← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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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. And I'm your host, Richard Wolff. Well, very recently we've had strikes, particularly strikes of public school teachers at all levels. The one in the news most recently was Los Angeles, where a school population of over 600,000 students found itself out of school because the teachers were on strike. First strike of teachers in Los Angeles in 30 years. And it comes after last year's very public strikes in Kentucky, in West Virginia, in Oklahoma, and it comes amid a wildcat strike of teachers in Oakland in recent weeks. And to show you that it's at all levels, a strike at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. What's going on? Why are teachers striking? What's at stake? What's the larger economics of all of this? Well, not much has been said about the fact that teachers are not paid very well in our society, and that's clearly the case. And that money has been hard to come by for public authorities. They've been cutting back on public programs in a variety of ways. And given the importance of public education among government programs, sooner or later that's going to be felt in the life of every school. But I think there's some bigger issues that haven't gotten the attention they want and need to get. And so I want to go right there. Here are some of the reasons why our schools are blowing up in terms of the funding and in terms of the upset of the teachers, not only about their being inadequately paid, but also being unable to do their jobs as they were trained to do with the resources they're being given. Here are some of the reasons. First, employers in the United States have been doing something in recent 20 or 30 years that contributes directly. They've actually been doing two things that worth mentioning. One, they've been using immigrants, more and more people coming into the United States from all over the world that are being hired by employers. And the employers understand very clearly the economics here. A young person, an adult who comes into the United States, and most immigrants are adults, has been educated at some other country's expense. They come from a place where the other country paid for the schooling they had. And so they are free in terms of not requiring businesses to pay any taxes to pay for their education because somebody else took care of that. And so they wonder to themselves, why should we be paying taxes to educate Americans when we're hiring people who've already been educated at somebody else's expense? It takes away the incentive for business to support public education the second thing businesses have done that also leads them to pull away from supporting public education has been the enormous number of American businesses who have established production facilities. And outside the United States, they are very concerned about the quality and quantity of their labor force. But it's not American. If that labor force is going to be educated, it has to happen over there in China, in India, in Brazil, or wherever they've gotten. They actually have to become interested in education over there, but not in education here, because they don't need an educated labor force here. And they are therefore less inclined to pay taxes for an education they have less reliance on. This is important because the support of employers for a public education system was in large part dependent on the employers sensing that they would benefit from this educated labor force. But if the foreign countries are doing it, they don't want to have to pay for it. Here's a second. Profiteers. Capitalists looking to make money see public education as a fertile area. If they can take it away from the public school and make it a private activity, they can make money profit off of it for profit. Schools have been growing in recent decades, and that's because they can take, or hope they can, students away from the public school, put them in a private school where they can make private profit in a way they couldn't in a public school. So private capitalists looking to poach the education system are also not interested in making that public education system very successful. In fact, they have a competitive desire to make it less so. Then there are conservatives in this country who are very angry at public employees in general and public employee unions in particular. One of the strongest unions over the last 30 years have been public school teacher unions. And so there's an interest of conservatives to push back against those unions by making life in those jobs more difficult. And then there are parents anxious about what's happening in the public schools as they they don't get the resources they need looking to save their children from this declining public education system. So they become interested more in the charter school, in the private school, and as they pay the fees to send their children there, they're less inclined to support public school education. And finally, there's a population of working class people in America squeezed by their jobs, squeezed by the taxes they have to pay, looking for any relief they can. And if they can save on taxes, they are willing to go that way even if it hurts their schools. You put all that together and you have a squeeze on public education that has a lot to do with all of these strikes. It's a system that's falling apart. And you can see it because it's kind of shooting yourself in the foot. Every economist I know knows that the future of the American economy in a world economic system depends first and foremost on the quality and the quantity of the labor force in this country. And if we disinvest in that, which is what's going on in our public schools, which is where the vast majority of our young people are getting an education, we are hurting ourselves in the future badly. More importantly, we are splitting this society in the schooling between those who can afford to escape into a private school, a charter school or something, and the mass that will be left behind to live in the deteriorating circumstances of public education. Maybe that's all the employers need. They only have to educate a small number, given the immigrants they can hire, given the foreigners they can go over and hire. But that leaves a mass of people excluded from our contemporary society. And that exclusion undercuts the social cohesion without which any society cannot survive. The second theme I want to focus on in today's program has to do with the absurdity of the government shutdown that has been so much in the news with the New Year. There is something so crazy here that it bears some focus on why it's happening. Look, on the one hand, we're going to have a wall built according to our president. Even though every piece of evidence that I can see, including the testimony of border patrol people and people who have been in charge of the borders for decades, is that a wall will not do the job. Not only will the wall, no matter what it is, be penetrated by people who want to get through it, but cities, towns, airports, trains and boats provide all kinds of ways around that limit. Let's remember, everything we have done to prevent immigrants in the past didn't work just like everything we have done in the so called war on drugs seems not to do the job. And the notion that a wall will be able to do what everything else was unable to do and what previous walls have been unable to do, and even set aside the ethics of it all is a strange focus for a society like ours. With the range of problems we have, then there is the kind of equal absurdity. We're not going to spend 5.6 or whatever it is. Billion dollars. $5.6 billion is an awful lot of money. But compared to a budget in this country, which is $4.4 trillion each year, the federal government, that amount of money is pocket change. What is that about? If this is a serious issue, then the money is the least of it. And yet we're hearing the money is a big issue, and we're hearing that the wall will do the. What's going on here? Well, it's clear that the Republicans, led by Mr. Trump, are appealing to their mass base by building a wall and pretending that this is going to solve the, the problems of this country, which is a stretch beyond even my capacity to get my head around. And we have Democrats unwilling to spend some money as if it were a great issue of our budgetary capability. They're appealing, of course, to their base, which doesn't like the wall and doesn't want to spend the money either. It's strange that you shut down a government which, by the way, costs already more than what is not being spent on the wall, damaging people present and into the future, causing all kinds of pain, financial and otherwise, hamstringing the government from functioning as each of these two parties panders to a relatively small base that are its regular supporters. This is a society in which the little bit of social consciousness that sort of enables us to function as a community is clearly breaking down. In a way, the deterioration of our public schools is another symptom of this lack of a sense of a society and a community that needs to be sustained, that needs to have a reasonably shared notion of its priorities that it can then pursue. I think it's important finally to face that these signsand we cover many of them in this program. These signs of a public school system breaking down, of a governmental apparatus disintegrating into absurd contests over secondary issues while the primary ones go unattended. These are signs of, of social disintegration. And they have to be taken seriously, because if something isn't done that faces that fact, it will continue to deteriorate and may get us to a point where we'll be unable to prevent the final dissolution. You know, I recently did essays and programs around what happened in the Soviet Union in 1989. The Soviet Union didn't come to an end because they were attacked from outside. They didn't come to an end because of some external collapse. The Soviet Union imploded of itself. Its own internal inability to solve its problems, inability even to face them, caused in the end the disintegration that the rest of the world observed. Are we observing that here now? And if you can't answer it right away, think about it. Well, we've come to the end of the first half of this program, and it gives me the opportunity to remind you, please, we post a great deal of material, including this program on YouTube. It's very helpful to us for you to sign up. Doesn't cost anything on the YouTube to become a subscriber to our YouTube channels. We also invite you to make use of our websites democracyatwork.info and rdwolffwith2f's com. Those websites allow you to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. They allow you to see the range of activities we do. This is also an opportunity for me to offer specific thanks to our Patreon community. Going to Patreon and watching Economic Update. There is a way of supporting and kind of endorsing the effort we make here and we ask you in all of these ways to partner with us. We want to have the biggest reach possible and working together, you and us, is a way to accomplish that. I think you will find the interview that comes after the short break remarkable and important. So please stay with us. We'll be right back. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic update. With me today for this second half is Alex Vitaly. He is a professor of sociology and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, a unit of the City University of New York. He has spent the last 25 years consulting police departments and human rights groups internationally. In his new book, the End of Policing, he argues that the bulk of liberal police reforms currently being considered in the United States are either ineffective and or counterproductive, and that what's really needed is a dramatic reduction in our reliance on the police. I can't think of a more important topic. So it's with great pleasure that for you and for me, I welcome Alex Vitale. Thank you very much for joining us.
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B
My pleasure.
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A
Okay, let's get right into two of the major thrusts of your book, namely, if I get it correctly, that policing has been vastly expanded or increased in the United States in recent decades and that it has changed how it works. Tell us a little bit about these two changes so we're all on the same page of what's been going on.
- [15:46]
B
Well, I sometimes think about the problem of policing as having two distinct qualities. One is a kind of 400 year old problem, which is a problem of colonialism and slave patrols and the management of workers. That's at the root of the creation of police forces, mostly in the early 19th century. But then there's a more recent element to the problem, which is this dramatic expansion in the scope and domain of policing over the last 40 years or so, beginning with the war on drugs, but including the expansion of border policing, school policing, and that policing has not only expanded in scope, but in many ways in intensity. So the huge increase in our reliance on SWAT teams, the whole development of mass incarceration, which is, of course, always begins with arrests, has characterized this kind of shift, not just in policing, but in our broader economic and governmental systems.
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A
And why? Why has it expanded? Why has it changed in the way you describe?
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B
Well, part of the story is about the rise of a new Republican Party, basically lined with the Nixon era. So Nixon makes the effort to respond to the victories of the civil rights movement by trying to switch white Southern voters from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. He knows he can't bring back segregation, so instead he decides to develop a war on crime, war on drugs narrative to signal to those white votes voters that he's going to use the power of the federal government to put blacks in their place. And we now have this evidence from inside the Nixon White House that this was the explicit intent of getting the federal government involved in drug interdiction.
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A
I was wondering, are you familiar with the work of Michelle Alexander in terms of mass incarceration? Seems to me that that work and what you're saying.
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B
Absolutely. Michelle's work is incredibly important. And in understanding that the nature of the criminalization of communities of color in the United States is a political problem. It has nothing to do with public safety, nothing to do with crime, or only marginally about those things. It's about a political project. And that political project is tied to both the politics of racial resentment and the kind of public sector austerity that you talked about in relationship to the teachers strike and even what's going on in the border. A kind of resentment of the other that's being harnessed in the face of the profound economic changes we've seen in the last 40 years, the kind of economic precarity and underinvestment that has left people looking for someone else to blame. And by ramping up criminalization, we define all our social problems in terms of, like, moral laxity or moral incompetence that will only respond to these kinds of coercive state interventions.
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A
It strikes me as almost ironic that if you go back not that long ago, it was popular for liberal media in the west to mock the arrests of political dissidents in Eastern Europe, which were always characterized as the arrest of criminal elements. And the mockery was, this has nothing to do with crime. This is a political project. And basically you're saying we were calling the kettle black, but we were in the process of doing pretty much the same thing.
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B
Well, if you just look at the War on drugs, you know, we've had this for over 40 years by any metric than you can imagine, it's a complete failure. Right. Drugs are cheaper, easier to get, higher quality overdoses are through the roof. Any young person in the United States can get drugs anytime they want them. And yet we persist in this idea that we need the war on Drugs to keep our kids safe. It's never been about that. It's never achieved that and it's never going to achieve that. And instead of giving narcotics units anti bias training, we need to just end the war on drugs and just reduce that completely counterproductive burden of policing on our society.
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A
Strikes me very similar to Trump repeating that crime is being brought in by immigrants, despite the fact that endless statistical studies show that the rate of most crimes is higher in native born populations than in immigrant communities. But this narrative has been repeated so often. It's one of those great examples in which if you say it often enough, people will believe it because of other reasons that make them want perhaps to believe it.
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B
Yeah. In my chapter on border policing, I point out that border policing has never been about closing the border, and it's certainly not about that now. It's about a production of whiteness, really. It's about a set of economic and social relationships. So signaling who we're trying to keep out is a way of identifying who we think we are. And that's always done in these racialized terms, whether it's the Chinese Exclusion Act, Operation Wetback or the Wall. These are always projects of racialization.
- [21:19]
A
It's like Trump telling us we need more Norwegians. If I ever write in the country. Okay, is it correct or would you comment on the notion that you really are advocating, if not the end of policing, a drastic reduction as well as change in what policing. Tell us what you would like to see happen in this country.
- [21:44]
B
I associate myself with a kind of what I call a divest invest movement, which is the idea that the vast majority of the social problems that we're using the police in theory to address could be better addressed in less coercive and punitive ways. And that what we need is the kind of community investments and economic restructurings that are going to reduce the burdens of crime and social disorder on communities. So really excited about work that Just Leadership USA is doing in their Build Communities movement, for example, where they understand that what's driving populations in jails and prisons is using the police to deal with the fact that these neighborhoods are in huge distress. And instead of investing in education, community centers, libraries, basic health care, drug treatment, we are turning those problems over to the police. So the way to get the police out of our lives in as many ways possible is to do that investment. So I always say, show me the problem and then let's see if we can figure out a non authoritarian solution to it. If there's something left at the end of that, guys with guns who want to enforce their will on the rest of us, maybe we need some mechanism for dealing with that. But the vast majority of what policing does is really about managing the consequences of inequality in a way that maintains and exacerbates that inequality.
- [23:14]
A
Let me put my economics hat on. We spend an ungodly amount of money on policing, on prisons, on all of that. If we could severely reduce the police as an institution and the incarceration institutions in our country, there would be a liberation of resources to do a lot of these other things. So it's not only a good idea in terms of the human community, but it's also economically feasible because there's a, a shift of resources. So this isn't going to be the expensive item that the critics of it might otherwise claim.
- [23:54]
B
I mean, I think we shouldn't limit ourselves to just those pots of money. First of all, if we look at what we spend on the military, if we put that in the mix too, then maybe we're moving in the right direction. But it is very true. There are a lot of groups around the country who are articulating things like the Youth Justice Coalition in la, which looked at how much LA county was spending on policing and jails. And they said if we could just have 5% of that money, $10 billion a year, we could fund all the youth services, community based anti violence efforts that would really make our community safer and stronger and reduce the burden of criminalization. But it's going to take more than just reducing police budgets and jail budgets. We're going to need some economic restructuring and some substantial new investments.
- [24:45]
A
Do you see a growing awareness of what you're saying? Is there an audience for the kind of book you've written, for the kind of arguments you made?
- [24:55]
B
Somewhat surprisingly.
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A
So tell us about that.
- [24:58]
B
Yeah, I conceptualized the book actually before the death of Eric Garner, before the events in Ferguson, and thought that I would be very much a voice in the wilderness. But as events have changed and new movements have emerged, what I've seen is a growing awareness in communities who are fighting around these issues that body cameras and community policing are not going to save us. They're not going to fix policing. They don't make any difference. There's no evidence to support them. And that what we really have to talk about is the kind of political accountability around these bigger questions of why are we using police to solve all our community problems when the tools they have to solve those problems are handguns and ticket books and handcuffs. And those are not the tools our communities need.
- [25:45]
A
You know, it's very similar to what I've been hearing from teachers that they feel that they are thrust into the disintegrating families, the disintegrating neighborhoods, and asked to teach as if there are no extra costs. And I don't just mean it in my money, but in time and in energy that they don't have those costs, that somehow they are to in their little classroom compensate or offset the disintegration of the larger society. And they make basically the same claim you do. These are political and broad economic problems. We could do the job maybe even with less resources than we have if people weren't here in New York, for example, the statistics that 10% of our public school kids were homeless at some part of last year. I mean, what are we talking about? The extra problems a child brings who has no home? If that problem isn't dealt with, what are you asking the teacher to compensate? It's a disaster. And then anyway, my point is, is there, I guess I want you to tell us that there is a growing audience, that there is an awareness that your idea isn't a cry in the wilderness, but is becoming the last best hope of solving these problems.
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B
Well, let's look at the Advancement Project and the work they're doing on schools. They have explicitly come out and said that part of the problem with schools is the reliance on school police. That as we've eliminated funding gone towards privatization, we're destroying the schools. Kids also are bringing their problems from home and the community into the school, giving the teachers no resources to deal with them. That's part of what the LA teachers are upset about.
- [27:28]
A
Exactly.
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B
We have to understand schools as a site not just for education, but for the well being of the communities, community school movements, restorative justice movements. We can make schools a positive part of the community if we reject using police privatization, charter school movements and really have a robust reinvestment in the idea of public education. And there are a lot of groups around the country doing this. In New York, we understand that there are more police than counselors in the city schools and that's got to end.
- [28:05]
A
I remember my elementary school being a place where everything happened. I mean, there were 10 different community activities every day after school because it was the. Well, you know, I have to say, as I often do, we've come to the end of our time. It goes very quickly. But I want to underscore the importance of the ideas you've brought. The questions about policing are long overdue. It's very good to hear that there's an audience for that. And I hope people will pursue your book and that you'll come back and talk about this with us again.
- [28:40]
B
Thank you.
- [28:42]
A
And for all of you, thank you for being part of this. And remember, please, that this is a program that's designed to have you as a partner, spreading what you learn here, sharing it with the people around you. And I look forward to speaking with you again next week.