Transcript
A (0:10)
Welcome friends, to another Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, incomes, our own debts, our children's, all of that. I'm your host, Richard Warren. I want to begin today with a story about a worker co op of a sort called the New Belgian Craft Beer. It's pretty well known and it got quite a bit of attention over recent months as it went about the process of selling itself to a major international beer capitalist, namely Kirin Beer from Japan. And so some stories seem to imply that this was a symbol or a representative of co ops not being viable or having to sell themselves out and give up their co op strategy. That's wrong for several reasons and I wanted quickly to go over them. Number one, the New Belgian Craft Beer is not really a worker co op, it's a worker owned enterprise. And that's different. And that difference needs to be understood. Worker owned means that the shares in the company are owned by the workers in the company. But that leaves open the question of whether the worker owners will organize the work process, making the beer in a cooperative way, or whether they will choose to reproduce the capitalist system. Have a few people at the top, call them a board of directors, telling everybody else what to do and gathering the profits into their hands for distribution. ESOP is the legal entity, employee stock ownership plan that operates in entities like New Belgian Beer. They chose not to make a co op the way they organized their business. They left it as something workers owned, not to make that unimportant. It is a very interesting step, worker ownership that could be a step to a real co op. But they didn't choose to make it. And as owners, they decided their best way forward would be to sell to Kieran Beer. Kieran Beer then will be the owner. There will no longer be workers owning anything. And so the step that could have been taken now won't be taken. That is a moment of sadness for folks like us. But be assured, there are many co ops in the beer business who have taken the step not only to own the business, but to make it run as a co op. In other words, to make all the decisions democratically, one worker, one vote. And not to have a board of directors to reproduce the very capitalism to which co ops could and should be an alternative. The second either economic update for today has to do with a report put out by the International Federation of Health Plans. This caught my attention because I have, as you know, fairly often talked to you about the Medical Industrial Complex, that grouping of four industries in the United Doctors, Hospitals, Medical Insurance companies and the drug and appliance makers in this country. Those four have gotten together, take care of each other, get each other's back in order to charge more for medical care than in any other country on earth. And the International Federation of Health Plans did a study. It was reported on. For those of you who'd like the details in the 28th of December, New York Times, if you want a shortcut to it, but let me give you the bottom line. As they say, the United States was compared with other countries, carefully chosen to be quite different. So let me tell you what the other countries, Switzerland, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Germany and the United Arab Emirates, if I have their name right. Okay, here was the bottom line. For most procedures in the hospital, you know, appendectomies, births, the things you go to hospitals for. For most hospital procedures and for most drugs, most of the rest of the world get ready, measured by these countries, pays less than half what it costs to do exactly the same thing in the United States. It's extraordinary. It's a wonderful summary statistic of how medical care is a gigantic ripoff. And in the United States, that is not equaled anywhere in the rest of the world. On the scale that we are ripped off in classic way by a monopoly that these four industries have organized, it's almost as lucrative for the medical industrial complex as it has long been for the military industrial complex. My next update takes a moment of explaining. Capitalism around the world is coming under enormous criticism. The level of inequality in the United States is off the chart. It's going back to the 19th century. And the level of inequality inside most other countries, from China to Britain to you name it, are likewise off the charts. Not only is capitalism producing gross inequality, but capitalism is just now slowly emerging from its second worst collapse in its history, 2008 and 09, with everybody expecting the next downturn to happen soon and to be a doozy. So we got capitalism producing inequality and instability. So no wonder it's getting criticized left and right. And that puts its defenders in a bit of a bind. How are you going to defend a system that works this poorly for the vast majority of people? Capitalism is in danger of being understood, as it long should have, as a system that's really good for the 1%. End of story. So the defenders have a hard time, but they've come up with something to which I want to respond. Here's their defense. Many years ago, sometimes a century is used, sometimes two or three centuries is used. Extreme poverty in the world was much worse than it is today. So capitalism should be applauded, should be celebrated, because it has reduced extreme poverty from what it once was to what it is today. Let me give you a response. First, extreme poverty is a very fuzzy concept. What exactly does it mean? The World bank, who keeps records of this stuff, has a definition of extreme poverty. That's when a human being lives on. Get ready now. $1.90 a day or less. That's right. Let me have that sink in. $1.90 per person to cover the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the shelter that keeps you from the rain and everything and anything else, all for 190. If you had to live on that, try to imagine what it would mean even at that absurd level. It is admitted by the World bank that today in the world, 700 million people live on $1.90 a day per person or less. Suppose we took as a different number, $10. Let me do it again. $10 per person for all the food, all the clothing, all the shelter and everything else. Medical care, transportation, care of children, you name it. $10 a day. If we use that measure, then half of the world today is poor. But to hear these people talk, oh, capitalism has done a wonderful job. Let me take it a step further. This kind of argument reminds me of my mother. Every time something was wrong in our family, my mother, in her defensive need, explained to us that it could have been and probably once was worse. Billionaires today. And let me remind you, the top 400 billionaires in the world have together more wealth than the bottom half of the people of this earth. That's all those people living under $10 a day. What the people defending capitalism can't defend against is the outrageous inequality and the gross immorality of this kind of inequality. You don't distract us and you don't deflect criticism of the here and now by telling us what it once was, using measures that are. I'm going to be polite now, dubious in the extreme. But it's worse when we look at what got people out of poverty. For those who managed to. Here's what we discover about capitalism and that capitalists in the majority opposed every one of the steps. When, for example, in the United States it was proposed to have a minimum wage so people weren't in poverty, capitalists opposed it. They've been opposing it ever since. You know, the last time the minimum wage was raised in the United States? 2009. That's a decade ago. Prices have risen across the decade, but not the minimum wage. That's not fighting poverty that's causing it. What capitalists want to doand you shouldn't be fooled is having tried to oppose minimum wage, family leave, a progressive income tax, all of the things that take people out of poverty. Having failed to stop them, capitalists now want us to give credit for those things that they fought against. Stop it. Don't be fooled. And you know, there's some things I can give you as examples in which capitalists, after they've lost the fight to prevent an emergence of poverty, bring it back. The poverty. There was a middle class created in America out of the Great Depression. Social Security, unemployment compensation, public jobs, and a minimum wage, all of which were done in the 1930s, were ways to lift people out of poverty. We don't have a public employment anymore. We've gutted Social Security, we've gutted unemployment, and we've gutted the. The minimum wage, which is why the middle class is disappearing. As every politician needs these days to say, that's an example not just of capitalism opposing the end of poverty, but bringing it back. Wow. Vast areas of rural America are simply being thrown under the bus in the last decades. That's an achievement of capitalism too. In it wasn't always that way. Detroit was once a thriving city. So was Cleveland. So were many others. It's capitalism that has laid them low. No, you don't defend capitalism by giving us some hustle about diminished poverty. Face the reality today, and this is the bottom line of bottom lines. We have a capitalism that has the capacity to alleviate poverty here and now, finally, and chooses not to do it. That is the most immoral act imaginable. There is no excuse. And looking backwards in history is a lame effort at doing so. And it leads me to be as much ashamed as anything else. Well, we've come to the end of the first half of today's economic Update. This is the moment when we remind you, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. It is an enormous help to Economic update costs you nothing but a click of the mouse at the YouTube to add us to those that you support. Likewise, make use of our websites. They are ways for you to communicate with us by email and to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And as always, our special thanks and our appreciation to a Patreon community that has rallied and supported us and make these programs possible. Thank you very much. Stay with us. We'll be right back with an important interview. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's economic Update. I'm very happy to welcome back to our microphones, where she's been before. A longtime friend and a guest, Laura Flanders. I don't really need to introduce her, but I'm going to just to make sure I cover all my bits. She's an award winning host and executive producer of the Laura Flanders Show. It's a nationally syndicated TV and radio program that looks at the disparities and struggles over power and meaning and the future across many disciplines, economics, politics and culture. She's worked in independent media, which is what we're going to be talking about for a long time. She's written six books, including the New York Times bestseller, Bush Women, Tales of a Cynical Species, which is a wonderful title. She recently received major awards and later in our interview, we're going to be talking about them. So, Laura, first of all, welcome.