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One of these days ain't gonna change. Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program of economic news and analysis that focuses on our jobs, our incomes, our debts, the debts of our children trying to get a college education, if they're up for that, the debts of everybody as they try to navigate an economic system that has us all worrying about credit and debt. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and I currently teach at the New School University in New York City. We have an exciting program today, a variety of shorter updates to begin, some responses to questions you've sent in, and then an interview on the recent encyclical of Pope Francis regarding the environment, our economic system, and what the relationship is between the two of them. So let's jump right in to the economic updates for today. The first one is a personal pleasure for me. On top of everything else I can report to you now after several months, that a story we did a while back about a college called Sweet Briar College in Virginia has had a very happy ending. And I can't often say that given the way our economy works. So I want to tell you a little bit about this. The board of that school, under very questionable circumstances, decided abruptly and without warning to close the school as of the end of this year. This is a remarkable decision made by a tiny group of people, the board of directors, because this college, like so many, is run in the manner of a business, that is a tiny group of people at the top of directors who are basically free to make pretty much any decision they want, who do not require that the decision be agreed to by the others involved in the college. By that I mean the faculty, the students and the alumna who fund the college and who build its reputation and are crucial to it. All of those groups, the vast majority of people associated with the college, Sweet Briar, and indeed with colleges in general, are excluded from the decisions, even the decisions to close the college, which was made by this board. However, here the story takes an unusual turn. As I reported some weeks and months ago, as I kept on this story, the alumna and certain students and faculty began to say, stop. This is undemocratic. This is unfair. This damages the school, the alumna, the students, the faculty, the community where the college is located. And none of these interest groups, these stakeholders, had any say in what was going on. And we don't like it and we don't want it and we don't accept it. And they went to work. And over the last week, after much struggle, a local court decided that the arguments of the alumna, the students and the faculty overwhelmed, overruled the decision of the board. The board was told, your decision is no longer valid and it would be nice to have your resignation, which the board everynot everyone but the majority of the board and those who had pushed for this decision are now gone. They're not the board anymore. This is a victory not just for the individuals involved in saving Sweet Briar College. Important as that is, this is a victory for everyone who questions this way of organizing institutions in our society, whether it's an enterprise or a college or a hospital or anything else. There is no justification, especially in a country that calls itself democratic, to have a tiny group of people unresponsive to, unaccountable to all of those affected by the decision. They shouldn't have the right to make that decision by themselves. That's what democracy means. And the people, the alumna, especially of Sweet Briar College, get my congratulations and thanks for having made a wonderful example of people deciding to say no when undemocratic decisions go against what the majority of the people need and want. Next Update this has to do with the scandal, and there is no other way to deal with it. The scandal of paid leave giving workers and a job the right to to take time off, either because they are sick or because they have a family to take care of, in which a member of the family is sick or a new member of the family has arrived, namely a baby and one or other or both of the parents are needed to help develop at least the beginnings of the life of a new person. We, the United States, are the only industrialized country that does not provide workers with any sort of paid leave, neither for sickness nor for family, let's call it, as part of government policy. There's no federal law about it, and as I say, we are the only country to do this. Let me give you some specifics. And by the way, if you're interested, there was an excellent story in the New York Times, Wednesday, June 24, about all of this. Paid leave is a need working people have demonstrated throughout history, and it is something that has won laws guaranteeing it in most other countries and certainly in all other industrial countries. So awful is the absence of this that I want to drive home to you that states and cities have decided to move on their own in the absence of a national law to provide this kind of leave. So, for example, Oregon, Philadelphia, and cities in California have All passed paid sick leave policies this year. Montgomery county in Maryland did so as well just over the last week. Last year, 11 states and cities did so and so on. However, to show the growing divide in this country between those folks who care about what happens to working people and Those who don't, 11 other states did something so extraordinary, I wanted to make sure you knew about it. Eleven other states, including Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia. And I want to stress Wisconsin, since its Governor Walker is about to announce he's running for president in the Republican Party and ought to be called out precisely because he's the governor who helped make this happen. Eleven other states have gone in the other direction, and here's what they've They've passed laws that forbid cities in their states. You ready? Banned the cities from enacting paid sick leave. That is, if the city wants it. And the city government elected by the people want to give paid sick leave to public employees. These states have made that impossible. To be fair, other states, California, New Jersey and Rhode island offer paid family leave. And several cities, including Boston and Seattle this year have begun offering parental leave to municipal employees. Why is this important? Well, let's see. We live in a country that has the following statistics about workers leave. 35% of American workers get no paid sick leave. Of those whose earnings are in the bottom quarter of our population, 66% get none. So if you're in the bottom 25% of the workforce in terms of your salary, then two thirds of you get no sick leave. So if you get sick, you have to go to work or you lose money, either way damaging your health or your income. And you're a person who doesn't get much income. What kind of society does this? For family leave, the statistics are even greater. Listen to this. 87% of workers and 95% of those in the bottom quarter get no family leave. No leave to take care of a sick member of your family. No leave to take care of a new baby. We live in a country where the vast majority of people are not given family leave. And yet we're a country in which we claim that we are unique and exceptional because of our commitment to family values. You can't have it both ways unless you are a liar. Let me move on. Angry as that makes me. Santa Cruz, California gets a tip of my hat because they made an interesting decision, which more and more cities and towns are considering. They noticed that earlier this year as we reported, the major banks of the United States, you know, those with names like Bank America, Wells Fargo, CITIBANK things like that were found guilty of a variety of manipulating interest rates, the so called Libor scandal, manipulating foreign exchange rates, felony crimes, if I'm not mistaken, that we talked about a few weeks ago, and many other behaviors that are either illegal or unethical or both. And it turns out that in Santa Cruz they have an ordinance in their city which says we don't do business with people that have these kinds of failures, illegal or unethical behaviors on their record. We're not going to do it. And Santa Cruz is moving to not do it. Wow. And they're inviting other cities and towns across America to do likewise. That is to respond to the proven misbehavior of major banks by not doing business with them. Do business with a small bank, do business with a local credit union, do business with people who do not have on their record the kind of misbehavior that has become the normal practice for huge American banks and who of course continue to do this sort of thing precisely because there seems to be nothing other than a little bit of bad publicity and a finer which is small relative to their business from the federal oversight institutions. So here's a way you might really change bank behavior if the cities and towns that are important customers of the big banks decide to follow up when big banks do illegal and unethical things by acting in the manner of Santa Cruz. Then there's the story of the Waldorf Astoria, the ritziest hotel in New York City. The the hotel in New York City where presidents and leading diplomats from around the world, including the United States, stay when they have business in New York. This autumn, the General assembly of the United nations brings many such diplomats and dignitaries to New York and a huge number of the very highest among them, including the President of the United States, normally stay at the Waldorf Astoria. However, this year they've announced they're not going to. President Obama and indeed other high diplomats from the United States are not going to stay in the place where presidents have stayed for a century, in the Waldorf Astoria. What is the reason given Israeli choice? It turns out that the Waldorf Astoria was purchased by a Chinese corporation some years ago. It isn't an American company anymore. It's located on Park Avenue in New York City. But it isn't an American company. And according to these news releases, release is a better word, actually. There's a fear that there might be some sort of surveillance conducted on our diplomats as if they haven't got mechanisms with which to deal with that problem, which they have dealt with for decades. But we're supposed to believe that this is not a slap at the Chinesewhich is surely what it is, but is instead something dictated by security concerns. Your wonderment about that, however, gets really intense when you discover which hotel in New York they're going to go to. Instead, it turns out it's the New York Palace Hotel, used to be called the Helmsley Palace Hotel when it was owned by the American Helmsley family. But it turns out that they sold it to the Lotte Group, you guessed it, which is owned and operated by a South Korean real estate conglomerate. Turns out there's no place for our leaders to stay in America anymore when they do business in New York and except in a foreign owned business. That's what happens when capitalism changes where it is primarily located. From the old centers of Western Europe, North America and Japan to the new centers of China, India, Brazil and so on. That's what you get and the weird behavior follows from that. Final update for today and a very important one. In the United Kingdom, people have gotten together in a variety of ways to fight against austerity. And because of the traditional relationships between the United States and the United Kingdom, the common language and history and so on, I want to pay some special attention. Over the last week there was a demonstration. Over 100,000 people, 100,000 people came to London to demonstrate that they're against austerity, that they're against pushing the costs of capitalism's failure and crisis since 2007 onto the mass of people by raising their taxes and gutting the government services that they had counted on. And in England this is particularly the case with the National Health Service. So there was a huge demonstration, but there are other signs of mobilization against the Conservative anti people, anti worker mentality and policies of the Cameron government. For example, the Labour Party, which is looking for new leadership after having lost the last election, has to the surprise of many, come up with a short list of those who will be the new leaders, one of whom is a known firm anti austerity leader. His name is Jeremy Corbyn, C O R B Y N and he has surprised everybody by doing very, very well in the struggles leading up to who will be the new leader of the Labour Party. It's hard not to see a certain parallel with the surprising strength of Bernie Sanders, who is a similarly anti austerity political leader and who is doing much better than was foreseen for him in the struggle over who will be the candidate of the Democratic Party. And finally, I was struck being an economist that a very interesting group called Economists Against Austerity is mobilizing against the budget that they expect to come down on July 8th from George Osborne and the Cameron government and they will be hosting a meeting at the House of Commons on July 9th. In response, they blame the austerity to for the double dip recession in recent British history and for the severe suffering of the mass of the British people under an austerity program that they believe is a catastrophic failure. I want to take my hat off to people that are mobilizing against the kind of policies that I've just described that I go by the name of austerity and hopefully will inspire Americans and many others to do likewise. I want to now turn, as I do in the second quarter of this program often, to responding to some of your questions. One, I want to just draw your attention to a film. Last week I had a person on here, Kristin Ross, who talked about the Paris Commune and what was interesting about that experience of workers taking control of a government and what lessons, although she didn't want me to use that word, that might hold for us today. One of you then commented to me that there's a wonderful film by a fellow named Watkins, W a T K I N s called La Commune, which you can get on YouTube. So I wanted to make sure that you were all aware that in Britain, Watkins made this film that if you were interested, you could follow up on. Also, again, we're dealing with England a lot today. I wanted to bring to your attention something in England that also has an echo here in the United States. In England, there is a kind of job that comes by the name traineeship, and it's part of a program called quote Entry to Work course. Unemployed young people with little work experience are encouraged to take on these traineeships, which can last up to six months. Well, I did some inquiry and here's what I learned. Most of these people are in the private sector and they're doing such wonderful training jobs as waiting on tables, stacking shelves, and doing telemarketing. The skills that you learn there, I will not comment on. They work for six months without pay.
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Wow.
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And they're told they need to do this to get a work history so that other employers will hire them. In other words, the way capitalism works in England, it creates unemployment, youth unemployment, and then uses the fact that it doesn't provide jobs to squeeze the desperately unemployed into working for nothing. Six months of working for nothing, acquiring skills, I'll use that in quotation marks and doing free labor for an employer. Good deal for an employer who gets something better than unemployment. Unemployment. You fire the worker, you don't pay him, but you don't get work with this traineeship. You fire the worker, then he comes back to work, or if he's a new worker, starts his work life by working for nothing. Well, this is not unique to England, this awful system of ripping young workers off here in the United States. Over the last week, through the benefit of the UK Guardian newspaper, we learned that the campaign for president of Hillary Rodham Clinton is taking a page. They're using internships, that's the preferred American term for what the British call traineeship. It's all a lot of different kinds of ship if you think about it. Any case in Mrs. Clinton's case, she's taking advantage not only of new young people who want a job, she's taking advantage of skilled campaign workers who've worked in campaigns quite a bit and bring quite a bit of experience. But they too are being told we don't have any money. Mrs. Clinton, whose campaign is scheduled to cost close to a billion dollars before we're done if she goes all the way to the final election, she doesn't have any money. And she's taking advantage, just like the employers in England, of a bad job situation in this country for all kinds of people to get people to work for nothing. What kind of an economic system drives itself into a crisis, produces unemployment, and then takes advantage of the unemployed by suckering them in to the need which they have to get another item on their resumewhich they must to have a future job that payswell, they have to work for nothing. Now I'm left almost speechless. This is a system whose achievement is to send tens of thousands of people to work for nothing at a time when profits are at record highs, when the rich have become richer relative to the middle and the poor on a scale we haven't seen for a century? The money is there, the wealth is there, but the pressure on the middle and the bottom to work for nothing is part of how you capitalism works. Think about it. Many of you have asked me questions, particularly over the last week. A flood of emails has come in about the tpp, the Trans Pacific Partnership, and indeed this last week, President Obama and the corporations that have been pushing for this have gotten what they wanted. The bills were passed, the President has signed off on what's called fast track authority, that is the deals being negotiated in secret with a dozen nations on the Pacific Ocean. And by the way, the same thing is being Negotiated with our trading partners on the Atlantic as I speak. But in this case, the Pacific came first. The President will now be able to get a simple up and down vote from the Congress, yes or no, no amendments, no discussion, pro or con, of this or that aspect of these deals. That's what he wants. That's what the corporations want. The labor movement which stood against it has been defeated. The environmental movement that stood against it has been defeated. All of the corporations that are very frightened in America, small businesses, rural business, but even many big ones that as part of these negotiations, their interests will be sacrificed to the foreign countries in exchange for the foreign countries giving the favored corporations herepharmaceuticals, airline companies, munitions manufacturers, the kinds of deals in the rest of the world they want. Here we have it. The President was gotten to by those big corporations that want it. The corporations who didn't, the labor movement who didn't. They couldn't get to the President. They didn't have whatever it was that it takes to get the votes. They had it two weeks ago, but they lost it in the interval as the President and the corporations put the squeeze on and made the deals with the number of senators and representatives needed to get it through. Make no mistake, these deals will improve the profit line of the companies that paid for them. They will damage the interests of the companies that couldn't compete and of the labor movement and the environmental movement that doesn't have the bucks to be a contender against the big corporations that produce this TPP shows us if we needed the evidence that we live in the best government money can buy. And the outcome, well, we see the incredibly wonderful outcome of NAFTA back from the 1990s that was passed, that was promised to give us a job boom like we'd never seen to make of Mexico a modern industrial. None of that happened. We haven't had a job boom. And Mexico is a country, half of which is in a failed state and the other half of which is an exercise in inequality. So the promises weren't delivered on, but some people made a lot of money and that's what will happen again. Okay, we've come to the end of the first half of this program. I want to remind you that we maintain two websites where you can follow this kind of analysis. Rdwolff with two Fs.com and democracyatwork, all one word, democracyatwork.com info. Please make use of these websites to communicate to us, to follow us on Twitter and Facebook, to sign up for our free newsletter, to let us know if you'd like us to come to your area to give a talk, to get us on a local radio station, whatever way you can partner with us and make use of the work we put on those websites that fulfills their purpose. Please stay with me. We will be back in a very short time. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. For today, it is my great pleasure to tell you that we're going to be talking about the remarkable document issued by Pope Francis from the Vatican regarding ecology and the environment. It has been a subject of enormous interest and I thought it would make an important topic for us to go over. And for that purpose I have invited and I'm welcoming with us today Bob Hennele. Bob Hennele is an award winning print and broadcast journalist who is a regular contributor to Salon, a well known website, and is the political analyst for wbgo, the National Public Radio station for Newark, New Jersey. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Miami Herald, the Village Voice, and several other publications. His broadcast work includes the PBS NewsHour, CBS's 60 Minutes, as well as NPR and the BBC. Well, that's a remarkable record. So I welcome you, Bob, to the conversation.
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B
Thanks for having me again.
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A
Oh, it's my pleasure. Now let's get right into it. Pope Francis has issued a remarkable document. Basically, I would like to begin by asking you in a very short time as a journalist, tell us what the core message you think lies in what the Pope told us.
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B
I think in 200 pages he's looking at all the things that we never discuss related to what we call the externalities of global market capitalism. All the things, the inconvenient truths, all the things like the emissions and the pollution that results, as it says in the encyclical, to millions of premature deaths just from air pollution alone that is never factored in to the cost benefit analysis that drives market based capitalism around the world.
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A
So does this constitute then to not put too fine a point on it, is the Pope taking a critical stance or position in in relationship to capitalism, at least in terms of how capitalism affects nature and the environment upon which we all depend?
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B
It's very important. I took some phrases down because he gets at the diagnoses the problem really very efficiently. He describes how foreign debt is a method of controlling poor countries. He describes how developing countries, where the most important reserves of the biosphere are found, continue to fuel the development of richer countries at the cost of their own present and future. This is a man who is a Trained chemist, has one lung. So he understands limitations and he's blowing the whistle. He's kind of being, if you will, a whistleblower. Yeah, exactly. In terms of a referee. He talks about as a result, whatever is fragile, like the environment is defenseless before the interests of a dangerous deified market, which becomes the only rule.
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Well, you know, as a professional economist all my life, there is this idea in economics which is taught to students. It's called externalities. You mentioned it. I want to push that a little bit here with you. The idea in economics runs like this. Whenever a businessman or woman running a company decides to do something because it's profitable, when you look closely, it turns out that many of the costs of whatever that project is are costs that that capitalist doesn't have to pay. The classic example, which is example of pollution goes like this. A capitalist sets up a laundry in a community, you know, a machine laundry, cleans dirty clothes, excuse me, cleans dirty clothes and so on, but spews out of its smokestack all kinds of pollution because of the fuel used to heat the washers and so on. That pollution damages lungs of children and adults and vitamins and water too, I'd imagine, too pollutes the water as well. And there are all kinds of costs. The children have to go to the doctor more often. A certain number will get asthma. You even have to paint your house more often because the pollution messes with the paint on your house. So there are all kinds of costs, but they're not costs for the company that sets up the laundry. They don't have to count about them and they don't have to pay for them. So it is not a good idea for the community, but it is a good idea for the capitalists. So it gets built because the capitalists have the money to go for that profit, even though the society loses more than it gains. That's an irrationality of capitalism. Isn't that what the Pope in a sense is pointing at?
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B
He's talking about a new social contract basically for the global economic system. And he's also really talking about the fact that it's relatively late in the game. It's important to note that this just didn't come out of his musings, but that he had a deep bench. People like Professor Sachs from Columbia, you know, dozens and dozens of the world's top Nobel laureates and atmospheric science. Looking at this astrophysicists. This was something that's been in works for a long time.
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A
It also, if I can interrupt, Bob, did he Have I had heard that he had a conference to build up the information. Could you tell us a little bit about that?
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B
A couple of months ago, he brought the best minds together in a kind of like, collegial papal setting. And they evaluated these situations and really came up with it. There's a bumper sticker that comes out of this. It's that in the letter that came from the panel, imagine 1 billion out of the 7.2 billion people in the world have access to fossil fuel, and they consume 55% of the fossil fuel. 3 billion people are feeling the brutality of global warming. And we see it in Pakistan and then in India. Over 2000 people die of heat because of ambient air temperatures at 118 degrees. Those people are bearing the brunt of fossil fuel consumption, but see no percentage in it at all. And so he's presenting this, offering this mirror, which is a certain brutality that we are insulated from. And he calls us out to not hide from that brutality and to own it.
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A
Right. But to own it would mean that we would have to face that we have been living for the last two, 300 years in a capitalist system that has boastfully industrialized a relatively small part of the world, Western Europe, North America, and Japan, and polluted the entire planet for the vast majority of people who were not part of the benefits that flowed from that industrialization. Or to put it differently, whatever benefits they got were skewed to the places where capitalism was born, and they were left imprisonment. In a long story short, capitalism has produced this kind of environmental disaster built on a stupefying inequality.
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B
That's right. Impoverished and degraded on a scale that's now created a challenge to the world in terms of civil stability. We saw in the New York Times Over 50 million people wandering the Earth because they're not safe where they are, not as a political statement, but because they love their children, they love their parents, they want to get them to safety, and we have made the world inhospitable to them. And so now we really have a crisis of conscience because this Pope is talking about a planet of limits. This really puts him in stark opposition to the American sensibility that really came out of the colonial era. The men that framed the Constitution, our founding documents, they looked at a limitless world in terms of the natural world. And you can understand that from the colonial perspective, looking at a continent that to them was unmapped. The point is, though, that we've built.
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A
As if there weren't people there, as.
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If there was no people and no limitation to the natural world, and particularly where Pope Francis is very effective, is in bringing up the issue of water and how even though it's essential for human life, it's become commodified. We see this being a big struggle in Ireland, even in Detroit and around the world where you see water used, whether it be for fracking here in the US or for other kinds of mining and extraction industries in Africa. Not only does it impoverish the people, but it degrades the ability of their immediate ecology to sustain them life itself.
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A
Now, let me, let me ask you a question. Conservatives, including those that have reacted with shock at what Francis has said, like to reiterate almost like a religious mantra that ok, there are some problems, but we should rely on the market to work its magic to solve these problems. What's your response to that in terms and what do you think Francis is.
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B
He takes it on directly. He talks about this marriage of business and technology which has a very poor record of once it comes up with a solution, creating all other kinds of problems that come with it. This is a man who's been in consultation with the best minds of the world and has seen capitalism and all this ugliness and I might say doesn't call it out directly, but just bears witness to what everyone is seeing happening around the world.
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And so would it be reasonable to say that capitalism and the market is how we got to this dilemma? So that the notion that we ought to rely on continuing what got us into this mess is sort of the fundamental definition of not using your intelligence. If something has helped bring you to a situation you don't want to be in, the solution isn't to continue.
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B
Exactly. Also he's talking about going in reverse in the sense of he's really. And in that letter that was put forward by the confab that did the foundational work here, they describe the fact that we, they call into question the very yardsticks we use to judge our success. And that is the gross national product, the all holy gdp. And they say that that totally fails to capture the state of humanity and it abstracts in a way that has no relationship to well being and the fact that now the imaginations of all the nations are harnessed to the gdp, well, it went up, it went down, it's totally irrelevant to the human condition. And indeed if all we're pursued as abstract numbers without regard. I mean, you mentioned before another example where market capitalism has totally fallen down is its inability to meet the basic social contract of any system to provide opportunity for the future. For the next generation that's coming up, a system that fails to do that and is destroying the earth. I think as time has passed, yes.
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A
I think so too. But it is for me, as someone who has been critical of capitalism much of my adult life, I must say it's an arresting phenomena that the leader of a major religious group in our planet should take so strong a position. Is there something going on in the Catholic Church in the world? How would you explain that this Pope at this time should take so strong a position?
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B
Well, I think it's fair. There's also ecumenical support for this in the supporting documents, a number of other major religious leaders sign onto it. What has happened here? If you look at the church's recent history, where you see a situation where it was caught up in this huge global scandal related to providing sanctuary for pedophiles on a criminal scale, which in some cases eroded the financial support of the worthwhile institutions that the Church does, whether it be schools and hospitals and also major financial scandals, to the point that the sitting Pope had to basically resign while he was still alive. So that's the moment we're in. We're also at a time where I think that the Church has found its traditional position in South America, one which isn't so secure because you see the Pentecostal Christian faith, congregational churches that were much more granular on the local level, really capturing the Hispanic imagination. So in order to make this church relevant, I think he feels he needs to move forward. And it also is important to understand this is the same church that just 500 years ago gave the basis for the justification of the doctrine of Christian discovery, which empowered the explorers on behalf of Catholic monarchs to enslave Native Americans. So this is an extraordinary transformation in human consciousness, an evolution of the church.
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A
Right. And a shift that suggests the wind in the world about capitalism is shifting. And this Pope sees that the future of the institution, he's in charge of requiring him to shift with it.
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B
Right. Well, and Pope Francis, Saint Francis, the person that he's identified with historically, was really about this kind of. He was the patron saint of ecologists, but also more importantly, of engaging all levels of humanity, that this, a non class system, if you will, to breathe is to be part of this enterprise.
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A
Let me ask you, Bob, because you have some special expertise, whether a story here in the New York, New Jersey area that you've covered, what does it say? Or how might it be relevant to what the Pope is telling us? What I'm talking about is a deal struck between the Governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, who's also running for president in the Republican Party. And our largest oil company, the Exxon Corporation, having to do with Exxon Corporation's longstanding pollution of the waterways that separate New Jersey from New York. Tell us about that story and what the Pope's encyclical might have to think about that.
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B
Right, right. I mean, I think we talked about this once before. Prior governors and environmental professionals within the state of New Jersey pursued aggressively what looked to be a very promising case against Exxon. Standard Oil got really its start in New Jersey in Bayonne and the refinery there in the 19th century and made billions and billions of dollars there. And at a time, it's important to know that New Jersey, like the rest of the world, looked at wetlands as a source of human disease. So they actually, the Riparian Commission bestowed Exxon these wetlands here, taking us off our hands, and they built these amazing complexes. And because society had no value in wetlands, the products and dumping, you have legacies of all kinds of environmental degradation, pesticides, you name it.
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A
They dumped that into wetland dumpling.
- [41:36]
B
Right. And in the process of having shipping come in to supply the world with petroleum products, they just destroyed these areas and turned them into wastelands, which continued to undermine which that had once at one time, it's hard to imagine, but the port of New York was the oyster capital of the world. Richard, Instead of hot dog stands, you had oyster stands. Imagine that a man could go down and get protein for his family by spending time gathering. Or a woman don't want to be sexist, but you could get oysters and feed your family. What a subsidy. There's a safety net. Well, Exxon destroyed all that along with industrialization. So there was talk of a multi billion dollar settlement. They were just on the eve of, of inking this. They managed to make the proofs in court that Exxon was liable, which is no small trick. And then all of a sudden the court decided that liability, they were liable on the hook. The question was how much? And so at the last minute, behind closed door, Governor Christie and his administration after got a half million dollar contribution from the Republican Governors association from rexon, offered them $225 million for what was supposed to be a $9 billion settlement. And there's more, I felt like a salesman. They threw in 16 other industrial sites and hundreds of other gas stations to resolve these issues. Well, the reality is that the people that live around these tank farms are, interestingly enough, probably a number of them are Catholic, they are immigrants, Latino folks People who get their toehold in America by living in areas where the rent is cheap. Rent is pretty cheap if you're living in amongst this, these tank farms. So the fact that this settlement is so small means there won't be the wetland reconstruction. Because what was contemplated in the big settlement, the $9 billion settlement, was actually restoring the wetlands. It's important to understand that when Sandy happened, this huge storm, the Bay Area refinery which Exxon subsequently sold was rendered useless by the storm surge because it has no wetlands. So in essence, Governor Christie passed up an opportunity to redeem the mistakes of over 100 years by having a just settlement and in the process continues to put in harm's way the very kinds of people who are in low lying areas that remain vulnerable to not just another storm surge, but to the toxic waste that comes along with it. Because of course, there's a legacy of all these contaminants and poisons in the sediments.
- [43:55]
A
So what the Pope is saying is directly relevant.
- [43:58]
B
Absolutely.
- [43:58]
A
This is tied in like a case study.
- [44:00]
B
Yeah, exactly. It's a matter of making. And we have, you know, dozens of island nations in similar situations where choices are being made far away in boardrooms that are having life and death consequences. And these results are happening now. We're seeing salinity intrusion into fresh water in these atolls and in these fragile ecologies. Really, the Pope is calling us to be present in the lives of all humanity and to understand that we can't make a profit if it's at the expense of the viability of the planet itself.
- [44:33]
A
Just a matter of detail in terms of what I'm about to say, not that it matters, but let's assume we have Catholic governors as well as Catholic residents and Catholics everywhere else in our society. It's an important religion in our country. Two part. How will Catholics, both those in positions of power and those in not, how will they react to how will they receive? How will they process what the Pope is now saying? What will happen in churches as local parish priests process this information and presumably work this material into sermons and so on. Long, long story short, what is the. You're a reporter. What do you think will be the social, political impact of the Pope at the top of the Catholic Church taking this kind of strong position?
- [45:35]
B
Well, already we can see that former Governor Jeb Bush, who was converted to Catholicism by virtue of his marriage to a Catholic, he gave a statement saying that he didn't want to see the Pope venture into politics. Politics, but to be basically saving souls. And this is a classic Thing that's gone on with the church going back to periods of time where the church had to stand up to oligarchs and secular powers. It seems leaders are always saying, you know what, stick with the afterlife. We don't want you to get involved with the nitty gritty. We'll handle the planet. Just keep. Because they want to use religion as a form of social control and that social transformation and even the church itself sometimes has been complicit kind of thing. The results so far have been mixed. We saw some high profile statements, but really this is a question of the laity, the civilians in the church, do they pick up this mantle and challenge and then you'll start seeing. I think it will have an impact. For instance, we're already seeing it where churches are looking at their own policies in terms of basic things like recycling. How does the church get its power? What kind of things is the church supporting in terms of an investment strategy? All those things are going to come into play. But again, it's not. I think we saw this when President Obama was elected, people this attitude, like we elected someone who had proper rhetoric. And so we expected there to be transformation. Like we're dropping our car off to have the oil changed. And the reality is nobody really held President Obama accountable and we saw what happened here. The Pope is only going to be as good as, as the response of the people he's, you know, trying to open up in conversation. Which by the way goes beyond the Catholic Church.
- [47:11]
A
Absolutely, yes. Okay. In the time that we have left, I want to propose a hypothetical to you and ask your response in terms of the Pope's statement. Suppose decisions, corporate decisions, were made not by a tiny board of directors selected by the major shareholders, but instead democratic. Suppose we had an economic system of worker co ops as the basic way we organized, so that a decision about what technology to use, what pollution impact any given technology would have, was made by all the people. So not a tiny group who could escape the pollution they caused by living in a special community far away with a nice big gate. But if the decisions were made by the people who not only have to live with whatever the profit is, but have to breathe the air, have to have their wives and husbands and children and neighbors and mothers. Isn't that a way to change the economic system so that the kinds of decision making will take into account the very issues that the Pope brings forward? The social question of all of the impacts that a economic decision has, including the ecological, environmental, as a way to begin to think about the Institutional changes that can realize what the Pope is saying.
- [48:31]
B
Well, and it's so ironic because of course, we associate the patriarch and the church being one and the same. And the Church has had its own struggles with its own workers, with the sisters who make commitments to support the church, and in many places are the backbone, the arms and legs and brains of the church, not being full participants in that church. So the Church has those challenges. The idea, though, of having this broad based, decentralized way of doing business is really the. I think what it does is it creates stability because we know that just as a matter of physics, that the decision making that's happening closest to where the action is is the one that stands the test of time.
- [49:12]
A
Well, you know, if we go back to the very beginning of this program, we made a comment about stakeholders, faculty, students, alumna overturning a decision to close a college that had been made by a tiny group of aristocrats of the education business at the top. And I think here the same message is coming that if a broader base of people who have to live with the results of our decisions about how to produce, if they were able to make these decisions that would help them institutionalize in corporate, take seriously what this Pope has said, because it would be in their interest to do so in a way that the existing system just doesn't do well.
- [50:01]
B
He does also warn about greenwashing, which I thought was very sophisticated in there. He warns about the head fakes that are going on where we try to throw a palliative on it and then proceed to do exactly what we've been doing before. This change is going to be hard. This change is transformational, but the options just are unthinkable of not doing it.
- [50:20]
A
Last point that we'll have time for today, Bob. I wish we had more time, but the last point we have time for will other religious leaders follow suit? Is the Pope charting out a new position not just on the encyclical about the environment, but on social issues? Can we expect more both from the Pope and from other religions? And let me tell you why, I ask. In the days after the encyclical on the environment, the Pope was asked a question and gave a speech in Turin in Italy, in which he said that people who manufacture military weapons, weapons of mass destruction, or who invest in companies that do, are being hypocritical if they call themselves Christian. I found that a remarkable statement and a suggestion that the Pope is on a broader campaign, that the encyclical on the environment is the first or the first major statement of. But that there is a real shift going on here in what is going to be said by this religion. And the question is others too?
- [51:35]
B
Well, yeah, I think others too. But I think that the media is paying attention now. As I said before, Pacheman Terrace, Peace on earth. Pope John XXIII laid this ground out. What this Pope is doing, though, is making the connection with how you make your living has to do about what's happening with your soul. And the idea of connecting those two things, we very much like to separate that idea. We'd like to have our work self and have that separate from our spiritual self. But reality, as we know in the world, a divided self can't stand.
- [52:04]
A
So in a sense, this is a religious leader who's wanting us to look critically at capitalism by asking the question, is it consistent or compatible with our deepest held human commitments to one another? And the conclusion he reaches is not so much.
- [52:25]
B
He also raises the fact that the war is destructive of the environment. I mean, can you imagine if President Obama had to do an environmental impact statement for every drone strike?
- [52:35]
A
Bob, it's been a wonderful opportunity. Thank you very much for coming. Folks. We've come to the end of the time. We have for today. Please remember with me that we maintain two websites that are designed for us to communicate with you and vice versa. The first one is rdwolff with two f's.com and the second one, democracyatwork.info, all one word, democracy at work. These websites have a way for you to communicate to us your thoughts, your questions, your criticisms, what you would like to see more and less of on this program in the future. It's also a way to follow us on Facebook and Twitter. It's a way to sign up for our newsletter. It's a way also for you to use the material we produce and share it with your friends through your own mechanisms. Please do that. That spreads the effectiveness of what we're trying to do. If you would like to talk to us about coming to your area to speak, if you have a radio station that you might help us get this program on, we're very proud of the 45 stations across America we have. We want always to have more get in touch with us, make use of these websites. I want to thank truthout.org that remarkable independent source of news and analysis, and ask you to check them out@truthout.org and once again, thank you for your time and I look forward to speaking with you again next week.