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Sam. Saint gonna change. Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, our jobs, our incomes, our debts, those scaring us coming down the road, and those confronting our children who probably ought to be even more scared than we are about what faces them. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and I grew up, currently teach at the New School University in New York City. Before jumping into today's economic Updates, I wanted to say a word of thanks. It's a good time of year to do that here at the end of January, a full year behind us that we're trying to understand and digest. And I simply wanted to thank the thousands and thousands of people both in the United States and abroad, who took a moment out to be supportive in all kinds of ways over the last year. It has meant the world to us, to encourage us, to make us believe that all this work pays off in the sense of reaching an audience, of informing an audience, of maybe providing ammunition for moving the world in a better direction than it seems so often to be taking. So thank you from all of us at Democracy at Work and at Economic Update for the support you have so generously provided. It is very much appreciated. Okay, let's begin. There's so many things that happened this last week, it's hard to know where. But let me start with one that deserves comment. American Airlines, one of the major carriers in air traffic in this country, announced this last week that it is going to be joining Delta and United, the other two major air carriers, in providing what they euphemistically call, quote, basic economic or basic economy fares on many of their flights. These are to start on February 10th. Passengers who purchase these new American Airlines no frills tickets will not be allowed to use the space in the overhead bins. They will be required to board the plane last. Their carry ons will need to be stuffed under the seat in front of them or else they will have to pay supplemental fines. They may not be able to get an assigned seat. They may have to wait till the very last minute and take whatever seat the airlines have left give them to use. They will not get as many miles if they have a miles program. In other words, these are fares for people who cannot pay what otherwise these tickets would cost. American Airlines explained that they have to follow the lead of low cost, no frills airlines such as Spirit, Allegiant Air and Frontier. And then there's a lot of PR around. The announcement by American Airlines about what a wonderful service this is to enable people to fly who couldn't otherwise do so by offering them a wonderful opportunity. I remember hearing this sort of nonsense in economics classes. But the wonders of the market as it provides a means for people stop. This is not a service. This is taking into account that the United States is becoming very quickly a two class system, if you hadn't already noticed. One class are those able to pay the going rate and the other ones are too poor to do it. That's because they don't have a job, or the job they have isn't steady, or the job they have isn't full time, or the job they have doesn't pay the benefits which they therefore have to pay out of their pocket, or the job's wages are too low, or all of those. And so what we're seeing is the accommodation of business. If they can't get the money out of you the way they did before because you don't have it, they're going to figure out a way to get less money because that's what the mass of Americans now have, less money. And they're only going to do it if it's profitable. And if that's the case, then the only way they will give you something at a lower price is if they give you a lower something. If you don't understand that, you haven't been paying attention real well to how a capitalist economy works. So the important news here is that the United States is becoming a two tier society, really fundamentally. One class of well paid people, 5 or 10%, no more than that, and everybody else being pinched. And those who are pinched the most will now be able to squeeze into a seat too small for a human being unable to use the bins above, which will of course be reserved more spaciously for those who pay more. We see this as well in the food industry, where those who can and will can buy organic food or natural food, they get better food, you see, because it hasn't been sprayed with horrible pesticides and insecticides and using fertilizer that has all kinds of side effects. That's what's left for the mass of people who can't afford the more expensive food. It's like buying more expensive natural clothing, etc. This is not a criticism of wanting to have good food, organic food, of course, but it's a criticism that restricts these things that are healthy for all of us to those able to pay. That's a unique contribution of a divided society which these airline cheap fares are all about. This isn't a service to people. It is a delivery of a sub quality product to people who have been hurt in this economy and can't afford to buy the quality, the decent, the safe. My next update is one that I just have to tell you about. This last week marked the first visit of a foreign leader to our new president, Donald Trump. The name of the leader, Theresa May, and she's the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and she's here because her economy is falling apart. A year ago or so, the people in Britain voted to leave the European Union. This has all kinds of consequences because the British economy depends on its economic relationships with the rest of Europe as much as it depends on anything. And they weren't prepared for this. The Conservative government didn't think it would happen. The Conservative government was overruled by the British people and there's been Russia real trouble ever since the value of the British pound fell. The prospects for the British economy are grim in many dimensions. So she's here trying to figure out what she can get for saving Britain from a new president. Likewise, we have a new president in this country who reflects the massive disaffection with the old establishment, Republican and Democratic alike, based on economic results. The that show a tiny percentage of the people, 1%, doing really well and everybody else nearly in trouble. So we have two economic basket cases more or less getting together their two leaders. So you have to really be amazed. It kind of takes your breath away to hear the press release coming out of these two governments about their meeting. It turns out that Prime Minister May and President Trump are going to be talking about a wonderful new alliance between the United States and the United Kingdom that will allow the two together. Here we go. To lead the world. What? Lead the world? You can't run your own affairs in a reasonable manner. There's turmoil in both your countries. This is the least popular president to take office probably in our history. The opposition to him begins the first minute he takes office. And this leader in Britain is rollicking around trying to cope with an out of control economic decline. They're going to lead the world. This is a wonderful example of politicians not only out of touch, but so far out of touch that they're downright delusional. And I guess they believe that by saying such junk we're all going to be taken in and imagine that the meeting of Trump and May is about leading the world. It's about saving their respective political careers amidst an economic crisis of larger and longer lasting than they ever imagined. Next item. And I apologize for focusing on President Trump, but that is much of the news these days. In his inauguration speech, he spoke about carnage, about problems of the American economy. And certainly, as you know from listening to this program, there are plenty of those and, and many of them are not getting any better. And then he did a classic move done by leading politicians in capitalist economies for many years. He blamed not the economic system, not the way we organized production with profit driven employers manipulating the mass of people as workers. No, no, no, no, no. Not a word about. That's not a problem. Of course. What is the problem? Foreigners. You see, foreigners are taking our jobs and a small clique in Washington. He adds that that's always good. Some bad politicians and we can take care of those by replacing them with Donald Trump, don't you know, and we can be harsher with our foreign trading partners and that'll whack the foreigner and that will make everything better. The problem is foreigners and a small clique in Washington and Donald Trump is taking care of both of them. This notion that a few politicians are the problem or that foreigners are the problem, that's called scapegoating. That's called running away from the problem of your own system, being unwilling to look at it for clues and signs of what's going wrong and what needs to be fixed to or changed or gone beyond. He should know better. Clearly he doesn't. Speaking of not knowing better, let's go to the other side of the ledger. The Bureau of Labor Statistics this last week announced the results for labor union membership in the United States. And it turns out in the year 2016 just ended, the percentage of Americans who are in the labor force and who are represented by or members of a union fell yet again from 11.1% for 2015 to 10.7% in 2016. 2016 was a year in which millions more people in America entered the labor force. But at the same time that our labor force grew, a quarter of a million people who had been in unions in 2015 weren't anymore in unions in 2016. Nine out of 10 workers in the United States are not in a union and are not represented by a union. Here is another system, the labor management system, you can call it the labor organization system that isn't working for working people. The major institution that fought for their interests in this capitalist economy, for decent wages, working conditions and all the rest have been shrinking uninterruptedly for half a century. This is a situation that ought to make all of those who work in labor unions who, who support labor unions, turn inward. You can't just blame the corporate sector, although Lord knows it deserves some. And you can't just blame the politicians, although Lord knows they deserve some blame too. You also have to look at yourself, your own policies, your own organizations, your own priorities, and interrogate them and as to how and what you ought to do differently if this catastrophe does not continue. And why do I call it a catastrophe? Because there are very few institutions that fight for workers interests. Labor unions are one of those and one of the reasons American workers have done badly over the last 40 years in ways now everyone acknowledges, including Trump, including Clinton, including all of them. One of those reasons is the decline, the weakness of the American labor movement. For that to continue is to further undermine American workers. No matter what Mr. Trump can or does do, etc. Etc. That's why it's important to pay attention to what's happening in and by the labor movement. My next update is about something much in the news these Mexico and the relationship between the United States and Mexico, and Mr. Trump's literally never ending effort to heap every kind of blame he can on, on the Mexican people, on the Mexican government, on Mexico, as if it were the big problem for the United States. It never was. It isn't now. This is a game, a distraction. But let's look at what Mr. Trump proposes for you to see just how much of a fakery this all is. Let's begin by assuming that Mr. Trump and the Republican Congress can actually carry through on the problems and the threats as they see them. Apparently Mr. Trump has issued the order to build a wall. Apparently he's going to go through with tariffs, blocking the freedom of the Mexicans to produce goods cheaply there and sell them into the United States, which they have been doing without paying any duty because that's what the NAFTA arrangement passed in 1994 allows them. Let's suppose it all stops that American companies can't or won't produce cars in Mexico. They'll produce them instead here in the United States. And that's what Mr. Trump says is his goal. Well, let's follow the logic. If you produce cars in the United States instead of Mexico, here's one problem you immediately have in if you are Ford, General Motors, Chrysler or any other company, you're going to have to pay American wages. You're going to have to pay American wages that are significantly higher than the wages you can get away with in Mexico, which is why those companies went to Mexico. Not only that, you are now going to face the reality that you have a competition. If you're an American company that's moved your production back into the United States States, you're going to be competing around the world with Japanese companies and South Korean companies and French companies and German companies and Italian companies who are not being forced by their respective governments to do anything of the sort. They will continue to produce cars in Mexico, thank you very much. Picking up the laborers that Americans fire down there and producing cars that they can sell at a much lower price and still make a profit because they are paying Mexican workers so much less. So around the world, where the United States might have thought that they could sell cars, they can't because they can't compete since they've been excluded from producing cars in Mexico. And by extension, Mr. Trump seems to want to prevent that production abroad from happening in China and other countries. So we can expect it to continue. That's going to force American companies pressured to produce here in the United States either to price their cars where they can't sell them. And by the way, that means pricing cars much higher than they now are because you got to pay American level wages. But note two things. Wages in the automobile sector have been coming down because of the crisis of the auto industry. So they don't have to produce cars, pay wages what they once did to American workers. So the impact on the American economy won't be that big. But if it is, if it really prices American cars produced in America at a price that's uncompetitive, then we know what corporations will do. They will substitute machines for people. That's how they'll try to compete. That's how capitalism works. They'll automate. And in the world of automobile production, that means robots. They will replace workers with robots and thereby achieve, they hope, the economies that will allow them to compete with folks that are still producing in Mexico using the low wages. So whatever jobs they might have created here will not in fact be created because of robots. And here comes the best. The world market in robots is dominated get ready by Chinese and Japanese producers. So the American car companies will likely be importing Chinese and Japanese robots to remove American workers. I could go on and on, but Mr. Trump hasn't thought any of that through and clearly hopes we don't either. So that the TV or Made for TV Spectacular Spectacular of doing something to the Mexicans is supposed to make us believe that all of this will work out for working people? It hasn't. There aren't any working people involved in any of this. The few workers who cheer this are fooled by Mr. Trump into not investigating what this all means. Nor am I done. What will happen also is that Mexico may very well be plunged into an unlivable situation there. The combination of American companies shutting down, or even just not coming at the pace that they have been coming in the past, means fewer jobs for Mexicans in the wall that is to be built. Also means that you're shutting off, perhaps to a significant degree, the flow of desperate Mexicans into the United States. Let's see, let's put those together. Fewer jobs for an economy already in trouble and no escape in the form of migration to where the jobs might be in the United States. And let's suppose this is pursued for several years. Mexico is already an unstable society. Millions of Mexicans cannot find work in a real economy and so turned to all kinds of illegal businesses, including the drug trade. Do we really want on our southern border a society in disintegration? We can blame it on them all we want. But what Mr. Trump's proposals amount to is a direct, serious aggravation of. Of an already unstable society. And I won't go into the imagery and the symbolism. A wall like the Berlin Wall, maybe, where desperate people will try to find a new life the way immigrants have always to the United States. But this time there'll be a war and there'll be people shooting at them in case they tried to climb over it. Yes, every day in the newspaper pictures. Really, this is a way to solve your problems. Wow. And speaking of solving problems, President Trump also removed the United States from the tpp, the Trans Pacific Partnership. What an interesting idea. This is part of the notion that the problems of America are about globalization, about the movement of capitalists around the world. Sure, that's part of the problem, but that's only a part. And if you shut that down, you're not solving anything. Let's suppose we have a great transition from globalization to what President Trump calls America First. Let's remember that globalization, we were told, would solve all our problems. It would be the best thing in the world. It would help everybody. It would be a win, win. Remember all of that. We now understand that was a hustle. Globalization, like every policy within capitalism, has winners and losers. And it's usually the winners who are capitalists and the losers who are workers. To believe that that basic story will change when we go from a globalization policy to an America first policy, but bespeaks an extraordinary naivete. Look at the people Mr. Trump has chosen to do his policy it's the richest collection of billionaires ever to be in a cabinet. These are people with long histories of anti worker automation, anti worker policy, anti worker pricing. What are we doing expecting them suddenly to change their colors? Folks, get real. This is a fight among capitalists. Some benefit by globalization a bit more than others. Some benefit by America First a bit more than others. Mr. Trump represents a group who want to go to America First. He's made a lot of common cause with people who say they don't even agree with that they'll fight it out. And the only thing we know for sure is that the working classes who were shafted in the one system are scheduled to get the same treatment in the other. These are struggles that working people do not belong in. Worrying about our problem is a system that tends to screw the mass of workers no matter what the governing government's policy is. What you can be sure is they cannot and will not fundamentally frustrate the capitalist class because that's what put them in power. They can and will support that class, pander to that class, and if that costs the mass of working people, then so be it. That's been the policy of every other political cabal at the top of the system. There is absolutely no reason, looking at the folks gathered around Mr. Trump, to imagine it will go any other way. Last update that we have time for a new study of colleges across the United States that comes out of something called the Equality of Opportunity Project and led by people around Professors Saez and Piketty, whose work on income inequality, I quote quite often. This new report issued last week comes up with an interesting piece of information. The elite colleges in the United States, those that have the highest standards and those are the most selective, it turns out this shouldn't surprise you, but maybe it will. They discriminate tremendously. They take an overwhelming portion of their students from the richest families in the United States, and they take precious few from the majority, the bottom two thirds. Let me give you just the numbers for Harvard. That's a school I went to, so I paid close attention to it. Here's the results for Harvard. Over two thirds, actually over 70% of students at Harvard came from the top 20% of families in the United States. By contrast, the bottom, the poorest, 20%. You know how many of them are in Harvard? 3% of Harvard students come from the bottom fifth. If you're not in the top fifth, you're not going to get even one third of the students at Harvard. And it was typically the same in all of the other elite schools. Bottom line, American higher education privately is for the rich and publicly. Here's one last statistic for you working class schools. The state schools of the United States saw in the 2008-2016 period, the last eight years, a cut in the amount of money spent from 56% cut in Arizona, 54%. Staggering numbers in per student support in in the public higher education for the average in the United States minus 18%. You got it. For the richest, the best education for everybody else, less and less. That's why American Airlines is giving us no frills tickets. Friends, we've come to the end of the first half of this program. Please stay with me. We will be right back.
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Oh father, tell me, do we get what we deserve? Oh, we get what we deserve.
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And.
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We'Re down we go go, go, go we're down we go. Down we fall way down we go. Whoa, you let your feet run W Time has come as we all go down Heaven.
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Welcome back, friends, to the second half of this program of Economic Update, our last program in the month of January 2017. I want to speak with you today about a couple of larger topics that need a bit more time to develop the point. And here I'm responding to really a large number of inquiries that have come from you, emails, letters about topics that you want addressed and that I have prepared segments to respond to. The first has to do with a very basic question. Everybody nowadays is using this term capitalism, as if we all understand it in the same way, define it in the same way, when the reality is we don't do that at all. Let me give you a couple of examples. Does capitalism mean a market economy? Does capitalism mean private enterprise? Well, if you read most American newspapers and indeed many from around the world, you would get the idea that perhaps the most basic definition is that capitalism is about private property and markets and that the only alternative to that is socialism of some sort by which we are to understand public property and planning. In other words, an economy can either have private ownership, that is private individuals own and operate enterprises, factories, stores and offices, or the government does private enterprise, public enterprise. And likewise, we can believe that an economy either distributes resources and products in the market by people, individual private people and companies buying and selling to one another, or the government could plan it and distribute it by act of government and there wouldn't be buying and selling. This is what we are told capitalism is private property and markets and other systems are those who don't have private property and markets. I want to argue against That I want to show you why that's not a reasonable way to explain what capitalism is, nor to differentiate it from. From other systems. So let me begin first, did other systems have private property? And the answer is, of course they did. Let me give you some examples. In slave economies, was there private property? Did private people own slaves? And the answer is yes. There are countless examples of private ownership of slaves in those economies. Did private individuals get to own factories where slaves worked or land where slaves worked? And the answer is an unambiguous yes. So there was private property, even when the relationships in production were those of master and slave, which are completely different from capitalism, which has mostly outlawed master slave relationships, made them illegal as well as virtually absent. So private property can't be what's distinctive about capitalism. And let me turn to feudal societies, the kind of system that existed in Europe, say from 500 to 1500 AD, a long time often called the Middle Ages or the medieval time. For much of that time, in much of Europe, for example, the economy consisted of manners of areas of land in which the dominant influence was that of people called lords who controlled the work of people called serfs. Now, they didn't own the serfs that would have made it slavery, but they had a relationship in which the serf owed them allegiance, loyalty and labor. They protected the serfs from other lords who might have wanted those people to be their serfs. There was a serf lord relationship, but often the land presided over by the lord was his, was his private property again. So we had private property in feudalism. So it's just not true that this is the distinctive quality of capitalism. Not only that, we can go forward, look at the Soviet Union, a socialist society, at least most people called it that for most of the 20th century. And it always had large portions of its land owned privately by Soviet farmers. Yes, they had some collective farms and some state farms that were owned publicly. But the notion that they never had private property is simply not true. In fact, The Revolution of 1917 in Russia distributed land as private property to the vast mass of Soviet rural people. So the notion that socialism can't have private property, that's not true either. And now let's turn to markets. Are they distinctive for capitalism? No. We know that markets existed in slavery. You know how we know it? Because there were slave markets all over the place. Last year, I was very kindly invited by the University of Kentucky in Lexington to go down there and give some talks at the university, which I did. And while I was down there, they took me around Lexington and showed me the old slave quarters and the old slave market, which is a major historical visiting place in Lexington that the community is proud of having kept there as a memorial. And I was much moved by it. But it clearly shows that there were markets in slavery. And in case you don't know, the major product of American slavery, cotton was sold in markets all over the world. So the presence of markets of distributing goods and services by means of a market existed in slavery. It's not unique or special to capitalism, and the same is true in feudal Europe. Feudal manners bought and sold things, and the same was true in the Soviet Union. They had markets all over the place where people bought and sold all manner of things. So presence or absence of market, presence or absence of private property isn't what makes something capitalism. Well, what is it then? It's the relationship between people as they go about producing and distributing goods and services. We call a system slave. If the basic relationship is that of master to slave, where the master owns the slave, that's a slave system because of the relation of the different groups in production and distribution. In feudalism, it's the relationship between lord and serf, which isn't slavery, because the lord doesn't own the serf. The serf has religious and legal obligations to the lord, swears a kind of loyalty to the lord, and the lord swears it to them, and that locks them in a certain relationship, and we call that feudalism. What is distinctive about capitalism is, is then the relationship. And here it is. It's the relationship of employer to employee. It's a contract between two independent units. One offers a wage to the other and the other in return provides labor. That's the deal. That's why there is a wage in feudalism. There were no wages paid because we didn't have an employer, that employee relationship, and we didn't have it in slavery either. That's the distinctive part. So what capitalism is is a relationship of employer to employee. And that relationship in capitalism teaches us a profound lesson that capitalism has a lot in common with the systems before, particularly slavery and feudalism. And here's what they have in common. A very small group of people, masters, lords, employers, are dominant, have the control and amass the wealth relative to the vast mass of people, the slaves or the serfs or the employees. This latter group, the majority, the vast majority, do the bulk of the work. The wealth produced is gathered into the hands of and controlled by the small group, a small group vis a vis a large group, that capitalism has in common with slavery. And feudalism. And that means capitalism is subject to the same tensions and criticisms and revolutions that plagued slavery and feudalism. Why? Because sooner or later, when things go bad, the mass of people figure out that they're locked into a system where they get the short end of the stick. They are the majority, but the wealth they produce goes to somebody else. They are the majority, but the power is in the hands of. Of somebody else. And they figure out that rather than begging as slaves, that the master treat them better, or begging as serfs, that the lord treat them better, or begging as employees, that the employer treat them better, what they ought to do maybe, is change the very system. So slaves got the idea we want our freedom. And serfs got the idea we want our freedom from feudalism. We don't want to be tied to the land, we don't want to have these obligations to the lord. And so they made capitalism in the hopes that this would free them. They broke away in the British revolutions of the 17th century, in the French and American revolutions of the 18th century, and in revolutions around the world ever since. That got rid of slavery, feudalism and some other systems and brought in capitalism as the means of freeing people. And then there was, sooner or later, everywhere, a recognition that this strategy didn't work, that capitalism wasn't freedom, that capitalism didn't fundamentally change the situation of a few people with the wealth and power and everybody else without. It just changed the rules for that system. It replaced master, slave, lord, serf, with employer, employee. So that what remained, if you were going to achieve the freedom that people in all those systems sooner or later felt, was a system that didn't organize production that way, that didn't divide the people who participate in producing and distributing goods and services into a minority with the wealth and power and a majority who do the work. And the only way to do that is to democratize the enterprise, whether it's a farm or a factory, a store or an office, to make it such that we don't have order givers, order takers, that everybody is a part of a community that together divides the work. And if somebody has to be for a while, in the position of order giver and others order takers, we rotate that. So you're an order giver for a while, and you're an order taker for a while, so you don't get locked into either one. So we don't reproduce the lord versus the serf, the master versus the slave, and the employer versus the employee. That's what a socialized or a Democratized or a communalized workplace is all about. Capitalism exists so long as you don't question, you don't criticize, and you don't move beyond yet another small group, power, mass of workers situation. Capitalism didn't change that. It just gave it a new form. It went from master slave, lord serf, to employer, employee. And you can have private property with all of them, and you can have markets with all of them, because that's not what's crucial. What's crucial is the relationship among people as they go about producing the goods and services without which we cannot live. This is an important matter because if you want to solve the problems of capitalism, especially now that it is working so badly for such a large majority of people, we're at the edge of the recognition by people that the problem is the system, not this or that politician, not this or that law or regulation or this or that trade treaty or, or any of the other diversions, deflections, distractions. The problem is the system. People in slavery eventually figured it out and went beyond that. People in feudalism eventually figured it out and went beyond it. And people in capitalism are in the process of figuring out. Dot, dot, dot. Let me turn to the next major topic for today that you've asked me about, the question of jobs. Some of you have said to me, well, isn't it good that President Trump is fixated on getting more jobs for Americans and putting them back to work and all of that? And isn't it therefore even worthwhile listening to him when he justifies restarting those pipelines in the Midwest that so many have protested against and uses as one of the justifications for doing this environmentally disastrous thing, this thing that abuses our long, sad history with indigenous Americans and so on. He justifies it by saying it will create jobs. This is something that has to be confronted in a direct way. Are we supposed to listen to presidents and other politicians telling us that the only way we can get jobs for Americans is to pander to one or another capitalist? Because that's really what we're being told. We're being told we have to pander to the pipeline companies that want to make a fortune off of building those pipelines, because that's a way to get jobs. We have to go with Mr. Trump to destroy Mexico and all that the Mexican workers need and want, because that will help us have jobs we have toyou get the picture. We justify things in the United States by saying it'll get jobs. President Obama did the same thing in the crisis years of 2009 and 10. At the beginning of his presidency, he pushed through the Congress a massive stimulus program. He gave huge amounts of money to all kinds of construction companies and other companies to invest in things paid for by government money. And when asked, well, why did you give it to those big companies, those rich politicians and bankers and so forth, because the mass of people need it more. He explained, this will create jobs. He justified trickle down economics, which is what he practiced, by saying it would eventually produce jobs. This is a peculiar logic, because if you want to produce jobs, if you're genuinely interested in jobs, there's a quick, easy, direct way to do that. And every politician knows it, but they want you not to think about it. How do we do it? Well, let me give you an example of an American president who did it. Franklin Roosevelt, in the depths of the Great Depression, looked around the United States, saw a basic problem of unemployment, and acted directly. Here's how he did it. He went to the richest Americans, the big corporations and the wealthy people. He taxed a good bit of money from them. He. He borrowed a good bit of money from them. And he used that to hire unemployed Americans to do all kinds of useful things. They built many of the national parks that most Americans visit one point or another in their lives. They did some of the first reclamation projects, the first ecological preservation projects in America. They built countless buildings and bridges and roads. They did useful things that we're still benefiting from. And they had good jobs and good incomes. You want to hire people, you want do that? Because that worked real well. There is no need to go through the private sector to make profits for the private sector and then justify it with jobs. That's fakery. This is not about a jobs program. Opening those pipelines is a gift to the pipeline companies. Doing what he's doing with the Mexicans is a gift to the companies that will benefit from doing that. Justifying it with jobs is an awful fakery because it's not about jobs. If you actually cared about jobs, you wouldn't take those routes. Let's be real honest here. If we have a war, a trade war with Mexico, which is sure what it looks like, Mr. Trump has told us not only is he going to build the wall, but the Mexicans are going to pay for it. The Mexican president has said that will never happen and he threatens retaliation, which, by the way, all governments around the world will seriously consider. Retaliation means if they can't sell Mexican produced goods in America, Americans will not be able to sell them in Mexico. And that means the loss of many American jobs. So if you're really concerned about jobs, you wouldn't go in this direction. It's too risky, it's too dangerous. And there are not enough jobs at the end of this process. Why are you doing this? If you care about jobs, provide them. Follow what Roosevelt did. Do it that way. You. It's been done before in America. It worked before. And all of these indirect methods promise much poorer results if they even get those. We should not permit the ideology to govern us that as if the only way to discuss providing work is whether we take this policy of confrontation with other countries or we let the the environment be destroyed or what are we doing here drilling in the Arctic? We don't have to do that for jobs. That's a fake argument and you shouldn't be fooled. And if you're wondering what would millions of Americans who got federal jobs do, let me give you a short list. We have major American cities that are wrecks. The housing stock is a wreck. The infrastructure is a wreck. I'm talking about Detroit and Cleveland and Camden, New Jersey, my hometown, Youngstown, Ohio, and many others. There's lots of work to be done here. I'll give you another example. Instead of befouling the environment with fossil fuels, why don't we green the American economy? Many have proposed that. Do something about the environment that we've spoiled so badly over the first two centuries of this country's history. Give a lot of people work doing something everybody will be healthier for that will save this planet. There's more work to be done than you can imagine. And here's put a lot of Americans to work helping other people around the world. Not threatening them with trade wars, not screaming America first in their faces. No doing something useful for them that will be good for this country too, in the way of goodwill, in the way of solidarity. There's lots that can be done that Americans would be proud to be employed to do. If you care about employment, you would have done it directly because it's the fastest, quickest and best way for us. The pandering instead to projects that make money profits for corporations and then hope it trickles down to jobs that's been a recipe for inequality and failure over and over again. I was sad during the Obama administration with all of that unemployment, that there never once was a massive march in Washington or anywhere else for jobs, not jobs through the private sector. Jobs now for people who need them now, for communities that need those people working now for families that can only hold together if the adults in them. Get a job now. But no, this country of family values don't you know, never put it together, that family values means giving Mama and Papa the adults, a job and an income that allows you to have a family and allows you to have a future. No, no. When you hear justification for something in terms of its being a job creator, you're hearing a hustler, someone who wants you to believe in the jobs precisely because what's being done is not directly creating a job, but in fact directly creating somebody's profit. That's how capitalism works. That's why this system is the problem. Lastly, some of you have said to me, is it really fair to say something like that Trump represents what's good for capitalists and not what's good for workers, no matter what he says? Well, rather than make the argument again, as I've done, I thought I'd read you a few statements made by leading capitalists at the recently concluded Davos meetings of the World Economic Force Forum in Switzerland. And these are taken from the Bloomberg news service that wrote them up. I picked two because I think they're wonderful. The first one comes from the CEO at J.P. morgan Asset Management, J.P. morgan, one of the largest banks in the world and in the United States. The CEO of JP Morgan Asset Management is Mary Callahan Erdose E R D O E S here's what she said in it's going to be a great several years. It's going to be very positive for businesses in the US which should cascade to businesses around the world. Wow. This is double trickle down. Trump is good for US Businesses and that'll trickle down to other businesses. And then, although she doesn't care to say anything, it'll trickle down to everybody else. Mary Callahan Erdos is very happy about Trump. Next, Goldman Sachs, the biggest investment bank in the United States. The CEO there is named Lloyd Blankfein and here's what he offered in an interview on Bloomberg Television from Davos, Switzerland, where he was Here we go. If you look at the policies that Trump has committed himself to, they are quite stimulative and quite market supportive. If you look at spending on infrastructure, lower tax rate and overlapping regulation, they are quite stimulative, far more stimulative than what people were expecting had the Democrats won the election. I think we're going to open it up, Mr. Blankfein said, and final quote, you can call it Dodd Frank as amended. These are happy capitalists and they should make you wonder. Before closing for today, let me remind you that we are supported by truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis. They help us. They partner with us. Please do likewise. Make use of our websites rdwolff with two f's.com and democracyatwork.info all one word democracyatwork.info that's the way to partner with us. Bring up me to your community. Bring this radio program to stations in your area. Send us emails. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Work with us. Spread the word. Make use of what we do here. That's why we do it. Thank you again for your interest, for your support, and I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Sam.