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Welcome friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. And I'm your host Richard Wolff, here to bring you these updates each week. I want to begin by mentioning today's theme that capitalism is an economic system that is a continuous war between the employer and the employee. It really never stops, even when it appears to. And many of today's updates kind of illustrate that point. I want to start with the exotic dancers in Los Angeles at a place called Soldiers of Pole. They went out being women. They went out on International Women's Day March 8, and their story is a story of the continual war of labor and capital. Here's how it they were considered independent contractors, consultants, things like that in that so called gig economy. That was a ploy so employers wouldn't have to offer them benefits and protections of the sort that are written into law for workers who are regular employees. But then there was a case brought and decided by the Supreme Court in California early last year and that said you can't do that anymore, that employers really can't evade their obligations to employees simply by using a category to escape those legitimate obligations. Okay, so now the strippers were regular employees and they quickly discovered that their employer was now playing around with the hours and the timing, basically trying to do to them as employers what had before been done to them as independent contractors, proving again that whatever the legal arrangements are and whatever reforms are passed, that war is never over and they're just always looking for other ways to get the same outcome. The next update has to do with an embarrassment for President Trump. Turns out that the deficit in the trade between the United States and the rest of the world reached a new record here after two years during which Mr. Trump has been telling us all of the great strides he's made in preventing us from buying stuff abroad and having it produced instead here, no success at all. Failure, failure. And to drive the point home, failure. What's at this the lesson here that Mr. Trump isn't good at what he does. Well, you don't need me to point that out. Let me make the bigger presidents don't have enough power no matter what they do. Capitalism is a system that has its own ways of working. And mostly what presidents do is diddle around the edges, but they can't change the basic logic and the basic thrust of this system. That's the lesson that's important here. Just to give you an example, you can make all the theatrical announcements you want about bringing manufacturing back, but as long as the wages are lower in the rest of the world than in the United States, which they have been, although that's changing, but they have been. And that's where capitalists go, where the wages are lowest. That's the same message as the strippers are learning and teaching us in Los Angeles. Likewise, because the rest of the world is facing real threats to the existing capitalism there. Wealthy people around the world are afraid and they move their money to New York and to the United States for safekeeping. And that drives up the value of the dollar and that makes it easier for foreigners to sell their goods here because the value of the other currency is less if the value of the dollar goes up. That's the way international trade, trade works. The very success of Mr. Trump in making America super safe for capitalists and wealthy people undermines what he's trying to do in terms of the trade. And the end result is we have the biggest deficit in the history of the United States after two years of a regime of a president who promised to do the other. And then there's the UN report published by the Human Rights Council of the United Nations. Their chief, Michel Bachelet, a Latin American leader, has made the simple argument that the level of inequality in the world today is producing protest uprising on a new scale that has been met by governments using repression. And she particularly cites in her report Sudan, Israel and France with the repression of the government of France against the Yellow vests, something we've talked about on this program. It caught my eye that just as the inequality was producing repression and all of that kind of tension, we also had the announcement that the most expensive car ever sold changed hands in this last month. It's a Bugatti, which was sold for $11 million. An illustration of inequality if you actually need it. The next update has to do with the city of Lordstown, Ohio, where the General Motors plant that has existed there for many, many years finally closed its doors, dumping yet another large group of working people into unemployment, plunging the city of Lordstown into God knows what kind of cutbacks in public services and depression. Back in the 1970s, General Motors reached an all time high employment of 618,000 employees. Today it has 103,000. From 618,000 to 103, a tiny group of people, the boys of directors of General Motors, made the decisions that deprived half a million workers over these years of their jobs, their incomes, their pensions, their futures. It's extraordinary. The real wage that is the money paid to auto workers today, adjusted for inflation, is lower than what it was 15 and 20 years ago, that's what the automobile companies didto make money abroad to move their factories around the United States to get away from the rules and regulations, to save on wages. They made money at the expense of literally millions of family members in this country. And you all should understand it and think about what that means. And then there was a decision of the Trump administration and the Federal Reserve a couple of weeks ago to, to reduce banking regulation. That took my breath away. We've had 10 years during which first the banks went bankrupt in 2008 because of the fancy gimmicks, asset backed securities and credit default swaps. You remember the language when they mishandled the world's credit system and we all collapsed. Then we had 10 years in which the big banks literally did every illegal and unethical thing imaginable. They manipulated interest rates, the Libor scandal, they got caught manipulating foreign exchange rates, they got caught charging people for fees they shouldn't have. They got caught mismanaging the mortgage crisis, you name it. Oh, I forgot, laundering criminal money. Shouldn't forget that. They got caught. They paid billions in fines. After a record 10 years like that, the logical thing is to give them less regulation. I told you it'd take your breath away. But that's what we have. You know, Mr. Obama didn't do much for banking regulation. He got through the namby pamby Dodd Frank bill which didn't regulate much, and Mr. Trump is reducing that too. It's interesting if you look at the Trump administration, the new budget has an enormous increase for the military and this deregulation, that's an enormous good thing for the banks. And the tax cut of December 2017, that's an enormously good thing for employers everywhere. As the corporate tax got slashed, he may not be able to solve our trade problems. He may not be able to give you a job, he may not be able to give you a decent income. He may not be able to help your kids with their college education. But taking care of the military, the banks and corporations is very good at that. And that's something else you ought to think about when you think about this government. Oh, and I left one thing out. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced that it's relaxing the rules governing payday lenders also. Oh, how charming. While you're helping the military, the banks and the corporations, and while you're reducing the control over the banks, you, you're relieving the payday lenders. You know, the people who charge workers who've got too much month at the end of the money, extraordinary levels of interest to get a little bit of help. Wow, what a government. Whatever that means. It all adds up to making America great again, don't you think? We've come to the end of the first half of Economic Update. I want to thank you all. I want to ask you, and please to remember, subscribe to us on our YouTube channel. It's an easy way to be supportive of us. It's a simple click for you, no cost at all. Make use of our democracyatwork.info and rdwolff with 2F's.com. those websites allow you to communicate directly with us through email and with a click to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Finally, of course, as always, our thanks to the Patreon community whose support, whose encouragement and whose partnership with us in bringing these messages to a larger community are enormously appreciated. Stay with us. We have an excellent interview. We'll be right back. I would like to take a brief moment to tell you about my latest book. It's called Understanding Marxism. Marx was a social critic who identified capitalism as not an end of human history, but rather merely the latest phase of human history, which, as we now see, needs a transition to something better. You can get your copy of Understanding Marxism Today by Simply going to lulu.com that's l u l u.com and searching for understanding Marxism by me, Richard D. Wolff. We are also very proud that this book is the first one published by our group, Democracy at Work, and we're proud to be able to bring it to you at this time. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic update. We're going to be continuing our theme about the endless war between employers and employees and what it means and how it works. And we're going to do that with my guest. He's been a guest on Economic Update before. He's a reporter by the name of Bob Henley. So it's a pleasure to welcome you back.