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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Debts, jobs, incomes, our own, those of our kids. 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 adequately to present these weekly economic updates to give us more of an insight into what's happening in the economy around us. I want to start with a remarkable story about the largest insurance company in Great Britain by the name of Aviva, and it's a company well known to the British people as its largest insurance company. And it did something recently for its 16,000 employees that might be interesting to folks around the world, and particularly here in the United States. Here's what the British insurance company offers all of these 16,000 employees, every new set of parents will be given the exact same amount of paid leave. And after the arrival of a child that is both the father and the mother, or as you'll see in a minute, both of the parents, whatever their gender and sexual orientation, Aviva offers all of its employees 26 weeks. That's half a year on full basic salary, regardless of gender or sexual or orientation. The policy applies to parents who have given birth or who have adopted a child or who have chosen surrogacy. That is, when you have someone else carry your embryo or your child to term. Now, why is this interesting? Besides a remarkable decision by a corporation to be generous to its own employees, to a remarkable extent, the United States is one of the few countries in the world that doesn't guarantee any paid maternity leave. It's not the law in this country, as it is in many other developed countries, that there must be some paid leave, at least for the mother. But here we see half a year, which is quite a bit, and for both parents, if they choose to use it, what's the risk to the company from doing it, which is what you hear about quite often. Well, one risk, if you like, is that other insurance companies that compete with Aviva will not afford this benefit to their workers, and that might make them some extra profit and that they might then out compete Aviva because it is incurring the expense. These kinds of arguments are really in the nature of advertising. They're not serious arguments. Let me explain. Whatever the effect might be of the competitive advantage to a company that doesn't do it, let's take a look at the other side of the ledger. A company that offers benefits like that will have much more loyal employees. They're much more likely to stay there in hopes of using that benefit. When and if they have children, they will feel a sense of gratitude to the company for having allowed them to be really close parents to their children in the first half year of the child's life. In other words, there'll be less turnover at a company like Aviva than there will be at a company that doesn't offer that. You'd have to weigh the positive effect on Aviva's profits from that against any negative effects from the cost to the company of doing it. Something which ought to be taken into account. You might also discover that if in the first half year parents are learning, particularly if it's a first child, how to cope with the ups and downs, the health problems and so on of a baby, that you will not suffer the absences you will otherwise have had because the parents are on leave, by the time they come back, they're more used to the ups and downs of childcare and will be less likely to be interrupting their work days and on and on and on. You'd have to see it. You might also investigate the mental health, the security of the relationship between the parents if they've had time to bond with their child. It's particularly interesting that in the United States, which makes more of a commitment to, quote, unquote, family values that doesn't have this service compared to England, which doesn't make anywhere near the hoop dee doo about family values, is going, of course, further. And the last point, the more big companies can be pressed by their employees to provide these kinds of benefits, which is why Aviva did it, the more likely it is pretty soon that Aviva itself will join with workers in making this, the law, the law that every employer has to provide this service. The minute, of course, Aviva joins the pressure to do that, it accomplishes two things. One, it takes away the competitive disadvantage of being the first company to do it because everybody else has to also. And for the people pushing for these benefits, it's very helpful to have a deep pocketed big corporation on their side pushing for the law to provide it to everyone. Remarkable development in England, something Americans might want to think about as well. The second update for today brings me back to one of the biggest banks in the United States, Citibank. Like other major banks over the last several years, it has been fined, found guilty of committing legal acts that are against the law, illegal acts rather, and ethically violating its customers. Well being. Well, here's another one, just for the record. Citibank was recently fined $6.5 million for abusing student loan recipients. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in Washington D.C. announced that Citibank, which paid the fine, misled students about the details of their student loans, charged them inappropriate fees and fines as they tried to pay off the loan. $6.5 million is a trivial fine for a multi billion dollar company like Citibank, but it is not trivial in terms of what it means. Why? Because it's yet another example, as if we needed it, that a company pushing for profits will sooner or later press its employees to push up against the laws and the ethical norms of a decent society. And then having pushed up against them, cross over them, cross the line. And here is Citibank having been caught by for money laundering, for shenanigans during the mortgage crisis, for helping to manipulate interest rates, for manipulating foreign exchange rates. Well, there's another line of business, the student debts, and it's in there doing illegal or unethical things there too. Mixing the issue of providing educational finance with capitalist profits doesn't work well, does it? Third, and this is another example of the same basic Idea, starting on November 26, 2017, tobacco companies in the United States are required to publicize and pay for advertisements of a particular sort of. I'm going to tell you about them in a minute. Why are they required to do this? Back in 1999, the Justice Department initiated a lawsuit against the tobacco companies. Remember back in those days, they had been found guilty of deliberately and knowingly pumping up the nicotine and other chemicals in cigarettes basically to get people addicted to them because then they would buy a great many of them and that would make money for the tobacco companies that produced them. Which tobacco companies? I'll give you the list so no one is mistaken. Altria, R.J. reynolds Tobacco, Laura Lard and Philip Morris, the giants of that industry. Well, the companies fought in the courts and, and it took from 1999 until 2006 to get a resolution of the suit. And as part of the settlement in 2006, the cigarette companies were required at their own expense to publish, quote, unquote corrective statements about what they had done and what the health risks and addictive nature of smoking were all about. But they resisted after this settlement too. And it took from 2006 to 2017, November 26, to be precise, for them finally to have to do what they were required to do as of the original settlement in 2006. If you have a lot of money and you can hire a lot of lawyers and that's how long you can keep raking in the money before you have to do what you're required to do when the court found you guilty of what the cigarette companies had done. So let me tell you what they're going to have to say. And I'm going to give you a sample. Two sample ads that you will begin to see. Here's the first one. Quote, more people die every year from smoking than murder, aids, suicide, drugs, car crashes and alcohol combined. Let me let that sink in. Here's another. Cigarette companies intentionally designed cigarettes with enough nicotine to create and sustain addiction. The companies I named required by this settlement to run those ads starting November 26th. What's the lesson here? It's a lesson that goes far beyond tobacco. This is not peculiar to cigarette companies. They just got caught. And partly was because they literally killed large numbers of people with the cancer and other consequences of an addiction to tobacco. They got caught. Others haven't yet, or have been or will be. Why? Because the drive to maximize profit drove these companies intentionally to maximize their profit. To subject millions of Americans to the deaths, injuries, loss of a family member and all the other painful consequences of lung and other forms of cancer that were a direct consequence of their profit making activities. From producing the cigarettes to enhancing the nicotine content, to advertising, especially to children and young people, the joys and pleasures of smoking. And you know the story. Now, people have been critical of this tobacco companies, but that's one thing that they don't take very far. Which is why I want to make the following point. It isn't peculiar to the tobacco companies. This isn't particularly a story limited to cigarettes. This is a story like with the Citibank story I started with, in which profit making capitalist enterprises are driven to do socially devastating things as a regular part of business. And to stretch it out, look at this behavior. You did it for years. You got caught. You got a suit against you from the Justice Department in 1999. You were found guilty and reached a settlement in 2006. And you stalled it off for the next 11 years so you could make even more money. There is no shame here. There is no regret. And there is something very wrong in a system that is organized like this. Before I go to the next item, I want to remind you that we maintain two websites that are there for your purposes, for your use. We fill them up with material that extends and elaborates with what we do on this show. The first one is rdwolff with two f's. Com and the second one is democracyatwork.info. that's all one word. Democracyatwork.info these websites are available to you at no charge whatsoever. 24 7. They allow you to communicate to us what you would like us to cover on the program, what you like and what you don't like. They allow you to follow with a click of the mouse the to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. They really are ways for you to partner with us to extend the reach of the programs we produce and the materials we post on these websites. Do join us in making use of this material. Share it with other people that you know that are friends, relatives and co workers. And for those of you that are listening to this program on the radio, if you would like to see it on television, let me urge you to visit patreon.com that's P A T R E O N patreon.com economicupdate for the television version of this program. The next update allows me to introduce to you, although I suspect you've already heard about this, the man who is now the richest man in the world, an American named Jeff Bezos or Bezos. I actually don't know exactly how he prefers it pronounced, but the spelling is B E Z O S. He's the chief executive officer of the Amazon Corporation, which I'm sure you know about. His personal wealth just went over this last month. $100 billion for one man to have $100 billion is the equivalent of saying that our society has achieved the dubious distinction of having an inequality that takes you back to the ancient pharaohs of Egypt. In the distance between these rich people and the average person. Let me give you an idea. Hard as it is to get your head around the notion of $100 billion. 14 out of the 50 states in the United States, 14 out of 50 have an annual total output of goods and services less than $100 billion. In other words, this one man disposes of more wealth than is created in any of these 14 states. Let me give you another example. There are 54 countries on the continent of Africa. Only four of them have a total output of goods and services. GDP, it's called, larger than 100 billion. The other 50 are smaller economic entities than what Mr. Bezos as a single individual disposes of. What is this for? What kind of a commitment to democracy allows a mass of people to have difficulty meeting the basic requirements food, clothing and shelter, while one man has an equanity of wealth far exceeding anything anyone could imagine in the way of personal wealth? What is this for? Why would you have a society organized like this? The influence he can have with his hundred billion relative to 99.9999% of the rest of the people is outlandish. He's not one citizen among others. We're not equal, all of us. We are wildly unequal. He recently bought the Washington Post newspaper, the major newspaper in our capital city. He recently bought Whole Foods, the major organic food supermarket in the United States. He can do whatever he chooses. And that's, by the way, not with his personal wealth, but with his control of the Amazon Corporation. What notion of democracy can survive this kind of inequality? But the story is even richer. As we speak, there are strikes of Amazon employees in both Germany and Italy that have been going on. In both cases, thousands of the employees of Amazon are striking because of the unbearable working conditions. That's where the profits come from that feed this outlandish wealth. Luigi Giovi, Secretary General of Italy's CGIL Trade Union Federation, says those that are striking Amazon are calling for shifts which are not exhausting. They've had physical exhaustion from the pace of work required. And he demands that Amazon redistribute its profits, sharing them in the larger society precisely so we don't have the inequality that makes a mockery of democracy. This is an extraordinary moment in American history producing this kind of wealth inequality. And I wanted to bring the issue to you. Finally. Today, I want to talk about an attack on higher education here in the United States. It is something not given the kind of attention it ought to. Let's begin with the basic facts. Adjusted for inflation, that is, taking account how much money is spent on higher education and what the costs of doing that are. The United States as a whole spent $5.7 billion less on public higher education in 2016 than it did in 2008. So let me do that again. We spent almost $6 billion less in 2016 than we did as a country in 2008. Over the exact same period of time, an additional 800,000 students entered higher education in the United States. So we have almost a million more students and almost $6 billion less spent on it. What possible sense does this make? Let me remind you that a basic rule explained to almost all students in this country is that the United States future as an economic society will depend more than ever on its position in the world economy, how well it does things, how well it produces goods and services, and so on. And one of the major determinants of how well we perform economically is the quantity and the quality of of the students going to colleges and universities, which is True. In every country where other countries are supporting, encouraging, expanding higher education, we are making it more cost costly for people and we're spending less money on the quality. And it will show and it will cost us. It's like a society shooting itself in the foot. And you have to wonder when a society does that. Let me give you an example, just from one state, so you get an idea. Arizona. Arizona has cut spending for higher education, public higher education, by 54% since 2008. The state now spends $3,500 less per year on every student than it did eight years ago. That's a collapse of the funding of the investment in the education of the young people of Arizona. And Arizona is not unique. It's a little worse than most of the other states, but it's not unique. Well, then why? The big question is why is this happening? What's the rationale for all of this? Well, before I tell you, I'm going to read you a recent statement made by Donald Trump Jr. That is the son of the current president. He gave a speech in Texas. He was paid to give this speech $100,000. That was his fee for giving this speech. And the speech was a lot about college campuses in America. I am now going to quote From Donald Trump Jr. S speech as reported by the Washington Post for those of your interest on November 25, 2017. Here we go. Ready? Here we go. Hate speech is anything that says America is a good country, that our founders were great people, that we need borders. Hate speech is anything faithful to the moral teachings of the Bible. Why is Donald Trump Jr. Saying this? Well, here's the many universities in America offer Americans a raw deal with will take $200,000 of your money in exchange. This is all Donald Trump Jr. Speakingin exchange will train your children to hate our country. We'll make them unemployable by teaching them courses in zombie studies, underwater basket weaving and my personal favorite, tree climbing, end of quote. What's this about? Republicans have figured out that university and college students and people who have attended colleges and universities tend to be more often Democratic and or liberal than they are conservative and or Republican. It isn't much more complicated than that since these kinds of political ideological considerations are now established in state legislatures where the Republican majorities control the bulk of states. You see the defund the colleges and universities make them unable to deliver a decent education and maybe then students will stop going and they won't afford it and then there'll be less people going into an institution that produces in the minds of Republicans, liberals and Democrats rather than conservatives and Republicans. The over the top idea that colleges train people to hate America. I'm a college teacher, spent my entire life in American colleges and universities and have never seen anything to corroborate what Mr. Donald Trump Jr. Says. But I do understand that we are in a society that is shooting itself in the foot in the way of education to satisfy an ideological agenda of one side of the political spectrum seeking to hold on to enough votes to keep itself in power. That's how empires and societies die, when the thing they do to hold on is the thing that undercuts their ability to hold on. We in the United States are at that point. And this story about education, like so many of the economic updates I bring to you, represent evidences for all of this kind of thing. That's why it's important to to face them and to understand them. Thank you very much. We have come to the end of the first half of Economic Update. We will continue after a very short break and I very much hope you'll stay with us for the second half of the program. Thank you and stay tuned. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. In this second half, we're going to be talking about two major topics and we're going to devote a little time to each of them to get into them a bit more deeply than we otherwise can in the shorter segments of the first part of Economic Update. Before jumping into it, I want to remind you please to make use of the websites that we maintain for your use by adding materials of all kinds and by providing services. These two websites are rdwolff with two Fs.com and democracyatwork.info Please make use of them as a partner for us in extending the reach of these sorts of materials. You can email us through those websites and let us know what you think we should be covering. It didn't do an adequate job. Whatever your thoughts are, we're interested to know how you receive this program. You can also, with a click of the mouse, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. And finally, you can, in a general way, as I said, partner with us in making use of all these materials so that more folks can be participants in our ongoing conversation. For those of you listening to the program, please also remember that you can see the program as a television program by going to patreon.com P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com economicupdate the first of these two topics for this half of the program has to do with. With Marxian economics. Why do I talk about that? Well, the most important thing is it's another way of understanding how the economy we live in works. And we need all the different ways of understanding this economic system if we're going to either fix it or go to a better one in terms of how we live our lives in this society. Unfortunately, Marxian economics is excluded in the United States and indeed in many other countries. The fear of another way of thinking is an old problem in many societies. The Cold War, from 1945 roughly to 1990, was a time when the hostilities between the United States and the Soviet Union were such that anything that had to do with socialism, communism, Marxism and so on was so frightening to people that they thought the best way to handle it was to pretend it wasn't there, to exclude it, to ignore it, to deny it, and so on. Across the United States, colleges and universities that used to have courses and teachers who explained this way of thinking about economics to students so they could draw upon it if and when it was useful, so they could compare it to the more conventional ways of understanding economics. This, which existed in the United States, was gotten rid of so that the majority of economics departments in colleges and universities, for example, across this period and since 1989 as well, simply don't teach economics from a Marxian perspective. They do not hire Marxian economists who know this material and could teach it because of fear. There is no intellectual justification for it. It is simply a matter of fear. And it diminishes the quality of the education everybody gets because you don't solve problems by ignoring some of the tools for handling them. That's really not a very smart move. It was justified by fear. But then again, since the Cold war ended roughly 1990, it's hard to justify continuing Cold War patterns of ignoring a kind of economics. Even though the Cold War is over, it shows you how deep the fears, the prejudices and the denial of have run. Well, what is it that Marxian economics says? It's a big topic. Reams of books and articles have been written about it. Thousands of people use Marxian economics around the world, including in the United States. So there's plenty of material, but I don't have plenty of time, so I'm going to go and cut to the chase, to the core ideas. And there are two number one, that in every economic system, the Marxians argue there is something called a surplus that is produced by people and then is distributed in the society. And that how that's done and what the consequences of it are, have a very powerful influence in shaping how the society works and how we live our lives in that society. So it becomes important to understand how the surplus is produced, by whom, who gets it, what they do with it, because it'll help us understand how the society works. And a corollary is, if we think that the way a society organizes the surplus it produces is at the root of many of its problems, then we might reach the conclusion that we ought to change the economic system to have a different way of producing and distributing this surplus as a way of solving social problems. In order to get at that, you have to learn a little bit about Marxian economics. Nothing is gained by knowing nothing, so you might as well learn it and see what insights it might get to you. Second basic point, which follows from the first. Marxians believe that an economic system would work better if it were grounded on an organization of production, the production of goods and services in factories, in offices, in stores. If that system that organized production there were a democratic worker, cooperative type of system where everybody who participates in the production process, everybody in the factory, the office or the store, has an equal one person, one vote, say, over what is produced, how the production works, where the production takes place, and what is done with the products of everybody's labor. To handle that in a cooperative way rather than in the hierarchical way that capitalist enterprises work is an idea that Marxists think will go a long way towards solving all kinds of social problems. So let's take a look briefly at the first idea and then the second. The first one, surplus. This is not complicated, folks. Here's how it works, and we can use as an example. Imagine a couple, a husband and a wife, in this case, who spend their time growing crops and raising animals on a farm. Let's take a look at what they do. They get up in the morning, they tend to the fields, they tend to the animals. And slowly, over time, they get a crop of corn and wheat and vegetables and fruits and chickens and lambs, and you get the picture. Now let's take a look at the product of their labor. They produce fruits, vegetables, and meat. Let's say. How much do they produce? Well, here it gets interesting. They produce enough to feed themselves and clothe themselves. They produce enough. So, say, when they sell this product at the local farmer's market, they earn enough money to take care of their own needs, husband and wife working together, their food, their clothing, their shelter, and so on. But let's also assume that, like most families, they decide to have children. Now, if they're going to sustain those children, we know something. They're going to have to work more than they might have if they didn't have children. They have to produce more vegetables, fruits, meat, potatoes, you name it. Because they don't just need to feed themselves, they. They have to produce. Here we go. A surplus. An output greater than what they themselves consume. Why? Because they're going to distribute it to the children. Because if they didn't, the children couldn't survive. So we know from the earliest history of the human race that human beings typically produce more than they themselves consume. And what do they do with that? They distribute it to other people so that those people can live by having food, clothing, shelter without themselves being involved in the production of that food, clothing and shelter. As in my example, the parents produce a surplus distributed to the children. Now, let's take it a step further. Suppose this is a community in which they live, where you need to have somebody who stands guard at the edge of your field to make sure that animals or even other people do not interfere in your farm. If you need a person to be there, that person is an important part of the game. He or she has to be clothed, fed and sheltered. But they do not participate in producing food, animals, crops. So the people who are working, the husband and wife in our story have to produce a surplus not only big enough to sustain their own children, but enough to distribute to the man or woman who stands on the edge of the field. Now, just generalize this with Every society that we have ever had, that we live in today, has the people who do the work to produce a surplus which is used to sustain children, security guards, and a vast array of other people who do all kinds of things that require them to consume so they can live, but who do not participate in producing those things themselves. Every society produces a surplus. Well, now, finally, last step, and this is Marx's punchline. In a slave society, the slaves produce a surplus and the masters get it and decide what to do with it. Who is going to be sustained by it. To whom will this surplus be distributed? In a feudal society, the serfs do the work and the lords take the surplus produced by those serfs. And the lords decide who's going to get it, who's going to be sustained by it. In a capitalist society, the workers, the employees, produce a surplus and the employer gets it. And the employers decide who gets a distributed share of the surplus. That's how these societies work. They are all class societies. And in the sense that one group of people produces this surplus. And a different group of people gets that surplus into their hands and decides what to do with it. And because of this particular group of people, a minority. In the case of slavery, the masters are a minority. In the case of feudalism, the lords are a minority. And the case of capitalism, the employers are a minority. In each of those cases, a minority gets the surplus and its decisions about how to do that, what to do with that surplus shape the society from which the Marxists conclude it would be better, for hundred different reasons, which you can learn about if you study it, that a society ought to allow the people who produce the surplus to collectively and democratically decide themselves what to do with it. They produced it. And if it were democratically decided what to do with it, a society would be very different from having the small minority of masters, lords and employers, which has been the history of production for the last thousand or two or three thousand years. That's an argument. My point is not that you should agree or disagree with it. My point is you get a wholly different understanding of how our economic system works if you think that way. If you explore the insights that flow from this, there is no excuse for excluding that from the learning of the American people, as has been done now for half a century. And that's why it's important from time to time to, to remind folks that this is another way of thinking and that you would understand your own situation and that of the world economy today better if you explored the insights from this approach rather than pretending they're not there. The second major topic for today has to do with something absolutely extraordinary going on in Great Britain. I've referred to it in other programs and as it has changed over the last year or two. I'm referring to the rise, the sudden and surprising rise of the British Labour Party. That political party is the number two party in England. It is roughly parallel with the Democratic Party here, that is the Conservatives are in power. The current Prime Minister, Theresa May, is a representative of the Conservative Party party and she is the Prime Minister. The person who runs the other party, the Labour Party, it's called, there is Jeremy Corbyn. And whereas he was not taken seriously as a contender as little as six to 12 months ago, he is now not only taken seriously, but in the aftermath of the most recent election earlier in 2017, polls now show him the likely winner of a national election in Great Britain if it were held relatively soon. Beyond that, no one can predict. I could spend a lot of time, but I don't have it to explain to you why the wind, the political wind, has shifted so much. Basically, the story is that the conservatives imposed on Britain an austerity in the wake of the crash of 2008, which was as severe in England as it was in the United States. And that austerity did not help the mass of people. The British economy limped along. Whatever recovery it had was only a recovery for the top 10%. And for the rest of the people, no recovery at all. In that way, Great Britain is quite similar to the United States, which is one of the reasons I want to talk to you about it. What is it that Mr. Corbyn is proposing that has made him so popular in this situation in Great Britain? The answer is that Mr. McCorby in England proposes things that are quite similar to what was done in the 1930s by Franklin Roosevelt in the last great collapse of capitalism, and likewise quite similar to some of the things proposed by Bernie Sanders in the presidential election last year that also occurs in the wake of the second major collapse of capitalism in the last 75 years. So let's go through what Mr. Corbyn is proposing so we can all think about what that means and particularly what it might mean for other countries where the mass of people have not done well with the dominant austerity programs imposed by their politicians upon them. The first issue of Mr. Corbyn has to do with taxes. The Labour Party has pledged, if elected, they will increase the income tax for the top 5% of British earners. Not for the 95% at the bottom, but only for the top 5% in England. That means roughly people earning over $100,000 per person per year. They also intend to raise corporations income tax. They want to go from the current 19% up to 26% by the year 2020. In other words, they're going to raise taxes on business and on the richest 5%. How has that gone down in England? Well, in the same way that several of the other things I'm about to go through with you have gone down. The corporations and the rich don't want it, don't like it, oppose it. But the mass of people are more and more in favor, which is why the fortunes of the Labour Party look as good as now. As I told you, they do. What have the opponents of the Labour Party said? Basically, one argument, very familiar, you hear it here in the United States and elsewhere, all the mustn't raise taxes on corporations and the rich because either you will have them leave the country to escape these higher taxes or. Or you will suffer because foreign investors won't come to England since they don't want to go to a place that has higher taxes on corporations and higher taxes on the rich people who get their riches from being high officials of the corporations. And I want to talk to you about that argument first. Mr. Corbyn says that part of the money that he will get by raising taxes on corporations and the rich will go to a major improvement in the National Health Service. Britain has a socialized medical program, a single payer kind of national health insurance that covers everybody, which is what most European countries have. Improving that health service will improve the health of the British people. Endless studies show that. So that means on the one hand, corporations won't be happy with a higher tax, but on the other hand, corporations will have a healthier workforce. And that is a major plus to the profitability and functioning Corporations will have to weigh those things. Their public relations hammers at the taxes they don't want to pay. But the reality is they have a mixed message here because they will gain by improving the health of the British people and they will not simply lose by having to pay higher taxes, number one. Number two, there's a disingenuousness that's a nice way for saying lying going on here. Why? Because every country and indeed every city and town in the capitalist world knows that one of the ways you can improve your situation is raise the taxes on the businesses that are already there, but give a special inducement to people who might come to your country. For example, you can get 10% off your taxes for the first two years or three years or five years. In other words, you can raise taxes on all the businesses you have and not suffer a loss of attractiveness to investors outside by giving them an inducement to come because they get a discount, they get a lower tax rate precisely for bringing new business into your country. Britain could obviously do that and that would avoid the whole critique that is being used as if it simply settles all of that. But it's more the extra revenue earned by taxing corporations and the rich can go to improving the schools and thereby raising the technical and productivity level of workers by improving the roads, highways and trains to get your workers to and from work on time to make the shipment of goods in and out of your business effectively more efficient and on and on. The opposition to taxing corporations and the rich acts as though the only effect of a tax is to pull more money out of a company without looking at what is done with the taxes that are raised. That may in a hundred ways, improve the quality of life, improve the quality of the workforce, improve the quality of the infrastructure. That is just as important, if not more, more important than the taxes corporations pay. Here's another example of what Mr. Corbyn is doing. The British people are angry about the loss of jobs as companies go out of the country. Mr. Corbyn has taken a very strong position. We're not going to let that happen. We're either going to make rules that make it harder for companies to leave, or we're going to say that you can't close your business and you can't leave. And if you insist that you don't want to stay here, we will take over the business and convert it to a worker co, op, owned and operated by the workers, so that the jobs are preserved and the revenue and taxes paid to local and national authorities in England is protected. That's what we're going to do. And that's an alternative to what is effectively blackmail. Corporations that say, you can't pass a law that controls me, you can't pass a law that raises taxes or else will leave is a threat. And that threat is empty because a company is not a country. The country can react to the company by saying, if you threaten us, who are the sovereign authority in this society, we will react back on you. You want to start throwing threats, we'll threaten you. You want to leave the country. You can't sell your goods back in Britain if you leave. We're not going to allow you to do that to escape the taxes you owe while making bigger profits by paying workers abroad less money. You're not going to have access to the British economy if you do that. And that'll make a corporation think long and hard about leaving the country or trying to threaten to leave the country. In other words, it's a mistake to think that all the cards are in the hands of the companies that they alone can threaten. And we all have to cave in. Uh, they want us to think that they are the final authority. But a government is much bigger than any corporation. And a government that says to a corporation, you've become an outlaw by not paying the taxes you owe your fair share. That's a government that can do many things to make the decisions of a corporation change. Last thing. The Labor Party under Corbyn has proposed that there will be a maximum pay ratio in the public sector. Here's what they the highest person can only make 20 times more than the lowest paid in any company that bids for and gets a government contract. Hmm. The government says, if you're going to do business with us, you cannot pay your top people more than 20 times what you pay your lowest people. This is a commitment that says we don't want grotesque inequality in this society, and we, the government, are going to do something about it. Not just talk about it, do something about it. We're to say, you want a government contract, you have to compress the gap between rich and poor beyond what you do now. By the way, in the United States, in a big corporation, the ratio is roughly 300 to 1, not 20 to 1. And know also that if the public companies, the ones that do business with the government, are going to have a 20 to 1 ratio in, it's going to compress the ratio everywhere else. Other companies are not going to have to give them wild salaries because the standard of what is coming down from the government, reflecting what the majority of Britons want, which is less inequality, which, by the way, the majority of Americans also say they want. Here's a way of moving in that direction. In Britain, these kinds of ideas have moved from being way out there to the center of what most people want. They are raising the fortunes of the Labour Party. So it's a good bet it will be the next government and Mr. Corbyn will be the next prime minister. That's how things have evolved since 2008 in Britain. How much further behind do you think it is in France or Germany or Italy or Ireland or the United States? The wind is shifting, and it's particularly shifting around economic squeezes. It puts a very enormous pressure on the United States because everything that the Trump and GOP government are doing is making the gap between rich and poor wider, whereas the rest of the world is seeing things being pushed in the other direction. That is going to lead to big changes and conflicts in the world economy. We've come to the end of the program. Thank you very much for your listening, for your viewing, and I look forward to speaking with you again next week.