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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, jobs, debts, incomes, our own and those of our children. And I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I want to begin with a particularly, at least for me, odious phenomena that needs to be called out. In this case, the offending country is the United Kingdom, but it is hardly alone. It turns out through court cases that for some years now it has been busily selling visas. The arrangement is again quite common. If you will invest a certain amount of money, in other words, bring that money into the United Kingdom. Well, then it turns out that the United Kingdom doesn't care what your needs are, what your religion might be, even if it's fashionable to be hostile to Muslims and so on, all is thrust aside for the real item, money. And in England, it turns out not only is it money that gets you a visa, but the speed with which you get the visa is correlated with the amount of money you're bringing in with you. It's like what airlines are doing, charging you for overhead, suitcase, charging you if you want to cough more than once on the flight, etc. Etc. To the credit of the United Kingdom, there is a public outrage now that it has been made public because once again, the gap between the financial reality and the make believe concern with other issues has been exposed. My next update has to do with private hospitals and private universities in this country. They are very often examples of, again, financial misdeeds disguised as lofty pursuits. Let me begin with the hospitals they were getting, the people who run them, the CEOs of hospitals, many millions of dollars throughout the pandemic. Yeah, we heard a lot about we're all in it together. But it turns out we weren't. The CEOs of the big hospitals were getting huge amounts of money while the people on the front lines, the nurses, the doctors, all the personnel scurrying around a typical hospital during a pandemic didn't get much of an extra help, didn't get millions of dollars, and many of them got Covid with all that that implies. People thinking about these institutions should also be aware of what it means when they are labeled, quote, unquote, nonprofit. Nonprofit hospitals, nonprofit universities. So I want to tell you what that means and my example since I've mentioned hospitals, which will be now a university, and in particular Yale University, which I have studied over the years because I have my doctorate in economics from Yale University. Yale is a nonprofit so called institution. Does that mean that it doesn't earn a profit? Let Me be very clear with you. No, it doesn't mean that at all. And it never did. Where does the phrase nonprofit come from? Well, it has an origin and the origin is in another phrase, which is much more accurate, which is why they dropped it. What it means is it's not taxed under the law. A hospital and a university are not taxed. They are considered socially desirable institutions. And to make sure we have them, so the argument goes, we don't tax them. So Yale University is a non taxed institution. It earns an enormous amount of money. It has assets in the billions and its annual budget is in excess of a billion dollars. Does it take in more money than it pays out in expenses? Absolutely. Would you call that difference of profit? Absolutely. It's what the word means. But then they do something which is legal under the law we have in this country, they take the difference between the income they get and the expenses they have. You know, the electricity in the classroom, the professor's salary and all the rest of it. They take the profit and they add it to their endowment. You know what that means? It's like you have a profit and you add it to your savings account. But in your case, that's the end of the story. Not for the hospitals and universities. Under the accounting rules in the United States, when Yale takes its profit and adds it to its storehouse of value, its endowment funds in banks and so on, that is considered providing for its future and is therefore a cost also. Then that profit disappears and they have no tax because their profit has been handled in that way. But make no mistake, the hospital, the university that calls itself nonprofit discovered that that sounds and looks a lot better than what they've got going, which is tax holiday forever. Universities use their used to be total relief of taxes. Now recently they have a very, very tiny amount to pay. Much, much smaller percentage than you and I pay on our income. And if we take some of our net income and add it to our savings account, we can't count that a cost the way the universities can. It's just a sign again that as more and more politicians are recognizing the system is rigged and as if to move right along to more of this, I want to talk to you about the CEO of the Apple Corporation, one of the most valuable biggest corporations on this planet. CEO's name is Mr. Cook and his pay package in 2021, a year in which we were all together battling this pandemic. His pay last year, a little more than you got ready $99 million. That's just shy of $2 million per week last year, it was, I thought you might like to know, 1,447 times the average pay of, of an Apple employee. Wow. Meanwhile, those employees here in the United States, many of whom are retail workers, because the actual production of Apple components, Apple products, is done in other countries, you know, like China. Those workers in the retail have begun to establish unions and to fight for unions around an organization called Apple 2. T o o Apple 2. But I wanted to mention the good times CEO Cook has with his 2 million bucks a week last year. Not only because it means we weren't all in this pandemic together, but I want you to know that when you buy Apple products, part of the money you pay goes to providing Mr. Cook $2 million a week. By the way, he's already a billionaire, so he needs this like a fish needs a bicycle. My last update that I'll have time for today has to do with one of the saddest stories I came across in this. Last week, the New York Police Department put out a video covering the arrests of 23 people, 23 warrants for arrest were executed. And the charge of these people was that they, and listen please to this, were, quote, stealing diapers, children's medicine and children's hygiene products. Oh, goodness. What was the total value of what they had stolen? $1,800, said the new York Police Department for this activity, for using the scarce resources of the New York Police Department, which has a big job to do in a city like this, especially when the injustices and the inequalities are going off the chart. But those folks in the police department were directed instead to arrest people for stealing the diapers and medicines and cleaning products their children needed. And to her credit, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, congresswoman from a district in Queens, which is part of New York City, she didn't think this was an appropriate event. She didn't think that attacking people trying to take care of their children this way was something that ought to be a police priority, let alone something the police boasted about. She asked very important questions. What in the world are the conditions that make people take a risk, in this case a serious one, of getting arrested with all that implies. What are the conditions that make them do that to take care of their children? If those people didn't do what they did, they might not have been able to pay their rent. And if they became homeless, as we have tens of thousands of people homeless in New York City, guess what? The police bringing those people to shelters, the costs of the shelters. This is financial craziness. It's more expensive if they're homeless for the city than it would be to do something about the conditions that bring all this about. And if they're denied children's hygiene products, children's medicine and diapers, aren't we as a society punishing innocent children? That's the way to deal with this situation. People who don't have enough money to be able to have a home and to take care of their children. This is a time when I'm telling you this about the children having just told you about the millionaires who buy themselves citizenship in England, or the millionaires who get tax write offs by giving money to places like Yale or Mr. Cook at Apple. With his 2 million a week, it would have been about two minutes of his time one week to cover the expense of those children. Bravo to AOC for taking the time to make a statement about this. We've come to the end of the first part of today's show and as always, I want to say thank you to all of you whose support makes this show and the others we produce possible. To learn more about the different ways you can support democracy at work and this show Economic Update, Please go to patreon.com economicupdate or visit democracyatwork.info Please remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel and I'd like to encourage you to share what you've learned here today with your friends and family as that also helps us educate more people than we can do alone. Please stay with us. We'll be right back with today's special guests, Green Party officials Gloria Matera and Michael o'. Neill. Welcome back friends, to the second half of today's Economic Update. I'm very proud and pleased and honored to have with us two guests today who are going to share responding to my questions. Both of them are leading advocates of the Green Party, a third party if you like, after the two that operate a monopoly in this society. And we're going to be talking about that first is Gloria Matera. She currently co chairs the New York State Green Party, formerly co chaired the United States Green Party. She's an ecosocialist and has been a Green Party candidate four times. She directs a child life program in a New York City public hospital and is a longtime single payer health care advocate. With her today, Michael o'. Neill. He serves on the Executive Committee of the New York Green Party and is the Communications manager for the United States Green Party. In 2016 he worked on Dr. Jill Stein's presidential campaign team. He has worked for multiple Green Party campaigns in New York, winning ballot status for the Green party for from 2010 to 2020. So, first of all, Gloria and Michael, thank you very much for joining us today. Okay. I wanna begin with something which is a little bit special for New York, but then again is pretty representative of much of the country. Just before he left the governorship, the honest way to say that would be just before he was forced out of the governorship because of sexual improprieties and so forth, the then Governor Andrew Cuomo pushed a bill through the legislature in New York that made it harder for the New York Green Party to contest elections in the state. Can we start, Gloria, by your telling us briefly what he did and why he did it?