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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, those for us and those for our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my life and on that basis bring you these updates. I want to start with something close to me as a lifelong professor of something a remarkable new development in the ever growing squeeze on college students. I just learned recently of something that's been going on a while which deserves the name, although it hasn't quite gotten it yet, of sharecropping among students. Here's how it A student can't afford his or her family can't afford to pay for a university education. So the student cuts the following.

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Student is approached by a broker or an agent for wealthy people, investors they like to be called and the investor offers the following deal through the I will give you a portion or maybe even all of your money you need to go to school and in exchange I'm going to get a cut of your income for 5, 10, 15, who knows how many years, depending on whatever luck you have in landing a job. That's just like what sharecroppers was when farmers couldn't pay for the seeds or couldn't pay for the machinery or the fertilizer. They would go to an investor, get some money, and have to give the investor a share of the crop at the end of the harvest. That's where the name comes from. So let's make sure we get this here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. What we are doing for students is saying, number one, we're not going to pay your family the kind of wage or income for their work that would allow them to pay for you to get an education. Number two, we're going to jack up the price of an education at the same time that we deprive your family of the wherewithal to pay for it. And then we're going to offer you a wonderful deal. We will lend you money and and you can go into debt for the rest of your life, or we will allow you now to become a sharecropper. We will then make profit not only by paying your folks too little, but by squeezing an interest payment out of you for however many years we can lend you or a share of your income for however many years you're trapped in this system. A society that does this to its people, and particularly to its young people, is a society that isn't working for the majority of the people. Good for the investors and not for anybody else. And to drive home the absurdity of this, let me remind you there are now seven countries in Europe that have cut out all tuition and fees for higher education. Germany has gone so far not only as to eliminate all fees and tuition for college and university, but to do so not only for German citizens, but for anybody who comes to Germany for an education. Is there a difference? Mmm, big time. I want to revert in my second update to the Trump administration in a particular way. You know, once upon a time, conservatives liked to say that they were against government intervention and in the economy. Ever since we had that massive intervention back in the 1930s when a collapsed capitalism was rescued by massive government intervention. You know, creating Social Security, creating unemployment compensation, passing the first minimum wage law, hiring as public employees, 15 million unemployed people across the 30s, you know, big intervention. Ever since then, conservatives said, no, no intervention is never good. Everything the government touches, it does badly. The private sector is efficient and wonderful. You know that crazy mantra. Well, they got their way with the regimes of Ms. Thatcher in England and Mr. Reagan here in the United States. We cut back the government, we limited its intervention, and we've had since the 1980s, much less government intervention. We even call this system neoliberalism in the British sense of the term. Liberal minimum government intervention. And what did us get us? Rapid increase in inequality in this society, rapid buildup of debt on a scale we've never seen before. The collapse of the system again, when we had been promised that would not happen in. In 2008. And it continues. So what do we get? We get Trump. Is Trump a conservative? He says so. Is Trump supported by the conservatives? They say so. And what is Mr. Trump doing? Massive government intervention in the economy. What? The very thing conservatives said they were against. Let's see. He attacks our trading partners. He imposes tariffs. That's a government intervention. He abrogates treaties to get economic advantage. He attacks particular companies for what they do and don't do everything that the conservative playbook said shouldn't happen. He's doing. Guess what that means. There's a lesson here. The conservatives, when they were against government, that was a fraud. It was always a fraud. What they meant was they want the government to tax them the minimum and help them the most. Employers were to be the beneficiaries of government, not employees. That's what they didn't like about the 1930s. Mr. Trump is intervening big time, and the conservatives are applauding big time because he helps the employer while giving the employees political Theater to distract them. Conservatives want employers to be helped by the government, not employees. And that was always the real issue. I want to turn next to pensions. We have been cutting back or eliminating pensions for people at retirement age or close to it, and we've been doing it for years. And I want to focus you on it again because there's a certain irony. We live in a society that pretends it cares about family values. We hear it all the time. Well, one of the biggest strains on any family is if there are elderly folks unable to take care of themselves financially, they then become distraught. They can't take care of themselves. They turn to their families for help. They become burdens, which is the last thing they want. Here's the statistics I thought I should share with you about how that has now shaped up in the United States. I'm using statistics from the Government Accountability Office. Here's the numbers, and I want you to think about them. They cover only people in the ages 55 to 64. That is the cohort of our people. They number many tens of millions about to go into retirement. All right, let's start. We're going to look at how much money they have saved up for their retirement. What is their personal situation of resources for retirement? The largest group of them, accounting for over 40%, have, and this is very important, nothing. Zero. If you take the next 20% on top of that, 40%. So we're now at 60%, just shy of 2/3 of our population. They have less than $50,000 to go into retirement. Friends, with less than $50,000 means you're not prepared for retirement. Two thirds of our people do not have the money for a retirement on any conceivable basis. Let me remind you, elderly people live longer now than they have for a long time. We are condemning a major part of our population to face their lives after a lifetime of work under conditions that are nothing short of ruthless. It is a capitalism that doesn't work. Okay. The other third, most of them don't have enough money either. Only 22% have more than $150,000 saved up. And that isn't enough either to live a decent life, especially if all you have beyond that is Social Security. It is a crisis waiting to impose itself on us. Nobody is correcting it. And mostly we don't even deal with it, which is why it's so important for all of us not to lose sight of it. It is a failure of the system, conveniently hidden from view for too many. My last economic update for today has to do with the shrinking middle class. Now, in a way, what I just told you about pensions is part of that story. Everybody knows about it. Candidates from both parties of the major parties are talking about it all the time. The end of the middle class, the shrinking middle class, the disappearing middle class, the fact that we are having a small part of the old middle class become part of the rich and the vast majority of the old middle class sinking ever lower into economic development difficulty. We know that polarizing inequality is everywhere. That's what made the vote for Brexit in England. That's what helped make the vote for Trump here. It's the vote that shaped the right wing government in Italy. It's the movement of the yellow vests in France. So far, these are all cosmetic changes. They are the beginnings of change, particularly with the yellow vests in France. The there's some substance to it. Where this will go we don't know. But the interesting thing is, for a long time, and this is the important point, capitalism as a system has defended itself or been defended by its supporters on the grounds that it creates, builds and sustains a big middle class, that it's not just the rich. And yes, we do have the poor, but we are a big middle class and capitalism is justified by it. That poses particular problems on societies that have gone that route when they now deprive that middle class of anything like a middle class livelihood. So what are they going to do? We can already see what the major push of capitalism's defenders, the conservatives, across all parties, where they're going, they have found someone to blame for the destruction of the middle class. It's foreigners. This is a very old, stale way of coping. That's right, it's the immigrants we should be angry at. It's those trading partners in other countries that are cheating us. An endless story of the evil other, the foreigner, you know, the one we can attack because they don't vote in our country, do they? Well, I got news for everybody and it shouldn't come as a surprise. Blaming the foreigner is like an addiction. After a while you gotta take it further to get the same high. And when blaming the foreigner has the effect we'll know it has, namely, it doesn't change anything. You can eject immigrants till you're blue in the face and you can renegotiate trade deals, but it doesn't change very much. And that'll be figured out by the people soon enough. So when that happens, you have to get your high some other way and you'll stop blaming the foreigners, and you'll discover that inside your country there are disguised foreigners, allies of the foreigners, and you'll turn in on yourself. We already see that with Trump attacking Muslim representatives sitting in the Congress. We've come to the end of the first half. Please remember to support us on the YouTube channel and the YouTube system. It's a very big help to us. Make use of our websites. I will return at the end of the program to say a few more words about that. Stay with us for an important interview. I would like to take a brief moment to tell you about my latest book. It's called Understanding Marxism. Marx was a social critic who identified capitalism as not an end of human history, but rather merely the latest phase of human history, which, as we now see, needs a transition to something better. You can get your copy of Understanding Marxism today by Simply going to lulu.com that's L U L U and Searching for Understanding Marxism by me, Richard D. Wolff. We are also very proud that this book is the first one published by our group, Democracy at Work, and we're proud to be able to bring it to you at this time. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's Economic Update. It is my pleasure to welcome an old friend of mine, an attorney, Michael Stephen Smith. He's the author of a new book, which is why I've asked him to join us today. The book is called Lawyers on the in the Courts, in the Streets and on the Air. I almost left that out. He is a co host of the nationally broadcast show Law and Disorder and a former member of the center for Constitutional Rights. He practiced law for 50 years before retiring. Michael, welcome to the show.