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Welcome friends to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, debts, incomes, our own and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I want to begin today with a topic that's been in the news a great deal recently. It's so called supply chains or global supply chains. And sometimes a partner idea. Just in time, production methods. Let me explain what these terms mean and then let's take a look at what's going on in the to do about them. Global supply chain means that instead of supplying the inputs to any production process from local sources, other companies or individuals producing inputs you need in the environment in which you work, that would be a local or nearby supply chain. Instead of that, and driven exclusively by questions of profit, corporate leaders have tried to find cheaper inputs no matter where they are located. As long as you can get an input cheaper somewhere else. And that has to include of course, the cost of transporting it back to where you are. Well then you move your sourcing of inputs from the local region to the distant global region. Over the last 40 years, as American companies have moved out of the United States in record numbers, there has also been a turning to global supply chains. More and more producers in the United States depend on inputs that come from hundreds or thousands of miles away. And there's only one reason, because it's more profitable to do that. Keep that in mind. Likewise, we have shifted from producing something, storing it as inventory for a while and then selling it as people want to buy it, to what we call just in time, production. You don't produce it until you have an order to sell it. No inventory, no storage, nothing. Okay. Why do you do that? Because storing things costs money. And you can save money and make more profits if you don't have to inventory anything that you produce. But here's the problem with capitalism's genius. When it pursues best profits, you don't take account of all the things you can't take account of. Let me give you an bad weather, climate change, a COVID pandemic, neglect by politicians of the infrastructure. Any of those things can. Yep. Disrupt your global supply chain. Remember the pictures of that huge freighter stuck in the Suez Canal for weeks?
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Why?
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Well, because the companies that use the Suez Canal had been too cheap in their profit hunting to deepen the canal, to widen the canal. Yup. To spend the money. To take account of all the things that can happen when you're dependent on things far away or dependent on being able to produce right away. And don't have an inventory. In other words, the profit drive of capitalism is not the efficiency mechanism its defenders want you to believe it is inefficient. And here's the examples that drive the point home. Today we are not able to get computer chips. Car production is down in the United States. So is the production of everything else that uses a computer chip. And nowadays virtually everything does use a computer chip. What's the problem? It's a global supply chain. See, they come from far away. And with COVID lockdowns and with global warming and with defunct infrastructure both in the United States and abroad, the things can't be moved in time or produced in time, and so they're unable to supply us. But there's no mystery here. The problem here isn't the weather or any of these other things. Corporations don't want to spend the money to accommodate what we all kind of know. The best preparation for an unknowable future is to be flexible and having global supply chains. And just in time, production takes away from flexibility. Profit driven capitalism makes loads and loads of misjudgments and mistakes. My next update has to do with a perennial the student debt problem here in the United States. But I wanted to answer the question some of you have been sending to me about comparing the burden of college costs in this country to others. And I wanted to nail that down with some examples that would make the point for you. Okay. The United States and the United Kingdom are by far the worst countries in the world to go to college in. If paying for it is a problem for you, let me give you an example of how different it could be. I'm going to give you the name of eight countries in Europe where tuition is either zero, which is in most of them, or very close to zero. Trivial couple hundred bucks per semester to go to college. Ready? Here we go. Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France, Finland, Greece and Poland. These are countries that range from quite wealthy to quite poor. They provide free education right through undergraduate and graduate education. Mexico and Brazil, really poor countries, they do it too. That's right. Don't have to pay for school if you go to college or graduate school. China does require you to pay, but it ranges their tuition from $2,500 to $10,000 a year. Much, much, much cheaper than in the United States. What's going on? Every one of those countries justifies free education on the grounds that educated people make a better and richer contribution to the society in which they live. They learn something and that learning comes back. It's a good investment. It's even better than that. It's about the best investment you can make in the long term, 50, 60 year productivity of the man or woman who gets a good comprehensive education. So of course the society subsidizes it. And you know what? It makes them more productive. And you know what that does? Makes them more competitive in the world economy. But the United States and Britain are cutting back, not doing that, racking up the price of education and imposing enormous indebtedness on students who want to get an education so they can contribute better and more to the society. This is a sure sign of where the world is declining in the US And UK and where it isn't in the societies that are investing in the precious commodity known as our young people wanting an education. And so in the United States, students who still decide to go have to rack up debt. And I wanted to give you an idea in case you're wondering. Yeah. Debt per student is higher in the United Kingdom and the United States than anywhere else. They're not even close. And here's the number to keep in your mind for the United States. In 2016, there are 171 million adults in the United States. That's people who aren't kids anymore, but are 60 years of age or younger. That's what we mean by the adult population. Right? 44 million had student debt. Out of the 171. That's one in four adults has student debt. And here's the averages in 2016. We're five years later. Now all these numbers would have to be adjusted in 2016. The average debt, $37,000. And it was costing the average graduate $400 a month to service the debt. The smartest people, in many ways the ones with the best chance to get an education, borrow money, go to school and are left with tens of thousands of dollars paying $400 a month in order simply to service the debt. You're making college impossible. And part of the reason for all of this is the notion we should make the students pay rather than subsidize this education the way all those other countries do. Privatization of education. Remember Betsy DeVos? That was what her slogan was. And here I hope you've understood what the costs of that are to Those individuals, the 44 million adults, and to our society. Which is the bigger loser for this mentality? My next update. People have been talking about an inflation and I wanted you all to understand what's going on over the last year. The three most important things in most food, clothing, shelter. Food prices are up over 3%. Clothing prices over the last year up 4% and rent in the United States up 7.5%. That is an inflation. That's a general rise in prices. It's wiping out whatever wage gains the vast majority of us were able to get over the last year. So we're not ahead, we're behind. These prices are rising faster than any wage increase we got. And I won't even ask how much extra work we have to do in the jobs we now have. And what does that mean? It means the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve, that's our central bank in America, has achieved two remarkable things by flooding the economy with money which went right to the stock market, bidding up the prices of stocks. And remember with me, 10% richest Americans own 80% of the stocks. So this policy of boosting the stock market helps the top 10%. In a word, it makes inequality greater than it was before. But now we can add a second way. The Federal Reserve is screwing all of us by an inflation. You know what this does? It makes a mockery of the fight to 15. Because if you get $15 an hour by 2025, which was most of these programs involved, at this rate of inflation, the 15% you get then will not buy you what $10 an hour would have got you last year. And the only thing worse than that is reading in the press that the current Secretary of the Treasury Chair, Janet Yellen, is right behind re nominating Raymond Powell, the head of the Fed, for another many years of term. Bipartisanship between Republicans. Powell's a Republican and Democrats. Yellen's a Democrat. When it comes to what matters to big business, and that's having a Federal Reserve. That gives them an inflation and rising inequality and makes us live with the results. The last economic update I have time for this morning before our interview has to do with crime in the United States. Another topic getting a lot of attention. Has crime gone up? Has crime gone down? I want to nail that down for you so we understand two things. I'm going to show you that crime in the United States, whether you measure it over the last 20 years or the last 30, has dramatically declined in the United States, with particular emphasis on violent crime. Murder, robbery, assault and rape. That's what violent crime statistics refer to. In 1992, the peak year, we had 750 violent crimes per 100,000. In 2014, that was down to 400. That's half a drop of 50%, a dramatic decline that's across the same time that millions of Americans were told they need to buy some guns for defense. No, you needed guns for defense less year by year as it fell by 50%. But the NRA told you you needed to defend yourself and out you went and spend the money you couldn't afford. And here's another if police have the right to kill anybody, it has to be in defense against violent crimes which were disappearing in this country compared to what they had been. There's no justification for police killing people when the crime isn't violent, et cetera. Think about it. We've come to the end of the first part of today's show and as always, I want to thank all of you who support Support makes this show possible each week, especially our Patreon community and other regular monthly supporters. If you haven't already, Please go to patreon.com economicupdate or visit democracyatwork.info to learn more about how you can support this show. And please remember to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. If you're watching this on YouTube, be sure to hit the red subscribe button below. Stay with us. We'll be right back with today's special guests, David Cobb and Michelle Vassell. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's Economic Update. I am very, very pleased and even a little bit proud to bring to our microphones and our camera two folks that are doing very important work that I want you to learn about and think about as I have done and I'm appreciative that they've joined us today. The first is Michelle Vassell. She serves as tribal administrator, kind of like a CEO of the Wiat tribe who have lived and cared for the land in and around Humboldt Bay in Northern California for more times and years and millennia than anyone can remember. She plans, manages and directs day to day operations of tribal government. She was active in the historic return of Tuluat island and the fight to protect Saki Yuwit, a sacred Wiat location. She also serves on the Board of Directors of Cooperation Humboldt. And that brings me to our second guest, David Cobb. He's the co coordinator of the US Solidarity Economy Network as well as being the Executive Director of Cooperation Humboldt. He was the Green Party nominee for president in 2004 and played a major role in discrediting black box voting, which was an even more horrific mechanism to distort our elections than all the others that are at work around us. Okay, let's get to our questions and I would like to ask direct the first question to you, Michel. The collaboration between Cooperation Humboldt and the Wiatt people seems unique. Michel, can you give us an idea of how this relationship developed and what its basic goals are?
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So, David and cooperation Humboldt, I believe we really started working together the tribe and Cooperation Humboldt around work that we were doing in the community. The tribe, I think, started. I think the very first thing I think we were working on together was food sovereignty and really increasing access to food in our community. Then the next thing that came along was Tula. The tribe was working to restore land that was owned by the city of Eureka on an island called Tulua in the middle of Humboldt Bay. That particular island is the center of the world for weot people. It's also a real significant ceremonial site and has cultural significance to the tribe. And the tribe was working with the city of Eureka to return land. And we reached some opposition locally and cooperation Humboldt basically came out to answer the call to support the efforts of city of Eureka to return the island to the Weap tribe. Again. They answered the call again. When we were working to protect a sacred site called Sac uit, which is at the southernmost point in the Wiat ancestral territory. And that particular site is also a culturally and religious significant site. And it's a high prayer site for weot people. That followed up with some work that we did around honor tax. David came to our tribe and ask if he could support honor tax in the community. And that's where local businesses and people give a voluntary tax to the tribe. And he was. He has promoted that in the community. And it really had an impact on us receiving honor tax. And then we did some other work around indigenous food, creating food forests in our community. And I think we also really did a lot of collaborative work during the early days of the COVID outbreak. We had, literally, him and I were in the parking lot mixing ingredients to make hand sanitizer, because, as you can recall, there was no toilet paper, There were no masks, there were no. And we had work that had to be done in our communities. And so we were just pulling whatever resources we had and doing what we could to try to work safely in our community. And I think that really bolstered the level of trust and work that we were doing around that.
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All right, let me turn to you, David, and ask if I understand correctly. Cooperation Humboldt was inspired, or at least took a cue from Cooperation Jackson. And we've had Kali Akuno on this program talking about the efforts in that part of the country in Mississippi, to develop a worker cooperative based economy. Tell us a little bit about what you're doing. In Humboldt and also how you came to ally or have a coalition with the Wiatte tribe around your perspective, much as Michelle just told us how you helped in things that were focus issues for them.
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Well, Rick, thanks for that question. You know, I have personally been knowing Kali akuno for almost 20 years now, and I know him as a serious revolutionary. I know him as someone who is a brilliant strategic thinker who is also rooted in real work on the ground. So, you know, 10 years ago, if you had told me that I would be so focused on building cooperatives, I would have sort of chuckled and said, well, I'm a serious revolutionary. I'm trying to restructure all of society. Co ops are good and all, but, you know, we're not going to recycle our way to ecological sustainability and we're not going to be able to do co ops one off and change the political economy. But when I saw what Kali was doing and his comrades were doing in Jackson and I read the Jackson Kush Plan, which was a comprehensive understanding of the need to create an entirely new political economy and to engage electoral politics authentically, but not as electoral fetishists. You see, the Jackson Kush Plan I thought was brilliant because it was a call to be rooted in your objective material conditions wherever you live and look at the history of that place and meet people's material needs where they live, work, play and pray and meet those needs in a cooperative fashion. It's basically how to do socialism and in the real world. And then lastly, and I think this is really important to engage the state and electoral politics without falling into it and allowing it to dictate all of your work. So I live in Wiatt ancestral territory. And so for me, the objective conditions are to recognize that the Wiyot tribe, in fact do know how to properly steward this place and that they have knowledge that I need. And frankly, our relationship is based on a genuine understanding of true mutual support and need. We're only going to survive if we work together.
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You know, I'm moved, frankly. And one of the reasons we wanted you on the program is that it is really unique and remarkable that a program for economic, political, social transformation is being led by a collaboration between a tribe that's been here for thousands of years and the Europeans who arrived here relatively recently, but who recognize a solidarity, a sense of responsibility, and a project that you can even call socialism. It's remarkable. So how are the people there responding? Michel, maybe let's start with you. What sense do you have of how the people in Your area, your constituents, let's call them. How do they understand what you're doing? What reactions have you gotten in the community?
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We've got some really good reactions, but I want to kind of back up a little bit and talk about a lot of community work that it took a long time to get here. It took 150 years, basically. But I really believe that this work that we're doing now really stems from a lot of hard community work that was done over the course of the last, I'd say 20, 30 years by our former tribal chairwoman, Cheryl Seidner, who her and her sister and two other non Indian ladies that are in our community came together and started doing vigils in the early 90s. And those vigils, I think, are the place where we really started to see community change in our community. And those were held every year on Woodley island, overseeing Indian Island. And at those vigils, you didn't just see we people coming. You saw native people from other places attending, but also people that were from Eureka and greater Hummel area that were showing up. And it was there when we really built a real relationship in this community. Then we also started working on environmentally restoring Indian island, which we now call Tula. That work was laboring hand in hand with our neighbors. I think that over time, those real relationships developed around this project and just connecting people in ways that you can only do by doing real hard work together.
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You know, what kind of economic future do you have in mind? In other words, I know this is difficult and you have not much time, but give us a sense. David, let me start with you, but Michelle, please feel free to jump in here. What do you hope to accomplish in the sense of the immediate future? What kind of plan do you offer to that larger community, both sides of it, that hopefully will bring them in to work with you on a growing basis?
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So, Rick, thanks for the question, and I'm going to get real. Ted Hernandez, the tribal chairman, has often said to remember that we're family, we're all family, and we are actually tied to this place. So for me, I want to transform this place. It's not enough to have good elected officials making good policies. This place, Ouija Bay and Jaradiji and this entire area was once in proper balance. And the Wiatte people understood that they were not owning the earth. They were part of the earth, and it was their responsibility to steward it. Rick, you and I know that the word economy just means the management of the household. Well, the Wiat people understood that they had to manage the household. So they managed their fisheries, they managed their forest, they managed all aspects of the physical world as an economic enterprise in balance. When Europeans first came here with the gold rush and then the extraction of salmon and then the extraction of timber, I mean, the reality is it has been an extractive, brutal, oppressive economic paradigm known as capitalism, by the way, that literally began to destroy this place. The Wiat tribe, through their work at Tuluwat island, to actually take an EPA hazardous site and turn it into a flourishing ecological place that allowed the return of the renewal ceremony. That's the way forward. Our entire point is regenerative economics. It is public banking. It is worker owned cooperatives, it is participatory budgeting. It is universal basic income wealth. We're going to prove that it's possible to meet everybody's needs without exploiting or oppressing anyone. It can be done in an ecologically sustainable way. And that means it has to be done cooperatively and collectively, which, by the way, is how indigenous people have done it since time immemorial.
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You know, the irony, and we're running out of time, but the irony that I love, that I hear from you, is that in a way, you are the true conservatives in the sense you want to conserve something that capitalism interrupted, that capitalism undid. And you're not afraid to say that. You're not afraid to project a future that draws on the wisdom of the past that is perhaps best lodged in the minds of the tribal continuation from long ago into the present. And I find it absolutely entrancing that a collaboration like yours should be part of a movement for change in the United States. So before I sign off, besides thanking you for coming on, I want to thank you for doing something which I think can and will inspire all kinds of people who watch and see what you have told us. So thank you again, and to my audience, I hope you have found as inspiring as I have what Michelle and what David have had to tell us today. And as always, I look forward to speaking with you again next week.
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Sam.