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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.