San Diego, California and it has to do with a little beer company. It's called Modern Times Beer. A company founded only in 2013. Brewery that makes beer, craft beer, good quality beer, currently employs about 118 people and produces over 40,000 barrels of beer per year. That's not why I'm talking about it. I'm talking about it because of what the owner operator who started the beer did this last week. His name is Jacob McKeon, M C K E A N and he's a remarkable fellow for two reasons that I want to bring to your attention. I'm not so interested in the fact that he successfully built a beer business. Others have done that, but he gets some approval for that. But that's not my interest and he isn't new in what I'm about to tell you. But he takes it further than others have and that's what I'm after. What did he do? A couple of Fridays ago he announced that he's converting his business into an esop. Esop, which stands for Employee Stock Ownership Plan. He's basically giving his workers those 118 a 30% ownership of the company in which they work. They are going together. If you add up what each one gets, they're going to own 30% of the company. The goal is for them eventually to own 100% of the company. That's what the current owner is planning to do. He believes it's in the best interests of San Diego of beer production of those 118 and of himself as an entrepreneur that that be the future of his company, Modern Times Beer. So first let's look at this. Is this unique? Is he weird? No. I'm going to give you the names of three other companies that have done that. The Deschutes Beer Company of Bend, Oregon, the New Belgium Beer Company of Fort Collins, Colorado and Harpoon Brewing of Boston. They are already employee owned to varying degrees. Companies. Wow. There are others. There are others. So this is not unique. So why am I focusing on it? Well, first of all, I want to make sure that everybody understands what an ESOP is because we're having more and more of them in the United States. That's when a company takes the ownership and transfers it from the family that may have started it, the individual who may have started it, other shareholders outside who may own pieces of it. And moves that ownership one way or another by buying out the old people, by issuing new. The old owners issuing new stocks. There's various ways of doing it, but they're basically transferring ownership to the workers that themselves. One of the goals of Mr. McKeon are best expressed by him. And since he gave an interview recently that I found, I want to read it to you. Here we go. This is Mr. McKean explaining why he did what he did. One way I pledge to keep this industry awesome is my never selling my brewery to big Beer. Big beer means, you know, Budweiser, any of the other monsters. Continuing with Mr. McKean, there will likely come a time when I'm tired of carrying the weight of so much responsibility as the owner operator of Modern Times Beer. But when that time comes, I'm not going to screw the people who made my success possible in the first place. I want to read that to you. I'm not going to screw the people who made my success possible in the first place. That would be an unethical choice I could never be proud of. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to everyone in this industry. And when it comes time for me to do something else, I refuse to throw a hand grenade or over my shoulder on my way out the door. Oh, goodness. An employer, an entrepreneur, who understands the gratitude he owes to his workers, to the community in which he developed this industry, to the countless helping hands, large and small, that all of those people, employees and citizens, gave to his company. He doesn't want to throw a hand grenade on his way out the door. Let me Continue Reading from Mr. I've certainly given this a great deal of thought. What I learned is that if employees are not passionate about what the company makes and how it operates, they won't see themselves as having a future in it. Even a 100% ESOP. Let me interject. That's a company where 100% of the ownership is in the hands of the employees. It does not have to offer any meaningful governance or management role to employees. What is he saying? He is saying that even if the workers own 100%, they can continue to live and work as workers. In other words, they don't act on their ownership. They don't use their ownership to change how the enterprise actually works. The consequence of not giving employees governance and control, Mr. McKean goes on to say, is the following. And again, I if you do that, the company's owners aren't invested in in the company's direction. That's a formula for a bad culture it can lead to selling the company to big beer. We plan to do the opposite. And by that he means they're going to take economic ownership. What ESOPs are when workers become owners, and they're going to use the ownership to do something very different, very important, and very additional, and that is to become a company that is not just owned by the workers, but is run by the workers. It's not workers who are stock owners, but give the role of running the company to a board of directors. Other people, not themselves, workers. No, no, no. What Mr. McKean is talking about is making the workers not only the owners, but here it comes. The operators, the directors. They won't name other people to be directors. They're going to make themselves the directors. You know why? Because as he puts it, it's ethical. It makes the company more successful, and obviously it increases the likelihood that the company will stay where these workers are rather than sell out to somebody else, destroying jobs, damaging the community, if and when the company you sell to decides to leave to make more money elsewhere, sort of like the car companies in Detroit did, because they were never run by their workers. Mr. McKean is recognizing something that is fundamental to the problems of the American capitalist economy. Most industries and most enterprises don't have someone like Jacob McKean. Too bad for them. Their culture isn't good the way he says they do. Sell out quickly and often to people who will move the factory out of the country, to people who will move the office out of the state, to people who will go where the profits are higher, rather than taking account of the profits, but alongside the lives of the people, the workers and the surrounding community that are effective. The way to change that is not to pass a law that corporations will evade. It's not a regulation. It's a change of the structure of the enterprise, to make the enterprise a place where those who work in it own it and direct it, and where the decisions they make have to be made together with the decisions coming from the residential communities that are affected by the company's decisions. The community's decisions affect the company. The company's decisions affect the residential community. So they need to be together in making decisions. Each one has to have veto power over the other one because they have to work out things that are good for the people as workers and for the people as residents in a community. If you don't do that, your democracy isn't real. And if you don't do that, you have all the bad consequences that Mr. Jacob McKean, a successful entrepreneur figures out for himself and announces to the world he puts his money where his mouth is. And the 118 workers in San Diego have launched themselves with his help on a project not just to become the owners and thereby much more secure in their jobs, but to do with that ownership, the transformation of their daily lives. They will all become not just workers in a beer factory, but also the designers, the directors, the decision makers on how to build that business, how to build the relationships with the communities where they live. They're in a position to change the economic system, to go beyond capitalism in a practical way. And beyond capitalism is not an abstraction. It's a simple idea. End the arrangement where a minority of people are the employers and the majority of the people are the employees, such that the minority makes all the key decisions and the majority has to make do and live with the results of decisions from which they are excluded. That's what Mr. McKean wants to put aside. And I am proud and pleased to take my hat off and to say, wow, there goes the kind of on the ground, practical moving beyond the capitalist system that is the hope of the future of an economy in this country that has shown itself to be a vehicle for those at the top, those Renaissance folks in Detroit, while it leaves the mass of the people to live with the failures, with the destruction that capitalism has wreaked in so many parts of the United States and beyond. We've come to the end of this program. I want to thank you for being with us. I want to remind you that the biggest goal of this program is to partner with you in getting this message, these ideas, these understandings out to a larger population. I want to thank truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and information that has partnered with us for years. I look forward to speaking with you again next week. But after a while, gonna be my time, my time, babe Thing gonna change, Things gonna change, yeah.