← 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. Jobs, incomes, debts, those for our children and those looming down the road facing us. Hi, I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life. And I'm trying to use that history to bring this program to you in a way that keeps you up to date about what's happening in the economy we live in and depend on. Let me jump right in by telling you a story about the New York Times and its receipt of a leaked date document. This happens a lot when government officials, upset by what their own government is doing, decide it's time for the public to know, and they find a friendly reporter and give him or her the documents in question so that we all get to see and hear what's going on. And what happened recently was that an agency inside the Trump government was commissioned to look at the costs and benefits of letting refugees and immigrants into the United States over the last 10 years. The report shows crystal clearly that these folks over the last 10 years contributed $63 billion. They even came up with a number like that, more in the productivity of their labor, in the taxes they paid and so on than they cost the United States. So they were clearly a net economic gain. This, of course, is not the message the Trump administration wishes to propose. So immediately they denounced the leak rather than dealing with the substance of the issue. And in particular, a close advisor to Mr. Trump, one Stephen Miller, went so far as to offer alternative facts, reminding me that while statistics don't lie, statisticians can and do. Here we go. What did Mr. Miller propose? He said we should be looking at the difference in costs to the American economy of new immigrants, refugees on the one hand, and native Americans who aren't immigrants, but just live here and work here on the other hand. This is silly. Always refugees and immigrants, the first two or three or four years that they're here cost all kinds of things, because that's the time it takes to adjust to a new language, a new culture, a new home, a new region, a new job and all the rest. So the appropriate comparison isn't the first three or four years of an immigrant or a refugee, but it's a question of a long term situation in which, yes, there are costs in the beginning, as with all investments, and then payoffs over time, as with all investments. But, you know, if you want to make a point and you don't want to be too careful about how you support it, you do what Mr. Miller and the Trump administration have done when you're embarrassed by a document that shows that indeed letting folks into the country, which the United States has done for from its earliest days, is a long term economic payoff. But I want to add a few points. Because this issue of immigration does not go away, Mr. Trump is determined to use it as a scapegoat issue, a distraction to face a hard reality. He cannot afford to tax wealthy people and corporations because they are the only financial support he and his candidacy and his presidency have. So he needs to pander to them. He cannot raise the taxes on corporations and the rich despite the fact that they have done the best over the last 40 years compared with the 99% of the rest of us. So if he isn't going to do something about that, having run on the presumption that he might. Scapegoats are useful and immigrants is a way to focus people on issues that take them away. But that has costs. I'm not talking about the moral or the political costs. It is, after all, bizarre in the world we live in today to have a country, the United States, bombing six or seven other countries but not be willing to take the refugees or who run away from the bombing and feel some obligation in this situation. It's rather odd. But I'm not going to talk about that. What I want to talk about are the economics of it. And there are several millions of people coming in here creates a demand for housing, for schooling, for goods and services that boost an economy. We're losing that if we get rid of these people. That has to be faced. And there are many other costs. If I had more time, I would go into them. A recent report indicates that California's agriculture is seriously impacted by a shortage of labor. They can't get the people to harvest the vegetables. They can't get the people to do the hard work. And here comes something that should surprise nobody. Americans are not. Native Americans I'm talking about are not that eager to have jobs that pay as poorly as those agricultural jobs do. And we're facing higher food prices, we're facing higher food imports which may make this country dependent on food. We have all kinds of consequences that are not being taken into account because it's politically expedient to make immigrants a scapegoat. I want to turn next to the issue of the BRICS countries. B, R, I, C S. If you're not familiar, let me tell you what that stands for. B is for Brazil, R is for Russia. I is for India. C is for China. And S is for South Africa. These five countries are now kind of middle economically developing countries. They're not quite as rich yet as North America, Western Europe and Japan, but, but they're rapidly catching up and in some cases overtaking those parts of the world. They are a very important bloc of nations and they have all kinds of agreements amongst themselves and they're welding all kinds of diplomatic relationships. I want to put into context how important they've become and then tell you why it matters. So I'm going to compare over the last 20 years. So I'm comparing 1997 with 2017. That's a 20 year gap. And I want to talk about the share of global output of goods and services that were achieved by the United States in 1997 compared to what the contribution was of all five of the BRICS nations. In 1997, the United States accounted for 23% of world output of goods and services and the BRICS altogether, 15.4%. So the United States alone was a much bigger player in the world economy in 1997 than all five of the BRICS countries. What has happened in the 20 years 2017, the United States share of the world economy, 18.2%. It's dropped 3 percentage points from what it was 20 years ago. And the BRICS, they are now 30.4%. Those five countries doubled their importance in the world economy. Well, here's why it matters. Sooner or later, the bigger the chunk of the world economy you account for, the bigger your footprint on what happens in the world. The bigger your influence, the bigger your power. The power of the United States is shrinking and the power of alternatives, alternative countries, alternative blocs of countries, and above all of the BRICs is zooming. Now, most of that is accounted for by China, but nonetheless, it is something that binds those five countries together and it tells you something about how the world is changing. After all, 300 years ago, when capitalism took off in England, Western Europe, North America and so on, those parts of the world which were relatively minor players in world history became the dominant players, the British Empire, the American Empire and so on. And that's when their share of global output mushroomed. Now that their share is shrinking and that of other players is what's mushrooming, then the future looks like it belongs to them. And that puts into a very scary context. But my job is not to make believe for that you can watch other programs, but to make it harsh and clear. It is therefore interesting that the United States is busy around the world militarily and makes one wonder Are we flashing our military power and predominance because the economic foundation isn't there for it anymore? Something to think about when we confront military adventures abroad. My next update is a very little story, but in a way a monstrous one. It has to do with the closing or the privatization. We have both of them, of public libraries in cities and towns across the United States. It is becoming a scary comment. It's another kind of shrinking of your economic footprint when you don't have the resources, or to be more accurate, you don't make available the resources so that every city and town has what for a hundred years we've prided ourselves having a place where young people and old people can go and get books, books and tapes and avail themselves of the cultural products of this society in a free public library? What's happening is the cities and towns are strapped for money. That goes back to what I said, unwillingness politically to tax the wealth where it is and to tax the high incomes where they are. Now that we have one of the most unequal economic systems in the world today, we can't seem to get the tax support from those who have it most, those from whom, if it were taken, would affect their lives the least. So we have to cut back because we don't tax. And one place we seem to think it's appropriate is the public library. So recently what came to my mind was Escondido, California, little town. I read in the San Diego Union Tribune back in August the struggle of that village and town to hold on to its public library. There had been an effort to shift it to a private company, quite notorious, called Library Systems and Services, LS&S, sometimes called LSSI. It now runs about 80 public libraries across the United States, where it has succeeded by going into the town and saying, well, you don't want to spend money on your public library because you don't have the money. You don't have the taxes. You're unwilling or unable to go get the taxes from the people who could give it to you. So here's what you do. Let us run the library. You won't have to pay for it, and we'll run it and we will make a profit off of it because we're so terribly efficient. Well, this is the old story of what we call privatization, this endless effort of private companies to make money by taking over what the community, what the public authorities have been doing for us, often quite nicely, thank you, for 100 plus years, as for example, public libraries, it turns out, and there's lots of information about this, particularly again, the New York Times has been very useful in revealing this. There have been stories in the Huffington Post and elsewhere. What they do is they get rid of unionized employees and hire non union employees, paying them much less. They're not accountable to the community because it's now a private enterprise that runs the library. The hours get cut, the services get reduced, you know, the making money, profit, the bottom line and all the rest of it. And the hope is nothing happens because the town leaders are so happy they don't have to pay for public libraries. It's a movement that's happening across the country. It takes such extremes that in San Juan, Texas, the community did it and then after a few years undid it and found it was better off staying with the public library than with the private one. It's an extraordinary comment. You know, it's a kind of fundamentalism in economics to believe that doing something with private enterprise is always and necessarily more efficient than doing it with public enterprise. There's absolutely no evidence from the economics profession which studies this question that that's true. For every example, and there are, where a private enterprise has done something more efficiently than a public one, there's a counter example of the reverse. And there you are, you're stuck with it. Turns out it's probably a better idea to wonder and look at whether any particular activity that a community wants is better handled in a public way or a private way. There are good reasons why we don't have anything other than a public fire department and public schools. Well, we used to have public schools. Madame DeVos is trying to undo that, but doesn't look like she's going to make it. We have all kinds of public services, our parks, our army, our police. It's very interesting we've decided to do it, but we seem to need to give lip service to the idea that the private is somehow better. Every day the newspapers are full of what private entrepreneurs have have done, and they've done a lot of criminal activity, a lot of stealing, a lot of misrepresentation. Let's remember all the things we've read in the last 12 months about car companies and banks and all the rest of it. To think that a private enterprise is the way to go always. And that is a kind of unthinking promotion of the private sector. I don't mind you promoting it, but don't pretend that there's much else that's going on. Before I turn to the next economic update, I want to remind you that we maintain two websites that are available all the time 24, 7 at no charge whatsoever where you can find out about these stories and many more where our TV interviews and whole courses are offered. Again, no charge whatsoever. Please make use of them. That's why we maintain them to partner with you and make this available all the work that we do on this program to you. The first one is rdwolff with two Fs.com and the second one is democracyatwork.info. please remember that these are available for you. Make use of them. Through them you can communicate to us what you like and don't about this program. You can follow us with a click of the mouse on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. These are services for you. Make use of them 24. 7 no charge. If you are interested in seeing a video version, a television program in effect of this program, you can find that on patreon.com p a t r e o n patreon.com for a televised version of this same program. Okay, let's turn back the International Labor Organization, a product of the United nations that's been around now since that time after World War II, together with the Walk Free foundation and the International Organization for Migration, has just completed a study in September of this year of slavery in the world. It was the response to discoveries by news and other organizations that there are plenty of examples of slavery in the world today, long after the world thought it had abolished this system in the world. And so they've released studies. This year's studies were released during the United Nations General assembly back in September. And they show that 40 million people around the world are victims of modern slavery in the year 2016. They also added, because they thought people would be interested, the estimate that approximately 152 million children aged between 5 and 17 years of age were subject to child labor. This is extraordinary in this day and age, and I wanted to tell you a little bit about it. The new estimates show that women and girls are disproportionately affected by modern slavery, accounting for almost 29 million, or 71% of the overall total of slaves. Women represent 99% of the victims of forced labor in the commercial sex industry and 84% representative of forced marriages. Indeed, sex work and forced marriages are the form that slavery takes more than anything any other single thing. Child labor remains concentrated primarily in agriculture. 71%. One in five child laborers work in the service sector, and 12% of child laborers work in industry. A number of companies were identified in recent news reports as using Slavery, often called by other names. And one of them struck me because of American history, the phrase indentured immigrant, indentured servant. This is an old thing that was very important in the colonial history of the United States. A person who wanted to leave Europe and come to the United States but lacked the money to pay for the cost of the trip would engage in the following. In exchange for getting the money or a ticket to travel on a boat to come to the Western Hemisphere, they would agree to work for seven years, typically for an employer, the person who fronted the money to pay for the ticket. In the course of working for seven years, effectively as a slave, you could not escape from this contract. You were effectively forced to work off many times the cost of that ticket. It was a rip off akin to and close enough to slavery to be included. Well, it turns out that for example, the Thai in Thailand, the Thai food giant CP Foods, which is a major producer and deliverer of prawns and shrimps around the world, was identified by the Guardian newspaper in England as having been a primary supplier to, among other companies, Walmart. So if you think you're not touched by slavery in the world today, think again next time you eat that shrimp cocktail. It is something that we have a world in which we see a variety of problems that we claim to be addressing, but this one remains far below the radar unless and until it's talked about publicly and openly. Which is the point and purpose of what I have brought to your attention this morning and this afternoon, depending on when you hear or see this program. The next update has to do with an enormous issue which deserves much more time than, than what I can give to it at this particular moment. But I wanted to bring to your attention a story in the Financial Times, a major global economic newspaper that I use quite often. And this recent story was about the so called gig economy. This lovely phrase that makes it sound almost exciting. This new way of arranging work contracts where instead of coming to work nine to five every week under a contract for a year of your labor or several years of your labor, where you know what you're going to be doing and you know when it's going to be and you know the conditions and that's been agreed to by you or your union on the one hand and the employer on the other, instead of all that, we have work that is temporary work that is precarious work that is maybe there or maybe not, maybe two hours today and six tomorrow and maybe three on Saturday, but maybe not maybe Friday. We'll tell you we don't need you on Saturday, but you need you on Sunday. All of the rest. And of course, major players in this gig economy are things like Uber and Deliveroo and many of these other companies that specialize in an arrangement that does what? Well, it does many things. But the one I want to focus on today is in a way a very old issue. It turns out that Uber drivers and Deliveroo workers and many others in the so called gig economy are spending many, many hours working way beyond the the eight hour day that generations of workers in the history of capitalism fought for the limit to the working day because of the intrinsic way in which capitalists competing with one another see the profit in getting workers to work another half hour, in getting the length of the lunch break to be reduced, in getting the number of breaks to go to the bathroom to be limited, in other words, to lengthen the working day. For those of you who don't remember back in the 18th and 19th centuries, the early centuries of capitalism, the length of the working day for most people was 16 hours. It was a fight to get it to 14, then to 12. The history of England is inseparable from what was there called the struggle for the 10 hour day. And here in our own country, the struggle was for the eight hour day. And we've never gotten beyond that. We have even now in the United States on the books a law that says it's an eight hour day and if you require a worker to stay longer, a, it has to be voluntary and B, you have to pay the worker time and a half, you have to pay more for more than eight hours because eight hours was what it was assumed to be, minimally healthy for a human being, physically healthy, psychologically healthy, not to be made to work immense long hours of the day. An early joke in British capitalism back in the 18th century was that in Britain, with the new capitalism that was taking over, the beds never get warm. You know what that meant? It meant that the exhausted worker coming home after 14 to 16 hours of labor was fell into the bed that was previously occupied by another member of the family who was leaving to go do that kind of a shift of work. My point is it was a struggle for 100 to 200 years under capitalism to limit the length of the working day. What the gig economy does is to undo those limits under the heading of everybody should be free to do all of this language, by the way, the old language of capitalists was you shouldn't limit our working day because what we as capitalists do is the efficient way to organize things and it'll hurt our profits and that will hurt our ability to offer jobs. You get the old picture. It's really the same stuff recycled all over again. Well, that was ignored by the mass of people. After years of suffering, backbreaking labor for unbelievable number of hours, we fought as a nation for the laws that now exist limiting us to an eight hour day. What the gig economy does is give capitalists a new way to go backwards historically to once again see people working 12, 10, 12, 14, 16 hours a day in order to make a living under the conditions being provided. The basic the gig economy is an attempt to get around the limits of an eight hour working day without having to pay the price or even to face the music. That that's what you're doing. Fancy words. Fancy words. It reminds me of a few years ago when Americans beginning to feel the pinch of a declining capitalist economy, found it harder and harder to afford hamburger meat. And so capitalism introduced us to hamburger helper grain what poor people around the world eat. But we were going to consider it the helper to the now absent hamburger. And we're supposed to feel somehow compensated. We've come to the end of the first half of economic update. I hope you found these discussions interesting. Please stay with us. We will be right back after a very short musical interruption.
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The problem's all inside your head, she said to me the answer's easy if we take it logically. I'd like to help you in your struggle to be free. There must be 50 ways to leave your lover she said it's really not my habit to intrude. Furthermore, I hope my meaning won't be lost or misconstrued, but I repeat myself at the risk of being rude. There must be 50 ways to leave your lover. 50 ways to leave your lover. You just slip out the back, Jack. Make a new play and stand. You don't need to be called Roy, you just listen to me. You hop on the bus, Gus. No need to discuss much. Just drop off the key and get yourself free. She said it grieves me now to see you in such pain I wasted it. There's something I could do to make you smile again. I said I appreciate that. Now would you please explain about the. The 50 ways? She said now why don't we both sleep only tonight and in the morning I believe that you begin to see the light. Then she kissed me and I realized that she was probably right.
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Welcome back. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of economic update. For today, I want to Respond in this second half to questions many of you have sent to me over the last six or 12 months. And they have to do with how we are to understand the transition from a capitalist system in which the dominant decision makers are the boards of directors and leaders of corporations, to an economy in which the basic unit of production is a worker cooperative, a democratic association of people who together are producing something and who share all the decision making positions equally amongst themselves. In short, how do we understand the transition from capitalism to something beyond that, that might be called a democratic workers co op system? The way to get at this is to remember, if we can, how the transition to capitalism happened, because it'll give us a whole host of clues as to how we might expect the next transition to happen. You know, the transition to capitalism came out of other systems, slavery, serfdom, feudalism, and so on, each of which in turn was a system that came out of transition from yet another system. Changing economic systems have been as pronounced a feature of human history as has changing technology or changing distribution of where people live, et cetera. So this is something that's part of human history and should have been more centrally located in your curriculum and mine than it likely was. So let's go. How did feudalism, which was the system in most parts of the world before capitalism arrived, how did feudalism pass over change, have a transition to capitalism? Well, the answer, schematically, because we don't have that much time, is as. Imagine feudal serfs, the people on the manors of a feudal society all over Europe, for example. Imagine those societies beginning to experience difficulties. Maybe the lord was expecting too much from the serfs and they couldn't produce enough rent to deliver to him. Maybe the soil wasn't very well maintained, they didn't understand agricultural land productivity all that well. And so maybe the land was giving out and there wasn't enough to eat. Whatever the causes were, over time, serfs, the people who did the hard work, like the slaves before them, began to not want to stay as a serf. To be blunt, they ran away, just like slaves ran away to get to something else, because they were finding their situations unbearable. Well, where did the serfs go in Europe? They ran away from the countryside, which is where feudal manors were located, to the emerging cities and towns. And there they arrived with nothing, rather like a slave who ran away arrives with nothing at wherever it is he or she is going. And so they are left in a situation where it's hard to survive if what you have is nothing you don't have access to land, you don't have access to any wealth. You literally have your brains and your muscles and that's about it. And it's not so easy to make it with that. In that moment, the runaway slave, the runaway serf, perhaps in a little town or a city, begins to make a move. If he or she is lucky enough to find someone to make it with. That is the moment of birth of capitalism. The person with nothing but muscles and brain encounters another person, someone who, for whatever reason, has a little wealth, has a little money, has a little stored up food, has a little room in their building, and a deal is struck. And here's the deal. If you give me a little money, a little food, a little something so I can survive, I will give you in return what I have, which is my brains and my muscles. I'll do work for you and you will give me something for doing it. In that moment is born a relationship, the relationship of the wage payer. That's the person who has something to give to a desperate runaway serf or slave. I will give you a wage. You will give me your effort, your brains, your muscle. You'll come and work for me. Now. The relationship is based on a simple understanding. The person who has sees an advantage in doing this. And the advantage is, I'm going to get more value from the work this person does than it costs me to engage them in this labor. I will get more than I pay, my wealth will be enhanced, my social position will be more secure. Capitalism is born in that way, out of the dissolution of, of another system. It's when the old system can't meet the needs of the people it relies on, that it begins to lose those people, slowly at first, maybe slowly over a long period of time. And those people leave if they can, if they have a place to go and they're in that new place under a new set of conditions, they cut a new deal, one they weren't doing before. On a feudal manor, nobody pays anybody wages. You're there, you were born there. The lord of the manor is the child of the feudal lords of the past, just like you're the child of feudal serfs of the past. It's a system that reproduces itself over time unless the conditions change, and it can't. But it's one thing to say that capitalism is born in that town or that village or that little city. It's another thing to say, can it flourish? Many times capitalist relationships started, maybe went for a while, maybe some months, maybe some years, maybe hundreds were Involved, maybe thousands. But then it fell apart. Maybe the feudal lords began to say to themselves in the surrounding countryside, we don't want our unhappy serfs to think they can run to the city and do what, what those folks did. So we better get rid of that group of capitalists, people with money that they paid in wages to become richer. We don't want there to be an option, we don't want there to be an attractive place for upset serfs to run away to. So often the capitalism that was born, had a short life and fell apart or was destroyed by, by the feudals that didn't want it to exist. But over time, eventually the capitalists began with their workers to build those cities, to build those towns, to fortify them against the ability of the feudals who were all around them, to shut them down. Slowly they developed the institutions to protect themselves, to grow. And eventually we got the transition, the full fledged shifting of society from the old feudalism as it was in Europe, to the new capitalism. Along the way, the capitalists had to develop supportive institutions. This often was a difficult process. They would have to have the government, if there was one, helping them, and not the feudals, only the way that governments always had. In the past, government and feudalism had been very close together. And so the new capitalists had to get the government to depend on them, which they got by paying taxes, and therefore to take care of the capitalists partly out of their own desire to keep that flow of tax revenue coming from those capitalists. Early days, they didn't tax workers because the workers had nothing. So you had to change the government. Sometimes the feudals didn't like this. We want the government that we established 1500 years ago to be doing for us, not for these new capitalists. Then they would come to blows. Those blows included things like the French and American revolutions when they killed each other in large numbers. Capitalism was born out of much violence along the way. Doesn't mean it has to go that way. But it did in the case of capitalism's transition, and it often has. So here we are, the result, a capitalist world system. Feudalism pretty much eliminated slavery, except for what we saw the previous half hour. Largely eliminated, although it doggedly hangs on, as do pockets of feudalism too. But now we come to the situation we're in, which is why I've told you this historical situation, this story. Capitalism is having more and more problems, like feudalism did before, and it is driving all kinds of its own people, not just its workers, but also its capitalists, to begin Thinking about a different system, just the way those runaway slaves and runaway serfs imagined and hoped for a different system. Did those who ran away, did they know they would make it in the new places they ran to? Of course not. Did they understand that they were setting up a new system which would one day be the system of the world? Unlikely. They knew they couldn't stand what they had, and they were willing to risk trying to do better somewhere else. And so it has been with more and more people in capitalism. I'm going to give you just two examples of thousands, millions I could give you. In the last century, American farmers who were typically small family with maybe four or five farm workers that they had working for themselves. They were little capitalists because they hired a few farm laborers and got more from that work than it cost them to pay those people. But they were small capitalists. They found themselves in an unbearable situation. On the one hand, they had to buy seeds from big companies who were charging a lot. On the other hand, they also had to buy transport to get their products to the markets. They grew the corn, they grew the animals, but they had to get the stuff to the market. And the only way to do that efficiently was with the railroad. And the railroad charged you a lot to move your product. And then there was all the competition among them, and not only among American farmers, but between American farmers and farmers in other countries that kept the price down low. Well, it was beginning to be impossible. The farmers couldn't work. They couldn't charge enough for what they produced to pay. The high prices for the seeds, the high prices later for the fertilizer, the high prices for the tractor and the fuel, the high prices for the railroad transport. And so they did what farmers often do. They borrowed money to get from one season to the next. And then they had a new expense. Of course, the interest on the loan they took, it was too much. They felt squeezed by these forces. And so they did an interesting thing, very individual. Each little farm on its own area began to develop the desire for cooperative farming. They felt they could get a better deal if there were 50 of them negotiating with the railroad company to move all the grain, not one of them at a time. The railroad could play with one, but it couldn't play with all 50. So they began to discover, like the runaway serf and slave before them, an opportunity for a new system. They wouldn't farm individually, they would farm collectively. The high price of the tractor would be a different problem if 10 of them shared the tractors, if 10 of them shared the Mechanical problem of repairing a tractor, etc. Etc. That is in the crisis of small capitalist farming, co ops were formed. Well, so it is today. More and more people are discovering in this capitalist economy that they can't continue. They can't continue. Let me give you two examples. A small capitalist business, say, located in Minnesota. Why not? It's got 50 employees, maybe 100. It's built up this business from when they started it, a young couple, 40 years ago. And now they're successful. They produce something, whatever it is. They've got, let's say, 100 employees. People from the community around them. They know them all, but they're now 68 years old and they've had enough. And their children are doing other things, so they don't quite know what to do. They could sell the company to a big corporation. They don't want to do that because that's not what they spent their lives building up for. And they don't want to let those hundred people down that they've employed. They know many of them, their children played with them. They don't want to risk that a big company they sell to will close the place, will move production to cheaper workers in China or India or Brazil. They don't want to close the business. Same reason, it turns out. They don't know what to do. They don't want to stay there. They're too old for this. And they come up with a plan, a new plan. They're going to sell the business to the workers, them. That's how those hundred people are going to be honored and respected. We're not going to sell you out because we're old. We have a sense of responsibility. We have a sense of community. We're going to keep this community going because this business is going to stay here. And you are all going to work hard to make it succeed because your own personal livelihood depends on it. It did before, when we were here. Now that we're gone, you're going to do it as a democratic activity amongst yourselves. That can be done. The laws of the United States already exist for all that to be done. It's been done already many times. And it's something in the story I just gave you, initiated by the capitalists, of course. I could give you another example. Workers, particularly young ones, coming out of high schools and colleges, looking at a future, working in a numbing cubicle in some big building, barely getting the time to go to the bathroom, looking at the same work all day, every day for the rest of their lives. This is not an attractive proposition. This is not what they studied hard for. This is not what they hoped for. It's not what their parents gave them as the idea of what an adult, free person can and should look forward to. In short, it's intolerable. And an increasing number of young people don't want this. And they sure don't want to work in one of those numbing cubicles when all of the important decisions about the process they're involved in the production of whatever it is that goes on in their factory or their office or their store. They don't want some people they don't even know telling them what to do every day of the work life, when to come, how to come, what to work with, what machine to work with, what to dress, where to move, how to stand. It's unbelievable. They had heard all these stories in school. They took them seriously about free people, about democracy, about sharing in the decisions that affect you. But they see their own mother and father terrified that the job they have now, which they feel lucky they still have, could be eliminated tomorrow if the factory closes, if a new machine is purchased at their expense, etc. Etc. They don't want all this. These young kids, they want a job where they have some control, where they have some participation, where the work they do varies during the day and across the work life so it can develop different skills that they have. They can even find out who they are and what skills they have. They want work to be meaningful. They can't find that in a capitalist enterprise. More and more in this country, these are huge impersonal machines to make money, in which you are something a bit more interesting than a robot, but not much more. So these people want something else. And you know what they're attracted to, you guessed it, co ops. Getting together with other people like themselves, who share a sense. I don't want to be an automaton in somebody else's enterprise. I want to have some say over this enterprise. Not more, but not less than the other people around me who, like me, want a good job, want a decent income, want to build a life. Let's do that together. Let's bring the democracy we were taught to admire, to respect and to want into the workplace where maybe it should have been all along anyway. Maybe what we are doing, such people can begin to understand, is not merely solving my particular problem in my particular workplace, in my town, in my family and so on. Maybe I'm doing all of that. I'm trying to solve a problem for me, for my life, and the people close to me. But maybe I know enough about the history of capitalism, the history of transitions from one system to another, to begin to be able to recognize that what's happening in the United States today and in other capitalist countries, particularly in Western Europe, North America and Japan, is another transition. That these are not just isolated moments of this capitalist or this worker. It's rather the beginning of a massive historical shift in which the capitalist system per se is recognized as the problem and the transition to a different and better system as the solution that was eventually understood by the people who made capitalism happen. They began to recognize, I'm not just a runaway serf or slave who wants a better situation in my life. I am that. But I'm more than that. I'm part of something. And then they got really poetic. I'm part of something that's going to bring a new world. Remember the slogans of the French Revolution? Liberty, equality, fraternity. These people thought they were pushing feudalism out of the picture, which there were, and bringing in not just another economic system, employer, employee, but they were bringing liberty for us all. Equality, fraternity, brotherhood. Wow. They saw what they were doing as not just an economic transition, but a literally political and cultural and transition, a new way of life. I don't know whether a transition from capitalism to worker co ops will bring in a new way, but I think there are some interesting hints that it might. Because let's go back to what I said a few minutes ago. A worker co op is a democratic institution. It is built on the idea that everybody who works in a factory, office or store is to play an equal role, one person, one vote, to decide what this enterprise produces, how it goes about producing it, where this production will take place, and what we all together are going to do with the profits that we all together help to produce, this really is then an economic system that can make a serious claim to being all about equality of vote, Making these decisions, the liberty that you know you are part of, the decision that you depend on, you have that freedom which a worker today doesn't have. Those decisions are not made by workers, they're made by somebody else. The workers don't control that. You've probably noticed that in your workplace. And most important, this notion of democracy that you actually get in the worker co op, democracy at the workplace, in comparison to that, what you have now is no democracy at all in the workplace. And I want to end with that because in a way, it's a provocation to you. If democracy means, as I believe it does, that if you're affected by a decision, you have the human right to participate in it. The same logic that says any politician, our mayor, our congressperson, who makes decisions that affect us, we have the right to have power over that person. We can elect them or not, at least some control from us who have to live with the decisions he or she makes. We have the power to decide who, who he or she is that makes this decision and what they stand for and what they're committed to. You don't have that in your workplace. The way we've organized capitalism, the way capitalism exists as a system, a tiny number of people, major shareholders who own the thing and the board of directors they elect, they make those decisions. In a typical large corporation, it's a tiny number of people, 10, 20, 30 people. In big corporations, they can have tens or hundreds of thousands, case of Walmart, millions of employees, but it's still 10 or 20 individuals who make all these key decisions. That's not democracy, folks. That's the opposite of democracy. That's autocracy. That's aristocracy. And you know how you can see it? Because just as 300 years ago the newspapers made all the news every day about the kings and queens and princes and what they did, we now make the same about the big businesses and big bankers and big, big, big down in Washington or elsewhere that run our lives, which we kind of know. So the notion of a transition from capitalism to a system of worker co ops, collectively and democratically making the decision is an economic transition as powerful and as profound as the one that brought us capitalism and its claims. That is the claims of those who are arguing about worker co ops today that they could realize slogans like democracy, freedom, participation, those are very powerful and they are pretty solidly backed kinds of claims to make given what they say they're trying to do. Final point. If workers together and democratically make a decision on how to distribute wages and salaries, you think they'd give one or two or three people at the top of the pyramid who are already rich, tens, hundreds of millions of dollars while everybody else can't pay for their college education, for their kids? Not going to happen. A democratic decision of how to distribute the wealth would have completely different results. Let me show you what that means. If you take the total wealth produced in America every year, say last year, something on the order of 16 or so trillion dollars, 17 trillion, and you divide it by the number of Americans, 320 million, roughly, you know what you get is the total wealth, a total income that we could have per person in America. If we divided the total output of what wealth is equally among every person, it's about $57,000 per person. A family of four in America would get 200 plus thousand dollars a year if it got an equal share of the income. I understand all the questions about it, the statistics, but roughly that's about what it is. We wouldn't have a society that has 0.001% of the people with more money than they know what to do with and everybody else scrounging around. We would have a completely different economic system. If workers democratically decided who gets a bit more, who gets a bit less, it would radically change. Just like the arrival of capitalism radically changed the world from what it was before, so will the next transition We've come to the end of this program. I hope you have found interesting both the short updates and the longer discussion. Please be a partner of this program and I always thank truthout.org, that independent source of news and analysis that has been our partner for a long time. And I invite you, like them, to make use of our websites to make use of what you learn on this program. Share it with family, friends and relatives. It's an important way to make the impact of this program as large as it can possibly be. Thank you for your attention and I look forward to speaking with you again next week.