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- [00:10]
A
Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, incomes, debts, our own, our kids. I'm your host, Richard Wolff, been a professor of economics all my life, and here I am offering economic updates each week. I want to begin by talking about a peculiar similarity between Britain and the United States. These are the two economies whose capitalism crashed back in 2008. As if that weren't bad enough, these are two economies who had a similar history in the previous 30 years of growing inequality between a shrinking group of people that are very rich and a mass of the working class that is in ever harder and more difficult circumstances. You might have imagined, after a period of declining equality, after a crash in 2008, and after the hard times in the decade after that, that these two societies would face that they have an economic system that isn't working for most people. But they didn't want to face that, or let's say the people in charge didn't want to. They needed to distract the mass of people from the obvious problem, fundamental problem of their economic system. So in Britain, they managed to come up with something to distract everybody, the momentous question of whether they'd be in or out of the economic unity of Europe, Brexit. And they had been obsessing about it for the last three years. And here in the United States, since The election of Mr. Trump, itself a product of a capitalism that's not working for most people, found another distractionrussiagate, the Mueller investigation, something to keep people focused on something other than the economic system that is their number one problem. Both societies need to put this away and focus on what is their real issue. Let me turn next to the update about the city of Chicago, which is engaged in a struggle around the labor of human beings, which is another sign where the economic problem is coming to the fore. So let me begin by celebrating, in a way, the courage, the strength, the determination of the musicians who make up the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. On the 10th of March, they went out on strike. They were not going to allow that orchestra to take away the kind of pension they've had for 50 years, a defined benefit pension, and substitute the much riskier defined contribution. And they were not going to allow their salaries to fall further behind than they already are. Other major orchestras. And when they could not get an agreement, and let's be clear, who do you get an agreement from, if you're part of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra? From the richest people in Chicago who sit on the board of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which is how you get there by being part of the city's elite. They want to have their fancy orchestra music. They just don't want to pay for it, which is their approach to everything else in life as well. And the Chicago musicians won't do it. And imagine even more interesting that on the 1st of April, the musicians joined the graduate students and teaching assistants of the University of Chicago, excuse me, the University of Illinois at Chicago, on the picket line at the university, showing that musicians and students can make a worker student alliance. Isn't that interesting? To fight for the benefits and rights of working people everywhere. Hats off. Something is happening in Chicago which used to go by the name class struggle. How interesting. And as if that weren't enough, another celebration for Chicago. This one goes to the Chicago City Council. They passed a new rulemaking it illegal to perform wage theft. Here's what that an employer hires people when it comes at the end of the week on Friday to pay them. He's busy. He can't make it late to the meeting. He didn't have enough money in the bank account. You know the story. And then time passes and the workers try to get the money that's owed them, but he's busy again, or he's traveling or he can't get there. In effect, the wages have been stolen. If they're lucky, they'll be paid late, which steals money, too. If they're unlucky, they'll never get paid. Who's the greatest victim of this? Immigrants. Why? Because the employer has them over the barrel. They dare not go, if they're undocumented, to the police or anywhere else to get help for fear they'll be deported. Even if they have the right, they don't want to have trouble with the authorities. They're new citizens or they're newly entitled to work. So he's got them. He's got them in a place where he can steal their wages, not pay them, and they can't do anything about it. Now, the effort to get this bill through was opposed by the business community, whose lobbyists worked hard against it. But they failed, and the City Council acted. Compare that to other states. For example, Florida, which passed a law recently at the state level forbidding cities to do for their workers what Chicago just did. That's how desperate businesses are. If they can't stop wage theft at the local level, they'll try to stop it at the state level. And given Mr. Trump, they'll for sure be working on it at the federal level. But Chicago won't have it. So Chicago is becoming a place where the struggle for working people to be treated properly is taking on a new kind of solidaristic motion. And that is something important for the whole country. I want to turn next to a study from Stanford University that shows yet once again what goes on in the schools of America. It shows that students from low income neighborhoods across the United States are systematically behind the students from high income neighborhoods across the spectrum of public schools. And the difference isn't three to six years behind is the finding of the Stanford study. And you know what this speaks to so called meritocracy. Here's what you give a job, you say to the one with the most merit studied. A lot knows a lot does well on tests. But it turns out that how well you do on tests has been now measured by Stanford. And it is shaped not by what you know, but by the circumstances in which you grow up, the help you get or don't get, the books you see or don't see, the educational experiences that are given to you or denied to you. You want to do something about merit? Change the economic situation of the mass of people and you'll see merit like you've never seen before. Otherwise, giving rewards to people based on merit simply validates the inequality built into our system. I want to turn next to this proposal for a Green New Deal and likewise the proposal of Medicare for All. It's been put forward in various forms by many of the candidates for president emerging in the Democratic Party. And I want to talk about how the business community and the Republicans have reacted. Basically, they've had two ideas. One, that it's very expensive, and number two, that it's elitist, that the mass of people don't really care about ecology. And here is a program for a Green New Deal to improve something that only elite people would be interested in. I want to talk about all of this. First, the notion that it's expensive. You bet it's expensive. But when you care about something and you recognize how important it is, you recognize the need to spend on it, even if it's expensive. Bailing out the biggest banks of the United States in 2008 was extremely expensive in the trillions of dollars, way more than the Green New Deal is going to cost. But nobody in the Congress said boo the leading Republicans. The leading and Democrats rushed in. The issue of expense was not relevant to the important thing of bailing out rich corporations and their shareholders. How come that doesn't apply to the Green New Deal? How come it doesn't apply to Medicare for All let's take a look at these programs. You improve the environment, you're improving the health of everybody. You give everybody Medicare, you're improving the health of everybody. That makes workers more productive, that makes families hold together, that makes the society work better. And it saves a ton of money in medical care because you've taken care of people from the beginning of their lives. That's why every other industrial developed country does that provide medical insurance for everybody. Not out of the goodness of their souls, but out of the practical benefits. They aren't held back by a medical industrial complex that monopolizes medical care and insurance and squeezes it for the maximum amount of profit it can get. We even know little details. If you improve the environment, the paint on your house does not wear out as fast. Neither do the tires on your car. The extra expenses we all have because we don't take care of the environment not only kill us physically but cost us a mint. As does the lost work time of sick people. As do the insurance costs of taking care of. Let's stop being narrow minded. Let's stop being held hostage by the profiteers, the doctors, the hospitals, the drug companies and the medical insurers held hostage by them so they can charge us more than anyone in the world pays for medical care and give us a mediocre result. Let's have Medicare for all and let's do a Green New Deal because it's better for most of us. It's only held back by the profits of a few. Here's my last economic update that we'll have time for today. I want to call out Kentucky, Arkansas and five other states. They have been going for waivers from the federal government that would allow them to do the to pay people, to cover people, excuse me, with Medicaid only if they work for their benefits. We're not going to help the sick person with a Medicaid covered treatment unless he or she works for it. The mere fact that they're sick and that they're fellow Americans won't do. I'm not going to talk about because I'm going to go over the line how Christian quite you might be if you relate to a sick fellow human beings in that way. I'm not going to help you unless you work. But I want you to see the utter unfairness of this. We as a society provide public schooling to every child in this country. Do we make their parents work for the benefit of a free public school? No.
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Wow.
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We provided corporations with bailouts in 2008. Did we say to the Executives of the banks and the corporations. Hey, you have to clean up that empty lot next Saturday or else we're not bailing out your bank. It didn't even occur to us. Every church, every synagogue, every mosque in America is subsidized by the federal government. They are delivered public services, garbage collection, police protection, fire protection, cleaning the air, maintaining the city's infrastructure that's given free to all of the institutions of religion. Do we make the local minister, rabbi, imam, go out there and sweep up on Fridays to get the benefit? The only reason we do that to poor people is because we want to punish them. That's the attitude, and it's the attitude of a federal government under Trump that is beginning to become, and this is a language I do not use, easily fascistic. The fascism is not just in the cozy relationship between business and government. It's also in the demonization of people who are really in that position that used to be called there but for the grace of God go I. People not that different from you and me, but who need some help, like our children need an education, like we have to have a public park to have a picnic in. We subsidize those activities. We don't punish people who need them and use them unless there's something wrong with us. We've come to the end of the first half of Economic Update. I want to urge you to stay with us for a remarkable interview having to do with the economics and politics of what's going on between the United States and Venezuela. But before we do, I want to remind you, please make use of our websites democracyatwork.info and rdwolf with 2f's.com. please subscribe to our YouTube channel. It is an important service to us and costs you nothing but the click of your mouse. And finally, as always, let me urge you to communicate to us through our website. Click on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram icons to follow us that way. And our special thanks, as always, to the Patreon community. That is an enormous source of encouragement and support for all that we do. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. It is my pleasure today to be able to talk about one of the most important foreign issues confronting the United States. United States. Not to speak of what's confronting the whole Latin America by virtue of what we're going to talk about, namely Venezuela, all the things going on there, and all the things actioning or activating the relationship between the United States and Venezuela, and therefore, indeed touching all the world. With me is my guest, Professor George Ciccarello Martin. He's a visiting scholar at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. He previously taught at Drexel University, San Quentin State Prison, and the Venezuelan School of Planning in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela. He is a co author of the Duke University Press series Radical Americas, and he's the author of three books that brought him to our attention. We Created A People's History of the Venezuelan Revolution, Building the Commune, Radical Democracy in Venezuela, and most recently, Decolonizing Dialectics. George, if I may call you. So thanks for coming.
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B
Thanks for having me, Rick.
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All right, let's jump right in and start us off by getting us all on the same page. Give me a thumbnail sense of what the last 20 years of Venezuela have been all about.
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Well, you, of course, are speaking of the emergence of Chavismo, the development of this radical movement known as the Bolivarian Revolution. But I often emphasize the fact that you have to go further back than those 20 years. You have to look at a century of oil development. You have to look at the fact that that oil money was not reaching the Venezuelan people. And you have to look at a mass explosion now, 30 years ago, known as the Caracasso, a riot that lasted up to a week across the country and which created a sort of breach in the political space of Venezuela that allowed then Hugo Chavez and revolutionary movements to push forward and to develop and to struggle to build an alternative vision for Venezuelan society.
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A
So you'd say it really is the fruit of a hundred years or more.
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B
Absolutely. And it's the fruit of movement struggles. Right. This was not about an individual that showed up with some good ideas. It was an individual who was the expression of revolutionary movements.
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It is obvious, I think, to most of the world and even to a good part of the United States, that first the Chavez government, now the Maduro government have been targeted by both Republican and democratic leaders in and out of office to be pushed aside, overthrown, dismissed. And I think for most of us, the interesting question is why haven't they succeeded? What has prevented such a long lasting. I mean, the original effort was to overthrow Chavez. He was whisked out of the country. He was basically kidnapped. They had to bring him back. What's going on to help us understand, not so much the effort to overthrow, since that's an old part of America's history, Latin America being the receiver of this effort by the United States. But the really interesting question, why hasn't it worked?
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Absolutely. I think, and I think you're right to say that this is a bipartisan effort. Right. There's been an effort by Hillary Clinton calling Chavez a dictator. Right. You know, this is the sort of bipartisan effort that allows American leaders to say whatever they want about Venezuela. You also have a rabid Venezuelan opposition. This is not Cuba, where many of the elites left. They're still there and still fighting to take this power back. So you've got this array of forces against Chavismo, and yet you have this resilience, which is very inexplicable if you look at just historically. In 2002, Chavez was overthrown in a coup that lasted two days, and that coup was reversed. Again, inexplicable. This doesn't happen in world history. And how did it happen? It happened because hundreds of thousands of people came down from the hills, took over the city and demanded that he be brought back, forcing sectors of the military to realize that this was really a break with the constitutional order, a break with the demands of the popular sectors. And they realized that if they didn't bring him back, that something much worse would happen. And then you had the oil industry later that year shut down for two months, almost by an opposition lockout disguised as a strike. And similarly, people had no oil. The entire economy ceased to function for almost two months. And yet people lined up, they waited, they were patient, they sang songs, they invented new songs, and they resisted. And they demonstrated an unprecedented resilience because they knew who was trying to overthrow them. We see something similar happening today.
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A
Go into that a little bit. I think my audience, the listeners, the viewers would want to know, how was this maintained? How is this sustained? How was this organized to have the mass of people in the bottom of society, you might say, mobilized enough to thwart the efforts both by the opposition inside that stayed there and their helpers in New York and Washington. How was that done? How did you get the people mobilized so they could defend what Chavismo, what Maduro are trying to do?
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It has everything to do precisely with mobilization. And I think if you look across Latin America, you see other governments, left wing governments in Brazil, in Chile, elsewhere, that didn't understand the need to maintain a constant mobilization and the difficulties of doing so. The coup, of course, continued to mobilize people, to radicalize them, but so too with public policy. And this was not simply about social welfare. Chavismo dramatically improved healthcare, education dramatically reduced poverty, extreme poverty. But more important than that was political participation, the establishment of direct local councils where people could participate and engage in political life. And in planning their local neighborhood development, they saw themselves often as participants in the political life of Venezuela, helping to write the Constitution of 1999, helping to get it approved, and then continuing to mobilize to keep their government in power when they knew that it was under threat. And it was really this constant mobilization that has provided, even amid an incredibly deep crisis that people are suffering today, a resilience that is still surprising to people. So, for example, In January of 2019, the Venezuelan opposition thought that the time had come and they could simply get rid of Maduro through this sort of coup led by Juan Guaido, and that there wouldn't be any resistance. And what they found was much more resistance in the military and in society as a whole than they expect.
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Was there real power then? You're a political scientist. Did power devolve from the top, as is so typical, to the mass of people? Is the giving power to the mass of people who never had it before? Is that the clue? Is that the trick, in some sense, that makes this history different?
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B
I think approaching that is the trick. Right. This is something CLR James said about the French Revolution. He said the masses were not in power, but it was the closest they had ever come. And what existed for a number of years was a productive dynamic where grassroots sectors could mobilize. Even armed militias that were sort of communist militias could mobilize, pressure, make demands, radicalize the government, and push for a much more radical vision of society, which at its sort of conclusion, would mean the transformation of the Venezuelan state, which is an incredibly top head, heavy, bloated oil state, and it's sort of dispersal across societies, the establishment of councils, the establishment of federations of councils and communes, where people would produce what they needed locally, democratically, directly, and would be able to develop a productive autonomy that then could engage with people like Chavez, who supported decentralized power, but who was still, of course, part of a traditional state apparatus.
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So there was a tension then between holding, having radicals in some sense get to the top of the state, but being able to take advantage of that, but at the same time having to devolve power onto lower levels of society, which in a way threatened them too. This was resolved, at least in part, by giving real power lower into the society. Is that correct?
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Absolutely. But it persists as a tension. It doesn't go away. It's something that exists today, so that radical sectors of Chavismo often struggle against conservative sectors of the government, but they're pushing for a vision that even Chavez himself had endorsed, had pushed where he said that popular participation is what chavismo is, and this is what the future of it is. And it really offers the only sustainable alternative to this model of oil development that is creating yet another crisis in Venezuela today.
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It's always an amazement for me as an economist to look at the enormous wealth that Venezuela's oil brought in and then to realize it didn't change the society. It was grabbed by the people in a position to grab it, who entrenched themselves as an oligarchy, all the stronger. It was a terrible waste of a resource. Quickly now, give us a sense of how you think Latin American society, other countries, how are they reacting to what's going on in Venezuela, including the effort of the United States to.
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B
I think we need to understand what's happening today in the context of what's happened over waves of recent Latin American history. So the 1980s and early 90s were this, this period of really ferocious and brutal imposition of neoliberal structural adjustments, forcing capitalist reforms down the throats of unwilling populations, often through dictatorships, as in Chile and elsewhere, but through the ballot box as well. The failure of this neoliberal reform then leads to a wave of reaction against the left wing pink tide, which spreads across and creates a kind of hegemonic bloc across the region that then upholds and supports experiments in Bolivia, in Venezuela and elsewhere. Gives them a sort of supported context. That context is disintegrating. You see coups, quasi constitutional coups in Paraguay and Brazil, elections in Argentina, in Colombia, again returning to the far right. And so you find a situation in which, even if things were going great in Venezuela, the support for that experiment has been disintegrating regionally in no small part due to US interference. So now you have this aggressive right wing, which were, of course the countries that stood up immediately and recognized this coup in Venezuela as legitimate. But this was part of the plan. They were the ones that had planned the coup, that knew that it was going to happen. The so called Lima Group and what it represents is a longer shift, the 10 year historical shift to the right in Latin America as well, which reveals, I think, really the, the fact that this was all part of a regional project that will rise and will fall on a regional level as well.
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I have to ask you this question, even though in a sense I know your answer, but I know it's important in people's minds. American leaders from Mr. Trump on down, US leaders from Mr. Trump on down have pointed to what's going on in Venezuela, particularly their economic development, difficulties as an illustration, that quote, unquote, socialism doesn't work. What's your response to this effort to make that case?
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B
Yeah, I mean, first of all, Venezuela is not a socialist country. I think that's what we need to understand. Venezuela is a country in which an incredibly capitalist country in which certain efforts were made to regulate capitalism, to provide an alternative to capitalism and alternative forms of property. But what you're witnessing is an actual war between different ways of arranging a society. And that war is brutal. For example, you see it in currency controls, you see it in price controls. You see the fact that global capitalism does not accept these alternatives and punishes them. If you set a price control in Venezuela so that people can eat, people will begin to smuggle goods across the border and sell them in Colombia or in Brazil. And that will help to undermine and destroy that economic alternative, which makes the task, I think, very difficult. But we don't point to Mexico, where we see hundreds of thousands of deaths and say that's a crisis of capitalism. We don't point to France, where of course the leadership has a lower approval rating than Maduro and say that government needs to be overthrown. Now, these are things that are only said when it comes to Venezuela.
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And there are other countries trying to do that. Bolivia and others come to mind. Why? The choice of Venezuela is just a bizarre effort to try to mobilize in this country old anti left sentiments and as if somehow they're validated by what goes on there. What's your sense of what's gonna happen? Obviously, nobody can predict the future, but you've been studying Latin America a long time. You've been studying Venezuela, you've written books about it. Give us your sense of where the situation is now and where it's likely to go.
- [27:23]
B
I think the situation in the next months in Venezuela is going to be incredibly difficult. The brutal sanctions that Trump instituted more than a year ago have now been redoubled. So you had a financial blockade, essentially, which makes any international financial transactions very difficult for Venezuela, including oil sales and other imports. And this has been just. The screws have been tightened on Venezuela in this new round of sanctions which amount to an oil blockade. The oil production in the country is collapsing, oil exports are collapsing, and the wager of the United States and blood, bloodthirsty sort of demons like Elliot Abrams who are running this policy. Is that things. And they've said this openly and they've said if we make things bad enough, people will overthrow Maduro themselves. That is their strategy and that's what they're going to be trying to do. So the fact that this coup has been more or less defeated, the Juan Guaidoku, doesn't mean that the long term strategy is not moving forward. And it's going to really rely on the ability of the Venezuelan government to institute measures to preserve the standard of living of the the poorest and keep them mobilized against this imperialist threat. We've seen hints of this. We see Juan Guaido being chased out of a working class neighborhood the other day. There are good signs that people on the grassroots level are ready to resist, but the situation will be incredibly difficult moving forward.
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A
I wish I could continue. We've run out of time, which happens to us often. Thank you very much, Professor George Ciccarillo Marr. I hope others will pursue his work and follow up on these conversations. Thank you all for participating, and I look forward to speaking with you again next week.