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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.