← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Economic Update: Social Movement for Economic Democracy
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- [00:10]
A
Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, debts, incomes, our own, those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff, and I present to you these updates in the hopes of that will help offset the kinds of image about our economic system left by the mainstream media. A new study has just been released about that tax cut bill that Mr. Trump boasts about that the Republicans pushed through when they ran the Congress back in December of 2017. And this new study releases data that I want to share with you because it really needs to be exposed. Out of the Fortune 500, that's the 500 biggest corporations that dominate the American economy. 66. 0. 60 out of the 500 paid zero taxes in 2018 thanks to that bill. 0. I want to read to you the names of some of them so you get an idea who paid no taxes. And this is a good time of year since you've just finished paying yours. Amazon. Oh, Amazon, General Motors, Chevron, Delta Air Lines, John Deere, Caterpillar, Molson, Coors Beer and so on. Not only did they pay no taxes, but many of them claimed refunds which they got. How much? $4.3 billion of your taxes that you paid were sent back to these companies who paid no taxes at all during the same year. Total amount of money they earned on which they paid no taxes, 79 billion. Add to that 4.3 billion of refunds. This is a perverse tax code. It gives to the richest while taking from everybody else. It ought to make you angry. These kinds of numbers totally dwarf the small amounts of tax refunds that the vast majority of Americans got, if they even got that. It also worsens our inequality, because think about it, if you give a refund to a rich corporation, somebody has to pay for that. You and I do. The average person. If the government can't tax these 60 companies who have billions they would otherwise have to pay, then either the government doesn't provide us with services because that money isn't there, or else it borrows the money that it can't take from them, which is what happened in 2018. That money has to be paid back and interest on it has to be paid, and we will all be charged our taxes to pay for what is not taken from the rich. So it worsens the inequality in our society and it should be exposed for that. Years ago, we passed a minimum annual tax that everybody has to pay, no matter what games they play with the tax code that applied to individuals, it never applied to corporations. How nice for them. I want to turn next to one of those corporations and talk about it. The General Motors Corporation. The CEO of General Motors, Mary Barra, took home the following salary in 2018. $20.9 million. Profits of GM11 billion. This is the same company that during the same year that it was paying her 20, $21.9 million, announced the closing of four factories here in the United States, firing thousands of salaried workers to focus on the future of self driving automobiles and electric cars, which, by the way, will get rid of many other people's jobs too. As all of this was happening, what went through my mind? This is all profitable for shareholders, and this is all profitable for the company, which can then use that money to pay these kinds of salaries. And if you have a corporation, that's what the priorities. Dividends to shareholders, big fat pay packages to the top salaried officers and the rest. The factory jobs, the salaried office worker jobs, the communities whose taxes are wrecked by these plant closures. It's not their concern. They have no responsibility for that at all. Their responsibility is the profit for their shareholders and the big salaries for their executives. And they take care of their priorities. Just as we are left with the wreckage of that system of priorities. Could there be an alternative? Of course there could. We could pass a law that says a company whose decisions negatively impact a community, causing job loss, causing destitution for families whose breadwinners have been denied a job. We could say that's part of the responsibility of the company. It has to set aside money to compensate these people, to compensate these communities. Maybe a program to retrain workers that are laid off so that they and their communities are not left to suffer. Maybe that's part of the responsibility. Not doing that is a little bit like allowing a car to crash into some people and then drive home with no responsibility for the damage done to those people. We wouldn't think that's reasonable. Why? Why in the world do we find it reasonable for corporations to be given such extraordinary privileges? My third update is about that fire in Paris. The great fire at the Church of Notre Dame. It was actually a few weeks ago that I was at that church in Paris, walked right by it and noticed the scaffolding all around it. This was before it had burned anyway. It had a spectacular fire. I don't need to tell you about that. It was all across the media. What struck me about the fire was the. A desperately unpopular president, Mr. Macron, tried desperately to make some political hay out of it. Oh, he was going to attend to this great monument, this 8 century old church that sits on a little island in the middle of the Seine river, etc. He was going to be committed to rebuilding it. And so, together with some of his very good friends, some of the richest people in France, the Gucci Empire and the others, they got together and miracle of miracles, in a matter of hours, they came up with nearly a billion dollars from a handful of rich families to rebuild the top towers of the Notre Dame fire that the Notre Dame fire had destroyed. Poor President Macron, trying desperately to look like a hero, he's going to restore the church. He quickly finds a billion dollars. This is the same president who cut salaries, who damaged the labor laws in order to make it more profitable for corporations, who explained that the government couldn't do the things it used to do for the people of France because there was no money. Suddenly discovered money. What a miracle. He found the money. And where did he find it? In the hands of the rich people. Turns out they had it all along. But it gets worse. The fakery of these kinds of governments, it's worse. Why? Turns out that these super rich families who got together to give a billion dollars are entitled under French law to deduct from their taxes the charitable contribution. And French law is very good. If you're an individual, you can deduct 66% of what you give. If you're a business, it's 60%. Which means the bulk of the money that those rich people contributed isn't their money at all, it's tax money. They're not going to pay taxes the way they would have because they can count that against what they have to pay taxes on. You know what that means? That a good part of the rebuilding of the Notre Dame church will be paid by the French taxpayers who are being screwed yet again. But it didn't work in France because the Yellow Vest movement pinpointed this right away. They made a mockery. First you tell us you can't do things and then you quickly find a billion dollars overnight. You said there was no money, but you found it quickly and you found it for people who don't need it, for people who are already crazy rich. And we're going to rip off this government and our society. And as they give money to get the publicity of being so charitable, it is, to quote the French dgutants, which is their word for disgusting. My last update has to do with strikes. In the United States, we're seeing more strikes than we have since the 1980s. The largest private sector strike in the last three years ended as of this preparation of this report. It was the strike of 31,000 supermarket workers in the Stop and Shop chain in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island. 31,000 went out, went on strike. I drove past one of them two days ago and it was really interesting to see a big stop and Shop parking lot empty and out in front about 25 picketers carrying signs in the manner of a good strike. But what was interesting was the empty parking lot. The Boston Globe reported that 75% of the normal shopping done in the week before Easter wasn't done at Stop and Shop, which is of course a big fat reason why they reached a settlement. Workers are getting a raise and workers are not being deprived of the pension and medical coverage that had been threatened by the company that owns the chain. A successful strike whose lesson is militancy and unity is the way forward. A lesson other workers, and indeed the whole social movement community might want to learn even better than they already have. But I want to report on two more strikes. The Chicago Symphony is out on strike and continues to be. The New York State nurses, a very, very militant group, voted 97% to go on strike. And that was enough to get the authorities to give the union what they demanded before they even had to do one day of strike. So it turns out showing that you're unified and showing that you're militant is 3/4 of the battle in a society of capitalists who think that the working class is no longer able to organize, to be militant or unified in what it seeks to do. That these strikes are happening more and more is a sign that yet another part of this capitalist system is loosening, is coming undone. It's like the levels of inequality that we see are not really sustainable anymore. You convinced this population that capitalism is the way to become rich and prosperous, that it will create and sustain and build a vast middle class. And yet the middle class is keenly aware that it is being pecked at from every side, is unable to afford an education for its kids, unable to afford the so called American dream that was promised but is not being delivered. And all the while, what do we see at the other pole, at the other end? A system whose politics is clearly strong, spinning out of control. A system who says that the man who developed a bit faster way to deliver packages has become the richest person on Earth. Mr. Bezos is a glorified delivery boy. Good for him the packages come sooner. Is that why $150 billion are sitting in his account? For for him to decide with what he wants. Whereas we could educate an entire generation of young people in much better equipped schools. Millions for the people rather than billions for a glorified delivery boy. It's extraordinary. We are coming to the end of this first half. I will introduce the second half with an interview I think you will find very interesting. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Welcome back friends, to the second half of Economic Update. Before I introduce you to our very interesting guest for today, I want to remind you please to Support us via YouTube with our websites as well, rdwolff with two Fs.com and democracyatwork.info you can follow us there as always on Facebook, Twitter and so on. And again, our thanks to the Patreon community. My guest today is Rebecca Lurie. She is the director of Community and Worker Ownership Project at the School of Labor and Urban Studies at the City University of New York. I want to stress that as the director of that project, she is already part of the growing interest in and the growing support for economic democracy worker co ops and that's indeed what we're going to be talking about today. So Rebecca, thank you very much for coming. So let's start with one of your early successes. You had a conference in April of this year. Tell us a little bit about what it was about, who came and what it's part of.
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B
Sure, sure. The School of Labor and Urban Studies is the newest school at the City University of New York. But for 35 years we've been the Murphy Institute and well known within the left community and the labor community as a place for gathering. So this was our first faculty led conference under the aegis of the new School and I was asked if I would do it on the cooperative economics or economic Democracy. We pulled together faculty from around the city, the city University and a few people from outside Rutgers, Brissam players, some folks from different places to think about what we need to say if we're going to have a faculty conference. But the first thing we said was it has to be about practice too. So it's academics praxis. And in that space where we come together, we also wanted to bring policymakers. So the deputy mayor opened. Phil Thompson, deputy mayor for Strategic Initiatives, opened the morning and really helped lay a groundwork for what a new economy needs to look like. Much of what was discussed are things that you've covered in your shows. I don't want to be redundant in the short time we have. But what was so exciting with almost every section or session was someone who's been writing or studying it and some people who've been doing it. And so we really were very intentional about mixing the praxis with the academic space so everyone could leave with papers that were written, PowerPoints, but also stories and real organizations, businesses, folks who are putting this together.
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A
So tell me, is it reasonable for me to believe that this is an idea that's catching hold? That the whole notion that we could run our businesses in a democratic, cooperative way, that we don't have to accept the historical legacy of enterprises run by a tiny group at the top, Is this spreading? Is your conference a sign of that?
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B
I want to say yes. And on my way here, I was feeling depressed about the state of the world. And when I listened to your session this morning, furthermore, how absurd and how disgusting as you quoted the French, the system is when there's so much at the top and so little at the bottom. But in some ways that might be the actual reason why there is something bubbling up everywhere where people are saying we need something more. Just so. When I visited Zuccotti Park a number of years ago for the Occupy, there was a sign on a pizza box. Someone had written, compassion is our new currency. And I want to put that out as what I think also happens when everybody's trying to figure out how to do something other than what they saw witness with Amazon not coming to New York or with the billionaire, the billions that overnight appeared in France and go down the list, people are seeing something's not right and they're hungry to figure out how can we make compassion our new currency.
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A
Are there? Did examples come up at your conference of ongoing efforts at worker co ops? Tell us a little bit about what struck you there?
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B
Yeah, it was worker co ops. It was also all other types of cooperative enterprises. So I want to put worker co ops in the context of a cooperative economy. People were talking about land and land trusts and what do we do about land, banking and finance. I can go down the lists, but I don't want to go into all the details only to say that in every nook and cranny where people are trying to figure out how to do, you know, where people show up when they show up at school, how can that be run more democratically? So there was something about schools. So you can see it's not the traditional like, well, it is some businesses that people are trying to start, but it's not only businesses they're trying to start. It may be businesses they're already in, it may be enterprises they're already managing. Non profits folks are trying to figure out how can we run our nonprofits organizations more democratically. So I often say, and based. I've learned a lot from your show and others. Economic democracy requires two things. It requires transparency with the resources. So you look at the economy, how things are moved and how they're shared. What's the transparency? What do we know and understand about the resources and how do we make decisions democratically. And as soon as you start to bury unbury and uncover what that looks like, people need to be more. To be more democratic. They have to undo the hierarchical thinking that capitalism has given us. So you start undoing racism, undoing sexism, undoing classism right in place. You start to undo a hierarchical power structure and people start to be a lot enlivened with what's possible.
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A
Are people excited?
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B
Absolutely. We had.
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A
Because part of this will have to be carried by. By a kind of explosion of feeling about the importance of doing this right.
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B
And I'm talking some about the feeling. And some of my more academic partners might say, what about the thinking? I'll say it's the head and the heart and the hand. So all these things have to be in it together. So in the academic space, although we're a school where we have degrees in urban studies and labor studies, we have to learn a little bit more about business. If someone's going to run something democratically, they have to know how to read the spreadsheet and they have to understand the market that they're in. Becomes a political question. You know, why do we have certain things we have and how can we control the market? The capitalists have figured out how to control the market. How do we control the market? So there's that, but there's also people who were there, psychologists, sociologists, lawyers. I mean, a very broad swath of folks. There's almost, I'd like to say there's no wrong door to enter a place of practice for economic democracy.
- [21:34]
A
Were there any links to the other efforts in other parts of the world? You know, the Mondragon experiment in Spain, that is such an extraordinary achievement. Or the Emilia Romagna economy in Italy. How do your activities connect or do they with the rest of the world's interest in economic democracy?
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B
So everybody who's involved is trying to learn from what has already happened or is happening in other places. Jessica Gordon Nembord has written a book, Collective Courage that people Know. I think you've had her on your show. And she's a faculty member at John Jay. And her research uncovered the wealth of things that have happened out of the black community over time and understanding that collective, as she calls it, courage. But collective activism happens in the face of struggle. So what we saw in Mondragon when they started almost 60 years ago, similarly was in the face of struggle, what can we do? So what's happening when we look around the world is we see what people are doing in the face of really a lot of suffering or austerity or lack, then come together for abundance. And abundance can be forged. One of the things about Italy that we see is it's often how do we look at the public sector and public needs. So really there's a look across now that people, people are saying against privatization. We need to have a different sense of control of what's in the public, what belongs to us in the commons. Our second speaker was Sheila Foster, who's written a lot about the commons and the Co City, along with Roger Greene and Carmen Huerta Noble, who is. They're both with cuny. But Sheila was able to really bring out this whole notion of what belongs in the commons and how do we steward what is ours. And so when we look, if we look at Mondragon or Italy or Japan or anyplace else, we can also hearken back to the native people right here in the Northeast and understand that human beings figured out how to do things collectively forever around the globe and will again. It just. We have to wrestle that control so that we can. And I think some of it is the suffering that comes our way actually opens up the possibility.
- [23:49]
A
Yeah, I think this show, doing interviews as I've done them now for some years, reinforces what you're saying that a number of the people who have been on the show and talked about worker co ops, they've been part of talk about how the depression of the experience of being a drone in a place where you have no control, no idea of what's being planned, no idea of what's going to happen to you literally from week to week becomes unbelievably burdensome. So that when you're part of the knowledge of the decision making of the design of the enterprise, it's like a liberation. It's like a whole different part of your life going to work from what it was before.
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B
Yeah, it's. Let's be the change we want to see in the world. Right. So when people think about running something, we are battling in our heads often, I don't want to say always, but there is this battle of what it looks like to run something that hierarchical. Who's at the top telling everybody what to do? Oh, I'm at the top now I'll tell everybody what to do, which is actually not the goal if we're trying to do something that's more egalitarian. And so we have to start fighting. Also some of those internal messages that told us what control looks like, because control also looks like sitting in a circle and figuring out and giving everybody a voice.
- [25:08]
A
No, it's a real step forward, I think, because of exactly what you said, that if you have no new model in your head, then even if you win in a struggle, you then reproduce that which trapped you before. Because winning the control is only the first step to changing the system.
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B
And I want to say, because I think why now is different? We can hope, right? One example, but it's a very important one for us in America is Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter is putting out into the world that there is a notion that we have to listen to those who have been least listened to. The notion after Occupy, we are the 99%. Similarly, that there's something happening that's saying we versus I. And if we figure this out, we can come at it differently.
- [25:59]
A
Where do you see the future for economic democracy, for worker co ops, other kinds of co ops? Do you see a growing social movement? Do you see a proliferation of conferences and little organizations? How do you. And I don't want you to predict the future. Maybe I should put it differently. What do you hope will be emerging here?
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B
It's funny you say don't predict the future because I consider myself a bit of a science fiction fanatic. And I'm often seeing the future of what I would like to see.
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A
Good, then tell us what you see.
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B
What I'd like to see is that there's more circles and less hierarchy and there's more engagement wherever people are. And I think that that begins to happen again in small spaces as much as there might be structural ones. So structurally speaking, we have participatory budgeting that's now happened in New York City and growing around the globe, actually. And there's a participatory budgeting project that's taking it every place. When you say, here's a million dollars, here's $400 to a group of people, and they have to figure out how to spend it together, you are putting into practice what I refer to as the transparency with the resources and the democratic decision making. The two ingredients. Same thing happens in a family if people are transparent. So if we start to promote these Things in little places, they bubble up. But we also need policy from the top down. So we had at the conference a few policymakers who were speaking, Councilmember Brad Lander, we had Assemblyman Kim from the state. And they were speaking about what things can be pushed out in terms of policy to make a shared decision making and shared expenditures make more sense.
- [27:34]
A
So there even are some politicians in our system that are open to this.
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B
Well, some people are opting to get into politics to make this change.
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A
There we go.
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B
At the school we have a course, a non credit course on civil engagement, civic engagement, that helps people figure out how to run for office with these ideas.
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A
Very good.
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B
We're putting one of the things I hope to get out of the conference is, or a lot of us hope actually, is to really promote more of an academic field of study that would put a lot of this together in something we would all want to call economic democracy or cooperative enterprise management.
- [28:10]
A
I've always been amazed with your final point there that business schools in a country that calls itself democracy and a democratic society have a curriculum for democratic organizations of business instead of giving only courses as if there was one kind of economic organization.
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B
Well, let's make that one of our goals.
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A
Thank you very much, Rebecca. Wonderful to talk to you. And for all of you, a sign what Rebecca has been doing, her conference, her center, her project. This is part of a really revolutionary change from the bottom about our workplaces and their importance in our lives. So I'm proud that we have these conversations and I look forward to continuing them with you next week.