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- [00:10]
A
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.
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B
Glad to be here.
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A
I want today to talk about something that is scaring millions of people around the world. It's the decline of an empire. You know, the human community has seen that many times. The Greek empire was once the king of the hill. It passed the Roman Empire, the Russian Empire, the British Empire and now the American Empire. You know, it's barely a hundred years old. It was really World War I that the American empire really took off. The old empire, particularly the British, fading giving way to a new one. It's always been difficult in human history when empires begin to unravel, when the empires try to do more than their puffed up sense of themselves allows them to do. The United States has been unable to win the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, now Syria too. It can't quite do it. It can't provide the services to the mass of people that the government once could and did. It can't provide the Jobs and job securities to the mass of people that it can't do it. And that's not because of the failure of this or that politician. It's a declining empire. I want to explore that with you, because one of the ways you know about that and you understand it, is that it shows up in the psychology of the people living through this experience, whether they understand that it's a declining empire that's at the root of the problem or not. And so, as you have explained to us in previous programs, white American male workers have been particularly hit by. By this declining empire right where it hurts. And I wanted to ask you to begin to summarize, and then we can talk in concrete ways about the symptoms that they are experiencing.
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B
Well, the way they've been hurt most is because they were at the king of the heap. They were the kings of the heap before in a racist, sexist economy. They were the ones who were hired. And there was a premium on white male labor. The whole world wasn't at our disposal then, so that white males were in demand, and they got what's called a family wage, a wage that could support a family, and that included dependent wives and children. And so two of the gender components of maleness in America, particularly white maleness, were the ability to support a wife and dependent children, A and B, the ability to be strong and have a sexually organized way of being vulnerable. Men counted on a pretense of invulnerability, and their sexual identification allowed them to be vulnerable to women with whom they were having sex, so that the sex kind of compensated for their emotional vulnerability. Well, one of the things that happened is men can't support women in the household anymore. They're not given family wages when their jobs were outsourced, computerized, robotized and mechanized, and they were abandoned in the capitalist search for profit, and their jobs were given to people who work for so much less or mechanized, robotized, et cetera. They lost their position. They lost their ability to support their families, their wives.
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Yes, and if I could interrupt. What always struck me, and I think you've made this point too, is that there's a double whammy here. Not only did the white men lose the jobs, the social position, the authority, the dominance that had come to be theirs as the kind of junior partners of capitalism. But no explanation was given to them. Nothing was done to explain how and why corporate profit making shaped the decision to go abroad or to automate or whatever social. So that in addition to their suffering, they were kind of led to believe that it was somehow their fault. And even if it wasn't their fault, somebody was doing it, some scapegoat could be identified in the environment to take your anger out on because you were not given any chance to understand it any other way.
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B
Well, obviously the capitalists wouldn't want to say we are denying you your livelihood because we can make more money elsewhere. And therefore the anger would have been directed at the capitalists who deserved it. They didn't want that. They made it seem like a natural phenomenon. In other countries like Sweden and Germany, outsourcing was forbidden and mechanizing and throwing workers out was also not allowed without getting workers equivalent jobs elsewhere. So that that which was presented as a natural phenomenon is obviously preventable if you have militant left unions, which we didn't have. So it was presented as, huh, what happened? We're all gone. Too bad for you.
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A
Okay, now you, as a psychologist, as a person who studies and interacts with people living through this in a very intimate, personal way, what are some of the major symptoms, if you like, if that's the right word, of the difficulties that this declining empire is imposing on this particular community, particularly of adult white working men, that you could see and show us, give us evidence of the very decline we're talking about.
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B
That is quite easy because the male sex role was designed. I am a man because I am a provider. I have a dependent wife and children and I have a sex partner and a family who she takes care of. Well, that was all facilitated by the white family wage. When that was over, American women joined their minority sisters and had to be in the workforce making money. A woman who works outside the home is less excited about coming home and doing a full second shift of taking care of her man's needs, taking care of her kids needs, doing housework, connecting her husband and family with other people with social connections and relatives, entertaining his friends. So men come home from their now inferior jobs or looking for work and not finding them with ego wounds that they want salved with sexual solace from their wives and they want extra services. Women come home from their jobs tired, upset and wanting some help. At home, tensions between men and women hugely increased to the point where in addition now to have being rejected as dominant workers well paid on their jobs. The majority of divorces are now initiated by women and it's now women who usually refuse to be married because why be married to someone when you can't, you know he won't support you and wants you to do all sorts of extra work beyond your share so that Men were demoted emotionally, sexually and economically and their sense of being a man and being in control and having power was terribly disrupted. They were in stressful situations.
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A
Tell us about the three specific symptoms that we discussed before.
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B
Right, I'm leading up.
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A
We don't read.
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B
That's right, I'm sorry. Well, within this stress, men respond to stress with fight or flight. And turns out women who are used to not be included in the studies usually respond by tend and befriend connect with other people to get through a hard time. Well, the fight, the rage is there in angry white men. So far, 154 mass murders have been committed just so far in the first six months of this year, all by men, last, in the last three years, 1,102 mass murders all by angry white men. And they all had something in common which is that they all had lost a loved one who walked out on them or made it difficult for them or lost a job or both. So that both moorings of manhood were broken and they were enraged, they fought. It is also men who joined the Ku Klux Klan, the alt right, the hate, revenge porn sites, the trolls. Those are largely male avenues for men feeling denied and angry that they've lost their primacy. White men and mass murder is one of the ways that angry men show that they are dissatisfied and they figure they're no longer having patience with anything. They, they're very angry and they're going to go down in a blaze of manly glory shooting other people.
- [26:28]
A
What about the other kind of response, one that isn't aggressive outward but is a turning of the upset and the sense of loss inward. I'm thinking here about the people who commit suicide. I'm thinking about the people who become drug dependent, who use the opioids even to the point of a kind of self defense destruction with them. Are these also symptoms of.
- [26:53]
B
They are, they're symptoms. And although suicide has increased 30% in total across the board, 77% of the suicides are male suicides, 84% are white people and 77% of those more than three quarters are white males, usually middle aged white males. Why them? Because they thought at this point they'd have a nice place, they'd pay off their mortgage, they would be looking forward to a pension, they'd have seniority in their jobs. Instead they're fired, they're laid off, they don't have support, they have mortgage debt, they have child student debt and it's just too much and they have no prospects because there's a lot of job discrimination against middle aged and older people and they expected a life they don't have. And so they are the biggest candidates for suicide. They're also the biggest candidates for overdose deaths, white middle aged men.
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So is it fair in closing, to say that the decline of the empire is not some abstraction that describes some social phenomena in the distance, but something immediately shaping the lives and the deaths of the people around us?
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B
Absolutely.
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A
Thank you very much, Dr. Fraad. We've come to the end, but as always, it's very, very important stuff that we talk about and I look forward to talking with all of you again in the nearest Sam.