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- [00:10]
A
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.
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Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here.
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Good. Let's start. And here you need to be real, honest and not modest. Okay. You are a fast rising Internet presence. As a social critic, how would you explain your growing audience and its response to your work, which is why it's growing? Give us your sense of what's happening to the work you do.
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Well, maybe I will be a tiny bit modest. I think that honestly I got into it at the right time. So I got into it around 2016. So this was kind of after Bernie Sanders first failed run for president where a lot of people were through that turned on to the problems of neoliberal capitalism. And it was around the same time as the election of Donald Trump, which really just flummoxed everybody. And at that time the big platforms like YouTube, et cetera, were really dominated by these right wing grifters basically or really, really well funded right wing operations like Prageru. And they were really just misleading people as to what were the true causes of their problems. Right. Like it's feminism, it's immigrants, it's some quote Unquote, globalist conspiracy. And, you know, just diverting people's attention away from the contradictions of capitalism itself as a system and how, you know, our current material conditions and the struggles that we're going through are really easily understandable if you have a class analysis. So I got into it at a time where there was kind of this burgeoning leftist response to all of that, and it's really just grown exponentially since then. And of course, there have been, you know, leftist creators and commentators on these platforms before that, and credit to them because they face a lot of backlash. But I think post 2016, there was this real hunger for this kind of political education, one that could adequately make sense of the struggles that people were facing in their daily lives. Like they're drowning in debt. You know, young people, people can't expect to be homeowners, let alone retire at any point in their lives. Inequality is skyrocketing. And also to be able to explain adequately the rise of figures like Donald Trump, right. Like, how could somebody who is so clearly part of the establishment and the ruling elite run and win on a platform of, quote, unquote, draining the swamp? It's because most Americans don't have a political education. They don't have an analysis of capitalism or political economy, and they don't understand the different economic ethos of the different parties that they're voting for. So when a Republican capitalist comes along and says that I'm going to fight for the little guy, people believe that, and the irony is just completely lost. Right? So I think there is just really this appetite for this kind of political education. And especially with the crises going on right now, I feel like left media is so important and people are responding to this work because we are actually providing analysis that makes sense and we can actually point people towards effective solutions. And that's something that the right wing or even the liberals can't actually provide because they're just, you know, fighting capitalism with more capitalism plus nationalism. Right? So I think that's why there's been such a, you know, a positive response to, to my work and to all of the other left media creators and, you know, your, your channel and yourself included. And I just hope that we're in such a crisis right now in capitalism and people are being radicalized either towards the left or towards the right. And I just hope that with this burgeoning kind of left critic sphere, we can capture enough people's imagination and attention and point them towards actually organizing in their communities and their workplaces, et CETERA well, that's it.
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That's what we try to do as well. So, I mean, welcome to the club, let's call it. One of the things that I find particularly interesting in your work and that I'd like you to comment on, is that you try, if I understand correctly, watching your work, you try to bring together a critique of capitalism based in economics, together with a broad commitment to social justice, together with a concern, veganism and everything about this kind of new way, or not so new, but a different way of dealing with our natural environment in terms of our eating habits and so on. This bringing together of different social movement impulses into one composite program, and in your case, one composite person. But this is crucial. This is, this is what has to happen if all these different movements that kind of are on the left become conscious of that fact and get together. So I'd really like you to tell us sort of how that happened in your life and then becomes the project, in a sense, of your work.
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Well, in my life I was into, I guess, anti capitalist politics prior to my veganism. I think actually when I was in university, I was in environmental studies. And so I learned kind of simultaneously the impact that capitalism has on our environment, which are devastating, and then also the impacts of animal agriculture on our. On our environment, which are also devastating. And so I kind of got into these two modes of, you know, politics simultaneously. But then later, as I started to learn more and kind of got involved with more, you know, radical anti speciesist voices, I started to make these connections like they just became a lot more clear for me. And now I really, really advocate for that in my work. So I would actually swap the word veganism. I try to say anti speciesism or animal liberation just because anti speciesism is a movement that understands that human oppression and animal oppression are interlinked, you know, through colonialism and capitalism and all the rest. And so it really seeks to fight the root causes of this oppression and kind of expand the idea of liberation to be one of total liberation. Whereas veganism in the mainstream, I mean, I argue for veganism as a political stance against the commodity status of animals. And as you know, someone who adopts that stance, you'll incorporate that into your life as much as is possible and practicable. But in the mainstream, veganism is often just associated with consumerism or just changing what you buy. And it's considered bourgeois because under this capitalist system, not everyone can necessarily consume perfectly all the time. So I do kind of make that distinction. The consumption piece is still important. The UN has said many times that eating a plant based diet is the single best thing that an individual can do to cut their carbon footprint in half. So if you have the means, that is important. But as we know with a broader political analysis, we can't consume our way out of capitalist crisis. And if we're still operating within a capitalist system, but we're all consuming plant based, that's still not going to be environmentally sustainable. So, yeah, in my work, I mean, I actually just did a video shameless plug called Speciesism, Capitalism and Pandemics where I talk about a lot of these intersections and how they've played out through the COVID pandemic and what's been happening to slaughterhouse workers, what's been happening to animals. I mean, hundreds of thousands of animals had to be killed that weren't going to end up as food for anybody. And their bodies were just put through wood chippers and spread out on these big compost heaps. Meanwhile, millions of Americans are lining up at food banks because they've lost their job due to Covid or there's shortages at the stores. So the system is just completely brutal, it's ineffective and it harms both humans and animals. So, yeah, if you're interested in more of those links, you can check out that video because I do go into, you know, slaughterhouse workers and racial capitalism and how this is all linked. It's also linked with, you know, patriarchy and other things. So, yeah, I just, as much as possible, I try to incorporate all these things in my analysis and encourage people to incorporate these things in their fights on the ground through direct action.
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Well, I think it's very politically important. I really can't stress it enough that you're doing that because that's helping people put these things together to begin to see that a person fighting for those animals that were senselessly killed is part of the same thing that other people are striking at a workplace or are demanding a different governmental reaction to the pandemic. That these are. And that if we do get together, the way you try to make it happen on your programs, we will all be more able to realize these objectives. It's that lesson in organizing and coming together that's made very tangible in your work. Okay, Dangerous as this is, I'm gonna ask you what, what do you think about the crazy election season that we're in? Right. We're all drowning in it. We're all surrounded by it. The mainstream media can seem to get no end to it. But I wanna know how someone from your Perspective thinks about all of this.
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B
Well, I wanna start by saying that I am Canadian, so I have held off from talking directly about the election or just basically held off from criticizing Biden and Harris the past few months, because, you know, Americans get very, very upset, and understandably so, thinking that people who are outside of the country are doing work or saying things that are going to condemn them to fascism. So I'm very sensitive to that. And I have held off on criticizing Biden and Harris for the past few months. So, I mean, obviously, I, I don't want to see Trump win a second term. I don't think that anybody can afford that. But at the same time, I mean, the election is such a complete farce, right? Like Joe Biden running on a platform of a return to normalcy. It's basically just a return to crushing neoliberalism. And, you know, there's actually the danger, I think, that if he gets into power and then doesn't actually provide any positive change, you know, he doesn't, he's not selling the answers, you know, he can't solve the contradictions of capitalism. And so in four years time, we could just have a swing back to a potentially even worse Republican, maybe a Tucker Carlson or something like that. Right. But I'm actually hopeful because I don't actually think that Joe Biden can diffuse the revolutionary energy right now the same way that Obama did and he, I mean, he did in 2008. He's just not as inspiring. So I just, I don't see a lot of people who are really riding with Biden unironically. I just see a lot of people who are saying, you know, we really need to get Trump out of office. And I don't particularly care for this man or his platform, but, you know, we just have to get this done. So in that sense, I'm hopeful because I think it seems that people are more and more awake these days, and I think they're awake enough to know that voting in another neoliberal Democrat is not going to be the solution to our problems. It's strategic. It's strategic, but there's a lot more work that needs to be done. So, I mean, I think that I'm hopeful in that sense. I also think the Democrats could win this election if they bothered to offer anything that their base actually wanted, like universal healthcare. But, yeah, I mean, it's clear that they don't. I don't think they care about winning as much as they care about not providing systemic change that would hurt them and their Wall street donors.
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Well, thank you. I appreciate it. Your being a Canadian gives you a perspective that is perfectly important for Americans to hear so that we're not all in the same little bubble looking at it. But you have someone from outside. Thank you very much, Megsi, and I especially thank you for the work that you do. It is vitally important and lots and lots of us recognize it and thank you for it. To all the rest of you, I hope you found this interesting and a good introduction to someone you should follow and learn more about. She has lots to teach us. This is Richard Wolff and I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Sam.