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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 jobs, our incomes, our lives, our families, our futures, and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life and currently I teach at the New School University in New York City. Let's jump right into Economic Update for today by speaking a few words about the economic dimensions of what has been overwhelming the airwaves in recent days, namely the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. I want to say a few words about it. I did last week when I spoke a little bit about the bizarre, quote, unquote, revitalization of Cleveland in which a basically tiny part of the town, the downtown, has been refixed up, new buildings, parks, really made to look like it ought to look for everybody. But I pointed out that it's a tiny part of the city, the rest of which is one of the worst examples of urban decay and poverty across this country, right up there with Detroit, my hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, Camden, New Jersey, and countless others. And that the fakery of presenting Cleveland with this one perspective of this small part that has been over invested in to match the under investment in the rest of it tells you something about American politics that you will not see at the convention. And lest I be misunderstood, I don't expect to see it at the Democratic Convention either. Well, it turns out that some of my colleagues who work on a project called Left out prepared a segment that you can see on our website which talks about yet another part of Cleveland you will hear nothing about at the Republican Convention. There is an emerging community wealth building model in Cleveland that incorporates worker cooperatives. It's a very impressive effort and you can watch it and see it and hear about it by going to our website, democracyork.info and it'll jump right out at you. And I think it'll give you a view on Cleveland that, as I say, is not going to be there in any of the official presentations. Let me turn then to the Republican Convention itself. I'm not going to repeat what's in the media. It's hardly necessary. I wanted to talk a little bit about the economics and I wanted in particular point out two glaring contradictions. If you're interested in the economics, let's begin with the minimum wage, a perennial issue of interest to political campaigns for decades. Mr. Trump's effort has been to make crystal clear on the one hand that he is not in favor of increasing the minimum wage. This is interesting given the efforts over the last several years to get $15 an hour as a minimum, particularly in the retail and fast food sectors of the United States, which with notable achievements being accomplished across the country. No, Mrs. Clinton, if I understand correctly, is advocating an increase, but much more modest than what the $15 an hour folks want. They want it now. They want it long ago, of course. But Mr. Trump will disagree with Mrs. Clinton. He doesn't want any increase at all. It's interesting then to look at a contradiction in his program. He wants to build a wall to keep out Mexican immigrants. He wants to expel immigrants, large numbers of them, those who don't have the requisite documentation and maybe some who do. Well, I'm an economist and here's what'll happen if you expel large numbers of immigrants. Those immigrants are here for a reason. They take the lowest paid jobs. That's what they do. They make it possible for the minimum wage to exist in this country by working, often underneath the table illegally, for even less money because there are a lot of immigrants able, willing, often desperate to have jobs at all. It is possible for the professional employer to get away with offering the minimum wage, perhaps to a Native American worker, because there's always an immigrant ready and willing to take the job if that doesn't work out. So guess what, Mr. Trump, if you radically reduce the number of immigrants available competing for low wage jobs, it will force employers. Yep, you guessed it. To raise the minimum wage that they have to pay to get any workers at all. So you're not in favor of the minimum wage being raised legally, but your anti immigration stance will have exactly the same effect raising it that you said you were opposed to. That's called a contradiction. Here's Mr. Trump's platform and that of the Republicans, calls for lowering the tax on corporate profits, a perennial Republican goal. At the same time, though, Mr. Trump advocates putting a tariff, and sometimes he mentions the number 45% on goods coming in from the rest of the world. That is right, that the price of things we buy from outside the United States, wine, clothing, all kinds of things would go up and if he has his way, buy a lot. Well, guess what? The leading corporations in the United States, most of them have been spending the last 30 years investing huge amounts of money in buying companies and establishing enterprises in China, in India, in Brazil, all over, precisely to produce there, paying lower wages and ship it back into the United States for it to be sold. You slap a tariff of 45% on their effort to do this. You have undermined their investments for 30 years. You have hurt their profits terribly. So it's contradictory. Republicans, you're going to lower the tax on profits. What good is it if you cut the profits by means of this import tax? These are contradictions. But then I take a step back, as I'm sure many of you do, and I realize who in the end pays much attention to all of these things. Who really cares? In most of these campaigns, the platform is a vague document that not more than a tiny percentage of the public even reads, let alone thinks about or debates. And you know, in a way, the people who don't pay attention are right, because these platforms don't in fact matter much. The laws which would have to be written to accomplish any of these platform goals will in fact be written in the cozy, quiet backrooms of the House and Senate where the people we elect, together with tens of thousands of lobbyists who whom we don't elect, will sit down and write the actual law covering whatever it is they decide to do in their own interest, by much language, as if any of it had to do with the theatrics of the convention. I'll try to do the same analysis, which I have no doubt will be easily replicable when we get to Philadelphia and the Democrats. Before I leave the Republican Convention, I wanted to bring up a topic of this last week that belongs here on Economic Update Plus. We have been following this story now for many weeks. It is something that should have been talked about at a leading political convention like the one in Cleveland, but it wasn't. And I frankly expect nothing in Philadelphia either. But it is a story that is in many ways bigger and more important in terms of its impact on the United States than many of the topics that are brought up. What do I mean? Well, I want to return again to the VW Corporation, Volkswagen, the leading German producer of automobiles. Over the last week, the attorney generals from three states in the United States, New York, Massachusetts and Maryland, filed suit against VW's leading executives. In particular a gentleman named Mueller who sat at the top of that company across this scandal ridden story. And to remind you what VW did going back at least as far as 2004, so that's 12 years. What we know is that they installed in VW diesel cars and possibly in others, specific equipment that gave false readings for the amount of pollution emerging from the automobile. In other words, when it was tested, it would give one reading much, much lower in terms of how much pollution was created than what was actually the case when the car would be out on the road. It turns out that there are upwards of 11 million of these automobiles around the world, including at least half a million here in the United States. And as I say, we don't really know for sure where else in VW's output such devices were put. And we have learned since that other companies did similar things as well. But let's stay with vw, because that's what got the attorneys general of three states in this country to file a suit. And by the way, other states are expected to file suit later. They are angry that nobody has been punished for doing this. They are angry because millions of people have suffered asthma problems, lung problems, lung cancer problems, all kinds of health problems from the pollution pouring into their lungs for no reason other than the desire of the VW executives to, to make more profits by this fake reading on pollution that they installed than they could have made without doing it. They enhance their profits at the expense of the health and the very lives of the millions of people their behavior put at risk. That's something that ought to be talked about, not just because VW does it, but because other car companies are, are now known to have done it and because other companies in a position to do this kind of thing are probably doing similar things. And this is an enormous issue. But there's not a word at the Republican convention and I expect nothing from the Democrats on it either. Let me finish this story by two things. Letting you know that last year, Mr. Mueller, as well as the other top executives, the very people being pinpointed by these suits as having made this inhumane profit driven decision at the expense of millions, that in 2015, they together, these top executives received salary and bonuses in excess of, of 63 million euros. That's almost $70 million parceled out among these people. That only means that not only were they not prosecuted for this crime that they committed, but they were in fact rewarded and rewarded at the tippety top of what a reward means. I can't speak to this any better than the following quotation from one of the three Attorney generals. Her name, Maura Henley, and she's the Attorney General in the state of Massachusetts. And here's what she. Sorry. Maura Healy is her name. My mistake, my apologies. Here's what she. This is an example of a company that not only engaged in deception and fraud on a brazen scale, but covered up that deception. This conduct, says Ms. Healy, reflects a corporate culture that had no regard for the law, no respect for the American people, and no regard for the environment or people's health. Such behavior raises the fundamental question of why we permit corporations to have the kind of power to do what we now know they've done, and that even when we know they've done it, we continue to leave them untouched. Whoever the new executives are, if even they change them, will be subject to the same pressures and the same rewards and punishments, and we will discover we're going to get the same result. There ought to be a national debate about whether large companies that have this kind of social position should ever be private, driven by private profit for the few, and therefore able to make a decision that hurts the large number of people for the private benefit of the few. We ought to be questioning the capitalist way of organizing enterprises because it's the logical inference from this story of what these people did. Let me turn to a few short updates of this last week that I think demand some attention. Well, earlier this year, and it's continuing at breakneck pace, we of the United States went over the $1 trillion mark in the amount of credit outstanding for car loans. This 1 trillion mark is now really interesting. We have over a trillion dollars in outstanding credit card debt by Americans. We have an excess of 1.2 or 3 trillion in outstanding student loan debt. And now we've crossed the trillion dollar mark in auto loan debt. Well, why is that? Well, there are several reasons and I'm using a story from CNBC on the 15th of July headlined, and I want you to take account of this, Wall street is cranking out auto loans and the dollar total is huge. Here's what I want to draw your attention to. We're lending more people more money to buy a car than ever before. And the reason is they can't afford to buy it. They have to borrow it. And the amount that they're borrowing is growing. A new mark, 30,000 bucks, the new mark. The new record of how much is being borrowed. The monthly payment is at a new record too. 500 bucks. That's the average monthly payment. The price of a new car over $33,500. The length of the average loan is now longer, more months than before. Americans are falling into a deeper and deeper debt, moving higher in their indebtedness at a much higher rate than their income is increasing. That's where we were before people when we collapsed in 2008, an economy that drove people by necessity to borrow more and more without giving them the rising income to be able to sustain the debt. And the statistics indicate we are doing it all over again. Next item came up this Last, a report by Larry Mitchell and Jessica Scheider. I'm not sure how she pronounces it. From the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. You can follow their work@epi.org, on the 12th of July, they did a nice summary of what has been happening during to CEO salaries, the salaries of the people at the top. And I'm always taken aback, but I want to keep you aware of the numbers. So here's how they broke it down from 1978 to 2015, adjusting CEO compensation for the inflation. In other words, lowering the compensation to take account that if prices rose, well, it wasn't a real increase for them because they had to pay higher prices. Taking that into account, how much did their compensation grow between 1978 and 2015? The answer? You'll like this. 940.9%. Wow. How fast did the stock market grow over that period? Well, nowhere near as fast. Hmm. The payment to the top executives grew faster, actually 73% faster than the stock market itself grew. And what about typical workers annual compensation over the same period, 1978 to 2015, typical workers compensation grows 10.3%. So let me drive it home, folks. The CEO at the top, his income went up 940%. And you and me, ours went up 10%. You want to know why the gap between rich and poor in the United States is exploding? Well, I just told you. Last item for this early part of the show. I want to talk to you briefly about a report from the Italian banking system in Italy, because it reveals so much. First, there are hundreds of billions of bad loans on, on the books of the leading banks in Italy. In other words, all the talk about recovery of the economy since 2008, and all the talk about quantitative easing and pumping more money in and the austerity policies imposed on people that have to be done in order to get us out of the mess. Turns out, at least as far as the Italians are concerned, didn't get us out of the mess at all. But here's the problem the Italians face. On the one hand, what they want to do, what their leader wants to do in Italy is bail the banks out. Now, folks, hear me out. Italy, like the United States and most other major industrial countries, already bailed their banks out in the horrible times of late 2008 and 2009. So what we're talking about is another bailout paid for again by public funds. But it turns out that the European Union passed a rule in the wake of the mass anger of the European people at having Been told they have to pay through an austerity policy for the loans made to the banks who had behaved so badly, made such bad loans that they could not survive. They were bankrupt, they were angry and they got a ruling that you can't do that. Governments cannot do that. The government can only step in and help a bank. The new rules say if first the owners of the bank lose all their money and the creditors, people who have lent to the bank lose their money, then if that's not enough to solve the problem, the people who own the bank and the people who've invested in it, if their money can't solve the problem of the bank they own or the bank they've invested in, only then can you turn to the government. Well, here's the problem with that nice sounding rule. The same banks that were supposed to be controlled by this pulled a clever stunt in recent years. They went to their depositors and they said, hey, you're a depositor in this bank. You only get a very small interest rate. Why don't you lend us the money rather than deposit, and you'll be a creditor of this bank and we'll pay you more for that than if you deposit your money here. So millions of Italians, working people, small businesses, followed the advice and the invitation, so they are now listed among the creditors. So if you follow the rules of Europe, the Italian banks are going to wipe out the savings of millions of Italians who, who lent to those banks, never dreaming that they would be called upon to lose everything to offset the failure of those banks. This, by the way, is partly called a bail in. In other words, you take the money out of the people who are owning or lending to the bank rather than go to the public. Italy is therefore caught. It is either going to screw its people to bail out the banks by using government money, or screw its people by a bail in in which millions of Italians innocently lending money to their banks at the invitation of the banks are wiped out. This is a sign that we're not out of the collapse of capitalism since 2008. We are right deep in it. And what is happening in Italy is doubly important because unlike Greece or Portugal or Ireland, who are small countries relative to the European economy, Italy is a monster. Italy is one of the four major economies in Europe. And if you put together its banking crisis with the Brexit, the removal of Britain from its participation in European economic life the way it did, you're talking about a situation in which economic and political turmoil and trouble continue to fester. In the wake of a breakdown of capitalism, a breakdown in which the people who own and operate the leading industries, banking, automobiles, have been revealed to have made bad investments in the case of vw, illegal, immoral, crooked, cruel investments that are backfiring left and right that have plunged us into a nightmare now of eight years of economic downturn and turmoil. This should be the subject of the conventions, don't you think? Well, folks, we've come to the end of the first half of Economic Update. We're going to turn to a number of topics that you have asked me to analyze. I will do that when we return in a very few minutes. Please, folks, stay with me. I look forward to speaking with you again in literally a matter of seconds.
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I went back to Ohio, but my city was gone. There was no train station. There was no downtown. South tower disappeared. All my favorite places, my city had been pulled down, reduced to walking spaces. Hey. Oh, A way to go, Ohio.
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Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update for this week. I want here, as I often do, to respond to some of your communications to us through the websites and provide analyses of issues you've wanted me to deal with. Before I do, I want to remind everyone listening and watching that these websites were created precisely for us to partner with you. That is for you to use them, and they are available 247 at no charge ever, for you to communicate to us your interests, your criticisms, your questions, anything at all. Both of the websites whose names I'm going to give you in a moment have facilities for you to email us directly from with all of your interests and concerns, and they help us, and we're grateful for it, in shaping the contents of these programs. The first website is democracyatwork, all one word, democracyatwork.info I N F O. And the other website is rdwolf wolff. Rdwolf.com that's me. Either of those websites will get you from one to the other, will allow you to communicate with us, will allow you to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, a way we can partner with you. I want to urge you to use what's on the websites, what we do on this program, communicate it to other people, share it with other people. That's a way of partnering with, with all of the efforts we make to have these programs interesting and useful. And this allows us to reach even more people through your participation. And finally, as I often do, I want to remind you that I make travels around the United States. I was going to mention today that I'll be in the Bay Area, in San Francisco area, both in the first week of October and again in the middle of February this year. And while the schedule is filling up, there's still possibility, if other interested groups contact us, for me to perhaps work something out with them. And I have travel scheduled elsewhere as well. So if you're interested in having an event of some sort, get in touch with us. If you're in a position to help us, contact a local radio station that might be interested or even a television station in the televised version of this program, let us know. Give us the name of a contact. We will follow up. But most of all, use your own creativity. If there are ways we can work with you or you with us, if you're interested in getting involved in some of the groups we're setting up around the country, let us know and we will follow up with you. Because the partnership amongst us is the surest way to maximize the impact we can have on the evolution of a country going through a remarkable period, I think you will agree. All right, let's begin then. I have been asked frequently, and it's increasing, to talk a little bit about the economics of lotteries. And by lottery, I mean buying a ticket or tickets containing a bunch of numbers in the hope that while millions of people are doing this, the numbers you've chosen or that have been spit out for you by a random number machine will turn out to be the right number and you will take home a big pot of money. Well, let's talk about it. And I'm going to talk about three dimensions. A lottery. First, the lottery is a metaphor for capitalism, because here's what it does. It takes a little bit of money from lots of people in order to make a tiny number of people very rich. No wonder capitalism invented lotteries in their modern form. The two go together like ham and cheese. The lottery is sort of like, I don't know, Starbucks or McDonald's. You take a little bit of money from an awful lot of people and you make the major shareholders and the top executives, as we saw last half hour, very rich indeed. So it's kind of a metaphor for capitalism. What's the second economic dimension of lotteries? They're very bad for the economy. Let me underscore this. They are very bad for the economy. Why? Well, the answer is simple. If you take, let's say on average, that the average person throws 10 bucks at a lottery ticket, that's money coming out of the pockets of middle and lower income people. The vast majority of our Population, money. They likely. Here we go now. Likely would have spent on a cold drink, a sandwich, a pair of socks, who knows? But we do know that that money would have been spent to buy goods and services that provide jobs for the people who make those goods and services. By taking 10 bucks away from millions of us and giving millions of dollars to a few of us. Here's what we know. The people who become instantly rich will in all likelihood not spend all of that money, indeed, not spend a great deal of it. They're going to be millionaires overnight. Sure, some of them blow it all away. I've heard the stories. But in general, they will get good advice. They will be told to sock it away somewhere. Bottom line is the spending. Something we need to keep the economy moving, something we need to keep the jobs in place to produce the goods and services that people buy. When you have a lottery, you're taking away the money that would have been spent by many and putting it all in the hands of a tiny few who will in general spend a lot less of it. And that will diminish the demand for goods and services and therefore diminish the jobs producing them. It's bad for the economy. Well, then the third dimension. Why do we have lotteries if they're a metaphor for capitalism's less attractive features? And if they're bad for the economy, the answer is they're good for capitalists, big businesses and the rich. And let's see why. The most important thing is the if you take a map state by state, I've done this for the state of Connecticut, where I lived a long time, but I understand from studies that it's the norm across the United States. If you take a map of a state and you put a dot for every lottery ticket, soldier. And you superimpose that on a map that shows where rich people live, middle income people live, and poor people live, you very quickly learn something. The overwhelming bulk of lottery tickets are purchased by middle and lower income people. Rich people don't need it, really. Rich people laugh at it, the odds are too low and they are already millionaires or think they're on the way. Lottery tickets are purchased by low and middle income people every day or every week or every month, whatever it is. Many people buy the tickets. And that's great because the government, you see, gets that money into its hands because the government runs the lottery. And for the government, a lottery is like a tax. In fact, the lottery is a tax. It's a way of taxing low and middle income people when you dare not call it a tax. Because low and middle income people have been revolting against the burden of taxation in this country for decades. They don't want to pay a tax. So here's what we've invented in our ingenious we're going to tax you, but we're going to put a little teaser there. We're going to take this money from you, but it's all voluntary. As long as you would like to get rich. As long as you'd like to get out of the low income or medium income life you're leading now and in our country with heavy advertising all day, every day from every corner, who wouldn't? Most folks do. So you tease them with something, you make them want, you push them to want, you encourage them to want, but you never pay them enough to afford it. So now you give them magic. Buy a ticket. And people do in the United States to the tune of billions of dollars. That's money flowing into the government, coming out of the pockets of middle and lower income people. And that saves the government from having to go and tax corporations and the rich. You see, the people at the bottom wouldn't permit themselves to be taxed further while the corporations and the rich keep getting away with what they're getting away with. That's politically too dangerous. The lottery solves the problem. Give the masses a fantasy, the dream of getting to be a winner. Sure, you know the odds are poorer than getting hit by lightning, but you can dream, can't you? And so you use people's needs, their dreams as a way to save taxes for corporations and the rich. Which would be the other way that the government could raise the money that they take and keep from selling us lottery tickets. Lotteries are just as bad as the old preachers used to tell us, even if they didn't understand just exactly why. Next item. This is a story about St. Louis, Missouri, but it can be replicated everywhere. A study was done by something called the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. There have been some news stories about it if any of you are interested in following. On July 19, the New York Times had a pretty good story about it. Here's what the National Community Reinvestment Coalition study discovered and don't shake your heads those of you who know this story because you already knew it. A lot of people have known what I'm about to say, but it's a little bit different when someone does a pretty systematic scientific study to come up to prove it. Mortgages are not made, at least in the St. Louis area where the study was conducted, mortgages are not made to African American citizens even when they have the same income as their white counterparts. In other words, banks will give a mortgage to a white family earning, let's say, $75,000, and they won't to an African American family earning the same. Theoretically, that's not supposed to happen. Theoretically, your income is one of the most important variables a bank is supposed to look at in determining whether it's too risky or not too risky to provide you with a mortgage loan to buy your house or your home. And the conclusion of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition was that racism is going on here, that banks are racist in discriminating against African American families when it comes to mortgage loans, even when the capacity of the family to pay is the same as it would be on an equally income rich white family. I don't want to quarrel with this outcome, but I want to take it a further step. My suspicion is that the banks, if confronted with this, as I presume they will be, will defend themselves by making comments about how, for one reason or another other than race, lending money for homes where African Americans live is too risky for them. They can't get the same relationship of risk and return. They can't ultimately be as profitable as lending to African American families as they can to white families when both families have the same income. And I want to deal with that defense head on. Let's grant for the moment the bank's premise that it's not as profitable to lend to an African American family earning $75,000 a year than to a white family. Let's assume, just for the moment, that there isn't racism wrapped up in there, even though I'm assuming all of us understand that it is. I want to make another point. Why do we accept the notion that profitability is a deciding determination here? Let's suppose it was a little bit less profitable to provide mortgage loans to African American families than to white ones. Now, in our society, where we are committed, at least we say so, to treating people equally, to avoiding ghettoization, to having people accept, welcome and get to know one another regardless, for example, of the color of their skin, wouldn't it be important to give African Americans the opportunities to buy homes so that they are not in a different situation? So that an African American neighborhood is not a neighborhood where, because they can't get loans from banks, they can't maintain their homes the same way that a white neighborhood can? They can't expand their homes as readily as the those In a white neighborhood. You know the story. If we have social values of integration, if we have social values of treating people equally, then providing loans to people shouldn't be determined simply on whether or not it's profitable. Assuming you even know that. Because profit isn't the beginning and the end of the story. That's the logic of capitalism. But it is and shouldn't be the logic of a decent society, democratically organized and committed to overcoming the racial divisions and racial inequalities and racial discriminations that have haunted this country from its beginning to this minute. Allowing profit to be used as some sort of final arbiter, as the bottom line, as the thing that has to be governing our decisions, puts the profit of the few ahead of the social needs of all of us. And that's why we don't solve problems like racism. It's something to think about. Last for today, the relationship between socialism on the one hand, this alternative to capitalism that's been around now for centuries, and worker self directed enterprises or worker co ops. Why are these two things coming together nowadays? And I want to talk to you about that. Socialism, as I pointed out, is old. It's been around a long time. It's always been sort of halfway an alternative to capitalism and halfway a criticism of capitalism. Socialists have always been interested in pointing out ways that capitalism isn't good enough, isn't fair enough, isn't democratic, isn't egalitarian, etc. And they've put forward the notions that we can do better, we socialists, so they've said. And the main way they've thought of doing it is by having the government take a bigger role. The government should limit how rich, rich people can get. The government should prevent poor people from being abusively treated, should make the minimum wage higher, should guarantee a single payer health program, program subsidized education. You get the picture. The government coming in to make the economy and the society work better than what you would get if you left it to the tender or not so tender mercies of private capitalist enterprises. Well, the Soviet Union, China and other countries have been experimenting for much of the last century with a governmentally intervening system. They did many good things, they also did many bad things. And so the world has to learn from what they achieved and what they did not achieve. And each of us has to think about that and each of us has to reach a conclusion. I'm interested in learning from their achievements and from their failures as much from the one as from the other. The achievements, well, they were able to create Societies in which everybody was provided with most of the basics of life. I find that very impressive. Free education for everybody all the way right through the university, free medical care as part of being a citizen, housing that could not take more than a modest percentage of your income and was priced accordingly. And on and on and on. Many of you know the stories. Moderate socialists didn't go that far. I like to tell the story of certain countries in Europe where socialists have been very powerful. In Scandinavia, in Germany, in France. So they have governmental rules the likes of which we never see in the United States. France has a law. As soon as you enter the labor force, once you've finished either high school or college or university, once you enter the labor force and take a regular job, your employer is required by law to give you five weeks of paid vacation every year. That's the law. Most of those countries provide you with medical insurance, insurance for your medical care from the day you're born to the day you die. That's what they do. Most of them provide very low cost or free public education right through to the university. In any case, much, much, much cheaper than we do here in the United States. The government is given all kinds of authority, but it's very modest. The government doesn't run enterprises, or at least not too many of them. Whereas in Russia and China, the government really ran pretty much the entire industrial part of their economy, not so much the agriculture. So they achieved quite a number of things that have been impressive, proving to the world that that's possible, that you can have a perfectly well functioning economy while providing people with an enormous array of services. Putting to the lie the notion we can't afford it. Sure we can. Just like we can here in the United States today. We may choose not to. Our politics may prevent it, but it's not because we're not capable of it. And that's been an interesting thing for the world to have learned from these various moderate and not so moderate socialist experiments. But what about the other side? Well, we did see in Russia and China and elsewhere the tendency that if you give the government that amount of economic, say, that amount of power in the life of the economy, that it's pretty hard to make sure that it isn't also a state that uses its power politically or culturally or in terms of what its people can hear or read or think. So we've had a bad reaction, I think it's fair to say most of us, to the authoritarianism, to the top downism, to the statism that seems to have gone along with these early experiments in socialism. So it really isn't such a surprise, is it, that those who think we can do better than capitalism, those who think we can and should hold on to the achievements that socialist societies really can boast about, and yet who also want to avoid what happened in those societies that we do not want to repeat, then it isn't a surprise that they would come up with an interest in worker co ops. That's right, an economic system that isn't capitalist. It doesn't have a few people who are the major shareholders of a company pick the board of directors, which is how it works to make all the decisions what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, what to do with the profits, and that all the rest of us who actually work to produce those profits, we have to live with the decisions those few people make. In the first half of this program, I reminded you that one of the things made by the board of directors and the major shareholders, one of the decisions they made over the last 40 years, has been to raise the salaries of the people at the top 940% and everybody else on average 10%. That alone ought to disqualify the system. That record is not a record that ought to be accepted by a democratic society. So of course the idea is let's democratize the enterprise. Let's turn the enterprises over to all the people who work there together democratically to make the basic decisions in coordination with the communities in which they live and work, not one or the other. Co determination, let's call it. The community has a veto on what's done in the enterprise and vice versa, because all of us have two identities, or at least most of us do. We work someplace and we live someplace. And so we need to have the two communities, the work community and the living community, interact and shape each other. But no more tiny minority of people owning everything and telling everybody else what to do at the workplace. It's not healthy, it's not necessary, and it might provide a kind of socialism that captures what, what was good about the early experiments in socialism, the Russian, the Chinese and so on. And at the same time avoids putting too much power in the state, avoids what was bad and what we have to learn not to do. Again, from the early experiments in socialism, that would be a sane way of learning from the past and not falling into the trap of imagining that the only socialism is the kind that we had in the early experiments of Russia and China, which is really crazy if you think about it. Socialism will be experimented with in many ways and likewise doesn't fall into the trap of thinking that because the Soviet Union and China aren't what they once were, well, then capitalism wins, socialism loses. That's childish and naive as well. The struggle between these two goes on. We see it here in our country with Bernie Sanders making such a case. Workers cooperatives is a way of redefining what socialism means that learns from the past and offers a new direction into the future. Thank you very much for being with me this week. Next week we will have an interview with an important author here in the United States, Adam Hochschild. So I invite you to come next week when I will look forward to another session of economic update. Let me also thank truthout.org that remarkable independent source of news and analysis for their partnership that I appreciate, much as I ask for your partnership as well. Your time now, baby. But after a while gonna be my time. My time, babe. They ain't gonna change. Things gonna change. Yep.