← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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- [00:00]
Richard D. Wolff
Sam. Saint gonna change. Welcome friends, to another edition of Economic Update, weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, the jobs we have, the incomes we have and hope to keep, the future, the debts, our children, and the economic changes looming now more ominously than they have even since 2008. We'll have more about that later. I have an exciting program I believe for you today, but one of the things it's going to make me do is go quickly. So I'm going to dispense with anything other than mentioning the two websites that we maintain and that will expand on almost everything we do today. Democracyatwork.info and rdwolff with two Fs.com please keep them in mind. Make a note, make use of them. They are a way for us and you to partner in effective ways. Let's go through them. Many of you sent comments about a segment I did last week about Harvard University and the glaring contrast between their fundraising, their enormous wealth and the fact that they forced a strike on 750 of their poorest, lowest paid workers, the people who work in their cafeterias, feeding the students and the faculty. And I could see from your emails you wanted more information but some clarification. So let me quickly do that.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
And.
- [02:36]
Richard D. Wolff
I'm going to use for that purpose, as I did last week, the November December issue of the Harvard Alumni Magazine. These are magazines put out by many universities that are modes of fundraising and self promotion and usually little else. And this one is true to form and it features the president of Harvard, Drew Faust, boasting of the $7 billion that they are on track to raise in this fundraising period. And as I pointed out last week, they boast that this is better than the second place finish the of Stanford University a few years ago that only managed to raise a good bit less than that. But I'm struck by the fact that the three week strike of those workers, by the way, who average around $30,000 a year, which is no big salary to say the least. And in a very expensive area like Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts, it is particularly an extremely modest living paid for by the richest university probably on this planet, but certainly the richest in the United States. And so I was particularly struck by this speech given by President Drew Faust, talking about how proud she is of the money they've raised. I can't do better than her words. So let me read them to you. I am deeply grateful to everyone who has participated in this outstanding effort so far. Our aspirations speak to our larger hopes for not only a better Harvard, but also for a better world. Notice please the order of her enthusiasm. Her efforts are for a better Harvard comma, but also for a better world. And she must then believe that a better world was achieved by denying these working people the small increase from 30 to 35,000 a year that they requested, imposing on them a three week strike which diminished their salary by 6%, their annual salary because you get about 2% per week. So they imposed on them a loss before finally caving in. But this spectacle of the richest university in the country talking about its $7 billion fundraiser, when I calculated that what it would cost to give the 750 workers an extra 5,000 a year would be under $4 million. This is a university that boasted already has 36 billion on track to raise another 7. The out of touchedness of this is the lesson to take away from it. The rich keep getting richer, imposing what they will on the rest of us and thinking we don't notice and it doesn't matter. The last week brought another economic update. Three mega mergers. I mentioned one last week, but. But I want to flesh that out. The one I mentioned, ATT and Time Warner is coming in at $85.4 billion. Another one announced this last week, General Electric and the oil fields company Baker Hughes, that comes in at 32 billion. And then finally CenturyLink, an Internet company, is purchasing level three, another one. And, and that's coming in at 19 billion. Altogether over $125 billion worth of mergers in which huge companies become huger still, enabling them to lay off thousands of workers, enabling them to jack up the prices because they're buying up their competitors and enabling them to make more profits. We will then face companies with even more resources than they now have to to buy political elections the way they're doing, to beat the band and to deny us even the little bit of economic democracy we ever had. And it wasn't much. Next item. The city council in Berlin has announced, excuse me, the parliament in Germany, not the city council. The cabinet made a decision and it will go to the parliament. The cabinet of Germany made a decision to outlaw any and all GMO products grown or raised in the agriculture of Germany. A complete ban on all GMO adjusted plants and animals. I thought Americans would like to think about what that means. Next topic. Well, many of you have asked, because it's the height of the political season, to be given the information about who's raised how much money. So I went to the source that many of us use. It's called opensecrets.org all one word opensecrets.org used by publications such as Business Insider and so on. As of October 31, the most recent data which I could get. Here's how much has been raised, both by the campaign committees and by outside groups for the various candidates that we have observed over the last year and a half. Leading the pack by a huge amount. Hillary Clinton $700 million. And as some headlines blared this last week, she's on her way to a billion dollar campaign effort. Far behind her Donald Trump 300 million. Less than half of Clinton's Bernie Sanders 200 million. Two thirds of what Trump did and so far behind Hillary Clinton. Well, you can excuse that perhaps by saying he's not in the race the last few months. And bush and Rubio 150 million. The neighborhood they were in Clinton 700 million. Trump 300 and the other two three far behind. I thought you might be interested in how much money Gary Johnson and Jill Stein have raised for their presidential campaigns, which are still in full swing. Gary Johnson 13 million Jill Stein 3.5 million. So let's do it. Hillary Clinton at one end, $700 million. Jill Stein at the other, $3.5 million. What kind of democracy permits such inequality? In the effort to make your message known, to reach the public, to explain what you are there to do if you're elected, you don't have a democratic political system. If you do not have a democratic economic system upon which it sits. I wanted to shout out my appreciation to Portland, Oregon. It looks like Portland, Oregon is going to be the first city in the United States to levy a tax on corporations that have extremely wide pay gaps between their CEO and and their workers. If your gap is greater than a certain amount, which is already allowing CEOs to be very well paid indeed. But if you're greedy and go beyond that, you're going to have to pay a tax in Portland if this plan passes. At the latest City Council meeting, there was a majority of people on the City Council speaking for it and I was so taken with the comments of the Mayor of Portland, Mayor Charlie Hales, who told a story at the public hearing that I'm going to summarize for you by reading his words as to why he supports levying a tax on corporations who grotesquely overpay their CEOs. Here's his Between 2002 and 2012, I worked for HRD, an employee owned engineering firm with a CEO worker pay ratio of about 10 to 1. That's well below what would be the cutoff for this law. During this period, the firm grew from 2,700 employees to 8,000. And in only one year during that period did the company's profit margin drop below 15%. Now here come the words of Mayor Hales, I want you to obviously this model worker owned enterprise leads to prosperity and I was very happy about that. On a personal level, it helped me put two kids through college. But on the morale side, the impact was even more profound. Everyone worked a little harder because your success was my success. And that egalitarian culture led to a strong work ethic that drove the corporation to success. The mayor of Portland, Oregon, next, a short update on evidence about the economic recovery we hear about but just aren't going through. That is the bottom 99% of us. Over the last week, the world's 20 biggest container shipping companies announced that none of them, none of the 20 largest shipping container companies, that's the people who run the big containers on those monstrous freighters across the oceans of the world, none of them will report any profit at all. Why? Because of a collapse in world trade that's not a sign of an economy recovering, friends and neighbors, that's a sign of an economy in deep trouble. International trade is a major component of and booster for the economies of the world. That none of the 20 largest shipping companies will report any profit is a sign of how desperate the world's trade relationships are. And the impact on our economies is not far behind. Next update, rolling right along. The Koch brothers, famous right wing billionaires who fund what they want America to look like, have gotten themselves into another controversy. This time it has to do with the Catholic University of America. It turns out that the Catholic University of America has been accepting money, particularly its business school, the Bush School of Business and Economics, from the Koch Foundation. And this led all kinds of Catholic theologians and professors to raise alarms about what the this means, worrying that the influence of the Koch brothers will push the Catholic University of America and so on to the right politically, etc. Etc. Well, it was interesting then to see that these comments provoked an angry response from the leaders of the Catholic University of America. And in particular, there was an op ed in the Wall Street Journal written by the university's president, John Garvey, and the business school's founding dean, Andrew Abella. They declared that they would not, quote, cave to demands made by the liberal social justice movement. And they wrote that it would be a mistake, quote, to stifle debate by pretending that genuine controversial positions are official church teaching. Well, that's not Very subtle. That's announcing that what is being stated by Pope Francis is for them a controversial matter and not church doctrine, which at least has some interesting impacts on the internal struggles of the Roman Catholic Church. The Pope has been Pope Francis. That is the unquestionably clear. Let me quote a couple of things that are in this controversy. Quote from the Pope. Some people continue to defend trickle down theories which assume that economic growth encouraged by a free market will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice in the world. This opinion, said the Pope, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power. As if to show that this controversy is alive, let me close with a quotation from the Chicago based Heartland Institute, another Catholic institution that has received funding from Mr. Koch. Last fall it issued a document which reads, and I quote, again, Pope Francis views on global warming are scientifically in error. His views on capitalism are outdated and wrong. The Koch brothers working their way inside the Roman Catholic community. Next, I comment, and fairly often, on the problem of corporations that have been leaving the United States for 40 years. First manufacturing, then services and so on. I've been talking about it long before this presidential election as a sign of a capitalism that has decided basically to abandon production in North America, Western Europe and Japan and move it to where they can make more money by paying lower wages, evading environmental controls, avoiding taxes, and so on. And some of you have asked me for some more concrete evidence. So I caught the latest report of an interesting institution called the Fair labor association based in Washington D.C. which tries to argue and advocate for people who are not being treated well around the world, hence the term Fair Labor Association. And from their latest report, I want to read to you what the minimum wages are in two countries that you probably don't study much. One is Myanmar. The old name was Burma, it's now Myanmar. And the other was a country once part of the Soviet Union, Georgia, which is now its own country, and the fla. The Fair labor association has been fighting for better minimum wages for workers in those two countries, among many others. So here are the two countries and the minimum wages they have in Myanmar. The minimum wage, the new minimum wage used to be lower. The new one, just established in September of 2015 was $2.80 for an 8 hour workday. I'm going to say that again, $2.80 for an 8 Hour Workday. In Georgia, the former Soviet republic, the minimum wage for a month is $8.50. Both countries admit that this minimum wage is less than what you need to physically survive. So they count on these workers to be paid this and then to scrounge in whatever way they can, enough not to die of starvation or cold. American companies, European companies, and Japanese companies look at these numbers and drool about the amount of profits they can make if they can hire workers at those wages. As long as we permit free movement of capital and this kind of inequality of wages in the world, we can hardly be surprised by where it ends up, even though we pretend that we are surprised. Okay, my next comment is about the words recently Ushered by Stephen Allen Schwarzman. He is a business magnate and financier. He's the CEO of one of the biggest private equity groups, the Blackstone Group, an immensely powerful global institution that takes money from very wealthy, wealthy people and invests it so that they become more wealthy. Okay, his personal fortune is estimated at $10.1 billion, according to Forbes magazine, and he was ranked 113th on the world's Billionaires list, also maintained by Forbes magazine. Why am I telling you about this? Well, he was the featured speaker very recently, the end of October, at a dinner at Columbia University's School of Journalism. I'm not going to talk about why a school of journalism training people in the objective reporting of news, etc. Would be celebrating someone who is as committed to one way of looking at the News. And as Mr. Schwarzman has always been, that's not my concern. Although it could be. I'm rather concerned with what Stephen Schwarzman told the assembled notables at this fancy, fancy dinner. And here it is. He's concerned that there's a big chunk of the US Population, those are his words, that are scared, insecure. And I think we find ourselves in the middle of this, said Mr. Schwarzman, quoting him, when half the population can't marshal $400 one paycheck. They should be scared, said Mr. Schwarzman. They should feel insecure. They should be unhappy. While this might sound to you like a very wealthy person feeling some compassion for those who aren't, and we might even wonder, will he find his way to seeing the connection between the difficulty most people have and the absurd wealth he presides over personally. But don't worry, he didn't. Here's what he did in the rest of his speech. The problem, he said, is is the government. Now, folks, I could go on for hours about this. I won't. But there is something magical in seeing the difficulties of the mass of people, difficulties that have to do with their employer, the man or woman or board of Directors, who pays them so little for the work they do to get angry at anyone. If your income is insufficient, the first logical object of your criticism would be your employer, public or private, because that's who's deciding how much you're getting paid. It's wonderful to have a society in which the employers can cut your pay, reduce your pay, nibble away your pay. And who do you get angry at? The government. That's magical. Not the people who are doing it to you, but somebody else. And Mr. Schwarzman loves it, because the alternative is that we might get angry at him. Let me quote you some more words from Mr. Schwarzman at the dinner. Instead of allowing banks and financial institutions. That's him. To lend more and put capital into the system, the governments instead instituted tighter regulations, slowing an economic recovery. Oh, goodness. He's the success. He's the means to recovery. The government is everybody's problem. This is the purest ideological nonsense I've heard in quite a while. Am I surprised? Well, no, I'm not really surprised. Business wants us to believe that if we have economic criticisms, they're to go to the government, never to them. And if we're looking for an economic solution, it's letting them do more of what they make money off of. Isn't it obvious the people who lead this country are out of touch. The people at Harvard that I spoke at the beginning. Out of touch, Mr. Schwarzman. Out of touch. You might be interested that at the end of his talk he was asked some questions and Mr. Schwarzman said a couple of things that you might be interested in. The country would have been better off if former Republican nominee Mitt Romney was elected president instead of Barack Obama in 2012. When asked about the current Clinton Trump, Here is what Mr. Schwarzman this is a really tough election. I think certainly there would be an unpredictable outcome if Donald was in that seat, but, you know, it would somehow find its way if Hillary was in that seat. It would be a bit more predictable. But, and I won't bore you with the rest, so much for one of our financial leaders. I can't end this first half of the program without mentioning that we continue to be in the midst of one of the greatest strikes of people incarcerated in American prisons in the history of the United States. If you haven't heard about it, well, that gives you another hint about how your news is organized for you by the mass media. But I want to remind everyone that we have a peculiar country. The Constitution of our country has the 13th Amendment, which outlaws slavery and which came because we were in a civil war to get rid of slavery in this country, which we did by the war and then by the amendment, the 13th amendment. But the 13th amendment that outlawed slavery as a horror we wanted nothing to do with, said there was one exception. We could have slavery if it were imposed on people inside prisons. And so we do. We make them work against their will. We make them work for amounts of money that are pennies per hour, not even close to our lamentably low minimum wage. We impose slavery and then wonder why people coming out of jail are often angry, bitter, are not rehabilitated. Slavery would rehabilitate whom, please, and in what way? It is a shame upon the United States, not only that we have more prisoners per population than any other country on the planet, but that we enslave them there. Well, it defies much that I can say. Well, folks, we've come to the end of the first half of this program. I do want to take this moment, however, to remind you that we need and want your partnership in lots of different ways. And we have a moment for me to explain those to you with a bit more fullness than I normally have. Go to our websites, democracyatwork.info rdwolf with two Fs.com make use of them in all the ways they provide to communicate with us, to use our materials, to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, to see our new blog that's about to emerge, and so on. Use the website. Stay with us. We will be right back.
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Bob Dylan
Come you masters of war here that build the big guns here that build the death planes here that build all the bombs it hide behind walls, it hide behind this I just don't want you to know I can see through your masks you that never done nothing but built to destroy. You play with my world like it's your little toy. You put a gun in my hand and you hide from my eyes and you turn and run farther when the fast bullets fly. Like a Judas of old you lie and deceive A world war can be.
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Richard D. Wolff
Won.
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Bob Dylan
You want me to believe.
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Richard D. Wolff
Welcome back, friends, to the second half of economic Update for this opening part of November 2016, I am very pleased to welcome to the microphone and the program Dr. Harriet Fraad. And before I introduce her, since many of you know her, I want to explain to you what we are now planning to do. It is our intention to use the first weekly program each month to bring Dr. Frad onto the program to talk about the ways the economy impacts our psychology and our intimate personal lives and vice versa, how those lives and their problems impact the economy. And we're doing that because you, our listeners and our viewers have sent us in more comments requesting more of Dr. Frad than you have for any other person that I have brought to these microphones. And it has been consistently the case. And so it is a way of responding and appreciating your participation, your partnership in this program that brings me to bring her back so we can continue the conversation. So first of all, Dr. Fraad, thank you very much for joining me.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
Thank you. Good to be back.
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Richard D. Wolff
Dr. Fraad is a mental health counselor and hypnotherapist. She has a private practice in Manhattan in New York City. She speaks and writes extensively on the intersection of politics, economics and mental health. I should mention that if you wish to respond to ask questions, to propose topics for these conversations, or in any way respond to what Dr. Fraud says, please use the websites associated with this program, the ones I mention each week, and that I will mention now one more time. Democracyatwork.info that's all one word, democracyatwork.info and the second website, RD Wolff, with two Fs all communications and both websites allow you to email us as you wish 24 7, no charge for anything. Any one of the communications you send to her through us will be forwarded to her and will get her personal attention. Okay, Dr. Frad, here's the plan for today for our conversation. I talk often about the problems of capitalist enterprises, by which I mean enterprises that have a tiny group of people at the top, the major shareholders and the boards of directors that they select because it's one vote per share. And since 1% of the shareholders own three quarters of the shares, the 1% decide who's on the board of directors. And the board of directors make all decisions in most companies, what to produce, how to produce, where to produce and what to do with the profits. And I contrast that way of organizing business with worker co ops with democratic workplaces where everybody has one vote who works there, and if you don't work there, you're not part of the decisions on the internal life of that enterprise. Of course, the local community interacts with the working enterprise in the usual co respective way. But we're focusing on the difference in the workplace experience for a person caught up in a hierarchical capitalist enterprise versus a worker co op. And so what I want you to talk about because so many have asked us, is what are the implications for a person's mental health of working in a capitalist Enterprise versus working in a worker co op enterprise. How does it affect the life we lead? Keeping in mind that the single most frequent place that an adult American finds himself or herself is at the workplace. Five days a week, the best hours of the day, you're at work. So how work is organized, how you experience it, is going to shape everything about you. Tell us, using your expertise, about the difference between, in the mental health impacts of the alternative, between capitalism and a democratic workplace.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
Well, there's two basic concepts about mental health that people have to understand. One of them is ontological security, which means the right to just be that you are welcome in the world, that you are okay, that you are approved of, and that you're basically okay and acceptable. The opposite of that is chaotic nonentity, where you lose all sense of yourself and connection to anyone, which is insanity. And another is that mental health is kind of like a four legged table, that each leg adds to the stability of the table. If one leg isn't quite as wobbly, it affects the table, but the table doesn't fall down. If all four of them or three of them are shaking, you're going to have an awfully hard time. So let's go over quickly what they are. The first is personal connection.
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Richard D. Wolff
These are the first of the four legs of the legs that hold up.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
Your mental health table. The first is personal connection. A personal relationship. It could be a sexual relationship that's personal. It could be relatives, it could be you and your children. It could be you and close friends, people you can turn to, people whose love you count on. Those would be the people who would put you at the center, part of the hub of their wheel that goes around their life. And they are the center of yours or one of the centers of yours.
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Richard D. Wolff
So that's one leg of your mental health table.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
That's right, it's one leg. That's the leg at which we begin life. Children don't grow, they don't develop, they don't learn to talk, they don't learn to walk unless they have a personal physical connection. With up to five caregivers in the orphanages where children were abandoned after World War II and given physical care, but not held and talked to and cooed at. They didn't develop, they died. It's called failure to thrive. The same thing happened in Ceausescu's Romania because he wouldn't allow birth control or abortion. So they housed thousands of orphans who they fed and they changed, but they had no personal interaction and most of them died. It's called failure to thrive.
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Richard D. Wolff
So there was not only the mental health, but also the physical health.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
The physical health was devastated. Physical health is affected on all levels. But on the primary level, when we're just beginning life, it's the definitive devastating element. The second table is a slightly second leg of the table, the second leg of this table. And each table represents a wider kind of connectivity, because connection with others is the basis of mental health, and that is a closer circle of friends, of acquaintances, of people who. In whose company you can thrive, even if they're people you see at work every day. You do each other little favors. You talk. You don't have a life after work, but you have connection. Then there's a third leg of your table, which is groups you belong to. This leg is things like the PTA or a blood drive that you are trying to sustain or a bowling league or political campaigns. And this is a very neglected leg in America. There are fewer people active in anything in the United States now than were in bowling leagues alone in 1970, because people have been isolated from each other, which is a sign of unstable mental health.
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Richard D. Wolff
There's that wonderful book that the Harvard sociologist Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone, which documents that.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
That's his statistic. And then the fourth leg of the emotional table is a wider sense that you are part of humanity, part of the world. People may differ in their opinions from yours. Like Arlie Hochschule talked about the Trump supporters that she had great sympathy for, because they're part of humanity, where you see that although we may have differences, you're part of the world. And that what's happening to our planet affects you, what's happening in our.
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Richard D. Wolff
And you feel a kind of solidarity with humanity, with the human race.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
Right, with the human race.
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Richard D. Wolff
And you need all four of these.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
You need all four of these to really be solid in yourself and to.
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Richard D. Wolff
Have what you call mental health.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
Exactly. And in all of them. Americans are shaking. Their personal relationships deteriorate. Marriage is over for the majority of people. It's only the 1% who stay consistently married because they have all the supports for the relationship. They have time off. They're the ones with paid vacations. They have personal days. They have decent salaries. They can afford to go out to dinner together. They can afford the time. They can afford quality child care, all those things that the rest of the population can't afford. So it's the top maybe 10% who have that intact. Personal relationships, the secondary. Every connection is now wobbly in the United States. And how do we know this. How do we know this? Well, if you look at a sense, I am part of it. I am connected versus I am disconnected. When people are disconnected, they are frightened, they are alone. They are often either depressed where their anger is turned down inside them and pushes them down, or the anger is directed out. Now, what are some of the symptoms of this? Well, one of them, of your anger directed out is mass murder here. It's a very clear indication. I looked at it for the month of September. In one month alone, we had 40 mass shootings. That's shootings of at least two people with whom you have no relationship. But your rage is such at all of humanity, you just shoot them. There have been 200 wounded or dead just in the month. You compare that to the fuss made over ISIS in the United States. Whoa, this is a real problem. And there is no other country that is anything like that. Because in other countries there's a sense of caring that's shown by supports maternal, for instance, maternity leaves. We are one of four countries in the entire world that has no maternity leave. And we're in the company of paid maternal leave, paid maternity leave, which no guaranteed paid maternity leave. The other countries in whose company we are are Swaziland, Somalia, which is basically a failed state, and Papua New Guinea.
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Richard D. Wolff
In other words, some of the poorest places on this planet.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
Right. The poorest, most disintegrated societies that don't provide a connection that says, we care about you, we care about the future and your children.
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Richard D. Wolff
It's amazing too for me, that a country whose conservatives, as well as most others, speak endlessly about a commitment to family values in the family, do not provide the maternal paid time off so that the mother and the child can give each other that first leg of mental health that you just told us.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
Exactly. And every other country of the 24 wealthier nations, many of whom are not all that wealthy, like Slovenia or Poland or something, or Hungary, does this for their people. And they have early childhood possibilities for their people and supports for parenting and children. And their people are much less routinely enraged and certainly aren't shooting people. Remember, we had 40 mass shootings in one month. Whereas the other wealthy nations, for example England, France, the Netherlands and Slovenia and Norway had one mass shooting each in four years. We had 40 in a month. In one month. Denmark, Switzerland and Finland had two shootings in the last four years. We had 40 in one month. Germany was upset and tried to deal with this because they have had three mass shootings in the last four years. We have had the Equivalent of more than one a day for the month of September. And I don't study every month. That's the month I studied. So what does this have to do with, with the legs of the table or anything else? Well, one of the ways people get connected is they feel that they are important. They have the security. Yes, you are part of something. We say yes to your life. We say yes to your child's life. We provide for you. Americas are not provided for and are very angry and lonely, upset and, and the workplace, the workplace. Every other nation in the 24 nations have some solidarity at the workplace and have political unions that get out there and protest.
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Richard D. Wolff
You mean the 24 OECD wealthy countries?
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
Well, yes, the wealthier nations of the world. So it's not only their parents and their children, it's also on the job. They have more, they don't have necessarily, you know, they have more co ops than we do, especially Italy, but they don't. They have cooperation. They have a sense of somebody's looking out for them. They're part of this country and this country is giving something to them. The United States doesn't have that. And so people are disconnected and without connection. You just don't have anyone saying yes to your life. Another indication of how Americans are in trouble, disconnected is the level of opioid, you know, opiates that people take. Because for every traumatic thing that happens to a human being, whether it's being neglected or abused in childhood, and Americans have the highest rate of child abuse and child murder of the 24 wealthier countries of the world because parents are abandoned and under huge pressure. Is that with every trauma strike, with every hour that you're abandoned because your parents can't afford or your mother can't afford a babysitter, you're alone and screaming and unheard with every bit of physical punishment. The way children survive is the brain has a biochemical wash of uppers, downers and painkillers that allow you to forget that your caregiver is a predator, that there is no one there for you. And then when you get older, you look for drugs that will enhance the internal addiction you already have to these painkillers which take you offline. And opiates are one of those drugs that does that. That's why the U.S. population is 5%, approximately of the world's population. And we take 80% of the opiates which have become the biggest cause of accidental death in the United States. Bigger than car accidents, bigger than anything else, because people are trying to drug Themselves because they don't have the connection they need. Because at their jobs they're disconnected. At home they're disconnected. They don't have the networks that make them feel. I have a place here.
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Richard D. Wolff
When you mention the jobs, I want to take you back to that focus.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
Okay, let's go back.
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Richard D. Wolff
Tell us how a conventional job workplace organization will contribute to wobbly legs of your mental health. In a way that the worker co op might behave in a different way, might affect you in a different way. Absolutely mean mental stability in a different way. I want to get at the mental effects, if you like, the mental health implications of a top down hierarchical workplace versus a cooperative workplace.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
Well, in a top down hierarchical workplace, as you said, a capitalist workplace, you have a board of directors that makes up the decisions about what you do when you do it, how to divide the profit. And you don't. You are just a cipher in a profit calculus that is not something that contributes to your sense of importance and of connection with the wider job. You may have friends on the job, but you can lose that job and.
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Richard D. Wolff
Be replaced, and be replaced as if.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
You were just a cog in a wheel. But not a person whose contribution is.
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Richard D. Wolff
Valued and it doesn't call on your capabilities, right?
- [48:09]
Dr. Harriet Fraad
No, you don't decide anything.
- [48:11]
Richard D. Wolff
You're just a particular functionary. You're to do a particular job. That's all any authority cares for. You are not drawn in to the life, the control, the design, the management, this enterprise. So in a sense, many of your capabilities, many of the parts of your personality are utterly unwanted.
- [48:34]
Dr. Harriet Fraad
In fact, most of them are. And you are just a function. You're not a human, you're not wanted, you're needed or needed. You are a function. You do this, you do that. But you are not a person who is needed and wanted as such. You contrast that with the cooperative in which every person cooperates to do everything. When I visited the Mondragon community, which is a city of CO OPS, 104,000 people organized in different co ops. I was in the big free Gore factory that makes dishwashers, refrigerators and stoves and I noticed that a buzzer went off every two hours. And that's because they voted that no one should have to do repetitive work for more than two hours at a time. So at the two hour buzzer they shift jobs. So you're not just performing a function that's one little function all day long. Then there's a uniform lunch hour where people socialize and connect with each other one day a week. There are meetings where you decide how to deal with your job along with the other people there. And I asked, well, what happens if somebody's drunk on the job and, you know, how is that handled? And they said, the first thing we do, which is 90% effective, is the other people on the job talk about how they need that person and they need him to be part of things or her to be part of things and talk about what's wrong. If that doesn't work, they go away or they go to a rehab and then they come back and are welcomed. And that has never failed. Because one of the reasons that people get addicted or drunk, which is a kind of addiction, is because they're disconnected, they're traumatized, and they need the alcohol to help the internal wash let them know that they haven't gone through what they've done, that they aren't so alone.
- [50:42]
Richard D. Wolff
Even though they are.
- [50:43]
Dr. Harriet Fraad
Even though they are. But it's the illusion that opiates give you of infinite connection and relaxation.
- [50:52]
Richard D. Wolff
So that the defense people look for. If I could be an economist for a minute. The defense of a top down hierarchical work arrangement that it is quote, unquote efficient, is undercut when you see the psychological damage these hierarchical structures impose on the mass of people that are just drone functionaries and are not allowed to develop all their capabilities and participate. Those people will then have all kinds of personal problems, addiction problems. And the efficiency that they're talking about is compromise, is compromised and is undercut and it's a false claim they will.
- [51:32]
Dr. Harriet Fraad
Fail on the job much more likely if they're drunk, if they're having terrible turmoil in their personal lives, if they're just so desperately alone. Every single one of the mass and unhappy last in September that I looked at was a disconnected person. Alone and disconnected. And that connection that you have at work, if you're in a co op where you, you meet with the people, you work out what you do, you're.
- [52:03]
Richard D. Wolff
Part of a team.
- [52:03]
Dr. Harriet Fraad
You're all respectively part of a team. I talked to a woman at Mondragon when they had to have cutbacks because one of the things they were making in their factory wasn't being bought up in Spain's slump because fewer people were buying vacation condos in Spain. And she said that they decided as a group that they would take a cut in pay, but they'd have more time off. And I said, was that what you wanted? She said, I would have liked more pay, but since we were all in the same boat and we all had to decide this was something I can live with because we decided it isn't like she has to take her anger and alienation and turn it inside. She made a decision, she's responsible, she's valued, she's part of a team, she's connected. Because without connection, people are sunk. That's why solitary confinement is a cruel and unusual punishment that is totally disintegrating of individuals.
- [53:06]
Richard D. Wolff
I also notice in my life too, because you stimulate me to think about it, that many of the men that I've talked to look back with greater fondness on their time either in a sports team or in the army when they were told, you're part of a little platoon, you all depend on each other, you're part of a team. That that feeling of being part of something where everybody has everybody's back, where everybody has to get along was experienced as a kind of euphoria compared to the loneliness and isolation that the rest of their life has meant. Which is why they look back with such nostalgia on those early experiences which were team experiences, and yet never seem to have the mental ideas say, well, what about making the workplace a team effort? How might that change your life?
- [54:00]
Dr. Harriet Fraad
That's one of the reasons that just about one out of three people who come back from the army and are isolated, has post traumatic stress disorder and are in terrible mental trouble. Because although now part of it is they're now in a safe place so that they can process what they've been through, but part of it is they're disconnected. They don't have their platoon, they don't have their buddies, they don't have the sense of camaraderie which everyone needs and which a co op invites. That's what you have at your workplace. You have these supports. You're part of something and you're part of something that has enormous power you in the co op, in the Mondragon system, which is in most co ops, no one's allowed to make more than eight times what the lowest paid worker makes. So you're all in the same boat that way. Plus they can call recall any of the people they elect directly. It's not like our election where it takes a billion dollars to get elected from some capitalists with special interests. It's they're elected from among the people and they could be recalled from among the people. So you have a sense that you're belonging to what governs your economic life and your political life. Another thing is that the violence level for which people pay a lot. You pay police, you pay guards, you pay security prisons. You don't you pay. Prisons is not needed. I walked into a bank, I couldn't believe it. No cops in the bank. Nice lady sitting by. What do you want? Da da da da. The whole feeling is different because people aren't feeling enraged and alienated and alone because human connection is fostered in a cooperative. That means you are together with other people, working together. Arrangement versus a capitalist arrangement in which you are told what to do and decisions are made that utterly affect your life and you have nothing to say about it.
- [56:19]
Richard D. Wolff
As usual, I wish we had more time. It's gone very, very fast, which is a good sign that the topic we're engaged with engages us. And as I said to you all, Dr. Fraad will be back in the first session of December, so you will have plenty of opportunity. If you'd like to address a question, let us know. Use our two websites, democracyatwork.info or rdwolf.com to let us know what you thought about today's program and what you would like to see in the future. I also want to ask you to make use of this program. Share it with other people. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Partner with us. Bring me out to wherever you are to give a talk. Help us get on local radio stations. I want to particularly thank truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis. They've been a good partner in the past. It's exactly that kind of partnership we're looking for with others. Get in touch. Let's work together and I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Change change change change change change Thing going to change Y. Sam.