Loading summary
Transcript15 lines
- [00:10]
A
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 start today by bringing you in, if you like, on what Wall street insiders are talking about, even though both of the major party candidates are careful not to talk about it. And that's part of why I'm bringing it to you. The last 40 years, right up until this minute, are a period of time when the American economy has. Has had one problem after another, always responded to, always solved by the monetary policies of this country. The job of the central bank in this country called the Federal Reserve, crashes that we've had, downturns, conflicts in the world of trade, all been responded to by money lowering interest rates, pumping more money into the system, and at no time more aggressively than right now, when trillions are pumped in and interest rates are virtually zero. What is going on? Because that's not the only way to handle problems of economic downturn, problems of a lagging economy, problems of massive unemployment. What's the alternative? Well, everyone who does this kind of work knows the answer. It's called fiscal policy instead of monetary policy. What's fiscal policy about? That's having the government get directly involved to fix the problem. Let me give you the simplest example. The federal government could come in and do right now what it did back in the 1930s. Hire people, convert unemployed people into employed people, give them a job doing something socially useful. Cause the government doesn't have to make profits the way a private company does so it can produce what's good for the country. You know, the national parks in the west, that's what they did in the 30s. Or the first ecological reclamation projects, that's what they did in the 30s. Or giving artists a chance to go all over the country to teach people who wanted to learn their arts and their crafts. Yep, that's what they did in the 1930s. The federal government could step in and solve unemployment like that overnight. Wouldn't have taken this whole summer to wonder about it. Could have been done right early in April. Why not? Well, the answer is, in order to hire all those people, they, the government would have to get the money. And here we go. How do you get the money if you're the government? Two ways. You either tax or you borrow. And it would have brought that question right up front for the American people to debate. And guess what? The vast majority of us would have had the right solution. Tax the billionaires, tax the, the Rich tax those who already rich were getting richer in the pandemic, versus the 50 million who had to go on unemployment. That would have been dangerous for the people at the top. And that's why we didn't have fiscal policy. We didn't have a government jobs program the way we did in the 1930s. Instead, we rely on the monetary policy. We flood the economy with money and low interest rates. And guess what happened over the last six months? All that money that you could borrow if you were a bank or a rich person at very low interest was indeed taken by the banks and the rich, and they play in the stock market with it. So the stock prices went up as they bid against each other, buying and selling stocks with the cheap money that the Federal Reserve gave them, excuse me, lent them at virtually no interest, which is kind of like a gift. And so the stock market went up. The rich got richer. The Federal Reserve was watching this. They watch this every day. They know what's going on. There's no naive surprise. Monetary policy is the favored policy of the rich, and that's why we have it. And we don't have a government jobs program because they're afraid we'll make them pay the taxes to cover it, because that's what happened in the 1930s. Don't be fooled. And the silence of the major candidates on the drastic change in policy that's needed tells you more than anything I can add. I want to talk to you next about the center for Disease control moratorium because Mr. Trump handed it over to them on evictions. How interesting. A landlord cannot, at least until December 31st of this year, evict you if you're not paying rent. But if you read the fine print which I'm about to summarize for you, you'll discover that this is extraordinarily harsh. What is being done? Here we go. The landlord who cannot evict you for not paying your rent has been specifically entitled in the legislation in the order to be free to evict you for other infractions. If your landlord finds out that there's something else you're doing that he can make a claim about, he can, in fact, evict you. And so we're all relying on landlords who would like to evict you because you're not paying your rent, coming up in a creative way with some other reason to evict you. And if he does, he's free to proceed during now, the time between now and the end of the year. The landlord can also raise the rent. So what you owe at the end in December 31st will be all of the rents you haven't paid because they're not forgiven. They're just postponed by this law, by this rule. And they may be more than the rents you didn't pay because the landlord is free to raise the rents while you don't pay them. If this sounds strange, oh, you're right, it is. On January 1st, this coming January, your New Year's gift will be you owe all of the rentals you didn't pay. Let me hammer at that. The government is not giving you the money to pay your rent. The government is not freeing you from the debts of the rents you haven't paid. Indeed, landlords are entitled to apply interest charges because they've had to wait for the rent and penalties. That's allowed. So you will owe a big fat bundle in the middle of a cold winter. What are we doing here? We're setting up a fantastic social conflict coming January 1st. On the one hand, millions of people facing an eviction they cannot forestall because they can't pay six months of rent plus raises, plus interest, plus penalties, versus the landlords. What, are we going to have battles in the streets between the landlords who want to get the money paid and the tenants who can't. Is that what this system is producing for us? If you follow the logic of this law, that's what we're looking at. Election will be behind us, maybe, but we'll be stuck with an unspeakable social conflict. Last point. The government gave the airlines, about a dozen of them in this country, 25 to 30 billions of dollars at the beginning of this pandemic. It wasn't a loan, it was a gift to help them get through 30 billion decided by the boards of directors, 10 or 15 people in each of those dozen companies. We're not giving the tenants of this country a gift the way we gave the big companies. We're giving them a loan that can get bigger and that can be charged interest. What a radically different way of helping the mass of people, tenants versus helping the big airline companies. And I could have given you other examples. This is not a gift. The company's got a gift. The renter, he and she got a loan. Next item. Louis Vuitton, the biggest luxury producer in the world, had a fantastic exhibit in August, the Shanghai, China Fashion show. China will account for 50% of luxury goods production and consumption by 2025, say industry insiders. The world luxury market is becoming Chinese, and the Chinese are setting the trends of what counts in fashion. When you hear Mr. Trump telling he's making war on China and they're having to pay, and it isn't happening, friends, it's going the other way. The world of fashion, the world of luxury is moving to China. And it's not just in high tech. It's across the board. And that war between the United States and China, better or worse, the United States is not winning. My last update I have time for today has to do with a report I read from the New York State Restaurants Association. They did a survey of their members and there are several things I want to bring to your attention about restaurants in New York State. And I have very little reason to believe that it wouldn't be more or less the same everywhere else in the United States. Their survey showed them that 63.6%, that's almost 2/3 of the restaurants in the state of New York will either close or likely close by the end of this year if no more massive relief is provided. Let me say that two thirds of the restaurants in the state of New York will close forever at the end of the year if things remain as they are now. Okay, this is a failure that I have to kind of drive home. It's more than the tragedy of these people. The waiters, the chefs, the waitresses, everybody who works in restaurants, a big employer in this country, millions of people work there. It's a catastrophe for them. Of course, it's also a catastrophe for the cities and towns. Restaurants are things people go to as part of social life, to how they gather. It's how they do a little shopping before or after they have their lunch or their dinner. It creates the business climate. It creates the market. It's always been part of what the very word market implies. You're changing the culture by allowing the restaurants to die and why it was all so unnecessary. Let me explain. We've had tens of millions of people unemployed. We still do. Had the government come in and hired them. Here's what the government could have done. It could have said, we are going to provide the money to help restaurants get together, three, four, five little ones become a shared composite big one, maybe even maintaining their different cuisines. But we'll get them a big space and we'll use the unemployed to convert big spaces that are empty now. You know, whole department stores, whole stadiums that can't have anything go on. And we'll reconfigure them so tables are far apart and that kitchens are related. The work in the kitchen can be done in safe ways. That would have been a creative way to do it. We could have converted city streets to into restaurants. The city of Paris in France has been doing this on a grand scale, once again leading the way in matters of cuisine. We could have done it. We should have done it. We didn't do it. And it is changing our society. It is a failure of our system to have reacted so poorly. We've come to the end of the first part of today's show. Please remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and be sure to Visit our website, democracyatwork.info to learn more about other democracy at work shows, our union co op store, and the two books we've published, Understanding Marxism and Understanding Socialism. And lastly, a special thanks to our Patreon community whose invaluable support helps make this show possible. Stay with us. We'll be right back with today's repeat guest, Dave Zirin. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's economic update. It is my pleasure to welcome and in fact to welcome back to our microphones and our cameras Dave Zirin. He is the sports editor of the Nation magazine. He's the author of 10 books on the politics of sports, and he's the host of the Edge of Sports podcast. You can tweet him at his handle, edgeofsports. So, first of all, Dave, thank you very much for coming back and doing this with us.
- [15:04]
B
Oh, great to be here. Thank you.
- [15:06]
A
All right, I want to jump right in with a question that goes to what many of our viewers and listeners have asked us about, and that is to get your take on the significance and the explanation of why this remarkable behavior of professional sports stars and teams around police violence, around the repression of African Americans. Why is this happening? What's going on? What's your understanding?
- [15:41]
B
Well, first and foremost, it's remarkable. It's history without a compass. We have no precedent for what we've seen in the world of sports. Wildcat strikes in defense of black lives. Nothing, nothing historically prepares us for what has happened over the last couple of weeks. And I think the way to understand it, first and foremost, is you have to understand the national demonstrations that exploded after the police murder of George Floyd. When that took place, it almost scuttled the entire plan of the National Basketball association to have players play in this hermetically sealed Covid bubble in Orlando, Florida. Now, some of the players said we should cancel the entire season because if we play, we're actually going to be Taking attention away from the demands of protesters in the streets. And other NBA players made the counter argument that said, well, if we play, though, we're actually. We could have a profile to speak about these issues and amplify these issues. And one of the ways that the NBA management sort of put their thumb on the scale and got the players into the COVID bubble was to say, look, we'll put Black Lives Matter on the courts. We'll have slogans about racial justice on the back of uniforms. You can kneel during the anthem. All of these things to say that the season itself will be like a tribute to the protests. So that was enough for the overwhelming majority of the players to say, okay, we'll go into the bubble and we'll play ball. Now, after the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a lot of these players started to feel, and there's no other way to put this, sort of like chumps. They were making comments to the press like, geez, we've got black Lives Matter written on the court, got these slogans on our uniforms, and it doesn't mean a damn thing. It's not doing anything. In fact, people are still getting shot. And that led the Milwaukee Bucks, and of course, Milwaukee is just 45 minutes away from Kenosha. That led the Milwaukee Bucks to say, you know what? We're not going to come out for our playoff game against the Orlando Magic. We are, in effect, going on strike. We are withdrawing our labor. And then you see it spread. You see it cascade from sport to sport to sport. First, other NBA teams said, all right, well, if they're not going to play, we're not going to play either. And it canceled days of playoff games in the NBA. Then Major League Baseball, which is a very conservative sport with overwhelmingly white players, they decided as well, starting with the Milwaukee brewers, that they weren't going to play. Then the WNBA said they weren't going to play. Then it spread to Major League Soccer. Then it spread to the National Hockey League, of all places. College and NFL teams canceled practices. Naomi Osaka, the tennis player, said that she wouldn't be playing in her next tournament. So it became like a strike wave. And it cascaded so quickly across the landscape that it left a lot of us, even those of us who are veteran observers of the intersection of sports and politics with our jaws on the.
- [18:47]
A
Floor, tell me, I mean, this is extraordinary. Do the athletes understand their historic position, in other words, that they are doing what working people, in the end have always done, Understood that their ultimate power comes from withholding their labor in a capitalist system that depends on them. They can make a political difference. They can make a political statement by withholding their. Are they aware of the last sentence you just uttered? That this is a kind of unprecedented strike wave?
- [19:27]
B
The players are very aware of it and management is very aware of it as well. We know the players are aware of it because of their actions and their self consciousness about why they're doing what they're doing and their statements to the press about the importance of solidarity and the importance of them acting as one. Now, let's be clear, management is also very aware of this because what you're seeing now is a big strategic shift, particularly on behalf of the National Football League whose season starts next week, where they are trying to have teams give statements as one, like not just. And they're doing whatever they can to avoid a player strike. In other words, they're doing literally four hour sit downs with the players and coming up with lists of racial justice demands that are then on the team's website that's been endorsed by management, that's been endorsed by franchise owners. The NFL is putting the words end racism in the end zone for this season. Before opening day, they're going to sing Lift every Voice and Sing, which is known as the, the black national anthem. They're literally dancing as fast as they can to make sure that there are not strikes in the NFL as well. So they've adopted this very canny strategy that frankly speaks to the strength of the players to try to show that they are united as one to keep the players from cleaving themselves off, going on strike and exercising their power at workers.
- [21:00]
A
So for the NFL, for example, this is also a cash issue. Their money, their income, their wealth is exposed as utterly dependent on the labor, in this case the sporting labor, but the labor of all those workers who are the teams. And so that is also a driver, I would assume, of this situation.
- [21:22]
B
Yeah, in the NFL in particular, we have to look at how their economics are running because first and foremost, they're by far the largest sport in the land. Their value is in the tens of billions of dollars. But also the NFL depends very little on actual fans for that money. Fans are basically scenery at NFL games. You know, things like buying nine dollar beers and things of that nature. Buying big foam fingers. That's not that important to the NFL's bottom line. What's important is their ability to televise games. Their television contracts are worth billions and billions of dollars. They would make obscene profits even if nobody showed up to the games. And so in this Covid environment, they're actually not that hurt as opposed to other sports by not having that many fans in the stands. Some teams are saying no fans in the stands, other teams are saying 20%. But all of that is just about having scenery in the stands. The bigger issue is that if the players go on strike, they can't broadcast games. And that would be just like sticking a knife into an inner tube. It would just leak out all the air from the NFL's bottom line.
- [22:32]
A
Wonderfully, very clear. Okay, I know this is speculation, but you're an expert on the politics of sport, you've written a dozen books, you're the man to ask what is the political short and long term outcome? What are the consequences? How do you see the social and political effects of what you've just described and summarized for us?
- [22:59]
B
Yeah, the political effects, the consequences, short term have already been very effective. I mean, first and foremost what the players have done is they recentered the conversation around Jacob Blake and what happened to him at a time when the entire Republican party with their convention was, was trying to make it into something about anarchists burning down cities and not talking about the actual cause, which is the police shot this man in the back seven times in front of his kids. That basic bottom line. The players were able to recenter the conversation on that question. Secondly, what the players did is they are the first people to really do it in a serious way. They've brought the question of the strike to the question of the Black Lives Matter movement and this idea that labor can play a role by asserting itself in the fight for racial justice. And of course, there's a long tradition of labor playing a central role in the fight for racial justice. But it's a tradition that's certainly been, would say separated in the decades since the civil rights movement in the 1960s and 70s. So that's a huge deal. It's put the question of labor into the movement. And then lastly, I think they gave a big burst of hope to people during a time where that's not very hopeful that we can fight back, that we can make change, that it's not just about violence and nihilism, but that it is possible to fight back with the idea of dreaming for a better world. So that's the short term. The long term, I do not know whatsoever because I really do think we're operating without a compass here where this is going to go long term. I mean, certainly the players are realizing that they have leverage, the likes of which they've never realized before. They're feeling their power in ways that they've never felt before. We could see this trickle in very dynamic fashion to college sports where there's a very high level of exploitation of college athletes, particularly at the football and basketball level, and the revenue producing sports. And the genie's out of the bottle on what athletes can do. So how they're going to use that power is an open question. And whether or not unions are going to pick up the baton from them and use the ideas that they've now put into the public marketplace, that's also an open question. But all of that is now on the table.
- [25:19]
A
I want to pick up on one of the points you made because it strikes me as so absolutely fundamental that the ability of the status quo in this country to continue and to survive has in no small way been dependent on keeping separate the so called social movements over there and the labor movement over there. I won't go into all of the details. We don't have the time. And here's what I want. This is a fantastic lesson which you've touched on to the social movements of how much they can gain by having a labor movement ally, a labor movement coalition partner, however you want to put it. And it's also a lesson for the labor movement of how you could regain what you once had, which is a leadership relationship to the social movements. And so that both sides learn they could be enormously stronger each by the alliance with the other. Am I just hopeful or do you see that in some way happening?
- [26:31]
B
Well, first and foremost, you got to have hope. So I would never denigrate any statement for being overly hopeful. But I think what you're saying is also rooted in material reality. It's not pie in the sky hope, it's actual hope that's rooted in the actions of these players. They have put this question forward. Can the strike, can the labor movement be a tool in the fight for black lives? I mean, the answer is absolutely in the affirmative. It's in the affirmative, certainly historically, with anybody who has a basic understanding of the history of the movements of the 30s, the 60s, the 70s, know that those connections have existed in the past and that they can in turn exist again? The question is going to be, will the labor movement, during a time of high unemployment, of people feeling very concerned about their jobs, of people, of course, being very skittish about their health care in these Covid times, will they pick up that baton and say the players did it, Maybe we can do it too. And will the players have the leadership inside their unions to say, you know what? The answer is not in siding with management for these kinds of toothless labor and management together in the fight for black lives, but actually keep their political independence, certainly make demands and fight for concessions from management, but not see them as an ally and a partner in this process.
- [27:53]
A
Well, Dave, this has been really wonderful. And the reason we wanted to do this, and not so coincidentally in and around Labor Day, was because it is a historic reconnection, if I can overstate it a bit, between the social movements and the labor movement, so that they may together be able to inspire the whole rest of the country. So thank you very, very much for appearing again. I hope my audience, and I expect my audience will be as positively inspired by what you've had to say as I have been. So thanks again and have a good season coming up.
- [28:31]
B
Thank you, too, sir. And a happy Labor Day to you.
- [28:34]
A
Okay. This is Richard Wolff from Democracy at Work. Thank you for your attention, and I look forward to speaking with you again next weekend.