Injustice, Race and Class

Summary

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Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff

Episode: "Injustice, Race and Class"

Date: August 22, 2019

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Professor Richard D. Wolff critically explores how economic injustice is deeply intertwined with issues of race and class in the United States. Using recent high-profile cases, examples of corporate malfeasance, and stories of community struggle, Wolff and guest investigative journalist Bob Henley examine how capitalism, profit motive, and systemic inequality perpetuate both economic and racial disparities. The episode highlights the self-reinforcing nature of inequality, exposes the failures of the justice system, and discusses community-based alternatives to corporate capitalism.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Corporate Capitalism’s Failures: Three Illustrative Stories

(00:25–04:51)

• Boeing and the 737 Max:

  • Boeing prioritized profits over safety by cutting costs, leading to development failures and fatal crashes.
  • Regulatory agencies, supposed to safeguard public interest, were compromised due to their close relationship with the corporation.
  • “A capitalist corporation, to make more money...Compromised the government and killed a significant number of people.” (01:56, Wolff)

• Audi/Volkswagen Emission Scandal:

  • VW and Audi were caught deliberately cheating emissions controls, allowing millions of polluting vehicles on the road.
  • Other major car companies have also engaged in similar fraudulent behavior, with severe health consequences for the public.
  • “Capitalism kills.” (03:24, Wolff)

• Juul and Nicotine Addiction:

  • Juul marketed vaping products to children, echoing past tobacco industry practices.
  • Despite past penalties for cigarette companies’ actions, new companies continue exploiting loopholes to maximize profits at the expense of public health.

• Underlying Message:

  • In all cases, profit was prioritized over safety, health, and ethical responsibility.
  • “Profit is our bottom line. In simple English, profit is the goal. Safety isn’t.” (04:53, Wolff)

2. Monopoly, Competition, and Systemic Exploitation

(04:51–09:55)

• Ongoing Department of Justice antitrust probes into tech giants (Google, Facebook, Amazon).
• Wolff argues that monopoly is not an accident but a natural outcome of capitalist competition—winners grow larger, losers disappear.
• Cyclical pattern: Competition creates monopolies, monopoly breeds new competitors craving those profits, and the cycle repeats.
• Government investigations are cyclical, costly, and rarely lead to lasting solutions; the public foots the bill on both sides.
• “How many times do you need to get ripped off before you recognize a ripoff?” (09:48, Wolff)

3. Cooperative Alternatives and Worker Empowerment

(09:55–11:10)

• Introduction of initiatives like Brightly and the Arizmendi Association—organizations that franchise worker cooperatives in the U.S.
• Franchising co-ops is positioned as a practical model for spreading economic democracy and worker empowerment.

4. The Vicious Cycle of Inequality

(11:10–14:26)

• Systematic pay differences shape lifelong inequalities—better-paid individuals access superior housing, education, and opportunities.
• These disparities become entrenched, leading to persistent segregation by both class and race.
• Case study: Long Island’s Hempstead (2% white, under-resourced) vs. Garden City (87% white, affluent)—massive funding disparities replicate societal divides.
• “The whole quality of what’s happening to the children reproduces the inequality that exists in the society.” (13:44, Wolff)

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Interview Segment with Bob Henley (Investigative Journalist)

(14:39–28:07)

5. The Eric Garner Case—Race and Class Collide

(16:07–20:34)

• Garner, an African American man, was killed by police for allegedly selling loose cigarettes—a subsistence activity in the face of $14/pack cigarettes.
• Henley argues the issue is both about race and economic survival:
  • Law enforcement resources were used to police street-level hustling while high-level white-collar crimes go unaddressed.
  • Capitalism and political corruption focused enforcement on petty crime rather than the root economic injustices.
• “His crime was trying to make a living selling individual cigarettes. And the New York Police Department, with the range of problems it has, was focused on that rather than on all the other issues.” (19:15, Wolff to Henley)
• The narrative of Garner as “victim” (the “I can’t breathe” video) often overshadows his resistance and humanity.

6. Selective Justice: The Epstein and Kushner Examples

(20:48–23:46)

• Henley contrasts the aggressive prosecution of street-level offenders with leniency or self-directed sentencing for the wealthy:

  • Jeffrey Epstein received a lenient plea deal for sex trafficking, living freely with minimal consequences until public outcry forced further action.
  • Charles Kushner (real estate mogul, major donor) manipulated his sentencing, avoiding significant repercussions for political corruption.
  • “You really have two tracks of justice here. And it’s becoming really, at this point, medieval.” (23:17, Henley)

• The media and political establishment often frame urban crises as racial or local issues, ignoring economic crimes like foreclosure and systemic deindustrialization that devastate communities.

7. Racialized Distraction from Systemic Economic Failure

(23:46–27:40)

• Trump’s rhetoric in places like Baltimore is cited as an example of using race to deflect from economic policy failures—shifting blame onto immigrants or minorities rather than a broken system.

• Many urban areas with significant African American populations suffered industrial abandonment and have not recovered, impacting jobs and community stability.

• “The system breaks down...The failure of the system to provide gets deflected, gets distracted by Mr. Trump. It’s the immigrant that you’re supposed to be angry at...He finds in a classic conservative mentality everything he can think of to blame other than the system that isn’t working.” (25:37, Wolff)

• Henley notes crime in New York has dropped partly thanks to immigrant communities, contradicting far-right narratives:

  • “What changed was undocumented immigrants...made the city of New York a place to raise children in neighborhoods that this industrial abandonment had wrecked entirely.” (26:43, Henley)

• Now, even as cities are revitalized, the working class and immigrants are being pushed out by gentrification and multinational capital.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Corporate Priorities:

  • “Profit is the goal. Safety isn’t. When we fly in something, or when we drive something, or when we take something into our bodies, the number one priority shouldn’t be the profit of the producer, it should be the safety of the consumer.” (04:53, Wolff)

• On Monopoly:

  • “It’s the competition that produces the monopoly. And why is monopoly attractive? Because then businesses can get two kinds of profit...They can jack the price up way beyond what it would otherwise be because the buying public...have no options.” (06:29, Wolff)
  • “How many times do you need to get ripped off before you recognize a ripoff?” (09:48, Wolff)

• On Eric Garner’s Legacy:

  • “He was a big guy...known as a gentle giant who kind of kept social order. And that piece is lost in the discussion.” (20:03, Henley)

• On Selective Justice:

  • “You really have two tracks of justice here. And it’s becoming really, at this point, medieval. I mean, the stark contrasts are getting worse every day.” (23:17, Henley)

• On Systemic Distraction:

  • “The system breaks down...The failure of the system to provide gets deflected...[Trump says] it’s the immigrant...or now African Americans. He finds...everything he can think of to blame other than the system that isn’t working.” (25:37, Wolff)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Corporate Capitalism’s Failures: 00:25–04:51
• Monopoly and Systemic Cyclicality: 04:51–09:55
• Cooperative Alternatives: 09:55–11:10
• Long Island’s School Inequality: 11:10–14:26
• Eric Garner and Class/Race: 16:07–20:34
• Epstein/Kushner – Selective Justice: 20:48–23:46
• Trump, Urban Decline, and Distraction: 23:46–27:40
• Immigrants and Urban Renewal, Gentrification: 26:42–27:57

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Tone & Takeaways

• The tone is urgent, critical, and insightful, blending economic analysis with social justice commentary.
• Wolff and Henley challenge listeners to see the bigger picture—how race and class are manipulated to divide working people and obscure deeper, systemic economic injustices.
• The conversation underscores the importance of shifting from profit-driven, exploitative capitalism to cooperative, democratic forms of economic organization for real social progress.

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Transcript

[A]

Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic.

[B]

Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, those of our children, those looming ahead of all of us.

[A]

I'm your host, Richard Wolf.

[B]

I want to start today by telling you three little short stories about corporate capitalism. They're stories about the failures of capitalism and I've chosen them because they are very different. One is out of the United States and two are inside. And they cover completely different industries. Because the point is, something is in common in all of these stories. Here they are very quickly. The Boeing Corporation, one of the biggest airline producers in the world, produced a very, very unsafe airplane, the 737 Max. You know about it. It's been in the headlines. Two major crashes killing hundreds of people happened over the last year or so. Why? It's now clear from the reporting that these airplanes were unsafe. The software that guided them, the safety arrangements made for them, were inadequate. Partly the reasons are clear. Boeing was saving on costs using cheap software engineers, for example, saving on safety tests that could have and should have been done. And the bottom line was that the government's supervision, which is supposed to catch that kind of behavior, was compromised because the government was in cahoots with Boeing in terms of who the supervisors were, who paid them and who they reported to. Bottom a capitalist corporation to make more money to save on costs. That's why you do that, to boost your profits. Compromised the government and killed a significant number of people. My second example out of the United States, the Audi Automobile Corporation. Audi is a subdivision of vw. Volkswagen. And you know, because we've reported it and there's been many stories about it, that VW was caught several years ago having systematically and knowingly cheated on its emissions control activities and its emissions control devices that were supposed to be installed in cars. Effectively, they had fooled the controller by putting in a failed device so that they could get away with selling to the public millions of automobiles that were polluting the air more than they were supposed to and that were legally allowed even as VW was exposed and the press was on it and the world knew the subdivision of VW called Audi, the maker of high end cars, continued we now know, to do the same thing, hoping to get away with it. Those extra emissions that were produced by the way, not just by VW and Audi, but by virtually all the major car companies who have been caught over recent years doing it. That pollution caused emphysema, caused asthma and caused people to die in significant numbers from compromised lungs, etc. Capitalism kills. Third example, cigarettes were banned in the United States for advertising publicly, particularly for children. And the cigarette companies fined heavily because of the addiction qualities of nicotine addiction that was exaggerated intentionally by the cigarette companies. What do we have today? Is the lesson learned? Not at all. A new company, Juul J U L has been producing vapes, they're called vaporizer substitutes for cigarettes. And guess what? They've now been caught systematically exposing children to advertising to get them to start smoking these things with claims that they're less dangerous than cigarettes.

[A]

My goodness.

[B]

That's what the cigarette companies tried. Remember filter cigarettes? You were supposed to shift to them because they were safer until we got rid of the whole thing. Now we get this company once again making money by addicting children to another form of nicotine. Take in. Wow.

[A]

Capitalism.

[B]

What's the point here?

[A]

Capitalism is about profit.

[B]

To use their language. Profit is our bottom line. In simple English, profit is the goal. Profit is the priority. Safety isn't. And when we fly in something, or when we drive something, or when we take something into our bodies, the number one priority shouldn't be the profit of the producer, it should be the safety of the consumer. The profiteers are few, the consumers are many. It's not democratic, it's not human, it's inappropriate and they ought to be called out. What's common to Boeing, to Audi and to Juul is that they are profit driven capitalist enterprises. And therein lies the common problem. My next update has to do with the decision of the Department of Justice in Washington to begin an inquiry, an antitrust investigation, into large high tech corporations like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and so on. The name of the game here is ready shock and awe that these companies may be operating a monopoly. What's a monopoly mean? It means that instead of having many competitors, many companies competing with one another, instead what you have is simply only one. That's literally a monopoly or a very small number. And the reason that's bad is if it's one or a very small number, they can manipulate the market, they can jack up the prices higher than what they would otherwise be because you've got nowhere else to go but that one. Or the few because there aren't many. This is not rocket science, friends. What's the problem here? Here's the Capitalism always proceeds to Monopoly. Here's the when you have many competitors, each one trying to beat the other one, some win and some lose. That's what competition means. And guess what happens? The winners get bigger and the losers go out of business. And when the losers go out of Business. They lay off workers, they sell off their equip. You know who hires those workers, and you know who buys that equipment? The winners. And slowly, over time, what competition does is reduce the many to the few. So if you don't like Monopoly, you got a problem. You don't like capitalism. Cause that's what it is. It's the competition that produces the monopoly. And why is monopoly attractive? Because then businesses can get two kinds of profit. One, what they get off their workers, who they pay less than what those workers produce for the company. But now they have a second way to gain. They can jack the price up way beyond what it would otherwise be because the buying public, whoever they are, have no options. That's why companies want to become monopolies, because they make more money. It's built into the system. So an investigation to see whether it's happening for the umpteenth time is an investigation into the likelihood that. That tomorrow the sun will rise. Not really need an investigation. And here's an even more rich irony. No sooner do monopolies take over in an enterprise, in an industry like cigarettes or cars or machinery or whatever you name, than pretty soon they're making so much money that there's an incentive for other companies to come in with a new product to substitute because it's so profitable. So, ironically, monopoly generates competition again, as others want in on the enormous profits that monopolists make. In other words, capitalism displays, as it always has, the transition from competition to monopoly and the transition back. The only thing that makes this even more ludicrous is when the government investigates. That means the Department of Justice is going to hire and use a vast array of lawyers, accountants, economists like me to come in and push about why is this happening and it shouldn't happen? And the companies will have their irony, excess of lawyers and accountants to argue why they should. And they might not. And it should take some time, and they have to adjust. And you know who pays for the lawyers on both sides? You and me. The taxes we pay pay for the government lawyers. And the companies that are defending themselves, they'll jack up the price, which they're monopolists, and they can do to cover the cost of their lawyers. We get to pay the lawyers on both sides. And you know what ends up happening? One possibility, nothing, and just keep going. Second possibility, we break up the company into many small companies to resume competition, which we do, and that produces. Then again, monopoly. This is crazy, what we're doing. Our problem isn't monopoly or competition. Our problem is a system that displays the transition from one to the other during which we are are overcharged for the monopolized goods, overcharged for the legal shenanigans in which they argue with each other for the umpteenth time. How many times do you need to get ripped off before you recognize a ripoff? I want to call out a remarkable development. Cooperatives have been formed, worker cooperatives across America. But there's a new thing happening. It's called Brightly. It's a system that franchises worker co ops. You know, like you franchise a fast food joint or you franchise. You create a model that lots of people can easily get into that business. That's now being done for worker co ops. One of the supporters of it is the center for Family Life. If you're interested, go look up Brightly. Go look up the center for Family Life. Look up this phenomena of franchising of worker co ops as they spread. Another good example of this is the Arizmendi association of Cooperatives in the Bay Area of California that is also helping to spread this model so it develops in America even faster in the future than it has been in the recent past. The last thing I want to talk about today that we'll have time for, or perhaps we'll have time for two we'll see is the problem of inequality in the United States. I wanted to make sure that people understand the history of all of this. If you pay some people systematically more than other people, certain things follow. Those who are better paid can afford better housing, better schooling, better transportall of that. And as a result you get two different kinds of neighborhoods, two different kinds of childhoods, two different kinds of schools. And if you don't deal with that inequality, it becomes baked into the society. People who live in the nicer neighborhood want some distance between themselves and those who are not. Those with children in the better schools don't want them to be reduced in quality by having to deal with kids that bring more problems. Why? Because their parents earn less money and can't live in the nice ne. You get the picture. Because we all know what this is about. And then it becomes self reproducing over time. That's the real terrible part of all of this. So I was struck when I recently learned the two school districts in Long Island, New York exemplify this. And I wanted to simply tell you about it. In Hempstead, the Hempstead Union Free School District and the Garden City Union Free School District are a very few miles apart. Enrollment in Hempast Schools is 2% white, while immediately to the north, the school district in Garden City is 87% white. Get the picture? White people paid more than non white people. And now these arrangements have happened. Now what's at stake here? Well, you can get many implications of it. I'm just going to give you one. Ready. In Hempstead City schools, they get almost 5,000 more per student per year. Other wealthy districts get even more, 7,000 more per student per year. In other words, the whole quality of what's happening to the children reproduces the inequality that exists in the society. You can't blame people for this inequality. You're blaming conditions that determine what happens to those people. That's why you've got to deal with the inequality at the base, at the unequal access to the resources that shape the community. Housing, schools, transportation and all the rest. We've come to the end of the first half of our program. For those of you that follow us on YouTube, please become a YouTube supporter. It's very important to us make use please of our websites rdwolff with two Fs.com and democracyatwork.info where you can communicate to us. And of course, as always, thank you to our Patreon audience for the support and encouragement you constantly provide and we depend on.

[A]

Stay with us.

[B]

We'll be right back.

[A]

Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. It is my pleasure to welcome back to our microphones a journalist whom I admire who is a kind of reminder of what really good investigative research based reporting can do in illuminating what's going on and what it means in the lives we are all trying to lead. So let me introduce again my friend Bob Henley.

[B]

Thanks for having me. Welcome so much. Pleasure to the program.

[A]

Bob, just to remind everyone is a well known and awarded research investigative journalist. To put all the words together. He works regularly for the chief leader and there he covers.

[C]

Well, we had been doing public and.

[D]

Civil service since 1897.

[C]

In the last couple of months we're.

[D]

Taking on the entire American labor movement, including the private sector.

[A]

So here's a newspaper with a reporter that's really going to cover labor. Something to pay attention to.

[B]

Bob has a line of credits longer.

[A]

Than I can copy all of here. He writes regularly for Salon where you can find his work. But he has been on 60 Minutes, he's written for the New York Times, a long, long list of really the premier outlets for good quality journalism. And it is a privilege for us.

[B]

To be able to talk with him today.

[D]

Thanks for having me.

[B]

All right, Bob, let's start with that remarkable Eric Garner case case where police used chokeholds and effectively killed an African American who was selling individual cigarettes basically to support his family. And your article, which caught my mind, caught my attention, was about how this should be seen not only in the racial terms, which is how it was mostly covered, and which it clearly has as an important component, but also as an economic or class issue. Tell us about why you felt that way and what was it about that story that you felt required you to focus on the race and class dimensions?

[D]

Well, because first of all, on that particular day, Eric Garner told the police he wasn't selling Lucy's, but he had been arrested in the past and he was. Why this occurred to me was that at its core, the decision by the city of New York to enforce this draconian measure, I mean, cigarettes are going for $14 a pack. And so he had found a niche historically and other people that hung in that spot where they could come up with this subsistence living. And to that mind, it reminded me, knowing how corrupt New York City politics are and at the choices that were made about why did they pick that? With all that's going on in the city, why did they choose that? With all the white collar crime going on on Wall street, why zero in on that?

[B]

And in point of fact, let me just interrupt.

[A]

The niche you're talking about is selling.

[B]

Cigarettes one by one, right, for a dollar.

[C]

And so what occurred to me was that he actually had more in common with the Sons of Liberty and the successful fight of the Stamp act that.

[D]

Led up to the American Revolution and indeed the Shay Rebellion, which was held by put forward by farmers who were veterans of the Revolutionary War, returned back to where they were from, and then realized that the local government had passed laws that was going to throw them off their farms.

[C]

So they took direct action because they were being oppressed by this political economy, which was corrupt. And so I looked at detail at who was it who made the decision to put that area under surveillance? Because as it turns out, the New York City police had that area under surveillance. And that whole way of making a living they had targeted. The person that made that decision was the highest ranking African American, Chief Banks.

[D]

With the police department. He was at the center of some significant police corruption scandals. He was never indicted or convicted, but his lawyer let it be known in a letter that was made public that he would take the Fifth Amendment, which all tied into Mayor de Blasio's whole campaign finance scandal, because the two principals that were close to De Blasio and giving money to de Blasio were part of the social nexus of the police corruption that banks was involved in. That part of the story is not discussed. How was it that working class cops were in the ridiculous position of having to have this kind of enforcement that ended up resulting in the loss of his life because of decisions made that we don't even discuss? And that's where the focus needs to be.

[B]

So that his crime was trying to make a living selling individual cigarettes. And the New York Police Department, with the range of problems it has, was focused on that rather than on all the other issues.

[D]

Right.

[C]

Some merchant had made a call that had a problem. And so in the system, we have Wall street creating all kinds of white collar crimes that targets all kinds of people in this country in the same five boroughs.

[D]

And yet they fixated on loose cigarettes.

[C]

That was the thing that they actually, I mean, when you think about it, the ripple effects, I mean, he had.

[D]

I think, six children. He had prior to that been working for the city Parks Department. He had been sidelined by asthma.

[C]

This is a person who was trying.

[D]

To do the right thing and ironically.

[C]

Was kind of like the mayor of the place.

[D]

He was a big guy and he was known as a gentle giant who kind of kept social order. And that piece is lost in the discussion.

[C]

And the other thing I wanted to cast him is the video we see over and over again is him as a victim saying, I can't breathe, I can't breathe. The part of the tape that's important that we don't see is when he said to the police, and he stood up for himself in posterity, not today, referring to the decision to try to arrest him for something he said he didn't even do. And even if he did do, shouldn't have been seen as a crime.

[B]

Do you see a pattern in the police actions, but also in the courts in our country in which the class element is lost sight of, is denied even when the racial dimension is seen.

[D]

I think the best example is the situation with Jeffrey Epstein. And I had the opportunity for my position as covering the courts here in New York to sit right behind him at his arraignment. Of course, just to review for people, Mr. Epstein was a person who was supposedly a big time hedge fund individual who the former, the Secretary of Labor, when he was U.S. attorney, Mr. Acosta worked out a plea deal where this very prominent person was able to avoid. Epstein was able to avoid any kind of criminal sanction for what was a child sex trafficking. And he pled to a much lesser offense, which permitted him a state charge to go back and forth to his job and pretty much live his life without a problem. This was fine. This was back in 2007. But then there was such a hubbub after Mr. Acosta was nominated to be Secretary of Labor. And much to the credit of the Miami Herald, they resurfaced this story. And it turned out that there was so much evidence that had been overlooked by Mr. Acosta that the Southern District brought additional charges. That's right. The same Department of Justice that had worked out a deal with Mr. Epstein actually put him back into custody. So if you look at how the System treats a Mr. Epstein versus Eric Garner, you really have, in a nutshell, how upside down our current moment is.

[B]

What about the case of Kushner? It's also getting a lot of attention and you've written about it. Does the cases, oh, Charles Kushner, the father of Jared Kushner, especially Trump's son in law, does that also illustrate the injustice of the justice system?

[C]

And this, of course, is a story.

[D]

About Jared Kushner's father, who was a developer and a major donor to the Democratic Party nationally. And he was very close to Governor Jim McGreevey.

[C]

He was appointed to the Port Authority.

[D]

Which is a very powerful body here. Multibillion dollar capital budget. It turned out that he was involved with political corruption. He was indicted, but he was able to work it out so that in the final analysis, he didn't have to give anybody up.

[C]

He really was in command and control of the way his sentence went down. And so you really have two tracks of justice here. And it's becoming really, at this point, medieval. I mean, the stark contrasts are getting worse every day. And that's why you're seeing, I think, with this grassroots outcry. And to some degree, the corporate media wants to keep it only about race. But for instance, when they cover about Ferguson and they talk about the upheaval there, they won't look at the situation related to the foreclosure crisis and the economic crimes that have devastated these cities. And so we never seem to get to that piece of the thing that really threatens the kind of radical critique and analysis that can prompt people to take the action that's long overdue.

[B]

Yeah, you see it to bring in something more recent. Perhaps you see it in the attack by Mr. Trump on Mr. Cummings in Maryland and Baltimore, a city afflicted by the way capitalism has evolved in many ways, doing similar things in parts of Philadelphia, doing similar things Camden, New Jersey, which is. And somehow making it almost a racial issue. So he can focus people's awareness of the inequality that is everywhere in our society by portraying it instead as though it has some racial origin rather than an economic.

[C]

What's ironic is if you go back and look at his stump speech where he got the Rust Belt to reject. And that's the other thing I think is so relevant right now. Remember, he managed to flip 200 counties and had voted for President Obama twice. So these were in place and only by 70,000 votes. That was the margin. And these were places like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio. These are places that had a traditional labor base, if you will. What had happened is there was no recovery. And we talked about this at the time.

[D]

We saw Trump coming. Other people didn't. And so the irony is that Trump.

[C]

Had talked about how corporations had, when he was running for president the first time, had abandoned America's industrial base and he was going to hold them to account. Well, that's what happened in places like Baltim, Newer Camden. We had people that move, people from the south who were people of color move for work, and there were union jobs there to maintain and support and uplift a family. And the jobs left and the people were left behind, and the consequences are still living with us. So people just have to pay attention to the earlier Trump and compare notes.

[B]

You know, it seems to me a pattern. The system breaks down. It doesn't provide decent jobs for people. It doesn't provide income. Even if they get a job, they're now they're in a job where they don't know from week to week when they're going to work, how much they're going to earn, how secure the job is has no benefits. The failure of the system to provide gets deflected, gets distracted by Mr. Trump. It's the immigrant that you're supposed to be angry at, or the Chinese or the trading partner or now African Americans. He finds in a classic conservative mentality everything he can think of to blame other than the system that isn't working. I find it both stark and amazing. And then I get depressed that people don't see it.

[C]

Well, what's also a great concern is that it's so disconnected. If you've really observed what's happened in the world, it is just based and, and this kind of prejudice, it's not even borne out in reality on the ground.

[D]

I'll give you one example.

[C]

I have lived and worked as a reporter covering New York City from the time when there were 2,100 homicides a year. Imagine that we're under like 400 today. You probably people aren't aware of this. I've made this point in this program before. What changed? What changed was undocumented immigrants from all over the world came and made the city of New York a place to raise children in neighborhoods that this industrial abandonment had wrecked entirely. Because undocumented immigrants, if you know some, if you work with some, there's three basic things. It's faith, family, and work. Rick, we know this. This is how their life. It's not like, let me go make trouble. It's like, let's stay out of trouble and advance the circumstance of my family. That's what created the moment here.

[D]

That was, we did have a police force that became more multicultural, could speak a multitude of languages.

[C]

But it was this fundamental demographic shift that transformed and revitalized New York City. Now, ironically, they can't hang around to enjoy the transformation that's happened because multinational capital comes in and wants to have multimillion dollar condos and wants to have.

[B]

Headquarters and clean out whole parts of the city. Bob, thank you as always. It's a pleasure to talk to.

[C]

I'm at Stuck Nation too. We always have to.

[D]

That's the Twitter handle, just so you know.

[B]

Okay, Stuck Nation, folks, I want to.

[A]

Thank you for joining. I hope you found what Bob Henley has to say as interesting as we do, which is why we keep bringing him back. Let us know what you think. Once again, both our websites are ways for you to communicate. Rdwolff with two Fs.com and democracyatwork.info and again, a special thanks to our Patreon community for the support, encouragement they provide. You are a godsend for us and we want you to know we appreciate you and would appreciate as many of you as would like to join our Patreon community as can. Thank you very much for your attention and we look forward to speaking with you again next week.