← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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Sam. Saint gonna change.
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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Our jobs, our incomes, our debts, those for our children, looming down the road. And looming a bit for us as well. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and I currently teach at the New School University in New York City. Before jumping into today's economic updates and the analyses that go with it, I wanted to alert you all to something we're quite proud of, that you can now see this program. That's right, see it as well as hear it. But it has a video form. And you can watch me doing what I am currently doing, which is presenting as best I can, the last week's interesting economic news and revelations. And there are two places where you can follow us in video form. The first that I would urge you to take a look at is a website called Patreon P A T R e o n patreon.com economicupdate will get you right there. An Economic Update is all one word. So once again, patreon.com the other place where you can also catch us on video is of course, YouTube. And you can find us at YouTube. And I would urge you to do so if you are interested in following the video form because as we try to do, we're expanding the number of platforms that we're using to get this program and what we offer here into as many homes and offices as we possibly can. So thank you for those of you that have already taken a look at these websites and thanks as well for those that you of you that might do that now. And of course, no opening would be complete if I did not remind you of the two websites we directly maintain. Democracy at work. That's all one word, democracy at work.info info. And the other one is rdwolf with two f's.com. both of those websites allow you to communicate to us what you would like us to cover, what pleased or didn't please you in something we did. Suggestions. Those are coming in at a wonderful clip and we review them all and make use of most of them. So you really are a partner with us when you interact with us through those websites and the communications they make possible. The websites also allow you to follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube again, and in that way partner with us as well on an ongoing basis. And finally, those websites are places where we upload a great deal of material that supplements and extends what is done on this program. So it is yet another way of getting more benefit out of the work that we at this program are doing. So make use of them. That's why they're there. And by the way, the websites are available 247 and of course, no charge. I want to begin with a story that caught my eye in last week's Financial Times. And it talks about a French bank. I believe it's the largest bank in France, BNP Paribas by name, having been slapped with a $350 million fine by the New York State banking regulator. That's not the federal government. That's just one out of 50 states whose bank regulator, looking into what the bank was doing, found it was doing bad things, illegal things, inappropriate things. And it did a thorough investigation and it found wrongdoing. And it assessed a $350 million fine which the bank has paid. What was the misconduct that it found? It's very important for many reasons. First, it found that this misconduct lasted at least from 2007 to. To 2015. That's kind of remarkable when you think about it, because it suggests an ongoing process. It's true. The article mentions that the specific employees of BNP Paribas has tens of thousands of employees around the world. It's a global bank. It's true that all the ones involved in this misconduct have been fired or let go or don't work. In any case, for BNP Paribas, that's called punishing the lower levels for something that the upper levels could not possibly have been unaware of, although I'm sure they claim the contrary. This is regular business of these banks. In this case, it was the business of managing foreign exchange activities. And you know what that is, or let me explain briefly, it's if you have business in another country, you have to buy something there. Typically, you need to acquire the currency of that country because everything in that country is priced in its own currency. So, for example, if you were interested in buying French wine, you would have to get Euros, because that's the currency used in France. So you'd have to go through a procedure of exchanging the currency. You have, say, the US Dollar for so and so many French Euros or Euros for the whole European Community. And typically that is an exchange that is handled by a bank. A bank has one currency and exchanges it for the other. And here comes the fun part. It takes a small commission for that exchange and makes a good deal of money on it. But now imagine that the people who are supposed to make an exchange at whatever the going rate is, begin to use their own money to manipulate the rates to make them a bit more expensive to get a euro than it was 10 minutes ago or 10 days ago. And knowing that their own activity is going to change the value, they can then gamble in various ways. But it's a riskless gamble because they know what's going to happen, since they're the one who makes it happen. Did they do that? You bet. Did they get caught at it? You bet. Did the people in the bank get fired? Yeah. But something that goes on for this many years reflects the fact that the bank, at the very least, rewarded people who improved the income of the bank in this way and probably punished people who didn't reward the bank, perhaps because they didn't engage in this illegal activity. We'll never know, but it's a reasonable guess. Well, is BNP Paribas unique or alone or exceptional in having done this illegal, manipulative work and having got caught at it? Not at all. In May 2015, six global banks, six of the biggest banks in the world, together paid the United States Department of Treasury of justice, excuse me, a total of $5.6 billion to settle allegations of rigging the foreign exchange market. In other words, this illegal activity is normal business, normal business for the big banks of the world and has been for more years than most of us can remember. In other words, it's another example of big private capitalist enterprises using their position in the economy to make money for themselves at the expense of. Of the whole world. Let me explain. Everything that comes into the United States, and we import hundreds of billions of dollars worth of goods, everything that comes into this country from abroad just about involves some kind of foreign exchange transaction. If the manipulations go a certain way, the prices of these things are higher than they would otherwise be. Similarly, if we're concerned in any country, but we'll take our own as an example, if we're concerned that foreigners are buying assets here, if a manipulation by banks makes the dollar cheaper than it would otherwise be, they make an incentive for foreigners to pounce when the dollar is cheap, because it effectively means they get more dollars for their currency than they did before, and that cheapens the cost of buying anything in the United States. So we have all kinds of social effects that all of us take for granted when we pay for something in the supermarket or the department store. But the truth of it is that either that object or some component inside that object was imported, went through perhaps one or more foreign exchange transactions before it got here. And those exchanges affect the price and affect whether it's affordable to us or not. And if you add that up over many products, over many years, this has a material impact on the wealth and poverty across the world. A tiny group of banks manipulating foreign exchanges for their private profit are thereby costing the world uncalculable amounts of loss, of mistaken preparations, of expectations that don't work out not because of the way the market works, but because of the way they, like so many others, manipulate that market. Final point. The very bankers who do this, who manipulated markets, got caught, paid fines, have been doing it for years. They're the same bankers who get up and tell you about the glories of the free market. A free market where every transaction is transparent, where everybody knows who the buyers and the sellers are and, and the price reflects simply what buyers and sellers negotiate. No manipulation for the private profit by anyone. The free market is a fantasy. It's never existed. It doesn't exist now. It's a utopia that some people think will be achieved in some distant future, because Lord knows it's not with us now, that wouldn't be so bad. Utopias are all around us, things people hope or imagine may someday be. But when you recognize what a non free market is, and that's what we have, then you also have to face who's manipulating, who's gaining and who's losing. Allowing private banks to manage something as important as money, something as universally important as converting one currency to another, is to invite, to enable. And now we have the evidence to prove illegal private profit making at the public's expense. The next update. This is an issue that arises often, and so this is a good time to deal with it. When President Trump was running for office, he made a point, especially when speaking to evangelical audiences, that he, as president, would get rid of the Johnson Amendment. I'm assuming that many of you may have wondered what exactly that was. So let me explain, and for those of you who already know, my apologies, but we should all be on the same page here. The Johnson Amendment was passed in the United States Congress in 1954. That makes it 63 years old. And it basically said that charities that enjoy a tax exemption, in other words, charities that the federal government allows to earn money without paying taxes on it, to spend money without paying sales taxes, and so on, cannot engage in politics, they should not be involved in supporting one candidate against another, etc. Tax exempt institutions include churches, charities, and so on. And that means churches have been barred from explicit political activity as a condition for enjoying their tax exemption, which saves them an enormous bundle of money without which many churches could not survive. So Mr. Trump was basically saying, I want to free you to the churches, particularly from the limits of the Johnson Amendment. So I'm going to get rid of it and I'm going to hold back the IRS from bothering you. This left the impression, which of course, Mr. Trump was pandering to in that speech. This left the impression that churches are somehow being really restricted in what they can say and do politically by fearing the loss of their tax exemption because they could be found to be in violation of the Johnson Amendment. To correct that misunderstanding, willful though it is, let me tell you that only once, once in 63 years has a charity of any kind, including any church, had its tax exemption taken away because of its political activity. Once in 63 years, is the political activity of the churches being effectively held back by the IRS and the Johnson amendment? Not if you get one case in 63 years. New that means the IRS is mostly looking the other way. And in case you're interested, what was that one case? It took place because a church did something in 1992. It was a church in Binghamton, New York, and it lost its tax exempt status because the church took out paid newspaper ads urging Christians to vote against Bill Clinton for president in 1992 that was so egregious that the IRS proceeded to took away the tax exempt status for that church in Binghamton one time. No one else has had that experience in the 63 years that the Johnson Amendment has been there. In other words, it was a phony issue to which Mr. Trump pandered for votes and may well have helped him. I don't know. Let's take a look at then, at what the IRS does with tax exempt organizations in the 1970s, according to one study, and by the way, I'm relying here on the research of Professor Philip Hackney. He is a professor in the law school at Louisiana State University and has written wonderfully about this whole subject from a legal point of view. According to professor hackney, in the 1970s, there were about 1,000 IRS Internal Revenue Service agents who were responsible to look at, to study, to review what tax exempt institutions were doing to see if they violated any of the rules, including the Johnson amendment. In 2013, that number had dropped to 842. That is a remarkably large drop in the number of agents, the IRS even looking at what churches and other tax exempt institutions do. Meanwhile, as the number of agents looking at these tax exempt organizations drops, let's see how many of them there were to have their situations reviewed. In 1980, there were roughly 320,000 tax exempt organizations that the IRS reviewed. By 2016, when the number of agents dropped in the way that I just described, the number of tax exempt institutions was 1.6 million. That's right. Between 1980 and 2016, the number of tax exempt institutions went up five times, whereas the number of IRS agents reviewing them dropped significantly. And what's more, the new budget proposed last week by President Trump calls for further cuts in the IRS on top of those big cuts that have happened since 2010. What is this all about? This is all about deregulation, something that conservatives are pushing all the time. You deregulate, among other ways, by having fewer regulators looking at institutions that may well be doing all kinds of things that are illegal. Let me give you an example of some of the things that the IRS has caught. And again, I'll use Professor Hackney's work. The Red Cross, you've certainly heard of that. The Red Cross is still struggling to quell concerns because in 2013, the center for Investigative Reporting and the Tampa Bay Times zeroed in on 50 charities that had spent as little as 3 cents on the dollar they raised for charitable activity and work tied to their missions. The Red Cross came into a lot of criticism for activities in Haiti and so on. In other words, the IRS discovered that these charities were spending very little money on what they were raising money for and a great deal of money for themselves. In 2016, the Federal Trade Commission, all 50 states and the District of Columbia, settled with something called the Cancer Fund of America and Cancer Support Services, Inc. And the leader of both groups, a man named James Reynolds Sr. Barring them all from operating in the charitable world again, the Federal Trades Commission alleged that most of their money, they spent most of the money they raised not on cancer, but on families, friends, and so forth. These are the kinds of things the IRS is supposed to find and fix. But we're deregulating, so we're not doing that. Most Americans file automatic taxes for money that has been withheld from their paychecks. They don't do hardly anything that a machine can't pick up. If there's something irregular, if it doesn't show up the right way, basically it's richer people and people engaged in illegal activities that manipulate and maneuver in such a way that the IRS needs to look into it. Deregulating makes it easier for them, and that's a large reason why we have it. But as a freedom for churches to be politically expressive, it has not been a serious obstacle to that and claims to that are fake. You might even call them fake news if you were looking for a phrase. Next item on my list of updates have to do with data that we now have on what happened to the pay of CEOs, chief executive officers of major American companies and what happened to them, particularly in the last full year, 2016. So I got a very good summary May 23rd in Market Watch, a good source of these kinds of documents. So I thought I would share the best parts of this with you. And the basic group that was examined were the chief executives of the standard and poor 500 companies. Those are the 500 biggest enterprises, basically in the United States. The chief executive. Now let's go through what the statistics tell us. The chief executive on the average of The Standard and Poor 500 companies received a pay increase in 2016, nearly three times the size of the increase in average worker got. Okay, before I even go on and spell it out, let's be clear what I've just said and what it means. People at the top got paid an increase three times larger than people who are average. You know what that means? That the gap between the richest and all the rest of us grew larger in 2016. Much larger. So we talk a lot in this country about the gap between the rich and the poor and something that needs to be done about it, but it's only talk. The reality is inequality deepens like the beat of a drum that can't stop drumming. Okay, more. What was the average pay? Median? Excuse me, Pay. You know, 50% got more, 50% got less. These CEOs of the biggest companies. $11.5 million. Of the 346 executives who were in their job at least two years or more, 346 women were 21. That's right. You heard me right. Women were 21 out of 346. For those of you interested in the glass ceiling, this suggests it's very much in place and harder and tougher to break than you might imagine. Lastly, the average CEO of the S&P 500 companies made 347 times more money than the average worker, the guy at the top. And boy is it, a guy makes 347 times more. The average production and non supervisory worker earned $37,600 in 2016. The average CEO made $11.9 million. If you want to understand inequality in the United States, that's where it starts, that's where it goes, and that's what it means. One group of people have extraordinary wealth, including the wealth needed to donate to the politicians who make sure that we limit any serious effort to do something about this inequality and what it means for average people, limits it to just words of deep concern while the inequality worsens year after year. Okay, we've come to the end of the first half of this program. I want to thank you for being here with us. I want to ask you to stay with us. We're going to have very interesting analyses of major issues in the second half of this program. So please stay with us. We will be right back.
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Spirit at the ring around your finger I have only come here seeking knowledge, things that you would not teach me of in college. I can see that destiny soul turn into a shining brand of gold I'll be wrapped around your finger I'll be wrapped around your we. Not your name I know what you're up to just the same.
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Welcome back, friends, to the second half of this edition of Economic Update. As I sometimes do, I want to open by reminding you that you can now also see as well as hear this program and the two best places to direct you if you wish to see the video version of of this program. The first is patreon.com that's P A T R E O N patreon.com economicupdate that's all one word. And the second place is YouTube, where economic update is uploaded in its video form regularly after each show. Today in the second half, I want to address several bigger issues that take a little time for me to treat properly. And so we leave them to the second half when we don't have an interview and we put the shorter topics in the first half. So here's the first for today. This has to do with a peculiar tendency here in the United States, and it's quite strong here, stronger than I have found it in many European countries, for example. And this is a tradition of blaming the poor for their condition and likewise at the other end, over inflating the celebration of the rich, which is as serious a mistake in understanding what's going on. It is to blame the poor. So let's take a look at these two bizarre, extreme kinds of positions that are found all too often here in the United States. We can begin by discussing the problem or the process of blaming the poor. A wonderful example of that happened this last week when the Trump Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, usually referred to as the HUD Department, a man you know as Ben Carson, made a remarkable public statement. He said that poverty is largely or mostly a state of mind. In other words, the poor are that way because of the way they think or way their mind works. There isn't anything social you have to worry about. There isn't anything in the structure of the economy you have to worry about. It's the mentality of these poor people. This is a polite way of blaming the poor. You've got the wrong mindset, you've got the wrong mentality. It's something you can correct if you just think properly or analyze things properly. Now, in the case of Secretary Carson, this is probably no more than a simple way to justify not using government resources to help the poor. The Trump budget proposal is full of these withholdings of resources. Food stamps, now called the SNAP program, that is slated to be cut. That's a big support for middle and low income people, and so are many other programs slated for cuts. We'll see what the Congress does with Mr. Trump's proposal, but presumably in if they don't give him everything he wants, they'll give him some of it, and that means cutting resources. So it may be important to cover over what you're doing by focusing public attention not on withholding supports for poor people, but rather on blaming the poor people and saying, if only they had a different mindset, if only they straightened out their mental processes, why then we wouldn't have a poverty program and then that we wouldn't need to spend scarce monies on it. Well, there's so many ways to show the absurdity of this. I really almost don't know where to begin. Well, let's begin with where we left off at the first half of this program. If the average income this country of a worker is $37,000, roughly, that means millions of workers earn considerably less than that because that's the average. Those are the poor, the ones who earn considerably less than that. A family trying to make it with two or three children and one income earner, or even two at low wages, is poor. They're not poor because of their mindset. They're poor because they aren't paid enough money. Meanwhile, we pay the CEO of the very companies paying them next to nothing, $11.5 million per year on average. The poor people are poor because the rich don't pay them. This isn't very complicated. You know, we could pay the CEO less. We could pay all CEOs less, and then there would be more for other people. We could, and that sentence can be finished a thousand ways. We might limit people to only two homes instead of 12. We might, we might, we might do something about Poverty, no problem. That is, it's not a technical problem and it's not an economic problem. I can assure you of that. It is a political problem. The people with the money don't want to give it up. The people with lots of money not only don't want to give it up, but they use their lots of money to make sure the politics doesn't take it from them. Poverty has always been a political problem. Those who try to say it's a matter of how poor people think are really no different from those in my profession of economics who try to tell you that poor people are poor because the productivity they bring to the market is low, or other economic arguments as if the economic system dictates how much you get paid. Let me drive it home with a simple comparison. Back in the 1970s, the average CEO got about varied 50 to 70 times what the average worker got. A big difference. The rich were 50 to 60 times better paid than the poor. Today that number is 347 times. That's what I told you in the last half hour. Somehow the rich got an awful lot richer. They were rich in the 70s, plenty rich. Gap between rich and poor, well known, well documented. We didn't have to make the rich much, much, much richer relative to everybody else. We could have handled the growing wealth we produce as a country in a much less unequal way. And then we might have done something about poverty. You know, we've been waging wars on poverty for my entire lifetime. From the day I was born in Youngstown, Ohio to this minute, some major part of the government has been fighting poverty. Well, with such a sorry record, you might think there'd be some questioning of what it is exactly we are doing and not doing. That explains why, as the Bible says, the poor will always be with us unless and until we listen real closely to other parts of the Bible which tell us to throw the money changers out of the temple and to be concerned about the lowest amongst us and to raise them up. Not hard to do economically and not much to do with mental processes. The line of causality goes much more from being poor to having certain mindset than the other way around. And yes, does poverty breed in people? Depression, Resignation. Is there a mental part of the problem of poverty? Of course there is. But to fasten on that and to blame poverty on that takes a small part of the story, makes it the whole story, and that's done with an ulterior to leave the poor poor and devote even fewer resources and all that will do was increase the misery of the poor and their number as well. This kind of political leadership is the opposite of what the problem of poverty needs. Now let's turn to the other side of the extreme. The extreme fawning attitude towards the richest amongst us. And I'm going to pick one just as an illustration. I have no particular concern with him, Mr. Zuckerberg, who's now a multi billionaire because of Facebook, he captured. He owns the Facebook idea. Did he have something to do with developing it as a new phenomena in our society? Clearly he did. Was he creative in doing that? I think so. Let's give him that. How came he to be creative? Let's see. He went to school there. He had teachers, some of whom were extraordinarily successful with him, helping him to learn, helping him to see. He had parents who fostered and sustained his education. He had all kinds of encounters with fellow students and the media and books and articles. You know, Mark Zuckerberg had to be developed in order to be able to. To do what he did. There had to be inventions by lots of other people, modern computers. Mr. Zuckerberg had nothing to do with developing modern computers. But the development of Facebook is unthinkable without the modern computer. So Mr. Zuckerberg's achievement, really, when you think about it, isn't his achievement. Yes, he put a number of things together in a creative new way, and that deserves praise, let's give him that. But what he put together, other people had created those, many who got together and finally developed the modern computer, Those who taught Mr. Zuckerberg how to use that computer, who wrote the books that. That he studied with, who provided him with the supports along the way. The reality is that Facebook isn't the creation of Mr. Zuckerberg. It's actually the creation of the whole society, and particularly of the many thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people who contributed their creativity to. To all the parts of what Facebook became. But Mr. Zuckerberg is a multi billionaire, and many of the other people have a hard time making ends meet, even though without what they contributed, Mr. Zuckerberg could not have done what he did. It is a bizarre society that gives to one person kind of the last guy on the chain of creativity. He gets the big bucks and everybody else, nada, nothing. It's a strange idea. There's only one thing stranger than dividing up the wealth created by Facebook and giving overwhelmingly to one person. The thing that's even worse than that is then turning that strange behavior around and justifying it as if the creation was all Mr. Zuckerberg, that out of nothing but his brilliance came this Facebook invention. Nothing of the sort is true. To reward and then justify the reward of unconscionable wealth to one person at the expense of all the others who contributed is as crazy as blaming poverty on the poor. And if we didn't do that with the rich, who knows, we might actually use a modest portion of what we now give to one man, Mr. Zuckerberg, to alleviate the poverty of millions. A society that doesn't see that and that doesn't do that is a strange one to claim that it takes Christian or any other morality and ethics seriously. The next topic that demands some of our attention, that takes a little time, has to do with this last week's behavior by, yes, once again, President Trump. As I'm sure many of you know, he went visiting to Europe, and while there, he had some fairly explosive things to say to the Europeans assembled to meet with him. And he singled out the strongest European economy, Germany. The issues on which he expressed disagreement with what the consensus is among the Europeans, namely the importance of maintaining the Paris climate agreement, not pulling out, as Mr. Trump has repeatedly threatened to do, supporting NATO as a alliance that the United States is part of and helped to create after World War II and a variety of other topics. Mr. Trump, however, singled out Germany and even after he returned to the United States, continued attacking Germany and coming close to attacking Angela Merkel, the current leader of Germany. And here's what he attacks Germany for mostly. Number one, that the United States has a trade deficit with Germany. In other words, Germany exports more of its products to the United States for sale than the United States does to Germany for sale. And the second? Much less important, but the second is that Germany doesn't contribute as much into the NATO defense operations as they're supposed to by the agreements when NATO was set up, and that the United States wants Germany to do something about that deficit. In other words, either to reduce the number of exports that go to the United States or to increase the number of US Exports imported into Germany and to up the amount of money they spend on or give to NATO. What's the problem here? Well, the problem is as old as Methuselah. It goes like every country in the world, tries to manipulate and use foreign trade to advantage its constituents. So obviously, Germany, like every other country, including the United States, is busy supporting, encouraging, and helping its companies sell more goods, sell more goods in Germany, sell more goods outside of Germany. The government supports exporters, and likewise, the government support helps its own industries defend Themselves. When foreign companies ship stuff into Germany, they try to make sure that the foreign government isn't helping their own companies too much and that that would hurt the German company. So countries, businesses, governments, they all get together. They, the businesses are the big rich power in a capitalist society. So they make sure that the government hears what they want and helps them get it. And that's how the politicians keep the donations coming. That's how it works in Germany, that's how it works in the United States. Who are we kidding? Yelling at the Germans because they've been successful at it, yelling at them because they've been more successful at it, and they have than the United States has. And the reasons for that are many, many, many. For example, the United States has now for quite a long time put the squeeze on its working class's wages, the real wages, that is what a worker gets adjusted for the prices a worker has to pay. The real wage of the aver worker hasn't changed for 30 or 40 years. That's a stunning statistic. The real wage hasn't gone up. That means American families are pinched, are always worried about their budgets, are always finding too much month at the end of the money. And that has led them to be extremely price conscious. And in their price consciousness, a consequence of not getting paid, increases even as they became more productive over the last 30 years. As a result, they are looking all the time for the cheapest goods. In that period of 30 years, one company really excelled in bringing to the American worker the cheapest goods made on the planet. That company is called Walmart. That's how it became the biggest single company in the country, the largest single employer in the private sector, and so on. And where did Walmart get these cheap goods to sell to the pinched American worker? The answer was from wherever in the world you could get the cheapest goods. And that turned out to be China, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Mexico. And you fill in the blank. And that meant America's deficits grew. It imported more than it exported, but not because the German government manipulated, but fundamentally because the United States own economy became more import dependent as a consequence of its own development. There's no way around this. When Mr. Trump made headlines early in his presidency, even before he became president with the carrier corporation in Indiana, where he browbeat them and got money to be given by the state of Indiana to that company, the whole point was not to move to Mexico, not to begin importing goods from Mexico. He was trying to manipulate the trade balance of, of the United States using subsidies and so on that's what the Germans do. Yes, the United States would like to do better at it. Nice goal. But the way the global capitalist system works, every country manipulates as best it can. The stronger countries are more able to do that manipulation. The more powerful governments likewise. If you don't like the results, it's fun to blame a particular player. But the problem isn't this or that player. They're all doing the same thing. There's no evidence to suggest that Germany is any more aggressive in the way it plays this game than than is the United States. The problem isn't with the players. The problem is with the game. We have a winner take all, dog eat dog. Global capitalist system. Profit is everything. Everybody's at everybody else's throats. Every business turns to the government to help them against others. This is a society that works like that. And we don't like some of the results, but we have this charming ability to quarrel over the results but never question the basic system out of which all of this comes. The struggle between Mr. Trump and Ms. Merkel, between the United States and Germany is a falling out, if not among thieves, then among capitalists struggling as they always have with winners and losers, depending on how cleverly each government can collaborate and how well the shifting winds of popular desire, preferences and technologies play out within a system that's called capitalism. Last story we have time for today. Once again, we are all victims of the manipulation of yet another market. This time it's the oil market. It's remarkable. It really is remarkable. Meetings are held in which a tiny number, 20, 30, 40 representatives of the richest oil producing companies in the world, countries, excuse me, and some of the biggest oil companies in the world get together and decide how to make the most money for them out of manipulating the oil markets. What do I mean, manipulating? Deliberately controlling the quantity of oil you bring out of the ground so that given the demand, given the fact that an enormous part of the world's economy depends, at least for the time being, on oil, you know what the demand is, because the societies would come to a stop if they didn't have the oil, that literally the lights would go out, you know what the demand is, so you can get together and manipulate the quantity available to drive up or down the price, depending on whatever your strategy at the moment is. I'm not concerned with the strategy. I'm concerned again with the system that allows a tiny group of profit driven countries and companies, the leaders of whom are among the richest people on this planet, American and foreign. These tiny institutions Governments and big oil companies and the tiny number of super rich people who sit atop them, they decide what the price of oil will be for their profit. We, the mass of people, the 99%, we live with the results which will determine what the cost of running our automobile is, what the cost of heating our home is, what the cost of the plastics we use for everything is, what the cost of the fertilizer is. It comes from petroleum that we use to grow our food. The most fundamental qualities of our lives, the price of them and what that means, given the incomes we earn, is being determined by a tiny number of people whose goal is not what we need, but the profits they wish to maximize. The leaders of Saudi Arabia, the leaders of ExxonMobil. These are among the richest people on this planet. We give them the authority in this system, this capitalist system. We give them the authority to dictate to us the cost and price of what our lives depend on. Our food, our transport, our plastics, the heat in our homes. It is the most undemocratic economic arrangement one could think of. It's like putting your fate in the hands of an emperor or a czar or a king. I really had thought we had gotten beyond that as a modern civilization. We've come to the end of this program. I want to thank you all. I want to urge you, please, to make use of all the information we've given you, the websites and so on, so that you can partner with us, help us to reach people with what we do on this program. I want to thank truthout.org that remarkable independent source of news and analysis, for being a partner with us all these years. But I want more partners and I want them among you all. So do join with us, make use of our websites, make use of this program, and I look forward to talking with you again next week. Your time now, bab. But after a while gonna be my time, my time babe they ain't gonna change change, change, change, change, change, change thing on the change yes, it.
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A
Sa.