Transcript
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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Debts, incomes, our jobs, those of our children, those looming down the road. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I want to begin today by noting a very old blame game that is circulating around major capitalist economies. It's not a new thing, but it's important to realize that it's an old thing being recycled yet again. So let's start with the United States, with Mr. Trump and the Republican Party. Who are they blaming for the difficulties of the United States? Here we go. Immigrants. The Chinese, our trading partners.
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And.
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And now also African Americans, because they are responsible for the decline of, say, Baltimore. And also, of course, his political opponents notice what's missing. The capitalist economic system. No blame at all. Let's shift then to England. They have a new leader, Boris Johnson. What does he do? Hmm. It'll come as a surprise. He blames immigrants and other foreigners. In his case, European Europeans with a little China bashing thrown in for good. And his political opponents, same story, same blame game, same exemption. Nothing wrong with the economic system. And in the European Union, you basically get the same thing depending on which of the many countries in the European Union you look at. They either blame the United States, China, trade war, or immigrants or their political opponents, left or right. In France, the leader, Macron, blames the yellow vest movement that has shaken France for the last several months. In Germany, Angela Merkel, on her way out, blames the far right. The resurgence of a fascism in Germany that is truly scary. In all of these kinds of things, there's always a grain of truth. There are problems for these societies that come from immigrants and from the Chinese, trade wars and so on. But there really interesting thing is they're not facing the problems of an economic system in decline. Capitalism in Western Europe, North America and Japan is having more and more troubles as an economic system as it serves a smaller and smaller rich minority at the expense of everybody else. But it's the job of all of these politicians to point the finger everywhere else but there. It's a blame game. You, you shouldn't be fooled. Then my eyes and ears were caught by a remarkable piece of reporting done by the Wall Street Journal. To give them credit, and based on the work of a professor of law at the Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. by the name of Adam Levitin. Here's what he did. A simple exercise, but boy, does it tell a lot. He asked how much has the median income of an American family changed over the last 30 years, counting from 1987 to 2017, a nice period of 30 years we can look at. And he said, I want to see how much income the 50% middle of the American distribution of income, how has it changed over those 30 years? And here's what he found. When you adjust for inflation, in other words, you adjust for the fact that prices went up. The median income in an American family went up 14% in 30 years. That's less than one half of 1% of a real increase on average for an American family. In other words, very little at all. And then he said, I'm going to look at three specific other things that American families have to pay for to see what happened to them, because it'll give us an insight. And here's what he found and I'm gonna give you the exact numbers. Housing prices, one of the most important things anybody spends money on over the same 30 years, 1987 to 2017 went up ready, adjusted for inflation. Taking account of rising general prices, it went up ready, not 14%. That's what people's income went up, 290%. That's right, tripled. So the cost of housing has taken a bigger and bigger chunk out of Americans income. They're still living in the same place. They're sleeping there and eating there. But the amount of their income they have to spend to be able to do those things has dramatically increased. Then he looked at public, public four year colleges. They're cheaper in general than private. How far did they go up over the same 30 year period adjusting for inflation? And here's what he found, that those kinds of costs went up 311%. They went up even faster than housing. So if you want to live somewhere and you want your kids to go to college, oh boy, have you had to cut back on other things to pay for those things? And finally he looked at per person healthcare expenditures and they went up 51% compared to the income that went up 14%. In other words, those three things, housing, college education and personal healthcare, really took more and more out of people, leaving less and less for everything else. And that's the reality. People have lived in the United States. And why? Because our economic system doesn't produce housing at a rate that will allow people to live in a home without being gouged this way. And what about college? Because our system doesn't provide the funding for four year public colleges that it used to provide. More and more of the payment for that education has to come out of the family sending their children to school. And in healthcare, well, we Talk about that all the time. The medical industrial complex, jacking up the prices of your drugs, of your hospital stay, of your doctor, of your medical insurance. And then you can see the squeezing of the American family as these three messed up parts of our economy eat up more of the real income Americans have. It is something to understand how this system gets down low into the individual lives we all lead to cause us the pain and the difficulty that's showing up in such an anger in our culture these days. I want to turn next to an idea coming from a number of the Democratic folks looking to be the Democratic candidate for president in 2020. And they're talking about co determination. This comes from Germany. In German it's called Mitbestimung. And here's what it means that the idea in Germanyand this has been true in Germany for decades is, is that because workers, employees are affected in every business where they're employed, they ought to have a say. It's a notion of democracy in the decisions made in that business. So the way the Germans worked that out with their commitment to democracy was to say that a certain number of seats on the board of directors of every company have to be filled by workers who are elected to those positions by other workers. So that in most large German corporations, for sure, a little under 50%, less than 50% of Board of directors, seats are filled by workers who are elected by other workers. And it's a notion of stakeholders, the workers should be represented because they have to live with the decisions the board of directors in any company makes. So they should be there. In the United States, of course, we have none of that. The vast majority of boards of directors have never had a worker on them. And those that have had any of it have had one or maybe sometimes two. So you see that it's absent in the United States, which is why the idea is coming. But lest anyone get too carried away with the novelty of this idea, now that you know, it isn't a novelty at all. It exists in Germany, which has been a very successful capitalist economy. Let's remember this is a minor reform. Sure, it's better than having no workers. But it reminds me of the history of when we got rid of monarchy and kings, when kings used to rule us, particularly here in the Western world, there were no parliaments. The king did whatever he wanted and nobody could do anything about it. People got angry and upset because they had to live with the King's decisions, but had no power over them. So they pressed to have a parliamentary. The King refused. But when he couldn't refuse anymore, he allowed a parliament, but he wouldn't be bound by anything. The parliament decided. So then the parliament pushed for more. And eventually, you know what happened? The parliament took all the power and eliminated the king. There are no more kings, except in a few countries that haven't made it that far yet. It's the same story here. The workers and the community and the customers of a business are the ones who care most about it and who depend on it. And they ought to be the ones making the decision, not simply the people who bought shares in the company. The idea that they alone should make all the decisions, which is how it is in the United States and in so many other parts of the world, is the weird idea like kingdom that ought not to exist in the larger society. Why do we have little kingdoms inside our workplaces? And that issue is being broached at least a little bit by talking about co determination, the workers participating in shaping what corporations do. It's long overdue. My last update that we'll have time for today has to do with what I think is a lesson given to the whole of the American population and maybe even the world by the courageous and politically active people of Puerto Rico who don't get anywhere near the attention and the credit they deserve. The people of Puerto Rico have been suffering from decades of the problem of being a kind of colony of the United States, even though we don't call it that, of putting into power there people who are often very, very corrupt. They suffered terribly and disproportionately in Puerto Rico from the capitalist collapse of 2008. They suffered disproportionately, the austerity afterward. The Trump administration particularly has been very hesitant to provide the support to this day that this society needs. They got very badly hurt by Hurricane Maria. Many of you will remember that afterwards. And then they finally have this leader recently, Rosello, Governor Rosello, who was caught by good reporters being misogynistic, homophobic and corrupt. The FBI arrested people in the cabinet and so on. And the people of Puerto Rico had too much, too many decades of corruption, too many decades of American domination and control without the benefits that were supposed to come with that disaster, from the collapse of capitalism, from the hurricane, and very little help of the sort that was needed. And of the help they got, many of it sidelined into the corruption that has been endemic there. So they went into the streets for a week or two. First 50,000, then 100,000, then 500,000. And guess what? After everyone said this would make no difference going into the streets. It made all the difference in the world. Governor Rosello is gone. His term wasn't over, but the people said, yeah, it is over. Bye bye, you're gone. And they're keeping their activity going. They want to make a fundamental change. The lesson here, political action in the street made the difference. Nothing else has. They made a statement the people of Puerto Rico that others around the world, including on the mainland, might want to think about. And in that final thought about Puerto Rico, Jeff Stein of the Washington Post pointed out a wonderful know a lot has been said about Venezuela and how bad the conditions are there that something like 13%, the UN says of people from Venezuela left Venezuela because the conditions are so poor and the enemies of Venezuela have liked to use that number. Mr. Stein quotes the UN saying the percentage of people that have left Puerto rico just since 2008 isn't the 13% that Venezuelans are leaving, it's 15%. The people of Puerto Rico are in worse shape than the people of Venezuela. Puerto Rico is protected by the United States and Venezuela is attacked by the United States. Think about it. We've come to the end of the first half. Please stay with us for a remarkable interview that will follow shortly. Please remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel, which is an enormous source of support and help to us. Make use of our websites rdwolffwith2f's.com and democracyatwork.info and as always, special thanks to our Patreon community for the continuing support you provide which is crucial to for everything we do. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. It is my pleasure to welcome back to our cameras and microphones a friend of mine, Rob Robinson. He is a very active citizen here in the city of New York. He works particularly on all kinds of rights organizations, social rights, economic rights, but with a particular emphasis on homelessness, on the right to the land, the right to housing. He's been doing that here in the New York area, but he also does it all over the United States. He's worked with the city of New York, he's worked with the United nations. He's been active in Brazil, in Spain. He really is a kind of expert who even has his own personal experience to build on and working on this question. So I've asked him to come today and talk with us about homelessness in the United States. Rob, welcome very much.