← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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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, incomes, those coming down the road for us, for our kids. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and my hope is that it has prepared me to offer these analyses and interpretations of the economic events surrounding us. I want to begin today with Disneyland and Disney World and those places that mean something to folks who've gone there with their kids. They refer to themselves with a modesty that I can only mention in passing as, quote, the happiest place on earth. And when you read that, please keep in mind there are a lot of people who also tell us that we are in an economic recovery. And the two of them, those two statements are about the same when it comes to what they don't tell you. So let me give you the example of Disney. On March 23, hundreds of workers marched to the headquarters of Disney, particularly to Disney Springs, the shopping complex that is on Disney property, demanding an end to Disney poverty. That's one of the signs they held up. We work, we sweat. Put a raise on our check was another sign they carried. The unions representing 38,000 Disney World employees were asking that the $10 minimum wage that Disney pays be raised to $15. Let me remind everyone that those are wages which, if you depend on them, make you a person in poverty in the United States. Disney didn't want to do it, didn't want to raise wages for their folks in California either. So there have been actions by workers there when they couldn't reach an agreement. Back in December, Disney recently announced a new tactic. They had promised all workers $1,000 bonus because of the enormous tax cut that the Trump administration enacted back in December. And now Disney announced to the workers that if they didn't accept what Disney offered, they wouldn't be given the bonuses that the company got by paying lower taxes. What did Disney offer in place of the demand of workers to have the $10 minimum wage raised to 15? $0.50, not $5. They would give them an additional $0.50 each year for a number of years. No, thank you, said the workers, who voted overwhelmingly not to accept that offer. So beneath the veneer of the happiest place on Earth are an awful lot of people, many thousands of them who work there who aren't happy at all. It's little like the rest of us keep hearing about recovery in the economy and wonder who is talking exactly about about what. My next update is about a straw in the wind an economic straw. Two places of great importance, New York City and Toronto, Canada, reported this last week extraordinary drops in the value of homes compared to what they were a year ago. Let me give you the numbers because they are arresting. Home prices in Manhattan dropped 25% from a year earlier in the first quarter of 2018. And this was true across all categories of housing, from the most expensive to the most modest. What is going on? And before I analyze it, let me tell you that the numbers in Toronto are similarly astonishing. Sales of homes in and around Canada's biggest city fell 46% in March from the same month a year ago. The average price of a home fell 17% from a year ago. These are extraordinary drops in real estate values in two North American cities. What's going on? Well, it's at least three factors and I want to bring them to your attention. One, interest rates are going up and that means the size of a mortgage for a house or a home is going up, the monthly payment. And that is bad news for the real estate business. There's been an excess of building over, over the last 10 to 20 years. The reason for that, the extraordinarily low interest rates that allow builders and developers to borrow money very cheaply and then to build particularly for the rich, because that's where the money and the wealth have been concentrated. So the market for high end co ops, condos, detached homes has been exploding. So the supply has been created ahead of, of the demand. We don't plan things in our capitalist economy, so we allow the market to determine things and the market stimulates the builders way ahead of what it can absorb in the way of buyers. And here's the last one that affects New York more than Toronto. Foreigners are becoming more and more hesitant about investing in real estate. And in New York, or for that matter, across the United States, the attitude of the Trump administration, the hostility to foreigners of all kinds, whether it be expressed in anti immigrant language or anti Chinese language in terms of trade or the notion of going to war against Muslim countries. That is coming out from political leaders. People around the world are saying to themselves, this is a country that's going out of control. Not smart to keep money invested in a country like that. Who knows what they will do. So maybe we should better have an apartment in Paris or London or Rome or Tokyo or places where we do not feel anything like these threats. The third update today has to do with water and once again is with the Nestle Company which is making an awful lot of money by taking water from underground, putting it in a plastic bottle and selling it to us to make a buck. This time the story is in Michigan. And here's what happened. A commission in Michigan allowed Nestle that was taking 250 gallons per minute out of the ground in the state of Michigan, particularly at the White Pine Springs in the Great Lakes Basin, and boost that up to 400 gallons a minute, which works out, in case you're interested, to 576 gallons per day from that one source. And so they had a public hearing, the commission did, Where? What do people in the affected areas? Michigan, basically. What do they think about this? Are they in favor of letting Nestle take more water out of the ground? What struck me more than anything else were the results. Comments were solicited from the people ready and about 81,000 comments. That's a lot of comments were gotten from the people of Michigan. And here's how they broke. 80,945 were against it, 75 were for it. I'm going to repeat that because you don't think you heard me right. 80,945 people were against letting Nestle do that to the water under the ground in Michigan. 75 comments were in favor. The commission voted to give Nestle the right to do it. What were the concerns of the 80,000 people who were against it? Here they were listed in the order of importance. People were concerned about corporate greed versus people and the environment. Water should not be for profit. And number three, it's worrisome to have water become a privately owned thing because we all depend on it for our lives. Look, this is business, folks. First, you do everything in your power to let the public services be pinched for money so they can't maintain good quality public water the way most Americans have had it through the history of this country. As the quality of the water coming out of the tap deteriorates up, jump the private capitalists offering you cleaner, better water in their bottle, in their plastic bottle. You just have to pay for it in a way that you never had to before. And it's much more expensive to get your water that way than to get it out of the tap. So they make money by actually helping the deterioration of the public free water supply. And as for the commission saying it had to give this to the Nestle company because it's the law. Let me all remind you, big business spends a fortune maintaining the lobbyists who write the laws. To say that the law allows you to do it is just to say you're going to allow the companies to write the laws that, surprise, surprise, bring them the profit, and it's the water, the water that we all depend on. The next item has to do with a fight going on between President Trump on the one hand, and the Amazon Corporation on the other. It's quite clear that the reason for this fight has very little to do with economics. It has to do with the fact that the head of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, purchased the Washington Post a little while ago and that the Washington Post prints articles that are critical of Mr. Trump, and he's not happy with that. But I want to talk about what Mr. Trump said, because that's where the economics comes in. He attacked Amazon for somehow being responsible for the US Post Office losing money and said that they had to make Amazon pay more in order that the Post Office not be a losing proposition that we taxpayers have to somehow compensate for by giving taxpayer money to. To offset the deficit run by the Post Office. The level of economic error in this analysis is so profound. I want to tell you what's going on. The Post Office does two kinds of business in the United States. The most important thing it does is bring this country together. That's why it was set up. The old Pony Express. The whole history of the Post Office. We are a very large country dispersed over an enormous amount of territory. Many of us live in remote rural areas. The Post Office creates this country, unifies us, allows everyone to interact with anybody else in this country automatically, in an efficient way. It is a social service, as important to our society as harbors, rivers, land defense, or anything else we we support socially. So the whole idea that it should be making a profit is bizarre. It's like saying to the army, you should make a profit. Nobody does that because they are a social service, or at least we want to believe that. And so we don't demand that they make a profit. Why do we do it of the Post Office? Yet the reality is the particular kinds of business the Post Office does are, in fact, profitable. The most profitable thing the Post Office does is deliver packages. That's, by the way, where the deal with Amazon comes in. Amazon uses the Post Office to do what's called delivery for the last mile. Amazon organizes the distribution, and then the Post Office delivers much of what Amazon delivers to many people around the country. They make money off. That's profitable. What isn't so profitable for the Post Office are letters. And that's because it's difficult. And we have been switching from letters to email. And that has hurt the business of the Post Office. But even with the losing proposition of letters offset by the profitable activity of packaging. The Post Office is on whole self sustaining. It doesn't need support, that is, it didn't need it until a few years ago when Congress passed a particular law. And I want to tell you about that because it's a wonderful example of capitalism in action. Congress passed a law that requires the Post Office every year to set aside billions of dollars for the future medical insurance for current and possible future employees and to count that as a cost. Just like it pays for gas to run those trucks that deliver the mail. Just like it pays for the heating of the Post Office and all the rest. No other government agency is required to do that. No private corporation is required to do that in this country. The Post Office was required. And that added suddenly the cost of setting aside this money. That's why the Post Office is losing money. Because it has to incur a cost no other enterprise, public or private, is required to do. Now why, you might ask, would the Congress do that? Because under existing law, the Post Office has to raise rates to cover its costs. If you impose on them this new cost of the future possible medical expenses of employees, they have to raise their rates. And when the Post Office raises its rates, that means money in the bank for the competitors of the Post Office. Above all the United parcel service and FedEx. They can compete with the Post Office. Cause they don't have to set aside billions for the possible future expenses of their retirees and workers. They don't have the cost that the Congress imposed. What a lovely favor done to the private competitors of the Post Office at our expense of the people who have to cover the losses of the Post Office. But Amazon isn't the problem and even the politicians aren't. It's the pressure from business to use the government as a way to make more money. Before I turn to the remaining updates, I want to remind you, as I always, that we maintain two websites that are there for your use. They're available at no charge 24. 7. They allow you to communicate with us. They allow you to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Twitter and Instagram. The first one is called democracyatwork.info all one word, democracyatwork.info and the second one, rdwolf with two Fs.com make use of them. They're a way to partner with us. They're a way to get more out of this program than even what we can do in an hour. If you would like to see the video version of of this program, Please go to patreon.com P A T R E O-N patreon.com economicupdate the name of this program and there you will be able to see the video version. And this is a good moment for me to thank our entire Patreon community because you are providing crucial encouragement and and support for everything we do on this program. I also want to remind you of one of the podcasts that we produce on a regular basis called Puerto Rico Forward, and it's also available on Apple Podcasts and Google Play. Last but not least, I am proud that I play a small role in a new film that is airing shortly for the first time, being previewed in both New York and Los Angeles. It's called American the Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs. It opens in New York City on April 27 at the Cinema Village, and it opens in Los Angeles at La maze Monica on May 4th. I think you'll find it a remarkable film about one of the most important men in American history, particularly the history of people building a labor movement of enormous importance throughout the 20th century. Our next update is about Larry Summers. He was once a Secretary of treasury and now works with Michael Bloomberg. And he's busily working on the problem of obesity, which is an epidemic both in the United States but but in other countries as well. And he comments on a report in the British medical journal Lancet about how happy he is to see taxes on unhealthy goodssoda. Alcohol and tobacco, particularly the UK has been raising those taxes. He refers to it as the best way to curb obesity and other diseases. With all due respect, I disagree. It's not the best way. It's actually one of the worst ways. Why? Because if you raise the price, which is what a tax does on soda or alcohol or anything like that, you are applying what we call a regressive tax. You are putting X cents more on the price of a can of soda, for example. Well, X cents more on a can of soda means a lot to a poor person, means nothing at all to a rich person. It makes no effort to distinguish capacity to pay. It's a disproportionate burden on those who have little money. If you want to deal with obesity, why are you doing it that way? Here's an alternative. Make regular taxes, progressive taxes, income taxes that are structured to take more from those who have more, who can afford it more, and then use that money to do what? Public education on the costs of sugary drinks and what they do to your health. Passing laws that Prevent large quantities of these things to be sold, Preventing school children from having access as youngsters to these sorts of. Come on. There are lots of ways of doing this that could be funded in a much more ethical, moral and free fair way to slap a tax on the objects is to whack hardest the people who can least afford it. Shame on Mr. Summers for calling that the best way to deal with it. Our next economic update quickly has to do with the VW scandal. This is a scandal that simply will not go away. The latest aspect of the scandal struck me when I learned this last week that VW has recalled in the United States almost all of the 500,000 vehicles in which they installed cheating software mechanisms that gave a flawed reading about the pollution that comes out of those cars. I learned to my amazement that 300,000 cars were are sitting recalled by VW in parking lots across the United States. 37 facilities, including a Detroit football arena, a paper mill in Minnesota and a desert vehicle cemetery in Victorville, California. It turns out it's less costly to VW to take these cars and, and park them where they will rust to death than to do something with these 300,000 vehicles. Fix them, for God's sake. Make them available in all kinds of ways without the damage to the environment so they can help human needs. Don't park them. It's such a comment on why producing for profit is a disastrously inefficient way to function. It's extraordinary. I wanted to end today's program with a comment about the MeToo movement. Sexual harassment, particularly of women. I'm not going to talk to you about the immorality of it. I'm not going to talk to you about the remarkable upsurge of rebellion by women particularly, and some men against sexual harassment on the job. But I want to talk because it's a program on economic update. I want to talk to you about the economics of it, to add in a way to what I hope is your sense that this is a movement whose time has come and is long overdue. Let's begin. Millions of women leave their jobs because of. Of sexual harassment. They can't stand it for a variety of reasons. They may be unable to stop it. They may be fearful. So they leave their employment and they go somewhere else, often being told by a superior that if you don't like to work here, go get another job. And they do. But let's be clear on what the economic costs are of this kind of subordination and, and oppression, particularly of women when you leave and go to another job, you lose skills appropriate to that job. You leave, you've learned how to work there. You've learned how to work with those people. You can do your job because you've learned how to work. You go to a new job, you have to start learning all over again. That's not efficient, folks. Number two, the salary will typically be lower when you have to leave, particularly in a hurry. Because you have to get out of an unsustainable, sexually oppressive job situation. So you, but also the family members, your children who depend on your income, are hurt. No fault of their own. They're just hurt. The costs to this country's economy, beyond all the personal and humane costs, are staggering. Allowing this kind of thing to go unchallenged and unopposed. Then there are the millions of women who do protest, who are not willing to walk away and search for another job. But they discover that when they protest, their careers are damaged their ability to contribute. There were those stories of the actresses who, after refusing to go along with Harvey Weinstein, discovered that their careers were suddenly in trouble. Other directors in Hollywood, having heard from Mr. Weinstein or folks around him that these were difficult actresses to work with, kept their distance, damaging their careers, damaging our. The public's ability to. To see skilled actresses perform, et cetera, et cetera. Those women lost. Those careers lost. We as a society lost what those women could have and should have contributed because of sexual harassment on the job. And then there are what are probably the largest number. The women who don't leave for another job and are not particularly destroyed in terms of their career. They stay, they work under these conditions. But as any psychologist will tell you, if your job, in addition to all the other regular stresses and strains of any job, have on top of it, the fact that you must fear, must worry about, must maneuver around sexual harassment only worsens the health costs, mental and physical and all the other negative aspects of a job. How many people have suffered nervous breakdowns? How many families have been torn apart by the pressure, the strain, the difficulty? The MeToo movement is not only about having women achieve the dignity, the respect they have always deserved. It's about saying that a capitalist economic system that puts some people in enormous positions of power at the top of a hierarchy, and that makes men the overwhelming majority the higher you go. In virtually every industry. That is a recipe for exactly what has happened. And that makes this capitalist system fundamentally inefficient right from the get go. The struggle for women's equality is a struggle against the system that worked this way. And that undercut the quality of life we all could have enjoyed had we dealt with this much, much earlier. We've come to the end of the first half of Economic Update. I want to thank you for staying with us, invite you again to be a good partner and ask you to stay with us for a remarkable interview coming up. We'll be right back. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. Well, we're going to do something a little different on this show this time, but it's something I've thought of for a long time and I think you will enjoy. As much as I have enjoyed anticipating how it might go. I have a guest with me. Her name is Juliana Forlano. I want to tell you a little bit about her. She is a host, writer, performer, and now a correspondent for the activism oriented outlet ACT tv. She's an adjunct professor at Brooklyn College. That's part of the City University of New York, where what she teaches is broadcast journalism and new media. She travels nationally and internationally to perform and to speak on the use of humor as a tool of engagement across disciplines, including political activism and the independent media. In the shortest possible English. She's a comedian and I want to enjoy and talk with her comic ability about where we are in this economy and in this society because Lord knows we need to laugh, if only to keep from crying, as a great person once said. I want to also mention that she will be performing her comedic skills at the Left Forum and at the Netroots Nation conferences. And she has a one woman show in preparation on the absurdity of having a baby in a for profit medical care system. That's right. She had one recently. So she really knows. So it's with great pleasure that I welcome you to a conversation with Juliana Forlano. Hi. Thank you for coming.
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Oh, it's a pleasure.
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All right, let's jump right in.
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Okay.
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Everyone knows these are scary times. Everyone knows these are times of change. Weirdness of all kinds. You're a comedian. What does that all do to what you do?
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B
Well, for me personally, seeing what's happening for Trump with Trump actually kind of dampens my ability to be funny because it is terrifying what is happening. The possibility of a nuclear annihilation. You know, it's only funny up to a certain point. So sometimes it actually dampens the comedic impulse. And also he is so absurd with what he's doing that he's already a clown and a character of himself. So making the jokes are actually becomes a little bit harder. George W. Bush was easier because he was partially serious in his ridiculousness and his horrible behavior and his bad policy.
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It's like he had gone to school. How to be the straight man. So. To set you up for your joke.
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Yeah, exactly. Yeah, he was perfect. Whereas Trump is a little bit harder. But people are doing it, obviously. All of our late night hosts are tearing into Trump basically every night.
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A
Well, I was gonna ask you later about that. Let me ask you now. What do you think about that? When you see Trevor Noah or Stephen Colbert or any of the others, how do you as a comedian react to how they're handling it?
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Yeah, I mean, I'm a big fan of Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah. Those are basically the two that I watch regularly. Of course, the other guys are probably doing a good job. I know Jimmy Kimmel is using his personal experience with the healthcare system to basically advocate against what Trump is doing in that area. So they have big platforms and they are trusted people. They're a little more trusted than news anchors because basically they're there to be your friend and be funny and go through life with you. And that is a really personal relationship people have with their favorite comedians. So they're in a particular position to get points across that a newscaster or an economist might not be able to kind of get across to, especially to people on the opposite side of the argument.
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Do you think they're doing a good job in the sense of offering an alternative way of thinking about what's happening to the official line?
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Yeah, I don't know. You know, my idea of alternative and your idea of alternative are far more alternative than say, you know, what would be on any mainstream media network. So we get on there when they want someone different.
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Yeah, well, I meant more in terms of Stephen Colbert or Trevor Noah. They're offering something different. For me, I've always seen the mainstream media in America as pretty much the same across most of them. So I kind of appreciate Colbert and Noah and folks like that because they're actually doing a better job of offering an alternative than the mass media. So it's kind of a moment when comedians have an enormous importance, because it's out of their mouths, people like you, that the alternatives are actually coming into the popular awareness. And if it weren't for them, I don't think the mass media would be doing a very good job of it, to tell you the truth.
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No, I don't think so. And, you know, comedy is basically about getting to the truth and offering up that truth in a way that isn't just telling you it is illustrating the truth using things that are of common understanding. And you can use hyperbole, which is blowing the truth out of proportion, to actually get at the truth of a situation or a truth. Something that expands the discussion, expands the thinking. And I think comedians are particularly well suited to do that because when you're making something funny, you're using your perspective to see, like, what is the. Or at least I do. What's the absurdity here? Or where do these concepts not fit together? Or what is funny about this? How does it relate to cheesecake? You know, there could be any number of ideas put together to let people access the truth.
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Would you push Trevor Noah or Stephen Colbert further in any particular way? Have you ever watched them and said to yourself, he could have done this, he might have done that? I'm trying to get at how you might be a bit different from them, even as you respect and admire what they do.
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Well, one of the things that I thought was not necessarily their fault, but because they work for networks. I don't think networks want people to start a revolution. You know, I don't really think they're. That's what they're not. Okay. You know, they work, you know, Jon Stewart, Trevor. No, they work for Viacom. It's a big company. There's only six big media companies, and they're one of them. It was six. Last time I checked. There could be two by now.
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They combined. That's right.
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Forget it. So there. You know, do you remember when Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert had that march for sanity in dc? Well, I went and I was excited about it because I thought there might be any good March has a call for action. They want to call on their senators to do X, Y and Z, and they want to call on their other elected officials to do the rest. And they want to call on people to move. And it was really a show. And thousands, hundreds of thousands, I think, of people went to that. And it was really a giant comedy show on the mall, which was funny. But I think what was lost there was the ability to motivate those masses because Stuart and Colbert and Trevor Noah are doing a great job educating. But what is education if you don't act on it? Right? So when I was doing my show, I used to host a show on Pacifica out of wbai, just like your show. That's. I.
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That's how we started that.
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That's how we started. I really tried to. We would make the jokes and then we would do a serious interview, which was also kind of funny. And Personality driven. And then I would give what people can do because I don't know. I don't usually tell people this, but I started off as a psychotherapist, and my desire was to help people. And when people are at home watching things, whether it's comedy, which is really helpful in this psychotherapeutic, you know, everybody's tense now, so having a joke is really.
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And that relief that comes from seeing the funny side of something.
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Yeah, exactly. I can't wait to hear what Bill Maher has to say every week, because I know he's gonna say something funny about things that are generally presented as a disaster. They probably are a disaster, but just the presenting them is like, this is a scary thing. I know. I listened to, like, the Washington Post podcast, and they're like, today, it's like every day something horrible. You know, it's horrible news.
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So, yeah, I encounter people all the time now who tell me that they've turned off all the news they don't want. For them, it is such a drumbeat of depressing negativity that they, you know, they just don't want it anymore.
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And that's why comedic takes on news is it's the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down. In medieval times, the court jester was the only guy who could tell the truth, both about the king and to the king, without being beheaded. And we're seeing in these times that that is also true. Although comedians now have to put up with like a, you know, a Twitter beheading of the masses. If they say something that certain group doesn't like, whether it be on the. I mean, the left is actually. They're pretty. They're pretty tough to make laugh, number one, because everything is very serious. And number two, they tend to take every little joke. Maybe they don't. Well, the right doesn't get the jokes either, but we're not even trying to get them to laugh. The right. There's a difference between the left and the right. The right punches down in comedy. They make fun of people below them, and the right or the left only punches up. Which is why it's way funnier, because everyone wants to see the guy who is abusing the system and poisoning your.
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Water and finally get his.
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Finally get his. So if they can't give it to them politically, at least comedically, we can give it to them. And I think it also creates a sense of unity among people who are watching. If you're laughing in a group of people, there's some sort of Connection or release that's there that I found more powerful than actually doing psychotherapy was like, if I can make a whole group of people laugh, they feel this oneness. They don't feel alone. And in this time, I think that's.
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A crucial political moment.
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Yeah.
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How did you react? This is. Something just occurs to me when Trump got all bent out of shape because of the Saturday Night Live stuff. The imitation of him and his Sean Spicer and the other. How did you react to the spectacle of a president, obviously with no sense of humor, at his own expense, couldn't. Couldn't tolerate one moment of it.
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B
Why did he think it was going to be different for him than every other president? Every other president gets made fun of on Saturday Night Live. Every, every one of them. And if you're Sean Spicer or the mooch guy, you're just ripe for comedy because the characters. And then Sean Spicer went out there.
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And that's why I'm asking, why did you think when a president, knowing what you just said.
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Yeah.
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That everyone gets it. He loses it.
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Yeah.
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And exposes it.
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I thought it shows narcissism.
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Yeah.
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Like a tremendous mental illness. You know, I hate to say that, but if one can't laugh at themselves or their circumstances, it's going to be, you know, a very depressing life. And it's also. It ain't sane, you know, it's just not. I don't know, I just thought he's just being kind of a whiny little.
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Yes. It struck me as a terrible mistake for this man. Brings him down from the exalted, the president, you know, who you think of as, oh, something special. And now he becomes a guy who.
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Like a sniveling Twitter hater who can't.
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Stand a joke about himself, which is clearly a joke with made up faces. And I mean, come on, you're that uptight, really.
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Well, maybe he's not aware of how terrible he is and to have it put in his face like that might be a little too confrontive, you know, I don't know. He was on Saturday Night Live.
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Yes.
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And then the original argument was they were too nice to him and they helped him kind of seem passable as a person.
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So maybe they had to make. Do you think of yourself as in the line of people like. Well, to go back a long time, Charlie Chaplin and more recently, George Carlin. I know an awful lot of the people I encounter as I travel around the country look up to George Carlin as kind of the oasis in the desert. Of many of the years, the 70s, 80s, 90s, when he was able to say the very thing you said to say the unsayable in American society. And people roared with laughter.
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What I loved about George Carlin and I, I don't know, I, I would love to be considered in the vein, but that is for history to decide, I guess.
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You know, you're working on it.
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I'm working on it. You know, I, I do what comes for me, it's an art form. But I, I did study, I was a huge fan, I continue to be a huge fan. And I did study how he, how he interacted with the crowd and how he did it. And he did it this way. He started all of his shows with basically a dick joke so that the whole crowd could get in on that. He did not come out and say, hey, they're coming for your Social Security. Which was the main point of that particular, one of the main points he made in that show. So he started with, this is where we all are as human beings, you know, and then he moved into that stuff. And that is what is so beautiful and revolutionary and how he could get all of these people to really love what he did. One of the ways, I mean, he was a genius.
- [42:56]
A
He was a genius. I remember the things that always were amazing to me. I was teaching at a school and he gave a stand up show in that community. And lots of my students and colleagues went, including a good number that would have answered the question, are you religious? With the answer, yes, I am. They went and he did his real anti religion thing, there is no God, all of that. And they exploded with laughter. And I asked them afterwards, because they're.
- [43:32]
B
Friends of mine, could you explain it?
- [43:34]
A
How could. You know, I'm a, you know, I enjoyed it too, but I'm a little surprised you did. And they said what clearly Trump can say, which is, look, if you're religious, you also have to think a little bit about why you are religious and you then understand it has to do with how you were brought up and stuff like. So making jokes about this part of your life is as reasonable as making jokes about all of life's mysteries and complexities. So they were able to be spoken to.
- [44:05]
B
How many years ago was this just out of curiosity? Because I wonder if that would still hold.
- [44:10]
A
Fifteen, maybe. Yeah, I think Americans were more religious then than they are now. And yet he was unbelievably successful with his humor around all of that. And I think it opened those people up. I think after laughing at this religion they were able not necessarily to give up their religion, but to see it in a context and to be less upset about people who don't see it that way. Because he built a bond with them too, in a sense. Here I am, he said, carlin, I'm anti religious, but we can laugh together about. And it worked. It was amazing to me to see.
- [44:50]
B
Yeah, it's a great joy to be able to perform to the opposite crowd and get that response. Now, one of the things that happens as you're doing standup is if you're coming up in the club. The clubs are a capitalist enterprise and they want to sell their two drinks. They don't want people getting up and leaving or saying, hey, stand up. New York had this person on, I'm never going there again. I was completely offended. Xyz. And so I have found, or I had found that the kind of real cutting edge political or social satire is not really welcome in the clubs. Unless you already have a huge name like a Carlin of these days or Bill Maher or something. And then Bill Maher's too popular to play clubs now, so he would play a larger theater. So there's this. There's this vacuum of really cutting social satire in comedy clubs, which of course it's not the only place these days, thank goodness, where people can go and enter the stream of the entertainment industry. There's YouTube, yay, here we are. And there's Netflix and different things like that. But that is still a main source of where we get our comedians. And comedy requires practice. You need to try it out on the audience. You have to. The point is to make those people laugh.
- [46:17]
A
Let me ask you a question. I think this is fascinating. Suppose there were a public institution in America, comedy clubs. In every town that has, say, 30,000 people or more, sizable town, there is a public theater of some sort where comedy is one of the forms of the art and you don't have to make money. This is a public service like a public park, and it's sustained by tax money. And if you're feeling like you would like to see an up and coming new comedian, you can go there. And you don't have to be limited to what sells tickets because this is a public service like a park.
- [47:03]
B
Well, comedians themselves tend to band together and then do a show at say, a bar. I was doing, there was this great bar called Jimmy's 43. And he was very, he was very supportive of satire and he was very liberal, gave a lot of money to liberal causes. And the front was A bar area. And the back was theater. He supported a lot of art. So we did a theater show, I think it was every week for a while with a bunch of the, you know, the most political comics that are today. And some comics, you know, have a mainstream act and then a political part. So. So they were welcome as well. And that's always really nice. Sort of like Carlin, he would have his mainstream, the things that he could get to the mainstream, and then the other part where he could get to those audiences. I mean, brilliant.
- [47:47]
A
How did this go?
- [47:48]
B
It went well. I mean, we would get an audience. Each comedian would have, would kind of use their social network to say, hey, we're doing this. And then people would come and then you'd introduce different audiences. And even we would invite groups that were probably in our corner. We had Organizing for America, Obama's group come, and they needed a laugh too. So they would laugh. And then some of the more. Anti establishment comedians would really, they'd be like, you know, they would shock them. So, you know, but basically the comedians get together and. And if you like one anti establishment comedian, you'll probably like the other two that they hang around with. So, you know, we have to do it ourselves.
- [48:38]
A
The model here that's in my mind is Italy. You know, there was a time, because of the importance of opera in Italian culture, that every town in Italy, there was time in the 20th century, particularly early. Every town would get the money together as a sort of a civic activity to have a place where operas could be put on. And they really didn't care that much if a lot of tickets were sold or not so many tickets, because opera that people could go to, that's part of the culture, that's part of what a good life is about. Like having a movie house in your community. And if it couldn't be sustained by money making, well, then the community would sustain it the same way all kinds of public services are done. It just occurs to me that, that there ought to be that here. And there was that in the 1930s, there was this WPA where the government, to deal with unemployment, created artists groups and funded them to give them jobs. And they sent theater groups and sculpture groups and painters all over the United States to run classes in communities that had never seen that before, to put on shows for the public that were often free. It was the greatest kind of cultural program for America we've ever had. We never had anything like it before, we've never had anything like it since. And wow, imagine if we didn't Take a depression to do that. People like you could be touring all over the place with audiences. You wouldn't have to worry about the selling of tickets, because. And of course, if you did it, you would create the audience. The more people got used to it, the more they would eventually pay the tickets. It would build itself.
- [50:21]
B
And I don't. I'm not. I don't. I'm not aware of any public or, you know, National Endowment for the Arts support of any comedy anywhere.
- [50:31]
A
Yeah, I'm theater.
- [50:34]
B
That's funny. That's. That's comedy. So they probably get some money there, but not stand up or even improv.
- [50:42]
A
Why? I wonder why.
- [50:43]
B
Well, they don't have a ton of money anyway. I guess they're constantly getting their budget.
- [50:47]
A
So I have to ask you, you've half answered it already. Tell me what you think about Mr. Trump and the moment we're in in American history as a comedian. Tell us, what is it? What does it provoke in you? What is what occurs to you when you pick up the morning newspaper or watch the TV show and see more of it?
- [51:11]
B
Well, it depends on the day, but generally speaking, I am very concerned about what's happening. You said I had a baby, which I do, and now I'm even more concerned about what's happening. And I feel like my way of being active is to make it funny so that people, specifically people who are politically active, because that's mostly who likes my comedy, have an outlet for laughter. Because all of that anger can be turned real quickly into depression or any other number of things that are crippling. And sometimes the marches are marches of people who are very upset and angry, and I feel like they need a break from that particular emotion. It's not a crime to laugh at something. It doesn't mean you are, you know, deserting the cause. You don't have to be angry all of the time in order to be politically active. And I think people fear that if. If you start laughing at something, you'll just go on the couch and you won't do anything. But I. I don't think that's the case. No. There were some friends of mine, comedians, did comedy at Occupy Wall Street.
- [52:25]
A
I mean, how has having a baby affected your comedy, too?
- [52:30]
B
Oh, well, it gives me a lot more point of reference.
- [52:37]
A
Well, you have something now in common with everybody who's had a baby, and most of us, one way or another.
- [52:43]
B
Yeah.
- [52:43]
A
So does it produce you?
- [52:48]
B
It gives me so much more material. Material. I think the fear part that came up more strongly after Having a baby was. I want the baby and her babies to have a nice world that's not completely polluted, that still has some trees and whales in it, that is not just crushing the little guy. I would like her to be able to enjoy what there is to enjoy in life and contribute to the best of her ability to what it is to be an American or to human. I want her to have the freedom to be able to live her best life. So it made me feel like I better hurry up, make more jokes because this is my way to help. And, you know, I also host, like you said, I host some work for ACT tv. And basically I do, you know, I interview you about the economy as it relates to whatever marches we're covering. I do the live on scene correspondent work for different political actions that are happening on the street. And I think being a comedian is really important. I mean, there's a real big overlap between journalism and comedy because the idea, again I said, it's bringing the truth to people and being able to see things from an unusual perspective and asking questions that aren't just straight up questions, but really trying to get to the meat of the matter and humanize it. And I think that really helps in covering these marches. Sometimes the activists aren't so thrilled to.
- [54:19]
A
They should be punching. I think it's good that you help us because, you know, there are many ways to understand something. Humor is a perfectly good one of those ways. And by making a joke, you may connect things in people's minds they hadn't seen before. I mean, humor is its own language, its own mechanism.
- [54:41]
B
I have found that humor is. I mean, I happen to be a professional humorist in a number of ways, writing this and that, but it works everywhere. It works when it's done well. You know, as a professor, I felt like I could engage the class more if I could use humor as a therapist. If people aren't completely stuck in their stuff. I could really engage the client more if we could see slightly the absurdity. It gives a little bit of detachment, a little bit of distance, and then better decisions can be made, whether it's political activism, family and personal. So I think it's. It really is the best medicine, as.
- [55:20]
A
They say, we need laughter.
- [55:22]
B
Thank you so much.
- [55:23]
A
Stay with it, Julia. My pleasure. My pleasure. Thank you all for joining us. Let us know what you think about using humor to get at the kinds of issues we try to deal with on a regular basis on this program. I want to thank not only you for watching. I want to thank truthout.org that remarkable independent source of news and analysis. And I again urge you, use the material on our websites, use what you learn and get from this program. Become part of an effort to change a society that needs it. And I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Sam.