← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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A
Sam. Saint Gonna change one welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, our jobs, our incomes, our debts, those for our children, looming down the road. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been an economics professor pretty much all my adult life. I currently teach at the New School University in New York City. Today, before we jump into economic Updates, I would like to make you all aware, if you're not already about a remarkable institution been around for about 30 years. Once a year, it gathers people from all over the United States and from a good number of countries abroad. Here in New York City, it's called the Left Forum, and it gathers people who are concerned about the very issues we talk about on Economic Update on a regular basis, a broader set of issues than that, but focused on those kinds of concerns about the United States. It's an important event. It's the largest of its kind every year. So I've asked a good friend of mine, a fellow member of the board, Kristen Lawler. She's a professor at the Mount St. Vincent College in Bronx, New York. And I've asked her to tell us a little bit about the Left Forum so that folks are aware that this kind of thing is going on in response to the kinds of topics we cover in this program. Kristen, glad to have you on the program.
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B
Thank you for having me, Rick. I'm glad to be here.
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A
So tell us a little bit about this annual event, the Left Forum. I do know that it's taking place from June 2 to June 4 at the City University of New York, which is hosting it. Tell us a little bit about it.
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B
Well, it'll be a whole weekend at John Jay College of Criminal justice of all different kinds of left groups coming together and talking about where we go from here. We all know that these are very dark times, but also in a lot of ways, really promising times for building the left. That's what we really want to do. So we bring together the left firm, brings together groups from all over working on all different kinds of struggles to think about how we progress in this goal of really building the left in the US and globally.
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A
Tell me, is there a type of person who tends to come? I've been told that it somehow tries, among other things, the Left Forum to bring academics together with activists. Can you say just a couple of words to give our audiences a sense of what who the people are who gather? Okay.
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B
Well, we've got three plenary sessions. The big plenary sessions are Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings where There are, you know, sort of big names in folks organizing, working on different kinds of struggles, thinking through the issues that we need to think about. But this year, especially more than other years, the panels have been organized in such a way. Our co coordinators, Marcus Gratch and Ashley Abbott, have put things together so that folks working on similar struggles, academics and activists, will be in the same area and will have an opportunity to interact with one another, organize together, think through the history of struggles, contemporary issues in the struggles that they're working towards, and then sort of actionable, you know, sort of organizing stuff that they can do together.
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A
Very good. I understand that in recent years the attendance has been between 4 and 5,000 folks. Is that expected again for this one?
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B
Yes. It's huge. I mean, that's the thing. It's absolutely a singular kind of event because there are just so many people with a similar set of how many.
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A
Panels do you know?
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B
350 plus panels, something like that?
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Yeah, it's remarkable. Must be an enormous amount of work.
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B
I think so, yes, absolutely.
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A
Finally, could you tell folks if they're interested in more information about it, where's the best place to go?
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B
Please check out leftforum.org you can get sort of the layout of all the panel programming and the plenary speakers and times and locations and all that kind of stuff.
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A
So, Professor Lawler, thank you very much for joining us. I really appreciate it and I hope to have you back on the program talking about the work you do in the near future.
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B
Thank you, Rick.
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A
Let's turn now to the economic updates for this week. By far the biggest event, economically speaking of the last week, was the presentation by the Trump administration of their proposed new budget. This is to be the budget of the federal government in fiscal year 2018 that starts later this year and runs into the latter part of 2018. What this budget proposal indicates is what the Trump administration wants, what it is sending to the Congress in the hope that the Congress will pass something close to what the President proposes. And so it's a good opportunity to see what the economic plans of the Trump administration are. I hasten to remind everyone that the Congress will debate it. And what the Congress finally passes may be more or less similar to what Trump has proposed. But at least we know where Trump is going and probably where the leadership of the Republican Party is going since they work together on these things. Here's what this budget shows. First, that it's crystal clear what the major commitments of the Trump administration are. They are the traditional right wing portion of the Republican Party's idea of, of what America should look like, economically speaking. The budget is full of proposals, as the Trump administration has made clear, to increase spending on defense and things related to defense. To cut taxes, particularly for corporations and wealthy people, and to deregulate private enterprises so they are free to make more decisions than they were free to make before. And to pay for the extra money for defense and to pay what it costs to reduce the taxes of corporations and the rich. The budget proposes to slash all kinds of government programs, more slashes, bigger slashes than even Republicans in the past have dared to publicly advocate, except for the extreme right wing who, whose budget this is the largest single cut is to the Environmental Protection Agency. One has to smile here because last week was also a visit between President Trump and Pope Francis, during which Pope Francis, with much attention of the press, gave President Trump his statement on the enormous importance of protecting the environment. He gave that to a president whose new budget proposes a 31% cut. That's in one year of the amount of money provided for environmental protection. The stunning contradiction couldn't be sharper. There are cuts to Medicaid. Even though on more than one occasion during his campaign for president, President Trump said he wouldn't do that. There are cuts to medical programs of all kinds of remarkable. At a time when the United States suffers from an epidemic of opioid and heroin overdose and an epidemic of obesity, that ranks the United States literally the number one country in the world for that social problem in terms of how many people need help in that area. And on and on and on. Cuts on the program of student aid. Students will have to pay for a longer time. They will not be forgiven their loans if they go into public service they were once enabled to do, and so on. Massive social programs referred to in the press as gutting the safety net. Well, however you characterize it, here's the bottom line. This is a president who may have pretended for a while that, that he was something new, something different, something unlike the conventional Republican Party and unlike the Democratic Party. Well, what this budget shows, as many other things have shown, is that that's not quite accurate. And I'm being here as polite as I know how to be. He is doing the old line extreme right wing Republican program. Cut taxes for corporations and the rich, build up defense and slash everything else more and further than ever before. That's who he is and what this will result inlet there be no mistake, is a country more divided between rich and poor, with the gap between rich and poor widened because these slashed Government programs will impact low and middle income people disproportionately, just like the tax cuts will help rich people and corporations disproportionately. We really seem, if this budget is to be taken seriously, a nation rushing headlong into an extreme inequality situation, which would be difficult for any society to sustain over the long run, but is doubly difficult for the United States because we have made such a point for the last 50 years that we are a country that gives everyone a chance at the American dream in which everyone is a member of the middle class or nearly so, etc. Etc. You've built up a population to expect what you are now putting further and further out of reach. This is a society heading into very dangerous conditions and times. Another big item this last week which connects beautifully to the story about the Trump budget, is a story about the Ford Motor Company. The Ford Motor Company, one of the giants of the American automobile industry, went through quite some turmoil this last week. They fired. Excuse me, the way this is handled was he resigned. Mark Fields, the CEO. This man had been brought in a mere two and a half years ago in 2014. Over the less than three years that he's been at the helm of Ford Motor Company, its sales have shrunk, its stock price has gone down, and he collected, at least according to the news reports, in in excess of $60 million compensation for these three, not even three years at the helm. He is accused by his critics of having made the wrong decisions and having therefore contributed. And so he's out and a new fellow is coming in with all the praise and expectations that greeted Mark Fields three years ago when he was the president, made the president of Ford Motor. Why am I interested in this? Why is this an important update? Well, there are several reasons. First, Ford Motor Company is an enormous part of the American economy. Ford Motor Company has an employee size of 200,000 employees, making it one of the largest companies in the country, if not in the world. Half of those employees are here in the United States. And as part of this shuffle of their leading executives, they also announced a 10% cut in their workforce. Hmm. If 100,000 people in America, in the United States are employed by Ford, which is what they say, and you're cutting 10%, we've just been told that 10,000Americans are going to lose their, their jobs in the auto industry, that's 10,000 families whose breadwinners are going to be out of work. That's Lord knows how many communities that are not going to see the taxes or the spending of these unemployed workers with all kinds of social effects on those communities. And at a time when President Trump says he's going to build up jobs for Americans, well, Ford Motor Company has made the decision not only not to build up jobs for Americans, but to take 10,000 away from Americans. Who made this decision? The board of directors of Ford Motor Company. Fifteen individuals who sit on the board have the power to hire and fire the CEO they fired. Excuse me, they arranged for the resignation of Mark Fields, the current CEO up until a few days ago. So let's be clear. A tiny number of people, 15 to be precise, had a meeting, made a decision to fire 10,000American employees, putting them, their families, and their communities into all kinds of catastrophic difficulties. They decided to bring in a new leadership. They decided to take Ford Motor Company in a new direction. All of those decisions have enormous social impacts. We live in a society in which tens of thousands of people's lives can be altered. And if these decisions go through, millions will have different options than they had before for automobiles, for transportation. And we allow 15 people. They're not elected by the population. They are not accountable to the people whose lives they've destroyed. There's no democracy here and at all. This is an autocracy. And as if to cap it off, since we're talking about the Ford Motor Company, you should understand that a major player in all of this is a member of the Ford family. And why is he in a position to make these decisions with other members of the board? Because he inherited shares from his parents. That kind of sounds like the kings of the old days who were kings because their fathers had been kings and because their grandfathers had been kings. And, you know, one of the reasons most societies in the world got rid of kingdoms and of monarchies was the absurdity of being governed by somebody who was in that position not because of anything he or she did or of anything they contributed, just because they were born to one family rather than another. And you know something? What the Ford catastrophe shows us. Getting rid of monarchy in politics is kind of half a step to recognizing that we have monarchy in our business sector, in our corporate sector. Tiny groups of people, kings and their courtiers, are making social decisions without being socially accountable. Something to think about. Third item for today. I mentioned the opioid crisis, and a number of you have asked me to say a few words about it. I want to, and I want to bring to your attention the scope of. Of the epidemic of heroin and other opioid drug use in the United States. Let me Give you an idea. Between 2002 and 2013, these were the best data I could come across with heroin related overdose deaths in the United states rose by 286%. In other words, from 2002 to 2013, that's 11 years, folks. The number of people dying from use of heroin tripled or just nearly tripled. And I wanted to break down a little bit. Who is using on this scale? You might be surprised. Where is the increase coming from? Well, the majority users are males, but the growth over the last 11 years has been much faster, twice as fast among women than among men. We are becoming a unisex drugged population. Here's another thing. Over the last 11 years, use of opioids and heroin has fallen in the non white part of the United States. Non whites, it is the whites who are using much, much more. For example, over this period, white people alone increased their use over 114% in 11 years over what they were doing before. And the rest of the sad story, the poorer you are, the more you use these kinds of drugs, and likewise the less insurance you have that you need to cope with this, the more likely you are to be a drug user. It could be coincidence that the economic decline of American capitalism before, but especially after 2008, it could be a coincidence that that decline hurt so many people, particularly white working class people who were impacted more strongly than they have in the past. The non white parts of the population are all too familiar with economic instability in the United States and as they bear the brunt most of the time. But it has now become so big, the economic decline of this country and the inequality so enormous, that white people cannot escape the same effects that have afflicted others. And here it shows up in drug use, in drug abuse, and in deaths from opioid drugs, many of which are sold by drug companies, and of course, illegal use of heroin. Next item. A remarkable story that got very little coverage in the United States over the last week. A referendum was held in a European country, namely Switzerland, and it was pushed by petitions that were carried around by the Swiss people to get signatures of Swiss citizens. And the referendum was in favor of disconnecting Switzerland from nuclear power as the way to generate the electricity the country needs. Predictably, those who are involved in nuclear energy production, the companies that make profits from it, spent a lot of money trying to persuade the Swiss voters to vote against this. And a mass of people wanting to make Switzerland a nuclear free zone, a country without nuclear weapons and a country without nuclear energy, so it never faces anything like Three Mile island or any of the other disasters, Fukushima and so on. And interestingly, the Swiss people voted clearly in favor of the referendum. Switzerland will now close down five nuclear energy facilities that they had built because that's what the Swiss people want. And they put that to a vote. Another country that has been remarkably more courageous than the United States has been Canada. Canada over the last week took the final steps to make it illegal for an airline to overbook the seats on its flights. We all know because it got wide coverage a few weeks ago when United Airlines was caught by alert passengers with smartphones dragging a doctor out of the seat he had booked in advance, paid for, etc. In order to save money on ferrying members of its crew from one city to another, ejecting and bloodying the nose of this doctor yanked out of his seat by security personnel because the airline had overbooked seats. There's been a lot of wringing of hands. There's been a lot of statements not just by United Airlines, but by several other airlines in the United States who were caught doing similar things that they have been reformed. They have been cautioned they won't do it again. We're supposed to rely on the same management of the same airlines that condoned, we don't know how many such incidents. This is the one that came to light because of alert fellow passengers, smartphones. Canada isn't relying on agency and airline management. It passed a law saying it is illegal to overbook knowingly and intentionally the seats on your airplanes. Guess what, folks, that may hurt a little bit the profits of Air Canada and other airlines subject to Canadian law, but it increases the safety and it increases the service quality to people who buy tickets on Canadian Airlines. They can't get that service and they can't get that comfort in the United States and anyplace else that will not follow suit to the steps that the Canadians have taken. Another item, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin made it clear in statements this last week that earlier remarks by Trump and others that they were going to reinstate a version of the Glass Steagall act passed in the 1930s in the wake of the Great Depression. Then they're not going to do that anymore. They've backed away from that. And that became pretty much official this last week with statements from Secretary of the Treasury Mnuchin to remind you all Glass Steagall, the name of two legislators back in the 1930s was a bill that said we can do better to avoid future catastrophes if we do not allow banks to use depositors money and other money that isn't theirs to make risky bets. And the way this was to be handled was we are going to forbid the banks that take deposits for checking accounts and your typical savings account of people, they couldn't make risky bets. There would have to be separate banks, we call them investment banks rather than commercial banks. And only investment banks could collect money from people who knowingly risked it with the bank and then take risky investments with the people's money who did that on purpose. It couldn't use depositors money whose main interest is to be able to get their deposits. Well, this separation of commercial banking from investment banking was the law under Glass Steagall from the middle 1930s until the end of the 1990s. That's how long it took for the banking industry to evade, avoid water down and then finally have enough power to repeal Glass Steagall in the 1990s. And the president who signed the repeal, Bill Clinton. So this was a joint effort of Republicans and Democrats. So by 1997, the bill is the Glass Steagall act is on its way out. Isn't it remarkable that eight or nine years later we are collapsed into the great crash of 2008, led into that crash in good part by banks misusing and taking extraordinary risks with other people's money. And those risks exploded, taking the whole country down. And we thought Mr. Trump made statements that he was going to reinstate it so that we don't have these crises in the future. But such is the power of the big banks. By the way, the big banks who still admire Mr. Trump celebrate Mr. Trump, support Mr. Trump. The mass of Americans may give him low marks, his popularity may be low. But in the big corporations expecting, looking for and welcoming tax cut and deregulation, the big question why are other people critical of Mr. Trump? He's a wonderful thing. Final update for today. Some people think there's no more American corporation in the world than the Harley Davidson Corporation, the maker of very famous motorcycles. But they were in the news this last week because they announced that they have been building and will soon complete a new factory for making Harley Davidson motorcycles in Thailand. They announced they're laying off workers in the United States 100 or more. And they're hiring in Thailand. They already have plants, it turns out, in India, Brazil and Australia. And the reason isn't far to look for. Their sales abroad of motorcycles grew 2.3% in 2016. Their sales of motorcycles in the United States fell by 4%. Their future is elsewhere as it is for so Many corporations, and that's where they're going. Sure, President Trump welcomed their executives clad in leather on the lawn of the White House in February. But the truth is that they're leaving the United States more and more, as are so many other countries. That's the reality, not the fantasy. From Washington, we've come to the end of the first half of this program. Please stay with us. We will be right back. I've been feeling old, I've been feeling cold. You're the he that I know. Listen, you are my son. Hush, I said there's more to life than us. Not gonna leave this place with us. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's edition of Economic Update. I am very pleased to welcome back to these microphones. He's been here once before, John Curl. He's the author of a wonderful book called for all the People. It's a history of worker co ops and other types of cooperation among working people in America from the early times of this country's history right down to the present. If you want a sense of what worker cooperation has been and why, it's been an important part of this country's history from the beginning. You cannot do better than for all the People. John Curl, spelled C U R L. John also worked for over 40 years in Heartwood, a cooperative wood shop in Berkeley, California, and he likewise served as a board member for the network of Bay Area worker cooperatives. So here's a person steeped in both the knowledge, the history, the theory and, and the practicality of worker co ops. And so I think he's remarkably positioned to talk to us about them. John, thank you very much for coming.
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C
Thank you for inviting me, Rick.
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A
All right, let's stop. Let's start. Excuse me. You have worked for decades with worker co ops, in worker co ops, with worker co ops, building the worker co op movement. How do you respond, given that history, to. To the many people that I encounter who dismiss worker co ops as somehow contrary to human nature, something that is unsustainable because workplaces need hierarchy. They need a boss, they need an owner that otherwise it can't work. It must be that way. How do you, based on your life and your thought and your history, how do you react?
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C
Well, I think they're actually, from my experience of over 40 years working in a Hartwood cooperative wood shop, I know there are a small number of people who do not have a cooperative gene, but the overwhelming majority of people are very cooperative. Human society could not exist without cooperation. It is based on cooperation. On people. People are very agreeable, basically agreeable, cooperative. You go on the highway, most people are, you know, just work with other people. You go into a supermarket, people are not bumping their carts into each other and getting into fist fights. You know, they work things out. It's, you know, and this country was built on mutual aid. Like every immigrant group who came here, literally 100% of every immigrant group set up cooperative structures among themselves to survive here, to survive, to survive. And native culture here is based on cooperation and community solidarity. And I think really just the opposite is true. That we live in a very. In a society that promotes the part of human nature which is competitive and which is individualistic. And that is just a small part. And you can, by putting people in a social situation where there's almost no safety net and society is not doing its job of helping each other, take care of each other, then that forces people to be more cooperative, to be more aggressive. And it almost builds a whole mythology around that which loses the much larger picture of cooperation.
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A
It's interesting because your story implies that there are social forces and people who create a society that hypes or exaggerates individualism and competitivism and acquisitiveness and imposes that on a society and then declares, having done that for generations, that this is human nature and that it isn't at all about this particular economic or other system. It's somehow intrinsic to the human being. It's an interesting sleight of hand in which you make, you have a social program produces people reacting in certain ways, and then you declare it must always be like that, but because you didn't create it, it's actually human nature. You see that in history. If you go back and you study slave societies, people there believed that there were some people who were naturally born master types and others who were naturally born slavish types, and that the society was simply accommodating an intrinsic human nature. I mean, we look back in stunned disbelief on such ideas, but they're not that different from the way we've worked it.
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C
Yeah, And America is, the United States is built largely from self selected people from European societies where they were not given the ability to lead a decent life and not given the opportunities and came over here. And they in fact myself come from peasant roots. You know, if they had stayed back there, you know that, I don't know what would have happened. But you know, most people in America today come here or are here because they wanted that ability to express themselves more to it because they knew they had that inherent ability, innate ability to, you know, to be a successful person, to be a, you know, it's like a plant not having the right environment. You can't, you know, a plant will not thrive without a correct environmental situation. And that's, you know, it has to do with cooperatives also. You know, you need. That's why societies, cooperatives can't exist without the larger society really supporting it that much. But they can really thrive tremendously if it's integrated much more into the larger society.
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A
Let me turn a little bit and ask you, since you've been involved in things like the network of Bay Area worker cooperatives, in other words, you're familiar with the community, one might say, of worker cooperatives, how has that changed in the United States, Canada, California, where you are, how have worker co ops fared in the public consciousness? And in terms of their very existence over the last few years? Is it a time of growth? Is it a time of shrinkage? How would you characterize it?
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C
No, this is a time of enormous growth where it's partly based on people needing other people needing mutual aid in order to help each other survive. And it's also based on the failures of the larger society. That our society really is not geared to create a situation where people can thrive and that people are thrown back on their own resources and large numbers of people all over the country have turned to, basically is turning to other people, getting together with other people and in similar situations and creating structures in which they can help each other to elevate themselves economically and socially. Also, because cooperative is not just an economic structure, they're also a social structure.
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A
I'm noticing that we here at Democracy at Work that produces this program, we're getting more and more emails from people who either have begun a co op or want to want to begin a co op. But it's clear that people are seeing the co op as a serious project for their own economic advancement. They are not anymore just looking, where can I get hired? Which is where kind of they were before. And they're discovering that the option of being not just the hired person, but the one who does the hiring, that you can be both, and, and that's what a cooperative is, the people collectively hiring themselves that this is a real option. I'm sort of struck by the number of people who find that now a normal option to pursue.
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C
Well, I think that it's connected with the situation where my parents and grandparents thought that if you got a job that you could have a whole career. There and they would take care of you in your old age. And that doesn't exist anymore. And we're coming into a world, we're in a society and coming more into a world where people are marginalized, where smaller and smaller elite are getting the wealth of the world and technology has resulted in people being excluded. So when you have a small elite who really just doesn't need people anymore, then there really is no alternative other than people getting together and creating new structures in which they can help each other survive.
- [40:30]
A
You have been active in struggles around Indigenous communities. Native Americans, is the co op as an institution present in that community? In those communities, is it an option that they are looking at with special interest? What's the relationship between Indigenous people in the United States and the worker co? Op?
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C
The basic connection are tribal enterprises. It's kind of the equivalent of community enterprises, of social enterprises, where it's, you know, it's not. Although there are worker cooperatives in Native America, the most prevalent form are tribal enterprises. And it's kind of the same thing. The group elects their leaders and their leaders try to figure out how do we promote prosperity in our community. And it's through community enterprises. And there are distinctions between worker cooperatives as a group of people inherently surrounded by just themselves. And actually they're not today just themselves because there are other organizations in the community which are connected. Like in the Bay Area, the network of Bay Area worker cooperatives. You know, Most over about 60 worker cooperatives are members. And you get, you know, certain benefits from being connected with them.
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A
So they help each other in various ways.
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C
Yeah, they help each other. You know, for example, if you're having some problem, some, you know, two individuals in your group are having problems, you know, you can hook in with the network and, you know, get some intervention there numerous ways that people can help each other.
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A
Okay, here's something that's concerned me for a long time. It upsets me, to be honest, that I enter into a conversation with someone about worker co op as an alternative to the capitalist hierarchical, top down corporate model. And they listen to me politely. And then when they respond, I immediately pick up that in their minds, a worker co op is something that poor people should engage in or that it makes sense for poor people to want. In other words, it's a mechanism to help people get out of poverty. But they don't want it to be seen as an alternative to the conventional capitalist way of doing business. They don't want to see it as a social change. They want to see it as Helping the Native American community or the African American community or some urban poor community. How do you find this issue? Does it arise in your work and how do you deal with it?
- [43:39]
C
Well, I think most people even just look at the Human beings are complex creatures and we have all different aspects to ourselves and our lives and people. I started becoming a woodworker because I needed a job, you know, basically. And I think a lot of people will treat a cooperative as say like a boat to get across the river. You know, you need the boat and you need to work with these people to get. Just like having it. Won't you retire from your job if you have other things you want to do in life? So, you know, so our economic life is part of our life, but it also our economic relationships that we have at work. We spend a tremendous amount of our time at work and it affects our whole being so that to be in a. A lot of people don't have a lot of experience with cooperative relationships since society is so hierarchically structured. So many people other than kind of a group of kids getting together to play a game, but they don't have that experience with it.
- [44:52]
A
Well, I'm interested in the peculiar way significant numbers of people seem to want to pigeonhole the worker co op as an anti poverty mechanism, which I recognize it can be, but that's supposedly all that it is. It can't serve as an alternative to what we have, a hierarchical boss, board of directors, all of that. It's just to help poor people, which I find to be a way, a polite way of keeping it down. And I wanted your reaction. Okay.
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C
My reaction is that we're in a world where there's no end, there's no other side to that, you know, in other words, we're not in a society where there's a small group of poor people who can be raised up and then everything is fine. It's a society in which enormous amount of poverty is structured into the society so that you. The. And the society, at least international capitalism really has no interest in dealing with that since everything is organized just to channel wealth into a small elite and then they can be empowered with it. So I would say that they don't understand or they have just no experience. First of all, they have no experience with cooperatives and they're also giving a false view of the world. The world is not structured so that there is just a small group of poor people that you can help and you raise them up. It's like the tide raises all boats. It doesn't Raise all boats. And the world that we're in now, in my opinion, really in order to make the world work for our grandchildren and even to get through this century, we need to structure a different kind of economics for people. That this economic system is not taken care of.
- [46:56]
A
And you see worker co ops as central to that process, I see.
- [46:59]
C
Absolutely. I think that really is the only solution. You know, worker cop variations of it can be changed. It can vary from place to place and situation to situation. But I think there really is no alternative to people getting together through different forms of mutual aid and social enterprises and community enterprises. Because the capitalist system is simply not geared towards providing a decent economic life for the vast majority of people. And it never will be. Just it's not what it's geared for, it's not what it's organized for, not only in this country, but internationally. So I think many, many people all over the world, many millions of people are realizing that in order to have a livable world, we really have to reinvent the economic system and that there is no alternative to doing that. That it's either an utter disaster that we don't even want to think about or re envisioning the possibilities of creating an economic system that does provide for people and is is based on humanistic values of caring for people, based on community and not based on simply individualism and competition and profit.
- [48:21]
A
Let me pick up on that. In the last election here in the United States, one candidate and only one of the two major parties. I'm not talking about the smaller parties where there were people who talked about worker co ops. But among the major candidates, only Bernie Sanders had on his platform a few words. It wasn't much and it wasn't very concrete, but he gave a nod to worker co ops as something that he would foster or support or encourage. None of the Republican candidates, including the President of the United states, now, nor Mrs. Clinton, deigned even to do that. But that is a piece of evidence that there's something happening that a major party candidate, at least one, saw fit to give a nod to co ops. Much more impressive is what Jeremy Corbyn in England has done. And that's what I want your reaction to Jeremy Corbyn, the relatively new leader of the British Labour Party, the second party of Britain, took a position publicly and on paper that his party, if elected to become the next government of Great Britain or whenever it would be elected, would pass a law basically to create a worker cooperative sector of the British economy. And the law's two key provisions as I read it were the first that they would pass a law that said any existing enterprise in Britain currently could continue in the same form if it stayed the way it was now. But if it decided either to close itself, cease functioning, bankruptcy, or something like that, or if it was thinking of selling itself to another company, or if it was thinking of becoming a public company that is issuing shares the way a stock company does, that it would have to give to its own workers something called the right of first refusal, namely, that it would have to offer its own workers to sell the company to them, to be rerun, reorganized as a worker co op. If the workers couldn't or wouldn't do it, then they would be free to do any of those other things, but they would have to give their own workers what's called the right of first refusal. And the second part of the law said that the way the workers could get the money to buy the company would be that the British government would lend it to them. That's an amazingly more developed notion of building a worker co op, not in a small country and not in a particularly poor country, but in one of the hallmarks of world capitalism. Because their problems in the minds of their second party, major party, are so severe, along the lines of what you just said, they're basically saying our capitalist system can't do it for Britain. We need to develop as a matter of policy of the government to create what you earlier called that environment, that fertile soil within which a worker co op could go. What's your reaction?
- [51:50]
C
That's tremendous. And actually the United Nations, a number of years ago, a year of the co op. Yeah. And they requested every government of the world to get into a partnership with their cooperative movement to work on exactly this project. And it can take different forms. This has to do with a political will. You know, if you recall, Margaret Thatcher famously said, there's only individuals, there is.
- [52:17]
A
No society, there's no alternative to capitalism. Tina?
- [52:21]
C
Yeah, right. But there is a society. And once your goal, if your goal really is to have to create that soil, not to take care of everybody in the sense of, you know, 19th century or 20th century state socialism where the government is doing everything. But if the government's role is to create that soil in which people can grow, can get together and work things out among themselves, and using their own energy and their own creativity and their own initiative with combining it with other people to create enterprises that are valuable to the society and valuable to their communities, I think that is kind of the basic role of government in the 21st century. If we want to have a successful 21st century, we have to go in that direction. Now to the degree that what they're doing there is a first step, it's not a panacea. And you don't want to deal with it in a really formalistic way. You have a goal and then you have these various ways of getting there are different ways of getting there. But you want to always keep your eye on the prize, which is a decent society based on human values that we and our grandchildren can live in. And to have a planet that we can leave to future generations, it requires that kind of those kind of policy decisions that put those structures as a top priority.
- [54:04]
A
You know, it's interesting in a country that likes to celebrate itself here in the United States as a country that believes in freedom of choice, that it really would only be possible to give the American people a choice between working in a top down capitalist hierarchical enterprise or, or the choice to work in a democratically run worker self directed enterprise. The only way you're ever going to give the American people that choice is if you develop such a sector the way Mr. Corbyn in London and in England is trying to do. So if you believe in choice, then you ought to support the development of this. Just like American consumers should have the choice between buying products that are made by a capitalist firm and buying products made by a worker co op. Use your dollar of purchasing to vote for the thing you want. You know, we have that in America these days. You can buy fair traded coffee, for example, pay maybe a couple cents more, but know that you're going to be giving your money to a farming situation that treats the farmer decently well, imagine products that were labeled not the country they come from and not fair traded, although that would be fair, but also with a little label that says this was produced by workers. Cooperating democratically in an enterprise versus a product that wasn't produced there would give people a choice. There's also another point. I would like just your response quickly in the time we have left. Some people think it's somehow unfair that the government should provide the support for a worker co op to develop, for a worker co op sector to develop. I'm always amazed when I hear that since the entire history of capitalism, from its origins 300 years ago in England to its present is a history of billions, trillions of dollars worth of tax breaks, subsidies, cheap loans, railroads built. I mean, the support of the government for the capitalist enterprise is beyond calculation. And yet people think there's something amiss were that support to be asked to be provided to an alternative so we could choose between them. How do you react?
- [56:20]
C
I think that that's the result of a certain type of propaganda which equates the economic system we have with a free market, with free market economics, where there really is. It's as if economics is not regulated and economics is always regulated. There's no such thing as an unregulated economy. And it's just a matter of how that economy is going to be regulated. And you know, how they, in using the terms of freedom to describe this economic system is just a way to get people to distract it from seeing the realities of what is going on.
- [57:13]
A
All right, John, we've come to the end of the time. It's been wonderful. It's been wonderful as it was the last time you were here. So thank you very much for bringing your knowledge and your history to us.
- [57:22]
C
Thank you so much, Rick, for all of you.
- [57:25]
A
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