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Sam. Saint gonna change. Welcome, friends, to edition of Economic Update, a weekly program that's devoted to the jobs, the incomes, the debts, our conditions, those looming for our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life. I currently teach at the New School University in New York City. We have a loaded calendar of economic updates today, but before we do, a couple of little announcements. First, I'm in the final stages of planning my next speaking tour and it will be to California. So I wanted to let folks know that are listening that I'll be speaking on the evenings of February 5 and 6 in Los Angeles, on February 10, in Berkeley, on February 14, Sonoma, and then on February 26 and 7 and 8 in San Jose and in San Luis Obispo. So if you're in any of those areas around those dates, take a look at our website, democracyatwork.info and there you can get all the specifics about the exact where and when. And needless to say, you are invited. I also want, because of the time of year it is and the honor we bestow on Martin Luther King, to read to you a quotation from Martin Luther King, one of his most famous, but for reasons you can imagine, not the one most often quoted. So let me be the one to do goes like this, and if I understand correctly, this has to do with a communication between Martin Luther King Jr. And Andrew Young, one of his associates. Capitalism is a failed system, writes Martin Luther King. Continuing capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That's the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system. Martin Luther King, Jr. I want to begin with two updates about activities of President Obama and what they suggest and what they call for in the way of comment on their economics. President Obama, like many other politicians, has been outraged by what happened in Flint, Michigan, which we reported on this program a week or two ago to remind everyone, basically as part of the austerity program in which governments don't want to tax rich and corporations and are afraid to tax the mass of people beyond what they already have, decide instead to save money by cutting government services, public services. As part of this economizing drive, the city of Flint, Michigan shifted from its former reliance on Detroit water to to reliance on the Flint River. The Flint river is badly polluted and the end Result of all of the arrangements made to serve the austerity policies. Lead infused lead, polluted water, which is very dangerous for people to use, particularly for children, was in use for almost a year until the levels of complaints about sickness, illness, anxiety about measured lead levels in the water finally got a reluctant Republican, Governor Snyder of Michigan and then also other politicians, Mayor of Flint, and ultimately President Obama to weigh in about how this was awful and had to be quickly fixed, which they are in the process of doing. The tragedy, the crime, as Michael Moore called it, of letting this happen in the first place, taking that kind of risk, then not responding for a year, more than enough time to do real brain damage to children is beyond words, as President Obama said it was. But what strikes me is that this is the tip of the proverbial iceberg austerity politics. Austerity policies around the United States are having horrific consequences elsewhere. There is a danger in picking on the extreme horror of Flint, Michigan, that the almost as horrible results everywhere else in the country are going to be bypassed and not given the attention that they screamingly deserve. I'm only going to give you because of time. Two or three examples. One right next door in Detroit where I reported last week that courageous teachers had a sick out in protest of the utterly dilapidated school funding disaster in Detroit. You can do as much damage to a generation of children by not giving them a decent education, by not giving them access to quality teachers in small enough classrooms to make the education really happen as you can do damage with lead infested water in neighboring Flint. And it's the same austerity problem of the same Governor Snyder in Michigan that is behind both of these dilapidations. Unfunded education, unfunded proper water system. It's the same story, or I'll give you another example. Around the country, the numbers of teachers laid off since 2008, this capitalist economic system not working real well led to four to 500. The estimates vary. Four to 500,000 teachers laid off, that's four to 500,000 fewer people and educating our children. That's absurd. Especially at a time where we are told that the future of the American economy depends in large part on the quality and quantity of trained, educated young people. We are shooting ourselves in the foot. But the example I really want to tell you about the most, partly because it's outrageous, takes place in Kansas where another austerity pushing Governor Brownback in this case really has taken all of this to another level. While he will not tax corporations and the rich, in fact he Proudly cuts taxes on them. He has increased taxes on the poorest. And in the middle. Here's what he's he's given Kansas a new distinction. First of all, it is one of only 14 states out of 50 that tax food. That's right, the food you buy in the grocery store. Not only that, Kansas has one of the highest tax rates raised recently by Governor Brownback as part of his austerity plan for dealing with the economic troubles of the state. Notice he doesn't raise taxes on the rich. And notice he cuts them. And he cuts taxes on the poor. Excuse me, on taxes on corporations as well. But he raised the food tax to six and a half percent. And what is it doing? It's actually screwing not only the poor the most. Those who spend the biggest portion of their income on food, that's the poorest folks amongst us, they get to pay that huge tax. He's taxing those who can afford at least the most and he's reducing taxes on those who can afford it the most. What a grotesque mockery. And it's not having the goal. You know what's happening? People are driving to neighboring states, Nebraska and others, in order to escape. Because in those states there are either no tax on food or a much lower one. And of course, if you drive to buy your food, you are going to use up your car. You're going to pollute the air with the exhaust from your car more than you would have otherwise. And who counts the number of people who have an injury or die in a car accident on the way to or from escaping this tax? My Lord. What kind of an economic system produces this policy? Austerity. A way to shift the burden of capitalism's 2008 crash. To shift the burden of bailing out corporations and banks. What you do is you jack up the taxes on those who can least afford it and you cut the services that all of us need. This is a system that doesn't work. As if to make the point again, President Obama visited Detroit. Was it to commiserate and speak with the people of Flint? No. Was it to deal with the educational collapse of the schools in Detroit? No. It was to visit the auto show, the annual extravaganza where the auto companies, excuse me, show their new models, etc. And there President Obama boasted about the great automobile recovery, about how he engineered, in the depths of the crash of 2008 and 9, a rescue plan for the automobile industry. It even sounds like an soap opera that he is so proud of. Really listening to. President Obama made Me wonder whether he and I live in different planets. Let me explain with the statistics, the economic statistics, of what was done in the crash of 2008 and 09, particularly for the General Motors Company, which was a hair's breadth from bankruptcy. Let's start in the year before the crash. 2005, 6007. In those years, the total number of people working in the Detroit auto industry was 1.1 million. Amazing. 1.1 million. So if you're going to boast about a recovery, let's see whether the numbers bear you out. The crash was so bad that By March of 2009, the number of people with jobs in the auto industry in Detroit had dropped from 1.1 million to 700,000. That's a drop of 400,000 jobs lost in a twinkling of an eye. Are we recovered? Is the President entitled to boast? I don't think so. Let me give you the numbers. Today in Detroit, the number of people working is listed as 929,000. So let's round it out. The crash 2008 meant 400,000 people lost their job. The recovery as of today has 200,000 of them back at work. And the other 200,000? No one seems to care. It's not a recovery if half the people don't get their jobs back. That's an economic disaster, as any trip to Detroit will show you. Well, what about the money that was spent? The government spent $80 billion rescuing the car companies of Detroit. It collected back at the end of all the wheeling and dealing, 70 billion. Which means that the net loss to the government was $10 billion. Wow. For a recovery that only got half the people their jobs back, the government lost $10 billion. But on top of that, the 80 billion it gave to the automobile companies, which the automobile companies used for several years to get themselves back on track. That's money that could've and should've been spent in other ways to build up this economy. We didn't need to lose 400,000 jobs and only get back 200. How about a plan to get a whole new 400,000 so that all the people get put back? To boast about what was done is what my mother used to do. No matter how paltry the results, she would say, well, it's better than nothing. Yeah, it probably is better than nothing, but it's way less than what could have and should have been done. And it's not a recovery. It's really not something to boast about. It's something to cry about, because it shows A system that can't even get people back. Half of them. Their jobs at a cost of $80 billion used in this effort. Wow. But there are people who fight back and I want to celebrate them. The first one are the sailors in Greece. That's right, the sailors in Greece. Once again, Greek activists are showing the way. The sailors in Greece are protesting the Greek government's plan to reform. They love that word. Pension and Social Security system. Greece's major private sector labor union is called the General Confederation of Greek workers, GSEE. It announced that a 24 hour strike would be held on February 4th in response to government social reforms. They may prolong the strike beyond 24 hours. They are angry about threats to cut their pensions. And you know what that is? Anger about austerity imposed on Greece more harshly than anywhere perhaps in the world over recent years. And they're fighting back. Maybe that's a suggestion for the people of Detroit and Flint and Kansas and on and on. I also reported a week ago about the hardware and home improvement chain Menards M E N A R D S it has in the Midwest. About 280 stores across 14 states. They got a real lot of attention when a magazine, the Progressive in the Midwest, pointed out that the contract with managers of those stores said that if workers under their management joined a union the manager's income would be automatically reduced by 60%. And that this put extraordinary pressure on a manager to use legal and, who knows, illegal mechanisms to block a union since his or her salary, 60% of it, was at stake. There were even questions raised by law professors as to whether this was legal. Well, Maynard's got the message and removed that paragraph from the contracts it has with its managers. You fight back, you can actually get something. I want to also shout out to a good radio station in the greater New York area, WBGO and their intrepid reporter Bob Henley, for noticing a difference between the Port of Newark, a huge and important seaport here in the east coast, and the Port of Los Angeles. Some years ago the Port of Los Angeles mandated that to prevent the pollution of air in the port area, trucks had to be equipped with an invention that was put into trucks in 2007 that drastically cut the dangerous pollution. They did that in Los Angeles, they didn't do it in Newark. That's the responsibility of the Port Authority of Newark and New Jersey and ultimately of the governors of those two states, Christie and Cuomo. Shame on them, as the WBGO report says, for condemning the children of Newark who have already much more asthma and other lung problems than the surrounding communities. One in six children in Newark is afflicted. Shame on them for not doing what Los Angeles showed them how to do. And people should say something about it. My next update has to do with Walmart. I won't bother to list for you what Walmart is and does, because you all know. Well, what did Walmart do that gets them an economic update this week? Well, what they did was to announce that they're closing stores, hundreds and hundreds of stores. Walmart stores are being closed. What's that all about? Well, says Walmart, we made some mistakes. You see, we invested in stores that didn't work out real well, particularly their smaller Walmart Express stores. 102 of them were set up and they're all being closed. A total of 154Walmarts are closing in the United States. One in Oakland made the announcement that it would close two days after the announcement. And you can imagine what that did to the lives of the people who work there, the lives of the people who shop there, and so on. Indeed, 10,000Americans will be affected, effectively losing their jobs as a result. Why am I mentioning all of this? Well, here's a hint. Over the last year, the stock of Walmart, if you invest in it, dropped from $90 a share to $60 a share. That is a cataclysmic loss. This is a company in trouble for all kinds of reasons. And so they're dealing with their trouble, as companies, particularly big, big ones, usually do, by taking it out on their employees and closing locations. I bring it up because if, as Walmart itself admits, it made a bad investment decision back in 2011, but by setting up all those Walmart Express stores at great expense, which they're now closing because they made a mistake, well, then it's reasonable to. How do we know they're not making a mistake now by closing all those stores, hurting all those communities, losing work for the 10,000 families affected? The answer is we don't. Because in a capitalist system like ours, we allow a tiny board of directors, 20 people at most, in and around Walmart, top executives, board of directors, they decide they make the mistakes if and when they want to. They cover them over if and when they want to. They make more decisions if and when they want to. And the workers and the customers all live with the results. Wow. They suffer from the results. They lose from the results. Democracy means, if it means anything, that if you are affected by a decision, then you have a role to play in it. The workers at Walmart are affected. The customers of Walmart are affected. The people in the community that count on the tax revenue paid by a Walmart are affected. But none of them participated in these decisions. Capitalism is the negation of democracy. Walmart is laughing at all of us. We permit a tiny number of people, totally in secret, to make decisions they themselves admit are often erroneous. And we are just the drones who have to live with the results, good, bad or indifferent. That's not an efficient economic system. That's not an honest economic system, and it sure as heck isn't a democratic economic system. And we pay the price. And Walmart is showing us just how big that price will be. Next quick update and I have to move quickly. I have so many hats off to the city of Santa Fe, which commissioned a 10 month study to see whether they might not be better off as a community if they had a public bank. Here's the simple idea, borrowed as it is in many ways from the successful hundred year experience of the public bank of North Dakota here. It's a city, not a state, doing it. And the idea is the state can, excuse me, the city of Santa Fe can deposit all the money that flows into the city, everything from parking tickets to local taxes and property taxes to fees paid to have a bicycle or a dog or whatever else, and put that money not in a private bank making interest income for a private bank, but in a public bank, make that money, which is the city's money. And the citizens of the city's money work for the citizens, not for a private profiteer, typically a bank from God knows where, big bang from someplace else. The city is going to use its own money for its own needs of its own citizens, whose money, in the end, it was in the first place. What an interesting idea. What a better way to solve the urban finance problems than those, say of Detroit or Flint or Mr. Brown back in Kansas. The last update that I have time for today has to do and this struck me also with sugar. That's right, sugar. Why would I be talking to you about sugar? Well, because the Food and Drug Administration is trying to get a new regulation passed about sugar. And the issue is really simple. We have an epidemic in the United States of two diseases in obesity, being extremely overweight and diabetes, a very serious disease indeed. And we know from countless studies that both obesity and diabetes have a great deal to do with ingesting too much sugar in your diet. It's not the only reason that there's never only one reason for something as important as a disease. But it is a major contributing factor. About that there's very little dispute, except of course, from the sugar companies. And there's the story again, what the maximum number of teaspoons a day of added sugar should be in your diet is about 12. To give you an idea, one can of soda of sugared soda gives you nine teaspoons. So if 12 is the maximum you should have a day, you can imagine what's in fact happening. The study, the recent study that prompts my analysis showed that of 80,000 items checked on grocery store shelves, 58%, nearly three out of five items have in them added sugar. Not the sugar that's naturally part of many of our foods, but added sugar. That's when the manufacturer of the food product adds sugar in the hope of getting you to buy it because you have a sweet tooth or because the sugar is something you have learned to crave because you've had too much of it all of your life. Added sugar means what it says. You have added sugar. And sugar is what we call empty calories. It's purely more sugar for your system. It doesn't come as it would if it were part of another food with all kinds of other nutritious components like the sugar in fruit or the sugar in milk and so on. Added sugar is an empty extra calorie and an empty contribution to your risk of obesity and or diabetes. So sneaky have the companies become that they have decided to fake it out by not adding sugar in the sense of announcing it on their packages. They either say things like cane solids or solid syrup or corn syrup or dextrose or sucrose. They have hundred different names so that you shouldn't understand. These are all parts of the added sugar. So the FDA wants there to be a label that adds it all up and tells you how much added sugar is. So if you want to avoid the risk of obesity and diabetes, you can do it. And the food companies are protesting. And why do I tell you? Because it's another example of how the capitalist system, the private profit, bottom line driven system we live with, is a direct contradiction to what's best for our health. And the fight that the FDA is having is which wins the health needs of the mass of our people or the profit needs of a handful of food companies. We've come to the end of the first half. I devoted it entirely to our updates because we have so many and they are in a way so important. Please stay with me. We will come back in a very, very short time and then we will have major discussions of some of the major issues that came up, particularly the very famous Oxfam report of this last week on poverty and inequality in the world. Stay with us. We'll be right back.
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Still don't know what I was waiting for and my time was running wild I mean, dead end streets and every time I thought I got admitted it seemed the taste was not so sweet so I turned myself to face me But I've never caught a glimpse.
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How.
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The others must see the faker I'm much too fast to take that test.
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Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update for this week. I'm your host Richard Wolff. And in the second half we look into some of the major issues that came up in the last week and that need more than the short form economic update analysis that we tend to cram into the first half hour. And my apologies, we did a lot of them this first half today because there were so many and I felt that they were important, even if there were a lot of them. I want to begin the longer stories, the more major discussions, by noting a parallel between the United States and the United Kingdom, America and Britain. And what I want to notice is the rising storm of criticism and questioning of capitalism by people who self identify as socialists and have become major players in the political life of these two countries. Here in the United States, it's clearly Bernie Sanders who is surprising everyone, and my guess is himself as well, by the level of support and interest his campaign is generating. He's much more critical of the status quo and the capitalist system we live in. He accepts without shame or hesitance the name socialist, democratic socialist, as he puts it. And he is showing everyone that there is huge interest and huge support for such a position becoming part of our political landscape. And that is something it has not been for the last half century. In the aftermath of World War II, as the United States looked upon the Soviet Union not as the ally it had been in World War II, but as the archenemy as the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt was unraveled and undone in the decades after 1945, anything that sounded, smelled, looked or talked like socialism was considered evil, dangerous, traitorous, vicious of the devil, you name it, every bad adjective you could imagine was attached to it. So much has changed and much is changing by the ascendancy into political normalcy, one might almost say of a socialist who's strong in his criticism of many aspects of the capitalist economic system we live in in England. You have something so similar. It deserves to be mentioned in the same Breath. This was the victory last year of Jeremy Corbyn, who became by election the new leader of the Labour Party. The Labour Party, which was once very clearly a socialist party, moved much to the right under the leadership of Tony Blair for quite a long time, but is now moving back. And here are some interesting things that I gleaned from an article on the whole Jeremy Corbyn phenomena that appeared in the very important British newspaper The Guardian on 13 January. It shows there that the membership of the Labour Party literally doubled between 6th of May of 2015 and 10th January. These are 200,000 more people joining actively the Labour Party because of Corbyn, because it's now a party that does, as many of the interviews reported in this story in the Guardian show, that now feel they have a reason to get involved in politics. That's what a lot of the people coming to rallies of Bernie Sanders in the United States also say. It is renewing the notion that there can be a politics which really discusses the different ways a society can organize itself, rather than making that kind of conversation taboo. So we discuss the details, but never the fundamental issue about the economic system we depend on and live in. It turns out that like Mr. Sanders, Mr. Corbyn was at first dismissed by all the right thinking folks in the media and in the establishment and in the University of Britain as unelectable, a marginal character, something that was a throwback to the past that could have no future. A lot of that tone has changed as it becomes clear that he is the beginning of a major wave of change in British politics. And much the same is happening in the United States. When two countries as different as the United States and Britain, yet having in common the same capitalist system and the same relatively conservative leadership of that capitalist system, when two of them have this kind of similar critical movement, then it's worth noting that there's something profound going on. But perhaps the most important topic for me to work on with you today has to do with a report released this last week to be exact, on the 18th of January by the world famous Oxfam organization in Great Britain. This is an institution that you can find out all about by going to their website, Oxfam. Just like it sounds. Oxfam, Oxfam.org UK and their report, one that they do every year, but their report is called an economy for the 1%. How privilege and power in the economy drive extreme inequality and how this can be stopped. Why do I bring it up to you? Well, because a number of the items it Brings out are so important, they're like a report card on the achievements of capitalism. Or maybe, to be fairer, a report card on the shortcomings of capitalism. Because surely the inequality that this system produces is staggering. And using the word shortcome really doesn't quite get to it. Let me explain. First, Oxfam studies billionaires. By that it means people around the world, across this planet, who own 1 billion. That's with a B1 billion worth of property or more. And then it looks at the richest among the billionaires and it comes up with a measurement ingenious and devastating all at the same time. Here's their measurement. Among the richest billionaires, how many of the very, very richest of them own the equivalent of the property owned by the poorest half of the population of this planet? That's right. They compare the richest billionaires on the one hand, and the total wealth owned by three and a half billion human beings on this planet. Hold on to your hats when I give you the result. In 2015, the last year of the statistics were kept by Oxfam for this report. The richest 62 billionaires, people like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, that kind of person. If you take the 62 richest billionaires, they own more than three and a half billion, the poor half of the population of our planet. On one side, 62 people, on the other side, three and a half billion people. There's almost no breath in me to comprehend this. And if you're having trouble getting your head around it, I understand. But here's how bad it is. They did the same calculation some years ago. In fact, they do it every year. In 2010, that's five years earlier, it was the 388 richest billionaires who together had more than the wealth of the lower half of the planet. But the rich have gotten so much richer that you don't need to have 388 of the richest. Only the top 62 richest are needed to get the equivalent of what the poorer half of the population has. Wow. Oxfam does another measurement. And bear with me, because they really are breathtaking. Here it says, it asks the question, when will the richest 1% of the people of the world, richest 1% own more than the other 99% combined? You heard me right. They thought this would happen in 2016, the year we've just entered, but they turned out to be wrong, which they point out. It happened last year. In 2015, it happened sooner because the gap between rich and poor is widening faster than even they had thought it would. So that in 2015 the line was passed. Finally, the top 1% owns more than the other 99%. That's right. The top 1% owns more than 50% of the wealth. And the other 99% scramble and fight each other for the other half. What is going on? What is going on is a capitalist system that promised the world when it came into dominance 300 years ago that it would bring democracy, equality and brotherhood. Remember, egalite was part of the French Revolution slogan. It was a promise that, that capitalism would overcome the absurd inequality associated with medieval times, with ancient Roman emperors, with ancient Greek pharaohs. Not to be. Capitalism reminds us of the ancient Greek pharaohs because the inequality Oxfam reports that I just summarized is as awful as, as extreme and as outrageous as anything in the history before capitalism ever came here. Oxfam documents more. Its estimates are that $7.6 trillion of this wealth of the rich is held in offshore accounts so that they don't have to pay taxes on that wealth. Hundreds of billions of dollars of taxes that might flow in to governments that would help the mass of people are not available because the super rich become ever more rich by stashing their wealth where it will not pay taxes. And let me remind you of the simple arithmetic of wealth I'm going to use as an example. Bill Gates. Why not? I have Nothing particular against Mr. Gates, but he's right up there. He's in those 62 billion. And I'm going to use as an estimate one that's often used, that he has $60 billion. Well, let's suppose he puts it in the hands of capable hedge funds who can earn him 10%. Many hedge funds do better than that. They certainly boast that they can do better than that. But let's assume 10%. Well, let's see, if you have $60 billion and it's managed by a hedge fund hustler and you get 10%, that's $6 billion you're going to get each year. Well, let's see. Don't the Gates foundation and the Gates family, don't they give money away? Yeah, they gave away 2 billion last year. So let's see. They gave away 2 billion. One of the biggest giveaways of any foundation. But they earned six. So after giving away two, they're still $4 billion richer than than they were a year ago. And you can see year after year why they become richer and richer. Let's be real honest. Wealth is created by everybody working together. The janitor who cleans the rooms in which the capitalists work, the secretaries who keep the records, the clerks who keep the records, the. The lawyers who watch for the legal. Everybody contributes in his or her way. If everybody contributes, how in the world do you justify billions to a handful of people? Mr. Gates helped invent Microsoft. Sure he did. Well, what about the role of all the teachers who taught him what he put together, who enabled him in a hundred ways in terms of skill, in terms of knowledge, in terms of emotional capability to do what he did? They too ought to get a piece of the result. Why do we allow the one person at one point to amass this kind of wealth? And how in the world do you square this with any commitment to democracy that that makes any sense at all? Bill and Melinda Gates, to stay with them, sit around and decide who they're going to give money to. This year it's Africa. Next year it's Asia. This year it's school. Next year it's medical. What? Millions of people's lives depend on the distribution of wealth that is decided by one or two people. That's why we got rid of kings and princes and emperors and czars and pharaohs long, difficult struggles, because that's so grotesquely unfair and undemocratic that it's not tolerable. Well, then why is it tolerable here? How do you justify all of this if that money were distributed around hundreds of millions of people who have died over the recent years from curable diseases, who've suffered lifelong difficulty because they never got an education that they could have got that this wealth would have paid for? What possible justification is there for one family, two families, five families having 27 homes, 12 yachts and more money than is imaginable, while other people haven't got enough for the basic what morality tolerates this capitalism is a system. This is a report card. You have failed as an economic system to do anything like what is needed and anything like what this system is capable of. We can produce wealth. It should be distributed. Those who are rich now can stay rich, but at a much more modest level. They can still have more than everybody else if that's so important. A million will do that, 5 million will do that. But 60 billion, it is obscene. And the amazing thing for me is only that there isn't more of a fundamental protest against it. A calculation of my own to summarize. I said to myself, wow, let's suppose a new world, a world in which the people, in a democratic way, have a democratic decision on how they would like income to be distributed. They would be able to choose to make an informed decision. On the one hand, they could leave things as they are. Billionaires, 62 of them with more wealth than half the people on the planet. 1% with more wealth than the other, 99%. At the other end, they could give complete equality. Everybody gets the same right down to the nickel. And in between those two extremes, they could have all kinds of gradations. Maybe they would allow some people to be 10 times wealthier than others, another group five times and so forth. And maybe they would like to link it to skill, education, innovation, entrepreneur. You could pick what the standards were that would allow you to give some money more to some than to others. We've had many surveys in the United States and it's crystal clear that the American people, by overwhelming majorities, want a much less unequal system of distributing income than we now have. So I'm very daring by saying let's make it a democratic decision. Should have been that all along. We all live with the consequences of a system and how it distributes income. We are all affected, whether it means stepping over homeless beggars in the street to and from our work and our jobs and our homes. Whether it means being at risk of desperate people having to feed their children, whether it means watching untold wealth parade by you while unspeakable poverty lurks in the shadows watching too. Or whether you want a society like we used to boast of in America, a middle class society where almost everybody is okay, some better, some worse, but we don't allow, we don't destroy ourselves by extreme inequality. Let the people decide. You don't see that. You can't imagine it. Well, that's a measure of how far this system to keep itself going has to keep out of democratic decision making the very decisions that that most affect us, that are most urgent and which those on top fear the most. Staying with this theme, I want to also report on another document released this last week, this one by the oecd, the Organization for Economic Community and Development. I hope that. No, I'm sorry. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and development, the OECD, very well known organization. It includes 34 countries, basically the more industrialized, higher income countries around the world. It was founded in 1961 and is an enormously important resource for all kinds of economic documents that everybody makes use of all the time. Anyway, they released a report this last week pertaining to poverty levels among the member nations, the 34 member nations. So I thought I would tell you, since we've just finished talking about extreme wealth, what it is that we can say about poverty. And of course, this is poverty among the 34 most developed nations in. In the world. And you all know which ones they are. I thought some of the results were arresting, and I wanted to tell you about them. The country with the largest amount of poverty, that is the percent of people living below the poverty line in each country out of the 34, the country with the largest amount of poverty is Israel. Let me let that sink in. Child poverty, the percentage of children age 0 to 17 living in poverty. Number one, 28.5% of children living in poverty. That honor goes to Israel. I don't know the details, but my guess is we're looking here at the consequences of Israel being two societies in one, one Jewish and one Palestinian. And we can all think about what that means. Coming in number four, fourth poorest is the United States. The country. I'm sorry. Fifth. Fifth. The countries that have more poverty than the United States are Turkey, Mexico, and Spain. Turkey, Mexico and Spain. The countries that have less poverty than the United States include Greece, Italy, Japan, France, Netherlands, Switzerland, Ireland, United Kingdom, Germany, and Denmark. Bernie Sanders has been mocked and criticized for making references to Denmark. Well, the numbers on poverty suggest why Denmark may have attracted Mr. Sanders interest. Let's begin with child poverty. In many ways the most important measure since what you do to your children, what you condemn them to live in and to grow up in, will affect not only them, but your own society for decades to come. It is in many ways the most so. Take a moment with me to look at global child poverty rates in perspective. OECD report. Israel, as I told you, was first. 28.5% of its children live in poverty. By contrast, the United States, 20.5% over one out of five American children lives below the poverty line. More than one in four in Israel does. What about Denmark? Are they up there with the 28.5% for Israel and 20.5% for the United States? No, they're not even close. In Denmark, the percentage of children living below the poverty line is 3.8%. Again, Israel, 28.5%. Denmark, 3.8%. Of course, you would want to look at Denmark and try to understand what they've done, how they did it, and what you can learn. Or, of course, alternatively, you can come up with a breezy dismissal that Denmark is different from the United States, which it surely is, and therefore there's nothing to learn, nothing to worry about, no comparison to draw lessons from. But if you do that, you're not thinking and you're evading and you ought to be called out about it. I could go on, but I really want to let this fundamental message sink in. An economic system that produces this kind of inequality inside societies across the globe is not excused by saying that some of the poorest in the world have a better income and diet than they used to. Sure, some of them do. The passage of time has done that. If capitalism wants to claim credit for what it did, okay. But then it has to also accept the gap between what it did and what it could have done. The millions, the hundreds of millions whose lives could have been drastically improved if we just took a little from those who have way more than they need. No morality of any major religion endorses, tolerates, condones what is going on, and that sooner or later will come into play. I want to remind you that all of these materials, including this program, are archived on our website democracyatwork.info please make use of it. Please make use of the events where I'll be speaking in California, as I announced during the month of February. Please find a way to come and let me meet you and vice versa. I want to thank truthout, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis. Check it out. And I want to invite you, please, to get in touch with us to use our websites democracyatwork.info and rdwolf.com to communicate to us, to follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Use our websites and this program. Share it with other people. Build the impact. We are partners and I thrive on that reality. I look forward to speaking with you again next week. It.