← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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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 debts, our incomes, those looming down the road, those facing our children in a country whose uncertainty, economic we've always talked about. And now, on top of that, a level of political insecurity that is also arresting in its implications. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life and I currently teach at the New School University here in New York City. I want, as I often do at the beginning of the month to remind everyone that you are invited, whether you live in the greater New York area or whether you might be visiting here, here in New York City, to remind you that the second Wednesday of every month, and that means February 8th in this case next week, I will be speaking as I always do, on the second Wednesday of the month in the evening at 7:30 at the Judson Memorial Church. It's a very old historic church on New York City's historic Washington Square. It's the only church there. You can't miss it. It's really worth visiting both as an attraction and something to see. And of course, it's a chance for us to meet you and vice versa. So if you're in the New York area and you have the time, it's a chance for me to do much more than I can do on the radio in an evening in a setting with people that are there to talk, to, learn to engage with this kind of material. February 8, 7:30, Judson Memorial Church, Washington Square, New York. Alright, let's jump right in. This is a famous weekend, as many of you listening and watching know, because of the super bowl. And the super bowl is something that attracts a great deal of interest, so it attracts mine as well. But since this is a show about economics, I want to talk briefly about about the economics of the NFL. This is the institution, the National Football League, that encompasses, that runs the entire professional football operation in this country. 32 teams competing. They get, just so you know, economics, about $5 billion in television money for allowing their programs to be televised. They also sell billions of dollars worth of tickets, of merchandise, etc. What you may not know is that they don't run in the normal capitalist way. What do I mean? Well, these teams do not get money according to how many tickets they sell or how well they do. Not at all. All of the television money, all 5 billion. And a good bit of the ticket and merchandise money is not distributed to the team that actually sells it to the team that's actually pictured on the tube. The money is redistributed. You heard me right. The money is redistributed among the teams. Teams that didn't do well often get more money. Teams that did very well don't get as much as they might have gotten if they had kept all the revenue, for example, from their tickets and from their merchandise sales. Why is that done? Because these teams have decided that it makes for a better sporting experience for themselves and for their fans to have roughly equal teams equally able on any given Sunday to win a game and maybe even go to the Super Bowl. And so to make it all work better, they redistribute their income. They don't distribute it to each team according to how it does. It's an income redistribution system that the very people who think that's not a good idea applaud when it comes to professional sports. Something like it is done in the other sports, too. Turns out, redistributing income, not making your income depend on the particular thing you do, but on what's good for the whole community. Works in some areas. Something to think about. Maybe it would work in other areas. Next item. Many of you, I assume, also besides being interested in the super bowl, pick up coffee from time to time at Starbucks. No, this is not an adult. We don't do ads on this program. So what am I bringing up Starbucks for? Because I want to tell you the good news experienced by the CEO, the leader of Starbucks, a man named Howard Schultz. And I'll cut right to the key part. Howard Schultz, age 63, has been the leader of Starbucks for quite a while. Stopped for a while, came back in around 2008 to run it again and has been running it the last nine years. And I thought you'd be interested in how much money he was paid over these last nine years as the head of Starbucks. Here we go. Ready? $555.3 million. So I took my little calculator and I worked out what that meant on a weekly basis for nine years, every week, 52 weeks a year, for nine years, Howard Schultz earned in each of those weeks $1.2 million. That's why he doesn't have to buy lottery tickets, because he wins the million dollars every week without buying lottery tickets, which is one thing that differentiates him from you and me. Why am I telling you this? Well, this kind of an income is outrageous. Obviously not necessary for him, not necessary for anybody. But I wouldn't bring it up for just that reason. He's far from the worst in that case. He's not even a billionaire here. He's just gotten half a billion in the last nine years. I tell you that because it's important for us to understand that every time you buy a Starbucks product, you're helping to overpay this man on this scale. And either that upsets you or it makes you proud. That's about you. Next item is an answer to a question that many of you have sent in. You've asked me either is it true that banks can take our deposits under certain circumstances from themselves? Or the same question put otherwise, what is a bail in? Having learned over the years, what is a bailout? So let me briefly explain what the rules are under the Dodd Frank act, which was the reform of regulation of banking that came out of the crisis of the collapse of global capitalism in 2008. Under the new rules, here's how it works. We are not going to bail out failed banks in the future, we say, compared to how we did it in 2008. That's when the government comes in and basically either gives or lends, or usually a combination of both, vast amounts of taxpayer money to get the banks out of the hole they've dug themselves into into. There is so much popular reaction and anger about this, mainly because the mass of Americans didn't get the kind of bailout that the big banks did, that the Dodd Frank bill went through Congress. Banks are trying to undo it now and maybe Mr. Trump and the Republicans will actually do that. But until they do, let me tell you that if the government isn't going to bail out the banks, what happens if the banks hit real trouble? Here's the law. Number one, the shareholders lose their investment. Number two, the banks or others that lent to the failed banks, they lose the loans they've made. They won't get those paid back. But if that's not enough, here it comes folks. If that's not enough, if the taking from the shareholders and the taking from from the creditors of failed banks isn't enough to fix the problem, then yes, the banks can perform what's called a bail in. They can take their depositors money, your money. If they fail, if that bothers you, welcome to capitalism when it's in trouble and what it is prepared to do next item, the Financial Times, a very famous British based newspaper of record in economics, recently did a study of the United States of America and the remarkable health results that recent reports make it possible to talk about. And I found this so interesting that I want to talk to you about it. The article is titled the Huge Disparities in US Life Expectancy in Five Charts, Financial Times data. I don't have time to do much of it, but let me give you the bit of it. They compare 1970 to 2014. That's sort of interesting. That's between, you know, 44 years of records showing what has happened to life expectancy, how long people live, and how much money is being spent country by country on health care. Around 1970, the situation wasn't all that different among three countries I'm going to pick out just to look at them. Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They were close to one another in terms of how much they spent on health care and what their life expectancy was. But boy, did things change in the last 44 years from 1970 to 2014. First, let's look at the United States off the chart as to how much money is spent on health care. Over $8,000 per person per year is spent in the United States. By comparison, just so you all know, it is 4,000 very close in both Japan and the United Kingdom. So we're not talking about a little difference. We're talking about a staggering difference. United kingdom and Japan, two highly developed, modern, industrial, wealthy countries, spend roughly $4,000 per person per year on health care. And here in the United States, we spend over 8,000 more than double what they do. Well, what about life expectancy? It is significantly lower in the United States than it is in either the UK Or Japan. We're talking a matter of years, not many years. But for a country that spends twice as much on medical care as we do than Japan and England, to have both England ahead of us and Japan even more ahead of us on life expectancy tells you something about a health care system that isn't working. Next, interesting thing from this Financial Times study. The poorest 20% of Americans from 1980 to 2010. So roughly the same period of time, little shorter, but roughly the same period. The poorest Americans, the bottom fifth, saw their life expectancy drop over those 30 years. I mean, that is an amazing piece of information, both men and women. The life expectancy of the poorest 20% fell over that period. For women, it fell for most women. 80% of women saw their life expectancy fall over the last 30 years. For men, not so bad. Theirs got a little bit better. Very interesting result that men's life expectancy got a little better and women's deteriorated. It may well be that the movement of women out of the Home into the workplace on a massive scale over those 30 years has more than a little to do with their catching up with or men catching up with them in the sense that men's life expectancy got a bit better for, but women's got worse. And here's the last thing that we have time to talk about from this Financial Times study of health in the United States. They tried to figure out why America's life expectancy was lower than that of most countries. And the answer that makes most sense to the scientists they record and the story, and as it's written by the reporters for Financial Times gives the answer very unambiguously. And that answer is one. Obesity. It's an amazing discovery to look at these charts that they've prepared. Obesity, overweight is a serious health problem the United States has. Of all the OECD countries, all 34 of them, I believe, advanced industrial country, the United States has the greatest problem with obesity, number one. Out of all those countries, more than Mexico, Hungary, Canada, Britain, Germany, Ireland, you name it. I thought you might be interested in the comparison with France, a country famous for its rich food. The United states has nearly 4 in 10Americans living listed as obese. Using the same standard, the French have less than 2. In other words, the French obesity problem is less than half what it is in the United States and that contributes well, then poverty, which goes with obesity suggests that an income inequality society that capitalism is, as we document on this program, as the famous research of Thomas Piketty that we've been talking about for the last two and a half years demonstrates, capitalism produces inequality, worsens it. What this study by the Financial Times shows us is that the capitalism that produces the inequality also generates the obesity, which together with the inequality, kills people before their time. It's a serious problem and the system is the problem behind these numbers. Next update, an amazing story from the New York Times, January 26. It's about a discovery behind the big Nike running shoes store in the SoHo section of Manhattan. A famous store that features all kinds of Nike shoe wear and in particular the sneakers that are called Kobe sneakers after the basketball great Kobe Bryant. Turns out somebody found a bag of shoes behind the Nike store. They were obviously thrown into the trash, but upon inspection by this writer for the New York Times, it turns out they were brand new shoes. It turns out even more that surprised this reporter. They had been slashed with razors, so they were unusable, even though they were brand new and there were lots of them in the bags. It led the reporter, Jim Dwyer, by Name D W Y E R January 26 New York Times to look into this whole question. And basically he discovered that corporations, in order to preserve their profits, will not allow goods that they haven't been able to sell for whatever reason to be used by other people who can't afford them. The reporter is clearly aware that that these high quality sneakers could and should provide footwear for all kinds of folks who need them but couldn't afford to pay them. These are things that cost hundreds of dollars often. And that led him to do the research that discovered, for example, given that we are in super bowl weekend, that before every super bowl there's a vast amount of counterfeit stuff with the logo of the teams playing printed on it, which the police often confiscate because it's illegal. And what do they do with it? Well, they destroy it. These are perfectly good hats and shirts and pants and you name it. And it all stemmed apparently from a number of years ago when after Hurricane Katrina confiscated stuff from a Super bowl was given to the suffering people in New Orleans who needed clothing. In the aftermath of that devastation, the companies went ballistic and got laws passed to prevent it. Folks, we live in an economic system, let's be real clear, where the profit motive of corporations means that perfectly good products badly needed by all kinds of people are not provided to them, but are rather destroyed, because that's how you maintain profits. I'm not angry at the companies, you know, because I understand the system, this is how it works. But I am angry at a system that works that way. A system that makes it rational for people to do something that in their hearts they know is crazy and inhumane. Next item. Iron workers. Iron workers local 17. The iron workers local 17, Cleveland were just given. And this is coming to all of us in America these days. That's why I'm reporting on it. Were given a choice. The current workers and the retired workers were given a choice. They were told that there's not enough money been set aside by the employers to cover the pensions that have been promised to these workers. And that even though there's an insurance from the government when this happens, the government now says so many pension funds that they're trying to insure don't have enough money that they're no longer willing to provide the guarantees. So the ironworkers, both those working now and those who have already retired, were given a choice. They were allowed to vote. Do you want to continue paying the pensions now, risk running out and not be covered in the future? Or are you going to Cut your pensions now so that the people getting the pension now will be hurt, but the people working when they retire will at least have something. The workers were given a choice. They voted to cut the pensions for those who get them now so that those who are still working will have something when they retire. That's like being given the choice between whether you want to be stabbed or shot. The goal would be not to be put into this situation, not to agonize over which one those iron workers didn't have the choice. Tens of millions of American workers are in the same situation. They are going to likewise be asked, unless something is radically done in the years ahead, to choose how to suffer a cut in their pensions sooner or later, just like iron workers in Cleveland. Okay, last item that I have time for. My good friend Nomi Prins, who is a former Goldman Sachs banker who has become a critic of all of that, has done some wonderful research and she recently wrote an article called the Goldman Sachs Effect. And I wanted to give you a little bit about that. She begins by reminding us of the inaugural address given by Donald Trump last month in Washington. Here's the line I want you to keep in your mind. For too long, a small group in our nation's capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Now the first thing about this quotation is its classic effort to make the problem be citizen versus government rather than citizens versus capitalist economic system. You know, when you lose your job, most Americans are fired by a private capitalist enterprise. When you lose your home, it's because you've been foreclosed upon by a private capitalist bank. If you have a problem with unemployment and you have a problem with homelessness and most other bases issues in this society, it has to do with your relationship to the employer. You deal with the idea that the problem is the government is a very clever way for the employer class to distract you, to focus your upset, your anger not at the economic system, not at the people who preside over this economic system, but instead at, at government officials. But that's really not the major reason I'm bringing it up. Important though that matter is I'm bringing it up because elsewhere during his campaign, Mr. Trump excoriated Goldman Sachs, a famous investment bank based in New York City. He attacked Hillary Clinton, as you may recall, for taking money from them and giving speeches at high price to them, etc. So I wanted to make sure everybody understood that having made a big deal out of the cabal in Washington distracting us from the business community and having attacked the business community that Mrs. Clinton was hooked up to, what did he do? Well, he has put more Goldman Sachs bankers into the highest positions of his government and than any president ever did before. And four individuals stand out. And I wanted to make sure you knew who they were and how they were connected to Goldman Sachs. First, the chief lawyer for Goldman Sachs, a man named J. Clayton C L A Y T O N is slated to become named by Donald Trump securities and Exchange Commission Chairman. That's the commission of the government that oversees the stock market and all that. That means he was the lead lawyer for Goldman Sachs, number one. Number two, Stephen Bannon, clearly the leading adviser to Donald Trump who recently was named to the National Security Council, who is extremely powerful. He was a vice president of Goldman Sachs before in his life. He became an advisor to Donald Trump. Number three, Steve Mnuchin. He is the new Secretary of the treasury in Donald Trump's cabinet. He was a partner, which is a higher thing than vice president in Goldman Sachs. And finally, Gary Cohn, the leading economic adviser in one of Donald Trump's economic councils who was up to the moment he became named to this, the president and coo Chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs. Right now, Clayton Bannon, Mnuchin and Cohn, four leading folks at the highest levels of government by a presidential candidate who said he was against all that. Okay, we've come to the end of the first half. Let me remind you, this kind of work, these kinds of reports, you can get more information and more like it at our websites, rdwolff, with two F's. Com and Democracy at Work. All one word. Democracy at Work. Become a partner of our. Use these websites. That's why they're there. You can follow us through them on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. You can communicate what you like and don't like. You can invite us to come to your area. You can help us get on more radio and television programs. Work with us. Use this material. Be a partner. We invite you. And we will be a good partner to you as well. Stay with us. We'll be back in a very few seconds with the second half of today's economic update.
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Stay with your arms up in the sky like you want to testify for the life that's been deleted Scream like a rebel's lullaby under such stripes for our souls that we're cheated we will be seen but not be heard Revolution Radio Operational Control. The headline Light off Bulletproof. Give me Cherry Bottles and Gasoline debuts and surgery in the headlines Nicole Ice. Give me a rage like to see the cats in a crowd do you want them around but the ass rise up the slums to the obsolete.
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Welcome back, friends, to the second half of this edition of Economic Update. Because this is the first program of the month of February, I am pleased to remind you all that the first program involves an interview between me and Dr. Harriet Fraad where we talk about the intersections between economics and psychology, an intersection we have found to be extremely important in both of our understandings of what's going on. To remind you, Dr. Harriet Fraad is a mental health counselor and hypnotherapist who practices here in New York City. She publishes widely in a variety of journals, and you can access her work also on our websites, democracy at work. That's all one word. Democracyatwork.info and rdwolf.com and I invite you to pursue, if you're interested, her work there. What we are talking about, what I've asked Dr. Frad to talk with us about today, is the explosive new women's movement that was occasioned by the election of Donald Trump. To be more careful, the whole campaign of Donald Trump, culminating in the election and in the early days thereafter with the pronouncements and so forth in this constantly evolving theater, if I can call it that, coming out of Washington and New York, and in particular what I wanted to talk about, because this is a program of economics, was how this new women's movement must be and already is, showing signs of being significantly different from the one that exploded in the 1960s and 70s, because therein lies the economics of how America has changed. And this is a women's movement that both reflects and then takes that further. So let's begin. Welcome.
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Thank you.
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I'm glad that you're here with us again. I think it's fair to say, and please of course, correct me if I'm wrong, that in the 1960s and 70s, the women's movement of that time tended to avoid the big economic issues, to think of them as somehow secondary or other people's issues, but to focus more on the relationships between men and women, the status of women as citizens in this society and so on, and that therefore it might be fair to say that economic issues, issues women and men share, were less important then than they have become. Is that a fair thing to say, first of all, about the movement then?
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It is very fair, although at the very beginning of the movement, it was often and usually actually started by women of the left who had Been in committees against the war in Vietnam and felt not treated as equals. And the thought was that if we stand up, we at the bottom will bring everyone with us. And there was a class sensitivity that changed.
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This is in the 60s and 70s.
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Yes. Now that changed in part with a lot of money from the FBI and CIA to make it a gender only movement because class is threatening to the capitalist system. They did the same with race. And so that the movement became, under Steinem's leadership, a movement. And she did work for the CIA. But it was a movement to create equality in the economy. And it was a movement and turned out to be a successful movement to create systems of equality within a system of grotesque and ever increasing inequality. We didn't see that at the time. We were naive. As a founding mother, I can attest to that. And it became polarized, that men were the enemy. I remember a big poster in the Women's liberation office of an astronaut man going to the moon. And it said, they took one man to the moon, now they can take.
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The rest of them.
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You know, hardly a united gender movement. And.
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Can I interrupt? Would it be fair to say, because this kind of question came up in terms of civil rights movements, that what women wanted in the 1960s, obviously it's a generalization, was to be let in to the capitalist system, to not be pressed to the bottom, but to be allowed the same range of opportunities within the capitalist system that men had. And that that was somehow became the primary focus.
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Is that reasonable? That's right. There were two foci at first, one which was much more inclusive on class terms. That was we who have had to work because minority men never got the family wage that white men got. We who have to work should not get $0.59 on the male dollar, which is what women got in the 1960s and early 70s. We want equality in pay.
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Then there was equal pay for equal work.
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Pay for equal work. Then for the more privileged women, it was, we want access.
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Break the glass ceiling.
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Break the glass ceiling. And that was an element, for example, still in Hillary's campaign, even though the mass of people are crawling on the floor. So the ceiling seems very far away. But it was more opportunities, more access to the professions, more access to graduate schools. And those have been very successfully impacted. There isn't exact equality, but there's huge transformation. The majority of women, the majority of managers are now women. Women who have neither husbands nor children make more than men. Still, women's domestic tasks that distract now from both ambition and also accomplishment and continuity. In the labor force, but that at first it was much more of a class and gender movement and then became subverted into a gender movement and lost a lot of its power and punch. Now what happened?
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Well, let's just summarize because it's really important, it seems to me. So it became a gender primary movement.
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Yes.
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And it was successful in helping women break all kinds of barriers to opportunities, income, jobs, as part of that massive movement of women into the paid labor force that took place between the 60s and 70s and our time.
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That's right.
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But it didn't question the existing economic system because it was primarily focused on getting women into a reasonable, reasonable access to it.
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Right. Parity with men.
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All right, so many.
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America was in a different position. You know, all the other economies were smashed after World War II, the sophisticated economies. And so that America was a very dominant country and there were many opportunities available. That was before mass mechanization, before outsourcing, before computers, before robots, and mainly before outsourcing with its sophisticated machines that enable it. And it was a time when unionized jobs were well paid. And where there's now about 5, only about, well, there's 35% or no, 80% is more like it. Less people unionized than were then. And so men got much higher salaries that white men could support a family on their wages. Capitalists were not interested in continuing that. And they had the whole world as their labor pool. And they wanted women. Capitalists really won out. They wanted women in the social service sector where wages were lower, jobs were ample, and that happened en masse.
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So if you were, for example, a business person and you wanted to cut the taxes you had to pay, if the government could hire women, and if the private sector could hire women at significantly lower rates than they had to pay men by moving the women into the paid labor force, this would accomplish that they wouldn't have to give the government as much money in taxes because you're paying cheaper workers, women. And likewise, they wouldn't have to use up their profits by paying male wages. They could begin to move the women in who could be paid less.
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But even more, they outsourced those well paid unionized jobs to other countries, People of the world who don't have the ecological standards we do, or the high wages or the health pay or anything like that. And what opened up in the United States, which became more of a service economy than a manufacturing economy, were all the low paid service jobs that men traditionally and even now don't really want very much. The home health aides the nurses aides and the lower paid health professions, the X ray technicians, the radiology technicians, the blood technicians at the hospitals, and health food service workers. These are the two biggest expanding jobs for women, for everybody in the United States. And they are lower paid and so that they could get women into those jobs because still 43% of women are in overwhelmingly pink collar jobs. Now we have to remember another thing that happened, that in the beginning there were the kind of demands that working class women need. Demands for quality universal free daycare and after school care and summer care for children and elder care. Because these have been women's traditional responsibilities. Those got subsumed into wage parity. And so now the thing that holds women back are just those domestic responsibilities.
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Because those were never really.
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Those were never addressed and men were never encouraged to participate in them. That was considered real crap work by the women's movement too. It wasn't. What do you learn from taking care of vulnerable lives? What do you learn and what is the value for creating order and cleanliness? It was part of the debasement of menial labor as well. And so the women's movement didn't address that, the nation didn't address that, and now it is crippling women also. What happened was because the United States used to be predominantly white country, that's changing enormously. And the white male wage could support a family so that women were supported in the home to do childcare and take care of their husbands full time. Cooking, cleaning order, emotional care, sexual services, et cetera. Well, now that men can't really earn enough to provide that, men's wages have gone down uniformly. Women's wages have gone up from the 59 cents on the dollar to 77 cents a dollar. That's not all that, you know, that's not parity, but it's a lot closer. And so men's wages have gone down and they can't support women in the home. And yet, because they got no help and they want to buttress an old fashioned traditional idea of manhood, they want more services in the home. And marriage has basically ended for the mass of people.
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Yes. Before the program, you mentioned this remarkable statistic about children being born. Could you.
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Right. Well, in the late 50s, early 60s, middle 60s, about 5% of children were born outside of marriages. Now it's between 41 and 42% of children are born outside of marriages because women want children. But there isn't the stability to plan to have a child and stay together. And most young people between 18 and 35 which were considered, and are considered prime fertility. Ages are not married anyway. And so that has broken down completely. That's part of what the right wing has said is women's and feminists fault rather than blame the capitalists who exported their jobs. And so that now the changed conditions of low male wages and low female wages and class contradictions which were introduced in a dramatic lasting way with the not very long lasting Occupy movement, the 99% versus 1%, that is what has changed. And so class solidarity is what you saw at the latest women's march. I was there, of course, I didn't see all million people marching in New York City, although they estimated only about a half a million. But what I saw was completely racially mixed. Lots and lots of men of all ages as well as women of all ages and many, many children. What was most dramatic to me was there was an African American man who had a double stroller and his two little girls with their pink hats had signs, I'm going to grow up to be a nasty woman, as Trump called feminists nasty women. That there was such a solidarity, which is the only hope of a movement, class solidarity. And it's the only hope in part because the racial, because jobs are segregated. If you actually had men and women together in the demand, you would address that without having people claim to be more oppressed than other people and creating racial divisions. And the same thing is true with the sexual divisions. And you could, in a united movement, sexual orientation, gender, race, all could be recognized as important and addressed.
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Let me stress and draw you out a little bit about why. Now. Granted the importance of Occupy raising this question, it's still worth asking why a woman's movement now would be more receptive to a 99% versus 1% than they were back then. And I think I hear you saying that the position of men and women in the economy has changed from what it was. So thatand correct me please, if I'm wrong, that women are now much more like men in the daily situation at the job and see the world through the same lens. And so now it's possible for a male, female, together change the economic system movement in a way that it wasn't possible back then, is that yes, it.
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Is, because 59% on the dollar in wages is not the same as 77%. And men are dispossessed on a level that they never have been before in American history. And so that there is, and people it is. In 1970, we were the most egalitarian, economically egalitarian and socially egalitarian nation in the western industrialized world. Now we are the least out of all the 30 wealthier countries. So that the inequalities are outrageous. That's another motivation for men and women and all races and sexual orientations to unite in a class based movement.
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Tell me, what is your sense of whether this time again the budding interest in a change the system strategy of a women's movement won't get deflected into a gender versus gender kind of focus the way you said happened in the 60s and 70s. Are you quite confident it can't or won't happen now?
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C
Again, I wish I were totally confident. I'm not. But because you can look at the Trump movement which has its strong blaming of minorities who are still in a one down position and an attitude towards women and a misogynistic attitude blaming women for capitalist desertion and deflecting people's anger from the capitalist system with its inequality and robbing men of their jobs and debasing wages to feminists and civil rights advocates and so on. And so that there, you know, there was even the difference between Bernie Sanders and Trump and a lot of Trump's voters would have voted for Bernie Sanders. It's a difference of do you emphasize the unity of the dispossessed who are now more dispossessed than ever? And the message of the old women's movement was much more like Hillary Clinton's message, break the glass ceiling, women together. Well, a woman like Hillary who makes $15 million a year is a total anomaly among women. Three percent of women make $150,000 a year and the rest less.
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Okay, let me push us into the future and ask you a question. Hypothetically, let's suppose Donald Trump's program is able to bring some number doesn't look like it will be very large, but some number of mail unionized manufacturing jobs, construction jobs back and does so for example, with an infrastructure program that is paid for by cutting social services the way the Republican planned budget already indicates, Medicare, then one of the effects of this will be to go a little of the way towards doing what male traditional worker jobs might want at the expense of making the situation of women more difficult. Is that likely then to provoke a movement among the women that we haven't seen before as they recognize this is.
- [49:40]
C
This possible but also among the men because the labor force is no longer just white A and if you take Medicare away from someone's old mother, that could be the man's old mother as well as the woman's and if you can't get Social Security, then no one gets Social Security, whether men or women. And the general robbing of the public of services, cutting down the hospitals so that you can't get health care. This will impact everyone and the quality of life, the food you can afford. If you have to pay for the social services, scant as they are in the United States that the government provided, even the right wing. I noticed some signs. Get the government out of my Medicare. Hello, That's a government program. And without Social Security, people, older men will die and older people's older parents will die and women can't afford to stay home and take care of them, even if there are going to be perhaps some jobs saved. But it is ironic that according to Bloomberg News, one of the infrastructure projects building the wall against Mexico, which it starts in Texas, and they're hiring the cheapest labor, which is undocumented Mexican labor. So that doesn't look very good in terms of the promises kept.
- [51:18]
A
So tell me, what is your prognosis? What do you think this upsurge of a new women's movement, where's that going to go? What's your sense? Having both thought about it, analyzed it.
- [51:29]
C
And participated, my feeling is it will be if the mass outpourings of men and women of all ages and colors together is what it has been with the movement at the airports, of demonstrations, at the airports against the refugee and immigrant ban, if the women's marches, which were millions of people, continue, it will be a people's movement. It will be the dispossessed, which is 99% of the population or 90% of the population because people. He can't provide what he's promised and people will be lost. It's a severe thing. And I hope that African Americans are realizing and women are realizing and all minorities are realizing and sexually oriented people who are either trans or gay or, you know, lesbian, homosexual, whatever, are realizing we need each other. What they have is the money and some government power. What we have is numbers. And if we don't get out there together, we won't have numbers and we'll fail. And if we're together, we have a chance. And that is our chance with what's coming down on us. And I think more and more people are experiencing that.
- [53:08]
A
Let me put you a final question. Arguably the leading woman Democratic politician in the United States, now that Hillary Clinton is a little bit out of the picture, is the congresswoman from California, Nancy Pelosi. Very recently, she engaged in a highly publicized question and answer and a Young man asked her a question and her answer was, he asked the question, how do you react? How does the Democratic Party react to the growing number of young people who are not happy with the capitalist system and so on? And you could see she was a little taken aback. And she answered, well, the Democratic Party is capitalist. That was her word. You could see that you're a little uncomfortable. But she said that, and I think that's correct.
- [54:01]
C
Yes.
- [54:02]
A
And the question then is, how do you see the future of a women's movement if the two major parties, Republican and Democrat, agree that the capitalist system is what they support, is what they advance, is what they endorse, and more and more young people, and now, according to you, more and more women, because of the changed situation you've described to us, are critical of capitalism. How is this going to be worked? How do you imagine this is going to work out? That the people are going in a direction that the two political parties don't see as theirs?
- [54:44]
C
Well, I think Bernie Sanders was an indication because he believed in socialism. He said, although he worked within the Democratic Party, that managed to undo him quite successfully, that I think you would need to have a different force and it may become a party, but you'd have to have a unified force. Instead of this issue and that issue and the other issue, you know, you'd have to have a force which may become a party and a force that says, we want a socialist America.
- [55:16]
A
Be interesting if then the United States, to follow the logic of what you just said, might now be on the cusp of rejoining, for example, most of the other advanced capitalist countries in the world that have functioning active, socialist, communist, green and other political parties, anti capitalist parties as a regular part of the political landscape.
- [55:41]
C
Absolutely. And you can look at France, where a left socialist became the Socialist party candidate rather than a right wing socialist like Hollande and is wildly popular. Or you could look at Portugal, which is run by the Greens, communists and socialists. You could look at the movements in Spain, which are very powerful, which are socialist, communist, feminist, green, which is happening all over Europe. And so that the old choices of a kind of fascistic Trump like capitalism, or a neoliberal capitalism that gives the money to the top but allows some gender reforms and race reforms and sexual orientation reforms. That, that doesn't cut it because the mass are dispossessed and the younger they are, the more dispossessed. And that is the future.
- [56:40]
A
I want to thank you. We've come to the end of our time. I think there's a lot to think about in what this new women's movement might be the spearhead of and the.
- [56:49]
C
Beginning for the new people's movement.
- [56:51]
A
Thank you all of you for listening. I hope you find this of interest. Once again, use our websites, rdwolf with two Fs.com and democracyork.in fox to communicate to us, to ask us what you would like us to cover. I want to thank those of you that are partnering with us by using the websites. I want to thank truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis that has been a good partner to us for a long time. Thank you again, and I look forward to speaking with you one more time next week when it rolls around to do this again. Thanks again. Gonna be my time, my time, baby Thing gonna change, Thing gonna change, yeah.