← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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Sam. Saint gonna change. Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, jobs, incomes, debts, those of our children and those looming down the road. 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. I wanted to begin today's program with another reminder that there are two particular things that we are working on these days where we would like to ask your help and your partnership. The first is in scheduling speaking engagements for myself. I like to travel around the country. I like to meet all of you. I like to have a chance to have a good evening's time to develop some of the analytic issues we focus on on this program to find out your interests in a more personal and immediate way. I do this for trade unions. I do it for community groups. I do it as fundraisers and public services for the radio stations that carry this program for a whole host of audiences of all sizes, types and interests. So, so if that's something you might like to explore with us, please use our websites. I'll give you their name in a moment to contact us and we will follow up to see if we can arrange one of these visits to you, to your area. And the second thing is we are organizing action groups, people who want to take the information we provide, looking at the situation we all face and want to do something together with their friends, their neighbors, their co workers, begin to have the action groups that can together make change. So if either of those kinds of projects, if you like, are of interest to you or something that you might want to participate in, please get in touch with us. We will follow up. This is an ongoing project. We're very, very gratified by the responses you've already provided, but we're open for business and looking for more. Alright, let's jump in the Updates here for June 2016. Well, last month a small victory was achieved and because it kind of blew by without too much attention, I wanted to make sure you were all aware of it. There aren't that many victories like this, and when they're there, they, they should be celebrated. It does teach us, as indeed several of today's stories do, that struggle does win things and that's a good reason to do it. This one has to do with the sugar industry. For many decades, sugar has been a problem in the American diet and in the American economy. In some ways, it's a little bit like cigarettes and tobacco in the sense that there Are companies pushing a product which, if taken in the wrong way, if taken in the wrong quantities, can be and has been dangerous to your health? Cigarettes and tobacco were that, and sugar has been that. Clearly, endless amounts of scientific work have demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt that excess consumption of sugar has a lot to do with the obesity problem of the United States, which is severe, with the diabetes problem in the United States, which is severe, with the damage to teeth, which was severe, although has been dealt with at least to some degree recently. And the history is always the same. Efforts by citizens groups, medical groups, advocacy groups of all kind, running afoul of the opposition and the well financed opposition of the sugar companies and of those industries that use a great deal of sugar and that fill up their products with a great deal of sugar. So it is with great interest that I noticed in May a victory in this case. It was the U.S. food and Drug Administration in Washington that announced that it was going to make some changes in sugar labeling of products. It made that announcement back in 2014 after, as I say, decades of struggle. And then finally, in May of this year, they finally came out with a decision. They were going to require labels on food in the United States to carry with a bolder typeface so that people could actually read it and see it, the quantity of sugar in products, food products. And this requires a bit of explanation because there's two kinds of sugar in food products. One is the sugar that occurs naturally and then the other is what's called sugar added. So you find out that the label, the new label that has now been decided over the opposition of considerable numbers of these industry groups, the new label says this is the total amount of sugar in the product and this is the amount of sugar added, that's extra sugar put in by the food manufacturer to jack up the sweetness in the hopes of more sales. And I wanted to celebrate the FDA for sticking with it, to thank Michelle Obama, who had something to do with championing all of this and deserves some of the credit, and for all the people in the advocacy groups who pressured the soda manufacturers, the food manufacturers and so on to overcome their opposition, which had been so successful and for so long. If I had time, but I don't to go into the details, I would have. There were some companies that were better than others. And in dealing with this, what I wanted to do though, was to remind you of the long standing lesson that all of this contains. Struggle works. It takes a long time, way longer than it should have. We'll never know how many people suffered sickness illness, even death from diabetes, from obesity. How many people's teeth were ruined. That's all criminal behavior. Criminal results. Criminal in the general human sense, not so much the legal sense. Behavior that we should never have had to struggle with to overcome. But that's how capitalism works, vested interests being what they are. So I wanted to leave you, though, with the following if you're interested in the details. The best story I found was in the Washington Post, dated May 20, 2016. An article by Roberto Ferdman, F E R D M A N in the Washington Post gives you all the basics. But to give you an idea of how severe it is, here a few statistics. The United States According to the article, in the United States we take in on average every man, woman and child, 126 grams of sugar a day. That would be the equivalent of drinking three 12 ounce cans of Coke. That's how much sugar we take in. To give you a sense of proportion, that is more than twice the average of the 54 countries that are currently surveyed by Euromonitor, that include countries like Britain, Canada and many others developed economic countries. So that we are off the chart in the amount of sugar we take in. According to the FDA, there ought to be a daily limit of 50 grams of added sugar. In other words, we should not consume more for our health than 50 grams of added sugar that is added to what's already naturally occurring in the products we consume. So that if you were to accept and if you were to abide by the 50 grams of added sugar per day, you would have a problem, for example, with one can of regular Pepsi. Why? Because in one gram of regular Pepsi, it has 69 grams of added sugar. In other words, one can of Pepsi alone puts you at 138% of what you're supposed to get per day. So we still have the problem. The question now to see is whether decades of struggle to get a label on the item will indeed do something to curb this consumer good from the damage it has done to the health of the American people. Now, another small victory in another corner of the world, but one again that deserves some attention. This time we're going to go to Sweden, and in particular to the major city there, Gothenburg or G O T H E N B E R G Gothenburg, Sweden. There have been an experiment. There's actually been several of them, but the one that I want to talk about has been going on now for quite a while and there are some results and that's why I'm bringing it to your attention. The experiment in Question is to reduce the length of the working week from eight hours a day to six hours a day, from a 40 hour week to a 30 hour week. And in particular the way they've organized it in Sweden you work five days a week, but you only work six hours, not eight hours. This is interesting. Why was this done? Well, it was a proposal pushed onto the government of Gothenburg by the Left Party, a political party there, quite influential, which argued basically that a 30 hour week is both more humane, both more in line with Swedish values and would in the end be better for business. Something which the business community disputed. As you might imagine, the argument of the Left Party was over the 40 previous years in Sweden, with a 40 hour work week, there had been a slowly but steadily rising problem of sick leave. More and more Swedish people taking sick sick leave from their jobs, and more and more choice of early retirement by people who said apparently that they were retiring because in part they were exhausted. Well, they've made the experiment. It's lasted long enough. They've surveyed the results. They've looked both to the businesses involved and their spokespersons and to the workers involved. And according to the New York Times story carried on May 21, 2016, the project has been a roaring success. Even the businesses involved and the offices involved say that with shorter work, the workers have shorter workdays. The workers have become markedly more productive, have suffered markedly fewer sick days and are much more energized and happy about the work experience than it was before. Let me express clarity here. They're paid exactly as much as they were before. They work two hours a day less, but their pay is the same. So this is a cut work week with no cut in pay. Wow, what an interesting idea. Here was a. An experiment with something probably all workers imaginable would want over the objections of business, that it would hurt the profitability and, and the efficiency of business. Turns out the business leaders were wrong and that this experiment was successful. Now, clearly it might not work in another country, it might not work in different industries. There are all kinds of questions that can be raised about such a study. And that's all well and good, because the issue isn't to establish the universality of this, but it's to learn a lesson that the people who may know better about the work process than the employer are the employees. And allowing them to make certain decisions and to make certain experiments is in the interest of everybody. And that what's good for workers isn't necessarily what is to be opposed by the employer. That there are a Number of things going on here that that can teach very valuable lessons to working people and to their employers. It also raises the question what about asking about other dimensions of the workplace? For example, most workplaces have business leaders, employers who worry rightly or wrongly, that workers are not paying attention, that workers are spending too much time in the bathroom, that workers are distracted by the Internet, that a whole host of things and so they use money to hire supervisors to install equipment that spies on workers. And that the combination of these kinds of steps lowers the profitability of the business, angers and builds resentment in the workers who are intruded upon, spied upon, manipulated and so on. If workers were granted a greater degree of self management, might you do 2 improve the workplace atmosphere, improve the workplace productivity and save the workplace the costs of expensive and often counterproductive supervision. The experiment would have to be made. And of course the next logical step is to ask what about making workers their own directors? What about making workers play both sides of the relationship? Employee and also employer question whether the system might not work better, the system of production of goods and services if we got rid of the old stale and by now ineffective pattern of making some people employers and other people employees. Why don't we overcome that soul searing division? It's really not that much more radical than saying hey, 40 hours a week shouldn't be written in stone. Let's see whether we can't do better with 30. They did that in Gothenburg, Sweden. They did it and they measured the results. And the results are what I told you and what teach us this valuable lesson. Next update. This one has to do with a decision by Citibank, one of the biggest banks in America, based in New York City, Citibank to move 150 jobs from their offices in Hartford, Connecticut to their offices in Tampa, Florida. This kind of move happens all the time, but it raises very important economic issues that I want briefly to discuss. Why did Citibank do this? Well, it doesn't take more than two minutes to look at the literature, even what Citibank says. So this is not a question of me having to do the research to see what lies behind because. Because my research about what lies behind Citibank is about the same as what Citibank itself says. This is a response to quote unquote incentives. That is the state of Florida, the city of Tampa are providing incentives. They're using taxpayer money, taxes raised from the citizens in Florida to induce a bank in New York to move jobs from Connecticut. Hartford is the capital of Connecticut down to Florida. Looking into it, here's what I learned. There's an incentive plan of which this move is a part. In the end, it will move 1,163 jobs, I believe many of them from Connecticut, maybe all. By 2018, these jobs will be moved to Tampa, Florida area. In exchange, Tampa, Florida area has provided $14.9 million worth of incentives. And that works out. I did the arithmetic to about, let's see, $13,000 per job created. So Tampa, Florida is paying $13,000 of taxpayer money to get those jobs to come from Connecticut to Florida. So whatever the benefits to Florida are from having those jobs and having those incomes paid, and let's be clear, the jobs are not necessarily going to go to Floridians. It's possible that people from Connecticut will move. It's possible that people from other states will be brought in by Citibank or by their own devices. So that's an open question. We don't know. And then there's the question of what will be the consequences of having those jobs filled in Florida. My guess is there will be some positive effects on the Florida economy. Having those people earning about roughly $75,000 per job will be the average pay. They will spend that money in Florida. So there's clearly going to be some gains in Florida. But of course, if you're an economist and you're thinking about the United States as a whole, whatever the gains to Florida, you'd have to weigh against them, the costs. One thing is that that $15 million that Florida could have used for all kinds of other things won't be available for those other things. They'll either have to not do $15 million worth of other things, or they'll have to raise $15 million more of taxes. And that'll be a negative impact on Florida. Then too, there's the negative impact on Connecticut. It is going to lose all those jobs. It is going to lose all the purchasing power that those people had. They stayed in Connecticut would have made. The stores in Hartford will have fewer customers. They may have to lay off workers who in turn will be unable to spend money. A rational way of organizing where industry goes in the United States, which would have to try at least to look at the costs and benefits of this move and decide whether it pays. Now, let's suppose, and this is often the case, that it is bad for America. That is, the losses in Connecticut outweigh the gains in Florida. So from the point of view of the United States, this isn't a good move to, to make the problem is the United States didn't make the investigation and the United States didn't weigh in. In fact, the free private enterprise in this case, Citibank, made the decision all by its lonesome. And it did it because it was profitable. It did it because when they looked at the costs and benefits and got the free handout From Florida of $14.9 million, it made it a privately profit for them to do, thanks to the nice fat subsidy from Florida. It might be good for Florida, and it certainly is good for Citibank because otherwise they wouldn't have done it. But it's bad for the United States because the losses in one part of the country might be greater than the other. We don't even look at that question in this country. We don't even determine what the case is. And we don't do anything to make sure that what's bad for America isn't, in fact, what is privately decided by these companies. And here's the worst of it all that will now happen because we do not have a rational way in a capitalist economy like ours to have these decisions made properly. It's a failure of our capitalist system, but the failure is worse. And here's why. Connecticut will likely respond to all of this by thinking, oh, my goodness, we better offer incentives. I'll use the word these folks like when they write their reports to prevent more companies from doing what Citibank did. And indeed, other states looking at this whole thing say, hey, if we had known about this, we might have offered Citibank even more money. Not just 14.9 million, I don't know, maybe 20 million, maybe 30 million to come to our state, Arizona, or maybe some other state where Citibank has already some employees, as it does in Florida. In other words, this is going to be another moment in what is widely and correctly called erased to the bottom. That is, we are driving all the cities and states of America to compete with one another for corporate location decisions. More and more tax money is being used not to provide goods and services for the citizens of the states paying the taxes, but to provide what are simply bribes by another name. In this case, the name incentive to get companies to come. And of course, the companies seeing this game for what it is, will play the cities and states against one another. Even if they're not thinking of leaving a particular city or state, they'll tell the local officials we're thinking about it. And boy, would it help us in our thinking if you provided some incentives. Or maybe they'll go out and get a friend of theirs in a city government somewhere else to offer an incentive just so they can take it to where they already are and see if they can't do better. You understand the picture. We are being held hostage, we the taxpayers, in a game that we are structured to lose as more and more of the city and the taxpayers money is being siphoned into the coffers of private enterprise as they make us beg and compete for where they're going to locate by shifting more resources and out of the public domain and into the private domain. This is no way to rationally organize the decisions about where production happens, where offices are located. It's what corporations want because it draws more and more public money into their hands. So the next time you hear some private enterprise enthusiast tell you about how America is to be so thankful for the private enterprise system, please remember this story occasioned by the move of Citibank out of Connecticut and to Florida as a very powerful co example or counterexample of what the enormous costs are to us as a people, to our governments, to our taxes and to the efficiency of our production systems. By allowing companies to make these decisions based on private profits and government incentives rather than on the merits of the case. What's best for the American working people and for the American economy. This is a dangerous road and we are on it and we've been on it for a long time. And the costs are reflected in the quality of the economy we have. Now we've come to the end of the first half of today's program. Please stay with us. We will be back very, very shortly with the second half and I think you will find some of the larger topics dealt with there of great interest to you. And remember, please to make use of our websites rdwolf and democracyatwork.info that's democracyatwork all one word.info we will be right back.
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I want so much, so much so love me in disguise but now you're just somebody else all the lights I tell myself you're impossible. There's so much in your blood I'm here to help you let it out I cause you a foam life baby girl found out I'll use the same weaponry that you used on me Impossible, impossible, you're impossible, impossible, you're impossible, impossible, possible, impossible.
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Welcome back, friends to the second half of Economic Update. I want to start this second half where we deal with some major issues by dealing with one that I don't believe we have dealt with in a long time. In this case it has to do with a lawsuit working its way through the courts that will no doubt end up at the Supreme Court. In this case, the protagonists, if you like, the adversaries, are on the one hand, an organization called Freedom From Religion foundation, ffrf. That's basically a group of people committed to maintaining the separation of church and state in the United States. They are generally atheistic in their approach and oppose the effort by certain, not all, religious groups to muddy that separation, to overcome that separation. The issue that has brought them to the courts is the pursuant to a law passed back in the 1950s, preachers, priests, rabbis, and clerics working in religious institutions who receive as part of their pay package an allowance for housing, a certain amount of money to help them pay the cost of their homes. That amount of money is exempted from the federal income tax. In other words, those individuals don't have to pay an income tax on that portion of their payment that is a housing allowance. What happened is the Freedom From Religion foundation said that this was a discrimination for people involved in religion. And they applied themselves for a similar exemption for the part of their income that was a housing allowance. And the Internal Revenue Service denied their request. They took them to court, and they got a judgment from a federal court judge, District Judge Barbara Crabb in the Western District of Wisconsin, who said that indeed, the FFRF was correct and that either the exemption would have to be given to them, too, or it couldn't be given to a religious institution or someone working for it. And then a later court threw it out, and now it's going back in, in. And it will go through the courts. So here's the issue it raises that I want at least briefly to discuss with you. It is important that everyone understand that in the United States we subsidize religion. And here's how that works. This kind of housing allowance is a small part of this story. It involves, by one estimate, a mere $700 million. Now, certainly, that's a great deal of money, but it is a very small part of what's at stake here. We're talking tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. When you think about the money that is not paid in taxes by the churches, the synagogues, the mosques and other religious institutions in the United States. Here's how it works. You are given an exemption both at the federal level and at the state and local levels. It means, for example, that if a church has a portfolio of stocks that earn dividends, if it owns bonds that earn interest, if it trades those securities and gets capital gains, none of those kinds of income, dividends, interest, capital gains, has to pay any tax to Uncle Sam, nor any income tax to any state government. But it goes further than that. When a church sits on a piece of land, which of course it must, and it has erected an impressive building that has in it all kinds of equipment, computers and all the rest of the all of that kind of real value, real property. It's called land buildings, inventories of equipment in buildings. If you are a private business, you must pay property tax to the locality where this business sits, where it exists. But if you are a church or a synagogue or a mosque, you are exempt from property tax. That's why we're talking hundreds, probably, certainly tens of billions, probably hundreds of billions of dollars in tax revenue not charged to religious institutions. In other words, they don't have to come up with the money to pay their taxes. They are entitled to receive exactly the same public services that have to be paid for as the tax paying institutions, but they don't pay any taxes. In other words, the police department has to provide police services to churches, synagogues and mosques. The health department has to clean the air and water that these religious institutions use. The fire department has to be ready to rescue them and to prevent fires in their institutions. The school system has to educate the children of these institutions, to teach them reading and writing so that they can go work in those religious institutions and be productive in the process of doing so. In other words, everything the federal, state and local governments do has to be delivered to the churches. But the churches don't have to pay for any of it the way citizens do and the way private enterprises do, etc. And that's a way of subsidizing religion. Why do I stress that? Because there are many, particularly the conservatives amongst us, who believe that everything ought to pay its own way. At least they say so. If churches had to pay their own way, they would have to charge their parishioners, pass the plate around for donations, raise the money to pay not only for the food they buy, for the furniture they use, for the electricity they purchase, but they would have to pay taxes like everybody else to pay for the public services delivered to them as are delivered to everybody else. But we don't do that. We don't know in the United States what would happen to the institutions of religion if they were required to pay the same taxes levied on everybody else. We subsidize religion by freeing them from all tax obligations. This is peculiar when you think about the separation of church and state, because clearly this Is the state giving a special benefit to religious institutions that most other institutions do not qualify for? It is true that like religious educations, charitable and educational institutions are also provided with tax exempt status, are freed from the obligation. And I have often spoken particularly about the example of rich universities being exempted. But there are of course quite rich churches and mosques and synagogues. And there is the question that can be raised whether those who do not believe in one or any of these religions ought to be required to, in effect subsidize institutions they not only do not participate in, but are perhaps philosophically opposed to. If you are an atheist or an agnostic, and there are millions of them in the United States, it is an interesting question whether it is appropriate or consistent with the Constitution to require them to pay taxes for an institution to which they are opposed. We see right away in the United States today all kinds of complicated struggles by people who don't want to be required by the government to support contraceptive provision as part of health care, abortion services as part of insurance policies, and a whole host of other issues in dispute. But as the Freedom from Religion foundation is making clear in its suit against the Internal Revenue Service, which will have to be decided by higher courts, there is an opening and a growing wonderment and a debate about the longstanding practice in the United States of providing a tax based subsidy so huge to organized religion. A wondering about what the size and social influence of organized religion would be if it had to pay taxes to fund the public services of which it makes use. Next item to get some attention from us is a book from time to time I like to bring to your attention books that I think raise major issues that you might want to take a look at. And the book in question is the following. The author is Douglas Rushkoff. I'll spell his last name. R U S H K O F F. The title of his new book is so arresting that I guess you will remember it. Here's the title of his new book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus. So this is Douglas Rushkoff's new book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus. Now, what's the point of Mr. Rushkoff's book, really? This is a book about technology and its social impact. Mr. Rushkoff is very critical. He basically, if I read him correctly, is saying the following. Modern technology. And by that he means all the kind of computer and telecommunications kinds of breakthroughs that are associated with names like Google. All of those could have, should have and was supposed to be ways in which life could be made better for everyone. And Mr. Rushkoff is deeply disappointed and says that the technical breakthroughs achieved in Silicon Valley, et cetera, et cetera, that area between San Jose and San Francisco and California, he's disappointed. He says it hasn't done for the mass of people's lives what it could have, what it should have and what it was supposed to do instead. It has had a completely different effect. It has made a small number of people wildly wealthy. What about this thesis? Well, I obviously wouldn't have brought it to your attention if I thought it was silly or if I was opposed to it, or at least I would have presented it in a different way. I do find his argument persuasive, but I also find it a repeat of an argument that has been made before. And so this new book that makes the argument very timely, very much about our own moment now in history, is also an opportunity for me to make the point in a more general way. Almost every major technical breakthrough of the last 2, 300 years, the years in which capitalism grew from a new kind of economic system in England to become the dominant prevailing system in the world. Over these last 250 years, capitalism has indeed introduced into our lives all kinds of major technical breakthroughs. The modern industrial engine, gasoline powered engine, modern chemistry, electricity, atomic energy, the Internet, the computer. There's a long list of them. They are truly epoch making, changing people's lives. No doubt each and every one of them promised, among other things, that it would make life easier, that it would make less drudgery for everybody, that it would improve the standard of living for everybody. That it would allow us to work much less while being much more comfortable. And yet, as we look around the world today, what do we see? We see, for example, here in the United States, people working longer hours than they have for many decades. We see a gap between rich and poor that is mind bending. Both on a global level and here inside the United States and inside so many countries, documented by every reasonable analyst, we see drudgery on a scale we haven't imagined before. For many people, the last 20 years have been times of losing interesting, well paid jobs in exchange for jobs with low pay, low security, no intrinsic interest, drudgery at a high rate and taking a toll on our bodies and our minds. So the promise of technical change versus what it delivers is stark. Mr. Rushkoff is quite right about his upset, symbolically speaking, about the Google bus. But I think it raises a deeper question which I would like to leave with you to think about. The problem is not technology, and I don't think the problem is even capitalism, insofar as it stimulates technical change, it has always done that. You might want to quarrel, as I certainly do, with what kinds of changes it stimulates and what kinds it doesn't. So, for example, it stimulates ways to make a private car marketable, stimulates technological developments that make the private car interesting, sexy in new ways. It doesn't do so well on coming up with a good mass transit substitute for the car, because that's not profitable. And so we don't see that. We make jokes about there being no cure for the common cold. But other things get cured, okay? That has to do with wealth and income of the people who fund the technology that gets changed. So I have my criticisms, but here we're talking about not the way capitalism stimulates technological change, but rather how capitalism distorts the consequences. Every change in technology, every way that is figured out to make something new or to make the process of production more efficient could introduce a better standard of living for everybody and could introduce more leisure, less work. If it hasn't done so, it's because the system that provokes the technological change, the system in which the technological change happens is one driven first and foremost by the proverbial bottom line, by profit. We really shouldn't be surprised that in a capitalist system, everything, including technical change, is subordinated to the one dominant imperative, make money, grow profits, and all the rest. So, yes, technology has been put to the service of profit, just like everything else has, and that's the result. And Mr. Rushkoff is right to be disappointed. But this is a deep problem of how capitalism works. And a final point on technology. Capitalists like to boast that their system is technologically dynamic. And to a point, they're right. It is. It has been and it continues to be. But let's be careful what we're comparing it to. In a capitalist system, technologies are pursued that are profitable. Technologies are adopted if and when they are profitable. The whole process of making technological improvement is subordinated to profit. The real question we should be asking ourselves is how would an alternative system develop productivity and technology in different ways? And would those ways be better? In a capitalist system, a worker doesn't have much incentive in many, many circumstances to improve the technology he or she works with, because there's nothing in it for them if their technology is more effective. For all they know, the employer will take advantage of the situation and make do with fewer workers. Their fellow workers, or even they themselves could lose their jobs. Why should they do this? What incentive is there? If we educate large numbers of people in schools that are substandard, where science, math, engineering issues associated with them are poorly taught, as they are in so many inner city schools in the United States. States. Because the bottom line means corporations don't want to pay the taxes to provide the quality education that could make millions of American young people much more likely to achieve technical breakthroughs than we now enable them to be. All these kinds of questions are swept under the rug, but they shouldn't be. Because in a different system governed by different values, the whole question of technology would be handled, dealt with and benefited from in completely different ways. Next item, and we have some time for it. I came across a stunning piece of information in the Detroit News. Now, you know, I talk about Detroit as such an example of failed capitalism, but I'm going to talk about it here in a different way. The story that caught my eye, and it's from May 19, the Detroit News, has to do with the fact that this year Michigan corporations, corporations across the state of Michigan will see an overall income tax refund. In other words, they are going to get back from the state of Michigan more money than they pay into the state of Michigan in taxes. This is so disastrous that the state of Michigan is going to have special emergency meetings to try to cope with the absurdity that this year the people of Michigan, the citizens, the working people, are going to have to pay even more than before because the corporations have managed things so that not only don't they have to pay taxes to the government of Michigan the way they once did, they're going to get back in tax refunds more than they're paying in, which is, on the face of it, absurd. Well, why did this happen? Well, here comes the answer. During the crash of 2008, 9, 10, the then governor of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm, in her rush to bail out the automobile companies that were conveniently threatening, remember what we talked about earlier in this program? Threatening to close down or to leave, to go to places where the workers were cheaper or where they could get a better deal or where there was an incentive. So she gave them tax refunds, which they're still cashing in. She gave them benefits, which they're still cashing in. So much so that this year the total amount of taxes paid in by Michigan corporations will be less than the refunds paid out to them. Should Governor Granholm have done it? Certainly not the way she did. By the way, Governor Granholm is a long term leading adviser to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. What's going on here? Is, you know, the bailing out of the big corporations, the helping them, not requiring them to come back and compensate the state for that bailout, not requiring them to have the state taxpayers share in their profit making recovery if they have one. But no, bequeathing to the state for years into the future the absurd situation they have now when the corporations take more from the state than they pay in taxes, leaving everybody else in Michigan to pick up the debris. This is a failure of a system. It's the result of the pressure corporations can and do put on politicians. It's the result of politicians with no backbone and no ability to go to the mass of people for the support they need to push back against the corporate demands to show the absurdity of where that leads. Shame on the politicians who fail to do that and who thereby fail their constituents, no matter what party they come from. Last item for today. According to Business Insider on 22 May, corporations have been borrowing money to beat the band over recent years and you all know why. Interest rates are at historic record lows, 1% less than 1%. Corporations can borrow like crazy and they have. They've used the borrowings to boost the payouts to their shareholders. They've used the borrowings to buy back their own shares. They've built up $6.6 trillion worth of debt, historic amount of debt. Yes, they have 1.8 trillion of cash on their books that they're not investing. But 1.8 trillion of cash is way, way less than 6.6 trillion of debt. Question everybody's in the years ahead if interest rates rise, if economic conditions are poor, how in the world will they pay it back? Well, for one standard and poor in a recent report worries out loud that we may be heading into a period of severe economic contraction because of the inability of corporations to pay back under new economic conditions the excess borrowing they indulged in in response to these record low interest rates. Capitalism is a system filled with irrational, dangerous behaviors and decisions. And one of the reasons we're so long overdue for a debate over capitalism is that these have to be put into the public eye so we can identify weaknesses and take the necessary steps before we're overwhelmed by them. We've come to the end of another program. I am really pleased to have been able to spend this time with you to bring to you the research that we at Democracy at Work do. Please make use of it, share it, use what's on our websites rdwolf with two Fs and democracyatwork.info Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, communicate to us, as well as follow us through those websites. Let us hear from you. We read everything that you send us. We want you to partner with us. Just as we thank truthout.org, the independent source of news and analysis that has been a partner with us for all these years. Thank you for being with us and I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Your time now baby but after a while gonna be my time, my time babe they ain't gonna change change, change, change, change Thing gonna change Yep it. Sam.