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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, our jobs, our incomes, our debts, our hopes for our children's future, all of that. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and I teach at the New School University in New York City now. And I also bring you this weekly program which is in a good mood today because it's spring and because finally the long winter is behind us here in New York City and indeed, just about everywhere else. So let's jump into the economic updates for today. There are quite a few of them. It was kind of hard to decide what to give priority to. But let's go in the last week, the name Ben Bernanke was in the news. He was the former chair of the Federal Reserve System, one of the most powerful economic institutions in the United States. He was in the news because he took a job with a large financial enterprise. And that is an interesting story because as the chair of the Fed, he was in charge of basically regulating the financial sector in the United States, banks in particular. But it's a unified sector and his influence extends all across it. So it is another example of the fox being hired by the chickens he used to regulate. It makes you wonder what might have been in his mind. Makes you wonder about a system that works this way. In the New York Times story about it, the writer reported that as head of the Fed, he earned $200,000 a year and that when he gives speeches to these financial giants that he now works for, he is often paid $200,000 for an evening's half hour presentation. He is also rumored to be concerned about income inequality in the United States. Second big item this last week was a decision by Judge Robert E. Gerber of the United States Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan. He was judging a set of cases brought against the General Motors Corporation by people who have suffered death, injury, and so on. From the ignition problems that I have reported to you on and have been in the news for a good many months now, it turns out that when the United States government bailed out General motors back in 2009, spending billions, over 50 billions of our money, taxpayer money, to help this private corporation. And when at the end it cost us billions of dollars more to save them than we got back from the position in shares that the government took as part of the bailout, it turns out that that bailout deal not only helped them financially not only allowed them to dump large numbers of auto workers from their jobs, but catch this gave them a blanket immunity from civil liability suits of precisely this sort. So that even though it has now been shown that General Motors, or at least many of its top officials, knew all about the problem of ignitions for years before all of the legal claims seeking to get damages for the loss of life and the injury and the loss of jobs and the loss in the value of their cars that GM's buyers suffered, the company turns out can't be sued and will save billions more dollars than they were already given to bail them out. Compare that to the bailout you got as part of the economic crisis and you'll understand more about this economy than anything I could explain Next Economic Update has to Do With Income Inequality There was an article on 31 March in the American magazine Scientific American, written by one Nicholas Fitz, F I T Z, which had some interesting things and I needed to relieve myself from the upset of reading it by sharing that with you. The average American believes so. Mr. Fitz explains to us that the richest fifth of Americans own 60% of the wealth, and the average American thinks that's too much. But Mr. Fitz enjoys explaining to us that the average American misunderstands the situation. The richest fifth of our fellow citizens don't own 60% of our country's wealth. They actually own 84%. Wow. Americans believe that the bottom 40% together own about 10% of our wealth. Wrong again. The bottom 40% ready own less than one half of 1% of the wealth. And here's a lovely sentence that I will read to you. The Walton family. That's the family that still owns a major share of the Walmart Corporation. The Walton family has more wealth than 42% of American families combined. That's right. A small handful of people own more than nearly half of the American people own. Mr. Fitts goes on and talks about mobility. That's the capacity of a person born with low income by dint of hard work and savings to make it into the upper ranges. So researchers recently found, and Mr. Fitts cites the exact studies they recently asked 3,000 people to guess the chance that someone born to a family in the poorest 20% ends up as an adult in the richer ranges of American society. Sure enough, people in America think that the mobility is much greater moving up the ladder than it actually is. And we may not want to believe it, he says, but the United States is now the most unequal of of all Western nations. And to make matters Worse, and I'm quoting now from his article, America has considerably less social mobility than either Canada or Europe. He ends his piece with a wonderful quotation from the recently passed comedian George Carlin. I'm going to quote it because I can't do better than this. The reason they call it the American dream, George Carlin tells us, is because you have to be asleep to believe it. Next update. This has to do with a story that, to use a phrase that's popular now, went viral. It has to do with a credit card processing company in Seattle, Washington, by the name of Gravity Payments. And its owner and chief executive, Dan Price, did a remarkable thing this last week. He announced to his employees, a good number of them, I think, if I remember, somewhere over a hundred. He announced to his employees that everybody earning less than 70,000 a year. Wow, that's a lot of people working for him. And anyone earning less than 70,000 a year would now be increased to 70,000. And he would use his own salary, currently $1 million a year. He would reduce it also to 70,000 so that everybody working in his business would earn the same amount of money. And when he was asked, why? Why are you doing this? Here's what he answered. And this was quoted in the New York Times as well. My workers were walking me through the math of making 40 grand a year and how hard it was. I hear that from them every single week. And it just eats at me inside. He said, I want to do something about inequality and not just talk about it. He thought, as a business leader, there is something I can do. And so he equalized everybody's income. He doesn't anticipate this is going to make any problem for his company. Prices of what he sells will remain competitive because he paid for the equality he wants with his fellow workers by reducing his salary to theirs. How interesting that it would occur to him. How interesting that Americans thought this was a very interesting story and reproduced it to one another across social media in an incredible surge of interest. Next economic update. Turns out that a number of professors have explained to the public that the IRS could be doing our taxes for. In other words, here's how the income tax works. The income you get paid to you has to be reported by your employer or by anyone who hires you to the federal government. And likewise, you have to report in a variety of ways your income to the federal government, basically knowing what you earned, knowing what your income is, and knowing whatever it is you're allowed in the way of deductions for, for an awful lot of US it would allow the government very quickly, by computer to tell us basically what we owe, to allow us perhaps to say, well, there's something else to take into account. But it would save us a lot of money and a lot of time. It's a little bit like when the government tells you what you owe for your tax on your car. They know the age of your car, they know the make of your car, et cetera, et cetera. They know what the tax rates are and they give you a bill. The government could do that with income tax, too. But that, of course, would put out of business some of the companies that are making money by having us go to them. Intuit, which does the TurboTax and other programs for doing taxes yourself, has spent a great deal of money lobbying to prevent any law being passed that would let the IRS do it for us as a public service. So here again we see how we are deprived of an advantage. We are made to spend more money on services because of the ability of private companies to curry favor into. It spends a great deal on lobbying. This was in a story April 15th in the New York Times about how much they spend 13 million in a year or two. So you can see that like medieval kingdoms, we, when there were courtiers and big officials and nobles who had the ear of the king and who could get good little deals for themselves at the public expense. Our system is just the same. It allows companies to make sure that the laws favor them, no matter the expense to the rest of us. Then there was a story that caught my eye that is really important. It has to do with work done by the University of California, Berkeley center for Labor Research and Education. They tabulated recently what proportion of federal assistance, food stamps, Medicaid, so on, goes to working people as opposed to people who are unemployed for one reason or another. And here's what they found, that in all but six states of the United States. So in other words, in. In 44 out of the 50 states in this country, the bulk, the majority, of federal assistance goes to working families. The state that ranks the highest might surprise you. It's Texas. 67% of the recipients of federal support, food stamps and so on, are working families. What does this mean? Well, before I answer the question, let me give you another piece of information that came to me this week. And this has to do with adjuncts. Adjuncts are the name we give to people who teach in our colleges and universities but don't have a regular full time job. They don't have tenure, they don't have A secure position. They're hired to teach one or two courses. Over the last 25 years, the majority of professors and teachers in our colleges and universities and have been no longer what they once were full time tenured or on a tenure track. Positions of teachers who give themselves to it. No, they have been quietly reduced to a minority of teachers. The majority are now much more poorly paid adjuncts. People hired to teach a particular course and who can only live by teaching more of them than than they could possibly prepare properly for. It's a sad old story, but here's an additional kicker. It turns out that according to market watch on 15 April, a story by Sylvia Escarelli, 25% of college adjunct faculty get government assistance. That's right. It's not just the poor retail sector worker, the poor fast food worker, the poor home health aid worker who has turn to the federal government because they're paid so poorly. It turns out even college teachers, a full quarter of the majority teachers who are adjuncts, are now getting it. Here's what I want to stress as an economist. We are subsidizing private enterprises. They can get away with paying workers less than they otherwise would have to because the government is is picking up a good chunk of the cost of living of their employees. Or to say the same thing more bluntly, we the taxpayers are required to kick in big bucks of taxes to enable corporations to underpay their employees. We subsidize them and they, the corporations are are laughing all the way to the bank where they collect their money. Moving right along, I want to give a shout out to the Corinthian. 100 Corinthian Colleges is the name of a for profit chain of colleges that have recently in the last week been fined by the Department of Education in Washington for fraudulently enrolling students. For fraudulent claims made to students that the rate of jobs they could get turned out to be much lower than what the college said. I mean, there's a long list. They have been sued by the state of California. They have been sued by other states. They continue to be sued. But here's the interesting thing. 100 Corinthian students angry over how they were misled. Angry how they went into debt for an education that was misrepresented to them, fraudulently represented to them. According to the Department of Education, they've decided to do something. They have refused to pay those debts. They believe those debts were undertaken under false pretenses. And it turns out that under the law, people, if you can show that you went into debt with on the basis of false claims made to you, which is exactly what the government is saying happened at Corinthian colleges. You don't have to pay the debts. So this is a sign that the movement to question debts to show that debts need not be repaid when fraud was committed along the way of setting up those dates, something the Greek government is trying to do in Europe and many are trying to do around the world. This has been picked up and used in a creative way by the defrauded students of Corinthian colleges. And this kind of activism is a good sign of a healthy society becoming aware of what needs to be changed. Let me turn now, as we do in this part of the program, often, to your questions and your comments and how I can respond to them. There are three I want to mention. I want to give a shout out to Meg. I won't identify her beyond that, but she did a very interesting thing after hearing my report a while ago about the massive strikes in Mexico of agricultural workers, some of whom were paid as little as seven and eight dollars a day for backbreaking work raising those berries that we like to eat. It turns out that one of the companies using these workers and facing this strike is the Driscoll company, whose name is on many packages of berries. Well, Meg went to her local trader Joe and true enough, discovered there Driscoll berries and made a representation to the company saying you really ought not to, given what you say about your commitment to decency, you really ought not to be carrying berries from a company against which desperate workers are now making a strike under the conditions that have been widely reported in the press and that I commented on a couple of weeks ago in response to her complaint about this to the manager, she got the following letter. I want to read it to you because it's a wonderful example of of the serious way in which retail giants take the complaints of people who are the customers they claim to serve. The letter begins, hello Meg. Isn't that charming? Here we go. Thank you for sharing your feedback. In response, we want to assure you that we work only with reputable suppliers that we trust. We also have third party audits and inspections as well as by our buying team members to ensure that any of our products are ethically sourced and meet current government standards. As a standard, we only work with suppliers that we feel provide quality products, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so they didn't probably even read what she sent them and they could care less. Their hope is that everybody who understands the issue goes away. Hopefully still shopping for those Driscoll berries. But but goes away. Meg is going right back to the store. My hat's off to her and the many like her who are trying to do something in solidarity with people who need it and who deserve it. In response to your next question, a number of you have asked me to talk about one implication of the massive radio relocation of capitalist enterprises that I have talked repeatedly about. The decision over the last 30 or 40 years for many major producers corporations in Western Europe, North America and Japan to leave those parts of the world places where they were born and raised and became large companies and to move instead to where wages are lower and, and profit conditions higher. Asia, Africa, Latin America and so on. And the criticisms that I have levied against them and the notion that if workers took over their enterprises, they would never move them that way because it would be self destructive. This question asks, well then wouldn't that hurt the workers in China, for example, that have benefited from this massive move of corporations to hire people in China rather than people in Western Europe, North America and Japan? Well, let me respond to that on one level. Of course, if the movement stops, then there will not be the creation of jobs from that movement that we have seen over the last 30 or 40 years. But that's not the only thing that's going to go on if that relocation stopped. The fact of the matter is that the movement of capitalism from its old centers to these new ones has mostly benefited a tiny super rich majority of people there. The income inequality in India and China rivals that of the United States. The benefits have been very highly skewed in terms of who they go to. If the movement of capitalism into China were to slow or stop, it might very well provoke, and my hope is that it would, a big set of changes in China, a big set of changes that say if you want to keep people working in China, you've got to redistribute the income so that the mass of people have the purchasing power to buy what they cannot afford to buy now and thereby keep themselves in jobs producing what they can't afford now to buy. In other words, you change the distribution of wealth, you change the distribution of income as a way to keep the system successful in terms of creating jobs. Even though the relocation of capitalism from the rest of the world to China is, is no longer the way that Chinese people get jobs. These kinds of adjustments would be not only better for the United States, which would stop losing jobs, but better in the long run for the Chinese workers as well, because it would give them a different distribution of wealth and income which the vast majority would benefit from. It would give them more secure jobs producing the goods and services for for this now equipped population to buy. And by the way, the Chinese situation today is nothing to hold onto. Chinese jobs today depend on China being an export machine. That is the job in China for most Chinese depends on the Chinese being able to sell goods and services in Europe and North America and other parts of the world. That ability of China is currently under attack. It is not secure. Therefore, their jobs are not secure. Staying where they are, having capitalism come to them to produce for export in the long run, in the medium run, they would be better off saying no to that arrangement and going in a new and different direction. Finally, is there a problem that if we move to worker self directed enterprises, if we change the way we organize enterprise and make it instead a kind of system in which workers collectively and democratically make the decisions of their enterprise, isn't it going to be very hard for them because we live in a capitalism where the standard of living is falling and they won't have a market or a place to sell what these worker self directed enterprises produce? I think here's a misunderstanding that I can quickly correct. When workers take over, when we stop having a capitalist economic system, they would not distribute the income that the company generates unequally. They wouldn't give a tiny number of people a vast amount and everybody doesn't. In other words, if you give workers the control of enterprise, they will distribute income differently and that will mean a surge of buying from all the people who now get a decent income. It's a little bit like that story of Mr. Price in Seattle. There will be a surge of spending, a demand for goods and services because all the worker self directed enterprises distribute the enterprise revenues in a much less unequal way. Well, folks, we've come to the end of the first half of our program. I want to thank you very much and ask you please to stay with us. After a short musical break, we will return and we will deal today with a number of major issues of concern that have come up both in the last week and in the previous period. And I will also, once again, towards the end of the program, talk to you about various ways that we can engage with you in a more ongoing way all the time between these weekly programs. So thank you for your attention and stay with us. We will be right back. Welcome back to Economic Update, the weekly program that looks at economic dimensions of our lives. In this half of the program, we are going to deal with a number of major topics. Again, these are partly shaped by your communications to us through our2rdwolf.com and democracyatwork.info I want to again thank you for the communications you send us. Let you know we read every one of them and use them not only to make the responses to questions that we do in the first half of the program, but but likewise to shape the topics and how we approach them in the rest of the program. Okay, toward the end of the program I'll have a little bit more to say about the websites. But let's turn now to the first of these major topics. I can't tell you how often I hear something like the wages cannot be raised in this or that company, in this or that industry because if we do that, the prices that will be charged in that industry will go up and that will mean people can't afford to buy these goods or will perhaps shift to other companies products. So we're really sorry, we employers and we academics and we journalists, but raising wages is really not good for the worker either because it would risk his or her job. We need to put this sort of economic nonsense to rest. Why? Well, let's go through the simple economics of it. There is no necessity when wages rise that the prices of the goods made by the workers whose wages rise also go up. Let's remember that a price of anything, a price of a hamburger, a price of an automobile, a price of anything, a good or a service, a haircut, a consultation, that price covers many of the costs that go into producing something. Let me go through just a few of them so you get the idea. Sure. Part of the price of everything goes to pay the worker who produced it. Part of the price of the automobile you buy is used to pay the worker who actually made the frame and the steering and the transmission and and so on in that automobile. But part of the price of the car also goes to pay the managers who never touch an automobile, who sit in an office sometimes many miles away and do whatever it is managers do. Part of the price of the automobile pays for their elegant office, pays for the manicured shrubbery around the office, and pays for their big salaries. Here's another thing. Prices for automobiles, to stay with that example, do they pay the profits of the company? That's right. The difference between what the company gets for what it sells and what all of its costs are, that net difference, what called profits, that's also coming out of the price you get when you sell. And here's another Item, the price of that automobile is what's basically going to pay for the dividends that the car company sends to its shareholders. So guess what? The price of something covers the wages, the managers salaries and budgets, the profits and the shareholders dividends. So guess what? If you raise the wages of the workers, but you lower the salaries of the managers, or the profits of the company, or the dividends paid to shareholders, then you wouldn't have to raise the price at all, would you? That's right. We can raise wages without raising the price of anything by making other folks who get paid out of the price of goods take a bit of a hit, couldn't we? If it is true that in the United States, which it is the typical large corporation, top managers get 2 and 300 times what workers on the production line get, which is much larger than in places like France or Germany or Japan, then it might be a very good public policy, wouldn't it, to raise wages, leave the prices exactly where they are and reduce the amount of money paid to top managers. That would make the wage earners much better off, allow them to spend more money boosting the economy. And they are in the large majority at the expense of a very small minority of wildly overpaid top managers. If you add that we could cut dividends to shareholders, how productive are they? And we might do something to lower the profits of corporations who these days maintain a huge amount of cash on holding, not knowing what to do with their big profits. Well then we could see that raising wages without that having an effect on prices is a no brainer. It's not only that it isn't impossible to do that, it's actually easy to do that. And here's another way to talk about the virtues of worker self directed enterprises. Because if an enterprise was actually owned and operated by the workers, all of them together, who made decisions democratically, then they would always be looking at all the different things that they pay for out of the prices they get for what they sell. They would never be assuming you can't change one of them because it'll affect the price, they would always understand, no, the price depends on how much we pay workers, how much we pay for profits, how much we pay managers, how much we give to shareholders, if we have any, and so on. And they would see that it's always a question of balancing the different interests and not assuming in an economic nonsensical way that something that happens to wages will necessarily be the same as what happens to prices. It's a little lesson in economics, but it is amazing how few people seem to have that clearly in their minds. Our next segment takes off from some interesting work done by Professor Hugh Goodacre, who is a professor of economics at the University College of London and at the University of Westminster in the United Kingdom. He has written widely and repeatedly in letters to the Financial Times about the incredibly narrow perspective that dominates most economics departments that are teaching economics to the people who then become policymakers, to the people who become journalists, to political leaders and to business leaders. And he points out very correctly, because it's something I've learned in my career as an economics educator, that one narrow brand of economics, one kind, one particular perspective, which is, by the way, called neoclassical economics, is absolutely dominant in teaching economics across Western Europe, North America, Japan and beyond. It is incredible how many universities allow nothing other than that particular perspective to be taught. In fact, economics, like most other disciplines, is, is a place where different perspectives contend with one another. There's not just neoclassical economics. There's Keynesian economics, there's Marxian economics, there's Austrian economics, there's institutional economics. There's all kinds of approaches that have different insights and generate different concepts of what you do politically to solve economic problems. To teach only one is as narrow minded, parochial and biased as if we had the following situation. Imagine a course called religion, and you took that course in a college or a university, and as you listened, you discovered that the instructor was teaching you in detail about one kind of Lutheranism. You would say to the teacher correctly, it's fine to teach me this kind of Lutheranism, but if you call the course religion, you've got to expose me and introduce me to alternatives to this kind of Lutheranism. Otherwise the course should be called Lutheranism or the name of this particular kind of Lutheranism. Well, it's just like that in Economics. Don't call the course economics, which is what it's called, if what you're teaching is only one particular kind and never exposing the students to another. And what I mean, never let me be as personal as I can. I went to school at Harvard, then I went to school at Stanford, and then I finished at Yale University. I have advanced degrees in economics and history from all of these places. I was never required on the way to getting my PhD in in economics to read one word of Marx's mature economic analysis, what is contained in his major work, three volumes called Capital. Okay, that's an inexcusable failure of my education. I had to go learn that on my own, and most of my fellow students had neither the interest nor the time to. To do that as they tried to make their careers in economics. So I know that there are other approaches, but most of my colleagues have long since given up because no one ever taught them. And they can only reproduce as teachers today what was narrowly taught to them. It's a tragedy, and I want to do something about it. And with particular reference to Marxian economics, because that's the real challenger to capitalism in the world today. That's the official theory governing much of the world, of the People's Republic of China, at least they say so, and so on. So we ought to learn it, don't you think? It's just fear and bias and narrowness that explains the failure of institutions in Western Europe and North America particularly to teach this. So I want to make it up and I want to deal with it because we need to have a broader array of economic theories and economic tools with which to deal with these kinds of questions. So let's begin. Just two points in our today's discussion. One, Marxian theory is not about the state. Marx never wrote a book about the state, wasn't very interested in the state. He was interested in capitalism as an economic system, was very interested in enterprises, how production gets organized and done, and not at all in how the state relates. He didn't think the big debate was having more or less intervention in the economy by the government, not important for Marx. That's very, very key. When Marx talked about the government, he saw it in a very different light, he thought, and he wasn't that big on this either. But he thought that the likely way working people could take society beyond capitalism would be if working people captured the government either by a revolution or by voting or however they managed to do it, to capture the government and use the government to take society beyond capitalism. He noticed that it was often governments that people captured to move society beyond slavery, that people captured to move society beyond feudalism. And he figured something like that would likely happen to move society beyond capitalism to the kind of economic equality and democracy that he had in his mind as the goal of social action. So please do not equate Marxian economics with something about socialist governments or communist states. They really have nothing to do with one another. True, the people who made socialist revolutions often looked to Marx as their source. But you know, people in history have looked to Jesus, to Mohammed, to all kinds of folks to justify things which we do not accept as the logical consequences of Jesus, Muhammad or anything else. It's open season. Anybody can do anything and claim it comes from anyone. All you have to do is say it. We still have to use our judgment to see whether this is a reasonable thing. So let's actually attend to what Marx said. Marx was critical of capitalism. And Marx said that what he wanted to do was understand that how capitalism worked. And he felt that the key institution in capitalism was the workplace, the enterprise, the place where human beings use their brains and muscles, where they spend most of their adult lives in terms of their daily activity at the workplace, Transforming nature to make the goods and services we depend on for our lives. Our food, our clothing, our shelter, and so on. And he wanted to focus on that place because there was a relationship that shaped this society in the key ways he felt we had to go beyond. And the key relationship at the workplace between the employer and the employee. And that relationship can be described as the employee comes to work. Why? Because the employee wants a job, wants to earn the income that he or she needs to, to live a life. And so they offer their brains and their muscles, typically five days a week, eight or more hours a day. And the employer says to you, the worker, I will hire you. You come here five days a week, nine to five. I will pay you at the end of each week a salary, a wage. And in return, you do what I say. You work on what I give you with the equipment I provide. And when you're done producing the goods or services, you go home. I own what you produced. Maybe your brains went into it, maybe your muscles went into it, but it's all mine. You take the salary I pay you and go home and get ready to come back next week and do it again. What does the employer do? He sells the fruits of the labor of, of his employees. And here comes the key point, Marks. Makes those workers, when they work, add more value to what that employer sells than the wage or salary the employer pays them. That's right. You produce more in the every hour that you work than he pays you, the employer, for that hour. That's the way the system works. And the difference between what the worker produces and what the worker gets, that's the profit. That's the surplus, that's the extra. That's what the capitalist is in business to get. And for Marx, that means this is a system built on conflict, on resentment, on. On opposition. And while you can bottle it up, you can't ever overcome it. And it periodically blows up. And he begins his analysis by analyzing all of that. My point is not to persuade you. My point is to tell you this is a highly sophisticated system. It has been developed over 125 years since Marx's death in every country on Earth. It's a complicated set of ideas that have generated all kinds of interesting insights. There is no excuse for this not being studied and learned in the United States and Western European universities. There's no excuse for an economics training system that systematically keeps students who will become journalists, political leaders and academics from an awareness of a critical perspective. I tell the following story. I'm going to tell it again. My apologies to those of you who've heard it. If you wanted to understand the family that lives up the street from you, and you knew there was mother, father and two kids, and one kid loved the family and thought it was great, and the other kid thought it was terrible, family was critical. If you wanted to understand the family, would you talk to only one of the two children, or would you think it's appropriate to talk to both of them and then make up your own mind? The answer is obvious. If you have in economics a set of ideas that thinks capitalism is wonderful and another set of ideas that thinks it isn't, and they're both sophisticated and have been developed by very, very smart people, don't you think a student ought to be exposed to both of them? Well, if you do, you're in the wrong society at the wrong moment of history, because most economics departments exclude the critical perspective, and that does nobody a favor at all. In the short time that we have left, I wanted to introduce a topic that we're going to deal with again. It came to me when I was noticing a report on the amount of electricity used in a variety of different countries per person kilowatt hours of electricity in the United States in the year 2011, per capita, 13,250 kilowatts. I want to give you by example, Germany and Japan, who each use 7,000 half of the electricity we do, and to many, many poor countries, for example, Ghana, 340 kilowatts per person compared to 13,250 in the United States, why do I mention this? Because the people in Asia, Africa and Latin America, who have very little by comparison to the United States, they want the appliances, the cars, the benefits, the enjoyments, the food, the clothing, the shelter. That's going to cost a lot of electricity. And they want what we already have, and why not? And they want the investments to be made. And suddenly they discover that the United States doesn't want to provide the money for these investments. Oh, the explanation is we have to protect the environment. The environment we didn't protect the environment when we got to the 13,000 kilowatt hours per person in the United States, when we got to the standard of living sustained by that use. Are we really going to pretend that we have the moral, ethical right to go to the rest of the world and say, you can't have the standard of living we have because we won't enable you to do to the damage to the environment that we finished doing over the last 200 years? That's not a viable political proposition and that won't work. In order to deal with the demands of the rest of the world, where the majority of people live, there's going to have to be accommodation from the west and from Western Europe, North America and Japan. And the sooner we understand that and begin to work out the mechanisms to have that happen, the sooner we will get away from a world of endless warfare, conflict, terrorism, drones and all the rest to a place where we want and can live in peace. We've come to the end of this program. I didn't mean to be quite so preachy. Toward the end, I want to ask you again to remember with me that we maintain two websites, rdwolf.com and democracyatwork.info they're available to you 24 hours a day, seven days a week, at absolutely no charge. I want to thank truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis. Please do check them out. I want to also ask you to use social media, Facebook, Twitter and so on to share whatever is interesting to you of this program with other people. You can find the archives this entire program@wbai.org and at our websites so you can see any past program or listen to it at your leisure. I also would like you to know that I travel around the United States giving talks in every corner of our country and abroad. I would be glad to talk with you about doing something like that in your area. Connect to us please through the websites. And finally, please support the local radio station or the television station that brings this program to you. If you believe this is a useful service in this time of this country's history and of the history of the country that you're living in. Then support the stations that bring this program to you. I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Sa.
- [50:28]
A
I ain't gonna change your time now Behaving after a while going to mind won't be mine One of these days Bab a morning droning baby Try, try.
- [50:51]
B
Hard.
- [50:54]
A
It won't be long long thing gonna change. Sometime in the middle of the night it's so long it's so long so.
- [51:10]
B
Long.
- [51:14]
A
They ain't gonna change they change, change, change Thing gonna change.
- [51:27]
B
For the.
- [51:28]
A
Own up the road, baby Thing gonna.
- [51:34]
B
Change.
- [51:37]
A
Change, change, change, change Change. Your time now, baby but after a while gonna be my time, my time, babe Thing gonna change, change, change, change, change, change.
- [52:10]
B
Thing gonna change yes, it is, it's it.