← 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 jobs, our incomes, our debts, those looming down the road and those looming even further for our kids. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and in a way, that's been a training for me to present these programs here to you. I want to begin, as I often do, with a couple of announcements that I think are important. For those of you who would like to see this program as a television program, I want to urge you to visit patreon.com p a t r e o n patreon.com where you can do that and where there are all kinds of encouragements and other facilities I think you'll find interesting. Just go to patreon.com and type in economic update, all one word, and you'll see the program. The second announcement has to do with a speaking bureau that I am now connected to. It's called Speak out now. That's all one word, speakoutnow.org, org. They handle my speaking engagements as I move around the United States and abroad and give talks where people of varying interests and backgrounds gather to meet me. And I can meet them. It's something I enjoy doing. If you're at all interested in arranging such a thing, just contact them@infospeakoutnow.org Finally, I want to recommend and invite you all to make use of the two websites that we maintain, rdwolf with two f's com and democracy at work. That's all one word. Democracyatwork.info I n f o. Both of those websites are available to you 24 7, no charge whatsoever. They contain a great deal of material beyond what we present on this program. Interviews, audio and video recordings, excuse me of all kinds of interesting things that expand and extend what we do on this program. The websites also allow you to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to send us what you like and don't like about the program, what you'd like to see us cover, and so on. All kinds of materials and facilities. Make use of them. That's why we update them every day. All right, let's jump into the updates for this week. The first one has to do with something I know has aggravated you as it has aggravated me. It has to do with flying on American Airlines, not American, the company, but all of the companies here in the United States particularly. It has become more and more unpleasant, more and more crowded, more and More literally uncomfortable. I'm talking in particular about the shrinkage in the size of seats and particularly in the distance between seats front and back. It has become so bad that recently a consumers group, the flyers rights organization, disgruntled flyers like you and me, got together and petitioned the Federal Aviation Agency, faa, to do something about the shrinking seats, the terrible problem of shrinking seats. Their argument was very urgent. The seats are now so close together that it's very difficult to move between them, which means any emergency evacuation of an airplane over sea or land could become extremely dangerous to your health and even your life. And they used that argument to appeal to the faa. The FAA said, no, we are not getting involved in this. We've long kept the distance from this question of seats. Well, this is very convenient for the FAA and even more convenient for the airline companies. Why? Because by making the seats narrower and by making the seats closer together front to back, you can get more seats in an airplane. You can particularly squeeze the folks in economy, the vast majority, in order to make room for a couple of more seats in the business or first class, which earn much more money for the airlines. You can see what's going on. Airline profits are driving a process in which our seats are becoming more uncomfortable and now dangerous as well. When the FAA rejected the appeal of the flyers rights group, they went to court. And in this last week, the appeals court in Washington, D.C. came down on the side of the consumers. It said that the FAA had erred in not taking seriously the evacuation risks of what they were doing. And given some of the statements of the court, it's clear that they themselves have been on those same airplanes and know exactly what the issue is. Well, the FAA will reconsider. Who knows what they will do? I will follow the story, but I want you to see the larger implication. The deregulation of airlines some years ago freed them up to find new ways of making money off of us. Charging us to put the suitcases in, charging us to use the overhead rack, cutting out the meals, charging us for meals. There's an endless array of mechanisms airlines are using to boost their profits. Many of these efforts are at the expense of the airline customer. That's how this system works. It's kind of an endless cat and mouse game. They try to make more money. We push back if we can, in order not to have to give up more and more, take risks, be uncomfortable when the purpose is to make more money. Let's remember the number of people who earn profits off of a company are very small relative to the number of consumers who ride the airlines of this country. This is a systemic problem. And I want to thank the British newspaper the Guardian July 29, which carried a very good article explaining all of this. A bit better than the articles I could find in the United States. But perhaps that reflects the interest of the press finding it easier to be critical of things happening in other countries than in their home country. Speaking of the press, let's turn to the second economic update for today. This has to do with a remarkable event in Chicago. It turns out that there's a newspaper in Chicago, a smaller one, not the main paper, called the Chicago Sun Times. And it made headlines this last week or two because it changed hands. It was bought. And the interesting issue is who bought it and what he or she planning to do with was bought by a partnership between a local politician and some trade unions. And in declaring why they were buying this newspaper, they were saying they wanted to return it to its working class roots. This was a newspaper, a tabloid, that grew up years ago as a newspaper that was responsive to, expressive of the interests of ordinary working people in the Chicago area. The feeling of the people who bought the newspaper was that no newspaper was reflecting working people's attitudes, feelings, thoughts, desires anymore. That newspapers had generally become huge businesses owned often by even huger businesses, and that they were reflecting of the point of view about what's happening in the world that goes with being a big businessman or woman and not with being an ordinary working person. They were bothered by this, they were troubled by this. And when the Chicago Sun Times came on the market, they decided to do something. The alderman, the politician, had access to resources, so did the union. They bought the newspaper and we shall see. But I want to talk to you about the economics of the so called free press. The idea of the free press, as you know, was very important to the founders of the United States. They felt it was an essential component of any just and democratic system, which it surely is. And they were concerned that a free pressand they made this quite clear in many of their writings, was free in two first, that it was free of government control. The government should not be able to control the means of everybody finding out what's going on, which is what a newspaper is for. But they were also interested in a second freedom of the press, that the press should never be the monopoly of a small part of the community, because then it would be as beholden to that small part as it might otherwise be beholden to the government, which is itself a small part of a large society. So the free press had to be free in both senses. But the reality in the United States, and this has been true more and more over recent decades, is that newspapers, and indeed other media, radio, television and so on, have been more and more business enterprises, more and more controlled, owned, operated by huge corporations for whom the media is only a part of. But these huge corporations have the mindset, have the goals, have the pressures that go with big business. Above all, be profitable, secondarily, make your stocks valuable. Number three, grow your enterprise. And if newspapers and radio and TV are more and more under the control and ownership of big business, well, then we have violated the freedom of the press. In that second sense, it isn't free of. Of being beholden to a small part of the community. Now, you could make newspapers a consensus activity. Newspapers could be governed by boards of people who work at the newspaper, people who are consumers, who read the newspaper, who could together govern how it functioned so that it covered everybody in a fair way. Or you could have different newspapers which owned and operated by different segments of the community, so they're not all under the control of one segment. That would require big changes. In a way, the purchase by a politician and a trade union of the Chicago Sun Times is a kind of de facto recognition that we don't have a free press. That if ordinary working people want something that reflects their interests, they, their perspective opens its pages to their op eds, their viewpoints. They're going to have to do it themselves and to push against the grain. It'll be difficult for the small Chicago Sun Times to be a viable business enterprise because it's in competition to monsters with much more in the way of resources at their disposal. And it does force us. And that's the point I want to stress to face up to the fact that we may have a press that's not under the control of the government, and that's a good thing. But we also have a press that is under the control of a tiny part of our society and our economy, the biggest, richest businesses. And that's not a press that's free in the sense that the people who started this country, and I think most of us listening and watching, would prefer it to be. That will be a story we continue to follow. The next economic update is a big one and one that is catching a lot of attention in the United States and has been for a while. It has to do about jobs. The American capitalist economy has been hemorrhaging jobs for decades now. On the one hand, capitalist businesses have moved jobs overseas to take Advantage of the lower wages there, that's the primary reason. But also lax rules governing environmental damage that a company might do, lax rules governing fire safety in buildings, many other things. So it's more profitable to go where you don't have to pay high wages. It's more profitable to go where you don't have to protect your workers from fire and other dangers. And so capitalists go, because that's what the system dictates to them, go where the profits are highest. And the second reason jobs have disappeared is that capitalists, again seeking to boost their profits, replace working people with machines. First it was computers, now it's robots. This also is a job killing process. And big business in America has been killing jobs for Americans by exporting them and by automating them for a long time. And that has made a mass of the American working people angry and bitter. Without good jobs that are secure, that pay well, that have good benefits, you cannot get the so called American dream. And most American workers have been watching that dream fall further and further away from what they can afford. That's part of the reason we got the surprise result of Mr. Trump's election in this country, and there are many other signs of it as well. So it's become necessary for politicians to do something about the job problem. But I'm going to give you a story now about politicians that are doing it. But I want you to understand how they're doing it, or to be more honest, I don't want you to be fooled by how they're doing it. So let's begin. The company in question is called Foxconn, just like it sounds. F O X C O N N. It's actually an English name for a Chinese company, the Hai Han Precision Industry Company from China. It made the headlines. And the head of that company was standing next to President Trump, Governor Walker of Wisconsin and Congressman Ryan of Wisconsin. Two Paul Ryan, famous folks. These three, Trump, Walker and Ryan. Why were they standing next to the Foxconn CEO? Because they were announcing with great glee that Foxconn was going to build a factory. It was going to build a factory that creates at least 3,000 jobs. Sounds wonderful. 3,000 jobs. And where in Wisconsin? That's why the governor is there. He wants to be photographed standing next to 3,000 jobs coming in. That's why Paul Ryan was standing there. Because, surprise, surprise, the factory is located in Paul Ryan's district. He represents a district within Wisconsin. The company was talking $10 billion. It was going to invest 3,000 jobs. And the state of Wisconsin was going to do its part, said the governor. And there was much talk about $3 billion worth of subsidies from the state of Wisconsin to bring in Foxconn to their state. And the press reports indicated that other states had competed bitterly and urgently to get Foxconn to locate it there, rather than in Wisconsin. But Wisconsin won out. Maybe the company understands that friends like Paul Ryan in Congress and Walker, who ran for president, if you may recall, on the Republican side, were good friends to have. Well, I'm an economist, so I did a little number crunching. Let's see. I said to myself, if the state of Wisconsin is going to subsidize this whole business with $3 billion, and that was one of the numbers bandied about. And if we're talking 3,000 jobs, well, that works out to $1 million of subsidy for each job. That's right. The state of Wisconsin will give $1 million to Foxconn for each of the jobs that Foxconn creates. Well, as I said, I'm an economist. I deal with numbers. So here's what I did. I said, let's take the round number of $50,000 a year. An awful lot of people in Wisconsin and everywhere else would be eager to get a job that pays them $50,000 a year. Now Wisconsin is ready to subsidize to the tune of $3 billion. So I asked myself, how many people could the state of Wisconsin hire for the same $3 billion if it just hired them at a flat rate of $50,000 a year? Hold on to your hats, fellas. Here's the result. 60,000. Wisconsin could hire 60,000 people, pay them $50,000 a year, and it works out to 3 billion. Wisconsin could, let me say it again, could hire 60,000 people, putting them to work in the schools, the parks, the hospitals, everywhere, where people of Wisconsin would have their service from the government enormously improved and increased by the addition of 60,000 employees. Or the state of Wisconsin could give $3 billion to the Foxconn corporations and see, not 60,000, 3,000. Well, if all you see in the newspaper is the headline, 3,000 jobs brought to you by Governor Walker and Congressman Ryan and President Trump, you might be surprised, you might be pleased, all those jobs. But don't be fooled. What this is, is a program to subsidize the profits of Foxconn. That's why they're interested. They're going to get $3 billion. They would have located the plant somewhere. And now by choosing Wisconsin, they draw in a vast amount of money. It's clear that they're winners. Meanwhile, Trump and Walker and Ryan need to position to posture themselves in the large as job creators, or at least job facilitators. And they get a nice picture in the newspaper, in lots of newspapers celebrating the 3,000 jobs. The irony is it could have been many, many times more jobs if it had only been handled differently. That's the real story. But the real story has a final ending that goes beyond it. Let's do a little more economics. If the state of Wisconsin is going to come up with $3 billion to subsidize Foxconn, where's the money going to come from? There's only three possibilities, friends. Either they raise taxes on the people and businesses of Wisconsin to get the 3 billion which they're going to give to Foxconn, or they can cut $3 billion from the programs they now have for the people of Wisconsin, their schools, their hospitals, their roads, their parks, and use the money instead to subsidize Foxconn. And here's the third and final possibility. If they don't want to raise taxes, and Republicans rarely do, and if they can't get away with cutting their services they've already cut, that government provides people in Wisconsin, then the only remaining thing is, is to borrow the money to do a bond issue and thereby to put all of the people of Wisconsin on the hook to pay back that money and to pay interest on that money for the years that they borrow. And all of that to profit a private company from China with this fake jobs story for the political cover these politicians need. Does a story make you angry? It makes me angry because it's repeated over and over again across the United States, with photo ops about job creation being the substitute for what's really going on. It's been going on for decades. For those decades, we've lost jobs to automation, to the export of jobs. But we've had one politician after another, Democrat as well as Republican, standing up there talking about the wonderful things they're doing as they actually subsidize corporate profits and fake it. When it comes to the jobs. This is just a big fat current example. I want to turn next to something that's about economics, but it's also about the arts. And I don't have an opportunity to do that as often as I would like. So I'm jumping at this one. As many of you know, both from this program and from other things happening in the larger society, Americans are, in a way, waking from a long slumber. The slumber is about 50 years old. It Happens under the aegis of what we call the Cold War. Roughly from the end of the 1940s up until almost the present, we were in a great struggle, we said and thought, at least our leaders did, with the Soviet Union, capitalism versus socialism, and so forth. And during that time, it was very difficult to talk in a reasonable way about such things as the capitalist economic system, the socialist economic system, and indeed other systems. By rational conversation, I mean looking at these systems, figuring out what are their strengths, what are their weaknesses, weighing them, and having a civil and civilized conversation about are we getting the best we could, could we do better with another? We couldn't have that conversation. The bad guys were over there with socialism. The good guys were here with capitalism. Instead of a rational discussion, instead of weighing pros and cons, we cheerleaded one and demonized the other. That's childish. You're supposed to outgrow that when you get to be an adult. Well, it got delayed in this country for half a century, but over the last eight or nine years, it has all come rushing back, and there's no difficulty explaining it. The crash of global capitalism in 2008 shook people. @ first we were told it wasn't going to happen. Then we were told it wasn't going to be very deep. Then we were told it wasn't going to last very long. All wrong. It was terrible. It cut very deep. And it has lasted right until this moment that I'm speaking. A second major crash. Second only to the even bigger one in the 1930s. Two collapses of the system in 75 years and several economic downturns between them. Not a good record. If stability is something you value. Capitalism is unstable. And when it's unstable, instability hurts you. You begin to look for alternatives. You ask questions you didn't used to about the capitalist system that you're living in. Maybe the problem isn't this or that detail this or that law, this or that enterprise's policy. Maybe it's systemic. Maybe the whole system is the problem. You know, it's like having a refrigerator that doesn't work. You get the repair person in and they tell you, well, it's the motor, it's the condenser, it's this or that. But after a certain number of repairs, that person comes back and says to you, friend, I can fix it, but it'll fall apart in three weeks. It's time to get a new and different machine. Well, people ask about their economic system in the same way. Have we gotten to the point where there's a system problem where we have to question the system, challenge the system, finally talk about it as rational adult human beings. And Americans have arrived at that point over the last five years. I think it's wonderful and refreshing. Other people are frightened by it, but here is where the arts community comes in. In Oakland, California. A few months ago, there opened the Museum of Capitalism in Oakland, California, where artists of all kinds are bringing their works. And you know what these artists are doing? Questioning, challenging capitalism. The arts community is joining the conversation about the system and I want you all to know about it. I want to congratulate the initiative of those folks in Oakland who did this and urge you to pay them a visit if you get a chance. We've come to the end of the first half of this program. I urge you, please to stay with us. We will have an interesting interview, the kind we have at the beginning of every month shortly. Stay with us. We will be right back. Sam. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. As usual, at the beginning of each month, I invite Dr. Harriet Frad to come and join me and talk about the intersection between economics and psychology. It's what both of us do. And we work on seeing the connections between these two as a way to deepen our understanding of the issues that arise in this program. So let me begin by welcoming Dr. Frad to the program once.
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Again. Hi. Glad to be.
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Here. Good. Well, I want to start by asking you one of those basic questions that comes up in a thousand different moments. At least it has in my life. It goes something like when people are troubled, oppressed, pressured, either in their political life or their home life or their economic situation, and we're going to be talking about the economic particularly, we see sometimes that they band together, realize the power that people together have, which is greater than any one of us can wield. And they get together, they define the problem, they work on a solution and they bring it about. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's hard, sometimes it lasts a long time. The struggle sometimes short. But with that in mind and with knowing that in American culture particularly, notion of the team effort is very powerful. The notion united we stand, divided we fall. There's all kinds of recognition in our culture that getting together with other people is the way to make positive change happen. But given all of that, what makes so many of us wonder is why it takes so long, why that isn't happening, why more people don't understand what those very slogans, which they often say, what they actually mean. And my last point, which is the Same point. Another way is that a famous political leader once commented on the lifelong struggles he had been engaged in by saying for decades nothing seems to happen, and then in a matter of weeks, decades happen. In other words, something makes people suddenly do what for long periods of time, they don't. So here's my question to you as a practicing psychotherapist. Hypnotherapists are in it. Hypnotherapist and mental health counselor. And by the way, I should add for the audience. Dr. Frad publishes in a wide variety of places. She has a blog or comments on the blog that we maintain@democracyatwork.info if you're interested in her writings. And she has her own website and I wanted to make sure that that was understood by everyone. And the website is harrietfraud.com and I'm going to spell that. H A R R I E T F as in frank R a a d harrietfraud.com if you'd like to pursue her work. So let me hear Help us understand why more people don't do the collective getting together to solve their problems than we actually see. What's the.
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Problem? Well, there's a lot of problems and of course culturally there are the things that team effort is what wins. But there's also the cult of the individual, the lone Ranger, the one who comes in like Clint Eastwood, turns a whole town around. Instead of a group effort, however, let's look at the psychology of it. Children, when children are little, particularly children of parents without money, have their voices heard. Very seldom one is taught to be quiet and obey. Parents are hassled and overworked and the whole idea of interacting, of asking your child what he or she thinks of talking with them, is not necessarily accepted. Children become kind of background music to a life and they did some class oriented sketches, Hess and Shipman studies where they had all African American parents. And how would middle class and upper class parents talk to their children on the first day of school? And how would working class parents or unemployed parents talk to their child? And the people who had more money and social and prestigious positions tended to say, the teacher is there to help you. If you have a question, ask the teacher. In short, whereas the people who were further down on the employment scale tended to say you behave now, teacher tells you to do something, you do it. Your job is to submit and obey. There's a very famous and brilliant psychologically oriented philosopher, Louis Althusser, a L T H U S S E R who had this idea that the way you really discipline people to obey and shut up and to think of themselves as subordinate to dominant, untouchable authorities is through a series of things that discipline them from the inside, not the cops or the army from the outside, but make you feel like you're nothing. As John Lennon sings in his song, A Working Class Hero, as soon as you're born, they make you feel small by giving you nothing instead of an all you know, instead of it all. It's a sense that an authoritarian family, where your job is to obey and not to ask questions and not to organize your own theories and not to move out and not to stand up and not to say, wait a minute, I disagree with that, is a way to teach children that their job in life and their survival, with these omnipotent parents in charge of their survival, their survival is to shut up and.
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Obey. And so you're telling us, if I understand you, that the way large numbers of people bring up their children, meaning the best for them and all of that, it's not malevolence, it's not cruelty, but the way they think they're helping their children is preparing them to.
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What? To accept authority meekly and to accept their authority. Often. They're very hassled and overwhelmed. And the poorer you are, the harder it is to live in this society of dollars. And so you don't want a lot of lip from your children. You don't want a hassle. You want them to do what they're told and shut up. That's in an authoritarian family. And so the child learns that his or her survival, because parents are in charge of your survival, depends on submission and obedience. Then they go into an authoritarian school system which wants the kids to sit still. At the success academies, they have to fold their hands and put them on the desk. I remember quiet and no questions and no.
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Interruptions. And I remember my teacher. Every time anyone in the class did anything, we would get a lecture about the importance of standing quietly in.
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Line.
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Absolutely. I'll never forget it. Standing in line was like an achievement that you had to focus on, and if you failed, it was really the teacher disapproved of.
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You. Quietly, not only stand in line, but shut up and get in line. And don't be intruding your own ideas about, hey, let's walk in a clump. No, no, you don't do.
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That. And it isn't explained to.
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You. It isn't explained. Nothing's explained. Your job is to obey. And then you might go to an authoritarian religious organization in which your job is to obey this person who is right between you and God. And we know about all the abuses that happen there by priests and rabbis and ministers. And so you start disciplining yourself from the inside. My job is to.
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Submit. My job is to obey, to accept what.
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Is. To accept whatever is and not make.
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Trouble. So now let's move into the.
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Workplace. Now let's you. Many workplaces demand the same subordination. Not make trouble. And explain that union organizers are troublemakers and you should stay away from these people so that people can feel like they're nobody and that their survival is to obey the dominant authority and not to challenge it. At certain points in history or with certain upbringings, children don't think that way. I remember in fourth grade with a very authoritarian teacher at P.S. 81, Public School 81 in New York. She said, why do you burn the yule log and Christmas? And I said to burn Santa when he comes down the chimney. Thinking that was clever. She came up the aisles because we sat straight in straight rows, grabbed me and knocked my head against the blackboard to illustrate to the other children in the class that speaking out of turn was not allowed ever and was to be punished. And because I wasn't brought up that way, I spent the rest of that day imagining the class rising en masse and squashing her against the board like a tick. But if I had been trained that I shouldn't speak up but I should obey, I just would have been filled with shame that I was such a bad person as to be out of line. And then in future, in my future life, I would discipline myself from.
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The inside so you wouldn't have to.
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Be. I would feel, don't be ashamed. Don't be a troublemaker. Be good. Shut up. Shut up and obey. And I think that is what happens. Louis Althusser explained that. That if you control people from the inside psychologically, you get them to put themselves down, doubt themselves and stay obedient. You're way ahead of when you have to use the army or the police, the external forces that couldn't possibly monitor everybody, particularly in their sexuality or whatever else you want to repress. And so that that happens quite a bit. And then what happens sometimes is that because there's a break in people's lives, as there is now in white people's lives, the expectations, particularly in rural areas in which people are dying on epidemic levels because they've lost hope, and they drink and take opiates and then shift often there, white people are prescribed opiates, artificial Painkiller type things and things like oxycodone and oxycontin. Far more frequently, because of the racism in our society, African Americans are suspected and they don't get as many opiates. Then once people are addicted, they look for street opiates like heroin, and people look for other things like.
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Alcohol. Are these. Let me interrupt.
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You. Food as a comfort? And then they die of obesity and heroin addiction and cirrhosis of the liver and diabetes. So that now heroin and other overdoses are the most frequent cause of accidental death, more than car.
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Accidents. But I want to get the logic of what you're saying. So if you are trained from childhood to provide from inside yourself the acceptance of oppressive conditions, whether they be at home or in the workplace or in the civil society, is it your point that this obedience keeps you quiet on the outside, but inside causes you to turn to drugs or to food as a comfort to you? Because on some level, being oppressed and doing nothing is a tension inside the human.
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Brain. What happens is the information this isn't fair starts traveling up the spinal cord to the cerebrum, where the conscious mind would say, wait a minute, this isn't fair, and explain it to you. And you clamp it down along the spine, causing constant stress, which suppresses the immune system and makes you much more vulnerable to diseases. And that's a very terrible.
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Thing. So the notion is that you accept, but you rebel in another.
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Way. Well, it takes away at.
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You. You do see the injustice. You do see your own suffering and that of the people around you. But because you've been trained to accept it instead of dealing with it as a problem, you find these substitutes. You go off and do other things to compensate, and that they can cause you illness and death. And that we seem to be in the middle of it, and yet we don't recognize it. Is that your.
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Argument? That's what we do. The only way a kid can escape from terrible conditions at home, at school, and at church is in his or her own mind to just go off and pretend this isn't happening. That's what children do. So you get used to pretending it isn't happening, but somewhere you know it is and it's very troubling, and you address it by comforting yourself with opiates, with alcohol, with too much food, with smoking. That's how it goes. But then what happens is at certain points, people have had enough. So some people stand up and say no and organize other people, and suddenly it's acceptable. Suddenly those barriers are broken. As they were in the 1930s when the CIO, the labor unions organized millions of people, along with the Communist Party and the Socialist Party, organized huge demonstrations in the cities of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of unemployed people saying, jobs, we need jobs, and demanding that. And people thought, wow, I could do that too. I could join that, too. And in the 60s, people did it around the. Ending the.
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War. So help us understand what causes the shift. What makes an individual or a group of individuals accept, resign themselves to oppressive conditions, say a job that's unfair or wages that are too low to live a decent life or to give your kids what you want? What happened? How do you account for psychologically the acceptance, which you've explained to us? But then the break from the acceptance, the sudden, apparently sudden in history, and maybe it isn't sudden. I'd like your thoughts about that. The shift that makes people suddenly come out and begin to understand the slogan, that it's a team effort, or together, you know, united we stand, divided we fall. Suddenly that becomes very real in their lives. And how do you explain.
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That? Well, we can take an example that explains it well, an example in American history, everyone knows that Rosa Parks started the Selma boycott and was instrumental in starting the civil rights movement with the boycott of the buses in Selma, led when he saw what was happening by Martin Luther King. And people said she was just a tired lady who was tired of sitting in the back of the bus. No, she was part of the NAACP that had been organizing for decades. And usually what happens is there are people as they were in Cuba before their revolution, as they were in South Africa. The African National Congress had been organizing for decades and doing small things and getting groups together. And at some point, and that one doesn't know, at some point, people are ready and they move. And you could see that in Selma, Alabama, tens of thousands of people who'd stayed at the back of the bus and 10 who were African American. And so many white people who knew that that was unjust but hadn't been able to address it and might have worked in the NAACP or elsewhere or read the things. Suddenly they came out of the woodwork because there was. They were.
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Ready. What happened to make them.
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B
Ready? A combination of all that spade work that had been done in their communities, and no one really knows why. Nobody knows why. In South Africa, people endured years of apartheid, hundreds of years of apartheid, before they finally, with their leadership in the African National Congress at the time, said no. But then everyone said no. School children were out, teenagers were out, old People were out, general strikes happened of.
- [48:06]
A
Everybody. Let me ask a layperson's question. Could it be that the combination of suffering, a bad job situation, a bad income, you know, the economic oppression that we talk about so much on this program, it does. It both makes the individual accept it for all the reasons you've given us, but also bridle about it, also push back, also feel the injuries, and that in some sense, they accumulate until the famous last straw that breaks the camel's back. Because you often see that what sets it off is something which by itself wasn't so unusual, wasn't so new, but in this moment, it was the.
- [48:52]
B
Spark. It was, it was and it is. And there was a lot of work before that to create that, but no one knows. Now. Some of it is voices like yours and mine that are giving a different truth from the newspaper's truth. Some of it are people like Colbert's show or Oliver's show and. And all these blogs and this counter news that basically says, no, you don't have to listen to the establishment. They're wrong. They're just wrong. Or Bernie Sanders comes out and gets 175,000 volunteers to volunteer the first week because he's saying things that meet their needs. Or Trump's saying he's going to clean up the swamp, even though he's hiring them all and making it worse. So what? He's saying that. And people listen and they feel like we could be great again, our lives could be great again. And they go to him. And then the more people go, the more they see others go, and the more emboldened they are, and it becomes a chain reaction. And people flood into the streets and they demonstrate. And what's happening in America now is people, 72%, according to the studies, are doing something mainly passive, mainly. They're informing themselves. They're going on alternate news sources, they're signing a petition, they're answering a comment on a Facebook or a blog, and they're beginning to do things. They're joining an organizational demonstration like the March for Women's Lives. They are not organizing it, but they're doing it. And when the leadership emerges the way it has with the redneck revolt in the south, which says, put the red back in redneck, which has its armed people, which demonstrates against the Klan and says, all we had is our white skin, we're suffering, too. Let's band together. And is more and more popular, there's all sorts of voices out there. And when you see them out there and you see you have A place to go, and there's lots of others out there, then it's.
- [51:16]
A
Possible. You think we're at that moment in American.
- [51:19]
B
History. I think we're getting there. I could see it when I was a teacher and parents were picketing outside and there was a mood, we're not going to stand for an inferior education for our children anymore. And one of the teachers in whose classroom I was at that moment said, which of you children have parents who are picketing? And some kids proudly raised their hand, and she said, well, you'll go to jail, and they'll go to jail. And this little girl stood up and said, don't you roll your eyes at me, old lady. I'll bring in my mama. She'll beat your butt. And all the kids clapped. Well, they never would have done that before, but their parents were outside picketing, and they felt, this is our school. Don't you tell us that we're nobody and that we're going to jail. Because they were emboldened by the activity around them. And as people get more active and they go on marches and they make demands, these things.
- [52:16]
A
Change. It's interesting because often the people in authority, when faced with the beginnings of this, go out of their way to claim they're not affected by it. Nothing will change. You can see, listening to you, that the whole strategy of pooh poohing, it is in fact the key thing you want to reestablish in them, in the people that are moving. The greater wisdom, don't move. Don't shake anything. It can't work. It'll only cause you grief. It's a very, very interesting how this is fought out by people as a psychological struggle without their being aware of.
- [52:57]
B
It. Exactly. You know, people found out that Nixon, who said that the demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of people had no effect on him, and then in his memoirs later, people found out he was running from window to window, worried because hundreds of thousands of Americans went all the way to Washington to say, stop the war. Start racial justice. Change America. You know. But his facade was, you're nobody. You don't matter. You better know your place, because your place is silent.
- [53:34]
A
Obedience. So it's an argument, I guess, I want your comment on this. It's an argument that those individuals who, because of their childhood upbringings or because of a rebellion they went through earlier in their life, you know, an authoritarian family, can provoke different children in different.
- [53:55]
B
Ways. That's.
- [53:55]
A
Right. There's the child who internalizes it all. I will be obedient. I will Shut up. And then there's a child, the rebel, the one who doesn't. But whatever it.
- [54:05]
B
Is. A bad.
- [54:06]
A
Child. Yeah, whatever it is. Those people who are the activists, the ones who keep it going, who say what's wrong, who force those to accept, to at least know what they're accepting, they have a very important function because the accumulation over time of people's interaction with them is part of what may bring them to the point where they shift and.
- [54:34]
B
Become. That's right. I could see it in the beginning of the women's movement. You know, we'd go, we'd talk to women, and then they heard their own voices. They heard each other's voices. They knew they could come to a meeting. There was a place established where they could come and talk about their lives and be heard in the early consciousness raising of the women's movement and where they were important and where they weren't pooh poohed as just silly women. That happens over and over again across the. The board. It happened in the civil rights movement where I was an organizer going door to door and people recognized what I said and they knew that they could get out there and do something and they wouldn't be alone. It's very important because people are.
- [55:24]
A
Frightened. I think when I go back and think about what you say. If you look at the last few years, maybe the greatest achievement both of the Occupy Wall street movement and of the Bernie Sanders campaign was not this or that program they advocated or this or that particular criticism, but it was something else. It was this large number of people who looked around themselves at an event and realized for the first time that I'm not alone. My point of view, my criticism, my wanting to make change is shared by, with Occupy, thousands of people, and then with Bernie, millions of fellow Americans, and that this is one of those cathartic experiences that takes you from quiet, resign yourself, shut up, into no, I'm going to make a.
- [56:18]
B
Change. That's right. And you can see that. I remember at Occupy Wall street talking to a young woman from Georgia who'd heard about Occupy Wall street in New York, and she was gay, and she said, whoa, there's gay people there and they're okay, and they're all in Occupy, I'm leaving. And she was about 17, but this was her chance to be alive and she could feel it. And she was emboldened by a place to.
- [56:46]
A
Go. That's why it's to not be.
- [56:49]
B
Alone. To not be alone in her conviction to be supported and to have a.
- [56:53]
A
Voice. Well, in some ways, besides thanking you for your insights, there probably is no more important political question than what happens in a society when it is accumulating these feelings, and they are on the verge of, as we shall see, becoming very.
- [57:14]
B
Different.
- [57:14]
A
Yes. Thank you all for your participation in the program today. I want to urge you, as I always do, to be a partner of this program, to share the websites, what you've heard on this program with other people so that we become more effective. I want to thank truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis that has been a partner like that for a long time. I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Change, change, change Things gonna change. Yep. It's.