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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, income, debts, our own and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I want to begin today with what I think is an extremely important story for the world, for the United States, for Europe, but beyond as well. I'm talking about the last year and two, three months now, almost a year and a half of economic struggles in France. Once again, that country is in an advanced leading position, giving the rest of the world an idea of what's likely coming there, too. Let's quickly review, because these events are momentous. Over a year ago, a mass movement of citizens, not part of the political party structure and not part of the trade union structure either, decided that they'd had enough, that the economic developments of French capitalism were unacceptable. The item that triggered it was another one of those small events, insignificant in their own dimension, but made by history into turning points. The president, Mr. Macron, decided that having delayed for a long time, he would do something about the climate change. You know, that unimportant event that has nothing to do with the fires that are destroying Australia, for example. He decided he would do something, not a lot, you know, something that looked good on tv and that he would pay for it by raising the taxes on fuel, fuels that make the trucks and cars go in France and so on. And the French people who support doing something about climate change decided this was one straw that broke the back of their toleration. They weren't going to have it, of course, do something about the climate, but not on the backs of people who have seen their social programs, their jobs, their incomes, their benefits taken away. They wouldn't have it. And so we've had a year and several months now of what came to be known as the Yellow Vest movement in France. Hundreds of thousands of people in cities across the country, not just in Paris, going out week after week, particularly on Saturdays when they were out of work, to show that they were angry that they wanted changes, they wanted that tax removed, but they were angry at a lot of things. So that when, after saying he would never budge, Mr. Macron was humiliated and withdrew the tax, Yellow Vest won that one. They kept going because by the time he moved, they knew that their grievances went way beyond that particular tax. And they had to do with everything that has happened to them over the last 10 years. They never recovered from the crash of 2008. The rich people did, the corporations did, but the mass of the French people didn't. And they are honest enough to face it and to say to one another, it's time for us to do something. There will not be business as usual in this country, they said, so long as business as usual, governed by Mr. Macron, gives them the raw deal of not only bringing the crisis on them in 2008, but giving them austerity afterwards, while the rich recovered with the help of government, that is the taxes paid by the people. And they made it clear they'd stand in the intersections, they'd stand in front of the churches and the schools. You could not get away from their message. Then it escalated. The government thought as those yellow vest demonstrators got fewer in number, they could just wait them out, a tactic governments like that usually use. But they were wrong. Just like Mr. Macron has been wrong all along. He thought he had beaten them. And so at the beginning of this year, he came forward with a new plan. This one used the following. France has 42 different systems for pensions for their workers. And so he said, I am going to modernize and upgrade and reform. We shouldn't have 42. We should have one, two or three that are systematic and treat everybody fairly. An obvious idea. No one believes this man anymore. They saw the risk that this reform was the mask for cutting their pensions. And as if to prove them right from the beginning, Mr. Macron proceeded to include in his pension reform raising the age when you become eligible for a pension in France, from the current 62 years of age to 64. Let's be real clear what this means. For decades, French workers put money out of their weekly wages and into the pension. What you're saying is having loyally put money in on the expectation they could retire at 62, you're going to make them wait two years. When asked why is he doing this to a working class in France that has had a hard time in the 10 years since the system fell apart on them, he answered, well, we need to make France competitive in the world. We need to have more products without having to pay extra for them. And that we're going to solve by delaying people's retirement. And the French people again said, no, Mr. Macron, you're not going to do that. You want to make French products more competitive in the world so people in the world will buy more of them, bring down the price. And here's how you can do that, Mr. Macron. You can lower the salaries paid to top executives. You can lower the dividends out of profits that are paid to shareholders. The tiny percentage of the French people that own shares that way, you'll save a bundle and you can lower the price and in other words, you can improve France's economic performance and competit without hurting the mass majority of the people. In fact, taking a little away from those at the top who can most afford it. Oh no, said Mr. Macron, that'll never happen. I will be steadfast. The union said. Okay. And on December 5, they declared a general strike. Three out of the four national unions led the strike, invited the yellow vest to join them, which they did. Invited the students of France to join them, which they did, led by the transportation unions, those who worked the subways and the trains. They started a strike on December 5th and as of this report it's still going along the way, they said Mr. Macron, this strike will stop transportation across the Christmas season, which it did. Across the new year holiday, which it did. You're not going to wait us out and you're not going to break us down. On 11 January, Mr. Macron withdrew the pension delay from 62 years to 64. Workers on the streets won. Establishment politician lost. Every working class in every country ought to think long and hard about what the French workers did and what they could accomplish, because the same imposition on working people from the same kind of establishment government, and Mr. Trump is a perfect example, is going on elsewhere. We don't have in this country yellow vest movement and we don't have unions leading general strikes. And therefore we do have cutbacks on our jobs, our incomes, our pensions and our job security. The lesson should be obvious. My second update is to answer a How do you pay for war in this country? An issue that is becoming more urgent each day, as with the assassination of that Iranian general by Mr. Trump. War is paid for usually by debts. And the reason for that is if you made the people in a society like the United States actually pay with taxes for what a war costs, they'd be a lot less pro war than they might otherwise be. So you kick the can down the road, you borrow to postpone the pain, but it just postpones it. It doesn't remove it. Don't be fooled. Your children will pay the older ones with their lives in a war and the younger one with economic problems. The that all wars bring with them, particularly wars that are not won, like the war in Afghanistan since 2003 or the war in Iraq since then. 17 years of war and we are worse off now in those countries than we the US was at the time. And in Libya, we've turned that over to the Turks and in Syria. That's now a Russian process and project. We haven't done well, but trillions of dollars were spent, our tax money poured into the coffers of the defense producers. What a wonderful name could have made this life better for Americans in countless ways. But it was used to pursue two wars that are a disaster, Afghanistan and Iraq, and two that are working to achieve that status. The last economic update we'll have time for today is sad for me to report on, but I have to. The modern world treats us to moments when there is a contradiction between a religious belief, a religious commitment on the one hand, and the lure of money on the on the other. The Roman Catholic Church faces these contradictions as all religious institutions do. It's taken on a poignancy in relationship to Catholicism that needs a comment. On the one hand, we have thousands and thousands of families of victims of priestly sexual abuse. You know all about it. I'm not going to repeat it. Those victims and their families have gone to court looking for apologies, looking for some kind of compensation for the trauma, physical and mental, that their experiences imposed on them. And the church who has said over and over again how moved it is by its victims, how committed it is to them, was exposed in early January by the Bloomberg News Service as having hidden $2 billion of wealth by using bankruptcy laws to move assets from diocese to parish so they could get out of having that stuff accessible by the victims going to court. You can't say your heart bleeds for the victim and then cheat them out of the assets they ought to be able to claim, can you? We've come to the end of the first half. I want to remind you, please, we published a book called Understanding Socialism that answers many of the questions you have sent us. You can get it@lulu.com l u l u we urge you to do so. Please check out our store. We have wonderful items. They are all union made. We ship internationally. You can get them by going to our website democracyatwork.info and clicking on Store. Special thanks as always to our Patreon community. Reminder to sign up for us and be a supporter subscriber on YouTube. Stay with us. We'll be right back with an interview of a fan favorite, Bob Henley, the investigative journalist. Stay with us. Welcome back friends, to the second half of today's Economic Update, where it is my pleasure to welcome back to the microphone someone who has been here a few times already. So many of you know him, he's an investigative journalist, one of the few that we still have in this country. His name is Bob Henley, Robert Henley. He has been a staff reporter for the Chief Leader, a many decades old newspaper covering unions in the greater New York area and beyond. He writes regularly for Salon magazine on both economics and politics. And he has over the years worked for a variety of outlets, which I'm going to read to you now because it's really quite an impressive list. CBS is 60 Minutes, the new York Times, the Village Voice, the Christian Science Monitor, CBS Money Watch, National Public Radio, WNYC and the Pacifica Network. Thank you, Bob, for joining us again.