Economic Update: Economics, Psychology and Mass Murders

Summary

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Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff

Episode: "Economics, Psychology and Mass Murders"

Date: October 5, 2017
Host: Richard D. Wolff (RW)
Guest: Dr. Harriet Fraad (HF), Mental Health Counselor

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Overview

In this episode, Richard D. Wolff analyzes the economic dimensions behind the tragic Las Vegas mass shooting and connects economic systems with deep psychological and social consequences. In the second half, Dr. Harriet Fraad joins to discuss the unique convergence of economic stress, gender roles, and gun culture that make mass shootings particularly American. Wolff further provides a sweeping critique of tax policy, healthcare failures, and the state of inequality in both the U.S. and post-Soviet societies, offering data-driven insights and passionate calls for systemic change.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Economic Aftermath of the Las Vegas Shooting

(00:10 – 06:20)

• Healthcare Burden: The mass shooting left hundreds in hospitals, with many survivors contending not only with physical and psychological trauma but also significant financial hardship due to the lack of universal health care in the U.S.
• Charity Reliance: Clark County set up a GoFundMe (cited by RW) to cover victims’ medical bills, highlighting the “unique American addition” of economic anxiety atop tragedy.
  • Quote (RW, 01:40): “In addition to the trauma, in addition to the wound, they have that peculiar American addition, which is economic anxiety on top of everything else.”

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2. “Bringing the Profits Home”: Corporate Tax Evasion

(06:21 – 14:24)

• Tax Dodging Tactics: U.S. corporations exploit legal loopholes to avoid paying taxes, shifting billions in profits overseas.
• Political Rewards for Evasion: The Trump administration’s proposed tax reform would let corporations repatriate overseas profits at a reduced 10% tax rate—a move RW frames as rewarding bad corporate citizenship.
  • Quote (RW, 10:02): “This is a reward offered by the United States government to the corporations that have successfully evaded their share of taxes for years.”
• Historical Precedent: Similar tax holidays in 2004 failed to spark domestic job growth or economic benefits.

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3. Economic Hardship & Inequality in the U.S. and Russia

(14:25 – 21:27)

• U.S. Economic Strain: According to the Consumer Financial Protection Board, 50% of U.S. citizens have trouble paying their bills.
• Post-Soviet Inequality: Citing research by Piketty & Saez, RW notes that after the dissolution of the USSR, Russia returned to “gross inequality,” now comparable to the U.S., and more unequal than China.
  • Quote (RW, 17:32): "The new capitalist Russia has caught up with the United States and has a distribution of wealth and income rather like that here in the United States."

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4. Eastern Europe: Broken Promises and the Rise of Right-Wing Populism

(21:28 – 25:58)

• Economic Disappointment: Eastern Europe, after the fall of communism, did not achieve Western European living standards but rather joined the continent’s economic periphery.
• Colonial Dynamics: Western banks and corporations dominate local economies, keeping wages low and stifling prosperity.
• Political Outcome: Economic disenchantment feeds right-wing populism and anti-immigrant sentiments as people seek explanations for their stagnant conditions.

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5. Alternative Political Winds in Europe

(25:59 – 27:39)

• Portugal: A left-wing, anti-austerity coalition government has found electoral success by prioritizing the needs of the majority over financial elites.
• United Kingdom: Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party are rising as the Conservative government flounders in Brexit negotiations.
  • Quote (RW, 27:21): "Very interesting that the winds of Europe are shifting."

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6. The Real Reason Banks Aren't Creating Jobs

(27:40 – 28:55)

• Systemic Failure: Banks are criticized for not lending to job-creating businesses, but RW argues the structure of capitalism incentivizes cost-cutting, globalization, and automation, not job growth.

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7. Rural Hospital Closures: Economic and Social Impact

(28:56 – 31:40)

• Healthcare Crisis: Since 2010, 82 rural U.S. hospitals have shut down, with hundreds more at risk, particularly in states like Georgia. The lack of access in places like Wheeler County (8,000 residents, no hospitals) is framed as a social failure.
  • Quote (RW, 30:36): "An equal devastation not associated with nature at all... is happening across the United States as we let down our fellow citizens."

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8. Puerto Rico: Colonial Exploitation and Disaster Response

(31:41 – 33:50)

• Colonial Status: Puerto Rico is called the “poorest part of the United States,” enduring high taxes, federal neglect, and a lack of self-determination.
• Disaster Aftermath: The government’s inadequate response to Hurricane Maria is used as a lens for larger social and policy failures.
  • Quote (RW, 33:03): "You can tell the moral and economic fiber of a society by how it treats those who suffer the most and who have the least..."

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FEATURE SEGMENT: Economics, Psychology, and Mass Murders with Dr. Harriet Fraad

(29:13 – 56:39)

9. American Mass Shootings: An International Outlier

(31:37 – 34:41)

• Stark Statistics: The U.S. has more mass shootings than all other advanced countries combined, with uniquely high rates of gun ownership and death; 43% of privately owned guns are in the U.S. despite holding only 4% of the world’s population.
• Depoliticized Violence: Unlike rare political mass shootings elsewhere, U.S. mass shooters act privately and randomly, venting personal rage.

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10. Guns, Masculinity, and Capitalist Dislocation

(35:58 – 42:51)

• Masculinity and Gun Culture: Mass shooters are virtually all male, overwhelmingly white, and often described as “loners.” Economic change dethroned white men, robbing them of old privileges and jobs.
  • Quote (HF, 39:20): “Now... they don’t want to face that the people who dethroned them from their male throne are not women or minorities or immigrants, but the capitalists. They like to suck up and kick down...”
• Marketing Masculinity: Gun ads (e.g., Bushmaster) exploit anxieties about manhood and economic status, equating gun ownership with regaining lost masculinity.
  • Quote (HF, 40:14): “‘Buy the Bushmaster automatic weapon. Reinstate your manhood.’ So it’s like buying testosterone cream.”

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11. Declining Labor Force Participation and Societal Disconnection

(42:52 – 45:27)

• Dropping Out: White men are dropping out of the labor force at high rates, reflecting frustration with poor prospects and loss of status both at work and at home.

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12. The Explosion of Mass Shootings: A Timeline

(45:28 – 49:53)

• Historical Shift: Mass shootings began increasing after 1984, correlating with aggressive attacks on unions, diminished working-class security, and rising inequality.
  • Reference: Mark Ames’ Going Postal links the rise in workplace mass killings to Reagan-era economic restructuring.
  • Quote (HF, 48:24): "Reagan was the first to start smashing up the American dream, to start smashing up the unions... It was the beginning of the crunching down of the working class."

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13. Psychological Isolation and the Need for Social Bonds

(49:54 – 54:57)

• Isolation as Risk Factor: Mass shooters are often socially isolated, emotionally disconnected, and lack male friendships; their only close tie is often a lost romantic partner.
  • Quote (HF, 51:24): “Men are emotionally disconnected, especially if they're not working… connection is crucial to mental health.”
• Contrast with Women: In times of distress, women tend to connect with others, building support networks that men often lack.
• Toxic Masculinity: The cultural stigma against male vulnerability exacerbates isolation and psychological distress.

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14. Calls for Political and Social Action

(54:58 – 56:39)

• The Need for Movements: Both hosts urge building collective alternatives and movements that explain economic hardships and offer paths to reclaiming agency.
  • Quote (HF, 55:00): “People need a movement. What Bernie started has to be built. There has to be an alternative where people can come together and say, this is our land.”
• Policy Suggestions: Redistribute wealth, reinstate progressive taxation, and confront economic structures that breed despair and violence.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Corporate Tax Evasion:

  • RW (12:03): “When they evade taxes on that money, either we have fewer services or we pay higher taxes to make up for what they don’t pay. That’s the economics of it.”

• On Gun Culture & Masculinity:

  • HF (39:20): “They don’t want to face that the people who dethroned them... are not women or minorities or immigrants, but the capitalists. They like to suck up and kick down.”
  • HF (40:14): “Buy the Bushmaster automatic weapon. Reinstate your manhood. So it’s like buying testosterone cream.”

• On Historical Patterns:

  • HF (47:38): “Between 1949 and 1966, there were no mass shootings. Between 1966 and 1984, there were no mass shootings. Starting in 1984, they became more and more frequent.”

• On Social Disconnection:

  • HF (51:24): “Men are emotionally disconnected, especially if they're not working… connection is crucial to mental health.”

• On Policy & Political Action:

  • RW (55:57): “You wonder and you hope whether maybe people will think about it in a new way and understand that political connection might go a long way…”

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Economic aftermath of Las Vegas massacre: 00:10 – 06:20
• Tax evasion and "bring profits home" policy: 06:21 – 14:24
• U.S. economic strain, Russia post-communism: 14:25 – 21:27
• Disappointment in Eastern Europe: 21:28 – 25:58
• Portugal, U.K., and shifting political winds: 25:59 – 27:39
• Banks and systemic dysfunction: 27:40 – 28:55
• Rural hospital closures: 28:56 – 31:40
• Puerto Rico as a colony: 31:41 – 33:50
• Dr. Harriet Fraad on mass shootings: 31:37 – 54:57
• Political solutions and collective action: 54:58 – 56:39

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Tone and Language

The episode combines Richard Wolff’s incisive, data-rich economic critique with Dr. Fraad’s passionate, psychologically informed analysis. Both employ plain, forceful language; Wolff often deploys pointed rhetorical questions (“Do we have a system that works for us or for somebody else?”), while Fraad uses vivid examples and advertising slogans to emphasize her arguments. The overall tone is urgent, challenging listeners to connect systemic economic forces with individual and societal behavior.

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For listeners and non-listeners alike, this episode offers a multifaceted understanding of how economic structure and cultural psychology interweave to produce America’s gun violence epidemic and broader social malaise—and urges both policy reform and rebuilding of collective social movements as pathways forward.

Transcript

[Richard Wolff]

Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, debts, income, those for ourselves, those coming down the road, and those facing our children in the years ahead. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life. And I hope that has prepared me well to present to you an economic analysis of what's been going on, particularly over the last week. Well, many of our thoughts and fears have been galvanized in recent days by the horrific events in Las Vegas. So it seemed fitting to begin this show by talking about an economic dimension of all of that that you may not have thought about and that the media coverage has not dealt with. Over 500 people injured, hundreds of them being treated in the network of hospitals in Clark county, which is the county where Las Vegas is. But here's an economic dimension that makes a horrible story worse. We don't have universal health care in the United States, as you all know. And therefore what's already beginning to happen is that the victims of this tragedy are already being confronted with bills from the county hospitals that have treated them. So that in addition to the trauma, in addition to the wound, they have that peculiar American addition, which is economic anxiety on top of everything else. So grievous is it that the Clark County Commission Chair, Steve Sisolak, has set up a GoFundMe account begging for charity to help defray some of the economic costs that are being imposed on the victims of this tragedy. Random victims shot because we don't have a national health insurance the way every other advanced industrial country does. Something to think about. I want to turn next to the question of tax reform because that is what's on the agenda for the Congress. That's what's in the media every day. And I'm going to be talking about it repeatedly. And I'm going to take different parts of what's being proposed by the Trump and GOP administration that is trying to push this through the Congress. What I want to deal with today is one particular part and that part has to do with so called bringing the prophets home. This has to be explained because it is as outrageous as, as anything I ever report on. Here's the story. Big corporations got the laws changed some years ago to enable them to do the if you can show that the profits you've earned as a big company, and I'm talking General Motors, General Electric, Apple, Google, you name it, big American corporations based in the United States. If you can show that you've earned profits Abroad, which, as I'll tell you in a minute, is easy to do. You don't have to pay the 35% profits income tax that are required of all corporations working in the United States. So, for example, if you're a company that has a subsidiary, say, in Ireland, you sell what you normally do, but you don't sell it, say, to somebody in Ohio or somebody in Nigeria. It doesn't matter. Directly from your headquarters in New York, here's what you. You sell what you produce in New York to your subsidiary in Ireland at a price equal to cost, so there's no profit there. Then your subsidiary sells it to your buyer, your customer, wherever he or she may be located, at the high price that makes the profit. In that way, you may be an American company, but your profits show up in the other country. They are therefore listed as foreign profits, and therefore they don't have to pay income tax. Not 35%, not 20, not 10. Zero. Companies have been doing this for years. That's called tax evasion. Is it legal? Yes, it is, because the company is doing it and others like them were able to get the law to read like that. Year after year, they avoid taxes. And therefore the government doesn't have the money to provide the services we all need. And therefore the government comes after us for more taxes to compensate the government for the taxes it can't raise on some of the biggest corporations in the world. Apple currently is listed as the number one corporation which has. Are you ready? Hundreds of billions of dollars in profits sitting overseas on which they have paid zero taxes. Does the government of the United States go after them for manipulating so the profits show up over there? No. Does the government go after them for using this as a tax evasion mechanism? No. Has the government made consistent efforts to change this law so it can get the taxes from these large corporations? No. But here's what Trump and the GOP bring the profits home. Now, you big companies, and we'll give you a break. We'll only charge you. And this is what Gary Cohn, the adviser to Mr. Trump, said this last week. We'll give you just 10%, not 35, 10. You know what this is? This is a reward offered by the United States government to the corporations that have successfully evaded their share of taxes for years. And as if that weren't bad enough, we've been here before. Back in 2004, we did this the first time. We gave them a break. They could bring the money home. They got a lower tax rate. Did it lead to the jobs we would have when the profits came home. No, it didn't. And it isn't going to do it this time either. Why not? Because even though the profits are abroad, companies can use those profits to make money, which they do. That doesn't sit in a bank account. It's used to do whatever it's profitable for that company to do from Ireland or from wherever the profits are stashed. So it has no effect bringing it home. It just was a tax avoidance mechanism. And we're now going to reward these companies for doing that by giving them an even lower rate than they themselves expected. And guess what? If it's only for a year, which is what's being proposed, what is the message you're sending to corporations? As soon as this year is over, start doing it again, just like you did it before 2004, just like you did it between then and now. Do it again once this law, this window of opportunity is closed down again because you'll save a lot of taxes and eventually another bought and paid for federal government will give you a special break as a reward. Someone say the system was rigged? Of course it is. And please understand that when major corporations stash. And by the way, the current estimate is over $2 trillion of money, profits earned by American companies stashed abroad. When they evade taxes on that money, either we have fewer services or we pay the higher taxes to make up for what they don't pay. That's the economics of it. Next thing, economic update. The Consumer Financial Protection Board in Washington keeps records on a whole lot of issues and does surveys of how consumer finances are going. And here's a statistic I wanted to share with you because it gives a window on the economic recovery we hear so much about but can't seem to locate when we go looking for it. One half of US citizens, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Board, have trouble paying their bills. 50% have trouble paying their bills in the survey conducted by them. That's not an economy that has recovered. You're recovered when you don't have trouble, or at least when not 50% of your citizens report that next item. Some of you have asked me what happened to the Soviet Union after it dissolved 1989 and became Russia. When it gave up the socialism, it said it had to go back to the capitalism before its revolution in 1917 to join the rest of the world's capitalist nations. And I thought you'd be interested in two statistics that come from a recent paper of the National Bureau of Economic Research. That's a famous source of all kinds of economic research in the United States. And the paper is entitled for those of you that are interested, From Soviets to Inequality and Property in Russia 1905-2016. This is produced by the team of researchers that are based at Berkeley, Piketty and Saez, whose work I often quote because it is the leading work on inequality in the world. And their website, which you can find at Piketty and Saez, is where everybody goes in the economics profession for these numbers. Here's the story. When Russia went from capitalist to what it called socialist, it dramatically changed the distribution of income and wealth in Russia. From a very unequal distribution, it became radically less unequal. And when it collapsed in 1989 and went back to capitalism, it also went back to gross inequality. Before the collapse in 1989, the Soviet Union's distribution of wealth and income was was much less unequal than that of the United States today or as of 2016. The new Russia, the new capitalist Russia has caught up with the United States and has a distribution of wealth and income rather like that here in the United States. That is to say, very unequal. You might also be interested to know that the NBER research I'm quoting indicates that wealth and income are much more unequally distributed in Russia today than in the People's Republic of China today. Something to think about. Next item. Eastern Europe is experiencing a surge of right wing populist governmentspoland Hungary and beyond. What's going on? Well, what's going on can be described in many ways, but I would like to get to the core of the economics of it. When the Soviet union collapsed in 1989, so too did the communist governments of Eastern Europe, one after the other. In some cases it started even before the Soviet Union collapsed, as in the case of Poland. The hope of the Eastern Europeans was that by leaving the Soviet system, by joining the west, for example, by joining the European Common Market, in some cases by joining NATO, they would enjoy the economic standards of living that they associated with Scandinavia, Germany and France. It was not their plan to join the economic conditions of Europe's poorer countries, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy and so on. Unfortunately, what the hopes of the Eastern Europeans were and what has happened are not the same. Eastern Europe is now the poor part of a unified Europe. Eastern Europe is not achieving what it had hoped for. It is achieving a status much closer to that of Greece, Portugal, etc. Etc. And why is that? Because they have become, in effect, colonies of Western Europe. If you look at the statistics, for example, the bulk of the Banks in Eastern Europe are, are subsidiaries of Western banks who came in there once the Soviet Union was gone and gobbled them up. Likewise, the big employers in many of these countries are Western companies who went to Eastern Europe from Western Europe for one big, cheap wages, low standards of living. And they went there because that's what kept them there. Now they're not about to give those workers higher wages to give them what they thought they would get in the west because they didn't understand how capitalism works. They get low wages, they get to be the poor part of Europe. They thought that wouldn't happen, but they didn't understand how capitalism works. It's a little like the United States where the poorest states are Mississippi, New Mexico and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. These have been the poorest states for a long, long time. Capitalism doesn't erase these kinds of inequalities. Indeed, it often makes them worse and it often keeps them for many decades. That's how the system works. Puerto Rico is in the process of being made even poorer than it was before, and it was the poorest part. I will come back to that in a few minutes. Eastern European people are furious at what's happening to them. Furious at the Europeans beginning to question joining the European Common Market because the promise of being part of European Community has been broken and right wing politicians jumped, denouncing the rest of Europe, associating Europe with the need to take in immigrants from the countries that Europe is bombing in the Middle east and fear that their situation will deteriorate even further if they have to share their meager economy with with desperate refugees is turning people in Eastern Europe towards the right wing politicians that express their anger and disappointment about Europe, coupled with their anxiety about immigration, it's producing right wing politics in Europe. But then again, once the Europeans discover that the solutions offered by the right wingers are nothing at all, who knows where they may then go next Item. A sign of where Europe may go is already in the air. And that has to do with two political developments that are economic in their significance. One is occurring in the poor country of Portugal and the other is occurring in the rich country of the United Kingdom. And I want to note it here so, so we can follow it in the future. Portugal had elections very, very recently. And in those elections, the governing alliance in Portugal, which had won the national elections in 2015, followed up by sweeping the municipal elections in Portugal. This at the end of September or the first day of October. Excuse me. The government of Portugal is unique in Europe because it's clearly committed against austerity. It is not going to hurt the mass of people to get out of the economic crisis since 2008. Instead it is giving money to poor people. It is built trickle up rather than trickle down, which is the austerity formula. The government of Portugal, in case you did not know and, and why would you given the media blackout? The government of Portugal is an alliance of three political the Portuguese Socialist Party, the Portuguese Communist Party and the Portuguese anti capitalist left bloc party. That's right, it's a left wing government. They won the national elections in 2015. They just swept the municipals on the basis of what? We are not going to make the mass of people pay for the financial crisis they did not cause and from which they have already suffered eight or nine years. We're going to help them first and that's the way forward. And the people of Portugal have voted for them massively. And the other sign of the wind changing is in Britain. Six months ago the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn was was looked at as a long shot who could never win national office. Here we are six months later. The Brexit negotiations between Britain and Europe are going nowhere fast. The cost to Britain is becoming clear. The Conservative government of Theresa May is not handling the situation well and the newspapers are now full of the likelihood that Mr. Corbyn may become the next Prime Minister of England. And, and he too is a trickle up, not a trickle down politician. Very interesting that the winds of Europe are shifting. Next item. The New York Times recently bemoaned, as many people do, that banks in America, the financial system isn't doing what it should do, which is loaning money to businesses who will hire people and provide jobs. And they shake their finger, they scold the financial industry. Well, far be it from me to defend the financial industry, but the New York Times is making an analytical mistake. The banks aren't the problem, they are just a symptom. The reason the banks don't do what it is you would like them to do is that nothing else in this economy is working in that direction. When they lend to businesses, it's mainly so the businesses can either move production abroad or automate jobs out of existence. If the businesses that the banks lend to are not job creators, but businesses in other countries creating jobs there, that's because it's more profitable, which is the way this system works, not just by banks, but by everybody. In short, the banks are not the problem because they are responding to the system. The system is the problem. It's the system that's not working and picking out one part of it and putting all your anger on that misunderstands that each of the parts is doing what's profitable and avoiding what's difficult. And that's the problem. We have a system all of whose players are ending up doing things that we as a people don't need and don't want. The next item crossed my mind, and I didn't know how to present it to you, but I wanted to. It has to do with rural hospitals. They are closing. To give you the exact numbers, which I wanted to do, since 2010, 82 rural hospitals have closed in the United States and 700 more are at risk of closing over the next 10 years. That's according to the National Rural Health association, which, which keeps track of these numbers. The state that has suffered the most, Georgia. And I wanted to tell you the story of one part of Georgia, Wheeler county, caught my attention. The last hospital in Wheeler county closed in June of 2014. That brought the total number of hospitals in Wheeler county to zero. How many people live in Wheeler County? 8,000. 8,000 of our fellow citizens live in Georgia, in a county that has no hospitals at all anymore. Yes, we pay a lot of attention to the tragedies of Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico and the hurricanes. But an equal devastation not associated with nature at all can't be blamed on. Nature is happening across the United States as we let down our fellow citizens by being unable to provide a basic hospital service to thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands, with many more at risk. So poor are the reimbursement rates under Medicare and Medicaid that hospitals that treat older people who tend to have more medical difficulties, and poor people who rely on Medicaid. Those reimbursement rates can't keep the hospitals going. In a society that cared about its fellow citizens, we'd find other resources, wouldn't we? But we don't. We let the hospitals close and then the people suffer. And we wonder why there's anger in the country, why some people become deranged under the pressure. Watching someone you care about die because you can't get to a hospital can have all kinds of effects on your mental stability. Puerto Rico. I wanted to end the first half of today's show with Puerto Rico, but before I do, I want to remind you we maintain two websites that I want you to make use of. We update them every day. They are available to you without charge, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. One of them is democracyatwork.info. that's all one word democracyatwork.info and the other one RD Wolff with two Fs. These are websites through which you can communicate to us what you like and don't about this program. You can, with a click of your mouse, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Basically be a partner with us. Use the material on this program and on those websites to share with others who are interested and might be induced to come and watch or listen to the program. Just like you do work with us, we try to work with you and it will help the project we are engaged in building. For those of you interested in watching this program as a television program on a regular basis, please make use of our patreon.com availability P A T R E o-n.com patreon.com economicupdate we'll get you right it and we would appreciate your taking a look at that. So back to Puerto Rico, our final economic update. Puerto Rico was taken over by the United States over a century ago in a war with Spain. It was, in effect, an American colony, and it never stopped being an American colony. It was given some privileges, such as having the people of Puerto Rico be American citizens who could travel to the United States without going through the normal visa and passport and other kinds of problems. But it was a undervalued, underserved, badly treated place, which is why so many of its citizens left Puerto Rico and went to the mainland. The behavior of the government now, the way it's been treated as a debtor, the way it is now not able to have its own elected officials run their society because a commission of the United States Congress has the final authority. The way that Mr. Trump neglected to deal with the Puerto Rican crisis after the storm. These are all symptoms, all a continuing sad story. Puerto Rico is the poorest part of the United States, even poorer than the states of Mississippi and New Mexico, which are the poorest states. It has the highest sales tax of any part of the United States. The poorest people pay the highest taxes. And now they've been devastated by a storm. Most of the island without power, without communications. You know, you can tell the moral and economic fiber of a society by how it treats those who suffer the most and who have the least. And by that standard, the way we treat the colony, which is the truth of what it is of Puerto Rico, isn't any better than the way all the rest of the colonies of the world were treated, which is why they rose up and refused to continue to be colonies a short while ago. It's worth thinking about the inequality that makes Puerto Rico poor is being worsened now by the storm and the response. And that's on us. We've come to the end of the first half of Economic Update. Thank you very much for staying with us. After a short interlude, we will be right back.

[Sam]

I can see the Russian army rolling through my head One side of me lies the enemy the other half is dead I've got diamonds and I've got pearls and I said hey, mister, why don't you come for me? Can take me home But I will never be your girl I won't let your mystery unfurl that's the whole thing about it I'm so in love today I've been waiting at the bus stop on my way. Hey, mister, why don't you come for me? I'm a psychosomatic sister running around the beach you can take me home I will never be your girl I won't let your history unfurl.

[Richard Wolff]

Welcome back to the second half of Economic Update for this week. I am pleased at the beginning of this month of October to welcome, as I do at the beginning of each month, Dr. Harriet Frad to talk with me and to talk with all of you about the intersection of economics and psychology, which is so important to shaping our personal lives, our work lives and everything else. Quickly, to remind you, Dr. Harriet Fraad is a mental health counselor and also a hypnotherapist with a private practice in New York City. She writes for a wide variety of scholarly and popular journals and she is also writing now regularly for the Democracy at Work blog, which you can find at our website, democracyatwork.info and she also has her own website, harrietfraud.com and I'll spell that for you. H A R R I E T F R a a d harrietfraud.com it is a pleasure to welcome Dr. Harriet Fraad to Economic Update.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

It's a pleasure to be here.

[Richard Wolff]

Thank you. Let me introduce our topic. We had originally planned a different topic.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

For today, sex work.

[Richard Wolff]

But the events, and we're going to deal with that in the future, the sex work industry and what it means for our economy and our society. But the events in Las Vegas, from which I don't think this country will recover very quickly and which we're all still trying to understand and digest, struck us as so important that it touched the economics and the psychology of this country in many ways and that it would be worth breaking our plans and talking about it so let me ask you, since I know you specialize in these things, let me ask you, please tell us a little bit about how the United States compares with other countries in terms of gun use, gun deaths, all of that kind of question. Because it's important, I think, to understand the United States through the lens of that kind of comparison.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

It's important. The United States has had more mass shootings than any of the other 10 most industrialized countries in the world combined. Where there are shootings in other countries, they're not at all like American mass shootings. They're politicized. So Breivik, who shot teenagers in Norway, was a fascist opposing the socialists by killing young people at the socialist camp. Our people are unpoliticized in the United States. Their rage at what's going on in their lives doesn't take them usually to a place. We've got to change this as a group. But to lashing out personally. And a mass shooting as defined usually and in the literature is a shooting of at least four people to whom the shooter is unrelated, going into a place and randomly shooting people. That doesn't count the thousands that are killed by girlfriends and so on. But this is anonymous, an anonymous lashing out. And the United Although many other countries have guns, Canada has a lot of hunters. It has a lot of guns. They don't have the kind of weapons that the United States has at all. This person Paddock, who shot all those people, killing 59, and there may be more because many are in critical condition at hospitals and wounding 515 people. He had 41 guns. He took 23 with him in 10 suitcases when he checked in the hotel. And he had another 19 at home. Many were automatic and he had thousands of rounds of ammunition. That's legal in the United States. It isn't anywhere else. We are the only nation which has prolific unchecked gun use.

[Richard Wolff]

In preparation for today, I looked up some of the statistics in hopes that I could perhaps add something. And the two that stayed with me as I came into the studio this morning were that there is a measure of the number of gun deaths per 1 million of population. And there's a list of 10 countries that are high. Most of them are in the range of 2 or 3 to 7. The United States is the only country where the number is in double digits. It's about 30.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

So you have no, it was 30 just for the month of September. And there have been 152 shootings since 2017. It's more. It's more. It's more than all those nearby.

[Richard Wolff]

I mean, 30 per million, in other words, as an average of what it is. And the other statistic that I recall is that The United States has 4% of the world's population, a little bit over 4%. And it has 43% of the world's privately owned guns, long and short guns. In other words, the gun ownership is 10 times the population percentage here in the United States. So I think it's fair to say that Americans or United States citizens have an attachment to guns as well as to gun violence that is out of proportion to that anywhere else literally on the planet. So it does invite the question, what's going on? Why is this happening? Why is the attachment to guns what it is? And I was hoping, since this has to be, at least in part a psychological question, what is it that attaches Americans, particularly now in our history, to guns on this scale? What can you help us understand?

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

Well, part of it is the media in which male gun violence is featured. Clint Eastwood, macho man, rides off alone, doesn't have any support system of other human beings he can count on. Just like the fellow who shot the 59 people, Mr. Paddock, whose girlfriend was in the Philippines. We don't know whether she left. In my study of them, all of them previously have had either a woman who left them or a job that fired them. He had made $2 million and lived off of it as a gambler for 30 years. So he was not fired. We don't know what his girlfriend Mary Lou was doing in the Philippines and not with him. But those are the emblems of masculinity in our toxically gendered culture. Having access to a woman who's loyal to you and having weapons. Now it's a combination, as always, of capitalism's bloody hand and gender psychology. And what happens is that when guns are sold in the United States, they're not sold as buy a gun make the gun manufacturers and the ammunitions producers who are wildly rich, even richer. It's buy a gun because it is your male freedom, because it makes you a real man, because it makes you able to defend your freedom. And so that it's all mixed up with toxic masculinity. That's why the gun shooters of all the mass killings are male. They're also overwhelmingly white, much more disproportionately white than whites are in our population, because it's white men who capitalism has dethroned. They used to get double bonuses, one for being white and another for being male. In a scarce labor force, where they were the manufacturing sector. A strong man could get a good job as long as he was white. Well, now that the big capitalists of the United States can export their jobs to people who make $38 a week, why bother with these white men? They've thrown them on the slag heap. Now, a lot of the jobs in our more service economy are held by women. And so that partly it's that they don't want to face that the people who dethroned them from their male throne are not women or minorities or immigrants, but the capitalists. They like to suck up and kick down, and they're happy to kick down on immigrants, women and minorities. And the gun owners are laughing all the way to the bank. They also. Politics comes into the mix because the NRA gave Trump $30 million for his campaign efforts and his inauguration. Therefore, Trump gets up, invokes God and that this is an evil man, says nothing about guns, asks everyone to pray and to bring themselves together with family. Which family? He's bringing himself together. Of the three of them, we don't know. And to believe that God is the light and God loves suffering people, you know, really Trump, who makes people loser, loser, you know, makes people suffer right and left, but that. So it's politics is in there, capitalism is in there, and the psychology of building up men who have been dethroned through guns. There's an ad which is particularly illustrative for the Bushmiller automatic weapon.

[Richard Wolff]

Bushmaster, I think it is Bushmaster.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

Obviously I'm not into this, but it says, does your girlfriend or wife earn more money than you? Revoke your man card. Do you prefer tofu to meat? Revoke your man card. And it goes through about 10 things. Then it says, buy the Bushmaster automatic weapon. Reinstate your manhood. So it's like buying testosterone cream. You Reinstate your manhood, you've been dethroned. You no longer can support a dependent wife and children who work for you all the time. This wife.

[Richard Wolff]

So there's an argument, if I follow your logic, there's an argument that particularly white men have been systematically economically disadvantaged. They had certain kinds of advantages. They don't have them anymore, and they don't have the prospect of regaining them anytime soon either, or the perks that went with them. So they get depressed in large numbers. The reason I raise this is economists have been struggling to explain something called reduced labor force participation. Particularly white men in the ages 25 to 60 are dropping out of the labor force. They need a job. They need income, but they are not, in fact, going back to get jobs. They don't want them, or they can't stand them, or they're dissatisfied with the income. This suggests what you're telling us is that not going back, dropping out, is a reflection of the depressed conditions of employment that they face. And it immediately suggests, if I follow you, and I'd like your opinion, that another way that a white male who's lost his job and can't get another good quality, say, manufacturing or construction job, one of the ways to shore himself up, particularly when he has no meaningful work he can get, would be this gun culture and the gun celebration. And if then you combine this sort of celebratory. Celebratory gun ownership with depressed people, then you begin to get the sense, well, if something unfortunate happens to that individual, you become not just depressed and have a lot of guns, but you actually use them in a socially destructive way.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

So to reinstate your manhood, you know, you go down in a blaze of glory, reinstating your manhood through killing people. I remember seeing a bus ad where there was a guy with a gun standing there and showing, I have the power. You know, that is male power. Another thing that's happening to men is that their suicide rates are higher than they've been for 30 years.

[Richard Wolff]

Male children, and again, it's the white.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

Male rates and male rate of suicide is going through the roof because their future, they can't see a future. We don't have a vibrant movement that really attracts people to a left alternative. Bernie began that and was shot down. And the fascist movement, luckily the alt right is not that popular, but they too, recapture your lost manhood. Make America great again. That is, make America white again and make you on top again. Now, most divorces are initiated by women because the old way was that women served men in the home in exchange for being supported economically and having a protected place to raise their children. Well, now they're not supported economically while they're expected to do the lion's share of housework and childcare and get jobs. And it's a bad deal. Even in the red states, where divorces are even greater than they are in the blue states, women initiate divorce, which.

[Richard Wolff]

Means, again, to go back to something you said earlier, that there's going to be a sizable part of the white male population that is disconnected from the kinds of jobs they either once had or expected they would have. And also, in a sense, dethroned at home as well as at the workplace, personally and professionally. So that if these Two things come together in the same individual. We can see a level of stress and anguish and bitterness that could then in people who have a personal problem of one kind or another, explode in the manner of this Mr. Paddock.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

Particularly if they don't have a movement to go to which explains it to them and helps them have the power to be a group of people who take their country and make it serve them instead of only the rich. We don't really have that kind of vibrant movement. And that's why in Europe, where people do killing, they do it in the name of a political goal. Not here. It's random and personal. And what's very interesting is to look at the history. I find that just amazing. Between 1949 and 1966, there were no mass shootings. Between 1966 and 1984, there were no mass shootings. Starting in 1984, they became more and more frequent. Until now they are very frequent. There have been 152 in 2017. Huge. And if you. There's a wonderful book by Mark Ames called Going Postal. And it looks at the beginning of what happened with mass shootings in the 1988. In 1984 was the first big one. It's called Going Postal because it began with the post Office. A rash of shootings at the post office because Reagan was the first to start smashing up the American dream, to start smashing up the unions with the traffic control workers and others, to start changing the estate tax and the taxation rate on the wealthy to make the middle class and the lower pay it all. And the post office had a powerful union, 30,000 people, very progressive union. And Reagan began just about before these killings, substituting the supervisors who used to be elected from among the ranks and understand what went on with business school graduates who saw the postal workers in an adversarial way, pushing them harder and harder to do more and more and promoting those who complied, creating enormous rage. It was the beginning of the crunching down of the working class. And with that, the rage at not being able to make a living, have a decent job, have control over your life that you could see, okay, I'll do my job, I'll do it well. I'll be connected in this job, in this union. I will then retire. I will have a pension. I will support my wife and children. Children, their dreams will be greater than mine. I'm a blue collar, they'll be a white collar. I'm a white collar, they'll be a professional that's dead. That doesn't happen anymore. Their male Perk of being. I am a man. I support my family. That's over.

[Richard Wolff]

So the argument you're making that comes from Ames is that in a sense the post office crisis and explosion, we didn't know it then, but was a harbinger of what was going to happen in a wider and wider range of jobs, particularly in well paid blue collar work, but also in other professions, driving people to feel, particularly white men, disconnected from the workplace and the work culture and also dethroned at home. Because what I appreciate so much about what you're telling us is that the economics and the psychology are being brought into the story. We're not being left with the empty statement it's evil or the empty blaming of the individual. No one is going to defend Mr. Paddock for the horrible damage he did. But this is because of the history you've shown us. This is a social problem. This is affecting large numbers of people, even though there are particular reasons why this individual or that individual is the one who blows up. Finally, if we don't deal with the social problems, we're allowing the pressures then to build up that will explode in one or another individual on a growing scale, as you've shown us, has already happened.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

I absolutely agree. And one of the things that Mr. Paddock illustrates is, is a problem that American men have. Usually their only emotional connection is with their sex partner. And if she leaves, they're utterly disconnected. As the country music song says, you've been thinking and I've been drinking. Now male alcoholism is going way up along with drug abuse. But that one of the things that happens is that men are emotionally disconnected, especially if they're not working. And even having the camaraderie on the job, even if it isn't intimate divulgences and secrets, it's a sense of being part of something. This man had not been working on a job for 30 years and his girlfriend was in the Philippines. I don't know whether she was leaving or whatever, but she certainly that's. She was.

[Richard Wolff]

She wasn't with him.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

She sure wasn't with him. And that women, when they have an emergency connect, they found. Cause they always used to only study men, that the fight and flight idea, when something's terrifying in women is fright and connect. When women are in trouble, they connect with their women friends. And they usually have stronger bonds emotionally with other women than they do with their husbands. They connect with their families, they connect with their children so that they are not emotionally abandoned when they're not on the job. And usually they describe the killer not only as a white and a male, but a loner. Doesn't talk to his neighbors, doesn't have friends, disconnected from his family. He hadn't talked to one brother for 20 years. The other was a couple of years when he inquired about his mom's health. You know, that he's a disconnected man because connection is crucial to mental health. And there's a toxic idea that you're not a real man if you cry, if you need support, if you need help, if you reach out to others. And that is a terrible blight, particularly as men have been dethroned from their white male family wage status because they don't get a family wage.

[Richard Wolff]

So their lack of connection is happening historically at the same time that their job and home situations put them in greater need of connection than ever before. That is an unbelievable pressure on these people. And it begins to make it remarkable that there aren't more explosions of violence or whatever. And the gun is simply the mechanism for the expression of all of this.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

And taking back your manhood, you know, revoke your manhood, take back your manhood, reinstate your manhood because it's associated. They're taking men who are feeling dethroned and unmanned and they're giving them the masculinity back with a gun by saying, this is about your freedom, this is about your manliness. This is about your right to defend your family. This is about re invoking your manhood, giving it back. This is me. And people are desperate. You know, there have been 152 mass shootings in 1970, in 2017, and we're not even done, you know, we have four more months. But that, it's really no wonder and that that has to be looked at rather than this is pure evil, which is what Trump said quite conveniently. It's also ironic that the NRA, which did give Trump 30 million and is politically pushing this point of view, they even have a target you can order from the NRA called the ex Girlfriend target, where you shoot it and it starts to bleed until its face is demolished and its whole body is blown away. They don't have a comparable boyfriend target because it's overwhelmingly a male thing. And ironically, they started this harvest festival, Route 91 harvest festival, to give the NRA a gentler image by starting a country music festival. And it was at this festival that 59 people were killed and 515 were wounded, many critically.

[Richard Wolff]

What do you think should be done?

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

Well, I think the first of all, it's rather A broken record with me. People need a movement. What Bernie started has to be built. There has to be an alternative where people can come together and say, this is our land. This land is your land. This land is my land, as Woody Guthrie said, and that it doesn't belong to the bankers who happen to own most of it in property. We can take it back. We can take it back as we did in the New Deal. We can take it back with the tax rate on the top. That is the 90. What is it, 94.8% tax rate. We can take those two and a half, you know, 2.3 trillion that are in overseas investments back. The Canary Islands are not going to set out a military force to oppose us.

[Richard Wolff]

I wish, as always, that we had more time, especially for a crisis situation, that this Las Vegas event has kind of brought us in. You wonder and you hope whether maybe people will think about it in a new way and understand that political connection might go a long way if you actually had it, to overcoming the lack of other connections that you have so clearly explained is a root cause of this kind of an event. So thank you very much. And when we meet again at the beginning of November, we will resume our conversation that we had planned about the economics and psychology of the sex work industry.

[Dr. Harriet Fraad]

Thank you. Glad to be here. Although I'm sorry about the circumstances of the topic.

[Richard Wolff]

I want to thank you all. We've come to the end of our program at this point. I do want to remind you of something I said at the very beginning, that the tragedy of Las Vegas is compounded in all of its horror, its psychological horror, the wounding and killing of people, many of them young, early part of their lives cut off, their families hurt. I do want to say that it is an added economic horror that we now have a fund set up, a charity to help defray the medical costs of the wounded. It's really almost unspeakable. In any case, thank you for joining us. We want to talk to you again next week. Let me remind you of our two websites, rdwolf.com and democracyatwork.info please be a partner. I want to, as usual, thank truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news that has been a partner with us. Join them. Join us. And I look forward to speaking with you again next week.

[Sam]

Sam.