← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
Sam.
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Richard Wolff
Saint gonna change. Welcome friends, to edition of Economic Update, a weekly hour long program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, our jobs, our debts, our hopes for the incomes we need to sustain our families and ourselves. 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. Before jumping into this July Economic Update, I wanted to invite you to take a look at a new project that we have. We call it Econominute. These are very short videos, three to five minutes in length, devoted to a condensed analysis of a topic in the news. They're posted up on YouTube, you can find them on our channel. You can go to our website, Democracy at work, all one word democracyatwork.info info and you can find it there. The latest Econominute just posted is about Brexit, this remarkable event in which the people of Great Britain thumb their nose at their government in order to change their lives. In this case by thinking that getting out of the European Union will solve that problem for them. And it is explained in the Econominute why their understandable anger has focused on a target that can't do for them what they had hoped for. Anyway, these Econom minutes are going to be produced regularly and I think you may find them of interest. Well, let's begin with what's Good news. On the 1st of July just passed a number of minimum wage changes. Laws went into effect in 14 US cities, states and counties. New higher minimum wages were put into effect. And I wanted to congratulate the places that did it by listing them quickly for you. Two states raised their minimum wage, Maryland and Oregon. Then there were the following. Washington, D.C. the county, Los Angeles County, California, and even more cities that include Chicago, eight cities in California and two in Kentucky. Now, what's interesting is that for many of these, the new minimum wage will be in the range of $10.50, 12, even $15 an hour, some quite away, others folded in over the next two or three years. In contrast, compare that with the federal minimum wage, the one coming out of Washington. That is for $7.25, folks. That works out to $290 a week if you work a full 40 hours. And, and that's before the money they take out for your income tax and your Social Security and so on. It's $14,500 a year if you work 50 out of the 52 weeks of the year at 40 hours. In other words, it's a minimum wage that lands anybody who gets it right in the middle of serious poverty. That's what the states and cities with the courage to go forward, or to be more accurate, not so much the courage as the pressure from below the workers who are earning below those amounts of money, even if it's above the federal minimum wage of 725 who have been agitating now for several years to do something about this. But I don't want to take away from the leadership of those states and cities that have responded to this pressure and raised the minimum wage. By the way, the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, which is, to be blunt, a scandal and a shame, hasn't been changed since 2009. Every year since 2009, the cost of living has gone up every single year. But the federal government, run these days by conservatives in the Republican Party, together with the conservatives in the Democratic Party, has fit to respond to the rising cost of living by not increasing the federal minimum wage, not even by a small amount that would just allow those at the bottom of the economic scale to keep up with rising prices. It's a scandal. It's a shame. And to not have raised it over the last seven years is a worse scandal and a bigger scandal. Shame. And it's a sign that the movement for rising wages having been stonewalled by the federal government, and that, I'm afraid, includes our president too, since he hasn't done very much to overcome the roadblock of the conservatives. But however you want to apportion the blame, one thing is that the movement for higher minimum wages has refocused itself on cities and state governments because it can't get anywhere with a federal government that isn't interested. Let me turn next to this issue of prisons. A number of you have asked me to talk a little bit about the economics of prisons. Well, let me be again, short and sweet. I hope about it, according to the folks who keep track of it, costs roughly $31,000 a year per prisoner to house the number of people that we keep in jail in this country, which, as I'm sure most of you know, is a larger number as a percentage of our total population than any other country on this planet. So we imprison more people, which means we spend a fortune of money, 31,000 on average. And by the way, states vary. Some spend a good bit less, other states spend a good bit more. The $31,000 per person per year in prison average gets us. What result? Well, there's a word called recidivism. It's a word that basically says what proportion of the people you put in jail when you let them out after they serve their sentence? What proportion of them are back in jail for committing yet another crime within the year, two, three years after you let them out? In our country, the recidivism rate is between 2/3 and 3/4. That's right, 2/3 and 3/4 of the prisoners that we put in jail. Our jails are so ineffective in dealing with the problems that bring those people there that they're back in there for another stint in a short time. Finally, the horrible treatment of people in jail by one another, by the guards, by the whole establishment is so much a fixture of our culture that late night television comedians make a regular habit of joking about what happens to you in jail. And the jokes are not funny when you realize what they are referring to. You might think a program this expensive and this unsuccessful and this terrible for the people involved would have long ago become subject to the withering criticism and the demands for change that. That it obviously deserves. But if you thought that, you're incorrect. It hasn't. The people who are involved in it. Hold on. The bureaucrats who run it. Hold on. The government that enforces it, holds on. Let me suggest something. And here I'm borrowing from a famous law in Italy called the Marcora Law. This law is about unemployment. I'm going to explain it in a moment. But it could apply to prisoners as well as to convicts as well, to incarcerated people as well. The Marcora law says to a person, if you become unemployed, you have a choice. Yes, you can get a check every week for a couple of years. We help you out. Or if you get at least nine other unemployed people like yourself together, we'll give you the whole two years worth of weekly unemployment checks as a lump sum. Right now, you and all the nine or more other unemployed. So together you're going to have a nice bundle of money. We will do that. If you use the money to set up a cooperative workplace and commit yourself to make it succeed, to have a job that way, because you're giving a job to yourself, it won't cost the government any more than it would have paid you per week. But it can make a much better result than having you on the dole for two years with all that does to your self esteem and all that does to your skills, et cetera, et cetera. It's worked beautifully in Italy since 1985. Well, let's now apply it to the jails of our society. The biggest Single problem for incarcerated people is what happens to them, or rather what doesn't happen to them after they are released. With a record, a criminal record of having been in the jails, it becomes hard, well, impossible for many to get a job. You have to work in a poor job with poor pay. In other words, you have two strikes against you because you're in the prison system and then you find out you have another strike when you get out. Moreover, the jails don't work that we spend less money on jailing people and more money on providing them with the training and the capital to become their own bosses when they come out. Set up cooperative enterprises where they will hire themselves themselves, thereby avoiding the whole problem of finding an employer who's willing to hire formerly incarcerated people. Making them able to run and be in charge of their own businesses will show the rest of American society what this model can do. And my guess is many fewer of these people will find their way back into jail because we've come up with a better way of helping them re enter and function in society than the one that in place now. Let me continue. I want to drive home in yet another way the fact that the so called economic recovery we were supposed to have over the last five years is a myth. It is something that applies only to the top 3 or 4% of the people who designed the recovery to take care of themselves. Just like they designed the money making deals that got us into the collapse in 2008 in the first place. Very quickly, three big signs. This last week, the Italian banking system told the world that it was in the worst imaginable shape. Things haven't gotten better since the downturn in 2008. In Italy, just like other poorer parts of Europe, Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, it now turns out that Italy is in trouble. It turns out that nearly 20% of the outstanding borrowers from Italian banks can't make enough money to pay back their loans, putting the banks themselves into desperate circumstances. And the Italian banks are demanding money from Europe to do another bailout, which the Italian people will not tolerate politically, or to take the money of the depositor and give it instead to the bank to bail the bank out. They tried that back in December in Italy. It caused an uproar. My point is we are seeing sign after sign that the so called recovery isn't there and has been hidden by gimmicks and is now coming to the surface. Another example, in a few weeks the Olympics will start in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I learned over the last week and a half that, that the Brazilian government has to devote. Get ready for this number 85,000 police and army personnel who are already engaged in running gunfights with the gangs that dominate society in a number of Brazilian cities, including Rio de Janeiro. This is a sign that an economy is in serious trouble when so many people can't get work, when so many people have to work in the illegal economy, that it has to have pitched battles with the army, that a global activity like the Olympics has to be guarded by 85,000 police and troops. What a sign of a global capitalism that cannot function very well for most people anymore. And a little detail that caught my attention so bad is the situation in Rio de Janeiro that the government there said it can't pay for finishing the construction and taking care of paying all these cops and soldiers. So the United States has made an emergency loan of $850 million, according to the website that I have used for this, which is called insightcrime.org if you want to pursue it. The third sign that the economic recovery is a myth and not a reality has to do with the affordability of automobiles. Here in the United States, a website called Bankrate.com did a recent study of the affordability of buying a car. And as an item that will not surprise many of you, it is turning out that the price of cars keeps going up, partly because of all the additional doodads that are put in each car. But the ability of the American family to buy the car hasn't gone up anywhere near as much. In short, it is becoming difficult for the average American family to buy a car. How is the family reacting to that? And by the way, there's the sign that a recovery hasn't happened. Because this is a new scary problem for Americans, most of whom live in places where there either is no public transportation or very inadequate public transportation, leaving them with no choice but to have a private car. Nor is that an accident. But in any case, what are Americans doing? Well, here it's interesting to see they're borrowing more money and they're stretching out their car loans. Car loans used to be three and four years. Now they are five to seven years in length. Well, when you lengthen the loan period, when you pay back over a longer period of time, the interest charges are much larger because you have a loan for a longer period of time, and interest accrues for you per period of time. So actually, what people are doing by stretching out their loans is to end up paying more for the car than they did when the loan lasted a shorter Time. The end result is that even though Americans can't afford a car, the strategy they've turned to to be able to manage the situation in the long run means they'll be paying even more for their car than they already do. This is a dead end situation that can't last. This is an unsustainable arrangement. And what's likely to show up in the years ahead are people who two years, three years, four years, five years into their car loan are going to discover two things that are very interesting. One, they're going to reach a point where the amount of money they own on their car is more than the car is worth at that time. They're going to be what in the real estate business is called underwater owing more than the thing you're paying off in is worth. And the second thing that's going to happen is an increasing number of people having economic difficulties, two years, four years, six years down the road are going to be unable to repay the car loan. And we're then going to hear discussions about subprime car loan crisis, just like we heard back in 2007 and eight about the subprime mortgage crisis. It's the same problem. It's an economic system that can't deliver jobs, incomes to the mass of people to do what they are required to do to live in this society. And that's when an economic system has lost its claim on anybody's loyalty, except for the few at the top who continue to make an awful lot of money and buy very expensive houses and apartments and etc. Etc. We are witnessing, and partly this program documents it to you, the disintegration, the dysfunction of an economic system that cannot provide the goods and the services to the mass of people that it once did and that those people have come to expect and that it does continue to provide. But to a shrinking group of people at the top, that's not a politically, morally or economically sustainable arrangement. And much of what I tell you week after week is documentation of the many ways that that's happening. Next, we have a little time for this. The United States Senate passed a genetically modified organism bill this last week. What do I mean? Well, the federal government, after years of people trying to, finally is beginning to pass a bill whose basic purpose is to require that the food we eat, all of those objects that we put into our bodies to survive, if they use genetically modified organisms, a part of nature that human beings have changed around, that they have to tell you that it's a labeling law, it's a law that says when you buy something, you have the right to be told whether genetically modified organisms are part of what you are going to be eating. Is the government doing this because it sees the obvious appropriateness of this? An informed consumer is something we have the right to demand. We now demand that the producers of food tell us what's in there. The calories, the salt, and the other things we need and have every right to be informed about. We're often given the information where this food comes from, etc. And now we're struggling to be told whether there's GMO, since there's an enormous controversy around the world and many parts of the world which forbid all of that because it may be unsafe. Okay. The industry, the food industry has been fighting in the state houses of our states and in the federal government to not have to do that. Why? Because it costs them money. Because people may decide they don't want to buy food that is gmo. And that means the food producers, from the farmers to the packagers to the processors, will have to have, for example, two kinds of food. The kind of food that does have GMO in it, or the kinds of food that doesn't. Maybe side by side on the shelf, so you have freedom of choice. Or maybe GMOs will become outlawed and they'll have to redo their production. They don't want to spend the money, they don't want to lose the profits. They don't want to take the risks. So to keep their profits and to minimize their risks, they are risking our lives. And it's important to understand that we live in an economic system in which this happens every day. They don't want to have to do it. Well, then why did they do it in the Senate? The answer is obvious in a number of states and here, Hats off to the state of Vermont. The state of Vermont passed a law saying you must do it. And if you do not label your food about, you cannot sell it to the people of Vermont. And the terrible fear in the food companies was, oh, my goodness, Vermont is going to be a model. They already know. There's a big movement in California and elsewhere to do exactly the same as Vermont has done, to demand that the consumer can know what he or she is buying and eating. So what this bill is, is an attempt to have the federal government do a namby pamby law so that the kind of law passed in Vermont is superseded by the federal law. The federal law takes precedent. The Vermont law doesn't apply, and they can forestall any of the Other states going in that direction to show you what I mean by namby pamby law. Real simple. There's no punishment if you violate it. This bill has no punishment. It's basically a voluntary arrangement since there's no penalty if you violate it. Beyond that, I could give you more details. It's a pathetic example of private private profits trumping public health. And that's a result of the economic system we have. We've come to the end of this program's first first half. Please stay with us. After a short interlude, we'll be back with a remarkable discussion between myself and Dr. Harriet Fraad, a practicing mental health counselor trying to analyze what happened in Orlando, Florida, when a deranged man killed 49 people in a nightclub. This is an issue that psychology and economics have much to say about. If you find that interesting, stay with us. We'll be right back.
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Song Performer
They're selling postcards of the hanging they're painting the passports brown the beauty parlor is filled with sailors lose the circus is in town Here comes the blind commissioner they've got him in a trance One hand is tied to the tightrope walker the other is in his pants and the riot squad, they're restless, they need somewhere to go as lady and I look out tonight from Desolation Room. Cinderella, she seems so easy it takes just want to know why and she smiles and puts her hands in her back pocket Betty Davis style and in comes Romeo, he's moaning, you belong to me, I believe Then someone says, you're in the wrong place my friend, you'd better leave and the only sound that's left after the ambulances go It's Cinderella sweeping up on Desolation Road. Now the moon is almost hidden the stars are beginning to hide the fortune telling lady has even taken all her things inside all except for Cain and Abel and the hunchback of Notre Dame Everybody is making love RL6 Expecting rain and the good the Samaritan he's dressing, he's getting ready for the show he's going to the carnival tonight on Desolation Road. Ophelia, she's neath the window for her I feel so afraid on her 22nd birthday she already is an old maid to her death is quite romantic she wears an iron vest her profession's her religion her sin is her lifelessness and though her eyes are fixed upon Noah's great rainbow she spends her time peeking into Desolation Road. Einstein disguised as Robin Hood with his memories in a trunk this way an hour ago with his friend A jealous monk now he looked so immaculately frightful as he bombed a cigarette. Then he went off sniffing drain pipes and reciting the Alphabet you would luck think to look at him. But he was famous long ago for playing the electric violin on Desolation Road. Doctor Filth. He keeps his world inside of a leather cuff. But all his sexless patience, they are trying to blow it up.
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Richard Wolff
Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. Many of you have written to me over the last several weeks and sent emails to the websites of this program, which I want to remind you of. Democracyatwork.info or rdwolff with 2f's.com either of those websites will reach us. And many of you have used those websites, as we invite you to do. To ask us to do some analysis of that horrible tragic event in Orlando, Florida, a few weeks ago in which a young man went into a nightclub and killed with heavy weapons, automatic weapons, 49 people, if I have the count right. And you're quite right to think that there are economic and psychological aspects that would warrant an analysis and might shed some light on broader issues in our society. And many of you also asked for me to bring back Dr. Harriet Fraad, a mental health counselor with a private practice in New York who's been on this program in the past. She's also a psychotherapist, and she writes a great deal with regular publications in truthout, in Tikkun, and in the Psycho History Journal, which is a journal that specializes in using psychological approaches to understand historical processes. So, first of all, thank you very much, Dr. Farad, for joining me.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
Thank you for inviting me.
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Richard Wolff
Okay, before we go into the analysis, could you, for everyone's benefit and to get us all on the same proverbial page, tell us what happened in Orlando as you, as a practicing mental health counselor, as you understand it from the documents you've been able to research with.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
Okay, I've researched with documents on the Net. I didn't know the killer, and I fortunately wasn't there at the event. But on the night of June 12, a man named Omar Mateen came to the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida with automatic weapons and killed 49 people and wounded more people than 49. And that was all. You know, we are used to mass murders, usually of about four or five people, but this was the biggest one. It was Latin night at Pulse, a homosexual nightclub. Now we ask, like, how come, you know, the primary motive, by the report of Mateen's friends and lovers, was revenge. Mateen was homosexual he was very attracted to Latin men in his friend's word. He loved the brown boys who did not return his enthusiasm. He had just been in a three way sexual event and later found out that one of the participants had aids. He was terrified and had himself tested repeatedly. The tests were always negative.
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Richard Wolff
So he did not have aids.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
He did not have aids, but he couldn't believe it. He felt so contaminated and so sick that he couldn't believe that he didn't have the dread disease of aids. Now we have to look at him in his context, his psychological and social context, as well as the economic context in which he lived. His first wife left him in part because he was gay. His father, who was virulently anti gay, forced him, and the father was obviously a domineering force in his life to marry a second wife. But this one he informed he was gay and the father would mock him in front of other people as gay and deride him as gay. He was a Muslim and within the orthodox Muslim religion there are a range of punishments for gay acts which are considered criminal. And they range from flogging in public to death. So he was in an environment of homophobia in his religion. He also lived in Florida, which has the third as many. The third to the number of hate groups in the United States.
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Richard Wolff
The third highest number.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
The third highest number. The first is California, the second is Texas or vice versa, and the third is Florida. These homosexual hate, anti homosexual hate groups have sprung up like mushrooms in the rain, particularly in the south and Florida in the south. So that we have to know he was surrounded by hatred. His hatred of himself happens as a lot of self hatred does. If you're surrounded by hatred, you take it inside.
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Richard Wolff
Even if you're the object of love.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
Even if, like people who are brought up to be thought of as terrible children think of themselves as terrible people. The way people develop a sense of self is through the mirror of the social glances of other people's eyes. And in the social glance we internalize.
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Richard Wolff
How others see us.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
That's right, we take that inside. And one part of us may feel bad about it, but we take it inside. The problem of groups that have been labeled inferior is they believe it and it does damage to their own sense of self.
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Richard Wolff
Well, they believe it or they struggle inside themselves with the part that believes it and another part that rejects it.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
That's right, that's so with every form of transferred hatred. But the part that believes it is very strong. Because human beings are social animals. When you're born, your Brain is the size of a small fist like mine. By the time you die, it's the size of a Nerf football. And every connection is a neuronal connection built through social contact of some kind or another. So an enormous part of our sense.
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Richard Wolff
Of self is accumulated by our social.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
System, accumulated by our social system and our first social system in our family. So that he was plagued by self hatred. He was Also employed by G4S, the biggest security company in the world. It operates in 100 countries and it has 610,000 employees. 54,000 are in the United States, in North America. And it has a violent history. It has operated, I should say manned, because they don't hire women, manned interrogation centers, torture centers. And it trained Mateen in the use of automatic weapons also.
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Richard Wolff
Clearly, though, I mean, having visited their website in preparation, they don't say any of those words. What they say is that they're a security outfit that provides security, guarding service, technical web systems to provide security to governments, to private enterprises and so on. It's all cleaned up. Even though I know, like you do, that they've been accused of.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
And it's right there on the Internet, you know, that they're at checkpoints that are violent. They're in torture and interrogation centers. You know, it's quite a. They have a wide range and have been accused of human rights abuses. He also was an American born in the United States, which is at this moment probably the most violent nation in the western industrialized world. Not only probably, it is. He's an American citizen, so he could see mass murders on television very regularly. And he's in a country that's been at war constantly bombing places and killing people all over the world. So that he's in a country whose political agenda is accomplished through violence. In addition, he's in a country which is the only one in the western industrialized world that allows the sale of automatic weapons, assault weapons to private citizens. There is no one else who does that. And so that he was able to have a collection of automatic weapons. There are also, you know, this is a program that tries to talk about economics. And there is a relevant economic factor here because you'd say to yourself, okay, this guy has a lot of self hatred. He grows up in a violent nation. What is this? Why shoot arbitrary people now? It is true, you could say he chose the Pulse nightclub on Latin night because he was angry at his own attraction to Latin men. He had been to that club, he had hooked up with other men at that club. He'd watched Them hook up with each other at that club. But he was enraged at his own homosexuality. And blaming homosexuals is something that hate groups do quite regularly. Also, we have to look at the economic roots here. Capitalist corporations have found it more profitable now to outsource jobs, to mechanize jobs, to robotize jobs, to computerize jobs that used to be held by males, particularly white males in our society. Because there used to be a scarce labor market, particularly scarce, since the best jobs were really reserved for whites and male whites particularly, who had a wage supplement for being white and another one for being male that's not necessary anymore. Thanks to computers and multinational communication systems, the whole world is America's labor pool. And they can exploit people who work for far less wages around the world.
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Richard Wolff
Around the world or as immigrants here.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
Or as immigrants here and who have far less ecological protections around the world. So that, you know, your factory can collapse in Bangladesh and nothing too much is done to inspect it as it shakes and cracks. There's a different standard where a lot of our capitalist corporations run and so they save money even though they take life. And so you have a group of men who have lost their position in society.
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Richard Wolff
You're meaning now the American men whose wages have either stagnated or gone down because of these economic changes.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
That's right. And because our society doesn't usually and our media don't link what's happening to us to what's happening in the economy in the world. They haven't a clue. They have a lot of free floating rage. They lost the family wage. The family wage used to be paid to primarily white males and certainly males to support dependent wives and children who worked as domestic servants and in case of wives, sexual servicers and childminders and so on full time. No more.
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Richard Wolff
Let me interrupt you. So when earlier you talked about a supplement that white men got because they were male and because they are white, you are now saying the same thing in terms of this so called family wage. In other words, capitalism in the United States had lifted up wages partly through the struggles of unions and so on, to get that, giving the men who had the good jobs, white men, enough money to sustain a dependent wife and children at home. And we call that the family wage. And that when capitalists wanted to make more money and moved production abroad or replaced these jobs with machines, automation and all that, the, the position of these white men was basically removed. They couldn't get that kind of a job with that kind of an enhanced income. And then here comes the cruncher. If I'M understanding you, they couldn't sustain these families anymore.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
That's right.
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Richard Wolff
The American family, which has been in a crisis for decades now, is itself in a sense a victim of economic changes that it doesn't understand to have economic causes, but does.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
Absolutely. And if they understood that there were economic causes, they could have been out there demonstrating for public quality child care, which we have less of than we did during the war, World War II, when we needed to employ women. Good quality child care, after school care, summer care for children, elder care, all.
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Richard Wolff
Of those things would have supported the family.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
Would have supported the family like it.
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Richard Wolff
Does when you took away the family wage.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
That's right. That's why we have the highest divorce rate in the western industrialized world.
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Richard Wolff
Because no supports were promoted, matched only.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
By Russia after 1989 when the supports for their childcare and after school and public kitchens and all the other things were removed. And, and so that you have men floundering with a lot of free floating rage and hatred because their position is over. Women don't want them anymore because they can't provide and they still want all sorts of services. And women can have children without men. 42% of children are born outside of a marriage. And so that they've lost their whole standing as men and as people. And one of the ways they get it back, thanks to the gun manufacturers and the nra, is through guns.
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Richard Wolff
So they want to have a gun because it's a kind of symbolic holding on to their mastery and manhood when in fact economically the ground has been pulled out from underneath them.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
Absolutely.
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Richard Wolff
So where does the, the gay and anti gay play? How does that fit in here?
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
Well, people have a lot of free floating rage, especially the white men who have been dethroned. And they look for somebody to blame and they look for somebody to blame where it doesn't cost them much. It's the suck up, kick down theory. And what, who do they find? Well, they look at the people who they think have unseated them. Because one of the things that did happen, although it isn't as big as capitalists investing in ways that destroyed the family, is that at the same time in the 70s, the same time as the factories moved overseas and people's jobs were computerized and mechanized, women and minorities fought hard for and got some extension of their basic rights and made some advances, advances in employment.
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Richard Wolff
So they began to see that, so.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
They saw that as the cause of their problem, that people who have sex outside of the family, which are homosexuals and who are not Real families. There have been, you know, there are 200 bills against the allowance of marriage, particularly in the south, of course, where Mateen came from. And so that they have huge rage, which they take out on homosexuals, on women and on immigrants, because those are all people beneath them in the hierarchy. And Trump becomes a vehicle.
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Richard Wolff
And they can believe that those people.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
Have stolen their manhood.
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Richard Wolff
That's right.
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Dr. Harriet Fraad
And stolen their jobs.
- [47:04]
Richard Wolff
For me, as an economic analyst and with interest in politics, it's also. There's a sadness in your story, very. Because you think to yourself they misidentified the problem. They were either unwilling or unable to confront, that the employer who fires you or the employer who doesn't raise your wages, or the employer who lowers your benefits, or the employer, et cetera, et cetera, that that's their problem. This employer group, this employer class, this system that allows them to do something that enhances their profit at terrible cost to you and your life, they're afraid or unwilling or unable to see that problem. Instead, they go after a scapegoat, a gay person, an immigrant, a female hippie, or whatever it is for their sad, floating rage. The sadness is no matter what they do to those groups, it's not going to solve their problems.
- [48:06]
Dr. Harriet Fraad
Of course it isn't. And there's another sadness, which is if they had realized that they could have organized to get supports and have men and women be friends and equals and have a different kind of love, which is much more freeing for both of them as they have, and a different.
- [48:24]
Richard Wolff
Kind of family structure, they could have.
- [48:26]
Dr. Harriet Fraad
Had a family structure where they see and interact with the children that they have and enjoy them, where they learn what are the strengths and joys of caring for vulnerable life, of making a beautiful environment of keeping things in order and clean. And women as women, through the women's movement and through the pressure of capitalism, gained skills in the workforce and gained access, they could have gained the domestic joys that they miss out on. So they lose on every side. They show hatred to a group that won't solve their problem.
- [49:04]
Richard Wolff
And this, Mr. Mateen, I can now see why it captures so many people. Because here's a guy who surrounded himself with high powered weapons to cope with his sense of loss of self, the.
- [49:20]
Dr. Harriet Fraad
Hatred, loss of manhood and his hatred.
- [49:22]
Richard Wolff
For himself for being a homosexual, perhaps for. For being a pariah, for being the object of his father's disapproval, which is hard for anybody. So in a sense, Mateen tries to kill off the gayness in himself as well as everybody else. He did die in the process too, of course. And he embodies this gun culture. He literally in himself embodied the end result of explaining the difficulties you face in your life. Not by understanding how it came to be that there's a difficulty and how to.
- [50:00]
Dr. Harriet Fraad
Then knowing how you got into a situation helps you know how to find your way out. But he didn't understand that.
- [50:07]
Richard Wolff
And I'm struck too that the people who say, oh well, this has to do with homosexuality being pariah in the Muslim religion as it is in so many religions, at least in the fundamentalist version. But the truth is that many things those religions say nobody pays any attention to. That's right, you mustn't use birth control, you mustn't have sex outside of it. Huge numbers of the faithful just ignore all. The question is, why would someone not ignore the negativity about homosexuality? Because he's fighting it in himself. And even more because of the economics you've actually laid out for us, because it fits into a way of coping with the decline in your economic circumstances that comes out of the forces of capitalism that you have no control over, that you don't even know about, but that impinge on you, taking away from you an identity which you then try to recoup with a big store of guns and going out with a flash and killing off the bad folks, the very gays, who you are, who you are and who you are. Such a tragedy, almost like a Greek tragedy.
- [51:22]
Dr. Harriet Fraad
That's right, it is. It's a tragic, tragic thing. It's also tragic because you are not ever understanding that manhood shouldn't be tied to money. That part of what happened was manhood was tied to economic dominance because men got higher wages and they had the money that the family needed and women and children were dependent on them, which made the man the king of his household. And we don't believe, supposedly Americans don't believe in monarchy. That wasn't a great idea to have that in our families. But rather than question that and question the tie between your self worth and your net worth, they reacted to their loss by grabbing the symbols of masculinity. And one of them is guns, the Bushmaster.
- [52:22]
Richard Wolff
Another one is anti gay uncertainty, anti hatred for gays.
- [52:26]
Dr. Harriet Fraad
That's why in the militaristic sort of macho areas like the army, there's constant rape of women and denigration of homosexuals. And in porno there's constant degradation. These are sort of refuges for these angry men. There's in hetero porno, there's that subjugation and humiliation of women in the Christian rite. There is the doctrine according to the Southern Conference on Gender that women must be subordinate and that there are in the nra. There's the constant put down of women, the worst being that ex girlfriend target you can shoot so she becomes obliterated and a bloodied lump that there and hate radio does this Rush Limbert, those people, Limbaugh, excuse me, Rush Limbaugh, who are saying, oh, you're feeling like you're nobody. Well, it's the feminazis who did it to you. You know, it's the fags, they did it to you. They're taking over, you know, and feeds the hatred of people who are worried and self questioning and lets them feel more powerful because they have guns and hatred, blowing themselves up like a little bird that fluffs its feathers in order to look menacing. And it's sad.
- [53:53]
Richard Wolff
It is a tragic thing.
- [53:55]
Dr. Harriet Fraad
And it's an American tragedy.
- [53:56]
Richard Wolff
It's very American. And it's also for an economist, which is what I am, it's such a lesson yet again that we permit in our society a very small number of people, those who run the big corporations, tiny percentage of our population to make these unbelievably powerful social decisions like moving jobs out of the country, changing the family that have staggering economic consequences that they don't have to worry about, that they don't even have to take into account. You know, I could do the calculation and show that the cost to the United States of all of the psychological and physical damage done by collapsing the system of wages that we had, yes, it makes profit for the few, but the social cost means that if you really cared about efficiency, that was not a good decision to make. That decision had more costs than benefits. The benefits went to a very few. The costs were stretched out for many and they weren't counted. And that's why we permitted it to happen. But when they stand up and say we do the efficient thing, the answer is no, you don't.
- [55:10]
Dr. Harriet Fraad
Well, efficient for who?
- [55:11]
Richard Wolff
That's right. Sufficient for you.
- [55:13]
Dr. Harriet Fraad
And also there is the personal costs in the lives. First of all, the 49 people who.
- [55:21]
Richard Wolff
Are dead and the horror for their.
- [55:23]
Dr. Harriet Fraad
Families and for over 100 wounded, same thing. The costs, the cost for those homosexuals of so much hatred against them, the cost of the men going after people who can't really help them and also losing touch with women who could be their allies and women with the men who could be their allies, building a better life and redistributing the top to be able to have the universal health care and child care that places like France have. And all over Europe, you know, it's a tragedy, and it's an American tragedy.
- [56:08]
Richard Wolff
Dr. Harriet Fraud, a psycho hypnotherapist.
- [56:14]
Dr. Harriet Fraad
I'm a hypnotherapist and a mental health counselor in New York City.
- [56:17]
Richard Wolff
That's right. And a prolific author and someone that you have asked me to bring back, which I will continue to do. I appreciate the response that her presence on the program generates each time. That's why she's here. And that reminds me to remind you, please partner with us through the websites rdwolfwith2f's.com and democracyatwork.info I want to thank truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis. They partner with us, we with them, and we want the same with all of you. Invite us to come to your town to give a talk, help us get on more radio stations. Work with us to deliver this message that this program represents to as wide an audience as possible. Get in touch with us for any kind of partnership you can imagine that we haven't even thought of. Thank you again for attending to this program this week, and I look forward to talking with you again next week. But after a while, gonna be my time my time, babe Thing gonna change. Thing gonna change y It. Sa.