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- [00:10]
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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 and our children's. I'm your host, Richard Wolff, been a professor of economics all my life. And on that basis prepare these weekly updates. First, quickly, a shout out to some Chicago labor events that we pointed to in an earlier program. Chicago is indeed becoming a very interesting place of change here in the United States. A new mayor, first woman, first gay, first non white, all combined in one person got elected to be the new mayor and promises to big changes. It's already a change that such a thing could happen. I'm also happy to announce that the University of Illinois at Chicago, the graduate students and teaching assistants who get terribly badly paid and overworked and under respected, went on strike and won some significant gains they could not have gotten otherwise. However, two other strikes continue. One that's been going on since the 10th of March is the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It's it turns out the wealthy folks of Chicago may like to have a symphony, but they don't want to pay for it. And that of course isn't so unusual for them. But kudos to the striking musicians who haven't caved in, who haven't gone back, who maintain that they deserve the pensions they once had and they deserve to be paid as much as orchestras elsewhere in major cities. A new strike. Interesting in another way. Headley Manufacturing, relatively small place, but here the strike is not by a union. The workers aren't unionized there. It's a strike led by Arise Chicago, a group of churches working together with workers to change the conditions of labor in Chicago. Bravo to you for getting together and doing that. And to those faith based folks who see a different way to express their commitment to religion. Let me turn now to the bigger ones. In the last quarter of 2018, world trade really contracted and that is continuing. It is hurting the world economy because it's more of a trading world economy than it's ever been. And why has that happened? Well, two things have really damaged world trade. One is the uncertainty of the crazy things going on in the United Kingdom over whether it will or will not stay in the European Union. That is hurting trade all over the place, as everybody has to calculate with that uncertainty. The second cause of world trade's decline is of course the trade war being perpetrated by Mr. Trump and the Republican Party against China, number one. But likewise against Mexico and Canada via NAFTA, against Europe with the trade tariffs being imposed on them and more of them threatened Interestingly, both the conservatives in England and Mr. Trump and the Republicans here have been using the trade war as a distraction for their people. People suffering from the horrors of a capitalism in decline, crashing in 2008, bailing out the very people who bought the crash and then imposing austerity on the mass of people. This is a capitalism in trouble. You have to distract your people from it by Brexit does that in England. And Mr. Trump's posturing as the protector of America against a cheating world trade partnership works that game here in the United States. Here's the irony. To evade the focus, the need to confront the declining system in the United States and the uk, the conservative leaders distract people. That makes the situation worse. That's the meaning of a declining world trade volume and so forth. So as you distract people, the problem gets worse. That's not gonna end well. Next item. The city of New York has committed to congestion pricing. This is so ridiculous that it really requires a bit of time. As many of you know who've ever visited New York, traffic congestion here is ludicrous. It matches or exceeds that in many other urban areas. Los Angeles comes to mind, Chicago, so forth. So there've been a demand by people to do something about it because it is, of course, the height of capitalist inefficiency. You're very efficient in the office, but it takes you two hours to get there because of the traffic there, cancels the efficiency in the office because of the inefficiency outside the office of a traffic system that is arcane, inadequate and overused and therefore breaking down, et cetera, et cetera. What is the solution that New York City has found? Well, it turns out it's going to copy some other world cities, Singapore, London, Stockholm, examples, and do congestion pricing. What does that mean? Below 60th street in Manhattan, you will have to pay a fee, a bunch of dollars every time you go into that area to reduce congestion. What an interesting idea. What a disaster. First of all, it is grotesquely unfair. For rich people, this is pocket change and will mean nothing. But for middle and low income people who have to come into that part of the city to work, it will be a major burden. Who came up with this? Well, let's see. Rich people don't want to pay taxes for the obvious solution, which is mass transit, really do something about the trains, buses and other kinds of vehicles that could move people in and out of the city. Then you discover, as I did when I did the research, a little millions of dollars have been spent by the Uber Corporation in favor of this congestion price. And now, of course, why? Because if you don't let cars in because they can't afford to pay, that will allow more Uber cars to be in there moving people around. Why? Because Uber already cut a deal with the city to put a $2.50 charge on every taxi ride to cover the cost of congestion. Notice not Uber pays it. The rider does. So guess who gets out of paying the cost of a proper mass transportation system? Corporations and the rich. And so they are behind it. They. They get the benefit. And the only thing that would be horrific is to imagine that this is about solving the congestion problem. Let me give you a little example of where this can lead. A few months ago, Mr. Macron In France decided he was going to do something about pollution. Hello, good morning. Only after 10 years. And what was he going to do? He was going to put an extra tax on fuel that everybody had to buy, putting the burden of dealing with pollution on the people who can afford it least. The result there was the last 20 weeks of yellow vests. Who knows, maybe in the United States, congestion pricing could lead people finally to say, of course the goal is very nice and pollution and congestion, but how you're doing it is disgusting in its injustice and who it protects. The imf, the International Monetary Fund, released its annual World Economic Outlook a couple of weeks ago. And there were two conclusions I want to share with you in case you missed reading that very long and poorly written report. First, the conclusion of the IMF that Trump's tariff war with China is a colossal mistake. Why? Because other factors, not the pricing of the two sides, are at play here in causing the imbalance in US China trade. It isn't about relative prices. Number two, the spillover effects dangerously undercut economic growth. That goes back to my earlier point about world trade contracting. That was the first thing they said that was interesting that they came to that conclusion. The second one they said is, beware to the whole world of the power of a few tech giants, you know, Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, because they have monopolies. They have worked carefully, says the imf, to get a monopoly to jack the prices up, to make it impossible for new companies to get into that business that slows economic growth. Well, you know, maybe that's why the major competitors to every one of those I just listed come from China, where they've been protected and where their government gives them the space to grow because the air has been sucked out of the rest of the world economy by the dominance of those companies, those big tech giants. The United States justifies attacking the Huawei Corporation from Japan because using its telecommunications equipment might enable the Chinese government to spy on the rest of the world. Well, what does the rest of the world use, my fellow Americans? They use the equipment of American companiesgoogle, Microsoft, intel, you know, and they've been using them for all their secret communications. And the American government, you can be very sure, is working with those companies. They admit it on using them for what? If the world were really worried about spying by Huawei, they should be much more worried about spying by these four monopoly companies that are all American. This is theater not to be taken seriously at face value. What is being said here? Monopoly is something capitalism always sees enterprises trying to get because there's a lot of money in it and a lot of power. It's only with pushback by the mass of people, which often takes years, that you break the monopolies up, only to watch the process renew itself immediately thereafter. Final Updates Several states have begun suing the Trump Department of Agriculture, New York, California, Illinois, Minnesota, New Mexico, Vermont and the District of Columbia. Why? Because it turns out the Department of Agriculture has relaxed certain rules for school lunches. Yeah, you guessed it. They are now going to relieve those lunches from having whole grains and relieve those lunches from limiting sodium. Why? Because the Trump administration, to hold on to its popular support, such as it is, needs to be positioning itself as anti Obama, anti Obama, anti. So they're getting rid of Obama's rules about safety in the nutrition for our children. This is craziness, but it is when politics is no longer about serving the people, but reproducing the dominance of small groups in the society. When that becomes not just part of politics, which it always is in capitalism, but the only determinant of then you get the systematic destruction of the health of our children in order to make a bit extra profit for the whole grain companies and whoever puts salt in everything. My concluding update for today has to do with a speech given by Donald Trump to the Republican national committee on 2 April. He does two interesting things there. One, he insults Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. He refers to her as a young bartender, which would position her as different from him, which is an old real estate hustler. But I guess if you're in the world of old real estate hustles, insulting like lying, become normal functions associated with the job you do. The other thing he said, which is of much more importance, is so interesting. I'm going to quote, don't underestimate the power of socialism to get a vote. That's right, Mr. Trump, and you deserve much of the credit for making socialism as attractive as it has become to millions of Americans. The kind of capitalism you champion, the kind of capitalism you're trying to take America back to, is precisely the single most important fuel for the rise of socialism, other than the actual performance of capitalism itself, for most people in the United States. We've come to the end of the first half of Economic Update. I want to remind you. Please follow us on on YouTube, indicate your interests, click on Being a Supporter subscriber. It's an enormous help to us make use of our websites democracyatwork.info and rdwolff with two Fs.com and as always, our thanks to the Patreon community. That is such a support and encouragement for all we do. Stay with us. We'll be right back. I would like to take a brief moment to tell you about my latest book called Understanding Marxism. Marx was a social critic who identified capitalism as not an end of human history, but rather merely the latest phase of human history, which, as we now see, needs a transition to something better. You can get your copy of Understanding Marxism Today by Simply going to lulu.com that's l u l u.com and searching for understanding Marxism by me, Richard D. Wolff. We are also very proud that this book is the first one published by our group, Democracy at Work, and we're proud to be able to bring it to you at this time. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. It is my pleasure once again to welcome to this program and for all of you, Dr. Harriet Fraad. She's been on the program many times and in a minute I'm going to tell you about a new project that I think you will find especially interesting and we are very excited about doing it. Harriet Fraad is a mental health counselor and a hypnotherapist in private practice in New York City. Her work explores the intersections of American personal, economic and political life. And it's on her website@harriotfraud.com the website is also the host of her podcast. It's called Capitalism Hits Home. And that's exactly what it's about. We're very excited about this podcast. It's part of a family of podcasts that we are growing and that make the work that we bring to you on this program more available, more extensive than otherwise. So we urge you take a look, Harriet. Fraud Capitalism Hits Home. The podcast is available on our website, democracyatwork.info and also on itunes and Google Play. Welcome to the program.
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Glad to be here.
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Okay, I want to talk today about a difficult topic. And it's a difficult topic for many reasons, and I won't have to explain it, but it has to do with sexual harassment. Sexual abuse on the job. It is something that affects almost every workplace. It is a factor shaping the productivity of our workers because of the experiences they have to undergo at the workplace. It's really a part of our economic performance, only it's one we don't think of that way and we haven't talked about. So let's begin by talking about what is sexual harassment? Sexual abuse. And I thought it might be useful here to read a definition. And the definition I'm going to read comes from the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the eeoc, a very important part of the federal government. And it defines workplace sexual harassment as the following. I'm going to read it because I want it to be in everyone's mind. Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors and other verbal or physical conduct. Conduct of a sexual nature when this conduct explicitly or implicitly affects an individual's employment, unreasonably interferes with an individual's work performance, or creates an intimidating, hostile, or offensive work environment. Throughout the United States, the EEOC says 79% of sexual harassment victims are women, 21% are men. A serious problem of sexual harassment has existed for decades in the armed forces of the United States. Finally, sexual harassment was determined to be a form of sex discrimination and therefore also violates Title vii of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The reason I did this was I want to make it clear to our audience that sexual harassment and sexual abuse is a crime in the United States. It may not be persecuted or prosecuted. It may not be enforced the way it should be. But we're not talking about some abstract thing. It has gone through the process of being coded into our legal system. Okay, let's start with the following question, which I know is on the minds of many folks who have sent inquiries to us. Why now is there a movement against it? This stuff has been going on a long time. That's why these laws were passed, that I just read. That's why these definitions were worked out. Anybody who's worked in a workplace that has men and women, or even those that don't know about it, why now is there a movement like MeToo and so forth? What's that about?
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Well, the United States has changed. The majority of women in the United States are now single for the first time in our history. And the women's movement basically helped women understand that we have a sexuality and that when we're sexual, it should be mutual. It shouldn't just be to submit and please a man. And although it was only in the 1990s that marital rape became a crime in the United States, women are opting out of oppressive relationships. It is women who initiate most divorces, and it is now women who refuse marriage. So you have a group, a majority of women who are conscious women and who don't want to submit to sex on a man's terms without having a say and participating as equals. That's a big change. Another very big change in the United States is that religion has diminished in the United States, particularly among young people, but across the board. And the more fundamentalist the religion, the more women are pushed into subordinate positions. For example, the Southern Conference leadership on gender from the Southern Baptist Convention on Gender states that women should be subordinate to men. Women who are religious in those denominations, which is hundreds of thousands, should not supervise men at work or manage men at work, or certainly not be managers in their own households. They should subordinate themselves to their husbands. And there is certainly the closer one is to a fundamentalist reading of the Bible. There is ample evidence in the Bible I'd like to from the beginning, in Genesis, Eve is blamed because she got the apple and they both took a bite, giving them knowledge of their own body parts, giving them sexuality, for which she is blamed. And the Lord speaks when he sees this, and he says to the woman, I will make your pains in childbearing very severe. With painful labor, you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you. That's in Genesis. Women are property in the Bible. So the Lord says in a commandment, you should not covet your neighbor's house. You should not covet your neighbor's wife or his male or female servant, his oxygen or donkey, or anything that belongs to your husband. That's in Exodus. That's the woman is property. Don't covet your neighbor's property. Collecting wives is a symbol of prestige. King Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines. And according to Kings in the Bible, his wives led him astray.
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So let me interrupt, even though I understand the point here. You're saying that the retreat of that kind of religion in the population, together with the broader social changes in the position of women, that they are more independent, that they are single longer, that they are not buried if you like, in the family relationship the way they were in the past. All of these things have contributed to a recognition that they are being sexually harassed and oppressed and that they want.
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To fight back and that they don't have to tolerate it. Women are not the property of men the way the Bible designates. So for example, in the Bible in Corinthians, if a woman does not cover her head, she might have her hair cut off. But it is a disgrace to for a woman to have her hair cut or her head shaved, then she should cover her head. Cause a man ought not to cover his head since he is the image and glory of God. But woman is the glory of man. For man did not come from woman. Woman was created from man. Now of course we know that turns reproduction on its head, but. But that's the way the Bible dictates. So you have fundamentalists reading the Bible have put women in an inferior position as property of men and as inferior to men and as subordinate to men. So letting go of religion and particularly fundamentalist religion has also added to women's sense of being equal people who do not have to service men just because men want it.
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Because we are pressed for time, the obvious other question, why do you think men have been doing this? Why have men performed on the workplace, but beyond the workplace, at home and elsewhere in ways that need these laws, need these definitions, and now need a movement of women to bring this behavior to an end? What's that about?
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What it's about is a lot of things psychological theory. Nancy Chodorow says that because children grow up in a virtual matriarchy, girls can identify with women. Women models are all around. Boys don't have that luxury. So they grow up with a negative model. I am the not with woman because.
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The man is away from the household.
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Where they grow up, is not away, is not involved, is not interactive with little children. He's not at the daycare center, he's not at the kindergarten, he's not in the after school program. He's not in their lives in a dominant way. And so in order to define themselves as male, they define themselves as the not female female and withdraw their compassion from women often and often think of themselves as not female. In our sexist society, men are taught to be stoic, to repress their feelings, not be a sissy, not be a female. Their games are more competitive and more physical. Their sports are little. Girls tend to play in small groups, non aggressive sports. Boys are not allowed their tenderness and their gentleness. It's a Terrible thing. And they're not allowed to be needy and dependent. And sex is a need that depends on women. And it's the one need that men are encouraged to have. And yet women can withhold it. That's probably why the. The lifespan of the average prostitute in the United States is 34. Because after men need her for sexual release, they often kill her because they're killing their own dependency. So in this trapping, sexist culture, which goes everywhere from children's books to advertising, where you don't see men who are gentle, you see hunky men hustling products and seductive women draping themselves around products and buying products that make them even more sexy. So you have a divergence of roles and pressure on boys to express a need for sex and to judge women according to sex and to bond with each other according to porno and girly magazines. You don't have an equivalent development in girls.
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Let me ask you a, a yes, no kind of question again, because of our time limits, do you think that there's more sexual harassment going on than in the past? Is the Clinton, the Trump, the movie directors, the athletes that are coming exposed, is there more of it going on or is it the women protesting that makes it more visible?
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I think that there is the same amount as always. I don't think the amount has changed. I think the ability to call it out has changed. And also because of the women in the Bible bear the shame for men's predations. But the women's movement rejects that, and so does a lot of other gender thinking. And so women want to put the shame of sexual aggression back on the men who are aggressive and not hold it themselves. And so instead of just being ashamed, they accuse.
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Well, as always, I want to thank you for coming, and I apologize that we don't have more time, but let me invite the audience. If this kind of discussion is something you want, let us hear from you. Let us know. And as always, towards the end of these programs, I want to thank all of you for being part of this. Thank Dr. Frad for sharing her insights from her program practice on this, and also to thank our Patreon community for its support. You can also find her podcast there at Patreon. Thanks again for being with us, and I look forward to being with you again next week.