← 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. Our jobs, our incomes, our debts, those coming down the road to confront us, and those already changing the lives of our children. 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 want to jump right in with a number of economic updates. This program comes to you from New York City. And this last week, we've had one of our unusual snow blizzards that changed all of our schedules. And for those of you affected by that, in terms of the accessibility of this program, please accept our apologies. But Mother Nature has a way of. Of reminding us of who we are as human beings in the larger scheme of things. Well, let me begin today with a shout out, an appreciation. It's for 30 people up in Burlington, Vermont. They are the workers at something called Switchback Brewery. Switchback is famous in Vermont for being, if not the best, one of the best locally made craft breweries in the United States and very, very popular in Vermont. Why am I mentioning this to you? Well, before I even tell you, let me tell you that Governor Scott, the new governor of Vermont, is also a tremendous fan, not only of the Switchback beer that they produce, but of this new development in that company that he thinks is very important for Vermont and indeed for the country as a whole. And I agree. Switchback was started 15, 18 years ago by two young men in Burlington, Vermont, who wanted to make a quality local beer. They were more successful than they ever dreamed. They're very proud of their achievement. And it is now a modern brewery with much larger facilities, with highly automated, makes an enormous amount of beer every year and employs 30 people in the relatively small city of Burlington, Vermont. Why am I talking about them? Because they've just made a big change. The two gentlemen who started it, seeing down the road that they are going to retire and wanting to make sure that this business survived, that it continued to be a source of income for 30 families, that it be an important part of the economy of Burlington, Vermont, that it continue to produce something the whole state enjoys and can be proud of, that it continues to be a successful business that does its share of paying taxes both to the state and to the city of Burlington. And in order to do that, they decided to sell their business to their own employees. That's right. Switchback Brewery in Vermont has become a workers cooperative, owned and operated by the workers themselves. The way it worked was the workers got a loan, used that to buy out the two friends who started the business. They will pay back the loan over 15 years, and in that process, sort of like a mortgage for a home, acquire equity, that is, acquire ownership of the business so that it switches from a top down capitalist type of business to a democratically owned and operated workers cooperative. Congratulations to the Switchback Brewery workers, to the two gentlemen with the foresight to see this way forward, and to Governor Scott of Vermont for recognizing that this way of sustaining a local economy with the people involved and bringing democracy to the workplace is something that he, as the governor too, should be proud of, as he was to his credit. The next item I'd like to mention is an ongoing struggle here in the United States that involves an important economic lesson. The new Trump administration seems to be moving towards giving support to coal as an industry in the United States. Of course, supporting the coal companies, making them more profitable than they have been in the past, cannot be explained in those terms, because then it looks like what it is. So instead, great breast beating is happening about helping coal workers, coal miners, and they indeed have gotten the short end of the stick for many, many decades and, and deserves support. But of course, as any thinking person would understand, supporting the coal miners is different from supporting the coal mining companies. What coal miners need is a healthy alternative, a good job, a decent income that would be less threatening to their health and welfare, and that could be provided by local, state or federal authorities. And if there were really the commitment to do that, it is not necessary to support the coal company with profits in order to help the coal miner. But that's a detail I won't go into at this moment. What I want to do is deal with one of the arguments made about why we should continue to rely on coal, particularly for generating electricity. And I should remind everyone that about 40% of the world's electricity is produced by burning coal. The problem with burning coal is that it is very bad for the atmosphere, for the air, for our lungs, for our health, for global warming, you name it. Bad news, we can and should switch to other forms of energy generation that do not have these bad consequences that would employ people. That's really not a problem. The solar energy industry in the United States today, which only accounts for 1% of all electricity, already employs more people than the coal business in the United States does. So if you were actually concerned about jobs, you would move more into solar energy, for example, than you do now, because it would provide more jobs there than would be lost if solar replaced coal. And the same is true for wind and energy and so on in terms of jobs. But the real reason, again is health, the health of the planet, the health of the people who live on it. Well, the argument is made coal is profitable and therefore it should be supported because it's profit. The argument here seems to be, for those who do, the logic that profit is to be taken as a sign that something should be done. In other words, if something's profitable, well, then it justifies its existence. If something is more profitable than something else, you should do the more profitable business, because somehow higher profit is taken to mean that that something is more socially valued, more socially useful, etc. And it is that argument I want to confront and to refute. And the way to do that is really simple. And I'm going to use coal as an example. How do you calculate the profit of the coal business? In the same way that you do any other business? You look at the revenues, what's earned when you sell coal, and, and you subtract the costs of getting the coal out of the ground, of processing it to whatever degree you have to, and shipping it to the customer. You subtract the costs, the ones I mentioned, from the revenue, and you get the profit. And that allows you to calculate what your rate of profit is. What's wrong with this calculation? Well, the answer is really quite simple. In a capitalist system, you are not required to count the actual costs of doing something like mining coal. You're only required to count the costs you actually have to pay. For, as the coal company, very simple example. If mining coal in a community cuts short the average lifespan of, of an adult coal miner, say by four years, compared to people who do other kinds of work, you might as a society say, well, that's an enormous cost, the cost of a shortened life. Those extra four years could have brought all kinds of pleasure to that person had he or she lived. To their families who needed them, they might have earned all kinds of income in that period. All of that was lost. All of that is a cost. But it is not a cost in our capitalist system that the coal company has to cover. And so the coal company doesn't count it as a cost. Well, here's the punchline. If you added to coal company costs the real costs that are a burden to the real people who do the coal mining, who breathe the air that results from coal mining, who suffer the climatic damage that flows from coal mining, if the coal companies had to count those costs, it would have eaten up all of their profits. Then they would have to admit that the coal business, if you actually count all of its costs, is a losing proposition. Please keep that in mind the next time anyone tells you that because any industry, coal or anything else is profitable, that that should be taken and as proof or evidence that it's a worthwhile activity, that it is something society wants or needs or benefits from. The real question you always should ask what costs were counted and what costs were not counted, because the not counted could Change the conclusion 100%. Next update. Well, an interesting thing happened a week or so ago. It was captured on video and so it became a kind of viral story and it is one that I want to comment on. In case you missed it, a young man at a town hall organized by the network CNN had a confrontation, a very mild and polite one, between a young college student named Trevor Hill and the leader, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, Representative Nancy Pelosi from the Bay Area in California. Young Mr. Hill cited a poll taken last spring by Harvard University's Institute of Politics, and it showed that a random sample of young Americans from the ages of 18 to 29, not just Democrats or anything but a random collection, no longer support the system of capitalism. They are either in favor of socialism or have serious doubts and criticisms of capitalism. And young Mr. Hill's question to Nancy Pelosi, Are the Democrats your party, Ms. Pelosi, willing to move to the left to accommodate, to respond to, to reflect the views of the young people that are, of course, growing into being the majority of American people with the passage of time? Nancy Pelosi's response was very quick and I'm going to quote it to you. Well, I thank you for your question, she said, and then continuing her words, but I have to say, we're capitalist and that's just the way it is. End of quotation. I think Mrs. Pelosi is quite right. The Democratic Party is capitalist in the sense that it accepts, supports, endorses, encourages all that kind of word, the capitalist economic system that is dominant here in the United States. And in that way, the Democratic Party is exactly like the Republican Party, which feels the same way about the capitalist system. And I mean all of the Republican Party, the George Bush type of Republican Party, the Paul Ryan type of Republican Party, and the Donald Trump type of Republican Party. Indeed, all three of those names, Bush, Ryan, Trump, are themselves capitalists. And so it's hardly surprising. But this raises a question. What does it say about a society like the United States that the two major parties that completely and absolutely dominate the federal government, the state government, and basically most local governments in the United States, that these two parties have no substantial difference about the capitalist system that the leaders of both parties would respond, just as Mrs. Pelosi did, by saying, of course we're capitalist and that's just the way it is. Here's what it tells There is no opposition to capitalism in the United States that takes a political form. We know from the Harvard poll that Trevor Hill quoted that there's lots of opposition to capitalism in the society. We know that millions of people voted for Bernie Sanders, who described himself as a democratic socialist. So we know that there's widespread feelings, views, attitudes that are critical of capitalism and that would like a better or different economic system in its place. So here's what we've a society with grave doubts, widespread criticism of capitalism, but it lacks any political party able or willing to express, to organize, to mobilize the that perspective. And that makes the United States different from most other capitalist economies, that is most other countries in which the capitalist system prevails. Because in most other countries where capitalism prevails, there are political parties that are critical of capitalism, opposed to capitalism, pursuing other systems. They are stronger in some countries and weaker in others. They carry names like socialist, communist, anti capitalist, and so on. But the United States lacks a political party that could put forward a critique of capitalism and a program for moving to another system. And yet there's every evidence that if such a party emerged, and if it positioned itself in that way, it would have very quickly a very sizable constituency, as young Trevor Hill and his question clearly implied. It makes one wonder whether the absence of such an anti capitalist political party in the United States really has very little to do with the population's feelings, views, needs or desires, and a great deal to do with the concerted effort by Republicans and Democrats to avoid any competition from such a party. Please keep that in mind the next time you hear a leading Republican and or Democrat give one of those July 4th speeches about the virtues of competition. Please keep in mind how those very same people have been and continue to do everything in their power to avoid, repress, suppress anything and everything that moves in the direction of producing a party that would respect and reflect huge anti capitalist political perspectives. That's what was behind the squelching of the Occupy Wall street movement under Obama. That was likewise the squelching of Bernie Sanders movement by the Clinton part of the Democratic party of which Mrs. Pelosi was a leading and is a leading member. It is important to keep that in mind Our next update has to do with a move by the Trump administration this last week to direct the Labor Department to review an Obama administration rule governing financial advisors. Let me explain. More and more Americans are without a pension. That's bad. We, we've talked about that. But I want to talk now about the millions of Americans who do still have a pension, even if it's less useful, less favorable than it used to be. And one of the ways that pensions have become less useful and less favorable than they once were is being changed from what used to be called defined benefit pensions to defined contribution pensions. Let me explain. A defined benefit, just like it sounds, means that you know as a worker that the money being set aside for you, money you're not getting as a wage or salary because your employer is setting it aside, investing it so that you can get a pension when you retire to find benefit. Pension means you are told you have a commitment that you will get so and so many dollars per month upon retirement. A defined retirement benefit. That's what we used to have. But employers didn't want to carry the risk that the stock market might not go real well, that the money they set aside might not be enough, something employers tend to do. And therefore they wouldn't be able to meet their commitment and could be sued by workers for not delivering the that they had defined. So instead, employers prefer a defined contribution. They had just promised to set aside a certain amount of money. How much you get depends on how well the investments did. And that has led to more and more companies also letting workers themselves manage the money, set aside the defined contribution. That way the employer doesn't have to worry about it and the risk is all on the worker themselves. Good for the employer. What do the workers do? Most workers don't know the details of investing money. It's not the material they've ever had to do before. It's nothing anyone ever taught them about. So they rely on advisors who work in companies that offer advice. And here's where the trouble starts. The advisors, as individuals, as employees of a company, have a conflict of interest. It's built right into the situation. When they give you, the worker, advice on how to invest the money put aside for your pension, do they give you advice that's best for you, who will receive the pension? Or do they give you advice that's best for them because they get paid fees for managing your investments? You, of course, would like to believe that they only take care of you, put your interests first. But it turns out, as countless studies have shown, that they don't that they tilt often in favor of suggesting to you investments that are good for the fees they collect but not so good for the value of the pension you ultimately rely on. And so the Obama administration, after years of public hearings and research, passed a rule that's supposed to take effect April 1st of this year, 2017, a rule which says an advisor has to put your interest, the person to get the pension ahead of his or her interests as a paid advisor. In other words, you as a pension recipient can go to court and sue an advisor. And you can win if you can prove that he or she advised you in ways that were better for him or her than for you. It's called the fiduciary rule. And Mr. Trump has advised the Labor Department to review it with an eye to preventing it from taking effect on April 1st. And if that strikes you as perhaps standing in criticism or, or contradiction to his helping the middle class in America, the people who still have pension, a defined contribution pension, and who don't want to get ripped off by the advisors they have to lean on, well, then you've got a problem with Mr. Trump. And if you didn't already know that, well, I'm afraid I have to give you the news that it is the case. I apologize for that. But then again, that is my job. Last item. We will have time for very brief One of the rationales for deflecting the upset and anger of America's working people, not to be directed to the economic system, capitalism, where their troubles start, but rather against poor immigrants, as if expelling them or making life harder for them is going to solve working people's problems. For those of you who have listened to these arguments, you may have heard President Trump or others suggest that immigration should be stopped or reversed because immigrants bring crime. A group of sociologists from a number of universities have been studying city after city in America, measuring the amount of immigration they have as it goes up over the last few years and the crime rate. And here's what they found in the higher the percentage of immigrants in a community, the lower the rate of crime. That's right. Turns out that immigrants were move into the poorest neighborhoods of cities for obvious reasons. And those neighborhoods, instead of becoming empty, crime ridden, are now filled with immigrants, stores, homes, people in the streets. Crime goes down. If you're interested in those studies, the journals where they were published and so on, here's the website to go to. It's called the conversation. That's two the conversation but no space between them. Theconversation.com look up immigration and crime when you get to that website and it'll give you all the details. We've come to the end of the first half of Economic Update. Please stay with me. We will be back in a very short time after a short interlude for some major discussions of issues you have asked me to address. Stay with us. We'll be right back.
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Don't want to talk to you today don't want to play the games you want to play I love you baby But I just don't know what we have what we have to do to change Leaving you has crossed my mind I'm afraid another heart is hard to find I love you baby but I don't know why why I love why it's falling so behind Find me a mountain already grand cans Just find us to leave you and I'm free to.
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Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. Here we are in February 2017, and before jumping into the major discussions of this program, I wanted, as I often do, to invite you to be a good partner for this program and for the work that we do. It is something I invite you to often and I want to underscore it this time because of its importance. Everything that is done to prepare this program, to bring the interviews to life, to bring the guests here to prepare and present the material that probably is what brings you to this program program, all of that is done with a hope. And the hope is that you, the listener, the viewer, will share what we are doing here with others. That's a way to magnify, to multiply the impact that this kind of material can have on shaping our future. And that's our hope. And there are many ways to do that. We maintain these two. Democracyatwork all one word, democracyatwork.info and the other one is rdwolf with two Fs. Rdwolff.com both of those websites are available for your partnership 24 7. No charge whatsoever for anything that's on those websites. Using the websites allows you to share what we do on this program. For example, because every one of the programs since we began in March of 2011 is archived on our websites and available for you to share, to listen to at your leisure in any way you like. Likewise, my appearances on interview programs on regular radio and television are carried there articles that I write. We now have something we're very proud of, Co Op Talk, a blog on democracyatwork.info where all kinds of people that work with us, that partner with US are presenting their work. So you have a growing array of people working in this area, critical of the economic system we're living with and eager to explore better ways of organizing the production and distribution of goods and services, democratizing the economy. 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The trips are constantly being arranged as people find occasions to engage with me in a direct way that is different from using the media of radio, television, and the written word. We ask you to help us find more radio and television stations that might be interested in carrying this program. We are proud of the 75 radio stations that do, of the television stations that do. We're working on getting more of them, but that's another area where partnership with you would be enormously appreciated. So in conclusion, take advantage of the two websites. Work with us. It's a partnership that we both will benefit from while doing something useful for the larger society. Democracyatwork.info and rdwolff with two Fs.com all right, I want to turn to an unusually philosophic subject for the first of our major discussions. And I want to begin by reminding you, if you're not familiar with it, and I'm explaining it perhaps for the first time, a remarkable piece of philosophic reflection by perhaps the greatest German philosopher ever. His name was Hegel. H E G E L. And perhaps the most famous thing he ever wrote. And he wrote quite a bit, and much of it has been extremely influential in the history of the world over the last few centuries. But one of the most important pieces he wrote was called the Dialectic of the Master and the Slave. It was an exploration a few pages long. It's not very difficult about the relationship between master and slave, because he felt that it had not been properly understood and he wanted to explain how he understood it. His idea is fundamentally simple, that the mistake has been to imagine that because the master dominates the slave, that the line of dependency is in one direction. The slave depends on the master. The master orders, controls, directs, literally owns the slave. The master is active, the slave is passive, the master controls, the slave is dependent. The point Hegel wants to make is that this is only a one sided perspective. It turns out that it runs the other way too. What I mean is that the master is dependent on the slave also. And here's how it works. Precisely because the master can get the slave to do virtually everything he needs, because that's what a slave means, that the slave is so dependent, the slave is so subordinate, the slave is so slavish that the master can compel the slave to do everything. And in so doing, the master becomes dependent on the slave doing everything for him. And thereby the very mastery of the slave makes the master the slave of the slave, the slave of his own dependence on on the slave. Or to say the same thing as simply as I know how. The line of dependency runs both ways. The illusion of the master that he is in charge is smashed the minute the slave declares he's not going to do it anymore. He refuses to continue to be a slave. Whereupon the master discovers the his dependence on the slave. And in that act of rebellion, the slave confronts what Hegel is that the dependence runs both ways, that the slave and the master are caught in a relationship they both depend on. Now why do I talk about this? Because it gives us an insight into how capitalism, among other systems, works. Let's show you that the capitalist needs the worker, but the capitalist also dominates the worker. The capitalist decides whether the worker he employs has a job or not. That's an enormous power. The capitalist pays the worker or not. The capitalist profits from the worker. The worker is dependent for income, for the work, for his or her position in the world, ability to feed their children. The dependence of the worker on the capitalist can appear to be one sided, can appear to be slavish in many respects. And many workers have felt that. And indeed the capitalist acts in a dominating way towards the employee all the time. Let me just give you the two big examples. Capitalists are forever trying to replace workers with machines to get rid of the worker, to save having to pay the worker any wage by replacing the costly worker with a less costly computer or a less costly, at least in the long run. Robot. The capitalist is always in a way threatening the worker or with unemployment by having the worker replaced with a machine. Likewise, the worker is threatened by his or her employer because the employer has the power as an employer to relocate production, that is to move it. To move it where, for example, wages are lower. Threaten your job by moving to China or India or Brazil or Mexico. There's another way that the capitalist can threaten your job. If he chooses not to move the production to another country to catch the low wages there, he can bring the low wage people here, immigration, and get away with paying them to less money for the work than he would have had to pay a native born person here. So capitalists are always squeezing, threatening, calculating, conniving to save on labor costs which threaten the worker. The system compels capitalists to do that. They are competing with other capitalists who are doing it. So they have to. Also they depend on profits to stay in business. And profits can be enhanced by automating your workers or relocating to lower wages. But here comes now the other side that Hegel alerts us to look for. The more successful. The employer is replacing workers with machines so he doesn't have to pay those workers wages anymore. Moving production out of the country, firing the workers here in the United States, for example, and hiring less expensive workers in Asia, Africa, Latin America or wherever. The more the capitalist does that, the more he is forced to confront his dependency as a capitalist on the workers. Because having cut the wages or removed the wages of workers, they lack the ability to buy. To buy what? To buy what the capitalist has to sell if he's going to stay in business. Herein lies what Hegel would call the contradiction. The two way relationship of dependence. The worker depends on the capitalist, to be sure, like the master depends on the slave. But the master, excuse me, the slave depends on the master. That's how the worker depends on the capitalist. But the reverse also holds. The capitalist depends on the worker. He depends on workers to produce whatever it is he has to sell. But he also depends on workers to buy what it is he has to sell. And if they cannot, or if they do not, then the capitalist is as destroyed as a capitalist, as the master would be destroyed if the slaves were unable or unwilling to work. And you know, it runs the other way. Workers know, in some sense, even if they can't say it in so many words, that that capitalist depends on them, that in a way they have the upper hand, even though it seems as though the capitalist does. How do workers have upper hand? How do workers May capitalists depend on them. Well, let's quickly review. First of all, the workers are the majority, the capitalists are the minority, as it was with masters and slaves. And workers long ago struggled to get universal suffrage, to be able to vote, to make political leadership at least subject to one person, one vote. And that gives the masses the power through the vote, to confront the masters. The employers and workers use that power often to choose someone for government that the employers were at best neutral about or very skeptical about. That's what the workers in England did when they voted to leave the European Union. And that's what many workers did in this country when they voted for Mr. Trump after the business establishment made it clear they were, at best, of mixed minds about him. Here's another way that capitalists depend on workers. The vast bulk of the police and the army, the enforcers of the rules of capitalism, are working people. They are not themselves capitalists. And so the capitalists depend on the army functioning the way they want and the police functioning the way they want. And that's a dependence of the capitalist on the powers of enforcement that are workers. But I'm not done. Here's another way workers reveal the dependence of the they can go on strike. They can say to the we won't work. And you know what, Mr. Capitalist, if we don't work, you don't make any money, you don't make any profit. You depend on us, therefore, for your survival. Rather like a master depends on the slave whom he has enslaved to do everything for that master. So it turns out the capitalist depends on the worker. And then there's that last little item that historically needs to be included. Workers can sabotage the production process. And here the way to explain it is to give you the history of the word. Sabotage comes from the French word sabot S a b O t. And that was the word for the wooden shoes that people in northern France and northern Europe used to wear. Some still do. And when workers were angry at their capitalist employers, they were known secretly and quietly to throw one of their wooden shoes into the machinery in the factory and thereby to commit sabotage. In other words, it's another way to remind the capitalist that he isn't in charge altogether, that he depends on the workers. 2. Well, what's the message and the lesson of Hegel's teaching? Master and slave, therefore, is not the master in control and the slave altogether dependent? The dependency runs both ways, between the lord and the serf in feudalism, same truism. And now between capitalist and worker the same two way Dependency. Well, what happens in this system is that you have two choices. You can continue the endless conflict, the endless struggle, master trying in every way to dominate, control and profit from the slave and the slave finding ways to use the dependence of the master to relieve their suffering, to impose costs on the master. And the same back and forth between lord and serf, and the same back and forth between employer and employee. The struggle can last forever and take up your whole life. Or you can try to make a resolution, what Hegel would call a synthesis of the two opposites. Solve the problem of endless conflict between master and slave, lord and serf, capitalist, employer and worker, employee, by overcoming that relationship. And what that means in economics is a democratic worker cooperative. Make the workers both the employer and the employee. End the struggle between two people, two groups, each dependent on and trying to overcome at the same time this dependency and not recognizing that they were locked in into a relationship. And that the escape from the dependency and the endless struggle requires fundamentally changing the relationship. That's why as far back as ancient slave societies and throughout the history of feudalism and throughout the history of capitalism, human beings have tried to escape from those tensions, of those oppositions, those contradictory struggles to form cooperatives, to produce goods in a collective way that did not pit master, slave, lord, serf, employer, employee. They did it in religious orders, when nuns and monks would work collectively to produce what the nunnery or the monastery needed. Farmers did it in conditions where a collective effort struck them as making more sense than continuing in the endless struggle of the opposites. Hegel's teaching is a way to understand both what ails us in a conflict ridden economic system and where the escape, the future, the better economic system lies. It lies with an overcoming of the contradictions that beleaguered slavery, feudalism and capitalism. It lies with the democratization of a cooperative community organization of work, together with the same kind of democratic community organization of the residential neighborhoods and communities where we live. In the time that remains today, which isn't a great deal. I wanted also to draw your attention to a certain parallel between the 1930s, when capitalism crashed after 1929's collapse, and our current period, a period after the second worst crash. We can learn something about what's happening to us now by looking carefully at what happened to us the last time the economic system in which we live broke down badly in 1929. Unemployment soared like it did after 2008. Business production contracted sharply in the early 30s, like it did in 2009. 2010, very similar situation, not as bad this time as then. But bad enough the difference in the 1930s was when the old political leadership that was associated with the collapse was ejected, rejected by the population. The choice of the population was to go to the left to institute a social democratic kind of government under the leadership of the Democrat Franklin Roosevelt. Whereas in the United States today, and increasingly in other parts of the capitalist world, in the troubled aftermath of the crash of 2008, we see a political movement going to the right. The conservatives in England, the conservatives on the continent, Mr. Trump in the United States. Now. The effort in the 1930s to go to the left had the government take a major role in providing a basic job and security to the mass of people. It was the job of the government to do for the mass of the working people what private capitalism failed to do. That's why we have Social Security, unemployment compensation. That's why FDR hired millions of people to work for the federal government, giving them a job and an income, a way to keep their home, etc. We are not doing that today. Instead, we are cutting down on the government, giving less support from the government to masses of people. The question is, will it work? And the question is, what's going on? And here's an answer, a brief one, because we don't have enough time, but one I hope will get you. The effort in the 1930s, in the end failed because most of the government programs passed then have since been either removed entirely, there's no federal jobs program anymore, or they have been cut back. Unemployment compensation, Social Security benefits reduced. Reduced. The capitalists who accepted the social democracy in the depths of the Depression spent the last 50 years undoing it. And my guess is that as the capitalists notice the damage done to their interests by the right wing shift of Mr. Trump, they will undo whatever it is he achieves for the same reason. Because the problem for Mr. Trump, as the problem for Mr. Roosevelt was, is if you don't change the capitalist system, it will continue to produce the instabilities and the inequalities that led you to make the efforts you did. You just didn't go far enough to make them permanent. Will Mr. Trump try to do that? And if so, will he succeed? Mr. Roosevelt didn't. And so he didn't. It is something to think about. Thank you very much for being with us this week despite the snowstorm here in New York. We're glad to produce this program. We invite you to be our partners. I want to thank truthout.org that remarkable independent source of news and analysis that has been a good partner to us for years and ask you to join with them. And I look forward to speaking with you again next week.
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Sam.