← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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Sam. Saint gonna change. Welcome, friends, to edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Our jobs, our incomes, our debts, the political system that rides on and is paid for by the economic system and how it is interacting with the economy, and also, of course, how it interacts with the future our children face. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and currently I teach at the New School University here in New York City. I want to welcome you to this, which will be the final program of 2016, an amazing year of political and economic upheaval and change. We'll have a bit more to talk about in that regard later in the program, and it's a kind of moment to look back. And I've chosen some of the stories not just because they happen over the last week, but also because they tell us something about the longer perspective of what's happening to the US and the world economies. So let's jump right in. Homelessness is becoming a problem around the world of huge dimensions. I don't know where you live, but here in New York City, for example, you really cannot walk more than two or three blocks on any given afternoon without encountering homeless people. And that's much worse than it was five years ago, 10 years ago. Let's talk a little bit then about homelessness and about how it is being responded to in the United States, with particular emphasis on Santa Clara county in Northern California. But let's take a step back. What basically is the homeless problem? It's very simple. It is the problem of people who don't earn enough money in order to pay the rent to have a home. In other words, the income they get from the work they do. Because most homeless people are. Are still working one way or another, plus whatever social benefits they may be entitled to, whatever welfare they may be able to get, whatever disability they may be on. But these are folks who don't have enough money to pay for a place to live. Okay, then there are really two solutions. Well, let's say three. Solution one, do nothing. Let them lie around the street. Find a tent. Live in the woods, in the subway tunnels of New York where thousands escape the rain. The second option is to give them a decent job at a decent income. So like most other people, they can and will, of course, afford an apartment, which is an infinitely preferable way to live. So you can ignore them and you can solve the problem with income and a job. If they have a job, pay them properly. If they don't have a job, give them one and pay them properly. Then there's a third option. And that is to say, and this is sort of the entrepreneurial way you might say, of dealing with it, these are people who don't have enough money for housing. Okay, can we make housing cheap enough that even with their limited means they might be able to afford it? And that is the direction that a billionaire entrepreneur by the name of John Sobrato, that's what he wants to do in Santa Clara County. Let me briefly describe. He went before the county commissioners, he went before the appropriate political authorities to be able to get some land provided to him upon which he proposes to erect housing for the homeless. Here's where it gets. Well, depending on your point of view, interesting or disgusting, he wants to use old shipping containers and he wants to, and he loves this word, repurpose them. His plan is to build a huge number of them on a two and a half acre plot in Santa Clara county. And they will be a mixture of 160 square foot and all the way up to 240 square feet. The first one, 160 would be for a single individual and the 240 I assume for a couple or maybe a mother with children. What about this idea of a cheap apartment? Well, to get a sense of what it meant, I went to the website of the Housing and Urban Development offices in Washington D.C. that's a cabinet position. That's a very important agency. And they keep track of how many square feet a human being needs. And the records they keep indicate that anything under 165 square feet is uninhabitable for human beings. Okay. Mr. Sobrato, the billionaire entrepreneur's solution for homeless people is to cram them into a space made out of an old shipping container that, that has less square feet than the absolute minimum of unlivability according to the United States government. And he wants praise for this and he wants some subsidies from the local government for this. What a way to solve the homeless problem in the United States at Christmas time. And maybe even, maybe even to believe that you're making a contribution as clearly Mr. Sobrato needs to believe. My next story has to do with how the economic system controls the political system. How can you make sure that a one person, one vote political system where the majority of persons, and therefore the majority of votes are held by the people who are not paid enough to have a home, paid enough to barely make ends meet, paid too little to have the American dream, they've been told to Expect that's the majority folks in this society. How do you make sure that the majority that in the end controls politics doesn't use their political power to offset the results of an economic system that is so unequal, that makes so few people so rich, that creates a billionaire like John Sobrato who's figuring out how to cram the poorest of the poor into less than the 165 square foot minimum of decent human life. The answer to how you control politics is to make the political system incapable of changing the economic system, even though one man, one vote would make it possible. And one way you do that is to exclude people from the voting booth. We heard a good bit about that in November around the presidential election. But I want to talk here briefly about the way that Florida does it. Florida is one of three states in the United States that has the following. If and when you are convicted of a felony and no matter whether you go to jail as your punishment, no matter how well behaved you are in the jail and after the jail, your debt to society may be paid. But in Florida, you can never again vote. Let me say that again, you can never again vote. The number of people in Florida eligible to vote except for a felony they had at some point in their lives is 10 times larger than the margin of victory of Mr. Trump in the presidential race in Florida. In other words, the number of people excluded in Florida is many times larger than what determines the outcome in many elections. But let's go a little further. Who gets arrested for felonies in Florida? A disproportionate number of, you guessed it, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, or to put a direct, clear point on poor people, working people, those are the overwhelmingly majority of people. So what you're doing is excluding a million and a half. Is the number in Florida people from the right to vote. These are people who may have committed a crime, they may have been convicted and they will have paid whatever the penalty was. Why are they not allowed to vote? They have to live with the consequences of what is done politically. They've paid their debt to society. That's what we say, but we exclude them. Why? The vote doesn't hurt anyone. Oh, wait a minute. It could. It could be the vote of poor people, working people, African American people, Hispanic American people. And they might have a lot to say about how Florida and the country works better to keep them out of the voting booth by such a law. Shame is what such a law ought to bring forth. Every now and then I see a film that is so well done in teaching economic lessons that I bring it to your attention and I have one today. This last week saw the opening of a film called I, Daniel Blake I comma Daniel Blake. It's a brand new film, comes from Great Britain. It's British. The director is a very famous director named Ken Loach. L O A. If you can see this film, I advise you to do so. Here's what it shows. A working man, worked hard all his life, has a heart attack, needs to take some time off, say his doctors. Once he has to take time off, he is no longer able to work. While he recuperates he will go back to work. But in the interval he needs to go into a government office to get the supports that are supposed to be available for people through no fault of their own, unable to earn an income. And the film watches the humiliation of this man, the denial of him of the most basic rights of an income and medical care when he has a heart attack. The impact on other people how other people that he encounters likewise get caught in the economy which doesn't have good jobs and income for them. And the political system that doesn't fix the problem. Why? Well, it doesn't allow people who want to need to vote to do that. As in Florida, England has comparable limits on what it allows people to do here. This film with beautiful acting male and female adults and children lays it out for you in a way you will not forget. The film again is I, Daniel Blake by the director Ken Loach. My next update comes from the Reuters news agency. One of the biggest and most well reputed in the world. It did a study stimulated by the scandal of Flint, Michigan. You all I think know about that. To save money in a state that wouldn't provide enough money to the cities within it. Flint, Michigan switched from the water it used to use to the river, the Flint river. And it was contaminated with lead. And that water was imbibed by adults and children. And when children particularly drink lead infected water, it damages their brains. It can delay their development as a thinking person can have lifelong lasting bad effects. Well, the Centers for Disease Control and the federal government because such a hoopla was made, the United nations sent in human rights inspectors. Because right to clean water is considered a human right across this planet. And it clearly had been denied to the people of Flint, Michigan. And $170 million was allocated by the federal government through the Centers for Disease Control to offset to clean up the water for the people of Flint, Michigan. But the Reuters news agency made an interesting decision. Let's Check the records of American water authorities and of the center for Disease Control that looks at these things in the United States to make sure there aren't other communities that are not getting the attention, at least not yet, but that deserve to get the attention because their conditions are as bad or worse than Flint, Michigan. And this last week, particularly on 19 December, Reuters issued a report based on its study in the United States. It found, get ready for this 3,000 areas. And I will quote now. With poisoning rates far higher than in Flint, Michigan, yet many of these lead hotspots are receiving little attention or. Or funding. The total amount of money allocated by the center for Disease Control for the rest of the country is one tenth the amount of money they have allocated to Flint, Michigan. That makes no sense. Over a thousand of the 3,000 areas Reuters discovered have lead blood levels in the children of higher than those in Flint. In other words, it's worse there, but all of them together are going to be getting one tenth the amount of money that Flint did. Why am I telling you this? Besides the horror of the failure of the United States to provide its people with safe water, A human right. I want to stress that because Flint, Michigan protested, because the parents and local leaders there got together and made a major stink about what was happening. They were the greasy wheel or the squeaky wheel, excuse me, that got the grease and the oil. The other 3,000 haven't yet made the demand. And so the Obama administration and the center of Disease Control do what the political system in this country, or usually does. Give a lot of photo op attention to the scandal that erupts while quietly ignoring, as long as they can get away with it, the largest scandal that hasn't yet hit the headlines. What the Obama administration did has been done by the administrations before them. And as we can tell from Mr. Trump with the Carrier Corporation in Indiana and with his famous or infamous tweets, grandstanding fakery to make it look like you're addressing a problem in the exact moment when you're not is what passes for politics in a society whose economic system isn't working for us anymore. And while I'm on Mr. Trump's case, after all, why not? He ran for the office. Here's a story that appeared in the Washington Post on Dec. 22 under the heading Virginia Politics. Why am I bringing it to your attention and what has it got to do with Mr. Trump? Let me tell you. It turns out Mr. Trump is the owner, together with his son, of a vineyard in Charlottesville, Virginia. Yes, a vineyard growing Grapes and making wine. How nice. But here's the problem. It turns out that during December 2016, after Mr. Trump has been elected to be the next President of the United States, he and his son once again applied, as they have for years, to be allowed to bring, get ready folks, foreign workers under H2 visas to pick the grapes, to maintain the vines, to run the operation. They've been doing it for years. They want foreign workers. They don't want American workers. They didn't want to hire local people in Virginia who need it. They wanted cheaper foreign workers who would accept $10.72 an hour for what is often backbreaking work in the vineyards. The same president wanted foreigners. As he runs around the country championing himself, the protector of American workers who will expel the foreigners, he's going out of his way to bring cheap foreigners into the United States. The amazing thing is not that he does it as he himself would say, the amazing thing is that apparently you can do that and nobody calls you on it, even when it's public. Turns out with a little research, that Mr. Trump has hired foreign workers not only for his Virginia vineyard, but for his Palm beach home called Mar a Lago Club in Florida, and so on. Cheap foreign laborers, the preferred effort, and I won't go into what it means, that the president elect is applying to the federal government for special visas to bring in foreign workers. In other words, as the owner of the vineyard, he'll be applying to himself as the president of the government. Should be an interesting outcome. Next, economic update that we have time for a study released on December 24, Christmas Eve, by Lawrence Whitner and carried on the History News Network. Again, the author is Lawrence Whitner, and he reports on a research study produced by the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. The document is called A Tale of Two Retirements. And here's what this document does. Among other things, it compares the retirement for the hundred corporate CEOs whose documents they found where they could track. These are major corporate CEOs, and it got 100 of them. And it asked how much retirement money is going to be available to them. And it edited it all up. And it turned out for these hundred individuals, it's $4.7 billion. Right? That's an amount of retirement money for those hundred people. That is equal to 41% of the American families total retirement. Let me do that again. 41%. That's roughly 50 million families. 50 million families in America together have less money for their retirement than 100 CEOs. Let me get at it. Another way to drive home what the level of inequality is that capitalism in America is now delivering to us. If the hundred CEOs all got the same, that is they got the average of what the total amount is available for the hundred, they don't actually do that. Some get more, some get less. But here's the average that the hundred top CEOs get. $253,000 per month. What is the average Social Security payment to a working person in the United States today? Ready. $1,239. So these hundred CEOs average 253,000amonth. And the average American who's dependent on Social Security gets $1,200 a month. I really don't know what to tell you. Please notice here the inequality is not a reflection of the people's contribution. We're talking about people whose working lives are behind them. These are people in retirement. They've done their job, they've made their contribution, they've carried their responsibilities. Now, in the declining years of their lives, they are to live in a decent way. Yes. No. The mass of people are asked to live on very, very little. And a tiny number are given an amount of money. You kind of wonder where are they going to spend a quarter of a million dollars a month in their retirement, given that they're already wealthy people? There is no justification for this. This has nothing to do with work. These are people beyond their work lives. This is simply a way of organizing the distribution of wealth in such a way that it penalizes the mass of people and grotesquely over funds a tiny number. Last of our brief updates for the day is research done by the junior senator from Rhode Island, Senator Sheldon WhiteHouse. And on December 20, in the publication Inside Higher Ed, that's higher education inside highered.com he reports on what troubles him a great deal, based on his research as a US Senator that the fossil fuel industry, oil, gas and all of that, has decided to do, he says, what the tobacco industry once did, confronted with the overwhelming scientific evidence that cigarette smoking was bad for your health, threatened your life, they got lots of scientists to be willing for big bucks to do research that suggested it might not be that bad, suggested maybe there was something else going on to do. Funny money science, let's call it. And the fossil fuel industry is following suit, trying to muddy the water so that the scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels is bad for our health, bad for the climate, dangerous for the level of seawater, dangerous for our agriculture, bad, bad, bad, and should be replaced by something else. No, no, no. Get in there. Hire a bunch of scientists, give them lots of money and support, to come up with every objection, to stall off what otherwise would be a society listening to its scientists and protecting itself. This, too, is a fruit of a capitalist system that allows private companies to do these sorts of things to protect their profits, no matter what the social cost is. We've come to the end of the first half of this program. I want to remind you that if these stories are of interest, please make use of our websites available to you 24. 7 at no charge whatsoever. Rdwolff with two Fs com and democracywork.info they are ways for you to partner with us, to make use of what we do, to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and to let us know through the email what you like and don't like, what you would like to see us do. Work with us, partner with us, help us expand the reach of all we do. That's the best way for you to be a listener with us and to share the project we're engaged in. Please stay with us. We'll be back in a very, very few seconds. Used to spend my nights out in ballroom. Liquor Was the only love I'd known. But you rescued me from reaching for the bottom and brought me back Being too far gone. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update for this final week of the year 2016. This second half is a time when we can go into more detail around two or three major issues, usually issues that you, in your communications through our websites, have sent in to us, things you want me to look into, things you want our team to research. We welcome all of these emails. We read every single one and and try within the resources we have to respond and in particular to produce some of these longer segments, which, together with the monthly economic update I do on the second Wednesday of each month at the Judson Memorial Church here in New York City. These are ways for us to partner with you, to respond to you. So let's jump into those for today. I begin with infrastructure. There's a great deal of talk, partly as a result of things President Elect Trump has said, great deal of talk about how we're going to see a spurt of spending in the United States to deal with our infrastructure. Well, let's first be clear what that means. Infrastructure is the roads, the railroads, the harbors, all of the mechanisms that make it possible for a modern economy to function. You might think of the economy as factories, offices and stores and it is indeed the case that those are important parts of the economy, but they have to be linked together with roads and railroads, with delivery systems for gas and oil and water, with harbors that allow for shipping, with all kinds of other structures that make it possible for the offices, stores and factories to function. And it turns out that we're going to be spending on infrastructure because we've let our infrastructure go. Businesses, you know, take care of their office, their factory, their store. They have to, or else their business dissolves. But we rely on the government, by and large, or at least we have in the past, to deal with much of the infrastructure, our harbor system, our road system, and indeed our rail system, which was once private, but is basically a public event now a public enterprise. Well, let's first then examine why our infrastructure has been badly neglected, why so many of our bridges are not safe, why we have disasters like the Flint water catastrophe that we referred to in the first half of today's program, and so on. Here's the politicians. In our capitalist political economy, politicians are in a very strange place in our society. The business community wants politicians to help them, to give them subsidies, to give them orders, and to maintain the infrastructure, to maintain the roads, because a business needs to have stuff come in and needs its products to be able to be shipped everywhere in the world. It needs harbors for that reason. It needs the infrastructure because otherwise it's hobbled. And it wants the government to deliver on infrastructure. It wants the government to deliver subsidies and orders and all the rest. And the mass of people, they want those things too, for themselves. They want the government to provide decent medical care. They want the government to provide public schools. They want the government to provide, you get it, the police department, the fire department, the social work department, and so on. Everybody has demands on the politicians. Okay, well, where do the politicians get the resources to meet the demands? And the answer? Taxation. At least that used to be the answer. You tax individuals and you tax businesses to raise the money to provide the services that businesses and individuals want. That's the logic. The problem is that we live in a society ripped apart by the conflict between business on the one hand and the public, the working people on the other. It's not the only division, but it's a big one. And here's how it works when it comes to politics. Business would like the working people to pay the taxes so that the government gives business to the services they want. And the people, the working people kind of want the opposite. They'd like the businesses to pay the bulk of the taxes and the services to be primarily aimed at what the mass of people need, good schools, etc. How does this get worked out? Not very well. And that's why our infrastructure is is in trouble. Because here's what happens. Politicians try to appeal to the public by providing services, or at least appearing to without taxing them, because that's what people want. And the politician who promises it can often defeat the politician who more honestly says, that's a game, that's a hype, that's a hustle. I'm not doing that. The honest politician is often outflanked by the crook who promises and doesn't deliver. How can a politician in capitalism deliver to the business community what they want and to the mass of people the public services they want without taxing accordingly? That politician who can pull it off is popular, gets votes. Businesses give that politician money to run a campaign and the masses give that politician votes because he delivers or appears to what they less taxes to pay, more services to get. How does a politician do that? Well, honestly, there isn't any way. So how do they do it? Dishonestly, Two ways. Number one, instead of taxing, they borrow. Well, you can't borrow from the mass of people. They don't have any money to lend to the government. So where does the government go when it borrows? Rather than tax, it goes to the corporations and the rich. Those are the ones who have the money that a government can borrow when it borrows. So let's see how this works. The politician says to the corporations and the rich, I'm not going to tax you. That's how you get popular with corporations and the rich. Not only am I not going to tax you, but I'm going to come hat in hand and borrow from you the money that I'm not taxing from you and I'm going to borrow it from you. I'm going to keep it for a few years to do what I could have done with the taxes if I had taxed you. And while I'm doing it, remember, I'm going to pay you all the money back that I'm borrowing from you. And while you're waiting, I'm going to pay you a nice hefty interest every year. In other words, the politician does the corporations and the rich a double favor. He doesn't tax them and instead borrows the money from them. Any rich person or corporation asked to choose between a politician who taxes you to do what the government ought to do versus a politician who says, I won't tax you instead, I'll borrow it from you, pay you it all back and give you interest. That's an easy choice, friends. And so we have more and more government debt in our society because it's the convenient political hustler's plan. But we're not done. Let's turn now to infrastructure. The politician who doesn't want to tax people, that's why he does this borrowing from the rich wants to deliver to the mass of people basic services, public schools and all the rest of the. But he doesn't want to have to tax them for that. Plus all the other things he's supposed to do, like maintain the infrastructure. And maintaining the infrastructure is an easy thing to save money on, because who knows exactly how much money needs to be spent this year on keeping up the roads and bridges. Politicians long ago understood you can let that go. You, you can save money, you don't have to spend it on infrastructure because nobody immediately feels it. It takes years for the road to deteriorate, the bridge to deteriorate, the rail bed to fall apart, et cetera. And by that time the politician who has saved money and therefore didn't have to tax the masses for it, by the time you figure out what they didn't do, they've gone on to higher office. They're not there anymore. They've left the problem to later politicians. So that's what politicians do, they borrow instead of tax, and they let infrastructure go. That's how our system works, folks. It's a system in which the big businesses are very happy, they get the best of the deal, they don't have to pay the taxes and instead they lend the money to the government. And the mass of people who can't afford any more taxes, who have no money to lend to the government, are told, okay, I'm a politician, I won't tax you anymore. And they're not told that this is done at the expense of the infrastructure until the car they're driving in falls through the crack of the bridge and they drown in the river or their children are shown to be drinking lead based water. Wow. So now we have a crisis of infrastructure. And now the worst of this story I have to give you. The great plan emerging in the United States and also by the way, in our northern neighbor Canada, is to solve the immense problem of decades of neglect of the infrastructure by the politicians put into office by the corporations and the rich who dominate our political system. As anyone who pays attention knows, their failure for decades is now going to be corrected by and Let me tell you what this means. Public private partnerships being put forward by Mr. Trudeau, the leader in Canada, and by Mr. Trump, the President elect here. We're going to get partnerships. The government, together with private enterprise, are going to be given contracts to rebuild our roads and our schools and our networks and our harbors and you name it. Well, what's the economics here, folks? It's very simple. If the government taxes and uses the money to build the infrastructure, that's the end of the story. The infrastructure has been built with taxes. We all get to use the roads and all the rest. But if it isn't done with taxes, if it is done in a public private partnership, well, the private only participates in this partnership if it makes money. In other words, it won't be enough to build the highway, to fix the bridge. You're going to have to make that into a paying proposition because the money contributed by the private sector is an investment for which they want a financial return. And across America, where these partnerships have been going on for quite some time in various parts of the country, not on the scale Mr. Trump suggests, but they've been going on. We know the result. The rate for your water goes through the roof. The costs of all the other infrastructure that are privately invested in likewise go up. Not because you need that money to have the infrastructure, no, you need that money to provide a profit to the private investors in the infrastructure. And let's remember, they're only there because the politicians serving big business and the rich didn't tax big business and the rich, had they taxed them, they could have maintained the infrastructure and this whole sorry mess would not be on us. Big business wins twice. And the rich, the people they make rich, they win twice, too. Maybe actually three times. Number one, they don't get taxed. Way back when the infrastructure should have been maintained. Number two, they got to lend to the government at hefty interest rates the very money that those politicians didn't tax from them. And then, number three, today they get to make money investing in the infrastructure their tax evasion now requires us to repair. That's how capitalism actually works. Not the textbook, not the rotarian speech, not the glib politicians silly remarks. Now, this is the reality of a system that doesn't work for the vast majority of people and is ripping us off as we speak. Well, then, let me conclude today's program by talking about something many of you have asked me to talk about, which is developing an alternative economic system or one that wouldn't work. The way we document every Week. This capitalist system does. What's the next system? Where can we go? What alternative can we pursue? And as many of you know that listen, I am an advocate of an alternative system that we ought to try, that we ought to experiment with and that we ought to discuss in a comparison with the capitalism we have. And the system I'm talking about is worker co ops, a way of arranging the organization of stores, factories and offices for profit. Not for profit, doesn't matter. To operate in a different way and thereby to change our society. A worker co op is a simple idea, it's a thousand years old. Human beings who work in an office, a factory or a store are a community. And they're to run their community democratically. One person, one vote. What happens in the enterprise is decided by a majority of vote of everybody who's involved there, together with the surrounding communities in a co respective sharing of decision making. Some of you wonder, well, how could that be done? Well, you know, the answer to that question is to remind you how capitalism got going. Once upon a time, for a thousand years in Europe, there was no capitalism. The system was feudal. You had landlords, you had serfs, there was no individual hiring people, there were no people who hired themselves out. If you were a serf, you were born on a piece of land, you spent your life working on that piece of land, you died there, you, your children stayed there, et cetera. You were supposed to be loyal to the lord of the village in which you lived. Nobody hired people for a wage, nobody got paid a money wage, none of that. So we know that capitalism, the system we now take for granted and live with, had to emerge from a system very different from it. How did the early capitalist enterprises get going? How did somebody come into possession of money and find somebody else who had nothing and was willing to work for that first person to get some wage paid to him so he could live, so that the person who hired him had some reason to do that. How did that all get worked out? Well, here's the individuals who didn't find a place that in European feudalism they were neither lords nor they were serfs. They had to find a way to live. Who were some of these people? Well, if I had time, I'd give you the whole history. It's very interesting. Some of these people were folks who weren't Christian. Europe at that time was mostly Roman Catholic, the dominant religion for most of the feudal period until the 15th and 16th centuries. And in this Roman Catholic Christian Europe, you could be a serf or a lord if you were a Christian. But if you weren't a Christian, neither of those positions was available to you. Suppose you were a Muslim. Suppose you were a person without any religious affiliation, an atheist. Suppose you were a Jew. Suppose you were one of those tribal groupings, gypsies and others that were always around in Europe. You had to find another way to live. You weren't a lord and you weren't a serf. Well, what many of them did is become peddlers. Find something in one area that's relatively cheap, fill your bag with it, walk 50 miles to where it wasn't cheap, where it was scarce, and sell it for more than you got it. What we nowadays call merchants, people who live by buying at one price and selling at a higher price. You could accumulate some money. That way you could survive. There were all kinds of other ways people survived. Well, that was part of the story. Here's another part of the story. What do you do if you're a serf and you have some land in a village and you deliver part of your produce to the lord, that was called a rent. And part of the time you live off of the produce of your own peace that you raise with your family. Well, suppose you have one son and that's all, and he inherits your little peace. And so it continues, End of story. Suppose you have two sons women were not allowed to inherit, so they're out of the picture. No matter what you had, they went off and got married. But your second son had a really big problem because feudalism was organized so that the land of the adult, when the adult gets too old or dies, passes to the first. The oldest son, the second son has no place to go. The second son is now desperate. He has to leave. He's not entitled to the land. He's therefore not a serf and he's not a lord. He's just the second or third or fourth son. He can go and find one of those merchants and they can cut a deal with each other. I'll work for you, says the second or third or fourth son. I'll work for you. You give me enough money to live and you can have what I produce for you. It's yours. And the merchant, the guy with the money who's been peddling, says, wait a minute. Instead of buying stuff at a price and selling it at a higher price, I can hire these desperate second and third sons, set up a little workshop here in the corner and produce this stuff and sell it, and I'll make more money that way. That's the beginning of capitalism. Well, how does other money get brought into it? Hundreds of ways. A landlord seeing this begin to develop can say, okay, I'll give you some money Mr. Capitalist, you got to give me a bunch back. But you can take the rest and make even more money by hiring these desperate people coming off the countryside. In other words, capitalists had to find ways, hook or crook, this way that to assemble the money to build the capitalist system. Along the way, as they became more numerous, they began to look to the governments in their societies for help. And the governments were often persuaded, sometimes with violence, sometimes without, to help. So capitalists got a good deal, capitalists got a subsidy, capitalists got some help, capitalists got a canal built where they could use the ships to bring their inputs in and to sell their output. They became the system that slowly challenged and eventually overthrew the the old feudal system. That's how it worked for a long time. You had feudal and capitalist side by side, working together, buying and selling goods from one another as the system progressed. Why am I telling you all this? Because basically a parallel story is now unfolding and needs our help. Namely the emergence of worker co ops as an alternative sector of the current economy. A non capitalist sector, a place where decisions are made democratically by everybody and therefore the decisions are radically different. A capitalist has reason to shut the factory here and go 1,000 miles away for cheap labor. But a factory run by the workers inside it would never do that. They wouldn't self destruct like that, would they? They would maintain their jobs. They wouldn't be applying for cheap visas for low wage workers. They wouldn't be doing a lot of the things we see going on around us. And how would they accumulate money? Well, before I give you some of the ways, let me develop a basic principle. There is every right for worker co ops to demand of the American government, or for that matter of any government, a level playing field with their capitalist competitors. For hundreds of years governments have been subsidizing, buying from building roads to and from developing the curriculum in schools for the workers of capitalist enterprises. It's long overdue for the government to do the same for the alternative worker co op so that the people can see how these two systems work. Just like people at the end of feudalism could compare the feudalism they'd known for a thousand years with the new capitalism emerging within those societies. We ought to have the same freedom of choice, ability to observe two systems that work very differently so we can decide which ones we want in what proportion in our society. There should be no hesitation. There's nothing false or special about worker co ops wanting government subsidies. Money from the government to help these worker co ops get going. Orders from the government so these worker co ops can sell their products to a reliable buyer. Curriculum teaching young people how to work in a cooperative way, in a democratic way, in an enterprise. Schools with different curriculum, different kinds of emphasis. And where would the money come from? The government can provide a lot of it, but not just the government. Suppose there are churches that see the value to their commitment religiously to having democratic workplaces. The churches can raise the money. The Protestant church raised a good bit of money for early capitalists because the feudals were tied more to the Roman Catholic Church. There'd be nothing wrong with progressive churches becoming part of such a movement here in the United States right now. Labor unions could begin to provide money to build such enterprises for their own members. The United Steelworkers in the United States is beginning to move in that direction. Laws should be passed to make it easier for banks to make loans for worker co ops to get going. Workers themselves can pool their money and ought to be given tax advantages just like capitalist enterprises get for doing so. There are hundreds of ways that worker co ops can and will find ways to raise capital. Are there difficulties along the way? For sure, as there were for the capitalists who had to do the same thing to raise money. They solved the problem. So can we. The question is, do we have the political and ideological commitment to build this kind of alternative sector when we know that the capitalist system isn't working for most of us? It's long overdue. It's time. Thank you so much for your attention. I want to thank truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis that has been a partner of ours for quite a while and to once again invite all of you to use our two websites, rdwolfwithtwofs.com and democracyatwork.in FOX, as ways to partner with us, to follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, to communicate with us, to help us find more radio stations to carry this program to bring me to your area as a speaker in any way. Let us know how you might want to partner with us. We're waiting to hear from you and we will respond. I look forward to talking with you again next week. It's.