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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, debts, incomes, our own, and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and I hope that prepares me well to present you with these analyses of the economic realities of our time. I want to begin by continuing the shout out I have offered to the teachers in four states. Courageous, successful, effective, Arizona, Kentucky, West Virginia and Oklahoma. Public school teachers in those states have shown the capacity to step up, to say enough is enough, to really stand for the public education of the children of their states by demanding, finally, that the governments in those states pay teachers properly so they can do their job and thereby serve the education of our children, which is about as important as anything states do. They showed the courage to do it and they deserve our respect. And I am happy to report that there are many cases now of public school teachers in other parts of the United States that are taking inspiration from what these teachers are showing in the way of making a real big difference in the way this world works. The second Update today has to do with something in the news that needs a little further exploration. This has to do with Facebook. The invention by Mark Zuckerberg and others of what we all take for granted these days as a mechanism of social communication. The original technical breakthrough, and the original idea was to make it easier for human beings to communicate with one another about a whole range of things. To stay in touch, to develop one another through a friendship. Electronically enhanced. So far, so good. But then the capitalist economic system intervened, as it does always with technical breakthroughs and typically in ways that do not enhance the technical change, but constrict it in the interests of profits for the few. Let's begin with Mr. Zuckerberg himself. He has become one of the 10 richest people on earth, even though his invention, however much you like it, is nothing more than a small step in the evolution of a technology about electronic communication that had many pioneers before him, that was learned by the teachers who taught Mr. Zuckerberg and who developed many of the ideas he then later used, give him an extra boost for having made the final breakthrough good. But to make him a multi multi billionaire when that money could and should be used for many more important things than fattening his individual wallet, I find that extraordinary. That's capitalism. It's how it works. It makes a few people ridiculously rich, thereby controlling wealth that could be much more usefully spent. But even that I could overlook. Asocial as it is. But now we see what use can be made by capitalism of this invention. It allows advertisers to track every one of us, to basically intrude themselves into the privacy of our personal lives, our personal communications with one another, to figure out how to annoy us and bother us with advertisements we don't need or want for products that are in half the cases faulty or misleading in terms of how they serve us. Not only that, it allows politicians who understand that what they do is to sell their Persona, their made up personality to the public. Much as otherwise the cereal company sends and sells its breakfast to you, they have also been exposed using and abusing this private information. It's the profit motive that drives these other things. It's how capitalism makes its use of technical breakthroughs that we don't want and that we don't need. It was clear from the beginning that if we have more private communications with one another through the medium of Facebook, and then there's a privacy issue and a respect for privacy issue that's wrapped up in that. That's why we make people go to a judge to get the right to listen in on our telephone conversations. But everybody could get access easily to Facebook. It's a shame what our economic system does to technical change. Deflects it, distorts it and turns it against us, rather than being an agency for our liberation. My next update has to do with a remark made by Harold O. Levy. You may not remember him, but he was the superintendent of schools in the city of New York starting in 2000. He was the superintendent for many years and New York City is the nation's largest public school system. He's currently suffering from ALS and knows himself to be dying and did something quite courageous that I want to talk about. He decided to write honestly in the New York times back on 7 April about something that has obviously bothered him for a long time. And here's what he basically said that US colleges and universities give lip service to enabling a few students to get into the ranks of the selective schools. Interesting word that selective. What he means is schools with reputations that are fancy and who therefore can give you a boost up for a job after you graduate. But the hard reality, says Mr. Levy, is that most schools reward privilege and reproduce it because they know that they depend for their reputations on having the money it takes to sustain those reputations. And so they want to create spaces and they tilt to create spaces, no matter what they say to the people that they know have the greatest chance of of being wealthy later on in life and making those contributions that make them the selective schools they are. This is a problem of this system. If you create great wealth in a small part of your population, you are creating the incentive and the wherewithal to allow those very rich people to secure privileged positions in the right universities so that they can carry on the wealth of this family. They can allow their parents to think that the wealth will last forever because they've gotten their kids into the right school, which was a way station to the right job and that will make them wealthy and they will pay back the school they went to. You can see the, the feedback loop here. And that's why, says the former superintendent of schools of New York, that's why it's just lip service and lots of PR for the few people from the bottom of the economic heap where two thirds of our people live. It's just a PR that they get in the schools. And the system conspire to make selective, well reputed schools the place where wealthy people send their kids. My next update has to do with a group of journalists and their associates in the Netherlands. They recently found and exposed documents and those documents teach us something. And it's been all the rage in the Netherlands. It has to do with one of the prime companies of that country, the Royal Shell Oil Company that will be familiar to many of you because of the Shell gas stations that dot the landscape in many countries, including the United States. The documents uncovered, particularly by the newspaper de Correspondent, my apologies if I'm not pronouncing it right, in Holland, in the Netherlands, show that as far back as the 1960s, Shell Oil scientists knew that fossil fuels cause catastrophic climate change. But they systematically misled the public about what their scientists had brought to their leaders attention. If this story sounds familiar, you. Yes, the same story has been associated with the Exxon Oil Company and many others. By the way, these documents about Shell, like the documents about Exxon, have been the basis for lawsuits. In the case of Exxon, lawsuits are now being pursued about the damage done to people by having withheld scientific information that was urgently in the public interest. The lawsuits are being pursued by New York City, by San Francisco, by the state of New York, the state of Massachusetts, the state of California for damage done and the litigants. And the litigation is growing. Let's be real clear about what happened here. Profit to be gained by finding bringing to the surface processing petroleum outweighed the staggering damage that the people profiting from oil knew burning fossil fuels would cause. This is an open and shut case of how and why the pursuit of private profit happens so often at the expense of public welfare. This issue could have been caught much earlier. Countless people's diseases and deaths from bad air, from pollution and so on could have been avoided. This is serious stuff. It reminds me also that in the news last week was stories about how Shell Oil and another oil company, the Italian ENI Oil company, are being accused in the Niger Delta in Africa of polluting that delta of one of the greatest rivers in the world, the Niger river, in catastrophic ways. Both companies have issued statements saying that they take great care not to pollute the area. I ask you what I asked how could we expect a rational human being to credit what those companies are telling us now about the horror that they're committing in Africa when we know what kind of untruths they dealt with for the last half century? Before I go to my next update, I want to remind you, as we often do in this program, that we have two websites that we invite you to visit where you can see these programs archived, where you can follow the work that we do. One is Democracy at work. That's all one word, democracyatwork.info and the other one is rdwolff with two f's. Com. You can of course follow us as well through those websites, if you like, on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. I want at this moment to also particularly thank our Patreon community, people who have gone to the patreon.com website that's P A T R E O N economicupdate. If you go there, you can see the entire program in its video version. But more than that, you can be supportive of us as you have been and as we are grateful for your continuing to be. And we are beginning to add new and interesting information at that website as well, and we invite you to go there to take a look at it. I also want to draw your attention to the podcasts that we produce Left out and Puerto Rico Forward currently. And I'm happy to announce more podcast programs are in the works and I will be announcing them as we move forward. The Puerto Rico Forward is also available on Apple Podcasts and Google Play. Returning to our updates, I want to bring your attention to a remarkable study in Great Britain. It's about something that will otherwise pass below the radar and it's going on in the United States, in other parts of Europe as well, but the British have done a fine job of documenting it recently and I want to commend particularly the British newspaper the Guardian for Making this publicly available since the 1970s. This research shows the average size of the rooms that British people live in have shrunk. And let me tell you about that. Average living rooms in British apartments have shrunk by one third since the 1970s. Master bedrooms have shrunk by 10%, kitchens by 13%. These figures are adding controversy in England to what is called you must love this rabbit hutch Britain. Apparently it turns out that British construction companies are busily converting former office buildings into apartment houses with apartments that are below the minimum size that England has created for any new home, namely 37 square meters. It turns out that in one property in the middle of London, in the Croydon section, The apartments measured 14.9 square meters. I could go on, but it is happening all over. And the reason I want to bring it to your attention is if you measure economic recovery from the collapse of 2008 and you don't measure this, you're missing what's going on. Even if people stay in an apartment that is, they don't become homeless. What we're seeing is that people are being crammed into smaller and smaller living spaces. That's not a recovery, friends. That's not the word that captures that economically. You know what word does it better? That's called economic decline. And the same is true of diets and many other things. There has been no recovery, friends, and there hasn't been one for more than the years since the collapse of 2008. Beware of the statistics and the boastful politicians, journalists and academics who want you to believe that that capitalism has recovered from its 2008 collapse. It hasn't. And the statistics I bring to your attention are just so many illustrations. My attention was caught this last couple of weeks also by the Sinclair Broadcasting Company. It's a very right wing broadcasting company that got caught recently when it required all of its announcers across all the many stations it owns to say the same thing on an evening night. So much for the editorial independence of the people who work for Sinclair. But many other journalists then asked those at Sinclair a simple why do you stay at a place that instead of allowing journalists to do their job, writes a script for them, making all kinds of statements that these journalists don't even believe or know to be false? It turns out that the answer given by the sad journalists at Sinclair was that many of them have a work contract with their employer that stipulates that if they leave the job, they must pay as much as, get ready, $10,000 of stipulated damages. This is illegal in most states in the United States, and there are now litigations beginning in California, Illinois and New York to deal with them. Once again, though, here we encounter a practice by employers to keep employees from leaving, but by requiring them to sign employment contracts, punishing them if they were to leave the job for a better offer somewhere else. Freedom means the right, at least if you're not treated well, if you're required to do things that are inappropriate or illegal or immoral, that you can leave your employer, you're not locked in where you have to compensate the employer. That's a new one and a sign of the relative weakness of organized labor and the opportunity for employers. The last update we will have time for today is one that is now in the news a lot. But I want to talk to you about it. This has to do with the epidemic of antidepressants. This is different from the opioid epidemic we have talked about on this program that has to do with anti pain medication and what it can do to you. This is a different kind of medication. It's called antidepressants. And I want to give you an idea of the numbers since they shocked me and they may have the same for you. More than 35 million people during the year 2013-2014, more than 35 million adults took antidepressants. As recently as 1999, 2000, the number of Americans taking them was 13 million. In other words, we've almost tripled the number of American adults taking antidepressant medicine. That's already a sign of something in the society not going real well. It's not what you would expect during a time of economic recovery. When things are looking better, things are looking up, when improvement is the order of the day, you wouldn't expect to see a tripling of the number of adults that need antidepressants to cope in their lives. But now the story darkens. It turns out that over one in 14Americans has been taking them for five years or longer. And it turns out that if you take it for a long period of time, there are serious side effects and they're difficult to measure and no systematic measurement has been done. And recently the following became common. People who have been taking them, particularly for long periods of time, which we can see millions of Americans have, can commonly cause the following side effects. By the way, the term here is commonly cause and my source is the New York Times April 7 On this material, emotional numbing, sexual problems like a lack of desire or erectile dysfunction and weight gain. Long term users report in many interviews, a creeping uneasiness about their dependence on these drugs that is difficult to measure. Popping these pills every day leaves them, in the words of the New York Times, doubting their own resilience. I want to read to you a summary statement about this situation by Professor Edward Shorter. He's a historian of psychiatry at the University of Toronto in Canada. Here we go. This is what Professor Shorter has to we've come to a place, at least in the west, where it seems every other person is depressed and on medication. You have to wonder what it says about our culture. Well, to help him not munder too much longer, I would say there's an awful lot of money to be made in marketing antidepressants to a population that is anxious about its life situation, that is doubly anxious about what the future holds, whose security in their work life and in their home life is shakier than it has been in decades. Those people are anxious. Those people get depressed? You bet. And so it becomes a real profit opportunity to feed that anxiety by promising good results from antidepressants. And in the logic of capitalism, it means not only promoting the good results, but hiding or minimizing the side effects, the costs, not undertaking the long term studies that might really shed some light here, making it necessary for daily newspapers like the New York Times to conduct the interviews that of course, should have been conducted by before these medicines became part of the daily life of 35 million American adults. This is capitalist medicine at its worst and needs to be exposed. In a concluding comment on this last week's economic events, I need to draw your attention to a remarkable other kind of development. The Labor Notes organization, which gathers together militants, activists, people committed to doing something to revive and to reinvigorate the American labor movement, had more people attending its Chicago conference than it has in years. And I take that to be a sign that's worth making mention of today, because it shows that people are slowly becoming aware, as of course they should have been for decades, that the decline of an organized labor movement serves only the interests of of the employers, who much rather deal with each individual worker by himself and herself, being able to fire them and replace them with others, especially at a time of masses of people eager for a job to not have to confront the possibility that an attempt to injure one worker will get you to have to confront all of them in a united way. The labor movement was always first and foremost an effort to correct the imbalance between an employer who has the wealth to hire people and the mass of workers who have to get a job precisely because they don't have wealth to rely on. That imbalance in power and economic strength allowed the employer to call the shots. And workers had to discover that the only way to get a balance back into that relationship was if the workers got together in a union. Have unions done bad things? Of course. They are like any other collection of human beings. They have their problems, they have their contradictions, their mistakes, their injustices. But that's true on all sides. And it's true with every effort to get human beings together inside corporations. All of those things have their effects and live their lives. It doesn't change the reality that if you have an unbalanced economy with power concentrated on the side of the employer and absent on the other, you, you're going to have the inequality and the accumulation of difficulties and problems that we see all around us in the United States today. And the Labor Notes Conference is a pushback against that. And for that they deserve a shout out. We've come to the end of the first half of this program. Thank you very much for staying with us in a very short time. We will be right back with an important continuation of an interview. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of this economic update. While it's a great pleasure for me to welcome back to this program someone who's been on here before and I want to continue the conversation, my guest is Rob. Robert is his full name, but we all call him Rob Robinson. An extraordinary fellow, someone I'm very proud to bring onto this program. He's a co founder and member of the leadership committee of the Take Back the Land movement, a very important global movement that deals with people denied their access to the land. And if there's anything as fundamental as the access to land of the human being, it would be access to water. And that's where we're going to be going a little later in the program. He's also a volunteer at the National Economic and Social Rights initiative known as NESRI. After losing his job in 2001, he spent two years homeless on the streets of Miami and 10 months in New York City's shelter system. He eventually overcame that homelessness and has been in the housing movement based in New York City since 2007. In the fall of 2009, Rob was chosen to be the New York City Chairperson for the first ever official mission to the United States of a United Nations Special Rapporteur of on the Right to Adequate Housing. He's worked with homeless populations in Budapest, Hungary and Berlin, Germany as well. He has Also been active with homeless populations and land and housing movements in South Africa and Brazil. It is an enormous pleasure for me to bring someone involved in these important global movements to talk with us in this case particularly, about the human right to water and where that stands as something human beings are struggling about. So I want to welcome Rob Robinson to this program. Thank you for coming, Rob.