← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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Sam. Saint gonna change. Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, our incomes, our jobs, our debts, those of our children and those looming down the road to confront them as well as us. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and I currently teach at the New School University in New York City. I want to jump into the updates, but a couple of announcements just to get us rolling. You have responded, but I want to ask you again, in the event that you would like to see this program as a video program, then you should Please go to patreon.com economicupdate that's P A T R E O N patreon.com economicupdate you can view the program there. And that's also a website that we work with that you may find interesting. And the same applies to going to YouTube, where we also are available in video form. I want to remind you also about the two websites that we maintain all the time, 24 7, no charge for you to become a better partner with us because we want you to be a partner to share what we do, to distribute it to your friends and neighbors and folks you think might be interested. The first one is democracyatwork.info that's all one word, democracyatwork.info and the second website is rdwolf, with two Fs. You will find their ways to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. You will find ways to communicate with us about what you like and don't like, ways that you can partner with us in the sense of participating in shaping what this program does. There are other benefits on these websites, but as I say, they're free to. They're available all the time. Make use of them. I think you'll find interesting materials there. Okay, let's jump into the updates for today. First, I want to thank Seth Sandronsky, a California writer who has a very interesting piece recently in Comstock magazine that you can find on the web at Comstock magazine. This is about yet another example of what is happening below the surface in our economic system. Things happening that give the lie to the proposition that we are an economy that is, quote, unquote, recovering. Yes, profits have recovered. Yes, the stock market has recovered, and yes, the top 1, 2, 3% have therefore recovered with those institutions. But the mass of people, not at all. And what Mr. Sandronsky's work shows is how serious the deterioration continues to be. His topic is the California State University system One of the most remarkable and successful programs of mass public higher education in the United States. 23 campuses stretched across the state of California, serving a vast array of young people and older people looking to get a college education. People who in the history of this country were usually excluded from such an opportunity. But what has the state of California, which is much more progressive in many ways than most other states, what has it been doing to its enormous and until recently, successful state university system? Between 1985 and 2015, 150,000 more people have enrolled and made use of the university. What a wonderful opportunity to lift the whole society by the educating of these people. That's an increase of 150,000. However, and this is the stunning statistic in his report, the State Today, California. When you adjust for inflation, in other words, when you adjust for the prices of things, so you get a feeling for what really the state support makes possible. The state now spends in 2015, 41% less per student than it did in 1985, 30 years during which the population of the student body went up by 150,000 and the support from the state went down by 41%. It takes my breath away. Now, granted, I'm a professor, so these things are closer to me than they might be to some of you. But bear with me as I lay out what this means. This is a society shooting itself in the foot. The decision by governors and legislatures in California to undermine public higher education by not supporting it the way they used to, by shifting the burden of paying for the university off of the general taxpayer in what is arguably the richest state in the union or one of them, by shifting it off of the taxpayer and onto the individual family, knowing that the majority of people who send their children to the California State University system are not rich people, are not full of extra cash they can spare for the high price now, at least of that kind of education. This is awful. It's awful for these families, it's awful for these students, it's awful for their future. But even more important than all of that, and that's enough, is the absurdity of considering this in the broader perspective. The United States now has to compete in a world economy with the European Union, with Japan, with China, and with countless other societies. One of the things that will determine the success of the United States as a place economically is the quality and the quantity of its working people. What kind of enthusiasm, what kind of creativity, what kind of productivity are they going to bring to the jobs they're asked to perform. Three quarters of the young People in this country who get a college or university education get it in a public institution. And what California, the leader in the country in public higher education, what it is doing to its state university system, unfortunately matched by what all kinds of other states are doing, is tragic. It is hurting this country's future. And the only reason is the fear of the politicians in California to tax the corporations and the rich who live there. My next update has to do with Mr. Trump, of course, and the coal industry. A few weeks ago, Mr. Trump made lots of headlines, announcing as he has said over and over again that he is going to rescue, revive, rebuild the coal industry. And this is a sign of how he is not going to be held back by environmentalists from doing good things for working coal miners. Sounds wonderful. It's total nonsense. Let me explain. The speech he gave announced that he was going to the Acosta Deep mine in Jennerstown, Pennsylvania, which is opening a mine. See, he said, I am helping to open mines. The number of jobs announced by the Acosta Deep Mine Corporation that it hopes to create at that min is 70 jobs. Not 70,000 folks, 77, 0. Well, let's look at the numbers of the coal industry in America to get an idea of the hype Mr. Trump is engaged in when he talks about opening coal mines in Jennerstown for 70 people. In the 1920s. That's little less than a century ago, the United States had 800,000 coal miners. By 2012, that was reduced to 90,000 coal miners, just over 10%. The other 90% of coal miners disappeared as a job. In 2016, the last year for which we have numbers, there were 50,000 coal miners. It a century ago, 800,000. Last year, 50,000. Coal mining is disappearing and it has been for 100 years. We are not relying on coal in this country, and I'm going to say more about that in a moment. And neither Mr. Trump nor anybody else has been able or is likely to change all of that in any significant way. That's why the president, in order to pretend he's going to do this, has to make a big deal about going to a mine where there are 70 jobs that may be created. But let's look a little further at the facts underlying the hype. There are basically two kinds of coal. One is called metallurgical coal, and that's what's in the Acosta Deep mine in Pennsylvania. That is coal used in making steel. That's a very small part of the coal mining industry's ultimate use for coal. The big one is called steam coal. And it is the coal used to produce the steam that then in turn produces our electricity. It is steam coal that has collapsed over the years and it isn't coming back. And here's the reason. And the ironies here are so rich. I have to tell you the story. We still, of course, have electricity in our country, lots of it. So there has to be steam created to produce the electricity. But the steam isn't being produced by burning coal. It is instead being produced by burning natural gas. And why is natural gas replacing coal? Because it's cheaper. And why is natural gas cheaper? Well, these days, it's particularly cheaper because of fracking. That's right. Allowing companies at high pressure to blow chemical gases and so on into the ground to bring up oil and gas from Canada to Texas in violation of environmental considerations, in violation of sacred territory to Native American populations, in violation of anxieties about earthquakes that this kind of fracking has produced in. In violation of all of that. A violation that Mr. Trump celebrates. That support of the government for fracking, of Mr. Trump for fracking, produces the cheap natural gas that has destroyed and continues to destroy miners jobs. The irony that the President is going to celebrate the opening of a mine for 70 miners while tens of thousands of them lose their jobs because of the fracking Mr. Trump's government supports because it cheapens natural gas. It takes your breath away. The reality and the political hype that Americans turn away from their politicians as inveterate liars, dissimulators, fakers. Stop listening. These are the examples of why that reaction in the American people is hardly surprising. Next, economic. I live in New York City. These days, the biggest hype in the real estate business in New York city is not Mr. Trump. It's actually an immense project of building a complex of residences and restaurants, very big, called Hudson Yards. It's called that, by the way, because it used to be where the railroads had their railroad yards, where they stored and repaired and housed railroad cars for various rail systems that come into and out of New York City. They're building, because of technology and because of lots of public support, including public money, a fantastic 21st century housing complex called 15 Hudson Yards. And they produced a glitzy, multicolored, very expensive brochure running about 20, 30 pages, which was inserted into major newspapers in New York City, New York Times, Wall Street Journal. So I got a copy and here's what I learned. Construction is coming to a close. Occupancy is scheduled for 2018. That's six months from now. Roughly. But before you get too excited about this, unbelievably luxurious. They'll have indoor gardens and meeting rooms and, you know, restaurants and shops and fancy apartments. 15 Hudson Yards offers. I'm now reading from their brochure, spectacular two to four bedroom residences. And I'll watch the language. Priced from approximately 3.8 million to over $30 million. Let's see now, folks. Stay with me on this. On my way to the studio today for this program, I passed and saw, because I counted them, 18 homeless people. And it's a short distance. Sleeping in doorways, begging on the street. The homeless in New York number in the tens of thousands, including entire families, many of them. The subway that I rode to come here is breaking down, has crumbling walls and ceilings, is in a state of disrepair, staggering. A state of disrepair that confronts 53 million riders per year. Any reasonable person looking at the city of New York with even a little bit of democratic impulse in him or her would know that morality, ethics, decency would spend money repairing a subway system upon which millions rely to get to and from their job, their school, their church, whatever. Or it would spend money to deal with the homeless in a decent way to resolve that problem. And there are countless other social needs surrounding us every day. But we don't do that because we are told by our political and economic leaders there isn't the money. But there is the money to spend billions of dollars producing a project whose cheapest apartment will be $3.8 million. This is what market capitalism delivers to us. That's its claim to fame. That's what it has achieved. Homeless people for whom nothing is done. A decrepit subway system for which way too little is done, a countless list of socially unmet needs that are put aside, either postponed or simply set aside while we spend billions of dollars to make even more fancy, rich apartments for people who already have more money than the vast majority of Americans. That's what gentrification means. That's what the market delivers us. If you want to know why people are critical of capitalism and markets in growing numbers, visit Hudson Yards and marvel. Last economic update for this first half of our program. Americans are doing something these days and in fact, over recent years that most of the American history would have thought impossible. Starting a few decades ago, Americans who had been told to save their money, who had been told in church that gambling was sinful, were told that now the world has changed and you should please gamble every day as much as possible. We call that the lottery system. On every corner, in. In every Tobacco store, in every stationary store, in countless drugstores, people are trying to sell you scratch tickets, lottery tickets, mega millions this and mega bucks that. You know, you know, that was once thought sinful, wasteful, inappropriate. Now we're being told you can't win if you don't play. Wow. And over the last few years, another unthinkable has happened. The following states have now legalized recreational use of Colorado, Washington, California, Nevada, Massachusetts and Maine. That's right, six states have made it legal. And it is a booming business, particularly in the states who did it earliest, Colorado and Washington. It's earning money for business folks getting into the business. But, and here's the crucial thing, it is earning money for state governments, much as the lotteries do. And that's what I want to make sure we all understand. Whatever our feelings, pro or con, about the appropriateness of lotteries and or marijuana, we were told that they are dangerous and bad and evil. For you, the lottery and the marijuana that turns out to have been more hype than serious reality. We now have both of them and society has hardly fallen apart. But the economics are what I want to focus on on this program of economic update. We have lotteries and we have the legalization of marijuana, not because of cultural reasons particularly and not because of cultural changes particularly. Most of the people who buy recreational marijuana legally were buying it in other ways before that. And everyone who ever lived in an American city knows that long before there were legal lotteries, the numbers game was rampant in the community. We have that because our state governments are afraid to tax corporations and the rich because they'll lose the money without which you cannot win electoral office in this country. And they've loaded up the mass of people with taxes because they didn't tax corporations and the rich so they dare not raise the taxes on them because then they will lose the votes. Caught between not wanting to lose votes and not wanting to lose the money they need to be politicians and to compete for the votes. They're desperate. That's why they borrow so much money and why Illinois, Puerto Rico have collapsed because they can't borrow anymore, having borrowed too much already. So imagine how desperate they are. Can we find, they ask themselves, new ways of raising money that the mass of people will not be angry at us about and not vote for us and that the corporations and the rich won't care because we're not taxing them? Answer yes, Part one of the Answer Institute lotteries. Part two of the answer legalize marijuana and yes, Colorado and Washington are leading the way, which is a good part of the reason why California, Nevada, Massachusetts and Maine have now followed suit. Those state governments can raise money from people who buy marijuana, but let's be clear, these are regressive taxes, both the lottery and the marijuana. The lottery for sure, since all statistics show us that the poorer you are, the more likely you are to spend on a lottery ticket. And that's no surprise, because the more desperate you are to engage the fantasy that you might become a millionaire tomorrow if you buy the right lottery ticket. And with marijuana, sure, it's a population that is so excited that it can finally do something legally that it has had to do illegally before that they won't mind, at least for a while, being taxed. But these are taxes on people that make no effort to discriminate according to their ability to pay. Lotteries hit the poor more than the rich and cost the poor a bigger share of their income than they cost the rich. And the tax on marijuana works pretty much the same way. These are not progressive taxes. They make no effort, like an income tax does, to tax you according to your ability to pay. They are escape hatches, friends and neighbors, ways for irresponsible Democrats and Republicans to get out of what they ought to be doing, which is taxing the wealthiest and the business community because they've been the ones to cut their taxes the most everywhere over the last 30 to 40 years. So don't be fooled. Whatever you think about lotteries and marijuana, it's all about the taxes and continuing the the unequal treatment of Americans around the tax issue. We've come to the end of the first half of this program. I want to thank you for participating. I think you'll find the second half interesting as well. Please remember as I asked you to take a look@patreon.com economicupdate P A T R E O N if you're interested in seeing a video version of this program and make use of our two websites available 24. 7@no democracyatwork.info and rdwolf with two Fs.com stay with us after a short interlude. I'll be right back for the second half. Sa. Hi. Welcome friends. Welcome back to the second half of economic update for June 2017. In this second half, we're going to address a few larger issues that are in the news, but are also issues that have a larger significance that applies much of the time, if not all of the time. I want to first talk about the economics of our politics here in the United States. And I believe this will apply as well to the politics in a number of other advanced industrial countries, as you can see. Here's the economics of the politics. It is clear from the pattern of voting, and by that I mean not only the people who vote how they vote, but also the huge numbers of people who don't vote and who make a point of not voting. Both those who don't vote and a growing large portion of those who do share a feeling of being betrayed. Betrayed by a particular party. Some are betrayed by both or all the parties, and some are betrayed in a general way about politics altogether. And I want to talk about that feeling of betrayal, because I think whatever its many motivations, economics is surely one of them. And those are the reasons, the motivations for this feeling of betrayal that I want to talk to you about over the last 30 to 40 years. Whether we're talking about the United States with Reagan and Clinton, or in England with Thatcher, all that came afterwards, or with Cole and Schroder in Germany and Sarkozy and what is his name? I've already blocked it out. Sorry about that. In France and so on and so on. There's a sense that we have been through a lot and it hasn't worked for many of us. What do I mean? Free trade. Everybody said they were for free trade, and that meant we should have globalization. We should be able to go anywhere if we're businesses and buy anywhere and sell anywhere and invest anywhere, and that we would all be better off because of the globalization of our economy. Then we were told that deregulation was really good in the United States. Republicans and Democrats fell all over themselves to deregulate. Wow. We were told we should cut the taxes of corporations and the rich so that they would be freer as ready job creators. And we were told it was important to cut welfare for the poor because it was creating disincentives for them to work hard and apply themselves. I remember Mr. Clinton's speech as president when he gutted the American welfare system through all of that, have we as a nation prospered? Have we as a nation or other nations like us had anything like the wonderful economic times that were promised to us to flow from free trade and globalization and deregulation and reduce corporate taxes and cut welfare? And the big loud answer of millions of people is no. We were promised things that weren't delivered or in simple language. We were betrayed by our political leaders, left and right, center left and right. And so what has happened? Masses of people are angry at the conservatives? Many. Why? Because one is having the deep, deep suspicion that all of this was about boosting profits for corporations and enabling them to have more money with which to pay their executives higher salaries so that they could become the super rich of our era, that this was all hype and hustle for profits becoming wealthy. So people are angry at conservatives feeling that they've perpetrated this fraud, which makes one feel betrayed. But on the other hand, the same people are, if anything, more angry at the liberal types, the left of center types. They, after all, promised to stop to prevent those conservatives from doing all that. And the anger at the liberals is intense, and maybe more intense than the anger at the conservatives because the liberals said they would prevent it and they failed. And the deep suspicion exists. They didn't try all that hard. It was Clinton who got rid of welfare. Was he pandering to the conservatives or are maybe liberals not that different? Is the real difference between liberals and conservatives that conservatives are profiting at a great pace in gross ways and the Democrats are simply saying, hey, slow down, don't change what you're doing, just don't be so gross about it. If that's reasonable, then we can understand why there's even greater anger and sense of betrayal about liberals. Because unlike the conservatives, the liberals promise that they are the representatives of working people, etc. Etc. So what have we got? Conservatives who actually take advantage of the feeling of betrayal. That's when politics gets interesting. The conservatives say, yes, you are betrayed. Yes, the government has let you down. Yes, even some conservatives like us did it. So what you can do now is a kind of revenge on politics. Destroy the government. Act out your anger, Support us today, conservatives, because all we're going to do is cut the government, cut taxes, cut government spending, stop borrowing. You can enact your rage and anger against a government that you feel betrayed you by making that government smaller, by working off your rage and anger at the government, by supporting today's conservatives who are committed to making the government literally disappear. Liberals can't go that route. So they say to you, vote for us, because yes, you've been suffering. Yes, you feel betrayed. Yes, liberals in the past have something to be responsible about in all of that. But those conservatives really want to destroy the government services you need. So vote for us, because at least we will cut them slower, less drastically. And you know something? More and more Americans at least, and I see it elsewhere in the western world too, they're really not buying it. They're not trusting the conservatives to come through Even though they like that story about revenge more than a little. And they don't trust the Democrats and the liberals, because after all, the go slow version of what the conservatives doing, which is what liberals have in fact been doing doing, is hardly an attractive proposition. That's why so many abandoned the liberals in the United States and went for Bernie Sanders. That's why so many in England are surprising the pundits by being interested in Jeremy Corbyn and so on. We have an economic system that isn't working, and that is reflected in a politics as bitter, as full of a sense of betrayal, as being shaped these days by impulses of revenge. It makes our politics ugly. It makes our politics seem hopeless. Not only does it not reverse the disinterest, the disconnection from our politics, it makes it worse. But if you don't want to see it and you don't want to understand it, you can do that. Because this is a political system where Republicans and Democrats alike are deniers all the way down to the wire. The next update isn't a long discussion because it's not necessary. It's about Mr. Trump's proposed budget for the next fiscal year. It's been much discussed in the press and I don't really have much to add to all that has been said, some of it ridiculous, much of it perfectly reasonable, pros and cons. I just want to make sure we all understand what Mr. Trump's budget is. The only word to describe it is the word that has been used in Europe since 2010, and that word is austerity. Mr. Trump's budget is an austerity budget. It promises to slash a vast array of government services, services that you rely on directly or indirectly. And the argument is that this is necessary because we're cutting taxes. And cutting taxes is necessary because by doing that, you will liberate, encourage, incentivize a boom in the economy. This is very old. This austerity notion is a modern version of trickle down economics. That's the phrase that became popular in the 1930s, the last time capitalism crashed the way it has since 2008. Trickle down simply meant that the job of the government is to help those at the top with the confidence that the rebounding of the folks at the top, big corporations, wealthy individuals, that the benefits to them would trickle down into everyone else's pocket as well. Well, the trickle down typically doesn't happen. It either doesn't happen at all, or it doesn't happen to a sufficient extent, or it takes a very long time for the little bit that finally dribbles down to the bottom to get there. And it doesn't change if you use the word austerity instead of trickle down. And it doesn't change, as the case goes with Mr. Trump, where you use neither the phrase trickle down nor the phrase austerity and simply talk about job creation or terms like that. This is a program that has one real function, whatever verbiage it's dressed up in. And that real function is to shift the cost of the crash of the system, in this case from 2008 to 2010 and lingering everywhere across Europe, in Japan, in the United States, and so on. The point of austerity is to shift the burden of pain from that crash off of the people at the top to everybody else. That's what it's about. The people who brought us this crash, the big banks, the big corporations, the globalizing industries, they're the ones who have recovered. They're the ones who got the government bailouts. They have had their pain offset, minimized and shortened. You, dear listener and observer, are the ones upon whom the pain has been put to last longer, to cut deeper. And this budget just continues the process. Capitalism crashes. Food stamps are going to be cut. Capitalism crashes. Subsidies to our students are going to be cut. Capitalism crashes. And welfare payments are going to be cut. The system run by those who are proud to refer to themselves as economic leaders was badly led, but they're held whole, they're recovered. Everybody else is told about what they're going to lose. It's up to all of us to decide whether a system that works this way is tolerable, is acceptable, is virtuous or not. But make believe none of us can afford. Mr. Trump has proposed austerity budget for the United States. And the double irony is Europe, who did that from 2010 onwards, has come out of the crash the most slowly, with the most suffering and now the most political disruption. Mr. Trump is choosing to follow the Europeans just as they become more and more willing to. To confront the mistake they made, even though the motivations were the same. We're coming into hard times, folks. Make no mistake, Mr. Trump is going to make a lot of money in four years, or maybe eight. He knows that. He knows he'll be out of there in four years or eight, and he's going to make it work for him and his friends, just like he's always done as a real estate hustler. You need to understand that this budget is about all that. He's paying off the political debts of his friends in the extreme right wing of the Republican Party and much of the middle of it too. That's what this is. That's what our politics has so often been. And that's the reality from which no shrinking back is affordable for the rest of us. The last longer discussion I want to engage with you today has to do with worker co ops. As I have said before on this program, there's a growing interest in in them. There's a growing building of new ones and a growing conversion of capitalistically organized businesses, corporations with boards of directors elected by shareholders or smaller capitalist company, more and more conversion of them into worker co ops. And I wanted to make clear to you why that's happening and what some of the implications are. The conversions are happening often at the initiative of the capitalists themselves, the owners and operators of the businesses. And that's because it is becoming more and more attractive to many of them than any other option for what to do with their businesses. I'm going to give you a simple example. Mr. And Mrs. Smith built up their business over 30, 40 years. They've now reached into their 60s. They want to retire. They have 284 employees who live in the town. They're an important part of the local community. They don't have children who want to continue the business. So they have the following. Close the business, sell it to another corporation, go public, sell shares. They don't want to do any of those things for very simple reasons. They don't know what the results are going to be or they know that the jobs will be lost by people they know in the communities in which they live. They don't want to do that. They don't want to close it. They don't want to sell it to somebody else. They don't want to make it over into shareholding company. And you know what? They discover there's another option. And as they think about it, it's more and more attractive. Sell the business to your own workers, convert it into a worker co op owned and operated by your employees. That's how you save them their jobs. That's how you save the community from having a business that's successful close down. That's how you keep the profits in the community. And in many states you get more after you pay taxes from doing that than selling it in any other way. That's why it's happening. Or young people are deciding to start a business as a co op because they rather work in a democratic workplace than in a top down hierarchical one. So it's happening. And as these businesses form, they turn to the local government for help for loans, for tax relief, for subsidies, for having help in finding and training employees. You know what the co ops ask local and regional and the federal government for? They ask them for nothing more than what capitalist enterprises have asked for and gotten from government for 300 years. There are folks who say, gee, they can't survive without government support. You know something? In many cases you're right. But that's true of all business. That's why we have tax breaks for businesses. That's why we have subsidies for them. That's why the roads were built in a certain place. That's why the school curriculums train young people to do things that the employers need. That's right. Private capitalist enterprises have turned to and benefited from the government's support from day one in this country and, and massively so many times. So there is nothing inappropriate, nothing unusual and nothing to apologize for in having worker co ops ask for and get help from the government. Indeed, what they're asking for is a level playing field. Instead of just helping capitalist enterprises, the government ought to be helping worker co ops, helping to create a co op sector of the American economy. And you know why? To give Americans freedom of choice, you should be able to choose. Do you want to work in a top down hierarchical capitalist enterprise or a democratically run worker co op? You don't have that freedom of choice unless there's a worker co op sector. Do you want to buy your product, use your dollar to vote for a capitalist enterprise or would you rather buy that product from a workers democratically owned and operated enterprise? You don't have that choice unless there's a worker co op sector. So to have the government help is to do nothing that the government hasn't done to capitalist enterprises and to do a lot to enhance the freedom of choice of the American people. And the same would apply in any other country. And let me close by talking a little bit about what a worker co op is. It's simply a workplace, you know, where there are some machines and there are some offices and there are some people sitting and people standing, talking to each other, cooperating, collaborating to produce a good or a service. It is in short, a community of people brought together to produce something. Okay? A worker co op simply says, simply embodies, simply represents the idea that such a community brought together, say five days a week from nine to five should be operated democratically because that's the best way for people to interact with, with one another, to get together. To discuss and decide what their work experience should be like, what should be done with the fruits of the labor they do together. In other words, a democratic community is the way to organize the work process. It should be an association of equals. If it chooses to have some people be leaders. Those people should only serve in the leadership position at the pleasure of the group. Their leadership can be revoked if the group doesn't want. The group should democratically decide what it produces and how it produces, where it produces and what it does with the profits which altogether their combined labor has generated. And you know something? Such enterprises, democratically owned and operated, will then have to do what capitalist enterprises did in their history. They'll have to forge linkages with other enterprises. Some are capitalists, some are worker co op. They'll have to develop their labor force. They'll have to work with the local residential communities where they are functioning to have a decent relationship. That's what capitalist enterprises are had to do. They had to work out their relations with one another. They had to work out how to get a labor force trained and able to work in a capitalist enterprise, mostly to take orders. You know, in a worker co op, what you'd have to teach in school is how to be collective, how to behave democratically, how to collaborate in a group, different kind of skill. And they all had to work out their relationships with the public whom they serve. But there's no reason to believe that worker co ops can't do it and do it better than capitalist enterprises have done. We live in a time when the capitalist system is in deep trouble, when it is literally unable to function for the benefit of the majority of the people who live in it. It's not long for this world if it keeps up the way it's going now. Now that's why there's interest in, that's why there's movement toward. And that's why it's important to understand what a growing worker co op movement is, what it wants and where it's going and why. In my opinion, it represents a way forward, a way out of the mess we're in. One that deserves your interest, your attention and certainly the analysis we try to give. Is it a system that solves all our problems? No. Is it a system without flaws and problems of its own? Of course not. Just like capitalism, it's going to have its ups and downs. But unlike capitalism, it's not ups and downs that a few people manipulate for their advantage at our expense. Whatever ups and downs we have now in a worker co op economy will be something we all own, we all got together to do. That's the logic of democracy. It's why we made our political system democratic. And it's now finally the time that our economic system catch up and do one better than our political system by being genuinely democratic. Thank you very much for your attention. We've come to the end of another economic update. Please remember to make use of our websites rdwolff with two Fs and democracyatwork.info Please join me in being a partner of democracy at work. Make use of what's on those websites. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Take a look at the video version of this program on patreon.com p a t r e o n patreon.com economicupdate or on YouTube where you can find us in that form. I want to thank truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis that has partnered with us for a long time. We are always looking for new partners, new sponsors. If you're interested, let us know. Use the websites to contact us. I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Your time now, babe. But after a while gonna be my time. My time, babe. Thing gonna change. Thing gonna change. Yes it is.