← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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Welcome friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives and and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. Before we begin today, I want to thank everyone who signed up for and participated in our latest online course, Marxian Class Analysis with Professor Shahram Azar. Our last class session will be this Wednesday, and for those of you who were unable to attend for whatever reason, each course session will be made available for a small fee so you can view it at your leisure. In addition, you will be given the opportunity to sign up for a live online Q and A with both Professor Azar and myself. That's in a few weeks. I will be sharing the exact details of this opportunity with you all next week. Or, if you haven't already, you can sign up for the weekly newsletter by going to our website democracyatwork.info and opting to receive emails from us with the information about this and other exciting events planned for this spring and summer. Please remember to like subscribe and share this video with others. That's why we make them for those of you who have not yet signed up for our Members Only Patreon. By doing so, you can gain access to Members Only content while also supporting our work. Just go to patreon.com democracyatwork and you can find the link in the description below. Okay, today's program has quite a few topics to go over in our updates, and then we will have an interview with an expert on artificial intelligence and the issues it raises for our economy, for our society, and for our future. And my guest will be Richard RJ Escau, a person who's a friend as well as a colleague, and we work together often. I think this interview will be of great interest to many of you. Okay, let's turn to the updates for today. In February of 2026, the United States lost 92,000 jobs. That's the official announcement from the United States government. It's the second worst employment statistic over the last year. In other words, October of last year we lost an even larger number of jobs. Some job. Some months we had increases, mostly very modest. Others we had decreases, mostly modest, except for last October and now in February again. However you look at this, under no blue sky is this economy great? I'm quoting Mr. Trump. We need somewhere between 100 and 150,000 workers who enter the job market each month to find jobs. We call those new entrants to the labor force. So we have to provide about 1001-200001-30000 new jobs each month just to accommodate the new people entering. So when you hear that in February, we didn't increase jobs by that, we didn't increase jobs at all. And in fact, we lost 92,000 jobs. You know, the economy is in trouble. And these numbers are so large that there's nothing about ICE and deporting people that explains them. Those numbers are not big enough to do it. Our unemployment, not surprisingly, rose official unemployment last month, February, 4.4%. Now, let me do a very simple arithmetic. The total number of people in the US labor force, according to the US government, is now about 170 million. 4.4% of that is just about 7 and a half million people are officially unemployed. And by the way, this doesn't count people who have given up looking. It doesn't count people who are part time but want a full time job. So this is the minimum amount, in other words, the equivalent of the population of New York City, our largest city, is what we have as unemployment across this country by the most modest conservative estimate. That's not a great economy, Mr. Trump. That's not even close. Mr. Trump's statements about the economy, like others that he makes, stand in an inverse relationship. The worse things get, the more he celebrates how wonderful they are. He does, he hopes, clearly by his saying so over and over again, you'll believe what he says, rather than the life you're actually leading and the unemployment in the economy you live in. My next update is kind of a shout out to the state of California. In California, they have something called the Fast Food Workers Union. It's an affiliate of SEIU Service Employees International Union, and they are developing a new strategy for protecting themselves from warrantless raids by ice. See, it turns out that fast food is the job of 630,000 people just in the state of California. Right? So this is a job category that employs millions of our fellow Americans, as you know. Right. But what you might not know is that California's done some work and they've discovered that of the 630,000 fast food workers, over a quarter are immigrants. So ICE has been raiding the immigrants. But of course, as every news story tells us, ICE is not good at separating a legal from an illegal immigrant. An immigrant, legal or illegal, from somebody who isn't an immigrant. Especially if they fit the brown and black profiles that ICE uses. So the workers in California have gotten together. They've gotten a constitutional pledge to protect California workers rights to keep ICE and other federal agents from going where they are legally not allowed and they're working hard to make legally not allowed include their workplaces and where they go. And that is to deal with the fact, I'm now using their words, that that whole community has been terrorized, not just the illegal immigrant they claim to be focusing on, but all the legal immigrants who have been arrested, have been detained, have been roughed up, and all of the people who aren't immigrants, but who know them, love them, work with them, go to school with them, and don't want to see them roughed up by anybody. This is a very important issue. And it's even more important that the labor movement is stepping up to become yet another movement against it. No wonder. Finally, Congress has suspended the the funding for ice. Okay, a piece of history is my next update. In 1929, we had the greatest crash that capitalism has to date suffered. We had a bad one in 2008, we had a bad one in 2020. But still, the record holding for worst of all was 1929 to 1941. Eleven years of a horrible depression. Under those conditions, working people in Britain, France and the United States went to the left politically. They supported socialists of one kind or another in Europe. And here they supported Franklin Roosevelt and a Democratic Party, which looked a lot like the socialists in Europe. But of course, when the depression hit Germany and Italy, it went sharply to the right. And where did that end up? In fascism and war. And the fascism and war destroyed Hitler and Mussolini. So it went to the right and the right went into a dead end a very few years later, 2008, we had the second worst crash of capitalism's history. And once again, there was a reaction of the mass of the people. They went to the right here in The United States, Mr. Trump, MAGA and all of that. And in Europe, anti immigrant, similar blaming the immigrants, scapegoating the immigrants. But, you know, going to the right in 29 led to fascism and war. And where exactly is it leading now when Trump is in office and the United States is at war with Iran? You know, Trump's proposals really amount to an economic dead end. And I want to conclude the first half of today's program by telling you that the problem, as we have been stressing, is that the American economy has been in decline. We can't rule the world the way we once did. The Chinese won't allow it. The Russians fight against it. And more and more people are upset with the United States. You can read it every day. Even our neighbors, north and south. We can't afford the 700 military bases. We have around the world. It's becoming harder for American capitalism to deliver the goods to its people because it doesn't have the empire in it once had after World War II, when it replaced all the old empires of Europe. But Americans don't look at it that way. They want to blame somebody. Mr. Trump is a specialist. He blames the whole world. So he hits the whole world with a tariff. And his idea is somehow the tariff is going to fix the economy so we can afford the empire. In fact, we can afford to extend it.
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Great.
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Grab Greenland, take back Panama and so on. But now the Supreme Court says you can't do the tariffs. And even if you could, the tariffs weren't raising enough money. It turns out to keep this empire going, he needs to increase the defense budget. And he told us by how much? $600 billion. Taking it from 900 billion, that's what it is this year, to 1.5 trillion next year. But, you know, if he does that, how is he going to pay for that? Well, he's got two options, and both of them don't work, which is a real problem for Mr. Trump. That's why he's in a dead end. One option is to go to the American people and raise taxes to pay for the enormous military to hold on to the empire. But you know something? If Mr. Trump goes to the American people and hits every family with several thousand dollars of extra taxes, he'll be voted out of office so fast your and his and our head will spin. Well, if he doesn't raise taxes, where's he going to get the money? Well, he's going to go out in the world and borrow it like we borrow so often, but we've been borrowing so much, the rest of the world won't lend to us anymore. That's why the credit rating of the United States has been dropped from AAA to double A by all the rating agencies. The rest of the world is going to say, we're not going to lend to you, or we will lend to you, but we're going to charge you much higher interest because you're becoming a bum as a borrower. The United States, the largest borrower in the world. And if the interest rates go up, so do your mortgage rates, your car payment rate. The economy will collapse. What is Mr. Trump going to do? The answer is there's nothing he can do. He has boxed us in as much as any president has, and there are no escapes. And wars in Iran will not distract us from those hard realities. We've come to the end of the first half of today's show. Please stay with us. The interview with RJ Escal coming right up. Before we jump into the second half of today's show, I wanted to thank you for your very generous response to our fundraising efforts this year and in particular in the last couple of months. And in part responding to that, we are extending the availability of our limited edition, linen covered home hardcover version of Understanding Capitalism, the book I wrote and that we have been making available now for quite a while. If you are interested, I will be signing copies of that hardcover and they will be available to you as they have been over the last few weeks. Just simply send on email to us@infodemocracyatwork.info and put in the subject line limited edition. We will send you all the information you need to order and receive your copy, signed copy of Understanding Capitalism in its hardback. And thank you again for for your kind attention to the fundraising dimension of what we do. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's Economic update. I am very happy to bring to our microphones and our cameras Richard RJ Escau. He and I have become good friends over the last several years and he has been especially helpful in the topic we're going to be dealing with, which is artificial intelligence. So let me introduce him to you and then we'll get right to it. Richard RJ Escau is a writer, a longtime leftist and a journalist. He hosts the Zero Hour, a syndicated radio and television program. He was the lead writer, speech writer and editor for the 2016 Bernie Sanders Presidential campaign. He has worked in data science and healthcare financing and policy in the corporate world and with governments and multinational organizations like the World bank, before wisely returning to his radical roots. Lovely writing there, as you can see, capturing a great deal. All right, Richard, let's go. This is one Richard to another, as we always discover. Tell us in a nutshell, what is AI that everybody is talking about? What does it do? What can it do? What is it actually doing? Or is it all a hype?
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Well, what it isn't is intelligence as anyone would normally understand it. It's something that it's a set of systems that take a lot enormous amount, staggering amount of data about what everybody does online all day takes it and uses that to predict what will happen. If you put certain words into a computer or as they move into robotics, if you make certain moves, what's the likeliest response that a person is going to make? That's, that's all it is. And so, in a sense, what I try to tell people is the enormous reservoirs of data that this drives off of are all being collected by kind of surveillance, surveillance of us by social media companies and all sorts of other data systems online. And, you know, if you strip away the tech glamour from it, then what I try to say is, imagine 30 years ago, your landlord rents you a house, doesn't tell you he's put microphones in every room. He's going to listen to everything you do and say because he thinks you're a smart person, and then he's going to like, predict and imitate that in order to try to compete with whatever you do for a living. You would say, that's not right. You didn't tell me you were going to do that. That's what AI is on a massive level. It just can be very impressive, that's all. It's doing a very sophisticated version of imitation.
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All right, let me ask you the question that is burning up Wall street these days. Is it an interesting addition to the services we get from computers, or is it a world changing, something that's going to disemploy millions of people around the world, change all ways of doing business? And the reason I ask is, you and I were alive when the computer came at the end of the 20th century and all kinds of predictions were made that it would radically alter our lives. And I don't want to diminish the fact that it made a difference. It's been an important thing. But the radical transformation of our lives, uh, it didn't do that. Where does AI fall in, let's call it this spectrum between a breakthrough of sorts and a hyped transformation of all of life?
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Well, there's no question that there's a huge amount of hype in it. How much hype versus how much innovation, we don't know for sure. I suspect we'll look back someday, if we're still here, and we'll say that this was an interesting advance and in the, in a way to use computers. This, this made it interesting, different, easier in a lot of ways. But a lot of it depends on how corporate forces and their government servants respond to all of this. Because can it displace a lot of people from their jobs? Sure. But especially if corporations only care about the bottom line, which we know, that is all they do. And, and if service goes to hell, let's say you can replace a call center virtually completely with AI chatbots, if you don't care that it's going to be even more Maddening and more difficult to get answers than it is now. And I think the answer is, in that sense it will displace a lot of people from their work. The long term implications for society and for the technology itself aren't good because once you take people out of the equation, the technology starts to decay considerably because there's nothing new coming in. But I think the answer is it's a clever technological breakthrough that's exploiting our own time and effort in order to achieve it. And that it will make things somewhat different if it goes out of control, make things quite different. But it is not the miracle massive advance in human evolution we're told it is. That's a lot of hype.
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You know, a comedian that I know told me the other day that he welcomes it and I asked him why and he said, because I'm already writing the comedic script for what you just said. You call the call center. You get a robot somewhere and the robot, you know, translating the robot becomes the comedy. You know, you're trying to get something done, the robot can't figure it out. The robot sends you to another robot. You know, it's just, it's made to order human, he said, for comedy.
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But the robot won't sound like a robot. It will sound, it will sound reasonably like a human, but like a human who suddenly says bizarre, strange things or completely misleads you. And by the way, possibly intentionally in some cases too. You know, you can make robots because they're machines. You can make them do things that no human being, most human beings would refuse to do.
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So give me some idea of how in your mind this is changing our culture or could do so well, it's
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already changing our culture in certain ways. I mean, I think more and more talented people are using it, creative people are using it to do their work. It's good for some things, terrible for other things. It's changed media because newspapers are using it to write articles. It's terrible at it, but they do it anyway. It's. We've already seen some songs get quite popular that were produced by AI Again, not very good. Not, not original. I mean, you can't think of any breakthrough. And whether it was the 60s or the 20s or whatever, revolutions in music aren't going to come from AI but it will change our culture in certain ways for sure. But you know, I'm a big. And probably make it even more difficult for genuinely original artists of various kinds to get their work out there. But you know, we'll just have to see Culture is a very unpredictable thing, as we know.
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Would you impose social controls of one kind or another on how AI gets used to, given that it's a mixture of positive and negative possibilities?
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Yeah. Well, first of all, I think it should be publicly owned. I think it is a public resource. I think it's in the same way that Cecil Rhodes is acknowledged now to have been a colonialist and a parasite for going into what is now Zimbabwe and mining its resources. I think private corporations are mining our time, our ideas and our resources. I don't think they have the right to do it. We could contract with them to extract our resource if we want, but I think it should be publicly owned, publicly controlled. They don't have a right to take our creative work or our analytical work and use it for their own purposes. If that can't be accomplished, then yes, of course, there have to be very strict controls on what it can and can't do, including. It should not be able to produce anything or interact with a human in any way without being clearly labeled as what it is, which is the product of an artificial system. This imitating pretending to be human beings has got to stop. But beyond that, I really think we should have a say. We're being addicted to social media so that we can keep providing the raw material for this data mining. We should have a say in. In those algorithms that addict us. We should have a say in how they're applied. If working people's skills are being used to put them out of work, they should reap the benefits of that. They're the ones providing the intellectual expertise. Expertise. So, you know, we could go down the whole list. But I think it begins with, at a minimum, they should be regulated like public utilities, which is what I said about social media 10 years ago. People thought I was crazy. But ideally, I think they should be publicly owned and democratically guided.
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Am I correct or would you disagree that that is not happening, that private corporations are. Are working very hard at the highest levels of government? I'm thinking about the people arrayed behind Mr. Trump when he took the oath of office, all the heads of the big mega corporations that are making the billions. Seems to me they have cornered this and are not going to allow it to go in the direction you just argued for.
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Oh, absolutely. I'm sorry if I laughed a little bit when you said, is it not going in this direction? It's going in the opposite direction. Our. Our own resources and skills and time are being used to make the incredibly wealthy even wealthier. They're being used to consolidate power and control. When Elon Musk's group went in and sucked up the Social Security and Medicare data, that was the greatest data theft in human history. That was the gold mine, the motherlode of data that they were able to get on every American citizen and many residents as well, non citizen residents. So no, I think it's the government has become another tool for these big tech entrepreneurs to exploit us and by the way, to exploit our environment too, because their technology is very fossil fuel heavy, very tough on the air and the water. And we haven't had a say in that either. In government has been the their instrument to get what they want.
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So what do we do?
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We raise holy hell. We educate the public. We're already beginning to see. Look, I'm happy because I've been writing about this for years. People know what the algorithm is. They know what algorithms are. By and large, they know they're being manipulated. Now people are protesting even in my area right here, data center construction, because they're saying, you know, why didn't we get any say in this? I think we have to amplify that message. I also think this is a great opportunity for the left, for the socialist left to advance some basic ideas that if you produce something, you should have ownership in it. First of all, the things we own in common, like the environment, one group of people, tiny group of billionaires shouldn't get to destroy it the way they've been doing. Secondly, if we all produce something together, whether it's workers at a factory or billions of people on the Internet, we ought to have a say in what happens. That's not radical, that's just common sense. But since we're the only ones that have been saying it, I think it's a great opportunity for us to get our message out.
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And that's indeed why you came on this program. And that's what this conversation hopefully will result. Thank you very much, Richard. R.J. escau, I look forward to talking with you again, which I will be doing on your show pretty soon. And I want you to come back and keep us up to date on what's going on with AI Anytime. All right, thank you very much. And to all my audience, think about what Richard has told us about AI and as always, I look forward to speaking with you again next week.