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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, this one at the beginning of a new year. So let me wish you all a happy and a better new year. The program, as you know, is about economics, about the income, the debts, the, the jobs we have or don't, for ourselves, for our children, the economics of the world we live in. And I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I want to begin by responding to questions many of you have sent to me to comment about President Elect Joe Biden's economic team, and in particular the progressives that are said to be on the team and that are said to reflect the openness of Joe Biden to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Let me begin with some general comments here. First of all, the economic team contains a remarkable number of carryovers, or holdovers, if you like, from the Obama government that Mr. Biden served a few years back. It's as if the Democratic Party wants to suggest that Mr. Trump was a kind of aberration, a weird four year interlude, and that now we're going to get back to normal or we're going to get back to usual, or we're going to get back to business as it was before Mr. Trump. I find this frightening as a probability because it suggests that these folks don't understand that the policies followed before Mr. Trump played a major role in producing Mr. Trump and his electoral victory. Therefore, going back to them strikes me as having not learned the lesson these people claim they have learned. But let me turn to the progressives that are on the team. As best I can tell from my own knowledge, and I do know some of them, there are three Heather Boucher, Jared Bernstein, and the new Secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yellen. It seems clear to me that Heather Boucher is the most progressive of those three based on the work she has done, particularly around inequality. Jared Bernstein, associated with the Economic Policy Institute, is part of the progressive sort of Washington, D.C. establishment, and he has been a long time Janet Yellen. I'm a little mystified why she's in that group. I can mention on grounds of transparency that she and I were students at Yale university getting our PhDs at about the same time. I had the same curriculum she did, I had the same professors she did. I do know about her training because it was the same as my own. I was involved when I was a graduate student in the efforts to form a new economics association. It was called the Union of Radical Political Economists. A whole group of us were active in starting that association. It is still in business. It produces its own Journal. It runs its own section of the American Economics Association. Janet Yellen as a graduate student and since has had absolutely nothing to do with any of that, because I would know, since I have been involved with that all of my adult life. It was revealed a few days ago that since her time as head of the Federal Reserve a few years ago, she has been giving speeches. She has earned apparently in the neighborhood of seven to eight million dollars giving those speeches. And they include apparently big fat fees from the Goldman Sachs company. Something that got Hillary Clinton into some difficulty, you may recall, a few years ago. Not usually part of the credentials of progressives, for all the reasons you don't need me to remind you about. So these three progressives are what you have. What they will do on the Council of Economic Advisers or as the Secretary of the treasury, is an open question. I. Are they sensitive to issues of inequality? Absolutely. They say so, and I take them at their word. But these are also people who have never gone outside the consensus of Washington D.C. and what does that mean? It means they do not question capitalism ever. They do not raise the issue that maybe some of the problems of inequality have to do with the way capitalist enterprises are organized. You know, with a tiny group of people at the top, the major shareholders, the board of directors, the CEO making all the key decisions. And resulting in what? A big surprise. Giving the bulk of the money to themselves in dividends, in huge salaries for the top executives. Isn't that a part of the problem? Well, you won't hear that from them. At least you never have before. Could they change? Absolutely. Could they become open to it? For sure. After all, Roosevelt became open and he was a middle of the road fellow just like them back in the 30s. But there was this difference. In the 1930s, a massive movement from below. The CIO, the biggest unionization drive in American history. Two socialist parties and a Communist party all working together. That's what made the New Deal. That's what made a politician middle of the road like Franklin Roosevelt become a champion of real progressivism. It could happen again. But that will have to depend on whether a movement from below develops. It will not depend on these folks in the Biden economic team. My next update is a kind of respect I want to pay to an enormously important development in Argentina in recent weeks. The Argentine Senate under enormous pressure from a massive movement of the Argentinian people led by the women of Argentina, who have been fighting this fight for a good six or seven years and probably longer. But six or seven years in the public eye, the Women assembled a powerful coalition, including many labor unions and many radical social movements. They put them all together, and what did they achieve? They defeated the government on a central issue, the right to an abortion. If a woman wishes to choose that way of dealing with her own body. The government opposed them. The Roman Catholic Church, the dominant religious institution in that country, opposed them. They defeated the government and they defeated the church, which went to extraordinary lengths, partly because the current pope comes from Argentina, as some of you may know. And the church went all out and it lost. And what's the significance? A mass mobilization from below, the very kind of mobilization I mentioned a few moments ago as making it possible that there might be a progressive Biden administration, because otherwise there won't be and there isn't one. Now, that kind of a movement that I talked about hypothetically in the United States is already a reality in Argentina. They got the Senate, to the surprise of many, to vote in favor. All women in Argentina will now be able legally to acquire an abortion up until the 14th week of a pregnancy. Before this action in Argentina, one of the largest and most important economies in all of Latin America, only very small parts of Latin America had legalized abortion. Cuba, of course, Uruguay, Guyana, and some parts of Mexico. That's it. All the other the main parts of Latin America were steadfastly in the control of governments and the Roman Catholic Church on the question of abortion. Already there are signs that in both Chile and Brazil, large Latin American countries like Argentina, the women's movements there have taken an enormous inspiration to take the same steps in their country. Things are changing south of the border, and they will not be limited to questions of abortion. They will go far beyond that, but to the rest of the social issues burning in that part of the world. My next update for today has to do with another question many of you have written to us about. This is the disconnect that now exists between what is going on in the stock market, the place where the richest of our rich people hold their wealth, and the economic realities facing the rest of us. It is as stark a difference as many of you know, simply from looking around the communities where you live, where you work, and where you shop. An analyst at Nomura securities in New York recently put his finger on it. He says the stock market in New York City is, quote, foaming at the mouth. Well, another way of saying that is it's crazy, but, you know, in its craziness, it reflects a truth. And that truth is the growing distance between the 1 to 5% of people rich enough to care about what's going on in the stock market. And that's all it is. The majority of people have no stocks. The minority who have them don't have enough to make much of a difference in their life. The 11 shares you inherited when grandma passed is not making you a player in the stock market. The core of people very small who control the bulk of the shares. 10% of shareholders own 80% of the shares. They're the ones doing real well. And let's give credit where credit is due. The government of this country, which is in service of this 1 to 5% at the top. The government has decided to deal with the Depression economically. We're in with the COVID 19 collapse on top of it. By pumping money into the economy to beat the ban, the treasury hasexcuse me. The Federal Reserve has pumped in many trillions of dollars. The treasury has been spending money it doesn't have by borrowing, and that ultimately comes from the Federal Reserve as well. So we have all this money being created because the mass of people are poor in America now and can't borrow. That money doesn't go in to produce more goods and services and hire people to produce them because the people of America can't buy this stuff. Millions are unemployed and everybody else is scared to death. So where does the money go if it doesn't go into producing goods and services, since the demand isn't there, it goes into the stock market where it bids up the price of stocks, which is what the rich people are happy about because it makes them richer still. That's why the billionaires in America amassed another $2 trillion while the rest of us were struggling with the COVID 19 disaster. It is a society ripped apart by its inequality. That's a story that never ends well. When a society makes the rich richer while impoverishing the mass of people, we're on that road. And Mr. Biden better get us off or else we will have another Trump before long. Look, the crises of this society are multiplying. It's a period of decline unless mass action is turns it around. We've come to the end of the first part of today's show. Before we move on, I want to remind you about our new book, the Sickness Is the When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or itself. Go to democracyatwork.info books to learn more or to get your copy. I want also to thank our Patreon community for their invaluable support. And if you haven't already, go to patreon.com economicupdate to learn more about how you can get involved. And now it is my pleasure to urge you not only to stay with us because we'll be right back, but to let you know that our guest today who really needs no introduction is Noam Chomsky, talking about where we are and where we're going. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's Economic update. I am really and genuinely honored and pleased to be able to welcome to our microphones and our cameras Professor Noam Chomsky. He doesn't really need much of an introduction. I'm sure many, many of you have read his work and listened to him and seen him and learned from him, as certainly I have. But I'm going to introduce him anyway because we introduce every guest here and I'll make it brief. Noam Chomsky is Institute professor Emeritus in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, mit. He is also the Laureate professor of Linguistics in the Program in Environment and Social justice at the University of Arizona. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is also the author of numerous bestselling political works which have been translated into literally scores of languages around the world. He has a new book, research released in January of 2021 called the consequences of Capitalism. Thank you very much, Noam Chomsky, for joining us.