← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Economic Update: Economic Change and Personal Life Crises
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One of these days I ain't gonna change. Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program about the economic dimensions of our lives. Our jobs, our incomes, our debts, our children's school expenses, all, all of that. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life and I teach now at the New School University in New York City. Later in this program, I will be telling you a little bit about websites and other ways you can follow the kinds of work we do. Get into it more elaborate the understanding that this program is designed to foster. But let me get right to the economic updates of this last week and focus your attention on some things that might have slipped by when you weren't busily paying attention. But even before I do that, I want to respond to a request some of you have kindly made that I let you know where I might be found if you're in the area and we might get to know each other a little bit better. Every month on the second Wednesday of that month in the evening, I give a monthly Economic Update report to people at a very famous location in New York City. It's called the Judson Memorial Church, located on Washington Square, a famous part of downtown New York City. The Exact address is 239 Thompson street, right off Washington Square. You're welcome to come there. It's a chance for you to meet me. It's a chance for me to explain with more time than we have on the radio, the kinds of economic analysis we do here. So if you're in the area always or sometimes, come join us. The next one will be Wednesday evening, April 8th at 7:30, Judson Memorial Church. Airlines are the first economic update the airline industry in the United States. Something I don't give enough attention to, and a couple of you have asked me to do so. The airline industry is in the news these days for basically two reasons. It is an industry that has gone from many competitors, many airline companies, to basically four. The mergers that have happened mean that the overwhelmingly dominant control of the airline industry, the most important transportation mechanism we have as a society now, is in the hands of four Delta, United, Southwest, and the newly merged American US Airways megacorporation. Because there are so few, they're in a position to control the industry. It is something that most capitalists in most industries seek to achieve. The tendency to go from many competitors to a few is present everywhere and it's an important phenomena because of its consequences. And as an illustration, I want to draw one out for you so we can See why and how the this is important. Over the last six to 10 months, the price of fuel oil has collapsed by more than half, an almost unprecedented drop in the cost of fuel. Why is that important? Because fuel is the largest single expense of airline companies. The most expensive part of carrying you on a flight is the fuel used for that jet engine. Excuse me, those jet engines on that plane to move you. If your most important expense drops by half, the expectation would be that the competition among the firms would lead them to lower their prices somewhat. They haven't lowered their prices at all. In other words, they're cashing in on the cheaper cost of fuel by making more profits. And indeed, they're on schedule to get record profits. So the next time someone says to you how private capitalist enterprise is a way to get you the best possible service at the lowest possible price, smirk. The airline industries is a stunning example of of exactly the opposite. They are using their market control, these four mega corporations, to take for themselves as higher profits for their shareholders. Most people who own shares don't own shares in airline companies. And most of the airline shares are owned by a very small number of major shareholders. So they will be the great beneficiaries, as will be the top executives of these companies from the huge extra profits they get by making profits, the gainer from lower oil prices. Not the consumer, not the air traveler, not you. And this is an important lesson that this economy teaches us. It also reinforces the notion that a terribly small number of people, the boards of directors of four airline companies. Boards of directors typically have about 15 members. You take four companies, you multiply it by 15 members of the board of directors in each company. That's about 60 people. How many Americans use airlines in the course of a year? Tens of millions. Oh, wow. 60 people make the decisions about what the airline serves as food. How much space there is or better isn't between you and the person next to you how safe it is or isn't how much you pay for a ride or don't. All of those decisions for millions of citizens are made by 60 people. That's a system of arrogance and concentration of power. That takes your breath away, doesn't it? Second update for today has to do with the fresh berries that many of us in America have become used to, particularly in the last few years. Those little plastic containers sold nearly everywhere with strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, and so on, whether they're sprinkled on our morning breakfast or on the frozen yogurt we buy at the store. Fresh berries are something we've come to take as a gift. But now there are thousands and thousands of very poor Mexican farm workers who are striking a couple hundred miles south of San Diego where the berries are produced. And here's what they're striking about. And they've been striking since the 16th of March. Their conditions are awful. Typical pay for a full day, for example, of picking berries, stooped over to pick berries. 7 and 8 dollars per day. These are working people who are living in unspeakable conditions documented by one international agency after another. Not adequate housing, not adequate sanitation, not adequate protection from insects from the air. You name it, they are being ripped off, exploited, whatever word you want by what the name used is Driscoll. But the reality is that Driscoll is part of another company. And I want to get the name of that company so that you're all aware of it. The US Writer R E I T E R WRITER Affiliated companies. They have a subsidiary called Berrymex and that in turn has a label called Driscoll. If you eat Driscoll berries, please understand that you are a beneficiary of unspeakable, inhumane treatment of tens of thousands of poor Mexican workers who have finally stood up against police batons and all the usual repressions to demand the minimum that ought to be accorded a working man or woman in this day and age. And if it makes it taste a little less, well, good, that will be a lesson in remembering that an economy isn't only about consumption. It's also about work and the conditions of work and the kinds of society you want to live in in terms of how it treats the worker as well as how it treats the consumer. Next update. There's been reports that we are fortunately seeing a recovery in the automobile business because more cars are being sold as often. What meets the eye here is a little different once you look below the surface. What is stunning about the American car industry is the fact that more and more of the car that you buy here in the United States from a company with an American name, or for that matter, with a foreign name, more and more of that car isn't produced here. It may be finally assembled here. But the production of the parts. No. Let me give you some examples. In2014, in the last year, 12,000 over $12,000 of content in every American light vehicle built was made out of car parts that were imported made someplace else. Give you another example. The 2015 model of the Ford Escape had 55% U.S. and Canadian content. In 2010, the the Ford Escape had 90% United States and Canada content. Bottom line, there's a cutback in jobs for car parts makers, which was just as important as the car assembly worker. And what we're seeing more and more of is a disaster in the car parts industry in the United States. A disaster partly because production is moved abroad. And then the ultimate consequence of moving abroad, production abroad to make car parts is what? Here's the news. It is now the case that in a number of car parts makers, including the American Axle and Manufacturing holdings company, a car parts factory in Three Rivers, the opening salary there is $10 an hour to make car parts. That's what you get if you work at Walmart. That's what you get when you work at a fast food. The days in which manufacturing could command an enormous premium over service kinds of jobs is over. And the reason is jobs have moved out of the United States. So the recovery of the car industry isn't the recovery that you might have thought it was. Because it's more and more a recovery of something whose contents are, are made in other parts of the world or made here by very poorly paid workers. And that's why this recovery really benefits those at the top with profits and not the mass of people who, even if they get a job, get one at a lower and lower salary and wage. The next update is really short. Couple of weeks ago I talked about the Uber car phenomena and there are other companies that do that too that are trying to get rid of the old taxi business in this country by having individuals use their own cars through a computer system and thereby help basically destroy the taxi industry. And what I took pains to explain was that this is a story of capitalism repeated endlessly. You start off with private companies giving car rides. We call them taxis, but too few of them are trained the drivers. The cars aren't insured, the cars aren't maintained. The drive to make money from taxis is endangering the rider. So what happens? People get hurt, People get hurt and don't have any insurance when it turns out the cab company is cutting costs by using a fly by night insurance company or none at all. So the end result is people get hurt. They demand that the government come in and, and regulate. And so we have regulated taxis. We have a government that makes sure the workers are reasonably paid, the cars are properly maintained. All the things that private capitalism failed to do, the government regulation imposes. But in order to do that, it has to charge pretty good prices so that the workers can get paid. And the profiteers who will run. These companies can get the profits they want and you get that kind of result periodically. Then a new capitalist comes in and says, whoa, with those prices that the cab companies are charging regulated, I can come in and I can use unlicensed drivers, uninsured cars inadequately maintained, and I can make a big profit charging about what the cab companies do, but without the expenses of, of doing it in a proper way. That's all Uber is. It's got nothing to do about sharing economy. It's got nothing to do about new technology. If you wanted to share more, if you wanted to use new technology that could be easily worked into the existing taxi business. So what Uber is, is simply going back to the wild west of capitalism. Companies using cut off arrangements, cutting corners, saving money in order to make a profit, but risking us. And how do I know? Last week in Germany the court said, quote, Uber's business model because they blocked a large part of Uber's business across Germany, quote, Uber's business model violated both national and European Union laws because it did not fully insure drivers or passengers in the event of accidents. There it is, the same recapitulated history of capitalism now in a new form. Next update. Briefly, there was a great deal of hoopla over the last six to eight months about the Soviet annexation of the Crimean area, part of what had been the Ukraine. And there was a great hoopty doodle in the press about this, about Russia taking a part of what was another country by the little detail that the referendum there showed that the people desperately wanted to be part of Russia, et cetera, et cetera. And then there were sanctions. There was a great deal of posturing by President Obama, by the leaders of Britain, France, Germany and so on, that Russia is behaving badly. It takes your breath away. Give me a moment just to say we live in a world in which countries are evading, invading one another. The Europeans did unspeakable things in Bosnia not so long ago. The United States is busy in half a dozen countries bombing and droning. But the Russians, you see, behaved really badly by going into another country. Put that aside. The sanctions were applied. We were going to punish them, we were going to make it harder for them to be and that was going to bring them to heel. Well, a story caught my eye in the Bloomberg Business Review by Matthew Winkler on the 20th of March. He basically headlines his article Russia Rebounds despite sanctions. Basic line. Russia's economy in this new year 2015 has done better than most economies around the world because as we cut off some of the ways Russia could make money internationally. Russia turned in and relied more and more on its own businesses, who as a result have enjoyed enormous growth in demand and enormous growth in their productivity and are doing just fine, thank you. It's a long lesson of world politics that sanctions very rarely work. And they did not work in the case of Russia. But other than for a little story buried in Bloomberg, you wouldn't know about it, which is one reason why we bring it up here. Last quick update, for which we barely have time. This comes from the website Vox.com Vox and and the headline of this story was if you're thinking about graduate school, this chart will scare you. And let me tell you what the results are. This is an article that looked at what we used to call mostly the humanities in our higher education system in the United States. English languages, history, philosophy, religion and classics, study of classical civilizations. Okay. And here's an example of what this article shows. In 2001, that's 14 years ago, there were more than 1,800 jobs for new English PhD. When you complete your graduate education and you receive your PhD, the normal next step is to become an assistant professor at a school somewhere, at a college or university in the country. PhDs mostly do that in the humanities. So in 2001, there were 1800 jobs for new English PhDs. In 2013 there were 1000. That's a drop of almost half. And the chart shows that it's just the same awful in history, philosophy, religion, languages, and classics. Perhaps even more interesting is that while the major collapse happened in 2008, 2009, when we had our economic meltdown anyway, they have not recovered. There has been no recovery in jobs for new PhDs. It's another marker that when you hear the word recovery, it means mostly profits and stock market prices, not the things that matter to the vast majority of people. Here's an example of of new PhDs in the humanities who have seen no recovery whatsoever. And here's the last little detail that the article makes clear. It takes an average of eight years between the time you enter a PhD program and the time you actually get the PhD and then go out on the market to look for a job as a new assistant professor. So what we have is a collapse concentrated over the last eight years. That's why we don't see yet a fall off in enrollments. People, young people, are still going to graduate school to study English and religion and philosophy and history because they're still the ones that have signed up are still finishing their education. They haven't come out and encountered the. The reality I just described to you. When they do, we are going to have thousands and thousands of very upset young people who have spent years training for jobs that this system cannot and will not provide. That is an element of fundamental social dysfunction. It's not working real well. Okay, let me turn then quickly to a couple of your questions that have come in that we have time for. The first one has to do with press reports in the last few weeks, and by the way, they've been going on for years, that the Chinese, the People's Republic of China, is manipulating the value of its currency, moving the yuan up or down to the advantage of, presumably of the interests of the Chinese economy and the Chinese government. And the question is, could I explain this and how do I understand it? Well, first, I have no doubt that the Chinese government is manipulating currency. The reason I have no doubt is that it's a very important shaper of what happens to China, and therefore the government is going to have to pay attention. And the second reason is that every government in a position to manipulate currency is busy doing that all the time. And when you hear an official complain about another country, this is really not worth listening to very much because it is probably true, but it is probably irrelevant because the government of the official doing the complaining is almost certainly doing it as well and, and trying, if anything, to outdo the other one in the process. What's at stake, it's simple. If you reduce the value of your currency, it will make it possible for other people in other countries to get more units of your currency for theirs than they used to. So instead of, say, giving a dollar for a euro, if you cheapen the value of your currency, then the people of Europe give up a euro. They get a dollar and a half. But rather than a dollar, that means the dollar has gone down in value because you get more of them for a foreign unit of currency. What this does is it makes it possible for Europeans, for each euro they spend, to get a dollar and a half. It makes everything in American dollars look cheaper to them. They'll buy more of it. So every American company that wants to sell more in Europe would like the value of the dollar to go down relative to the euro because they'll make more sales in Europe. But of course, if we make more sales in Europe, we're competing with European companies that want to make sales in Europe, and they're not going to be happy. And guess what? They're going to go to their government and say, don't Let the Americans do that. Depress the value of the euro so we get the advantage. You understand? Everybody plays the game because the one who plays it, if the others don't, gets an advantage and the other ones pay the price. And they're not going to do that. They're going to want the advantage for themselves or they're at least going to want to neutralize the advantage of the other side that cuts its currency. So the Chinese want to lower the value of their currency as best they can or keep it from rising so they can keep selling abroad. The Chinese depend on exports more than we do, so it's a more urgent problem for them, but we do it too. The only time you get a counter pressure is when you think about the fact that if your currency becomes more valuable, which is what's happened to the dollar in the last few months, it becomes cheaper for your country's companies to buy companies in another country because you get more euros for your dollar so you can more cheaply buy a European competitor. So guess what? The country is divided here, this America, like every other country, between those enterprises that stand to gain from cheapening the currency versus those enterprises that stand to gain from raising the value. And what happens is simply the result of the differing power of these two groups of businesses. Don't get caught up in the idea that working people have a stake here. They don't. This is a fight among capitalists about their profits. And what happens to the worker is something that is a byproduct that neither of the warring capitalists care much about. Last question. Very brief. Brief only because we don't have the time. Is there a place for trade unions? A person writes in if you have an economy of worker co ops. Very good question. There are those who believe that once the workers become their own directors, once the company is owned and operated by the workers who are also the workers there, well then you don't need an a union because the workers who do the work are also the ones who control everything. And they'd be negotiating with themselves and you don't need it. Well, there's an argument there, and I can see that. But let me give you an example of two ways that a union could still have a very important role to play in an economy of worker owned worker directed enterprises. First, suppose that the way the workers directed their own enterprises was what we might call representative worker control. So that is not all the workers literally together own and direct their enterprise. They elect say 10 of their own number to be the board of directors. So so you have a board of directors, but it's elected by the workers rather than in a capitalist system where it's elected by the shareholders. In such a representative worker co op, it might be very important that the workers who are now distinct from the board they've elected have some organization to bar, to bargain properly with their own elected representatives. It's just like citizens in a political system having an association that bargains for them with, with the people they've elected to be their political leaders. So you would need a union to represent collectively the interests of the workers in relationship to the board they've elected. So there might be a place for a union to play a role. And the other way, just as important, would go like this. There are two kinds of workers in every enterprise. Those who do the work of making what the company does and those who are enablers who those who provide the conditions. It's like the difference between the worker who makes the car and the secretary who keeps records of what's being done. One is making the car, the other one is doing the work necessary for the maker of the car to do his job. But those are two different kinds of workers with a different relationship to the whole enterprise. Unions might be a way of representing their different interests and bargaining with one another about how the company works. I wish I had more time. I will come back to it. We've come to the end of the first half of our program for today. Please stay with me. We will be right back. The second half of this program. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update for today. I'm your host, Richard Wolff, and in this second half I'm very happy and pleased to welcome again because she's been with us in the past, Dr. Harriet Fraad. She has been in practice for 40 years as a mental health counselor and hypnotherapist. She currently has a private practice in New York City. Dr. Frad also writes on the intersection of personal life and the economy for several journals and for the website truthout.org. her latest essay on personal life, written with Tess Fraud Wolf, can be found in the book edited by Frances Goldin, Deborah and Michael Smith entitled Imagine Living in a Socialist usa. Her more theoretical work can be found in the book edited by Graham Cassano entitled Class Struggle on the Home Front. Harriet, welcome to the program.
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Thank you for inviting me.
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A
Okay. I want to thank also Scott Fraser from Toronto, Canada, a listener who asked us to bring Dr. Frad back onto this program and to talk particularly about the movement called Men's Rights Men's rights. I slipped on that. That'd be an interesting question, why I did the men's rights movement, but also in the context of the relationship between economics and psychology. The. That is the topic that we talk about when you're on this show. So let me set a context and then ask you a question. Much of the time on this program, I talk about the changes in the American capitalist economy since the 1970s. And there I stress things like the departure of more and more high paid manufacturing jobs to other parts of the world as American companies go to where the wages are lower and the profits therefore higher. I talk a little bit about technological change, many jobs eliminated by computers, so that former jobs are lost and people have to find new jobs. They typically do that in positions that pay less well, that have fewer benefits, that are less secure, and that this has been, if anything, accelerated in the economic crash that happened in 2008. That it's also a country in which the gap between rich and poor is getting wider. So we've talked about these economic. What I want to discuss with you is how these things impact on the family, on men as opposed to women, and on the relationships among men, among women and between men and women, so that we can see what the costs, what the consequences of capitalism's own developments, driven above all by the profit decisions of corporations, how they play out in the lives of people. So could you begin by giving us a kind of an overview of what has happened to personal relationships, let's call it, in the last 30 to 40 years.
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I want to set this up to look at what has happened as the personal fallout from the desertion of US Workers and the export of US Jobs overseas, as well as their replacement with computers. Because what happened in the 70s is that computers replaced millions of jobs. And multinational communication systems enabled multinational corporations overseas to function without ecological restraints, without workers rights, and with much lower salaries. So that. And what happened economically, which had huge impact personally, was that Americans were lulled into a sense that we were an exceptional people, particularly white Americans, since African Americans and minorities were eliminated from the American dream. But during the 70s, the majority of Americans were white. And that's changing. So for 150 years, from 1820 to 1970, wages and profits rose together. White male workers got extra bonuses, one for being white, one for being male, and got higher wages, in fact, called family wages, wages that could support a family. Well, that ended in the 1970s. And white men were disempowered. The whole family system, which was the traditional family of the wage earning white male and the dependent wives and children was no longer tenable.
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In other words, we had built up a family in America of a man working and the wife, at least in the white part of the population, which.
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Was the majority at the time, based.
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On this system of rising wages.
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Right.
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And so a kind of catastrophe happens when the wages stop rising since the 70s. And now the question is, what happens to a family based on a rising wage when that's not available?
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While families depended on women's unpaid labor, their emotional labor in tying the family together, connecting them with relatives and friends and taking care of children, their domestic labor in terms of cooking and cleaning and shopping and their sexual labor, women were responsible. Well, and white men counted on women working full time to provide these good services for them in their individual homes. Well, before the 1970s, women's labor was reserved for disasters. Men were hurt, men were fired. You know, they were unemployed, they were hurt, they deserted their families. And so that women were forced into the labor force. Before that, women could be counted on to be home. And what that meant is even in those cases where women were in the labor force, the other neighboring women were at home looking out and could look out after your kids. So once women's labor was needed to.
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A
Just wait a minute, step by step. So you're saying when the men's wages didn't go up anymore, that's when the.
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Movement of women, that's when women had to go out and there was no extra in case of debt, in case of layoff, in, in case of injury. That left that extra little supplement was over. Elizabeth Warren and Tayogi wrote a good book about that. That's the same one as the senator.
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So I want to just establish this. So after the 1970s, with the end of the rising wage, the family becomes precarious economically unless the woman goes out and works.
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And when she goes out and works, they're precarious because in case of some problem, she can't go out to work. She's already working to keep the family going, period. There is no reserve, so there's no.
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Slack the way there once was.
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Everything is more precarious. Women's labor force participation, women leaving for jobs tripled after 1970. That's huge. And the effect on families in the light of these capitalist profit decisions was enormous. And at the same time, as women were pouring into the labor force, families were transformed. We didn't have the kind of support for families that would have made that transition possible. There's less child care, federally supported, quality childcare provided by our government now than was during World War II where it paid them because they needed women in the munitions factories. So that not only are families deserted, but the basic conditions that would have allowed those families to adjust like they have in other countries, like Universal. Excellent childcare that starts out to be free at 3 years old and is heavily subsidized before that. Meals, after school activities, maternity and paternity leaves, guaranteed vacations that allow families to spend time together. We don't have that and we are the least developed in the western industrialized and wealthy world on all of those things. So that this was a disaster. In addition to that happening, the recession starting in 2008 had its biggest effect on male jobs, which just accentuated that 4/5 of the jobs lost in 2008 were male jobs in construction. And these were jobs men didn't need an education. Construction, producing heavy machinery, manufacturing high power sales which needed a kind of bail testosterone infused aggression. And the biggest growth was in the service economy, which is much more geared to women. The biggest growth areas now are in food services and medical technology and medical assistance. Those were traditionally female jobs. In addition, the jobs that pay better require an education. Education and higher education were not a particular priority in blue collar male culture. And because of that, men have also really taken a shellacking. The majority of people in higher education, the whole of higher education, not every single field, but the totality, are women in college, women in master's degree programs, women in doctoral programs, women. And so that men have lost out in terms of their cultural expectation that they could get a decent job and support a family without an education.
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A
So let me summarize. Between the 1970s and the collapse of 2007, the problem begins to be that the traditional family can't survive economically.
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And it gets another chop in the.
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Neck with the recession right in the first phase, in a sense, we might say men have to become accustomed with whatever difficulty to the wife being no longer someone that they can support at home. They can't do that. They might have thought that was their social role, but they can't do it. And then with the crash of 2008, the added problem that they can't hold their job at all.
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That's right.
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And the jobs that are available are being picked up by women who have more of a job possibility in the midst of their losing. This is a heavy one, two punch in a 30 or 40 year period.
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A very heavy one, two punch.
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A
So let me push you, where does that, how does that play out?
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Well, let Me tell you, that's just what I was going to say. It's beautifully stated in a wonderful film by Maggie Baird called Life Inside Out. And it's a story of a family. And the man at one point says to the woman, we've never done this badly. Even when we started out. I don't feel like a man at all. And now you have to go out and work at a job that you don't like. I feel like a failure.
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The man says that, yes.
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And all over the United States, this has happened. Men who identified their manhood with being I am a man, I am a provider. A luxury not afforded to black males was gone. And so that, you know, men were unmanned in their own eyes. And this was a terrible blow. A good illustration is that in 1970, only four police of US wives out earned their husbands. They earned more money than their husbands. In 2012, one out of three wives earns more money than her husband.
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So we're talking about a basic sea.
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Change, a huge sea change. And there are different reactions to this. Naturally, the government does not want to acknowledge capitalism's role. And in league with that denial are the hate radio mavens. Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh on Rush Limbaugh, I've heard a man calling in saying, I'm confused. I don't feel like a guy. My wife earns more. And Rush Limber says that's because she's a feminazi. These women are taking over everything. And he goes on an anti woman rant. And Bill O'Reilly has the same idea that it's the reason you're in trouble, of course, has nothing to do with capitalism. He doesn't even mention the word. But the reason you're in trouble is those immigrants are taking your job. The upstart women who are not respectful, the African Americans, they're taking your jobs.
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In other words, no recognition of the move of companies abroad, no recognition of what profit decision means when a corporation does it. How these jobs, none of what you've told us about the economics is ignored. Instead, it's the act. You blame the immigrant. You scapegoat people and you scapegoat the women, the women particularly for wrecking your wife did it.
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She wrecked your personal life. Just shows these upstart women leaving you alone and you're so great. And they're terrible. They're feminazis. You know, we got to stop this.
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But it is true, right, that one of the pressure points since the 1970s, as families have had to navigate this Changed priority of profit industry has been the growth in the divorce rate, the inability of families to stay together as these pressures overwhelm or exaggerate whatever other differences were.
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B
Absolutely. And the more these are exaggerated like in the red states and in religious states dire the divorce rate. So that we can see that these contradictions are accentuated where the ideology is. There's nothing wrong with capitalism, there's something wrong with uppity women and so on. And so there have been several refuges that men have sought to both deny capitalism and recoup their traditional manhood which depended on domination of women and economic dominance for themselves and without the economic dominance holding on to the dominance. Nonetheless, the men's rights, men's rights movements are part of that. I'll talk about that.
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A
That's what the question came in, by the way.
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Yes, indeed. A very big one is the Christian right, because the Southern Convention Baptist Convention on men and women dictates that women should be subordinate to their men, who should be protective but in charge. Regardless of who earns more. Men are in charge. And that cry is carried on by the Catholic Church both with its discrimination against women not being able to be leaders in the church and priests and also in their day dictate that women are to be in charge of hearth and home rather than share. And men are dominant. And the same thing is true with orthodox Judaism, Hasidic religions and the Muslim tradition in its orthodoxy. And the NRA is another big one where they very successfully instead of saying buy a gun, the gun lobbies will love it and they'll make more money. It's you're defending your second amendment rights as a man. And just as a little ironic statement, the second amendment was added for the slave holding states so that they could form militias to hunt down escaped slaves. So it doesn't have a great tradition in the first place, but it's a very male dominant shoot them. They have a ex girlfriend target that you can shoot. It spurts blood all over her until she's utterly demolished. You can order that online.
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A
So your argument is that men found their way into these kinds of movements.
- [45:02]
B
Men who want to deny capitalism's role and assert their dominance rather than seeing this as a chance to be equals and friends and to learn how to take care of vulnerable beings, to be cooperative, to be egalitarian, to have a household co op and a chance for depth of friendship and connection, who want to assert their dominance and deny that capitalism has removed it gravitate towards these places. A military is another one which is why women are routinely raped in the military and they can't solve the problem. Another one is heterosexual pornography in which women are routinely humiliated and seem all excited about acts that don't, you know, that are humiliating for women. Homosexual pornography is much more egalitarian. It doesn't have that audience of men trying to recoup their superiority over women. Men's rights groups are a great example because they say, you know, the reason you can't see your kids whenever you feel like it is these women are denying you. It's not like they want to take care of their kids. They don't. Or that they want to take financial responsibility. They don't. They chafe under the idea they have to contribute at all. And those men's rights groups are hate groups, as opposed to father's rights groups, which say, we want to nurture our children, we want to take responsibility. We don't want gender discrimination when there's a divorce, because we too are nurturers. That's a very different statement from, we get rights. We don't have to nurture anybody. We're men. So, you know, the ultimate expression is shooting. You can't read the paper without seeing mass shootings. And one thing about all those mass killers is they're men. They're very angry. They feel denied, and for good reason. They've been denied a living wage and the ability to feel like providers, even co providers. You know, that's a huge sea change and a huge demotion. And they're overwhelmingly white men who are doing this because suddenly they feel unmanned. And when I did my little study of this mass murder phenomenon, I found that the majority of them, the overwhelming majority, have lost, has had a woman walk out on them or lost a job within the recent past and feel so enraged. And see those posters on the buses about I'm a man, you know, holding my. My gun, and movies like that. And they feel like, I'll go down in a blaze of glory. I'm not going to let these people put me down. I'm going out like a man, shooting people. And what is on the other hand, the good news is that there are other developments that have happened in personal life.
- [48:06]
A
Wait a minute. I want to set the tone because I do know where you're going with this. And it's so important if you understand this is me understanding you. So please correct me if I'm missing this. If you understand that the evolution of capitalism has destroyed the traditional family and provoked all of these developments by upset and understandably upset men as they try to cope, as the women try to cope, and you see a lot of these as negative. It's also possible to see that this makes possible a new kind of family. And what is that? And are there people going in that direction? That's in a sense where we want to end this conversation.
- [48:54]
B
That's where I wanted to end it. But I also want to add a little ironic note that those people calling themselves family rights groups and are family values and family values asserters are not acknowledging what has destroyed the traditional family and in fact are working to take away any benefit that would help families stay together. And, and what's happened is two big developments. One is independence. The overwhelming number of people between what they call prime marriageable age 18 to 34 are now single in the United States and single by choice because they don't have the money to start a family. And marriage is a luxury good for the mass of Americans. Only the top 5% have increased their marriage rates. The rest of the 95% haven't. So that these right wingers who push family values are pushing the destruction of the family they ostensibly espouse. So one alternative is people just saying I don't have the money, I'm going to live alone. Another is the mass of people cohabiting living together because they never have enough money to feel secure getting married and they won't because their jobs are insecure and, and their relationships become more insecure also. And another is what are more collective communal families in which people share working outside the home and share providing inside the home and caring for all the things around the home. That's another value and that is also espoused the legislation.
- [50:37]
A
So these are different ways that our people are trying to cope to cope with this by forming new ways of living alone in collections of groups or in more structured cooperative households.
- [50:52]
B
That's right. And there are. If the United States were interested in supporting people through the fallout from capitalist profit the way they endorsed and gave so many millions to capitalist corporations that caused the problem. If they wanted to subsidize some kind of reaction and comfort in dealing with this, they would do what people, for example, in Sweden, they have huge apartments where they recognize that 60% of people in Stockholm, like 50% of people in Manhattan, live alone. And they set up their new apartments with big communal spaces and small apartments and joint cooking arrangements and socializing arrangements so that people won't have to be so lonely and can be connected. And the housing recognizes the changes in patterns. Another is co housing. There's A co housing movement in the United States where people both who want children and who don't want children but want to be living around children live together. They buy a set of apartments and they allow people to communally decide what they're going to do here and who they're going to accept. Do they have a balance of single people and married people and cohabiting people and people with children? But they're a collective housing arrangement. You could build community centers where people can go and meet and work on things and do things together, which would be a huge antidote to American loneliness. They could add paternity and maternity leaves the way they do in most of Scandinavia where most paternity leaves now are compulsory. So men are not going to get extra credit by going back to work when it's not allowed. We are the only country that doesn't have paid maternity leaves that would allow mothers to bond with children or proper childcare arrangements. These are all very achievable things that other people have, as well as more activities in parks, from dog runs to playgrounds to adult activities. But you know what we have to see is that the reason that the marriage that the right wingers so ostensibly praise is in free fall. Only 5% of people who are at the top can afford to be married because they can hire other lower paid women to do all the work. And marriage is a luxury good. And we don't have the supports we need. And we can so that capitalism has destroyed the family and also prevents money to be given that would help support the alternatives people are creating to cope with the precarity of their situation, not only economically but also personally, with great suffering around that.
- [53:59]
A
And the irony to end it. The irony is all that the right wing really proposes is to abolish abortion. Have you go to church and block gay people from getting married. Things that don't go to any of the fundamental forces that are disrupting personal and family life that they claim to be concerned about. The ironies here are rich and many.
- [54:24]
B
Layered and they're even attacking birth control. However, one of and the gay rights is because if you allow people to live together as equals, they're the same sex. Gender is not. Gender roles are not assigned by birth or sex. Social roles aren't. Then you're already letting some doubt into this unequal arrangement. And the denial of gay rights, the denial of abortion, the denial of birth control, the denial of good public child care are all related in the denial of abortion, of course, to keeping women subordinate.
- [55:05]
A
Thank you very much, Harriet. I know we've only scratched the surface. I think that's why so many emails come in asking us to bring you back. I hope you will come back again and continue this conversation. I want to underscore before closing that one of the reasons we talk about economics is because it's so powerful in shaping our lives, even our most intimate lives, and at that point has to be brought back and talked about as part of facing up to the problems of this society and making the changes. I want to remind you all, we maintain two websites where this kind of information is elaborated. Please make use of them. They're available 247 at no cost. One is rdwolf with two Fs.com the other is democracyatwork.info you can go to these websites and follow us by clicking on an icon there through Facebook and Twitter. Please use those social media to convey what you've learned here to others, to share and to partner with as many people as possible. I want to thank truthout.org, a remarkable independent source of news and analysis, and ask you to check out their website. And I want to ask you again, please patronize and support the radio stations that bring you this program. Do the same for us if you can, and for sure. Please come back and join me next week for the next edition of Economic Update. Goodbye from Richard Wolff. Until then.