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Welcome friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, debts, incomes, our own, those of our kids. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life and, and I hope that it's prepared me well to offer you these economic updates about what's in the news. Well, it's a pleasure to speak a moment about an extraordinary election on July 1st in our Southern neighbor Mexico. There, the people did something extraordinary. For over 100, 200 years, the Mexican government has been owned and operated and run for a tiny elite. Big businesses, big landowners. It's an old pattern. All over Latin America and indeed elsewhere too. Those leaderships, one after the other, right up to the present, kept promising that they would make the economy work, that they would do something about the horrible endemic poverty of The Mexican people, etc. They never did. The promises were never kept. And finally, the Mexican people saw an opportunity to try something different, to give the government the power that it might use as promised, this time for real, to help working men and women, the vast majority. So they voted for Mr. Obrador on the 1st of July, a stunning definitive victory, massive victory at the presidential level and at the governorships across Mexico. The people of Mexico want a government that serves them, really. And now we have a chance to see what a society can get if a leadership committed to that is actually in power. And nothing could be more stark than the difference between what the Mexican people did and got and what is happening to American working people in the northern country, the northern neighbor of Mexico. The difference is night and day. Let me begin. A couple of weeks ago, the Supreme Court made a decision called the Janus decision because a Mr. Janus was involved. It's important that everyone understand what this decision was. Basically the latest step in a 50 year assault on the American organized labor movement to weaken one of the few institutions still left that actually represents, reflects and tries to advance the interests of ordinary men and women doing the work that makes this society run. Here's what the decision is about. 50 years ago, when the assault on American labor really got going, a bill was passed called the Taft Hartley Act 1947, and it contained a remarkable clause. Here's what it Anything that a labor union wins in its negotiations with an employer, with or without a strike, whatever the union and the employer agree to higher wages, better working conditions, less pollution in the factory, anything has to be given to every worker in that enterprise, whether or not that worker is a member of the union, whether or not that worker pays dues to the union, whether or not that worker responds to the union's request for help in waging the struggles with employers without which no advance of working people's conditions has ever been achieved. In other words, the Taft Hartley law created the free rider in the labor movement. The person who thinks to himself or herself in a quintessentially selfish way, why should I pay the dues? Why should I go out on strike and lose my pay if I'm going to get the benefits of all such actions by my fellow workers without participating? Gross, you say? Well, if you didn't know this was the law, then that's an interesting reflection on the educational system of this country. Well, unions understandably fought back and they reached a kind of weak compromise. They couldn't change the law, even though they tried. So they got the following rule, used to be called by the term agency fee. Yes, a worker wouldn't have to join the union, and yes, the worker wouldn't have to pay dues directly to the union. And yes, the worker could ignore the union's request to go on strike or otherwise support fellow workers. But the worker would have deducted from his or her salary an amount of money, roughly like union dues, that would go to pay for the union's expenses in hiring the staff, people paying for the leaflets, keeping open the office, the things necessary to wage class struggle with the employer. And that's what the Supreme Court struck down. They used the amazing argument that freedom of speech means that a worker shouldn't be required to contribute money to an institution whose politics he doesn't agree with. How interesting. Let me give a parallel. Millions and millions of Americans don't go to church. They don't believe in going to church, but they are required to pay taxes. And you know what the taxes go for? Providing all kinds of public services to churches and synagogues and mosques with which they disagree. They have to pay because in this society it is deemed that necessary for the well being of the society to have that done. But somehow that logic doesn't extend to unions. That's a society that is against unions. That is a government including the Supreme Court, that is the opposite of what was just elected in Mexico. Here's another example. President Trump did the usual PR preening in front of cameras in Wisconsin, announcing with great pleasure that the Foxconn Corporation, a company widely criticized for the horrific treatment it has meted out to its workers around the world. But they're building a big plant to do the same to the workers of Wisconsin. And it'll produce, he said with glowing language, the 13,000 jobs. And how much money is the state of Wisconsin and the local government and the federal government giving to Foxconn to help bring them here? More money than has ever been given to a capitalist corporation in American history. $4 billion. Now, any rational person would ask the question, could you do better with $4 billion than give it to a company that merely promises to provide 13,000 jobs? You know, $4 billion will be taken away from countless other programs in the state of Wisconsin and beyond, programs that will lose jobs for people, damage public schools, damage public services, hurting the American working class in profound ways. This is for politicians to say, see, I'm bringing jobs. But the real effect, they don't care. They're in it for the facade, the very thing that the Mexican working people said, Enough. We won't have it again. Let me turn to yet another example, horrifying in its way. The federal government, the Trump Republican government is busily working with several states, but also at the federal level, to impose a work requirement on the poor people who now qualify for Medicaid. That's right. We as a society used to say that if you're too poor, if you fall below the poverty line, we will not deprive you of your health as a kind of punishment for your poverty. We will give you the support to get health care you couldn't otherwise afford. It's the kind of thing most Christian and other religions say they are deeply committed to. But something goes wrong here in the United States, and we have a government led in this case by the state of Kentucky, that is determined to say people who get Medicaid are now going to be required to do work to get their medical care paid for. True. Last week, a federal judge threw out the measure in Kentucky on the grounds that it is a violation of the constitutional protection and of common human decency. But the Kentucky government is appealing, and the federal government is following. I know of no other country that does this sort of thing. And again, I want to remind you, Medicare recipients who get covered by Medicare, excuse me, Medicaid, poor people, 60% of them already work. So we're not imposing work on people who don't work. Most of them work, and most of the rest of them can't work because they are physically impaired, mentally impaired, or are required to take care of another member of the family who would be much more expensive to take care of if a family member weren't there to help them. In other words, this is fakery. This is pandering to people who want to believe that while their incomes are pinched in this capitalist economy, their real enemy is the people even poorer than them, whom they want to punish. Because that's what this is, punishing them. Let me give you an example of people in our society who get government handouts and are not required to work. Again, churches, schools, synagogues, mosques, they get lots of government services. They, they're not required to work. And by the way, they pay no taxes. Whereas Medicaid people, when they go into a store and buy a shirt, they have to pay the sales tax. Churches and synagogues are exempted. People rich enough to lend money to cities and states in America are not required to pay any income tax on the interest they get. And they're not made to work for the benefit of a tax free income. The wealthiest colleges and universities in AmericaHarvard, Yale, Princeton, all of them get enormous tax exemption. They don't pay any taxes at all, and they get big handouts from the government. And what work is required of them to get these benefits? Nothing. What a remarkable society. And then again, we do something else so different from what the Mexicans just voted for. Hurting working people rather than helping them. I'm talking again about the immigration craziness raging across the United States and Europe being used by every right wing politician doing his or her job to deflect the anger of people who've gone through the crisis of 2008, the collapsed economies, the austerity policies, the lost jobs, the lost benef, the loss of what they once had to turn, all that anger not against the employer who's paying them less, or the government who's providing them less services. But no, the poorest of the poor, the immigrants from abroad, as if they were the problem. Here's some facts to perhaps make you think about this in a new way. From 1860 to 1920, the heyday of American immigration, when most of the people watching or listening to this program, when most of their ancestors came here from Europe, the average number of immigrants in our population was about 13 to 15%. Then in the 1920s and 30s, the effect of turning people against immigrants then, plus the Great Depression, collapsed immigration down to about 5% by 1970. And since then it went back up. But guess what? It is today. 13.7% about what it was through most of our history, when we were the proud immigrant nation we once claimed to be. Here's another the two largest sources of immigration to the United States in 2016 were the Indians and the Chinesotin Americans, not Mexicans, not the people being attacked and pilloried by the politicians who want to fool you into blaming someone who isn't responsible for the problems that we have. Well, we've come to the end of the first half of today's Economic Update. Stay with us. We'll be right back with Dr. Harriot Fraad. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. Before I introduce Dr. Harriet Fraad, a person you know well because she's with us at the beginning of each month, I wanted to remind you to make use of our social media and platforms. Subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you would. It's a big help to us. Visit us and use us through Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Make use as well of our website, democracyatwork.info in these and other ways you can participate with us. Find out more. Get involved with us. It's a way for us to work with you and vice versa. I want also to thank those of you in the Patreon community that have been so supportive to what we've been trying to do. And as the programs proliferate and the support grows, it's a relationship that we value and we want to appreciate. So let me then turn to Dr. Harriet Fraad and, and mental health counselor here in New York City in private practice, a prolific writer and author in a variety of places that I tell you about each month. And I want you particularly to make use of her website, Harriet Fraud. That's two R's in Harriet and F R A A D in the last name. HarrietFraud.com welcome very much to the program.