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- [00:10]
A
Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our livesjobs, debts, incomes, our own, and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolf. Continuing from last week, we are looking at some of the major political economic stories of 2020, looking back at them in order to draw lessons from them. What did we learn? It's been a difficult year, and one of the ways you turn something difficult into something even better is by drawing some lessons. I left off last time talking about the Defund the Police slogan and movement often associated with Black Lives Matter and emerging from the killing of largely African Americans by police forces across the United States, which came to a head in 2020. I want to pick up what I said by reacting to some of the comments you've sent me. Some of you worried that this slogan is dangerous politically. Well, it was a major slogan across our media for much of 2020, and it was clearly associated with the Democratic Party. And we know who won, or at least most of us do, who won the election. It did not destroy support for the Democratic Party or for the Black Lives Matter movement. President former President Obama was upset by this slogan, argued that it shouldn't have been used. I wanted to remind him and all of you that there were two other defunding slogans over recent years that were very effective for those who pushed them. For example, conservatives had a program called Defund the irs. Their anger at taxes took the form of demanding that the IRS be cut back in terms of its funding, which it was, by Republican majorities. Here's another again, conservatives, mostly Republican, but some Democrats too, defund the government. That's right. The argument that somehow we would be better off if we give the government less money. It's the other side of not raising taxes. And that didn't cripple the Republican Party, didn't strike people as an impossible slogan, and it was quite effective. So defunding the police is not some aberration, some extremity, some unwise move. And let me drive the point home some more. If you talk to the people pushing Defund the Police, they don't mean dropping the money of the police to zero. They mean defunding, as in reducing the allocations to cops. And why? Because the argument is it's not an effective way of dealing with social problems, including crime. So let me give you some statistical background to evaluate this. The statistics are clear. We have gone up and up and up for the last 30 years in the amount of money each year allocated to policing in the United states, across all 50 states. For part of that time crime was going up and for part of that time crime was going down. There's no one to one relationship with the money going to cops and what is happening in the streets or in the criminal phase or aspects of our society. And here's another way to look at it. Let me give you some I think rather stunning numbers. In the most recent year for which we have statistics, the total amount of money spent on policing in the United States was $115 billion. 115. Let me compare over the same period how much money was given to, to the CDC, the Center for Disease Control. Ready. $11 billion. 115. Dealing with illness, disease, infections. 11. How many people were killed in the United States by murder, criminal murder? Under 20,000. How many people have died this year already from the disease? 300,000. What are we doing? What are we doing? Spending the amount of money we're spending on policing relative to the amount of money we're spending to deal with something much more dangerous to us, namely this pandemic. I could go on EPA, it got $9 billion in the last full year of reporting compared to policing that got 115. These are strange priorities. And where would the money go if it didn't go to the cops to the same extent? Well, I'm going to pick two examples of where the money might go. One is to a mental health counselor. There are a number of countries that have mental health specialists and they go into difficult situations in households, in neighborhoods where they can help with a mental health problem rather than asking the police to deal with a mental health problem. And if you want to think about that, here's a story from the Washington Post. It did a survey. 25% of police killings involve victims with mental health problems. Why not do what other societies have done, even some parts of the United States to have mental health counseling teams, bring them into a situation so it doesn't become a shoot em up police situation. Finland has almost no problem and very low policing outlays. Why? They don't permit homelessness. They find housing for everybody. And that's what the money could go for. Instead of the police, mental health counselors instead of the police. A real homeless prob solver. Come on. We can do better, especially when we're spending so much and especially when there's no relationship really between that and the so called crime that the police are supposed to deal with. The next item is China. That's only going to get bigger as an issue and it was already a big issue in 2020. I begin with John Ratliff. He is President Trump's Director of National Intelligence. And he gave a speech recently in which he said the United States greatest enemy, greater than the USSR ever was, he said, is now China. And Adam Schiff, a Democratic congressman that you may remember from the impeachment hearings, agrees and calls for bipartisanship to be hard on China. Well, does that mean that when President Trump was as aggressive as he was with the trade war and the tariffs against China, that he was speaking for both parties? Looks like it. But let me add some caution here. The USSR and China are not the same. And a Cold War between the US And China will be a very different affair. Just a few of the big differences. China has four times the population of the United States, way bigger than the ussr. We're talking about a very different thing. China has had longer, sustained, rapid economic growth, much faster than the United States for the last 30 years. It is now a player in the world of most advanced technology. It is far less isolated than the Soviet Union was. China may be a good way to prop up defense spending, to scare Americans into accepting less in the way of civil rights. But defeating the Chinese, either militarily or in a cold war, that's a very tall order and probably very unwise for the United States. A little detail to most of the last 25 years that China grew dramatically to the modern power. It is was also the time that the United States economy was among its most successful decades. We collaborated with the Chinese. Our trade went from a little to a great deal. Our integration of the economies went from a little to a great deal. Collaboration paid. Why is the United States bailing on that nice arrangement and moving in this different direction? It's a lesson from 2020. And finally, I come to the election itself. What lessons can we draw? Well, I'm going to be blunt. We have two political parties, as you know, Both of them depend on donations from rich people and corporations. Overwhelmingly, they are disconnected from the mass of people. We know that from virtually every poll. People don't feel represented. They don't feel it's fair. They are distant from these folks and vice versa. The politicians seem to live in a world of their own. Look at the spectacle of how they react to the people's voting as we're living through it right now. Each party serves its donating master. The only difference between them is how they carve up the majority of us, the employees they serve, the employers whose parties they are. So one party goes after those employees who are Evangelical, pro gun, anti abortion feel victimized by the government, rural, small town. And the other party goes after the employees who identify as black or brown or victimized by the police or or LGBT or college grads or single women or progressive or young or urban. You get the picture. The job of the two parties is to carve up the mass of US employees so that we're lined up with one or the other. Of what? Of two parties who are both responsible to and creatures of their donors who have long ago captured them. We're not going to get political decisions that are good for the mass of employees until and unless we have political parties that represent them. We don't have that. Now we have two parties who have controlled politics in this country for a long time. We do not allow monopolies in our business world. Why are we allowing two to monopolize the Congress? Look at this spectacle. The two monopoly parties are denouncing Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple for being monopolist with some justice. But who's calling who what? It's a political monopoly. And you begin to wonder is what they're really upset about is that these big businesses are eating a little into their domain. The mass of people are not going to be helped by fights between economic monopolists and political monopolists because neither of them have anything to do with us and with our needs for Americans to have real political choice. We learned this year that we need other parties with other programs and other promises. We don't need a monopoly of two that is getting staler and more irrelevant by the minute, as most Americans feel. If the Biden team now being assembled does what it looks like, namely go back to the way things were before Trump. We're just cementing the old monopoly again, repeating where the last time these folks were in charge got us. They were in charge under Obama and they got us Trump. And if they resume what they say, they're going to likely do it again. We've come to the end of the first part of today's show. Before we move on, let me remind you about our new book, the Sickness Is the When Capitalism Fails to Save Us From Pandemics or Itself. It's out now and available@democracyatwork.info books. I want to thank, as always, our Patreon community for their invaluable support. And if you haven't Already, go to patreon.com economicupdate and sign up today for access to exclusive content and more. Please stay with us. We will be right back with today's guest Podcaster David Pakman. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's Economic Update show. It is with great pleasure that I reconnect with someone I knew many years ago at the University of Massachusetts. When I'm on his program, he reminds his audience that we have that in common. So I wanted to start out doing that as well. David Pakman is host of the David Pakman Show. It's currently airing on 200 radio and television stations nationally, on satellite television's free speech TV and via podcast, and a popular YouTube channel with over 1.1 million subscribers. Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, David holds a degree in economics from the University of Massachusetts, as well as an MBA concentrating in economics and entrepreneurship from Bentley University. David, it's a pleasure to reverse our roles and to have me interview you. You've been very kind and interviewed me in the past. Thank you.
- [15:20]
B
Thanks for having me.
- [15:22]
A
Okay, let's jump in and start with your program. And one of the reasons I am eager for this interview is I want to help people understand that programs like yours are successful. In other words, that you're taking a, for lack of a better word, and please weigh in with your better word, you're taking a progressive approach to social issues, to economic issues, and there's an audience. And you prove, you have proved already and you're continuing to prove that there's an audience for that kind of media. You're creative with it, you've built it. I don't want to take away from you and your work, but I want you to help me understand what is happening in the United States and beyond to build the soil that your program has so well cultivated. Right.
- [16:17]
B
Yeah. I have many conversations with people in the Dinner Party era pre Covid, who would feel bad when I tell them what I do, assuming that it couldn't possibly be a sustainable way to earn a living. But it is. And much of that is owed to a lot of the infrastructure that now exists where high resolution video is accessible to a growing share of the country, either through smartphone or Internet connections. And I think really the progressive independent media space has benefited from two things. Number one, it's benefited from the increased ubiquity of these technologies that make it easy to find an alternative to corporate media that eliminates some obstacles. The second piece, which applies more to the younger generation of my audience, is they are not stuck in the paradigm where they assume where you get your political commentary is either talk radio owned by one of very few large conglomerates or a handful of television channels. For them, they didn't even need to sort of be disabused of that notion because they didn't grow up with it in the first place. And it's completely natural. And as those people start to follow news, politics, economics, et cetera, they're going directly to the platforms I already inhabit.
- [17:35]
A
Yeah, it's really interesting, you remind me that when I was growing up, everything was cbs, NBC, abc, you know, the New York Times or something like that, and there was nothing else unless you did a lot of hard work and found relatively obscure bits here and there. And it really is a different world. All right, let me flip it around and ask you the other question. What do you think your impact is? How do you sense, how can you share with our audience, both radio and television right now, what the impact is? What kind of keeps you going in terms of the effects of what you do?
- [18:15]
B
It's really just that every day there are things I wake up eager to communicate to the audience. And certainly the fact that the audience continues to grow makes me more eager. There's no doubt about that. But over the years now, the number of people who call in and say, you know, I got stuck in right wing filter bubble, echo chamber on YouTube and I got out of it thanks to the work of people like you, and sometimes you're mentioned or other hosts, you know, this ecosystem got me out of a very, very unfortunate path. And hearing that, or hearing, hey, I presented your content to my parents and now I find them watching it on their own, even without me, and they decided not to vote for the same person they've been voting for in their local election for the last 15 years as an example. So those are anecdotal stories, but it's really all we have. And those definitely are inspirational.
- [19:11]
A
Yeah. Anything particular this last year, in other words? I'm interested in how, given what you've just told us, either the economic crash we're living through or the pandemic, or the incredible simultaneity of both of them, how has that affected your work, both in terms of what you do and the audience impact?
- [19:36]
B
It's affected it in terms of what I do in that half of what I've done for the last 10 months has been either directly or indirectly related to the pandemic. It's either the pandemic itself or the economic repercussions or the foreign policy and structural repercussions. So it's affected the content in a very clear way in terms of the sort of program sustainability. The first month was very shaky, and as people were losing 4, 5, 6 million jobs per week rather than what now is only 700,000, which are still inconceivable numbers. The number of people supporting us financially went down. Some of the revenue we count on from platforms like YouTube and Facebook also decreased. But I think the combination of people staying home and having more time to consume the type of content I produce, combined with it being an election year, combined with some of those people who lost their jobs getting them back over the last few months, we ended up having by far the best 2020, and it's not even close the best year in 2020 that we've ever had. And I think it's because of the urgency with which people realized I'm not getting what I need from the sort of traditional three letter media outlets.
- [20:52]
A
Could you give us, I know this is difficult, but could you give us just a feeling for the difference if you had to explain it to someone, between your coverage of the economic crash and Covid on the one hand and mainstream media? In other words, what is it that the audience gets from you? That is the difference, which presumably is why they come.
- [21:17]
B
I think it's not unique to my program, but it's unique to all independently produced programs like mine that there's a different relationship between the host or hosts and the audience where there's a lot of interference and it feels like many intermediaries between the sort of truth and what is coming out of the box, out of the TV or out of the speaker. With corporate media, and sometimes I think people accurately perceive that they're either not being given the right story or the full story, and they may have an intuition as to why that is, either because. Because there may be layers of editors in between or advertiser bias. As we saw CNN's coverage of deepwater Horizon, you go to a commercial and there's a BP commercial, and I think people understand that there's something not quite right about that. So I think a big piece of it is the elimination of that. Now, somebody may see that and still not like me. And that's okay. But I think the point is that the relationship is noticeably more direct.
- [22:25]
A
Okay, do you see a future? I mean, is your sense of growth something you see continuing? Let me put it the other way. Is there any reason for it not to continue now that we can say that literally for a decade it has been growing?
- [22:42]
B
Well, I think if I were fully invested in the idea of indefinite growth forever, that would go against some of my instincts economically. So I don't, I'm not naive in that sense. But I mean, I think the outlook for the next several years or even decades is good in the sense that as more people get access to the Internet globally, which I anticipate will continue to happen, the pie is going to get bigger and bigger. And as a result, you know, my slice can continue to grow both as a. As a share of the total pie or in raw numbers. And that makes me very optimistic. And then I think, you know, as the people that grew up watching me become the teachers of those who are growing up, I think the independent type of programming that I do will be more embedded in the culture, much the same way that sitting by the radio was for a very long time.
- [23:35]
A
Do you think your international audience. Are you saying that. Do you anticipate a growth relative of your international audience, relative to your US Audience?
- [23:48]
B
Yeah, and we've seen that actually, as the focus has been more the online platforms, I've seen that the share of non US Audience has grown from what at one point was only about 8 to 10% to more like 16, 17%. So that's almost a doubling from five years ago.
- [24:06]
A
Any particular reason why that's happening, do you think?
- [24:10]
B
My instinct over the last four years is that it's global concern about Trump, that the idea is that the embarrassment that Trump has been is so obviously impacting people all over the world, that there's been more of a desire to tune in directly to those covering it within the US to see, quite frankly, what the hell is going on.
- [24:33]
A
Here's a question that comes directly out of my experience with this program we're building on. We're riding on a wave that's my in perception anyway, of people being able finally, sort of like a bear coming out of hibernation, to be critical of capitalism, to name the system we live in, to recognize that it has certain specific qualities, that it's not beyond or above criticism, and that it is okay to raise fundamental questions, to explore the strength and weaknesses, to begin thinking about alternative systems without all the Cold War taboo that used to enshroud all of this. Is this an experience you're having? Is your program somehow connected to any of this as you see it?
- [25:25]
B
I think so. I mean, there's still no shortage of wild allegations that I get about being somebody who would like to see a return of sort of Soviet style. You know, I mean, you. You've experienced the same thing. And particularly for me, as someone who considers myself a sort of Northern European social democrat, that's not been something I've advocated for. So There's. There's no shortage of the reflexive anti socialist, anti communist stuff that continues to happen. But I think the reassuring part of it is that the conversations I'm having are being increasingly understood as advocating for what I'm actually advocating for, rather than immediately falling into this reflexive Red Scare stuff. And I think you see that in the data, in terms of people's sort of general perception of terms like socialism in the United States, much, much less disfavorable, much more favorable. And it opens up the possibility of a spectrum of critiques of the system. Critiques like you do, critiques like I do and others.
- [26:32]
A
That's wonderful. I wanted to get to that before we ended, and you helped me do that. The segue is perfect. Do you feel good that people are understanding that socialism, communism and so on, that they associate with the Soviet Union or China or Vietnam is only one or a set of variants, and that Northern European or Scandinavian or whatever you want to call it, social democracy is another set of ways of being critical, ways of imagining an alternative. Is that kind of ability to be critical with some nuance. Do you see that evolving? Is that happening?
- [27:16]
B
It is evolving, but it's pretty disappointingly slow. I mean, even still, I think that there's very. The degree, had it evolved more, more appropriately, associating Joe Biden with Venezuela would have been far more difficult over the last six months. In other words, I think we see the proof of its slow progress in that, particularly with the Cuban American community. And I'm very much involved. I do actually do a Spanish language program for a Spanish cable network, and I'm regularly hearing from these communities. The ease with which the connection between Biden and Soviet style governance or Venezuela was made and stuck for a lot of people shows me that while there is progress, it's certainly happening slowly.
- [28:00]
A
All right, David. Well, it may be happening slowly. I share that frustration. It is very good. And I think for my audience to know that you're successful, that you are growing and you're happy, that your very style is a positive style, and I think that augurs well for the future. In any case, thank you very much for sharing your time. It's important that people know David Pakman. David Pakman show. It's a partner as we go forward. Thank you very much, David.
- [28:32]
B
Thank you.
- [28:33]
A
Thank you all for listening and watching, and I will be with you again. And I look forward to speaking with you again next week.
- [28:52]
B
Sat.