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Welcome friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, jobs, incomes, debts, our own, those of our children. Coming I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life and I hope it's prepared me well to offer you these economic updates about things changing in our economic environment over the last few days and weeks. Well, I'm going to bring you first a kind of a bombshell announcement. You might even say it's historic. It comes from the World Health Organization, which announced this week that for the first time in the history it keeps the healthy life expectancy in China exceeded that of the United States. Let me explain the measure. Healthy life expectancy is how long or how many years you can live independently where you don't need to be taken care of by other people. It's a little different from life expectancy, literally from birth to death. And in that measure, China has now exceeded the United States. In 2016, for US babies it was 68.5 years and for Chinese babies, 68.7. And the reasons are not far to look for. It has to do with inequality. That's right. It turns out that how long you can live a healthy life, even more than how long you can live, period, is shaped by how well you're doing economically, by the difference between rich and poor, comfortable and desperate. So let me read to you, rather than make up my own words, what the CBS news said in announcing these results. Despite medical advances and improving quality of life for the economic elites, lower earners have basically not seen any improvements in longevity since the 1980s. Today, a 40 year old man in the top 1% of US earners can expect to live to 87, while the same man among the lowest 1% has an expected lifespan 15 years shorter. Something about the world economy is signaled when the healthy life expectancy in the People's Republic of China surpasses that in the United States. It has been going steadily up in China and in the last two or three years it has gone down in the United States. My second update is a kind of unusual one. It takes its clue and its cue from the elections last week in Ireland, a vote, I should rather say, in which something happened in Ireland that for the last several hundred years would have been and was in fact unimaginable, unthinkable. A very Roman Catholic country, Ireland voted against the urgings of the church to permit abortion, to end the ban on abortion that had been part of Irish law for as long as anyone alive today can remember. I bring it up not so much about the issue of abortion, but because unthinkable things rarely happen by themselves. What makes possible something that used to be unthinkable usually goes together with other things that were unthinkable also becoming possible. So I would like to ask you, in the spirit of this program, to go with me and imagine whether or not we might have a maximum income. Something that has been thought about for centuries is that something we might want, a distribution of wealth and income much less wide than it is now, guaranteed jobs for all people as a matter of human right and so on. Things that were unthinkable are happening, and there's usually a good reason. My next update is about the unemployment numbers Mr. Trump has been trumpeting. Wow, they're down. They're only 3.9% in the latest count. And so on. What is all that about and what does it tell you? Well, of course, Mr. Trump, like any sitting president, likes to be able to say, A, that things are really good and B, that he's responsible for them. The newspapers are doing a fine job showing that the increase in employment has been going on long before Mr. Trump became president. So the notion that he's responsible for this is the kind of empty boasting for which he is justly famous. But I want to say something else to you. Capitalism works this way and it always has. And it's really important to understand that. What do I mean? Capitalism is an extremely unstable system for 200 to 300 years, that it has grown from its beginnings in England to becoming the worldwide dominant economic system. Capitalism in every country where it has settled in has had an economic downturn every four to seven years on average. Words like downturn, crisis, recession, depression, you get the picture. We have lots of words because it's such a regular part of human history under capitalism. But let's look at how it works and then you'll understand the unemployment numbers. Here's how it typically works, and this is particularly true when the downturns last a long time and cut deeply, such as the one in the 1930s and again like the one in 2008 that we're still living through. Here's what happens. The economy going along, doing well, employing people suddenly hits a stone wall. And in a very short time, remember back to the last four months of 2008, a very short time, millions of people are told not to come back to work Monday morning, as they leave the office, the factory or the store. Friday afternoon, they are laid off, they are fired. Businesses close Businesses cut back. It is a catastrophe which, if you remember, opened up in the last four months of 2008 and lasted through 2009 and well into 2010. When that happens, millions of people are thrown out of work. And the way the system works is it immediately confronts an either or. You could do something for all those people, namely maintain them, pay them what they were earning before, have them do some useful social activity. Something like that was done in the great employment of workers in the 1930s. Nothing like that was done after the crash of 2008. And therein lies the story. When you didn't provide work and good income for all the people laid off as capitalism suffered another downturn, you forced these people first to live a much more difficult life on unemployment insurance. And when that ran out, to eat up whatever savings they had. And when that ran out, to get help from friends, neighbors, family. And when that ran out, there's nothing left. But what? But go back to work with whatever job you can get. Gone is the job at high pay, with benefits, with security, with a contract and so on. You can't wait for that anymore because you are desperate. You will now take the job as the barista in the coffee shop, as the greeter at Walmart. You get the picture. That's what we have now. We have driven down the wages of American workers to the point where corporations facing such a cheap labor force can and do hire them because the profit they're getting is much higher than they would have had to live with if we had what we had before the crash of 2008. So when you read that the unemployment rate is low, do not follow Mr. Trump in imagining this is a sign of success. You're living in an economy which has crushed down, and the same has happened in Europe. But it can't go so far in Europe because they have public services that support people, we don't. They have subsidies for large families. They have long vacations. They have a national health insurance. So when they get in trouble, they have a floor below which they can't sink. Americans don't have that. So they have to go back and take the bad job. Poor wages, no security, few benefits. This low unemployment rate is not a sign of economic well being, it's a sign of the reverse. Once you understand how the system works, you can see that. Next update. Amazon Corporation offers workers 1,000 and up to $5,000 as a quitting bonus. That's right. If you quit, they say, we'll give you a bonus. Why would you do that, is your question? As it was mine. And Amazon explains most of the workers don't do that. They choose not to take a quitting bonus. They want to hold on to their jobs. And Amazon has found that when you go through this bizarre ritual, you, you have more of a commitment to the job and to the company than if you didn't voluntarily withhold and not take a quitting bonus. I love this story. And they've done the studies to show that productivity of workers went up when they went through this crazy ritual. So let me ask all of you watching and listening, imagine that a worker wasn't given a quitting bonus, but something much better. Equal ownership and equal say in running the business. It becomes theirs rather than somebody else's. Imagine then what kind of commitment they might have to their job and the employer. Imagine then how much more productivity would rise. Amazon has done the research. They don't understand where the logic of what, what they did might lead us. A California jury recently found Johnson and Johnson guilty of producing and selling baby power for decades that contained cancer causing asbestos in what they call talcum powder. It turns out that There are currently 9,000 cases claiming that that the talcum products cause ovarian cancer and other illnesses that are pending against Johnson and Johnson. A California jury recently awarded $25.7 million to a woman and her husband who said that talcum powder had caused mesothelioma. Wow. A New Jersey court in April forced the company to pay $117 million. The company is fighting. The company is appealing. The company says no. We live in a society that doesn't suspend production and use of a commodity. As these months and years go by of legal wrangling, a rational society would immediately stop, then do the research to see whether it's safe to put it back in. Why in the world not? That's the profit and the pressure of the company. That's what happens when you privatize health care. Let me briefly interrupt to remind you of something, particularly those of you that are listeners. If you would like to see this program in a TV format, please go to Patreon P A T R e o n patreon.com economicupdate where you can see it as a TV program. For those of you that watch and subscribe, or rather watch through YouTube, please remember to subscribe. It is a very important kind of support for what we are trying to do. And finally, let me invite you to make use at our websites, which I'll give you in a moment of the store where we now provide you with all Kinds of interesting things. You might Enjoy our websites, rdwolf.com with two Fs and democracyatwork.info Back to the updates. Well, the next one I want to talk to you about has to do with a chain, a supermarket chain across the American south called Publix P U B L I X. They have been giving large sums of money to a Republican politician named Adam Putnam. The total over the last three years, $670,000. It's a bit of change for a politician. He used to be Florida's agriculture commissioner. He's currently running for governor. And one of the major things he's known for and promotes is the National Rifle Association. Students from the Marjory Steinem Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida have been staging die ins where they lie down in the parking lots of the public stores to protest the support of the nra, which they feel has responsibility for what happens in these schools that suffer shootings. Publix has decided no more contributions to politicians. Oh, goodness. These kinds of activities have. Have economic effects when they're done carefully. In France, economic struggles. A center right government led by Mr. Macron is in the third or fourth month of railway strikes, airline strikes. But France is different from the United States and other countries because they send terrible tens of thousands and sometimes more into the streets to protest what's being done or what's being attempted to support the strikers and to protest the government's failure to reach an agreement with them. And so the government, as it gets desperate, the strike is not over and the inconvenience for the French people is enormous. The company and the government in this case does what companies usually do. And in this case it involved threatening and accusing the unions. Here's how it went. At several of the demonstrations, there was a tiny group of people who indulged in burning some cars and smashing some store windows. Those folks are known as the black bloc, and they exist in many countries. They're usually angry young people who want to make a stronger statement. And so the unions were accused of standing by, being passive in the face of this terrible violence, as if the unions were responsible, but because they have a powerful organized opposition in France the way the government and the business community do not in the United states. Very quickly, Mr. Macron and his government were, were responded to. And the backlash was profound. And I found it so interesting, I thought I'd share with you what the socialists and the unions said back to the government. First, the socialist leader said, how interesting that the president of our country would not blame the police for being incapable of dealing with the violence, but to blame the other people in the environment and as if it were their job to prevent violence. And Mr. Melanchon's group, a further left political group in France, had an even nicer way of answering. He said, you know, blaming the unions for the violent activity of a small number of people is a little bit like saying that when there is some violence at a soccer match, which happens in Europe all the time, a handful of people get out of hand, drink too much, and so on. It's alike, said Mr. Melanchon's group. It's like blaming all the other people who went to this sports event to enjoy the sports event for being inadequately active to control the handful that were out of control. Don't blame the unions. Mr. Government, nobody's fooled. Well, we are now in the 50th anniversary of something called the Poor People's Campaign, also sometimes called the Poor People's March on Washington. It's now called the Poor People's Campaign because it harks back to 1968, when Martin Luther King started the Poor People's March on Washington. And it actually was a march of many thousands of people who camped out in Washington for a while to do something about poverty in America. 1968, it's a long time ago, roughly half a century. So I thought I'd take a look at the poverty statistics between 1968, when we had the march, and the latest year for which we have composite numbers, 2016. And I want to thank the Economic Policy Institute in Washington for collecting these numbers of which I am making some use. So here's the story. Poverty in 1968 for all Americans together was 12.8% of our population lived under the poverty line. In 2016, it was 12.7%. In other words, it was the same. We've had 50 years to deal with the poverty that Martin Luther King brought to our attention so dramatically. If you were giving a grade to our performance, the grade wouldn't be real well received, would it? Let's look at the numbers a little more carefully. For those under 18, the children of America, the unemployment rate in 1968 was roughly 16%. The unemployment rate today 18%. It got worse for children, but here's one that might stun you even more. For the people 18 to 64, the unemployment rate was 9% in 1968, and it's 12% today, much higher. Well, then how was it stable for the population as a whole? Because poverty shrank for old people, people over 65 had all of the improvement. In fact, they had so much improvement that it offset the deterioration, the worsening of poverty for the vast majority of people who are 64 years of age and younger. Wow. We're not good at overcoming poverty, are we? So the last 50 years, which have boasted the growth of wealth beyond what anyone has seen, it really is true when you look at the statistics. The rich are getting richer and the poor are not only not getting richer, they're getting poorer. Those are results of a capitalist economic system. They're not the fault of Mr. Trump or the Democrats or anybody else. The best you can say about them is that they're not very relevant to all of this. This is a systemic problem, and we will not solve poverty, no matter what our religious, moral or ethical commitments are, unless and until we deal with having a system that reproduces poverty as efficiently as it produces wealth. The next update has to do with our sister Canada to the north. Canadian businesses have begun a campaign threatening to close their factories, offices and stores in Canada and move instead to the United States. And they explain why Mr. Trump, they say, is cutting the taxes on business, cutting the regulations on business. They can make more profits in the United States than they can in Canada. And they're using that argument to demand that the Canadian government compete with the United States, cut the taxes on business even more than the Americans did to keep the businesses there. Wow. This is called a race to the bottom. Every country in the world, not just Canada, is now going to face pressure from its business community to keep them there by equaling the advantages Mr. Trump is giving to them. In the end result, if those governments do that, and many of them will, not only will no jobs come to the United states the way Mr. Trump promised, but every country will have less money in the hands of the government to provide fewer services to. To the mass of the people. Wow. Corporations everywhere will have gained lower taxes and more profits, and we who depend on public service will have been deprived of them everywhere correspondingly. I want to conclude with one more update. This has to do with something happening in high fashion. The high fashion world was really shocked, even them, this last week when there was a display of a remarkable set of clothing from the very old and well established house of Balenciaga. Perhaps most amazing was a shirt. It was two shirts sewn together. One was a T shirt and one was a collar. Drapey shirt. Yes, they were sewn together. So if you wanted, you could wear the T shirt and the other shirt would be hanging off you or you could wear the other shirt and the T shirt would be hanging off you. It was a fashion new thing. The price of this t shirt plus regular shirt sewn together, $1290. I watched it on the Runway. I looked at pictures. It qualifies as the silliest and ugliest shirt I've ever seen. But I'm not bringing it to you for that reason. I want to tell you about other things Balenciaga is doing. There's a shirt made entirely out of gloves sewn together that's a real contestant for Most Ugly, but it was beaten out by that shirt. And finally, Balenciaga offers its own sneakers, and those come at the modest price of $895 a pair. What's going on here? Why did I bring this up? We now have 1/10 of 1% of the people of the world with an amount of wealth that is the other side of the difficult living conditions for the vast majority of the people on the planet. Another way to say this, the way economists like to do it, is we've had a transfer of wealth from the middle and the bottom to those at the very, very top. And those at the top want to have the outward signs of their extraordinary wealth. At least many of them do. And that gives the fashion world an opportunity do something so different and so outlandish that no one can match you. None of the rest of us can buy shirts or pants which, if not as well made, will at least look a little like those on the runways, like those of the fashionable people. So in order to do something that will set apart those at the very top, just like they buy the mansions and drive the crazy cars, they need the outfits that are so out there and are so highly priced that the rest of us can either be envious or make fun. I don't like the envious part, so I choose to make fun. I would, of course, be happier if this never happened, if we didn't have a society driven by to be as unequal as this one is. With all the results that follow, we've come to the end of the first half of Economic Update. Thank you so much for being with us. We're going to have a very interesting program coming up, so please stay with us. We will be right back. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. In this second half, as we are at the beginning of a month, we will once again be speaking with Dr. Harriet Fraad, a mental health counselor and hypnotherapist in private practice in New York City. Her Work like the therapy she provides, works at the intersection of Americans personal, economic and political lives. Recent articles that Dr. Frad has written have appeared in alternate in a variety of books and she appears regularly on this program Economic Update as well as other programs such as Redacted Tonight with Lee Camp. You can find her work at her website, Harriet with 2 Rs fraud, F R A A D harrietfraudalloneword.com. so please join me in welcoming Harriet Fraad to Economic Update. Thanks very much as usual for doing this.
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Glad to be here.
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Okay, I want us to talk today about the Me Too movement. It has been in the news a great deal and I understand there's now offshoot, if you like, a follow up movement. So bring us up to date on what the MeToo movement has been and what other movements it's beginning to Inspire.
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Well, the MeToo movement came on the scene when women in Hollywood were fed up with being sexually abused by people like Harvey Weinstein, when people who wanted to make it in television were sexually abused by Bill Cosby. And people began to realize this is a systemic problem. And Me Too voices happened all over the place. However, MeToo involved either having a class action suit or being able to afford a lawyer. The Supreme Court just struck down our ability to have class action suits which enabled people who don't have money for expensive lawyers to actually legally get their rights against sexual harassment and rape. However, Susan Sarandon and the Women's Law center have raised $22 million and started a group called Time's up that allows working class women to sue women like the 20,000 strong campesina movement of produce pickers in the United States who can sue the supervisors who sexually harass them because they're in charge of assigning work. So if they want a decent job or a job at all, they feel pressured by the hierarchy of farm labor to sexually accede to the demands of supervisors. It means people like the first person to use the Time's up fund, Ms. Petra at Walmart, to sue her supervisor because Walmart did nothing about her complaints and he allegedly kept harassing her until she left. Now she can afford a lawyer because Time's up has a legal fund and the law is hardly class free. It's open to those who can afford a decent lawyer.
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So you either have to have your own resources, your own economic resources to push back against sexual harassment and so on, or you need the help of groups like Susan Sarandon's and the Women's Law center and the Women's Law center but it still then means that for a. Or correct me if I'm wrong, that for enormous number of women across all the different industries, it's difficult, to say the least, if you don't have your own wealth. And if you can't, I mean, how many could go to the Women's Law Center? They have limited money. I'm sure they've raised money. But nonetheless, for many, many women, this must be a situation they can't really fight.
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That's right, they can't.
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So what do they do?
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Well, they publicize it. They demonstrate. They speak out in the media together because class action suits were struck down by the Supreme Court, which was another way where there was systemic abuse for women to speak out.
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But I meant even before that. I think what probably happened, I think from the stories that I've read, is that women facing this situation would either change jobs and if that wasn't sufficient, change industries. I mean, some of the most celebrated actresses, as I read the stories correctly, basically gave up on their acting careers and did something else in their lives. Although given what we've learned, one could get the impression that there's nowhere really you can go in our society without this phenomenon. It doesn't seem to be limited to actresses and others. With each passing day, there is more and more. The very MeToo movement seems to be bringing out evidence that it's everywhere.
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B
It's everywhere. And it's also not only about women. It's not anything that's inherent in the male sex drive. It's a power problem because men in jobs where a woman supervisor or a woman boss has economic power over them are also sexually pressured to have sex with their boss. They are not as vocal about it, but it's there. And they sue sometimes if they can afford it. It's everywhere because wherever you have a hierarchy of some people having economic power over other people's survival, you have abuses on every level, including sexual abuse. Now, it's come out more from women because men are mainly in positions of power and also because the male sex role has allowed itself to be sexually aggressive. But it's everywhere. It's everywhere that there is a hierarchy.
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Okay, this leads me then to want to explore something with you. If it's hierarchy, then it follows that we need to understand what it is that the person above you in the hierarchy has over you that might lead him, or as you point out, him or her, to abuse this. In other words, to use the hierarchy not only for whatever purpose it was set up for, but for all other purposes. It sort of. It leads me to wonder if hierarchy, say the hierarchy of a typical factory or an office or a store, the normal hierarchy we associate with a capitalist enterprise is an institution in which there are layers of authority. You do what you are told by someone above you, you can tell the person below you what to do. Isn't the kind of open ended invitation for everyone at every rung to not limit himself or herself to the particular authority within the enterprise, but to use that authority to get all kinds of other needs and desires met. Am I reading this right?
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You're reading that right. A big case was the Ford plant where women were systemically abused just as they were at Fox News because the head allows it, like Roger Ailes, then other people understand that's the ethos of the place, which was so in the tech industry as well. And part of this depends on women being ashamed of their own sexuality and abuses against them. And it changes as women don't feel shamed when men accost them, but stand up and say, I don't bear this shame, you do. Stormy Daniels is one of the top examples that instead of being ashamed that a lowly sex worker is being used by the President of the United States, she said, oh no you don't. Even your payoff won't buy my silence. And she has an excellent lawyer, better than the President's lawyer, and could stand up for herself and not be ashamed. Because one of the things that's changed because of the women's movement is that women are much less ashamed of our sexuality than they used to be. So when men sexually prey on women, they want to say, that's not my shame, that's yours. Just like it would be a refreshing change if working people who didn't make money weren't ashamed and feeling lowly because they didn't make much money, said, wait a minute, this is not my fault. I'm in a system that doesn't reward people's labor. And I say no and I am dignified. That's what the unemployed marches did in the 1930s in the US.
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Let me explore this further because I think this opens up a space in economics that I don't think has been explored before. That one of the costs of a hierarchical organization of production, you know, the typical capitalist corporation with the board of directors at the top and then the top managers who hire the middle managers who hire the supervisors who hire the mass of the. This sort of ranked grading. This allows every unhappy burden in the society of people mistreating each other. People who are Ethnically, one versus another group, one gender versus another, one, skin color versus. It allows prejudices and injustices a place to flourish. Because you have allowed, particularly in the workplace, you have allowed an authority which has, in a way, an extraordinarily powerful weapon. Not only am I over you in the pecking order of the enterprise, but I have the power to deprive you of your job, of your survival, of your life, of your ability to function. You're therefore creating unspeakable imbalances of power. So hardly we will be surprised if abuses in terms of gender or race or education or ethical background, ethnic background or religious affiliate. There's no end to this. And in a way, this movement is challenging something that's much broader than itself.
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Much broader. When I visited Mondragon some years ago, I remember asking about that. What do you do with a worker who's inappropriate? How do you handle that?
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You mean Mandragon, the cooperative?
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Mondragon Cooperative City, in a big factory that I was in that made heavy appliances. And they said, well, this is a co op culture. So the first thing we do is we have the person meet with the workers around him or her and confront the problem. He said, that almost always works. Say, look, we can't stand what you're doing. This has to change for you to be a part of this group. If that still doesn't work, then in the case of alcoholism, they send them to a rehab. Or in case of other things, they send them away with their insurance to a rehab. And it has never failed. But there, everyone is equal.
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No one is deprived of a job. And the issue of your job isn't really. You can't have that taken from you, if I understand.
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No, you can't.
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Except for the most extreme things that have to be resolved by the group as a whole.
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A group, not an individual who holds control over your survival on a job. Because in a co op, everyone has an equal voice. And if some people are elected to higher positions, they can also be taken from those positions at any time.
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A
And by a recall vote.
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By a recall vote. It's a democratic thing. No one has the authority over someone else's job. That's very, very, very important. Because, you know, you can have a culture like you had at Fox News where the women had to wear skirts, they had to sit at glass transparent desks so everyone could see their legs. And they had to have sex with Roger Ailes to be in top positions. And if they declined, they were disciplined by being demoted or fired with Harvey Weinstein. If you didn't give in to his sexual advances, he would badmouth you in Hollywood, which is why famous actresses like Daryl Hannah or Mira Sorvino were blacklisted, in that he went around telling everyone they were terrible to work with, and therefore no other director would work with them. No other producer would hire them because they wouldn't have sex with him.
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A
It's interesting to me to wonder if you had a cooperative workplace in which all the different functions, which I think happens at Mondragon, too, the different functions are not only occupied by people who have equal voice, one person, one vote, but that there's also a lot of rotation, a lot of movement of people. So if you're in one position, you have no really interest in coming down hard on someone in another one, because those roles are going to be reversed. And it kind of structures the golden rule. Don't do unto others what they will soon do, be in a position to do unto you. If I can play with it a little bit, would this be, you think, a reasonable thing for the MeToo movement or the Time's up movement at some point to become advocates of as a way to respond to the issue?
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B
Absolutely. This has huge ramifications. Co ops would be an excellent way because no one is allowed to have that kind of power over anyone else's livelihood. No individual. Also, a fair legal system where you don't have to be rich and pay a lawyer minimum $300 an hour to have a voice. Now, there are free legal services, but they're so overtaxed and the people don't have time to really deal with your case, usually because they're overwhelmed and underpaid. You'd need a fair legal system system before you had co ops. And then co ops are an excellent way of correcting that, as well as many other abuses of power within our hierarchy.
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A
Are there things holding back the MeToo movement or the Time's up movement from going in the direction of a bold change the economy approach to solving the problem they've brought to the fore?
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One of the things that holds them both back is that the awareness that a social movement is the way to advance your goals has not been part of the American consciousness for about 50 years. The usual American consciousness, and I think that's American exceptionalism. Between 1820 and the 1970s, if you were white and male, every generation could do better than the last generation. That wasn't so of Europe. In Europe, if you wanted to have a better life, you had to do it as a group, fight together. And so Americans are not as used to that tradition as the party of some chances dissolved, and work was exported and mechanized, robotized and computerized, and the unions were weakened by having kicked out their left. People have been at loss. And that consciousness is starting to happen. It's happened with the youth movement where people said, we can't trust the government to protect us from death. We can't trust a president who took 30 million from the NRA. We can't trust our legal representatives.
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A
You're talking about the high schoolers, the.
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Million high schoolers who stood up against gun violence and stood up as a group. People are realizing whether they're the teachers in West Virginia and elsewhere in the south, or whether they're the students or whether they're women who are sexually harassed and abused and raped on the job, we can't do it alone. We've got to come together. And I think that coming together is also a promise of greater coming together around economic issues and social issues and political issues. Bernie Sanders said, we at the bottom have to come together. And I am not taking big money from big corporations. I want everybody to give what they can at the bottom. And they did so that he could run and people could come together. And when he was destroyed by the Democratic Party and supported Hillary against Trump, that temporarily was quiet. I think it will rise up again if he runs again. But I think that was also, we need to come together. That's happening everywhere. And. And I think if you look at the teachers or if you look at the students or you look at MeToo and Time's up, people are coming together.
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A
I'm interested. Do you see a connection between women pushing back on the hierarchy of the workplace to stop sexual harassment and aggression? Is there a connection between that and. And what we used to call the civil rights movement when there was the effort of non white people on the job to protest against the fact that they were the last hired and the first fired and suffered all kinds of abuses that had nothing to do with the work they did. But were the working out of some attitudes, needs, desires that those in authority who had been white for historical reasons, just like those in authority, have been male, as you point out, abusing that. You saw something. Is there a link or a connection here?
- [48:02]
B
There is. Look, Black Lives Matter is directly linked to people standing up at the civil rights movement and saying, we're not going to the back of the bus on a symbolic level or any other level anymore. And we're people too. We have equal rights supposedly in this society. It also is a Very interesting thing. It's Louis Althusser, the Marxian philosopher, saying, the most powerful policing is internal policing. You teach people that they're not worth it so that they obey because they're shamed from the inside. So you teach these African Americans, you're not less. You don't have to cringe, you don't have to serve. You don't have to be ashamed of what you do. You're a person. Stand up and say no, because the system is unjust. The same thing for women. Just because you have a woman's body doesn't mean you could be used sexually. And shame for somebody else's preying on you. You have to change that shame into I accuse you because you cross the line, I'm not shamed. The shame is yours.
- [49:18]
A
Let me provoke you on this point. There is a fairly loud chorus saying that in response to what the MeToo movement and the Time's up movement have brought to the consciousness of American society people, the response is to appeal to males to change their behavior, to look at women in a different way, to enter the universe of gender relationships in a different way. How do you square that with your greater focus on changing the structure in which men and women are hierarchically layered in the workplace, in the capitalist workplace? What's the.
- [50:07]
B
Well, of course, you know, the first thing is to frighten men. Say you do this, you're going to pay for it. You're the example, Mr. Weinstein and Bill Cosby and all the others, you're not going to get away with this anymore. So you better police yourself from the inside, because it's not open season on us anymore. And it's the Black Lives Matter. People who have pressured enough so that there are cameras and other people take pictures of policemen shooting people in the back and choking them when they're on the ground and saying, you're not going to get away with this anymore because we're watching. So that's one. But then from there, the next step, which hasn't generally been taken, is to look at the structuring of society that enables these abuses. And Bernie and the Occupy movement pointed to, there are class structures in this society that shame people on the lower ends of the hierarchy into thinking they're less and so that they can be dominated and used however their bosses feel like it. And that has to change. So it isn't just an attitude change. It starts with making people afraid that there's consequences to that behavior. I'm not going to just feel ashamed and slink away. I'll get you back. But then also the next step is restructuring. And that hasn't generally been taken, although the co op movement is increasing across the United States, as are movements to make equal rights of legal representation.
- [51:55]
A
The interesting thing that keeps sticking in my mind in this conversation has to do with the fact that you are saying, yes, you appeal to men to behave differently, to think differently. And I want to remind everybody, as you pointed out at the beginning of this discussion, that women in positions of authority also sometimes abuse. Use it in the same logic of the situation. But you are making the argument, which I think is very important, that it isn't enough to appeal to people to be other than they've become. You also have to create the institutions that work in that direction. And just like the institution of the law, especially if it doesn't preclude class actions, can help change behavior. Behavior. It's even more urgent, I think, to change the structure of the economic life. We all spend five days a week either in the office, the store or the factory wherever we work. And if that were not hierarchically organized in such a way that, as we said, invites people to abuse a situation they shouldn't be in in the first place. If we take that situation away, we make the workplace democratic and egalitarian. We're going to undo while we mitigate the kind of behavior that you're talking about.
- [53:21]
B
That's right. We won't build it into the structure of our society. People say that after a strike, workers really often never catch up with what they lost, but they've gained dignity. They are in charge and they can make a statement together. And they couldn't do it if they weren't together. Well, you really. That's an exception for which workers often pay severely. You want to build that in so that people regard one another as people rather than as profit chinks in a profit system. And not as lowly workers without rights, whether they're sex workers or factory workers or anything else, but as people together. People together in this world trying to make a living, trying to make a better world. And co ops are the best economic organization and the most democratic to stop this. But these movements are just beginning. It's a further step to say no. To some extent, Emma Gonzalez did that when she said, I don't want your thoughts and tears, Mr. President. You took 30 million from the NRA. I don't want that. I want change. And then the next thing would be, what would be change that would prevent murder.
- [54:55]
A
As often I have to say, I wish we had more time. But I think this has been a very important discussion, both about the Me Too and Time's up movements, but in terms of their enormous potential and all that they say to the rest of the society, thank you very much for being with us as you are at the beginning of each month. Thank you all for watching Economic on Update and listening to us. I want to thank all of you for being partners, taking what you get on this program and sharing it with your friends, your neighbors, your co workers. Truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis, has been that kind of partner with us for a long time. And we're looking for more partners. And you can and should be one of them. Thanks again, and I look forward to speaking with you again next week.