← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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Sam. Saint. 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 looming down the road, and they're scary these days and those facing our children, and they're scarier still. 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 updates and then in the second half hour interview, a few short announcements. I want to remind everyone, because we're very proud here at Democracy at Work about this, that we are now a television program. That's right. This very program is a television program as well as a radio program. And you can see us Sunday evenings, 8 o' clock Eastern Time on Free Speech TV, carried by Dish Systems and so on across the United States. Again, 8 o' clock Eastern Time and the appropriate adjustments for Central, Mountain and Pacific times. I also want to remind everyone that the second Wednesday of every month, and that means in April, the 12th of April, at 7:30pm I give my monthly Economic update at the very famous historic Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square in New York City. Anyone who is listening or watching who may be in the New York area, visiting or resident is welcome to come. It's a chance for me to expand on the kinds of things we do on this program to meet you to answer questions. It's a real good opportunity to do all this live and that's something I look forward to. So once again, the next one will be Wednesday, April 12, 7:30, Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square. Finally, I will be in the Los Angeles area speaking on the Trump revolution, on where the economy is going, on the problems and the solutions. There will be two talksone on the 20th of May at the Emanuel Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles and the other on 21 April, the next day at Occidental College in Los Angeles. So once again, April 20 and 21, Emanuel Presbyterian Church and then Occidental College. For more information, go to democracyatwork and you will get the specifics. All right, let's jump into the economic updates. And the first one is the kind of update I like to do because it isn't me. I can quote somebody with impeccable credentials to tell us something about where the economy is going. And this time I'm going to quote John Gerspaks. I'll spell it for you. G E R S P A C H. He's the chief financial officer of Citibank one of the largest banks in the United States and indeed in the world. At a conference last month, he was asked about the decision by Citibank to dramatically cut its branches around the United States and indeed around the world by about 25% in the last few years, just closing them. And this is what he said. And it was reported in the financial times on April 3rd of this year. And I quote, reading from the Financial Times, Mr. Gerspeck explained that the US network of Citibank is now confined to six cities. New York, Chicago, Miami, Washington, D.C. los Angeles and San Francisco. And now listen to the quotation from Mr. Gersbach, because it says more about the American economy than an encyclopedia and it's much shorter. Here we go. Referring to those six cities where they've concentrated their networks, Mr. Gershbach says, quote, it's where the people with the money live and we feel pretty good about our ability then to generate good returns going forward. It's where the money is. If Those are the six cities where the money is, what is Mr. Gersbach telling us about the rest of the United States, where the vast majority of people are and how interesting they are to one of our biggest banks? I want to turn next to the elections in France that are coming up in a very short number of days, and I want to talk about them because they illuminate what's been going on in the United States, in the United Kingdom and elsewhere around the world. First, let me put the setting capitalism in France, as everywhere else over the last 30 to 40 years, has been leaving the country to move to lower wage parts of the world, imposing austerity cutbacks on public services, public jobs for the mass of people building up to the crash of 2008, from which we remain societies whose majority have not yet recovered, hardly at all. And so, of course, people are upset, getting desperate, becoming angry, becoming disillusioned with conventional politics. And so the British working class expressed their dismay over the way their capitalism has evolved by voting to leave the European Union. The surprise vote for Brexit. Yes, leaving the European Union doesn't solve their problems and indeed may make them worse. But this was a chance to vote against politics as usual, vote against the conventional leaders in Britain. And so the British masses did it. Likewise here in the United States. Conventional politics in the Republican Party had Jeb Bush and folks like that supposedly shoo ins to win until an upstart who expressed the anger and bitterness of masses of American working people, Donald Trump, basically pushed him out of the scene. And when the Democrats had a kind of upstart, new, different voice, Bernie Sanders, their leading candidate, Hillary Clinton pushed him out of the scene, not by winning so much as by shenanigans, but she did it, leaving the election to Trump the outrageous, the outsider, the nouveau against the same old, same old Mrs. Clinton. And we know the result. Working people changed. Either didn't vote at all, hurting Mrs. Clinton, or switched over to Mr. Trump, propelling him into victory. And now the French, basically, you know, the same story, but it's important that that be understood. Well, what's the old part of France? Well, it's the inheritors of Sarkozy and, and all of that. And they're represented by a Mr. Fillon. His problem was he got caught. He and his wife using public money to give themselves no show jobs for themselves, their children and so on. And so he's in trouble. He can't get the kind of votes he used to. He's being pushed out sort of the way Trump pushed Bush out in this country. And then there's the kind of central member of the Socialist Party, a Socialist Party that's very much like the Democratic Party in the United States. A Hillary Clinton type person is running an independent campaign. His name is Macron. Well, you put together the Hillary Clinton type, Macron and the Jeb Bush type, Fillon, and they get about 42, 43% of the votes, according to the polls that have been done over the last few months. And then there's the real outsider on the right, Marine Le Pen, sort of the Trump of France. And then there's on the left, there's the sort of Bernie Sanders, but that's split into two parties. A left wing socialist, Hamon, and an even further left wing ex Communist, Jean Luc Melanchon. You put Hamon and Melanchon together, they're not, they're separate candidates. But if you put them together, they get as many votes as Le Pen does. Something, by the way, that the American media overlooks with a regularity that is stunning. But basically, you put the left half of French politics together, they get about 50%. You put the right half of the of French politics together to get about 43%. The lesson should be lost on no one. This anger of the working class looking for outsiders is at least as much a left wing anger looking for left wing solutions as it is a right wing anger. The press tends to forget that it focuses much more on the right wing. Less Le Pen gets publicity in the west on a scale that completely dwarfs what is given to Hamond and Melangen, even though those two far left together have as many supporters in France as Le Pen does, that's the reality. So the anger of the working class, here's the lesson, can go either way, just like in this country. It could go to Trump or. Or it might have gone to Mr. Sanders. He is after all, getting the remarkable result in polls these days as being the most popular politician in the United States. Even Fox News has admitted that last thing about the remarkable French election whose results we'll know. The total number of people running for president in France right now is 11. The five that I've mentioned and then six others. The five are the major candidates, but there are six others. Some of them are fairly well known. Nathalie Artaud of the movement Lut Ouvriere Workers Struggle has been around a good while the others are a bit newer in most cases on television this last week, guess what? All 11 participated in a debate here in the United States. We of course exclude third, fourth and fifth party candidates in order to hammer at there's only really a two person race. The French don't do that so much. They actually give them all a chance to appear before the people and make their cases. You might be surprised to know that in polling after the debate this last week, the clear winner across the board, right wingers and left wingers said, was the most left wing candidate, Jean Luc Melanchon, who gave the best performance. And last point, Mr. Melanchon, Mr. Hamon, as the most left wing are interesting because what they remind an American most of is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They're demanding not the end of capitalism, not an alternative system, not at all. They're demanding left wing progressive limits, constraints, controls on capitalism. For example, Mr. Melanchon has advocated a top income tax rate for the French people of 100%. That's right, a maximum income. Because if you earn more than that, you under Mr. Melanchon's proposal, 100% of that would be taxed by the French government. So you couldn't earn more than that. That's exactly what Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed in his State of the Union message in 1944. So this is an old idea. It's an American idea, or at least it's as American as anybody else's. It's interesting that the most left wing character in French politics these days are one of the most redefines, rediscovers and re advocates a Rooseveltian idea. French politics will give us another sign of in which direction the anger of a mass of people Disgruntled dishappy, dissatisfied with capitalism, where that's going. The next item that caught my interest this last week was a story in the Washington Post. That newspaper did some digging and here's what they found. And this is a story on April 1, although it's not an April Fool's story, It's the real McCoy, not fake news. Here we go. It discovered in research into the University of Virginia. It basically discovered, and if you read the story, you'll see it, that admissions policies at elite universities are very careful to take into account when deciding who to admit, who to reject, who to put on a waiting list, the sort of in between. They take account of whether the candidate, the young person looking to get into the school, comes from a family that is rich or not, a family that has donated money to this university or not, and a family that might in the future, because it's well healed, be able to give money, especially if approached by the university in regard to the child of the family that the university accepted. In other words, if you've got the money, you get your kid into the good school. Is that the case? The Washington Post wondered. It did the research, it got the documents, and its answer is a resounding yes. Take a look at the story April 1st and you will see because it extends to many other schools beside the University of Virginia. And it's another reminder that the people at the top, the 1%, use their money, use the lure of their money to give their children all kinds of advantages of other people don't have, which gives those children a leg up to become themselves part of the 1%. And to reproduce is a sign of a capitalism getting old and a capitalism keeping the same people in the same position no matter what. And it's therefore a capitalism that cannot tap the energies, the enthusiasms, the creativity, the intelligence of all kinds of people. Because you know, when a well heeled family that made a contribution gets their child in, another child is kept out. And that's not a child whose ability is less, whose creativity is less. No, it's a child who didn't get born into a family that has given or may give money to the school. Keep in mind, we don't do education like that everywhere, do we? Primary schools, secondary schools, everybody gets into the school. It's your right, it's your obligation as a parent to give your child the right to an education. High schools do not, in general, at least not the public ones, have the ability to exclude people who don't have enough money. The private high schools well, that's another matter. And when you talk to the schools, they explain to you we have to do that. We're competing with all the other schools. If we don't admit the kinds of people who are likely to give us money, we'll fall behind. And what are those schools then saying? They're part of a system. They're saying don't single them out. They're saying don't punish us because we have to behave this way if, even if we don't like it, because the system works in such a way that we will be self destructive if we don't do something which even we know, as the Washington Post story tells, is undemocratic and unjust and in the long run bad for our society and even its economic system. The next story has to do with an obscure company in Great Britain, but here's why it's important. The company is called Legal and General Investment Management. Sounds boring. Well, it's the largest asset manager in England, that is, it manages other people's money, rich people's money who give this corporation known as LGIM the letters of the words I just gave you. And they have $1 trillion under management. That's the amount of money that's been given to them by individuals, by companies to manage. So they have an enormous impact, not just in Great Britain, but in the world if you dispose of a trillion dollars worth of investment. And here's what they've been doing, and it's something for Americans particularly to think about. They have decided that the successful businesses of the future will be the ones who adapt to the changing reality of global warming and climate. They want companies to not be reliant on fossil fuels, to not be part of what pollutes the air, the water, the oceans. They think the companies that adapt best to and soonest to a new world that does not allow these sorts of things as they are being outlawed across the world except in the United States. They believe the future lies with those companies. And they're letting companies know they will vote against the managements, they will divest, that is, they will not invest in companies that do not adjust to a green system of organizing capitalism. And you know what that means. It means they're going to favor those kinds of companies here in the United States where the Trump administration is deregulating and dismissing and denying all of this stuff. Companies are not going to be in the forefront of making adjustments because they don't have to. The law isn't pushing them, the government isn't pushing them, etcetera and so they will be disfavored by lgim. They will be companies that have a harder time selling their stocks and that will filter down to a harder time succeeding competitively. In other words, the next time you hear some gleeful tweet of President Trump about getting rid of climate regulations, this is the spectacle of an economic system shooting itself in the foot. This is not smart. The rest of the world is a bigger economic unit than the United States is, by a lot, and it is going in a different direction. We ought to be worried, very worried. Here's another example, in a way, of the same thing. The shipping fleets of the world, the big ships, the freighters that carry things, have been in terrible shape since the collapse of 2008. They haven't recovered at all because global foreign trade hasn't. We don't have the money to buy the quantity of stuff from China we once did, etc. Etc. So shipping companies have been in dire trouble. Meanwhile, the climate issue has caught up with the shipping industry. They pour all kinds of pollutants into the oceans of the world and into the air. Why? Because companies, to make more profit, American companies, European companies, Japanese companies, have been moving to Latin America, Africa, Asia to produce where wages are low, many times thousands and thousands of miles from where the market is. So, for example, an American company that serves an American market moves production to China. It now has a new problem. It's making a lot of money because it pays Chinese workers much less than American. But it has to bring that stuff 10,000 miles back to the United States to sell it. So it has to use shipping. And the ships dump their refuse, their spent fuel into the ocean and into the air. It's a big contributor to acid rain. The sulfur that comes from these ships becomes particles that are known to be causes of asthma, bronchitis and a whole host of other diseases. That's why the United States, excuse me, the United nations in October of last year reached an agreement that shipping companies have to stop doing this pollution that they're causing. They're going to have to change to more expensive fuel or they're going to have to install scrubbers, they're called, to be less of the pollutants. Well, they can't afford it because the economic crisis of capitalism has hurt them. It's a wonderful story about how the capitalist system breaks down. Can't solve the problem of its instability, can't solve the problem of. Of its pollution. And now the two are feeding on each other. It's a crisis no one knows what's going to happen. The shipping companies cannot afford to do what they have to do. Once again, we're seeing that the whole notion of profit is put our health in jeopardy. It's the part of capitalism we don't pay attention to. When profit does something that fouls the ocean, damages our health, and the companies that made the profit put it in the bank. And the rest of us deal with the costs that they as companies don't have to bear. Now the shipping companies are caught in that dilemma in the short time that we have left during this first half. Let me make a comment about the season. It's the tax season. April always is a tax season. And so I like, and I will do this in the next couple of weeks as well, to say a few things about our tax system because it's on our minds since we have to pay them today in the time that I have, I want to say something about property taxes. Here in the United States, as you know, we have three levels of federal, state and local. Federal government mostly relies on income tax. State governments rely on sales and other kinds of taxes. The local government tends to rely on property taxes. That's how most cities and towns survive. They tax the land, the homes, the automobiles, the business part of town. They all have to pay a tax that's a percentage of the value of the property. So if you're a property owner, you pay a tax. If you are a homeowner and you rent it out, you charge your tenants a rent, part of which you use to pay the tax on it. So renters pay. They just do it indirectly. Okay, here comes the punchline. If we really had a property tax, we would tax all property, both the kind that I just mentioned, which by the way is called tangible property, land, buildings, automobiles and so on. But we would also tax intangible property. And that's simply stocks, bonds, things like that. But we don't in the United States, we only tax tangible property in our thousands and thousands of cities and towns. We tax your home, we tax your car, we don't tax the value of your stocks and bonds. This is an enormous tax injustice. It exempts from taxation stocks and bonds, they don't. They are property, but they don't have to pay a tax. Let me show you how gross this is. If you own a hundred thousand dollar house, you pay a property tax. If you sell that house and buy with $100,000 that amount of stocks and bonds, your property tax is zero. You don't pay any. Now let me remind you, it's the richest people in America who own the bulk of stocks and bonds. 1% of shareholders own about two thirds of all the shares. So this is a property tax system that hits the middle and lower classes, the homeowners, the small business owners, the, the renters, directly or indirectly, and it exempts the folks at the top. If you feel taxes are unjust, you're right. But the solution isn't to make them higher or lower. The solution is to tax those who have escaped taxation for so long. We've come to the end of the first half of Economic Update. For today. We're going to have a very, very important and interesting conversation. And in the second half, please stay with us. I will introduce my guest, who is the same guest on the first show of each month, as some of you know, and we will have that conversation in a very short time. Please stay with us. We will be right back. Sam. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. I'm very happy to announce again, for those of you who may not have known, that the first program each month is devoted to an interview that I have with Dr. Harriet Fraad. She is a mental health counselor and a hypnotherapist. She has a private practice in New York City and has had it for many, many years. She writes in a variety of journals. And I'm happy to also say that you can now access her writings at two places. One is her own website, Harriet Fraad, spelled f r aad. That's all one word, harrietfraud.com but you can also go to the website that we maintain on this program, democracyatwork.info and you will find there her work as well, covering the topics we'll be discussing today, but a whole host of other things as well. Before I jump into the interview for today, let me first welcome you, Dr. Farad, to be with us and also remind you that we maintain two websites that you can go to, democracyatwork.info and rdwolf.com that are kinds of supplements to this program. They carry a great deal more information of the sort that we normally cover here. They allow you to comment on the program, to ask questions, to tell us what you like and don't like. They allow you with the click of your mouse to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. In other words, there are ways for you to partner with us, to see a way that you can make use of what we do here by sharing it with people you think might be interested, making use of it in your own life that's why we maintain these websites. They are available 247 at no charge whatsoever. Democracyatwork, all one word. Democracyatwork.info and rdwolf with two Fs dot com. Okay, Dr. Fraad, let's begin with a question that may be the most popular question we're getting these days in this program. So let's begin with a first question that is perhaps the most frequently received question that we get in this program these last few months. Now, how do you account as a psychological specialist, a professional, how do you account knowing all you do for the election of Donald Trump? What happened in this society to produce that outcome? How do you think about it?
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Well, this is what I think. I think that so many blue collar women as well as white collar women, but particularly blue collar men and women voted for Trump because they found that the neoliberal type capitalists like Hillary Clinton and Obama promised them prosperity and didn't deliver. They were willing to go out on a limb and vote for somebody they wouldn't have voted for ever before, someone black, someone young, Obama, because he promised.
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Hope and change and change.
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And people were excited because they knew changes had to happen for them to have a fair shot at life. Well, they didn't get that hope and change there either, economically, although many more people are working, they're working at low wage jobs and they're never getting ahead. The word Alice represents where people are at in a vast majority of American cases, which is assets limited, income constrained and employed. They're working, they're working harder and harder and they're getting nowhere. So what should they do, what to do? They decided, okay, we've got to do something. We've got to go for somebody completely different out of the establishment. And they had two choices. One was Bernie Sanders, who as you said, is the most popular politician in America, according to the Huffington Post, according to Mother Jones and also according to Fox News, because he promised change. He said, I will attack the corporate profits and the profiteers that have denied you. I will attack the banks that have cheated you and I will allocate that money for the mass of Americans who have been cheated and depleted. Donald Trump did not mention specifically the bankers, but he said, I will attack the swamp that is full of your.
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Money, that drain the swamp.
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I will drain the swamp which is Wall Street. And also Trump, like Bernie Sanders, spoke very compassionately about people's looted lives, that they couldn't make ends meet, that they were desperate, that the America that they hoped for in which they could have solid middle class lives was gone and through no fault of their hard working own. And he also intimated that the reason for this is, is that under Obama and Hillary Clinton, some people benefited while they suffered. And those people were minorities, women, gays and transgender Americans.
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In other words, if I am not understanding you, they saw those people's plight getting attention, getting some relief, even if not any near as much they suffered. They felt excluded from all of this attention and relief and they didn't know.
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It wasn't the limits of it.
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Right.
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They just saw, hey, they're getting, I'm not, They're getting attention, I'm not. One of them is in the White House, we're not. And they were angry and they didn't know they had two choices of where to go. One was Bernie Sanders and the other was Donald Trump. Well, Hillary Clinton's outfit, the Democratic National Committee, knifed Bernie in the back. They didn't give him the money he should have gotten as a Democrat. And Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was in charge, was rewarded by being Hillary Clinton's honorary campaign chair. So they switched, they switched to the other candidate. That didn't sound like business as usual, losing your life. Same old, same old, same old, cheating on same old. They switched to the other person who was passionately articulating in a very emotional way the injustices from which they suffered.
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And so they identified, in a sense.
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They identified with him even though he is a billionaire and shows it off. He's the kind of billionaire who's like a poor person who just got money, bragging, boasting, everything in gold they could identify. They had nothing against money, they just wanted more. And they thought, not unreasonably, that because he denounced the injustices and because he said he wanted to drain the swamp, he actually would. Wrong, he didn't. He denied civil rights, but he also cultivates Wall street profiteers. There are now four people from Goldman Sachs alone on Trump's financial advisory board and his cabinet. All but one are either multimillionaires, not, you know, just a couple of million, 50 million and up, or billionaires or multi billionaires.
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Let me just recap. So I understand your argument. Trump is elected out of a mixture of economic decline for the mass of people and a psychological anger in a sense that has been built up, that this decline is not universal, that somehow women, African Americans, minorities have somehow been exempted, leaving a mass which is still the majority, although a shrinking one, of mostly white working class people upset that their economic situation is deteriorating. And even more that they are the marginalized, the excluded, the discriminated against. Because you do, I think you tell me, but I feel the message coming from the folks that support Trump. We've been discriminated against.
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Yes.
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And we are protesting in a way, like the very groups we're angry at used to protest about their discrimination and still do.
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I mean, they are in Hillary Clinton's basket of deplorables. They suffer the shame of being cast as stupid rednecks. They suffer the shame of poverty, which is shamed in our culture, and shame of food stamps. One in four children in the United States get food stamps. They suffer that shame. And they feel that as transgender, gay and African American, people can be proud because their lives matter. They feel, hey, wait a minute, my life doesn't matter. I am cast as an ignorant, bigoted redneck, and I'm shamed because I can't afford much.
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And so Trump appeals as a kind of negation of that shame as the making America great again.
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I will make you great again. I will make white men great again. And your kids will have the brand name sneakers. They won't have to wear the no name sneakers and be ridiculed at school. And that is a huge shame and fury on the part of a mass of Americans that they've been bypassed. And they don't look at the actual gains and salaries and statistics on what African Americans and other minorities earn. They just have a sense of it. They're suffering.
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You know, the truth of it is, since I'm an economist, that over recent years, the loss, for example, in the average property owned by African Americans has been worse than the white people.
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That's right.
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And that the women, the percentage of men's income that women earn has been going down in the last several years. In other words, the truth of it is lost.
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They don't look at the stats, the.
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Symbolism of it all.
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That's right. They don't look at the stats. They look at the recognition and the news. You know, so that in the news, it looks like African Americans, minorities and women are gaining evermore. They're not, but it looks like it. And it's not what's true or it's made, it's what's presented that seems true. And now I just want to say one more thing. Now they are in the position that minorities and women have always been in and that they don't want to get used to.
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All right, so good. Now, the reality is we can make the beginning of an analysis because from the time January 20, when Trump becomes The president. Here we are, several months later, we, we can begin to see whether and how Mr. Trump and his policies are in fact responding to, delivering to the people who had these hopes and dreams you've just described. Is he delivering? Is he performing? And where does that mean we're going, given however you answer that question?
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Well, he's not performing for those people. And I'm going to look, you know, it's such a voluminous way that he's not performing for them, but rather hurting them. But I'm taking only a few. Health, because it's whether you live or not, education, the chances for children's future and the economy, jobs. And I'm looking at those to see what's happened now in the field of health. His first act is to try to gut the Affordable Care act, which is not sufficient. It's too expensive. But it was something, what Trump suggested was so terrible that even Republicans didn't embrace it wholeheartedly. And instead of buttressing his followers with the kind of healthcare that all the other developed industrial nations have, he would have made it even worse. So that's one thing in health.
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Okay, let me just stop that. To be very concrete, if I understand you.
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Yeah.
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If it had gone through that repeal, and I guess I should remind our audience that Trump has declared he's going to try again. In other words, he was defeated. The repeal didn't go through, but he's going to massage it to get enough more congressmen and women to support it. So he's going to try again. We don't know whether that will work, but he said he will do it. The one that almost got through, that he pushed, would have taken health care coverage away from about 21 million Americans.
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That's right.
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Is it reasonable to suppose that a very large number of them are the people who voted for him?
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Oh, of course it is. And he did it to take away the subsidy, which is the small tax on the wealthy, and restore that to the wealthy. What has happened is even with the Affordable Care act at both ends of the spectrum in terms of infant death and dying at an earlier age, America is in terrible shape. Cuba does better. Americans live less long than they used to. We're tops in maternal death and really at the bottom in child health care. And our infant death levels are already terrible. And he promises that they'll get worse. And this is how I want to talk about a couple of programs that he's cutting. And what are the results?
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But before we do, let's stay for a moment with Affordable Care. You cut the coverage of 21 million people. You use the savings because you don't have to spend billions on that to get rid of the tax on rich people, the tax on people earning over a quarter of a million dollars a year that paid for it. So it's a wonderful gift to the richest people in America since only a tiny percentage get to it. So he's taking something important away from millions at the poor end and giving more, giving more to people at the top end, therefore worsening the inequality that you just told us is part of the psychological upset of the very people he appealed to and won the support of. But I'm not done. One more thing. He also saved so much money by not giving insurance at 21 million that he hoped he could therefore give a tax cut to corporations, which he's working on now. So. So that would help the rich as individuals and the biggest and the best businesses disproportionately at the expense. This is not a person who's addressing the inequality and the upset. It's a person who's actually making it work. Am I reading you right?
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He's totally increasing it and he's taking away the food out of children's mouths in order to do that. His proposed cuts to wic, the Women and Infants nutrition programs, which go to people even at 185% of poverty level, his followers means that instead of subsidizing fruits and vegetables which allow pregnant women to have healthier pregnancies and allow children to survive better, he wants to cut those funds. And what does that mean? It means that children will be born with. These are the offshoots of inadequate nutrition when you're pregnant, cleft palates, congenital heart failure, abdominal tears, and generally poor health. And that means that people will have to spend more time on childcare, which is not subsidized for their children because they will be unhealthy. You're really taking the food from the.
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A
Mouths of babes and making life more difficult.
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B
And making life more difficult from just those people, for just those people who.
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Supported Donald Trump because of their hope for change.
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B
For change. And now they're getting, you know, they jumped out of the frying pan into the fire of change which is burning them up. The cuts to Planned Parenthood, of which abortion is a tiny part of what Planned Parenthood, of what Planned Parenthood mainly does screenings. They do screenings for breast cancer, since 1 in 8American women get breast cancer and if undetected people will die, they do things like pap smears which prevent you from getting uterine and cervical cancer. They do things like check for sti, sexually transmitted infections like hpv, which if undetected, causes cancer. And these are all very proven things. So it means that you're basically condemning your followers to death. Millions and millions of American women go to Planned Parenthood across the United States in places where other clinics don't even.
- [48:04]
A
Exist because they are either available where others are available.
- [48:09]
B
Low cost. Right. And so that you're condemning them to death. Another way thatand he's particularly condemning women to death and another way that he's condemning women to death, really injuring their survival is by cutting cuts to the domestic violence prevention programs and battered women's shelters. 1600 women a year conservatively die from being killed by their husbands or boyfriends through domestic battery. By taking away the battered women's shelters and the domestic violence prevention and making people aware this doesn't fly. You're condemning women to death, and you're also condemning parents. Children who suffer from or observe domestic violence are in terrible psychological shape. So are women who are beaten up. And he's also cutting the legal aid funds to help these women to get some kind of justice, as well as to help everybody else who isn't rich. You know, lawyers cost $300 an hour. Who can afford that to get justice? So that these are just three areas where he is condemning women often to death and hurting their children. And these are the women who voted and the men in these families who voted for Trump to have a better chance for themselves and their families. And while I'm talking about families, let's look at education. Good, because that's the third area. By the way, doing this research makes me cry. I mean, it's horrible what's happening. But whatever it will, education will be cut at all levels, from graduate school and college to pre kindergarten. Parents are going to have to let's look at pre kindergarten from the beginning, then go to the end. Parents are going to have to scramble. Already 85% of American children are in substandard daycare. They're sitting there wet in wet diapers, watching TV because they're crammed into inadequate daycares. They're not supervised properly, they're not educated properly. And these are the times of the greatest brain development for children 0 to 2 years old. And then again, there's a big surge from 2 to 6. Head Start is being cut. Head Start is hugely successful in preparing kids to have some of the advantage that rich kids have from their good private childcare centers. Where they learn to read and write and be part of an educational priority environment. There are already tens of thousands of children on the Head Start waiting list. He's going to cut Head Start further. And so parents will be lost again. Daycare is very expensive as well as inadequate, so that parents and their children will again be scrambling for the inadequate daycare they can't afford or women's jobs will be curtailed by their responsibilities for children. He's also doing this to elder care, and it's mainly women who are in charge of taking care of failing elders. So that, you know, they're also cutting after school programs and preschool programs, programs before school programs for children who need breakfast before school or. Or for children after school. K to 12. The most crimes committed against us children are committed in the hours after school and before their parents come home from work. By having after school programs, you prevent those crimes committed against children. And also by children, you also give them a healthy alternative. Because in order to be safe, latchkey children who have to come home alone have to do things sitting down. They watch tv, they play video games, they sit and they eat snacks because there's no healthy food for them. And they get diabetes and obesity problems, obesity problems which cause a whole range from diabetes to heart failure. So that. And then that's just the early programs. They also slash the programs for handicapped children who are even harder to take care of, for parents who are even more constrained and in difficulty in the United States. And then funds from the federal supplemental education grant, which allows low income people some help in college, college tuition, and also creates work study programs that allow people to make money while they go to school. The only people getting more money are charter and private school voucher programs which are shown through all the scholarship to be inferior to a public education. But people are making money off of them.
- [53:17]
A
Okay, you've made a powerful case. But now I have to ask you the sort of $64 billion question you're suggesting that the kinds of accumulated economic and psychological wants and needs of the American people propelled into office. First Mr. Obama, who was a disappointment, and now Mr. Trump, a more extreme on the other end of the spectrum. And you're telling us much the same story is evolving. In other words, yes, they're betraying Mr. Trump, is betraying hope and change. But whereas you might say for Obama, at least he didn't make it worse, he did a little bit that got better. That's right. Mr. Trump is with Mexico going backwards.
- [54:04]
B
Making it much worse.
- [54:06]
A
Yeah, where is that going to take The United States of America over the next two or three years. What are we looking at when what you're telling us is an already politically explosive level of anger and upset and bitterness now, according to you, is about to get much, much worse.
- [54:29]
B
It is getting much worse. And a nice little example is they're spending $18 million extra to keep Barron Trump and Melania Trump at Trump Tower. They could restore those cuts. Of course it will take.
- [54:44]
A
You mean if they didn't spend the money on.
- [54:45]
B
If they didn't spend the money to keep Barron in his private school until the end of the year, hundreds of thousands of other children in America of children would be advantaged. Or also, if you didn't spend 600 million on Trump's trips to Mar a Lago, with his travel expenses and his security, you'd save another 600 million. And this is just an example of the priorities that are getting people very angry. Now, should I. Do we have time for me to talk about the economics or should we go? Okay, I have to cut to the.
- [55:23]
A
End in the time that we have this time. And we can return to this. Of course, since what you're telling us is that this problem is going to be something we talk about a great deal from the top of your head in the minute we have. Where is this going to go? You're a psychological specialist. How are the American people going to cope not just with the economic inequality and decline that you're telling us about, but with the psychological trauma of. Of feeling as betrayed as you're suggesting we they are going to feel?
- [55:56]
B
Well, it can be what our options are. Kind of summarized by Langston Hughes, a great black poet. What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun or fester like a sore and then run? Does it just sag like a heavy load or does it explode? Those are the possibilities.
- [56:21]
A
Wow.
- [56:22]
B
People are depressed and feeling hopeless. That's one of the reasons that the heroin epidemic is hitting so hard on white people now. They're also committing suicide. Middle aged American men are committing suicide like they never had before because they're losing hope. It's the same reason they're dying sooner, because they're losing hope.
- [56:46]
A
We've run out of time. Is there a positive something that you.
- [56:50]
B
Can do with us, which is that people are connecting the way they haven't for 50 years. You know, fight and flight are the choices they say are for all people. No, they're just for men. Connect is women's biggest choice. When there's a crisis. People are connecting, particularly women, but people across the United States, they're organizing into groups. They're protesting, they're marching, they're sign petitions as they haven't for 50 years. And that will create the hope and the change.
- [57:21]
A
It's interesting. It takes us right back to the beginning of the program when we talked about French politics. The anger of the French people can go to the right but it can also go to the left.
- [57:31]
B
That's right.
- [57:31]
A
We will return to this.
- [57:32]
B
Well, that's left. Yes.
- [57:34]
A
Thank you, Dr. Fraad, as always. Fascinating. We have to come to the close of this program. I want to thank all of our partners, including truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis. Please, folks, take a look at this program in the weeks ahead. I think you'll find it particularly worthwhile and I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Sam.