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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, debts, income, our own, those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and I hope that that has prepared me to offer you these economic updates about what's been happening over the last week and sometimes a bit longer. Well, in the very recent past, many of us were affected by two notable suicides in the news. One was Kate Spade, a fashion designer famous for the bags that she developed and the industry that grew up around them. And the other one was the celebrity chef, for lack of a better term, Anthony Bourdin, who was also an author and a travel writer of extraordinary depth and excitement for many, many of us. These were tragic suicides, of course, but they force us all to wonder about our own lives, to wonder about what might have brought these two highly successful, much beloved in their ways, people to make that decision to take their own lives. It prompted me, as I thought about it, to look into what's happening in the way of suicide in this country. Were these isolated events or do they have maybe some more general message for us? And in particular, given this program, where's the economics in all of this? Well, I went to the center for Disease Control, that very important branch of the United States government that keeps track of our illnesses, our deaths, our health, in short. And there I found some results I want to bring to your attention and then offer a brief economic interpretation. The rate of suicide in the United States between 1999 and 2016, that's roughly over the last 20 years, has increased by 30%. That is an astonishing situation. Basically a one third increase in the rate at which people take their own lives. Here are some more information that is relevant. One half of the suicides occurring now occur by the use of firearms. To give you a sense of how many people we're talking about in the year 2016, which is the last year for which data are available, the number of suicides in the United States, 45,000. That makes suicide the 10th leading killer of Americans. When you take every source of death, only a half of those people had any known, quote, unquote, mental health problems. Half had no such problems that were known. And a good number of those who had known health problems had what most of us would consider to be occasional depression and a variety of other activities and moods that most of us have. So what's going on? The decisions of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdin are obviously not unique and not Restricted to them as individuals. I would argue the following. We are living in a time when American capitalism, our system, is in deep trouble. Many of the leading industries have moved out of the country. Many of their production facilities continue to move out of the country. The new center of economic growth is in China and India and Brazil and places like that. As a result, the quantity and the quality of jobs in this country are less and less important to American businesses because they're more and more invested. So somewhere else, as they develop the technology, what jobs, they don't move abroad, they replace people with machines and artificial intelligence promises to take that further. People see all of that. Their sense of economic opportunity is being constricted. The pressures on them, of jobs that are not as secure as they once were, of benefits that have shrunk from what they were once were. The fact that their children, to get a college education, now have to go into enormous debts or put drains on family finances. It's too much and you're putting the burden on too many people with no way out. And suicide is one way people respond. You know, I've talked on this program about the opioid crisis. In a way, that's another kind of death. You don't stop breathing, your brain doesn't stop, but it almost does. We're in a society that is showing us in these symptoms, something is terribly wrong. My next update has to do with the building the housing system in this country. You know, last week I had Bob Henley here and we talked about housing. And I did some work inspired by what he had to tell us. And here's what I discovered. The vacancy rate at the highest level, most expensive apartments, most expensive houses, 13%. The vacancy rate at the bottom end, 6%. We are building houses for the richest of our people, way ahead of what they can afford. And we're under building everywhere else, which is one of the reasons why rents are going up and going up quickly, because there isn't enough housing being built. Because we don't build housing in a capitalist system to meet people's needs. We build housing where and when it's profitable. And you know, building a house, especially a multi unit house, takes years between the planning and the permits and the excavation and the building and the zoning and all the rest of it. So there's always a lag. So when the economy looks good, too many people start the process. By the time the housing comes ready to be sold or rented, it's two, three, four years later when the economic situation will go. You might think that this awareness of this pattern would lead there to be some coordinated planning when it comes to housing, but there isn't, because we don't have the government doing public housing the way we once did. It's all a private gamble for private speculators to decide when and how to build housing. And they build it for the top, where the money is, and we live with the results. Is it a critique of this system? You bet. Here's some good news, and yet one that carries a lesson. A federal judge has granted class action status to nurses and nurse practitioners working at the Veterans Administration hospitals across the country. Why? The nurses and their lawyers argued that for years the VA administration was requiring many of them to do extra work on their own time for no pay. Sometimes it was the innocuous little oh, I hope you can stay available on your cell phone for an hour or so after this evening's end of workday. Or maybe you need to be accessible by email. The reason this caught my eye is that this too is a sign, a symptom of a declining capitalism, when the employer feels entitled, feels enabled to squeeze in this little way, in that little way more time, more work, more effort, more energy, more attention from workers without paying them counting on those workers being under the pressure of economic difficulty. So they're not in a good position to say no or to protest. So they go along first with this little thing and then that little thing, and pretty soon it adds up. And when you sit down with a pad and paper, they're being deprived of thousands of dollars of income that the law actually says they ought to have been paid for the work that they did. And so my hat's off to the nurses and nurse practitioners at the VA for getting together and saying enough is enough. I'm not going to do this anymore, and I'm going to get together with others similarly squeezed in ways that they should never have been to do something together. Later in today's program, you you'll learn about how college students burdened with debts are coming to the same conclusions and beginning to move in similar kinds of directions. The last economic update I have time for in this portion of the program has to do with that perennial issue, money in U.S. politics. And today I want to talk to you about the Uline family, spelled so you get it right. If you're interested in pursuing this U I H L E I N U line family. Well, where does it come from and why is it important? The Uhlein family is an extremely wealthy family here in the United States, which traces the origins of its wealth to the Schlitz Beer Company, Milwaukee. The beer that. Well, I won't bore you. Schlitz was never known for its. Again, I'll be polite. Quality. If you wanted a quality drink and you had a glass of water and Schlitz, it was a tough call, okay, but that didn't make any difference to making the money. So the EW lines take their money and here's some of the things they've been doing with it. One, they believe in the importance of making broad access available to assault weapons. They are deeply opposed to rights for transgendered people. They like to support right wing newspapers, and they were enthusiastic supporters of of Alabama candidate Roy Moore, even after he was accused of sexual misconduct with underage girls. In the lastin this current election cycle, I should say the U lines have already committed $26 million to 60 over 60 candidates in this election cycle. So why am I telling you this? Are they the only ones? Of course not. Are they the biggest donors? No, but they are among the few hundred people who give in the millions of dollars. And that's what I want to talk to you about. The notion of democracy, from its earliest articulations going back to ancient Greece all the way through to the modern United States, has always meant pretty clearly that people are equal in terms of the, say, the role they are to have on the decisions we live with, for example, the people who represent us in the city or the state or the government of the country where we live. We're supposed to have one person, one vote. And that's not just a literal detail. It's the notion that each of us is equal when it comes to making the political decisions because we all have to live with them and we all have to cope with them, then we should all participate equally. Allowing money in politics. On the matter of the Uhlein family makes a joke and is not a good joke about this. There is no democracy if one person can spend $26 million making sure you hear about the candidates they like more than you hear about others who can't raise that money. You learn what the candidates they want you to learn about. Say they can buy expensive advertising. They can pay people to knock on your door to tell you how wonderful this candidate is. You get the picture. Mr. Uline has one vote and I have one vote. But are we equal in shaping this democracy? Of course not. Money in politics is the enemy of democracy and always has been. And if you leave the money in there, you're writing the democracy out. We've come to the end of the first half of the program, I want to invite you to stay with me. I will be talking with Eli Campbell about student debt, and I think you'll find it very interesting. Welcome back, friends. I'm sitting here with my guest for this part of the show, Eli, and I want to tell you a little bit about him. But first, Eli, welcome to the show. Eli is a recent graduate of the State University of New York at New Paltz. There he majored in fine arts, as I recall, digital design and fabrication. But he's really gotten a passion for the whole problem of student debt, of the burden being put on students, on their families, on the whole United States as a society which knows it needs and relies on educated young people for so much of the present and the future of this society. So he's become an impassioned, self learning advocate of doing something and something severe and serious about the student debt problem. And that's why he's here. He's the author of a pamphlet which we'll mention later, but he's someone passionately involved in something that should concern us all. I recently learned, for example, that more than 4 out of 10 students in this country now graduate with debt, and the number is growing and the burden of debt is enormous. So, Eli, thanks for doing this work and thanks for making it available by joining us. Let me begin by asking you about something that caught my eye in the pamphlet that you wrote that you refer to the student debt issue as a strange madness of the United States. What do you mean?