← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Loading summary
Transcript44 lines
- [00:00]
A
Sam. Sa. Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Incomes, jobs, debts, all those kinds of things that present themselves to us, to our children, the ones that we see now and the ones that we have a sense are coming down the road. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and that has prepared me to present this kind of program to you each week. Let me begin quickly with a few announcements. If you are interested in supporting this program, please make use of the services of patreon.com p a t r e o-n.com if you are interested in the work that we do that's above and beyond this program, take a look at our websites, rdwolf, with two f's. Com and democracy at work, all one word, democracyatwork.info those websites are available to you without any charge 24. 7. They allow you to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, to communicate to us what you like and don't like about the program, what you would like to see us do, and things like that. And above all, it's a resource for you. It's a way for you to partner with us in an ongoing way. We upload all kinds of materials that supplement what this program does, all of it to make it possible for you to better understand what's going on in the economy and to share that with other people. And finally, we are now represented by a speaker bureau. It's called Speak Out Now. All one word. Speak out now. They handle my speaking engagements. And if you're interested in bringing me to wherever you are, they're the folks to get in touch with. Just write to them by email. Infoakoutnow.org Good. Let's turn now to the economic updates. I want to begin by talking to you about golf courses. Why golf courses? Well, it turns out they have an enormous economic impact in our society of a sort that everyone ought to understand. Let's begin with Los Angeles. Because of the recent work of Malcolm Gladwell and others, it has come to be understood what an enormous economic burden golf courses are. Let me explain. A relatively small percentage of the population plays on golf courses. And golf courses, as you know, take up an enormous amount of land and in places where water is scarce, an enormous amount of water. Well, it turns out that wealthy people in particular like golf courses and have made sure, through their wealth and power that comes from it, to allow the golf courses to do all kinds of things, use up an enormous amount of land, use up an enormous amount of water, get themselves exempted from environmental rules that shape the quality of the air we breathe, and so on. The result is, for example, in a place like Los Angeles or many other parts of the United States, that by using land in an area for a golf course, you make an enormous amount of land unavailable for other uses. For example, housing. If you want to know why the rents are high in many parts of the United States, part of the reason is you can't build rental properties on vast areas of communities that have been set aside for golf courses. The reason I bring it up is two things. First, it's a wonderful lesson in why markets are. Are not what they claim to be. There is no free market in land or in rental units because if it were free, then there wouldn't be the government stepping in to give all the benefits to landholders. To take huge parts of a community's land out of availability for housing, to get special tax treatment, which is often given to get special exemptions. All of the things that make a golf course function that way would be more difficult if they weren't supported by the government. So the price of your home, the rental you pay, is in part shaped by the ability of wealthy people to get the government to give them those golf courses where they want them, convenient. Otherwise, they'd have to go to some land that wasn't relevant to a community further out, for example, and have their golf courses at a remove. That would be a burden on those who use the golf courses, but not the burden on everybody else that they now are. I was reminded when I researched this little story about some work I did a few years ago when I lived in New Haven, Connecticut. I served there on what was called the New Haven Revenue Commission, an official body looking into the relationship between Yale University and the city, a relationship that is, to be polite, a rip off of the city by the university. Nothing illustrated this better than the hearings we had on the Yale golf course. Turns out the Yale golf course is right inside the city of New Haven, taking up an enormous amount of land in that city which could otherwise be generating income for the city if it were used for industry or commerce or residences. If there were rental properties there, the rent would go down because there'd be an extra supply of housing relative to an unchanged demand for it on the part of people. You get the picture. Yale enjoyed having that course. And when we, the commissioners, asked Yale the question, well, what do you get from this? We don't see the educational purpose because it turned out they didn't teach courses in playing golf, and they didn't teach courses in how to maintain a golf course. That's not what Yale thinks of itself as doing. And they admitted on the stand, when we asked them questions, that the point and purpose of the golf course was to have rich people come up to New Haven, usually from New York, and play golf while they visited. It was a fundraiser, but it took many acres of land from the city of New Haven, a city of 120,000 people whose rents, whose taxes were all less. And this was the best part. Yale refused to pay taxes, which it is exempted from, as universities are. So not only was the land withdrawn, not only was the ability to have commerce and residences restricted for the people of New Haven, but they wouldn't even pay taxes on it. Which commercial and industrial and residential properties would have had to. The city lost 12 different ways. For what? To convenience the richest people in this country, taking a trip from New York or Boston to New Haven and playing a few rounds of golf. The undemocratic nature of this, like the critique of the notion of a free market in things like land and rental properties, is, Is too obvious to ignore. There's a lesson in all of this, that we don't have a democratic system for choosing how to use the property we have. And that's something we ought to think about. I want to turn next to Bernie Sanders and drugs. No, not that he uses them, as far as I know, but he is interested, as are other senators. He's not the only one, in the prices of drugs that we pay. They are the highest prices in the world, just like we as a nation pay more for our medical care than any other people on this planet as a share of our national wealth. Well, it turns out that earlier this year, Bernie Sanders, together with Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, introduced a bill, a budget amendment in that case, which had a basic purpose and they've been working on it ever since. The purpose is to allow American citizens to buy drugs from Canada. Let me explain. Canada has a National Health Service single payer program. Canada operates, as we all know, in different ways from that of the United States. And one result of how they manage their health care is that the prices of drugs identical to those here in the United States cost much, much less. So Americans, not surprisingly, have decided they would like to be able to buy the drugs from Canada and pay a lower price than what they are charged here. This has gotten the drug companies into a tither. They want us to continue to pay much higher prices for our medicines than other people like Canadians do. And so they have blocked in every way they know how the passage of bills or amendments such as those championed by Bernie Sanders that would allow Americans. It has gotten other American politicians enraged too, not just those of us who are critics. I like particularly the comments made by Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, who was a candidate for president. He said, what's this stuff about Canadian medicine being unsafe? First of all, it's a slur on the Canadians. What are you saying? That the people and the government of Canada don't take care of their people to prevent them being exposed to dangerous drugs. What a statement to make about our neighbor. And then he got more colorful and he asked, my first response to that is, show me the dead Canadians. I'm quoting here. Where are the dead Canadians? His point was, if it's unsafe, these drugs in Canada, where is the evidence that people there have gotten sick or died from dangerous drugs? There is no evidence because of course, it has nothing to do with that. This is a way of maintaining profits for our drug companies, which are among the highest of drug companies in the world and of any other company in the United States. Drug company profits are stunning. And as if you needed me to add to this, it is also the case, and this is a quote from the International Business Times a couple of weeks ago. Campaign spending by the pharmaceutical industry is, I'm quoting from the newspaper here, quote, skyrocketing donations from pharmaceutical political action committees are up 11% as compared with 2015. And donations to ranking members of health related committees in the Congress have risen by 80% from two years ago. Amazing. The buying of politicians and the lesson here, the message for us here has to do with what it means to allow wealthy companies to become, in effect, monopoly sellers of what they produce by excluding everybody else, in this case excluding the Canadians from selling to Americans the identical safe medicine from what they would buy here. By the way, the law in this country which currently prevents us from buying drugs from other countries does not prevent drug companies in the United States from buying drugs outside and from buying components of drugs outside. That's why years ago, the Food and Drug Administration has in place procedures today to check for the safety of all medicines because of their foreign components. So we have in place what will enable us to allow Americans to buy cheaper Canadian drugs. It's just profit for a few at the expense of the budgets of the many. There's a message in here I don't want anyone to miss. The next item is short and sweet. I Hope. The Congress of the United States, goaded by the Trump administration, is about to consider dealing with the corporate tax rate. And a great deal of nonsense is being spoken about the need to cut the taxes on corporations. Here's how the argument the current tax rate on Corporate profits of 35% is higher than that in most other countries of the world. That's true. That's correct. It's just not relevant. Why? Because the proper comparison of the tax rate on corporations in this country and elsewhere is not to use what's called the statutory rate, the official rate, because that's not what corporations actually pay. They are allowed all kinds of deductions, all kinds of adjustments. And when you take into account the deductions and adjustments, both for American companies working here and for foreign companies in their home countries, the United States effective tax rate for corporations, not the statutory formal one, but the effective one, what they actually pay, is in the neighborhood of 14%, not 35%. And then the United States, when you compare the effective tax rates, is nowhere near the top in the world. It's all bogus propaganda to try to get another tax cut. By the way, over recent years, tax cuts on corporations have allowed corporate profits after taxes to rise spectacularly. They don't need it. They've already benefited from it. This is a lesson in profit grabbing, in using the power of your business to control the politics to give you yet another benefit on top of all of those you've purchased before. And as if to drive this home, let me turn to the same lesson from another source. The New York Times recently reported on the product, a famous product of the Monsanto chemical company, the weed killer called Roundup. Very famous, widely used, it is a source of enormous controversy because Roundup is thought to be a very dangerous pesticide with serious health consequences. It turns out, according to the New York Times, that Monsanto not only produces this, but tries to muddy the water in terms of what people understand about the health benefits. And it got caught funding the academic research professors it found, who in exchange for all kinds of financial assistance, let's call it published research in reputable journals questioning the medical health impacts of that drug. And as usual, that has delayed or undone controls on the use of Roundup, which is dangerous for our health. Once again, I'm not a scientist. I'm not weighing in on what's right and what's wrong. But here's what I know is wrong. To allow a private company that profits off making something to be in the business of sponsoring scientific research is asking for Corruption, It's a crazy way to organize a society. Professors are not supposed to do that. And if they do accept money, they're supposed to make that very clear so people can take that into account in evaluating what they've done. And what the New York Times exposed was Monsanto taking advantage of the fuzziness here. And that's at risk of our health. The last update I have time for is deserves a little bit more attention. So I've left the time to do that. I call this the economics of scapegoating Immigrants. Here's the way this works and I'm going to use examples from the United States and from Germany, two countries that are guilty of scapegoating immigrants. Why does that happen? Well, usually it happens because politicians get into difficulty because the economy isn't going well and they get blamed for that, rightly or wrongly, or they think their careers can get a boost. So what politicians do, with or without the support of the business community, sometimes they get the support, sometimes they don't. But however that plays out for the politician, an advantage is found in blaming immigrants for whatever is wrong in this society and then positioning yourself as the great champion to stop the immigrants whom you've demonized from doing the bad things they're doing to the economy. So let me give you the relevant examples. Two of the richest countries on this planet, the United States and Germany, have leaders these days who are advantaging their own political fortunes by scapegoating immigrants. I don't have to document what President Trump is doing. He's been a very good promoter of what he's doing. He has said things about Mexicans and Muslim immigrants that I won't repeat. You all know it anyway. And he has declared that somehow solving our economic problems is going to become easy because it's all about immigrants and we're just not going to tolerate the immigrants, et cetera, et cetera. You may not know so much because it hasn't gotten the same attention, but that Angela Merkel in Germany plays pretty much the same game. When first the crises in the Middle east and elsewhere began bringing large numbers of immigrants from the Middle east, particular places, particularly places like Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan, Asian and Middle Eastern countries when they began coming in large numbers, Ms. Merkel, who presides over the most prosperous European economy these days, Germany saw another chance to bring low paid, low wage workers into the frame of of German industry. And she welcomed the immigrants with all kinds of good sounding phrases about solidarity, charity, compassion and all those kinds of words. Then the people Inside Germany got upset, understanding that if you bring large numbers of low paid, impoverished immigrants desperate for work, your business community is going to take advantage of that by lowering wages, hiring immigrants instead of native born workers. This is a very old story and the German working class was smart enough to figure it out. And they let Ms. Merkel know they were not pleased with what was going on here. So Merkel, seeing that there might be a political cost to immigration, turned around and positioned herself, like Trump, as the great stopper of immigration. 180 degrees switcheroo. In 2015, the number of immigrants allowed into Germany, 900,000. In 2016, the last complete year, that was reduced to 280,000. An unbelievable shutting down of the German border. Let's take a look, particularly at the German example. Immigration into Germany is a result especially of two the relative wealth of Germany relative to the poverty in the places from which the immigrants come. And number two, the war going on all over the Middle east, but particularly in places like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. But the Germans are not some innocent victim of immigrants. The Germans are participating in those wars. The Germans building their economies around those wars, commissioning and contributing troops and equipment and ships to those wars. Either as a Germany alone or as a member of NATO. The Germans are part of the problem of bombs falling in areas where people make the unusually obvious decision, time to take my family and get out of here, because it's too dangerous to live even without the war. The gap between the wealth of Germany on the one hand and the poverty on the other, of people in the Middle East a few hours by train from Germany has always meant and always will mean that people who want a better economic life for their families and themselves and what they can get where they are, will move to where the chances are better. But again, Germany is not innocent. Germany has done many, many things over a century and a half to concentrate wealth and growth inside its border and to take the raw materials and the food from the rest of the world to make all that possible. Germany had a big empire in Asia and Africa. And even after they lost the empire, they continued to have economic relationships that were very good for Germany, not so for the countries from which they took a large part of their wealth. So they're not innocent. The uneven development of capitalism that makes Western Europe rich and Asia and Africa poor is a product as much of German decisions and German business as it is of anything else. They are reaping what they sowed. Immigration is a response to an uneven capitalism punctuated by war. And the United States is Not so different. Once again, the United States is the major shaper of the economics and politics of the Western Hemisphere. If the United States is very rich and all the countries from which immigrants come in Latin America are poor, the notion that the United States has nothing to do about that, no responsibility there, that's only believed by people who don't want to face what the reality is. If you make the people on your borders very poor, if you leave them very little of the production of wealth you achieve, you really can't be surprised if they start moving from the poverty they've known to the chance for a better life. The history of the United States is that process repeated over and over again from every corner of of the globe. And now here's the punchline of this story. When we say, as many of us do, that immigration makes a country rich and powerful. The United States is the obvious example. Letting immigrants come here for the last hundred and fifty years and longer, from all parts of the world, has been an important contributor to the wealth and power achieved in the United States. Why in the world would you want that to stop? But even if you do, the arguments for it make no sense. Is it possible to welcome immigrants in such a way that they don't cause the wages of native workers to go down, that they don't represent a threat to the job security of people already here? The answer is so obvious that I'm tempted to simply say of course. But I know that in the environment we live in, I have to explain here is one solution. Put a tax on the richest people in America, those who have become much richer in the last 30 years, those who can afford it most easily because it won't change their lifestyle one iota and take that money and provide genuine full employment. And in the United States, for those born here and for those coming, make the arrival of immigrants a moment when you really provide jobs to everybody, then the native workers will not feel threatened. They will welcome the immigrants as the source of creativity and diversity that they've always been. Because you will have taken away the competition among workers, native and immigrant. That has always been the root of the problem. If you care, that's a solution. By the way, as a hint to Americans beginning to care, let me give a shout out to Mayor de Blasio of New York City. He's just proposed a tax on the wealthy, very small, to rebuild the subway system that millions of New Yorkers rely on. That's right. Go to where the money is, where taking it will make the least impact on the few who are affected in order to improve the lives of the many. That's the lesson here. Stop beating up on the immigrants. It's the wrong target, it's not the problem you face. And a better solution is available if you just face where the wealth has to come from to do it, which it should have been taken long ago. Important lesson these days when demonizing and scapegoating immigrants is another shameful page of we don't really need to turn We've come to the end of the first half of Economic Update. Thank you for being with us. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Come gather round people wherever you roam.
- [29:07]
B
And admit that the waters around you.
- [29:11]
A
Have grown and accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone. If your time to you is worth.
- [29:21]
B
Saving then you better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone or the times are changing.
- [29:39]
A
I'm writers and critics who privatize with.
- [29:42]
B
Your pen and keep your eyes wide the chance won't come again and don't speak too soon for the wheel still in spin and there's no telling who that it's naming.
- [30:00]
A
Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. I want to introduce two folks. They're friends of mine, but they're people who are here for a different reason. First of all, they're co authors of a book that I want you to take a look at. I'm holding it in my hands. They are Jorg Rieger and Rosemary Henkel Rieger. They are both from Nashville, Tennessee, and they are both people engaged in the world of faith, of religious faith, and the world of economic and political activism. They combine the two because they think they go together and we're going to be talking about that. So let me begin by introducing them each individually and then we'll commence our conversation. Joerg Rieger is a distinguished professor of Theology at Vanderbilt University, where he holds a named chair. His work reflects on the misuse of power in religion, politics, and economics. His main interest is in movements that bring about transformation and in the positive contributions of religion and theology. He's the author and editor of more than 20 books translated in six languages and over 135 articles. With him today is Rosemarie Henkel Rieger. She is a lecturer, author, and consultant. She is the founder of the Texas New Era center, affiliated with Jobs for Justice. She's working in Nashville, where she lives on taking the initial steps to incubating worker owned cooperatives, teaches a class on cooperatives at a local university, and is working in low income communities to see whether and how worker co ops can be an engine for economic growth, development and greater equality. She's passionate about what she does, as Jorg is as well. So it's a pleasure to welcome both of them to the program. Thank you very much for coming up from Tennessee to be with us here.
- [32:24]
C
It's great to be here. Thanks for having us.
- [32:26]
A
Oh, it's my pleasure.
- [32:27]
B
Thanks for having us.
- [32:29]
A
Let me start with what I introduced you with, both of you, and that is a question. You are part of what is sometimes called in the United States a faith community. That is you take religion seriously, you take your faith seriously, and yet you are also concerned in an ongoing way about the conditions of working people. You recognize that they leave a lot to be desired in our culture and you want to change them. How do you come to put those two things together? How did they come to be joint commitments or passions?
- [33:06]
C
So I was raised in religious communities. I grew up as a Methodist in Germany, of all places, which is strange. Came to the United States, became a theologian. So I'm working on topics of religion. And there's always two sides to everything. So if you look at religion, of course, you see on the one hand, religion sometimes is part of the problem, but religion often is also part of the solution. And so for me, what's intriguing is there's some resources there in religion. There are some traditions, there's some concern for justice, there's some real passion, there's some real action that's coming out of religious communities. And while I'm a Christian, if you look at the other Abrahamic traditions, you know, Judaism, Islam, there is a lot of passion there that goes in the same direction. Equality is important. Fighting inequality is important. And those are not just ideas. You know, they're stories, they're alliances, affiliations. And so solidarity has been a reality. Sometimes that's lost. But there's also situations and cases where we can recover that.
- [34:16]
A
I was wondering. Let me turn to you, Rosemary, and ask you. In the United States, I think it's fair to say, but please correct me if you disagree, that most of the time when we hear about the relationship between religious commitment and faith on the one hand, and politics and economics, we get a message that suggests at least to some of us that religious folks are more on the right than they are on the left, that they are more part of a conservative community and political persuasion. President Trump, for example, likes to boast that he has captured Christian communities, or at least the evangelical Christians. Tell me how you see that or whether you see it in that way, or whether you see it more the way Jorg suggested as a contested terrain, religion, Christianity, even evangelicalism. How does it play in your mind? How do you see it? Yeah.
- [35:20]
B
So while I'm not a person of faith myself, but working with Jorg, living with Jorg, my experiences, just like Woody said, that there are these pockets of resistance, you know, within a lot of communities and within the faith communities, and not just small pockets. So our experience in Dallas, and that's what the book is based on, our work there is. We did find people in the faith communities, various faith communities that were interested in supporting workers and their fight for justice. And so I've made the experience that there are. It's not just one or the other.
- [36:06]
A
And so would you support the conclusion that the faith community, broadly understood, is itself divided the way so many other communities in our culture are, between those who want to hold on to the way things are and those that want change?
- [36:23]
B
Oh, yeah, definitely. I think that is the case.
- [36:26]
C
It seems that is the big issue. What surprises me is that one side of the story is not getting the reports. So we get the side of the right, we get the side that President Trump is talking about, but we're not as clear about the alternatives and the actual work that's being done. A couple of years ago, when we had the Occupy Wall street movement all over the country, a friend of mine wrote a book, Occupy Religion, and we talked about the actual effects of religion on Occupy Wall street and what Occupy Wall street was doing for religion. And there's a lot. There was a lot going on, but already at that time, we could see that that was not reported on television. This is something that happened without anybody, or not many people anyways, knowing about it.
- [37:15]
B
And there's a long tradition, right? Weren't there these movements in Oklahoma and these camp movements at the turn of the century?
- [37:24]
C
So this is a crazy story, right? We spent the past 22 years working in Dallas, Texas. I taught at SMU. Now we're at Vanderbilt in Nashville. And while in Texas, I did some research. About a hundred Years ago, early 1900s, they had Camp meetings in North Texas, southeastern Oklahoma. Religious camp meetings. Not a surprise to anyone. But the surprising thing is these camp meetings would bring together religious socialists. So they had 10,000 religious socialists, 1900 and maybe 11 or 12 in northeastern Texas, southeastern Oklahoma, getting together, being inspired. That's part of the tradition that nobody remembers, Right.
- [38:09]
A
I remember learning also when I was doing some research years ago, that in the early history of the Socialist Party here in the United States. It had an enormous number of ministers, particularly Protestant ministers, but other denominations too, for whom nothing seemed more normal and natural than their commitment to the church as a minister and their commitment to socialism as a better way to organize a society struck them as the most unremarkable sort of thing to flow directly out of how they read and understood the Bible. And we're talking thousands of people and a little known detail. One of the states in which the American Socialist Party was the strongest in America was Oklahoma, which for people today might be hard to understand. I want to turn to one of the concepts in your book, by the way, Unified we are a force. Jorg and Rosemary Rieger. This notion of wage depression is something that concerns you, that you're interested in. Tell us what it means to you and why you have focused on it.
- [39:16]
B
Right. So when I think about wage depression, I think about this graph, and I'm sure you and a lot of people have seen it before. It went around a couple years ago, and it looked at the productivity of workers over time, and it also looked at worker wages over time. And what the, the graph shows nicely is that from the end of World War II until about the 1970s, that productivity goes up and worker wages go up kind of lockstep. And then in the 70s, productivity continues to increase. So workers are working hard, right, and producing, but their wages stall out and they just stagnate. And that's happening until today. And so when we think of wage depression, we're talking about that, how workers wages haven't increased, and it's a form of wage theft, basically. You know, a lot of people are familiar with wage theft when, you know, workers don't get paid for the job they've done. But this wage depression is really going over time and where wages aren't increasing and workers are suffering.
- [40:38]
C
What we're finding with that is this is at the core of this growing inequality that everybody's talking about. So this is not news to anyone, right, that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, so is the middle class. So this inequality in wages ultimately is happening not just to poor people, it's happening to a lot of us. If you use Occupy Wall street language, it might be happening to the 99%, everybody who has to work for a living. And so the religious component of that is, as I said earlier, there's growing inequality. Many faith traditions, you know, not only the ones I mentioned, but others are worried about inequality. People are worried about inequality, faith or no faith. And so the question then is why is it happening and what we can do about it. But inequality, I think, is the real key. This is the subtitle of the book, How Faith and Labor Can Overcome America's Inequalities. And here's a number too. Today, the 1% control about 40 plus percent of the wealth of the community in the United States. That's well known. A lot of people do not know that the Roman Empire, these numbers were actually very different. Now people might think perhaps it was worse in the Roman Empire because today we're not, you know, this ancient empire anymore. The reality is the Roman Empire was more equal than the United States of today because in the year 150 CE, top 1% controlled about 16% of all wealth. Today, the top 1% in the United States controls 40% of all wealth. So this inequality here is really something that's remarkable and that all of us people of faith and of no faith should be concerned about.
- [42:34]
A
I want to turn to another topic you touch in the book, this concept you use of the working poor. I assume you mean by that to teach your readers and all of us that a very large percentage of the people today that are having trouble with their economic survival, the poor, are not people who aren't working, but are in fact, people who are working. Now, clearly a person with no job at all is in deeper trouble than a person who at least has one. But it is important to understand, and I think that's your point, that much of the problem of poverty and inequality is not about people who are excluded from a job, but from people who are, in fact made to work by their conditions but earn a quantity of money with which you cannot make a life. So tell me a little bit about your interest in working poor.
- [43:31]
B
Right. So what we're seeing in Nashville now, and some people have done studies in the area, that there are a growing number of people who are working, you know, more than half the year, more than 27 weeks, and they're either working or looking for work actively, and they can't make ends meet. I think the number right now is you need about three low wage jobs to afford, you know, a regular apartment. And so, you know, how can you live if you already need three jobs, you know, to have an apartment? So these are just some of the things that people are facing. And it's not just in Nashville and it's similar. The situation was similar in Dallas, but, you know, it's all over the country that people are working hard and they just can't survive.
- [44:24]
A
Tell Me a little bit, if you can, based perhaps on your experience in Nashville. Are the people facing these conditions able to understand why they're in those conditions? What is the sense people have of why this is happening to them? Do they blame themselves? Do they believe this is part of God's plan? And particularly I'm thinking here of folks involved in religious life. How do they understand the situation you've just described so well?
- [44:56]
C
You know, this blaming thing is very interesting because I've seen many religious people blaming the poor themselves, the working poor, the themselves. The reality is, though, not only are they working, they're sometimes working harder than anyone else because they're working a job, two jobs, you know, two and a half jobs, and they're still not able to make ends meet. So these poor working people, we've done quite a bit of work with people working at Walmart who are working at Walmart and additional jobs, and they're not able to make ends meet.
- [45:31]
A
Correct.
- [45:31]
C
Construction workers, similar stories. And so the blaming thing very often times comes from people who do not know this world, but somebody in the world itself would realize, you know, they're not lazy working people. Poor working people are working as hard as ever, maybe harder than ever before, and they're not able to make ends meet. So this raises the question, what's really going on here, this discrepancy between productivity and wages? Who is actually making that money? Where is it going?
- [46:03]
A
Yeah, let me explain for anyone in the audience who doesn't follow the word. Productivity simply is a measure of how much stuff an hour of a human being's labor produces. If productivity goes up, it means that the worker is either more skilled and more educated and. Or has more machinery to work with, or. Andor is just applying himself or herself more intensely. And so more wealth is being produced in each hour of her or his life. When Rosemarie said correctly, from the end of the war to the 70s, productivity went up and wages went up. That's a nice way of saying the extra wealth a worker produced per hour came back in part to him or her as a rising wage. They got a piece of the extra they were producing. If wages are flat, which they have been since the 70s and the productivity goes up, it means all the extra the worker produces each year is not coming back to him or to her. It's going to somebody else. And you're of course right, it goes to the rich, the ones who own the businesses, who run the businesses. Which is why the gap between rich and poor has been. Let me pick up on that. As a religious person, how do you interact with people who suffer wage depression, who are caught up in this inequality, who have no way to deal with the problems that they face economically? What do you say to them? What do you do with them? What kind of activism does your commitment to be critical of inequality, to overcome it, where does that take you? What are you doing?
- [47:50]
B
So one of the things we've done in Dallas and that we started also in Nashville, is to hold a meeting open to the public, and a worker Rights board hearing is what we call it. It's something Jobs with justice has done all over the nation, and we've picked it up in Dallas. And that gives. So we give workers an opportunity to tell their story to the community and to educate people on, you know, what's going on. Why are, you know, why are Walmart workers not able to make ends meet, or construction workers or others? We've even had, you know, people from organized labor speak. And so that's one thing we've done to just to educate people about what's going on. And when they hear stories from, you know, from workers themselves, it's different than, you know, if they hear it from us.
- [48:48]
A
Is this working? I mean, do you get people to come to these meetings, to participate in an ongoing way? In other words, is this an effective way to begin to build change?
- [49:00]
B
I think it is. It's an effective way to get dialogue going. We also invite people, community leaders from city hall or our state leaders to come and hear these stories because oftentimes our elected officials don't really know what's going on. So we think it is an effective way.
- [49:23]
C
And the faith part of that is the question, what role are you playing in that story? Oftentimes these workers are not ever given credit for playing a role in any story. So here, first of all, we're telling the story, or they're telling their story, what difference they're making in the world. The fact that there is production is actually based with the workers. Somebody who produces is a working person, somebody who manages has a role, too. But it's the workers who ultimately make that difference. To hear those stories, to hear some of the struggles that they're going through, to take that seriously. And we've done a lot of this work in the South. So we talk about Dallas, we talk about Nashville. There are other places. But a lot of the working people that we're working with are people of faith. And so for them to see that what they're talking about, what they're experiencing in the bulk of their waking hours has to do with their faith is something that's pretty powerful because they realize they actually matter. You know, they play a role. They play a role in the world. They matter to God. Now here comes a theological piece. This may be surprising because when people then think about God, you know, what do people have in mind? How do people envision God? In the ancient world, God was oftentimes envisioned in terms of a ruler, right. A king, a lord, an emperor. Today, you know, when you think of God, people think of God maybe as a powerful person, perhaps a CEO even. But do you ever think of God as a worker? Now, those things we are discussing with working people, and for them, it's not that hard to see that God may actually be more like a worker than.
- [51:04]
A
A CEO, maybe a carpenter.
- [51:07]
C
There's the Jesus story, right? So this is something that should be fairly easy to understand for Christians, even though it takes a little time to interpret. But this is why, you know, these Christians in Oklahoma that you mentioned earlier, for them, it was very natural to understand that Christianity might be related to socialism. Why? Well, because this is something that their sacred books talk about. But take it back one step further. There's the old story of the Exodus, right? This is the Hebrews, the Hebrew slaves in Egypt. And then you have the pharaoh and you have Moses. Now, these stories are in common to Christians, Jews and Muslims. And what's so amazing here is that God takes the side of the working persons. You know, God is the one who not only liberates, but, you know, is active in production, you know, later on, you know, finding a way of life that's more egalitarian. No longer slavery, you know, those things are stories that are part of people's legacies, people's heritage. And we don't have to bring this to them. They're already there. And all we have to do is, you know, help them see what's already there and make use of that for sort of a positive change in their own lives and in the communities.
- [52:23]
A
Yeah. I'm struck in listening to you that for many years in many parts of the world, a worker in a capitalist enterprise was referred to as a wage slave, someone who's enslaved to the wage system. If you actually took that literally, then you might be celebrating a religion that was formed out of a protest against slavery. Well, then it becomes logical to be protesting against wage slavery, too. So am I hearing you right, that the religious community could be, even if it isn't right now, but it could be a major partner of Contributor to a movement for basic economic and political change in the United States. Exactly.
- [53:11]
C
That's what we're talking about. Now, we're not idealists in the sense of thinking about what could be and what isn't. We're actually seeing some of that going on around the country. You know, there are some organizations of religion and labor working together. We were part of that. We are still part of it. So some of it is happening. A lot of it is out there, especially with the working people themselves. It's just the fault of a lot of the religious communities and the mainline religious communities especially, that they're not picking up on that. They're still seeing God somewhere up in the sky, you know, or in the skyscrapers or in the big steeples. Perhaps they're not paying attention to what's already happening all around them. So for us, the exciting thing is not only what could be, but what's sort of already brewing and what resources are there and what's keeping people alive. I mean, how is a working person who is doing all this work, working two and a half jobs at a time, even surviving, oftentimes is their faith. And that also then gives them the stamina to ask some of the questions that we are asking here.
- [54:17]
A
Are you hopeful? Do you feel that the change is happening in such a way that you look to the future as a possible moment of change here for us talking today?
- [54:34]
B
I think so. I think, you know, if you look the way capitalism is going, it looks like it's, you know, on the downside. And our view is that it can't be sustained over time. So I think things are, you know, it's not a good situation now. Things are looking bad for a lot of worker working people, but it can't stay like this. So in terms of a long view, I think it'll change.
- [55:06]
A
And you feel hopeful that your perspective that makes you think about religion as a force for positive social change, you can see that coming. You have a sense of it already, I think, as you put it earlier, underway in some sense.
- [55:25]
C
I think we could give you a lot of examples for that. But at the same time, you know, this is the sort of hope that's not the easy hope where you sort of think, we'll be fine in a few years because we're also very worried about where the system is heading. We are realizing that what's going on here is not natural. This is not a natural catastrophe. What's happening to working people. In Dallas, Texas, we had a number of 38, 39% of children living in poverty. So more than a third of children living in poverty, most of their parents are working. So this is the next generation growing up. And when that happens, what happens to the country? So in a way, we're quite worried. We're certainly worried about the next economic crash. I once wrote a book titled no Rising Tide that was published during the Great Recession, you know, that we were all living through. And people say, well, the tide's always rising. Well, of course we know the tide's rising, but for whom is the tide rising? So no Rising Tide wasn't saying there's never going to be a rising tide again, but it's actually helping fewer and fewer people. So this is the worry. But in order to make it happen, like Rosemary says, ultimately we're cautiously hopeful. You have to stare the trouble in the face and you have to address it head on, because it's not going to happen by itself. It will not resolve itself easily.
- [56:51]
A
So for you, the religious commitment and the activist commitment go together.
- [56:58]
C
I think that's what we're talking about. So even some of the old language people talk about discipleship a lot in the churches. What is discipleship? I'll take it back to Jesus. Discipleship is organizing, organizing people to work for a better world. This is the sort of thing that certainly you can see in religious communities, you can see it happening outside of religious communities. So for us, this is not either religion or not. But how can we do this together? What difference can we make?
- [57:26]
A
Thank you, Jorg. Thank you, Rosemary. I wish we had more time. Their book again is Unified We Are a Force. So this is Richard Wolff. We've come to the end of the program. I want to thank all of you, our partners@truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis, and I look forward to speaking with you again. Sam.