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Welcome, friends, to Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, debts, incomes, our children, ours. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and I hope that has prepared me well to bring you these Economic updates. Today's program begins with a kind of shout out to the voters in the state of Missouri. They did something very important that changes the way the wind blows in this country. And that's why I'm bringing it to you. The gop, which controls the legislature there, passed a right to work law that outlaws mandatory fees. That's when union members no longer have a union. You don't have to be a member of the union, but if the union wins something for you, it has to give you all the benefits. And so unions develop the system where if you're not a member, you pay a fee to get kind of your share of the costs of the benefits that have to be given to you. And so the question was, would the citizens of Missouri support this right to work law, as it's called, basically freeing members of workplaces from having to pay for the benefits they still get? And the victory was 2 to 1. And here's who won. The unions won. The unions went to the people of Missouri and said, the right wing, the business community says if you get rid of unions, because that's what this is about, you'll have more jobs because companies will come in, you see, because unions will be gone and wages will go down and you'll have a job. And the union's answer roughly was, you need unions and you need them to be strong because otherwise your wages will go nowhere. It was a stark choice for the voters. You want jobs even if it means low wages, or do you want decent wages? 2 to 1, they went for the union position. They defeated the Republicans and the gop. Wow. You know what that means? It means that the voters are beginning to be angry at the betrayal. You know, before, they were angry at the Democrats who had promised to be the party of the working class but didn't really deliver, which is why many of them voted for Republicans and even for Mr. Trump. And what the vote in Missouri shows is that workers are beginning to become angry and bitter and feel betrayed by Mr. Trump and the Republicans, and they're going back the other way. This is a very important election, this little election in Missouri, and that's why it's important to talk about it. The next update has to do with this perennial crisis that is only getting worse. The crisis of Student debt, which is now totaling in this country over one and a half trillion dollars more than all credit card debt. I mean, it's extraordinary. But there's new research that comes from CNBC and from Market Watch and several other sources about the consequences of student debt. Listen to these studies and what they that the level of debt is causing young people who carry that debt, students to either postpone or forget about marriage, to either postpone or forget about having children, to either postpone or forget about buying a home. And you know something? All of those things have enormous social but also economic costs. In the United States, home foreclosures are now increasingly connected to student loans. They can't cover the young folks the cost of a house and the cost of their student loans, and so they are losing their homes. Here's what the economic conclusion. It's irrational. In our capitalist system, the losses that are being suffered as a consequence of, of student debt are greater than the profits earned by the colleges, which is why students have to borrow to go because it's so expensive. It would be more rational to lose the profit for the private corporations because that's less than the social costs of having student debt. You know, that reminds me of prisons. Turns out it costs more to put a human being in jail for a year than it would to give him or her a decent job paying 35 grand a year because it's more expensive to put them in a place from which they never recover and from which society does not recover either. The irrationalities of this system are mounting and they're all around us. And as these irrationalities mount, you're beginning to see behavior that is so starkly out of whack that I can talk about it and you can see where it goes. One, Mr. Trump has imposed sanctions on Iran. This is a bizarre story. In 2015, Iran signed an agreement with Russia, America, U.S. france, China, UK and Germany promising to dismantle its nuclear weapons capability in exchange for getting rid of the sanctions that were hurting the Iranian company country. Every one of the other countries that signedagain, Russia, France, China, uk, Germany has said that the Iranians are keeping their part of the bargain. Mr. Trump decided otherwise to flex his muscles. OK? He's pandering to his base. He's Mr. Tough Guy. We all know about that story. But then he took it a step further. He announced that the United States would punish any company in any one of those other countries that does business with Iran. Well, the leaders of that other country then have an interesting problem. Are you just going to knuckle under to Mr. Trump. Can you imagine the leader of France announcing to us in the United States that any company that deals with somebody France doesn't like will be punished? Excuse me, how do you work a world in which people behave like this? So the Europeans immediately said any company that is sanctioned by the United States better continue to do business with Iran because if they don't, we will sanction them. So the companies have to choose between violating their own country's rules or violating the United States rules. What an interesting moment for these corporations. And guess what? A number of them have already started cutting their ties with Iran because they are companies that do enough business in the United States that having the United States cut them off is more costly than having their own countries cut them off. But here's something you should be sure. Those are not happy campers. They are enraged, these corporate leaders. They're being squeezed and above all by Mr. Trump, who is making them enemies, both of him and of the United States. This is the bully in the neighborhood telling everybody that they have to shape up. The Europeans have declared again that in their view Iran has done what it was asked to do. They have no sanctions on Iran, they don't agree with the United States and they are very angry. And one of the things those companies are now doing is cutting back on trade and dealings with the United States cuz it's too risky. We don't know, they're saying, when the next president or the next economic problem for Mr. Trump will lead him to do what else. To us doing business with the United States is not safe, is not profitable. The long term effects of isolating the United States in this way or ought to make every American not caught up in phony patriotism think long and hard about where this country is going and what it means. Yet again, another story about how capitalism works in ways that are producing, as in the case of Mr. Trump and Iran, all kinds of consequences that are scary to contemplate. This time we're dealing again with the Monsanto Chemical Company. But now Monsanto is no longer an independent company because it was bought out by the German Bayer company. Some of you are aware of Bayer because of the aspirin that is associated with its name. Recently Bayer purchased for 62.5 billion the Monsanto Chemical Company. And one of the products of Monsanto that it's most famous for is the chemical sprayed on crops that's called Roundup. Very widely used. Well, Roundup has been accused by countless scientists across many countries of being a carcinogen causing cancer. And a few weeks ago in California, the trial brought by a cancer victim, Dwayne Johnson, was settled by a jury that awarded him, he's still alive, although terminally ill with cancer, $389 million because the jury was persuaded that Roundup, that the chemical produced by Monsanto basically caused his cancer. Now, I am not a scientist and I don't claim to know the truth or not truth of what is or isn't cancer causing. But I know Monsanto and Bayer who keep pushing this do it because it's profitable. And the people who are opposed do it because they fear our health is at stake. If I'm going to make a mistake, I'd rather err on the side of the health than to err on the side of making profit for one company at the cost of who knows how many people. So unless and until we can figure out a neutral, really scientific way of doing it, which I'm sure governments could do, I want to err on the side of preventing this. Capitalism works the other way. It puts the incentive and the profits in the hands of people like Monsanto who have been producing Roundup for years while people said it made for cancer. My last update for today that we'll have time from is one of those head shakers. It has to do with the state of Louisiana. Politicians in Louisiana a week or two ago made a interesting decision that they're terribly proud of. They decided to punish two banks, bank of America and Citibank. Why they're not going to do business of a certain sort with them. They're not going to let them be part of their pension investment process. And why they announced with great pride that these two banks had been cutting back on the loans they make to companies that produce assault rifles and other deadly weapons. It's part of the banks, accommodating to the upswing of opinion in America that there oughtn't to be the easy access to these kinds of weapons. So the legislature in Louisiana is punishing those banks. Now here's what I want all of us to think about. Those are the same banks that over the last several years have been found to be legally and ethically compromised. I'm being very polite here. They engaged in money laundering, in manipulating exchange rates of currencies, in manipulating the interest rates we all have to pay, in abusing the fees that banks can charge, and abusing the mortgage lending process that led to the crash of 2008. Through all the crimes they committed, through all the unethical acts they performed, the legislature of Louisiana had nothing to say or didn't punish them. That's not a problem. But when they wouldn't lend to assault rifle producers, well, then the legislature of Louisiana rose up. Yeah, it's unbelievable, isn't it? Well, when a system spins out of control, these are the kinds of stories that become the norm in the society. Well, we've come to the end of the first half of the show, but before we meet today's guest, I want to remind you to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Remember to subscribe to us on our YouTube channel and to visit our website, democracyatwork.info where you can see more of what we do and how you can participate in it as well. And if you listen to this show as a podcast, you can now download our new Economic Update app where you can find recent episodes and archived shows. Finally, thank you as always to our Patreon community, a very important support of everything we do and bring you these insights because we get that support. And to our Patreon community, thank you. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. I am very pleased to bring to the audience and to all of you, Troy Walcott. He is a young man, as you can see in the moment, born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He has worked for the Spectrum Cable Company for 20 years. And at the time of the strike, which we're going to be talking about, he served as a survey technician and he's also Local 3 shop steward for the company. Welcome to the program, Troy.