← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Loading summary
Transcript31 lines
- [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. I try to bring this program every week to give some other perspective on what's happening to the economy around us. I want to give a belated shout out to the International Women's Day March 8 and to recognize both the old issues that women are still struggling with, especially here in the United States, the right to control their own body, the right to get equal pay for equal work, but also to recognize new, important changes to American society that the women in the United States have taken the lead on achieving. Here's a couple. One, the wave of strikes by public school teachers that have really gripped this country over the last six months. Those have been the strikes of public school teachers, overwhelmingly women, who have shown that they are the leaders in fighting back against the neglect of education and the general neglect and cutback in the quality and quantity of public services. They are leaders for changing the United States in a very important new direction. And the same is true of the MeToo movement, an attempt to change the culture long overdue. And again, the women are in the leadership and we all need to take our hats off to those particularly who are doing that. Last but not least, the flight attendants on our airways. Again, overwhelmingly women. They had the courage to come out during the recent government shutdown and demand that the AFL CIO call a general strike to show that working people don't want the political leaders to fight out their battles on the backs of working people, denied their salaries. Good leadership from the women in this country. It deserves recognition. The first regular update I want to bring to you has to do with the University of California's decision to break its relationship with a commercial publisher, Elsevier, in favor of the open access publishing of all research results. Stop putting a price on the research that is done at publicly supported universities who are trying to do something to benefit the human race in the research they undertake shouldn't be a profit making enterprise that holds back the research. Let me read to you what the head of the University of California's Faculty Senate said in response to this new development. Quote, knowledge should not be accessible only to those who can pay. Bravo to Robert May, Chair of the University of California's Faculty Senate. The only thing I would say besides congratulating that university for doing that is to say there are a lot of other things that ought not to be limited to people according to their ability to pay. I'm struck every time I go to a grocery store that now we have two kinds of groceries. Organic, you know, things that are healthy, that are good for the human body, that are less dangerous for cancer, and many other things that we pay extra for, and then the regular food that has been treated with God knows what that people who care afford the organic food have to buy. Whoa. Is that a reasonable thing to do? Is that any more reasonable than limiting the research that we publicly support from being available to everybody? Come on, folks. My guess is most of you can imagine the housing and many other basic needs of a decent community ought not to be limited to those who can pay and denied to those who can't. Good leadership from the University of California. It just needs to go a lot further. And then I want to also talk about Governor Cuomo, who's back at it, having been defeated in selling out the city of New York to the Amazon Corporation in his combination of begging first for them to come and then bribing them on top of it with billions in money that could be used for the subways, for the schools, for all the other things we need more than a headquarters for one of the richest companies on earth. My goodness, what kind of leadership is that? What's good about the University of California is what's bad about Governor Cuomo and the others that he's dragooned in there. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and, sadly, the NAACP and others who want to continue this program of begging and bribing corporations to locate here rather than there so all the cities and towns can compete to give away the resources they don't have to make corporations even richer than they already are. Where's the leadership to stop that awful pattern? Not from Governor Cuomo and not in New York. And this notion of selling out is of political leaders selling to corporations. Well, we've just had two more examples. Facebook has been exposed, having spent money around the world, bribing or whatever is politely supported, as influencing politicians to not pass laws that protect people's privacy so that Facebook can make even more money than it already has. I guess Mr. Zuckerberg wants to be even more super rich than he already is. So they want to be able to violate privacy rules, and so they need the politicians not to impose privacy rules to just because their constituents want it. Corporations versus Democratic control of things like our privacy, of things like our community's tax resources. And then you can see it again, the selling out by politicians. Mr. Trudeau In Canada just got caught protecting a company that was being accused, and it was clear that they were guilty of bribing other Politicians. The company in Canada, SNC Lavallin, had bribed officials in Libya to get advantages. And they were going to be prosecuted because Canada has laws. Until Mr. Trudeau, recognizing that they're a big employer in the Quebec province he's from, protected them and is now exposed and his government is in trouble. Politicians providing services and favors to corporations is the way our political system works. And the results are uniformly awful for the country as a whole. It ought to stop. We need some leadership. Maybe women should step forward since they've been the better leaders in recent times. And now another update that kind of exposes more hypocrisy. The United States has told the UK government in Great Britain that it will sign a special treaty, especially if the UK exits Europe as their Brexit crisis keeps boiling over. They're gonna make a deal with the United States. The exiters say they don't need Europe. Well, the United States has just given them a taste of what they're in for. The United States demands that the British stop blocking chlorinated chicken and hormone stuffed beef. Turns out that the United States washes its chickens in chlorine. I'm sorry to inform you of this. If it's a problem for you, you should have known. And the British don't allow that. They don't think it's safe and they don't think it's necessary. And the British say, we're not going to lower our standards just so you can sell chickens that have been dipped into the swimming pool. We're not gonna do that and we're not gonna take your beef either. And the United States is outraged. The ambassador to Britain issued a public statement rebuking the British for being. Wait a minute now. You're not gonna believe this. Protectionist. You're keeping us out. You don't really care about chlorine and you don't really care about health. You just wanna protect your own chicken producers. And that is protectionism. Says the United States after a year in which it put tariffs on steel, tariffs on aluminum, tariffs on automobiles, tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars to protect the American economy. That's this whole issue. If each country protects, we're not going to be trading much of anything with one another. And that's exactly what the World Trade Organization and every major trade deal in the last 50 years was designed to avoid. We are going backwards. We're not making America great again. We're making America at war with other countries over protectionism. And that often leads to military war. And we shouldn't forget It My next update has to do with the Bloomberg Financial News Service, hardly a radical source of information. They keep an index of the world's healthiest countries, and they just released their 2019 index of the world's healthiest countries. I thought you might be interested. Spain is the number one healthiest country. Italy is not far behind. The countries around the Mediterranean, it turns out, seem to have a very good diet. And they also have universal medical care, and that also includes preventive care and primary care for children and all of those things which we don't have here in the United States. And where does the United States rank by Bloomberg, which is a U.S. company? We rank, get ready, 35th. Cuba is ahead of us. Canada ranks 16th. You know, when you analyze the health of a society as Bloomberg did, you look at things like life expectancy, use of tobacco, obesity, environmental factors such as access to clean water and sanitation, you really put it together. It's a measure of how well you're doing. By that standard, the United States comes in near the bottom of the list of industrial countries. Spain is number one. Canada is number 16. Canada, remember, has a national health service that insures everybody. We don't. And that's the result. And that's what makes America great again. Or what. I want to conclude by bringing everybody up to speed on a law that was passed in the United States recently that got very little attention. It used to be called the Main Street Employee Ownership Act. It was passed on August 13, and it didn't get much attention because it was folded in under the John McCain National Defense Authorization act about our defense budget. But what this part of that law does, it allows the Small Business Administration to much more easily make loans available to workers who want to become their own employers, to set up a workers co op to bring finally some democracy to the workplace that is now easier to do than it was before, doesn't go as far as the UK Labour Party goes, which promises to really make it much easier for worker co ops to form and to lend them more money than the SBA is willing to do. But it shows that this demand is building up so that even conventional politicians go along. And now, finally, a number of Americans have been complaining that their tax refunds from the taxes they paid in 2018 that they expected to get this time of the year are either not there or much smaller than they expected. In other words, their taxes have gone up, not down. They're not getting the refunds that they've been getting in recent years, and they're all up in arms And I want to explain why. The tax reform, so called, passed in December of 2017 with great hoopla by Donald Trump and the GOP lowered taxes for corporations, lowered taxes for rich people, and gave a very small tax deduction for average people. But what it didn't tell you was that it raised taxes. Let me say that again. The GOP and Mr. Trump raised taxes. Here's how they did it. They took away the right of people to deduct from what they owe the federal government the taxes they pay to their state and the taxes they paid to their city. There's a maximum of $10,000 and whatever you pay to local and state taxes above that, you can't deduct anymore. And that's why you have to pay more federal, because this rule passed by Trump and the gop, when these people tell you they're cutting your taxes, reach for your wallet because they're reaching in it and they're gonna beat you to it if you're not very careful. We've reached the end of the first half of Economic Update. As usual. Please stay with us for an interesting interview. We'll be right back. 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.com 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 the Economic Update. It is my pleasure to welcome today Eleanor Goldfield. So let me say hello, Eleanor, to you.
- [14:46]
B
Thank you for having me.
- [14:47]
A
You're very welcome. Eleanor is a creative activist and a journalist. She started and hosts the show act out, which airs on Free Speech TV as we do on this program, as well as in podcast form. She also co hosts the podcast Common Censored with Lee Camp Lee, who was with us not very long ago. Her work covers people and topics that corporate media censor or misrepresents. She works in a variety of mediums and her performances blend music, spoken word and visual projections. She was also the co founder and singer of Rooftop Revolutionaries, a political rock band born from the fight against capitalism and all the evils that stem from it. Besides speaking and performing, she assists in local action organizing and activist training and is based in Washington, dc. So, Eleanor, welcome again.
- [15:51]
B
Thank you so much.
- [15:52]
A
Tell me why you started an activist website TV project and what it is.
- [15:58]
B
Well, so I came up with the idea for Act Out. Really during Occupy, I was involved in Occupy Los Angeles. And I felt that something that was missing from media was because alternative media does this excellent job of telling us all what the real news is. Right. But not so much how to address it. So here's really how our wars are affecting people. Here's the real economics of capitalism. But then it can almost feel very much like a downer, like, oh, gosh, now I'm gonna become an alcoholic because I just found out the truth. So what's the next step? The next step to me was, okay, how do we address this? This something that Occupy really started to foment in people. And so I wanted to build a show that introduced folks to the work that's already being done, because people are fighting on all of these issues across the nation and they're just not getting those platforms. So one of the core pieces of act out is to give those people the platform and introduce folks to those fights so they can engage with them.
- [16:59]
A
So you are another one of the consequences of Occupy. In other words, a person activated, stimulated, supported.
- [17:08]
B
I guess you could say that, but I was actually activated before then. Probably even before 2002. I started doing environmental work in Charlotte, North Carolina, where I lived. And then leading up to the Iraq war in 2002, I became a very vehement anti war activist. So I think what happened with me with Occupy was what happened to a lot of folks. I know that they were like, oh, wow, people are activating around this, just like I have been doing. And we're giving voice to collective efforts that we're doing. You know, Occupy did a great job of bringing together environmental, anti war and bringing it under the umbrella of capitalism. So I think that's what happened with me being funneled into the Occupy movement.
- [17:49]
A
So how's it going? Tell me about your show. Tell me what it achieves. Tell me what you think is your next step.
- [17:57]
B
Well, I'm gonna keep doing this until everything is fixed. No, I mean, I think it's going as well, as well as it can be when you're dealing with these issues. You know, I think one of the things that you also do is you bring awareness to these issues. You pull back the veil that's been swung in front of people through the education system, and also through corporate media. So that's what I'm doing. And I'd say it's going well because I do think, think that people are waking up and distrust in government is higher than it's ever been, as well as in corporate media. And the important thing for me to do is make sure that the analysis is not skewed, right? So that the analysis isn't, oh, it's the immigrant's fault, but that the analysis really goes to the core. The root problems of the issues that.
- [18:45]
A
We all face tell me, you know, there's more and more signs that people in America are interested in socialism. And when I look at that, I get the sense that what they're really saying with that is that they're not happy with capitalism. What exactly socialism is and where it's going, that's a bit murky. But there is this crucial opening to be able to be critical of capitalism, and you do that. So I want you to tell us why you do that and what you think that does for your audience. This focus on the root, as you put it, in capitalism. I'm intrigued to see, because we try to do that too, how that's working.
- [19:27]
B
Well, I think, like you pointed out, I think a lot of young folks, even younger than me, you know, I'm in my 30s, I think a lot of young folks are really seeing that the core issue is capitalism. And I think, you know, your show does a great job of doing that and alternative media. And I think the fact that most people don't get their news from corporate media anymore means that they're being that folks are seeing that there is this growing movement that's looking at capitalism and saying, that's not working, you know, and I think that the importance of that is that all of our issues tie back to that, whether that be the war machine, whether that be environmental destruction, women's rights, immigrants rights, what have you, police brutality, all of these things feed back into capitalism. So I think on an organizing level as well as on a media level, folks are seeing that this is how we can build that solidarity that's necessary to really address the problems. And none of our problems will ever be properly addressed unless we address the root cause, which is capitalism.
- [20:28]
A
Do you have any thoughts about the connection between what you do, for example, and concrete examples of activism come to my mind listening to you? The teachers around the country for the last six months have really shown extraordinary leadership in a labor movement that a lot of people thought had kind of gone to sleep. They are Showing, oh no, we're not sleeping, we're active. The most recent one, a real victory in Oakland, California with a 12% wage increase. I mean, I know there were problems and there were a lot of teachers who wanted to stay out on strike for further, but that's really good. It meant that the majority realized they made a gain and a good big minority wants more to happen. Is something happening to activism that you're picking up on because of your direct interest in it?
- [21:22]
B
I think so. I think on an organizing level I'm seeing more and more people leave the systemic answer to the problem, which is, oh, vote Democrat. I was recently at a meeting with some union leaders from across the country. A wonderful, powerful meeting. And the basic concept of the meeting was, okay, well the Dems aren't going to help us, so what do we do? And that was really powerful to see because I think more and more people, regardless of whether they're in the labor movement or not, are coming to that understanding that, okay, well, the system in and of itself is not going to save us because the system in and of itself is the problem. So I think previously in activism, you know, when I joined the anti war movement, it was like, let's just get a Democrat and let's get rid of Bush and we'll be okay, okay? And then Obama ramped up the war machine. And so I think what folks are really grabbing onto is that, okay, well maybe it's not just a matter of which party. Maybe it's the two party system and this whole structure that is perpetuating the ills that we're all suffering under.
- [22:22]
A
Yeah, we're coming up to a presidential race that is going to bring all of that to the fore. Literally inside the Democratic Party where you beginning to see more and more of attention. That's not so clear. If I understand correctly, you also take very seriously the arts. You come out of the arts. You come out of the possibility that art itself can be a mechanism to inform and to stimulate activism. Tell us a little bit about how the arts play a role in what you're doing and the success you're having.
- [22:57]
B
Well, put simply, art inspires. You know, art is not going to be that blockade on a street, but it inspires the folks who then go to the street. And I think that that's. And by art I mean everything from a film to a poster to comedy to music. And I think if you, if everybody just sat and thought about it for a second, what is it that inspired you to do something in terms of activism? I'm sure most people could think of, oh, I saw that really amazing poster, or I saw that really amazing banner, or that song that got stuck in my head or what have you. I think that that is a really powerful tool to bring people in. And something that I used to do at my shows when I. When I had a band was. It was very insidious. You bring people in and you're like, hey, you're going to a rock show. Isn't that cool? And then you'd go up on stage and you'd start smashing capitalism. And then you have. People are stuck. They've got their beer in their hand. They're like, oh, oh, okay. I didn't know that that was. But cool. And then on their way out, you've got people tabling for various issues. And so you. Basically, art is kind of the back door into people's minds because it hits them emotionally, and then they start to personally go over it in their mind, as opposed to handing them stats and being like, hey, here's proof that climate change is. Is a problem. Stats are difficult to grab ahold of. And sometimes people are like, no, no, no, I don't want to. But art is an emotional response first, and then it becomes a mental response. And I think that's a really powerful and indeed insidious way of getting to people in these ways.
- [24:33]
A
I couldn't agree more. How do you do it, though? Tell me, how do you bring the artistry into your own show? Well, I'm here because I want to.
- [24:41]
B
Learn how to do it, too, in this show. Well, I think that you should start dancing on your show. Personally, I think that would be great. So on my show, I incorporate spoken word oftentimes. And I also will highlight other artists and activists, whether that be street artists or musicians that are doing creative activism as well. But another thing that I do is I put on creative activism events. So kind of like, you know, hey, come see a show. And of course it's, you know, the poster's gonna have something political about it. But the point being that you're bringing people in to have a good time. And I think that's the other thing that needs to be made clear is that activism can oftentimes people hear it and they're like, wow, that sounds really depressing. All you do is research these heavy issues and talk about how they're affecting people negatively. But as Sol Alinsky wrote in his Rules for Radicals, if you don't make it fun, people aren't gonna come back. And I think that's the other part of using art is that it soothes the soul for those who are tired and worn down. But it also brings people together to see, oh wow, caring about things and doing something about it that is really a good time. And so I think those creative activism events are a big part of that as well.
- [25:52]
A
Is it fair to read you as a person and you as a personality doing this show as itself a sign that activism is coming back into the American scene, into the culture?
- [26:06]
B
I like to think so. I mean when I was in my band, we hit several walls in Hollywood because we got to the point where we were having meetings with record execs and they told me that I needed to write more love songs, get rid of the politics and go up a cup size or two. None of those things happened.
- [26:25]
A
I've still yet they really explicitly.
- [26:27]
B
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Bigger boobs please. And more love songs, less politics. They were afraid of politics. And I think that that doesn't surprise.
- [26:37]
A
Me but that they were as blunt. Oh yeah, I shouldn't be surprised about that.
- [26:42]
B
You know, they got stuff to do, they gotta onto the next point.
- [26:45]
A
Money to make.
- [26:46]
B
Yeah. So I think what we're seeing now, not that the music industry has changed, it's still incredibly sexist and afraid of making a statement, but I think what we're seeing now is that people are more interested in, in making a statement. And so back when I was trying to organize in Los Angeles, when I lived there, around Occupy even people were like, I have a Prius, I'm good, I've saved the planet, we're done. But now you're seeing more and more people think, okay, maybe that's not all it takes. Maybe my own personal choice of a tote bag is not going to save the planet. Perhaps I need to do more. I think that more and more people are looking at activism as a necessary part of their day to day lives.
- [27:27]
A
Last question we'll have time for how has the organized media in this country dealt with you? Do you feel you have an opportunity? Is it still closed to people who are politically critical? Where's the media mainstream and other related in terms of your own experience?
- [27:48]
B
I think alternative media is doing a great job of working in solidarity with each other. Corporate media will never, they will die before they ever reach out a hand. I've been censored heavily on Facebook and on Google and you know, the corporate social media as I call them. So I think there's that, as you know, there's that break, there's the alternative media like what you're doing. And then there's the corporate media, which will hold on to that state sponsored perspective until they die, which they will. And I think that's what we're seeing.
- [28:21]
A
As always, I wish we had more time, but I see in you a fellow struggler in this realm and I really do salute you. The more people doing what you're doing, the more this change that we're hoping for will come. So thank you for the work you do, as well as for joining us today.
- [28:38]
B
Thank you so much for having me.
- [28:39]
A
And I hope you've all found this as important and interesting as I have. And I will talk to you again next week. Sam.