Sam (28:09)

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 (29:13)

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 (30:26)

It's a pleasure to be here.

Richard Wolff (30:28)

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

Dr. Harriet Fraad (30:33)

For today, sex work.

Richard Wolff (30:35)

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 (31:37)

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 (33:52)

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 (34:27)

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 (34:42)

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 (35:58)

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 (40:12)

Bushmaster, I think it is Bushmaster.

Dr. Harriet Fraad (40:14)

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 (40:53)

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 (42:55)

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 (43:27)

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

Dr. Harriet Fraad (43:30)

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 (44:45)

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 (45:28)

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 (48:33)

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 (49:54)

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 (50:56)

She wasn't with him.

Dr. Harriet Fraad (50:57)

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 (52:31)

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 (53:00)

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 (54:58)

What do you think should be done?

Dr. Harriet Fraad (55:00)

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 (55:57)

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 (56:39)

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

Richard Wolff (56:46)

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 (58:00)

Sam.