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Sam. Saint. Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, our jobs, our incomes, our debts, those of our children and those looming down the road as we try to plan for and figure out our own economic futures. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life and currently I teach at the New School University in New York City. Well, the early part of August 2016 is full of things for us to talk about, kind of more than we can possibly manage. So bear with me as I go through, perhaps a bit more quickly, some of the major items. But before I do, I wanted to invite all of you that might be in the New York City area on Wednesday, August 10th at 7:30 in the evening. That's when I will be doing my monthly economic lecture. We call it the Monthly Economic Update. It always takes place the second Wednesday of every month at the very historic Judson Memorial Church in downtown Washington Square, a very famous part of New York City. So if you're a person from the New York City area or if you're a visitor to New York City this summer and you're around on the 10th of August, 7:30 in the evening, come join us at the Judson Memorial Church, Washington Square, and it'll be a chance for me to meet you and vice versa and have a bit more time to explore these kinds of issues than we can manage here on the radio. Also, I wanted to respond to many of you asking about a recent book that I published. Yes, it's true, I did. It is a book of essays on the economic crisis of our times. It's called Capitalism's Crisis Deepens. It was released in May of this year. And of course, I would love you to take a look at it and see whether it amplifies and extends some of the things we discuss on this program. And finally, as I often do, let me invite you again to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, to take a look at the extra work we do that we post up on our websites. The interviews I do, the talks that I and my associates now do. It's not just me at all anymore, I'm happy to say. All of that is available 247 without a charge on our websites rdwolf, with two Fs.com and democracyatwork.info once again, all one word, democracyatwork.info. well, I want to begin with another story. Yes, indeed, about Volkswagen, the major German automobile company, one of whose subsidiaries is the luxury car brand Audi. And Audi was in the headlines last week. Not this time. For what has been in the headlines for months now. Namely the deliberate producing in millions of automobiles, mostly diesel cars produced by vw, of a device that systematically under reports to the government how much pollution each of these diesel cars is dumping into our environment. VW got caught thanks to some American engineers who checked it, having produced a device that tells the regulators of pollution that the thing is really dumping little bit of pollution in the air. But when you actually take a VW diesel out on the road, it turns out to be dumping toxic amounts of pollution in the air, giving uncounted thousands of people lung problems, asthma problems, perhaps killing some people along the way. We don't have a way of tracking that sort of thing, but it was a disaster. And Volkswagen has been shelling out billions of dollars in partial payment as fines for having done this global deception to make more profits. Well, poor vw, if your heart is bleeding for them. They got into trouble now doing something else. What was it this time? Well, one of their executives, Audi chief executive Rupert Stadler, spent $13,980, well let's make it rounded out. $14,000 on a party for some top managers, 30 of them. And the party was called this is Germany after all, a beer contest. And so the Audi company wrote it off as an expense of doing business. This beer party for 30 people, which if you understand how taxes work, if Audi can call that an expense, it'll save them on their taxes paid in this case to the German government to pay for all the schools and hospitals and roads that the German government is responsible for. Well, I did the arithmetic. 30 top managers, $14,000 for a beer contest, that works out to $466 per manager. Folks, that's not a quantity of beer that you drink, that's a quantity of beer that you bathe in. So we have to wonder yet again about what a profit making automobile company is doing. Antisocial behavior by dumping pollution into the world. Antisocial behavior by phony expenses that reduce the taxes you pay for the services governments provide. Next, economic update. Three senior Irish bankers are going to jail. They are the first senior bankers anywhere in the world to go to jail for what they did in the collapse of global banking and capitalism. Capitalism. In 2008, Dennis Casey, former chief executive of Irish Life, is going to for two years and nine months. This follows a 74 day criminal trial, the longest criminal trial in Irish history. In addition, Willie McAteer, former finance director at the failed Anglo Irish bank and John Bowe or Bowie, the executive head of that bank, Bank's capital markets, they're going to jail for 42 months and 24 months respectively. In the conviction of these three senior bankers, the following three words were the summary that the judge and others used to describe what they had. Dishonest, deceitful and corrupt. So at least in Ireland, there's some punishment for the people who ran the big banks. But it also requires me as an economist to remind everybody, putting the chief bankers in jail leaves in place the system with the rewards it offers to bankers that will lead their replacements to. To face very many of the same temptations and the same sets of decisions that they did. Will they be little less likely to follow suit because their predecessors went to jail? Maybe, but it's a big maybe. We've seen elsewhere that wave after wave of executives in these banks end up behaving pretty much like one another. The way to solve this problem, therefore, whatever you think of putting top bankers in jail, is to change the system that puts them in a position and induces them to do what occasionally they get caught doing. Next item. Kind of like the story about bankers. Every now and then I like to give examples of what we call the revolving door and at the top of a capitalist system, the peculiar way in which the very top executives in the banks and the big corporations end up being the top political decision makers. And they kind of go back and forth, hence the term revolving door. For a few years they're wearing one hat, a political one, and then they go back to the business hat, and then maybe they go back to the political hat, and it gets a little confusing as to where they are. So in the wake of the Brexit vote, the vote in England for Britain to leave the European Union, there's been a whole spate of reports and stories in the press showing us that the British working people may have voted to get Britain out of the European Union, but the cozy revolving door at the top, both in England and in Europe, is alive and well and spinning as it always has. Let me give you a few examples. The president of the European Commission, one of the key bodies of the unified Europe, a man named Jose Manuel Barroso, is no longer the president of the European Commission. He has left that job and has signed up to be, yeah, you guessed it, a banker at Goldman Sachs Group. Another example, the former bank of England governor Mervyn King, who was reported a few years ago railing against, quote, incompetent and greedy bankers, has become a senior advisor to Citigroup Inc. One of the largest banks here in the United States. The recently departed Prime Minister of Britain, David Cameron used a little known mechanism of Queen Elizabeth's to provide honors to some of the people around him. And these include Isabel Spearman, a former aide to Cameron's wife who has no position in the British government and never did, as well as his media advisors and two of the former drivers of his car. Does kind of look like you're giving governmental favors to your friends as well as the revolving door, but I'm not done. Let's remember former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is currently an advisor to the JP Morgan Chase Company. His predecessor as Prime Minister of England, John Major, now works for the Credit Credit Suisse Group. And the person who came after Blair, the Labour Party leader, Gordon Brown, now works for the Pacific Investment Management Company, the largest bond trader and dealer in the world. And while we're talking about the Pacific Investment Management Company, otherwise known as Pimco, you might be excited to know that who works for them these days is former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke. So what the British are doing and what the European are doing is just following what the Americans are doing too. The current Secretary of the Treasury, Jacob Lew, used to work for the Citigroup before he returned to the government, while his predecessor, Robert Rubin, Secretary of the treasury under Bill Clinton, went the other way and now works again for Citigroup. If you get the feeling that the people at the top are busy taking care of themselves while you have an ever harder time economically, well then you figured it out. Next item, pensions. They're going to be getting a lot of attention in the years ahead. And so I need from time to time to explain them and catch you up on them. Cities and states and the federal government too have pensions for public employees. That's part of how public jobs work. You get a salary, of course, and you get some benefits. And among the benefits that public employees get are pensions. And when public employees sit down with their employer, the city of this, the police department over here, the fire department over there, the state employees over there, when they sit down each year or every three years to work out a contract to govern their employment, they debate or they negotiate not just over salaries, but over benefits like pensions. So it is very common for union members, workers to accept little or no wage increase because the employer gives them an improved pension benefit. So you don't get more now, but you get more in the future when you retire to take account of the fact that your work is harder or that you're better at it or all the usual things that happen in unemployment. But the thing that tempts politicians, of course, is to press unions to forego wage increases now, because if they give them, the workers, a benefit now, they have to raise taxes on people now to pay for it. Much better not to give the workers more now, to promise them more in the future when they retire, because that will leave to your successor, the politician who comes after you, the problem of raising the money then to make good on the promise you made now. So that's a clever politician who gives more in pensions than in wage increases because it makes him able to go to the public and say, I didn't raise your taxes. It's not honest, because what he did is raise the commitment to the future of these workers. Well, then, how does it work? Money is taken out of a public employee's check every week. A fireperson, a police officer, a teacher, a clerk, whatever money is taken out every week and set aside and invested. So it hopefully will grow to the point where when that worker retires at age 65, the money will be there to make good on the promise that he or she will get a pension for the rest of their lives. Okay, that means the money set aside has to grow in order to do it. Is there enough money? Have the governments of our cities and states set aside enough money so that it will grow at a good enough rate so that we will be able to pay the pensions that workers have accepted in place of wage increases over the years of their work for cities and states? And the answer is not at all. Here's the issue, if you can stay with me on this. Number one, the assumption of cities and states in this country is that the investments will grow, currently 7.6% a year. That's very generous. That's very ambitious. Things have not been growing at that rate in recent times. There's no guarantee that they will. But let's assume, just for simplicity, that it turns out that investments grow. Does that mean that there's enough there, if they grow at this very ambitious rate, to pay off the pensions? And the answer is not at all. Even if things grow at the 7.6% year in and year out average, the current rate of pension is 75%. That is, it's only enough money if it grows at this point ambitious rate to cover three quarters of the current obligations to public employees. Which means that if everything goes according to plan, as these people reach retirement age, the governments that they've been working for, the police departments, the school systems, the state agencies that they have worked a lifetime for are either going to say to them, we're very sorry. We made you a promise which we're not going to keep. For every dollar you thought you were going to get and where you accepted to forego wages in the past, we're going to give you 75 cents. Have a nice day. And if the politicians don't do that, they'll have to go to the public and say, in order for us to keep the promises we made to generations of public employees, you're going to have to up your taxes now, otherwise we can't be making good on it. That's called a pension crisis. The people who have noticed it, and they are many, have decided that the way to handle this is to blame politicians and workers, the ones to get the pensions, as if they've done something inappropriate by agreeing to pensions which are now unfunded or only funded to 75%, as if they pulled some sort of stunt. Not at all. The first and important reason why there isn't enough money in these pension funds is because politicians were unwilling to tax corporations and the rich to raise the money to put aside for the pensions so that there would be the sums there to honor the contracts and promises you made to the workers. If you weren't prepared to raise taxes on corporations and the rich to pay for it, you had no business making those promises to the workers who would then have had to get wage increases if they weren't going to get pension improvements. The fundamental problem here is that politicians in our capitalist system are in an absurd position. They're supposed to not raise taxes because that's what the business wants and that's what the rich people want, and that's what the average people want. At the same time, they're supposed to deliver services, schools, fire departments, and clean roads and public parks and all the rest of it. Well, that costs money. How are you going to do that? And you have to pay the workers who want to get a decent income for doing all that work. You got to work that out. But they found a clever way out. Corporations and the rich don't want to pay taxes and have 50 different ways of escaping them. That means that the politicians can't do it. They don't want to go to the mass of people who are already overtaxed. So they resort to borrowing, they build up debts, and they also resort to not funding the pensions for the workers to whom they've promised those pensions. That's what they've done to cope with this crazy system. And the end result is to confront masses of Americans with a real danger. Let me end this by giving you a list of some of the public employee funds that have not only noted funded fully their commitments, but haven't even come close. What I said before, about 75%. That's an average. Here's some examples of funds that are way below that that may strike you as remarkable. The Chicago Police Department has funded its pension at 27% of what is promised to police officers when they retire. When you hear politicians in Chicago talking about the importance of being behind our police forces, keep in mind that its words when it comes to deeds, those same politicians haven't put their money where their big mouths are. Let me give you another example. The whole state of Kentucky, the Kentucky Employee Retirement System, 22 the Philadelphia Municipal Retirement System, 44% funded. The Arizona Public Safety Personnel, 49% funded. And I could go on. Pensions are a volcano about to blow in this country. Let me come now to the last that we have time for today. A story caught my eye having to do with something that happened in New Haven. In the New Haven, Connecticut economy, a worker was fired for breaking a window. That's what I read. And then I saw that a huge hue and cry arose in the community, including the mayor of New Haven, a city of 125,000, one of the two major cities in the state of Connecticut. A hullabaloo arose, including the mayor demanding that this worker be reinstated. And he was. And the employer who reinstated him kind of halfway apologized and put him back to work. Well, this is not a story you encounter very often a worker who does something clearly inappropriate, breaking a window, getting fired. That's a bit of an overreaction of an employer. But in our system, an employer can fire people for things like that, whether or not it's a reasonable response to an infraction. But even more amazing is that there's a public outcry and the employer is forced to recant and rehire the worker. So I looked into it and I thought you might be interested because this story became very much richer and bigger as I looked into it. Who's the worker? 38 year old Corey Menefee, who works in a Yale dining hall. That's in a dining hall located in one of the Yale dormitories. Yale being what it is, doesn't like to call dormitories dormitories. So it wants to call them something else. It calls them colleges. And the particular dormitory dining hall in which Corey Menefee worked is called the Calhoun college dormitory or dining hall. And what did Mr. Menefee do? He broke a window that depicts slaves in the American south carrying cotton. Turns out Mr. Corey Menifee is himself an African American. And it turned out that he was angry at that picture because he referred to it as a racist, discriminatory image. He was offended, in other words. So he broke this relatively small window and got himself fired. Well, it struck an awful lot of students as outrageous. You know why? It turns out that students at Yale University, white, black and Hispanic, had been demonstrating in front of Calhoun College's dining hall for months, demanding that the name of the college of this dining hall dormitory be changed, and making the point that Calhoun College was named after John Calhoun, a famous early senator here in the United States, indeed a vice president, but whose fame is that? Not only was he the owner of many slaves in the south in the early part of the United States, but he was a fervent supporter of slavery, a man who disagreed with those in the south who sometimes said, it's a necessary evil. He didn't like hearing that, and he was famous for saying, it's not evil, it's good. Slavery is the best thing that could happen, especially to the black African population who was put in that situation. Turns out these students didn't think that was an appropriate name to be adorning their college, where many of them lived and ate and where they had come to school at Yale to learn. So they had been demonstrating to have the name changed. And of course, Mr. Menefee, as a worker in that college, an African American worker, was affected by these demonstrations, don't you know. So the mayor of Yalexcuse me, the mayor of New Haven, herself an African American, and others prevailed on Yale to hire him back, and they did. They won that. He got his job back and he's working there now. Last point. Did they change the name? Absolutely not. Peter Salovey, the president of Yale, refused to change the name, but the reasoning he gave is so stunning, I have to end this first half of the program with it. He said, look, we want to keep the name because it's important to confront the problem of slavery in America, and that's why we're keeping the name. You know, it takes your breath away. Maybe the next thing we can expect at Yale is that we'll have a school of journalism renamed Roger Ailes School of Journalism to celebrate needing to keep an eye on sex discrimination on the job, since Mr. Ailes is associated with that. Or maybe we will change the name of the gymnasium at Yale to the Hitler Gymnasium, lest we forget the Holocaust and all that it represents. You can remember slavery and Yale's relationship to it 27 different ways. How about a course? How about an instructional video, but keeping the name of a big supporter of slavery? You must be kidding. President of Yale. We've come to the end of the first half of this program. Please stay with me. I think we will have a fascinating second half. We will be back very shortly, and I look forward to speaking with you again in a matter of seconds.
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This land is your land this land is my land. From California, well, to the New York island From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream water.
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Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. Well, many of you repeatedly in the last year or two have sent us in emails after the appearance with me of Dr. Harriet Fraad, and because of the things you've said, which have been very welcome here and very warm indeed, we have decided to bring her back more often, basically to respond to the wonderful things you've said and your requests that we do so. So let me introduce with pleasure again, Dr. Harriet Fraad. She is a mental health counselor and hypnotherapist in private practice in New York City. She speaks and writes about the impact of our economic system, capitalism, on the personal and emotional lives of the American people. So welcome again, Harriet. Glad to have you on the program.
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I'm glad to be here.
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Okay, I'm going to introduce the topic today. We've discussed it before today's program, but it requires a few a couple of minutes of American history. Starting in the 1970s, American businesses made a fundamental set of decisions. They did that in the name of profits and making more money. And the two fundamental things they did was to really accelerate automation, that is, replacing people in jobs with machines. And we all know what the key machine was in this process, the computer. It really became part of the production system in this country, in the factories, in the offices, in the stores, everywhere. And it replaced millions of jobs that used to be done by people that could now be done automatically by counting machines, or what we call computers. The second thing that really killed a lot of jobs besides automation, was the decision by the same companies to make more money by moving production out of the United States, where wages were relatively high, to other parts of the country where wages were much lower, particularly to Asia, places like China above all, but other Asian countries, but also elsewhere in the world, Latin America, Eastern Europe and so on. If you put together these two movements since the 1970s, replacing people with computers and replacing American high paid workers with foreign low paid workers, including bringing immigrants into the country to do lower wage work than that jobs had been paid before to Native Americans. You end up with a fundamental change in the lives of millions of Americans. Namely good jobs, with security, with benefits, with good wages, which were held overwhelmingly by white American men, disappeared in huge numbers, leaving those white American men without the jobs, the incomes, the security that they had come to expect as their due as Americans, enough money to sustain a family, often with a wife and children at home. All of that was taken away. It transformed the family, it transformed the relationship between men and women. Part of the reason being that at the same time, women were moving out of the household, wanting to have an equal opportunity of jobs as men had had the so called women's liberation movement. Then there were women moving into the labor force, because with the men's jobs no longer being well paid or secure, the American dream couldn't be achieved by a family unless women joined. It transformed life. And what we want to talk about today, and what we asked Dr. Fryd to talk about is how did this play out in the intimate arena of people's lives? In the bedroom, in the household, in the relationship between men and women, and in their same, in that sense, in their self image. So let me open it up and tell us how you think, based on your practice and your experience, how did this play out in the intimate lives of the American people?
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It had enormous impact because as women left the household because they had to, and as men felt disempowered because they were denied the family wage. And just as a little parenthetical, minorities never got a family wage. And minority women have always been in the labor force. But the vast majority of people were white in the 70s, 87.5%, nothing like that now. And therefore they got used to having full time servants in their households. These males, women who would do the domestic labor, cooking and cleaning. Yes. Wives who would do the domestic labor, who do the childcare, who would emotionally take care of them, who would create the connections with relatives and friends, inviting people to dinner, the social secretary function, the sexual partners, and who would readily serve them because they were dependent and they needed to serve them. So men were in this superior position. Well, with women having to work and then coming back to men who were angry at being unmanned by having their wives working and their salaries reduced and their opportunities reduced, men often, most often unfortunately, adjusted by wanting more services, the average in the household, in the household, more sexual services, more emotional services and more domestic services.
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And childcare to sort of compensate them for what was happening in the workplace.
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Right. And so that what happened is the result of the fact that according to the statistics, the average unemployed man does less than housework than his fully employed wife. In my own experience, I'd had many clients who have left relationships because the man in the household was unemployed. And to recoup his masculinity demanded more and more of this tired, angry woman.
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Who was having a job outside, who.
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Had a job outside, who no longer economically depended on him, and who was angry at the level of demand. And so that conflict happened in the household. That's just one example. But women who needed help and equality and who got demands for more subservient services were not pleased.
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Does that have something to do then with the explosion of divorce and all of that?
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Absolutely. In 1970s, divorce was one in four marriages. Now it's quite a bit more than one in two. And the vast majority don't even bother getting married. For the first time in US history, most people between 18 and 34 in the US aren't married. So it's a huge divorce rate among that minority who are actually married. And marriage is a luxury good that can be afforded only by the wealthy, usually only by the wealthy who can afford to get some other woman or minority to be in there doing the cooking or going out to a restaurant, or taking the takeout food and the cleaning laundry other than the wife, so that the wife and husband who have the money can go on vacations and bond, can get family therapy, can have their kids in a good child care center and hire a nanny. But the vast number of Americans cannot do that. And it is women now who are rejecting marriage. The majority of divorces are initiated by women. Women are now the people who refuse marriage because they don't want to marry somebody without the financial stability that they can count on. And men's jobs are precarious. They're not the stable pensioned to use your previous announcement and benefited job that gave paid time off for vacations with the family, that gave an adequate wage so a woman could stay home and be a full time domestic laborer.
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Let me interrupt because it is so important as an economist, because it's such a wonderful illustration of how a decision driven by profit maximizing corporations, substituting the computer for people, moving production to cheap labor areas can have social consequences that are staggering but never figured into the calculation. Had we taken into account if we had an economic system that didn't allow decisions like that to be made unless you took into account what it would mean to the larger society. Many of those decisions would have been completely different, but they weren't. The people who made the decisions, the businesses looking only at profit didn't have to worry about because they had no responsibility and no expense in dealing with the disasters that you're describing flow from the decisions they made.
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That's right, because profit doesn't look at collateral damage. And the damage to the status quo of family has been huge. The whole terrain of gender has changed, which is probably why people get so freaked about the bathroom. Because what is expected of men, what is expected of women, have been turned around. And emotionally, this has been the greatest disaster for men, because men have traditionally and still do often tie their emotional vulnerable lives to a sex partner who they trust. Women's primary emotional partners have always been other women and children and relatives. So when these marriages don't happen, or when they break up en masse, men are set adrift. Women, they lose the emotional connection, whereas.
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The women have other.
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The women have other supports.
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Now I'm understanding better.
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That's why in the brief month that I actually, I studied mass killings for two months, because there's plenty of them to study. And I found that all of them had either an unemployment, all the men, because it's all men who kill masses of people. They either had an unemployment experience or a rejection from a sex partner or both. Even the man who shot everybody at the Orlando gay bar, he had had a very unfortunate sex experience with another man and was driven mad. Men are in a terrible situation. Blue collar men, these are the ones who support Trump. They're desperate, they've been dethroned. And they don't have the kind of jobs or the emotional connections that they counted on that went with them to.
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Sustain them in this adjustment to what the corporations have done, in an adjustment.
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To what corporate profit has inflicted on them. And women have not been in such a terrible space. The jobs.
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Why is that? Yeah, explain that.
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The jobs that remained were harder to outsource and mechanize, social service jobs. They were lower paid, but they were traditionally pink collar jobs, women's jobs. So that for. And also the blue collar males have thought it was quite unmasculine to get a higher education. So women are the vast majority in all higher education, not in engineering fields or math, but across the board. And the jobs that are decent now require a college degree. And that means that more and more women are also disempowered. And at the same time as the capitalists were decimating jobs for white males. Women's liberation was happening where women were encouraged to want the whole enchilada, jobs, economic power, political power, domestic lives, lives with children, romantic lives, the whole thing not to be shunted off into the household. And African Americans and other minorities were demanding recognition. So into this scarce labor pool came more contestants for jobs, minorities and women. Which is why Trump blames them completely bizarrely, because he doesn't in his wish to suck up and kick down, he wants to blame the more vulnerable people in society, the women and minorities, and not the corporations who exported white male jobs.
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But you're explaining very well here, I think, how that happened, that by not explaining, by not having a public conversation about corporate decisions driven by profit and what they would do to the family, you left men, particularly white men, particularly adrift at the same time as discriminated, subordinated people, non whites, females wanted a piece of the economy. And so it wasn't so surprising that the men could easily be focused in their anger and upset at what was happening to them, not to what was actually causing it, but actually to women and minorities who were competing for what was no longer available to them.
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And they're encouraged by the right wing. What has happened is the whole sexual mores, gender mores, have changed.
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Tell us a little bit about that.
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41% of children are born outside of a marriage and that seems quite acceptable. It didn't used to be one, two people live together without being married and then leave each other acceptable. It's an accepted continuous fact of life. Sex work is much more recognized now as valid work.
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Tell us what you mean by sex work.
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This is what I mean. All kinds of either pornography. One of the things capitalists have done, which we ought to take note of, is in the crisis of disempowerment for men, for men, they have substituted very powerful substitute that men can buy, which is highly profitable for them, even though it further destroys sexual connection. And that is pornography. In heterosexual pornography, women are humiliated, not in homosexual pornography, but in heterosexual pornography, so that men can pay and companies can make money in the profitable sector of pornography feeding, in a sense, this.
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Upset of white males that have been disempowered in the way you've described, Right.
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And giving him them a sexual empowerment and substitute which is dangerous. It also has changed the terrain of children's idea of what sex is. In our puritanical culture, we don't have responsible reliable sexual education. Therefore, the average child begins to watch porn at 11, and that is sex education in which there's no emotional connection, no psychological mutuality, but just getting screwed. And women are supposed to enjoy this so that it completely changes, so that middle school kids are sexting each other, sending pictures of their genitals during class. The whole thing has been. Sex has been divorced from connection and emotion. A disastrous thing. And part of the developments of sex work are that there's much more discussion of sex work as a reasonable way of making a living. A particular development which is spreading like wildfire, particularly in the south, but all over NYU is very healthy. Huge. I wouldn't say healthy, but huge. There is something called the sugar industry where the sugar daddy, a wealthy man, buys access to a woman and in addition pay usually and pay something on a regular basis. The most profitable site is Sugar Daddy University where university women get wealthy men students, graduate students, undergraduate students get wealthy men, women students to pay for their tuition or their tuition, room and board or any combination that they negotiate and in return they have to have be accessible. Not all the contracts that they draw up together involve sex, but many do. They have to be available and that.
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So when the man comes to town, they go out on dinner or if.
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He'S having a conference outside of town, at the Republican convention, although there they had mainly male sex workers but or the Democratic convention that they could import their sugar baby and look very smart by having a university, good looking woman from a university there meeting with their colleagues and adding them prestige. This is huge. It's huge at nyu, it's huge throughout the United States. And it is an acknowledged, not much touted in the brochure obviously, but it's an acknowledged way and one of the few ways for women without money to emerge with an education, without loads of debt, without debt. And that's how it's advertised on the website of Sugar Baby University.
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So yet in another way this is.
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This is how sex and capitalism interact here. Capitalism has transformed sex.
- [48:19]
A
Here you make a job unacceptable. You can't get a job without a degree. You can't get a degree unless you borrow a great deal of money. The system is set up like that. If you don't want to come out of college with a load of debt that changes your life, you are now given an opportunity to bargain. Sexuality in a sense and your intimate time, emotional access.
- [48:43]
B
It is what is as a way.
- [48:44]
A
To avoid the debt that this system.
- [48:48]
B
And it allows a man who can't really negotiate, change gender terrain and treating a woman as an equal to have a contract which is not binding. Either party can break that contract and which is in which he doesn't have to meet the new gender norms. He doesn't have to.
- [49:07]
A
He doesn't have to give his own emotional.
- [49:09]
B
That's right. He doesn't have to give emotional access. Or he can without worrying, because this is actually. Wealthy men feel better when they give money. They feel they're getting their money's worth, they don't have to give anything else. And I found that with wealthy male clients of mine, they give their children money they feel they've given. What else is there to ask? Because they actually confuse their emotional selves with their money. And so it's reasonable that they do that. At any rate, the most popular job in the sex trades is the gfe. The Girlfriend Experience.
- [49:45]
A
Gfe, Girlfriend Experience.
- [49:48]
B
Where you hire a woman for a day, a night, a week, two weeks to be your girlfriend, to take care of you, to be interested in you, to go where you're going, and to generally lavish on you the kind of services that a person would offer if she loved you. But of course, without the love and the voluntary choosing. This is a boon to many women who are afraid that if they got involved with a man emotionally and married him, they would lose their career possibilities. Because women who are married get less money and opportunities than women who are married. Men get more, but women get less and mothers get even less. So that women get not only a debt free education if they're sugar babies around that, but they also have a relationship in which they don't have to worry about losing their career focus, which becomes more and more urgent as nothing else is there for people. It's not like women can rely on men to support them. They can't. That's over for the mass of the American people. And so that you have masses of lonely people changing the whole sex terrain. What's expected? What's not expected?
- [51:17]
A
The whole. It's beyond sex. It's the whole.
- [51:20]
B
The whole relationship and relationship altogether between.
- [51:24]
A
Men and women and therefore by extension parents and children. All of this is being, and I don't want to use this word loosely, it's revolutionized. It is revolutionized because also with no one taking responsibility.
- [51:38]
B
That's right.
- [51:38]
A
No one pointing the finger at the economic decisions that are crucial to this story. And so everybody trying to find a way to solve it on an intimate, personal level, which you can't do because the forces are too large and it's producing misery.
- [51:54]
B
They're confused and miserable. It wouldn't have had to be like this, I don't think the family wage with a subordinate Woman and children who are dependent on a wage earning male who doesn't participate or get any of the joys in knowing and being with his children. I think that that is not a good deal for either the man or the woman. We also had a women's movement which was in many ways hijacked. It was hijacked by the CIA and the FBI and the great Wurlitzer operation which has been written up. Gloria Steinem was a CIA agent. Anybody who wants to look up and Google Gloria Steinem, CIA can see it. Whose purpose was to make the women's liberation movement, which started out with a very strong class consciousness, a gender only movement and eliminate class.
- [52:50]
A
But how could it be? Tell us a little bit of how in your mind we could at least begin to think about an alternative way for us to organize.
- [53:00]
B
I think it's really important because had we not done that, men and women together could have worked together to have it all, to be able to work, to have good childcare and after school care and summer care for their children, to have paid vacations. The US has the least paid vacation of any industrialized country.
- [53:21]
A
In other words, to build the conditions.
- [53:23]
B
That would have conditions to change the.
- [53:24]
A
Family, to have a very different emotional connection with one another.
- [53:28]
B
It's an egalitarian family. And to some extent that is what started happening in the Bernie Sanders campaign. Feminists like Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton criticized young women for working for Bernie and with Bernie instead of Hillary. And they said they did because they want friendship and connection with men. They want togetherness for everybody, gays, straights, everyone together to have a connected, collective, egalitarian set of relationships. And that was a big reason that people joined, because it was a chance to see a vision of another world with free health care, free after school and childcare like they have in most other developed countries.
- [54:20]
A
But seeing these kinds of things that Bernie stood for and so forth as conditions to enable a different relationship.
- [54:27]
B
This is the kind of connection than.
- [54:29]
A
The one that has involved men and women.
- [54:32]
B
From the family wage for whites in which women and children were dependent on a wage earning male now and the women's movement did not develop. What are the lessons you get from caring for vulnerable life? What are our strengths? What do you get from being with children? What does it do for you? And to fight for the right that we all could do this together, that.
- [54:56]
A
The men themselves, instead of being always.
- [54:58]
B
Elsewhere and having to work all the.
- [55:00]
A
Time, could become part of this. Because the conditions to enable them to learn those life lessons would have been in place.
- [55:09]
B
That's right. So that, you know, one of the biggest complaints of men with salaried jobs, college education and up is that they don't have enough time with their families because the structure isn't there. The whole structure of our lives has changed. Suburbia was dependent on the dependent wife and children staying home and the male commuting to his job. Now the wife has to commute. The suburbs are impoverished and it all because profit was better by exploiting people around the world. And the whole world was our labor pool, not just whites in the United States, and particularly reserving special jobs for white males. But the whole world is there to exploit without ecological protections, without proper wages, without protections of any kind. Okay, fine.
- [56:05]
A
Where do you think this is going? Since we're running out of time, as always, where do you think this situation is going? What's the prospect for the American people? The prospect, given what you see on your proverbial psychological couch?
- [56:19]
B
Well, what I see as the prospect is that either men and women have to join, as they did in the Sanders campaign, or they will be at odds. Their connections will fray. Men will be in particular distress. And as I said before, it's hardly a mystery. It's all men shooting people that's a sign of distress. And that people will be chronically depressed and unhappy and that those people selling to despair in pornography, in weapons sales, in all of the testosterone products that have gone through the roof, we'll be making money off of this disaster and.
- [57:02]
A
Not solving these people's problems at all.
- [57:05]
B
Interested in solving their problems.
- [57:07]
A
I wish, as always, we had more time. And let's see what the response of our listeners and viewers is.
- [57:14]
B
I hope so.
- [57:14]
A
And if it's good, we'll bring you back, as we probably will. In any case, thank you very much, Harriet Fraad, for being with us. I hope this has been as interesting to all of you as it has been to me. Thank you all for listening. I want to thank truthout.org that remarkable independent source of news and analysis which partners with us on a regular basis. And let me conclude, as I often do, by asking you all to partner with us. Go to our website, click on Facebook, Twitter, so you can follow us and share what we do with the rest of your world as well as ours. I look forward to talking with you again next week, Sam.