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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, incomes, debts, our own, 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.