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Welcome friends, to another edition of Economic Update, our weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, debts, incomes, yours, mine, our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. Okay, I want to start by congratulating the students and their allies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. They were called back in large numbers to the campus and they didn't want to, and they didn't feel that the campus had been made safe for them. And when they got there, they discovered that indeed it hadn't been. And so they did something courageous, unified and powerful. They went on strike. On September 8th, they went on strike. It was initially a four day strike that they called to make it clear how seriously they felt their educations and their very lives were at stake. When that didn't get a proper response from the university, they extended it for a week. The strike ended on the 16th of March of September, but not before the university had reacted like a large corporation when its workers do not want any more to work in conditions that are undignified and unsafe. They went to the court to get an injunction. Turns out there's an ancient law in Michigan, as in many states, that deny public employees the right to strike, that private employees enjoy in, in this, let me call it a democracy, I believe. Yes. And so they went to court and they wanted to use the courts to fine the students, to punish them, to force them back. All the usual corporate behavior from the administrators. It didn't work. It looked like the students were going to continue and were gathering support of teachers, of the parents, of all these people who, who understand the risks involved. And so an agreement was reached. The university withdrew its complaint, withdrew its court activity. All of that is to be done away with. Students are to be given the right to appeal any punishment that they are supposed to get for not showing up because it isn't safe. In other words, the students won their point and the university had to back down. Even a policing rule coming out of the notion that the police are excessively brought into bear here was achieved. In fact, residential advisors who didn't get quite the same agreement are still on strike as I speak to you. And I think this is an important event. I want to put this in context. And to get the context, I went to a polling institution called College Reaction, which does polls of college students in the United States to find out what they're thinking. I thought you'd be interested. 51% of students now enrolled in colleges think that going back to school this fall was a wrong choice. Let me let that sink in. But there's more. 6%. 6% of these students said they felt they were learning more than they used to before the pandemic hit and the University inadequately responded. 60% said they are learning less. In other words, the failure of universities and colleges across the board, with important exceptions, as, for example, the University of Illinois in Champaign, Urbana, which tests students every day and which took the kinds of steps that should have been mandated for all schools and colleges. So students know and they're on strike and they've won things. What's the lesson here? In the United States, universities are run by administrators. That's the wrong way to go. A university has two key players, the students who are there to learn and the teachers who are there to teach. They should be in charge because they're the people upon whom this institution depends and for which this institution was created. But what has happened is that over time, the model of the corporation dominated and took over the universities, so that a small group of administrators who were originally there to facilitate education have become its masters. It's a bit of a Frankenstein story, if you think about it. You create something and it becomes your dominator instead of your creation. Very strange, very sick and. And being fought by students all the time. And now with the pandemic in an urgent, dramatic way, my hat's off to the courageous students and their allies in Ann Arbor, Michigan. My next update has to do with a pharmaceutical giant corporation, Johnson and Johnson. They are now the target of the New York State Department of Financial Services, which has gone into court lodging a legal complaint that Johnson and Johnson falsely advertised opioids to the elderly, downplaying risks of side effects and downplaying the likelihood of addiction. The center for Disease Control in the United States says 400,000 deaths from opioid overdoses have occurred in the United States since 1997. 400,000 people who died from an overdose. What did Johnson and Johnson offer? They have offered. And they did this after. In an Oklahoma decision last November, they were fined $465 million just for phony opioid marketing in the state of Oklahoma. So they've offered $4 billion to settle all claims by all US cities, states and citizens. That works out to $10,000 per dead person. That's how much Johnson and Johnson thinks a life in America is worth. Talk about respect for human life. Not at Johnson and Johnson. And they are a health company, don't you know? What is going on here is extraordinary. It is the putting of profit ahead of everything else, literally including human life. So I looked Up Johnson and Johnson to see what $4 billion, which might sound like a lot to you, amounts to. And here is what I found out. In one year alone, 2019, the last year for which I could get numbers, the profits enjoyed by Johnson and Johnson were $23.3 billion. So over 23 years, they contributed to 400,000 deaths. And what they offer is a trivially small percentage of one year's profits that they earn. In other words, killing people is like a bump in the road for the profitable pharmaceutical giant. What's in order here? Well, at the very least, we have commissions of government that oversee other industries. You know, we have utility commissions in every state of the union making sure that the electric company and so forth don't abuse us. And we have insurance commissions to do the same thing, so insurance companies don't abuse us. And those commissions were put into effect because they were abusing us. We have taxi and limousine commissions in many American cities so that that industry doesn't abuse us. Now that we see how the pharmaceuticals abuse us, the least we could do is have a commission to make sure that the government watches what they do and might catch their putting profit before human health a little sooner than is now the case. My next update has to do with a statistic so stark. I'm sure no comment really is needed, so I'll keep mine brief. In the period between March 18th of 2020 and September 15th of 2020, the 643 wealthiest Americans, their combined wealth rose by $845 billion. I know it's hard to keep all these numbers in your head, so I'll, I'll do it for you. The average increase of the 643 wealthiest Americans, their wealth increased on average, more than a billion dollars per person. This is over the exact same period that over 60 million Americans had to file for unemployment compensation because they lost their job, they lost their income from the job, and, and they are suffering as they use up their family resources, their savings, if they had any, their friends, their neighbors, you know, it blows the mind. 200,000Americans dead, people in real financial difficulty, and the rich keep getting richer. If we tax the increase in wealth of the 643 wealthiest Americans that they've gained, they still would be the 643 wealthiest Americans. But we would have the $845 billion to do something about the American economy. And you know, what 845 billion would do, would have allowed every restaurant in this country to be reorganized, occupy a larger space with more distancing between people so that that component, for example, of every city, of every town, of a part of our lives would have been restored safely. No, we didn't do that. Threatening our cities, threatening our communities, hurting all the millions of people who depend on restaurant jobs, including, by the way, many students who can't afford school anymore because they didn't get the job over the summer working in that resort or in that restaurant. We could do such useful things. But we didn't. In our capitalist system, we used 845 billion not to help us through a supposed national emergency, but to make the richest people richer. I can't think of a more dramatic way to support the following. Capitalism is an unjust system of extremely unjust in extreme moments like now. And so I take my hat off to the governor of New Jersey. I'm surprised I'm doing that. Why? Because the governor and the legislature worked out a new additional tax on millionaires to help New Jersey through. It's not a big deal. It got more press than you might imagine. It raises the tax rate on people earning between 1 and $5 million a year from the rate it was before, 8.97% to a new 10.75%. So an increase of roughly 2%. Okay, I get it. On the amount over 1 million up to 5 million that you earn, not a big deal. We'll raise $390 million. We'll which that state will use to help its people. The millionaires will still be millionaires, but the people of New Jersey will get a boost. You know why it's important and why I'm mentioning it? Because it's a straw in the wind. Watch out, millionaires. This is coming all over America. New Jersey deserves the role of pioneer in finally recognizing that taxing the super rich is. Is long overdue in this society. Last one we have time for. Lots of numbers are being thrown out about unemployment. The most popular one is a very limited measure which says it's 8.4%. So here's what I. I counted the number of people now qualifying for unemployment and getting it state unemployment, federal unemployment. It turns out to be $30 million. And if you do that, as a percentage of the labor force, it's 18%. That's who's unemployed. One of the worst in American history. Well, we've come to the end of the first part of today's show. Before we move on, I want to remind you that we've just released my third book with democracy at work. It's called the Sickness is the System. When capitalism fails to save us from pandemics or its itself. It's a compilation of essays that aims to explain how and why capitalism is the sickness underlying all of the symptoms. Go to democracyatwork.info books where you can get your copy today. I want to thank our Patreon community, as always, for their ongoing invaluable support. It helps make this show and other work we produce possible. It's greatly appreciated. Stay tuned after the break for our guest, Mixie, a YouTube sensation and host of the popular podcast Vegan Vanguard. We will be right back. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. It is with real pleasure that I bring on to our microphones and our camera someone who does something like what I try to do. It's one of a growing number of people that are doing it in different ways that expand and enlarge the whole gamut of critical voices coming across and offering the American people a range of opinion they did not have before. In this case, my guest is Mexie. She hosts a popular YouTube channel where she provides grounded critiques of capitalism and explores issues relating to social, environmental and economic justice, decolonization, and animal liberation. She also co hosts a podcast called the Vegan Vanguard where she explores these issues in longer form and her discussions are available@veganvangardpodcast.com she holds a PhD in geography focusing on the intersections between political economy and environmental governance. Mexie, welcome to the program.