← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Loading summary
Transcript27 lines
- [00:10]
A
Welcome friends, to another edition of Economic Update, weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, jobs, incomes, debts, our own and our children's. And I'm your host, Richard Wolf. Well, I want to start today by talking about the recent estimates of how many people either are already or, or are facing imminent eviction. It's a global problem and the estimates run as high as 150 million people around the world, including millions in the United States, facing eviction now or by year's end. I want to talk about that. Under the influence of the pandemic, we tell people, as a way to cope with the pandemic, to shelter indoors away from others and to wash your hands frequently. In order to do that, you need a place to live. Otherwise you can't do either of those things anywhere near as often and as regularly as we are told to. Eviction amounts to a death sentence for people. This is not a time to do evictions. You know, the virus doesn't kill as many as the capitalist system does when it is plagued by a virus. You know what eviction is? It's when the owner of an apartment decides that the profit isn't there if the tenant doesn't pay the rent. Makes sense to me. And so the person who's the landlord is evicts the tenant because he wants to find someone else. It's the prophet dictating the eviction. And that's a comment on how we handle our society. It's not a comment on the virus. We could do a lot better against the virus. Prevent it from getting us sick, prevent it from killing us if we didn't have a profit driven system of housing. So here's a short term and a long term solution. Short term solution, the government comes in and pays the rent, or a large portion of it to the landlord. That keeps the landlord from going belly up in bankruptcy and it keeps the tenant in the house, which is the best way to go and a way to respond to the economic downturn. But here's a better long term we ought to have public housing. You know why? If the government owned and operated the housing, here's what it could. Whenever an emergency arises that makes it difficult for large numbers of tenants to pay their rent. A public ownership which doesn't have to make profit because that's not how the public works could say to people, okay, you don't pay for six months or a year, you'll make it up later. And if you're unemployed, here's something else we'll do. We'll give you a job here in this public housing project to use your unemployment as a time to make this an even nicer place to live than it was before. The public could do that. The public has done that. And why aren't we doing it now? We rather than evictions, which, as I said, will amount to a death sentence for large numbers of people who have done absolutely nothing wrong. My next update is a response to many of you asking me what exactly is the unemployment problem in the United States? The government has cleverly come up with half a dozen, some old, some new definitions, and you don't quite know where they all are. So I wanted to help out. So I'm going to use the how many people are collecting unemployment compensation? And the reason I use it is those are people who have to prove either to a state government agency or to a federal government agency that they are not working and getting money and therefore they qualify for unemployment. So you get a bit more care taken to validate that. Okay? The number right now people getting unemployment, state or federal, is about little over 25 million of our fellow citizens in the United States. For all of them, this is a horrible experience. They don't know whether they'll ever get that old job back. They don't know under what conditions they'll get it back. If even they do. They don't know how long they'll be unemployed. They don't know what the size of their unemployment compensation was. It was higher before July 31, when the 600 kicked in by the federal government was cut to 300. They're full of uncertainty. On top of fearing the disease and on top of being unemployed. It's particularly a cost for taxpayers. Unemployment is. Let me be clear that we all understand the you're unemployed. The vast majority of usif our private employer fires us. That's how you get to be unemployed, for the vast majority. Why does the employer do that? Because it's profitable. He's going to lose less money firing you than if he keeps you on. That's why he fires you. He didn't have to fire you. He could have used the profits from last year. He could have used the capital invested in his business to hold on to you. By the way, some businesses do that because they say to themselves, I'd rather keep him on three or four months than have to go find another one to replace him or her. It's a better bet, but it's always a bet. In any case, you're unemployed because the private employer finds it the most profitable option In a situation like the one we have now. And then what happens is really bizarre. You go on unemployment, the government now takes care of you because the private capitalist thought it was more profitable that you be fired. The private capitalist made the choice to the taxpayer, now has a new burden, namely the unemployed persons. Even that bad as it is, doesn't go to the real nub of it. Because of course the public, the government that pays unemployed people the money that they're entitled to, could do something that those workers would much prefer. Hire them, pay them, have them do something useful. An unemployed person sits there feeling bad all day about himself or herself, losing self esteem, losing their skills, perhaps losing their work contacts, their friendships. They would rather be working and earning an income. And that would be better for all of us because then the money we pay these unemployed people is offset by what they produce for the society in which the government hires them, which is what the United States did in the 1930s. And there is no excuse except the Republican government for why we're not doing that now. Think about it. It's infinitely more rational and you know why the government doesn't hire the unemployed people who were fired by the private sector and now go on government support. Because the private sector is afraid of government competition. That's all it ever was. They don't want the government to be producing things because people might say, gee, there's a better of doing it than having it rely on the private who only do it if there's a profit in it, rather than the government which does it because it's socially useful. To prevent that competition, the private sector does this bizarre thing. We, the private employer, want the freedom to fire you, but we don't want the government to hire you to make you productive in another area because we've denied you the right to be productive. And in our business, the arrogance and the inefficiency of this mind blowing. My third update has to do with a little decision far away but very meaningful. Denmark last week approved the passage of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline that brings natural gas from Russia to Germany and through that to the rest of Europe. The Danish parliament gave the Russians the right to pass the pipeline across their part of the continental shelf off the Danish coast. Why is this interesting? Well, let me tell you. The United States government has been pressing Angela Merkel in Germany to cancel the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, arguing that it makes Germany and Europe too dependent on Russian gas and the United States doesn't like to see Russia have that kind of power. Angela Merkel has made it crystal clear. And she has mobilized the other Europeans. We will not do what the United States is pressing us to do. And she's been clear about why we in Europe demand the right and we are pursuing the right to deal with Russia and China on our own terms, in our own national interest. And Denmark has clearly now lined up with Germany and Europe. Notice the German's decision is, yes, of course, that makes us dependent on Russia, but dependency is a two way street. We depend on Russian gas, they depend on us to buy it for their whole economic well being. And in that kind of mutual dependency is greater security than the option offered to us by the United States. It's a further sign that the Trump administration has broken an alliance and that the different parts of that alliance, basically the United States and Europe are going their own way and that deals between Russia and China, on the one hand with Europe are growing. And in part, that's to offset the impact on China of the United States aggressive use of tariffs and trade wars. And speaking of China, here's my next update. We are now in the middle of China's national holiday celebrating the revolution in 1949 that brought the Communist Party to power in China ever since. And in that holiday, the biggest one In China, roughly 500 million people used to move around the country on buses and trains and automobiles. People in the city visiting their families in the country and so forth. It was thought that the COVID would make it impossible. But conditions have improved so much in China that they're having their regular holiday, 500 million people on trains and buses because they haven't had a coronavirus case in many weeks. Let me remind everyone the Chinese death count from COVID 5,000 people. They have four times the population of the United States. They have 5,000 dead Chinese people. We have 215,000 with one quarter of the population. Where's the failure and where's the success? This year? This Covid year, the Chinese economy is growing a little under 2%, very low for China. We are shrinking somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 to 10%. What's a failure? What's a success? Who prepared and contained the virus better? Whose public health is better protected? Who's growing faster? That's why China went from one of the poorest countries in the world to the global economic superpower it is today because it's able to grow economically faster than the United States. And it's not even close. The next time someone equates socialism with Venezuela, think a little bit about China. Last point on that. Unemployment in the United States. You hear words about recovery unemployment. Covered unemployment in the United states peaked at 30 million over the last six months, two or three times. It's currently over 25 million. That's an improvement, but a recovery? Not even close. We've come to the end of the first part of today's show. Before we move on, I want to remind you that we've just released my third book with democracy at work. It's called the Sickness Is the System When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or itself. It is a compilation of essays that tries to explain the problems of our time around this pandemic. Get your copy today@democracyatwork.info Books. And I want to, of course, thank our Patreon community for their continuing support and their enthusiasm. It helps make this show a possible. If you're interested, Please go to patreon.com economicupdate and you can learn more. Please stay with us. We'll be right back with Today's guest, Lance, one member of the YouTube lefty comedy duo the Surfs. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's Economic Update. I am very pleased to present for both our radio audience and our TV audience, an interview with one of the two young men who produce something called the Serfs. And my apologies to those of you that already know all about this. The Serfs is a Canadian podcast conceived and run for a few years now by Lance and Dave. And we have Lance with us today. They began their podcast while university students developed it and then because of the attack of trolls, they were taken off YouTube for an entire year, or roughly thereabouts, before pressure from like minded folks and sympathizers got YouTube to reverse itself, put them back on the air and as they say, everything since then is a remarkable story of growth to become one of the most, if not the most, popular Canadian political stream on Twitch. And they also have two YouTube channels and a podcast on Patreon. So let me begin by welcoming Lance. Thank you very much for joining us to give us a little insight about what you've achieved.
- [16:09]
B
Oh, thank you very much. It's an honor to be here. I've actually got the official apology letter. I have to frame it still, but this is one of the Rare apologies from YouTube itself where they said that we terminated your channel in mistake. So I got it framed as soon as I could.
- [16:23]
A
Absolutely. Yes, yes. And put a thick glass cover over it in case one of the trolls gets nearby. Okay, I'm going to read you a sentence and then ask you if you think it is accurate, here's the the Serfs is a successful Canadian Twitch and YouTube show systemically critical of modern capitalism. Do you think that that's a reasonable description of your program?
- [16:53]
B
Yeah, I would say it's definitely critical of modern capitalism. I think what we use, and I'm gonna have delusions of grandeur here, so you have to forgive me, but we usually use the portmanteau of going after right wing reactionaries, and we use that as a basis of kind of analyzing what it is that makes them and their rhetoric so popular and why it exploded on the Internet so rapidly and grew so rapidly and what we can do to combat it. And the more we would get down into what exactly are these big figures like Tim Pool, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, all talking about and tapping into it, seemed to be that they were capable of identifying the same alienation that I think many people in the modern world feel from, you know, obviously the downfalls of modern capitalism and trying to identify what they feel should unify people around those causes.
- [17:45]
A
Okay, you've grown in popularity. Can you give us some sense of your reach of your audience?
- [17:52]
B
We have two YouTube channels. One of them is where we kind of focus on doing long form comedy. It's more what has become known as Breadtube. I know you recently had Mexi on, for example. She's a colleague of ours. And that's where we concentrate on that kind of stuff. And in that we have a smaller reach. We have about 50,000 subscribers. Our second channel, we do daily deep dives in just modern events. It's usually again, kind of cathartic takedowns of right wing reactionaries, but using that again, as a jumping point as to figuring out why it is they are talking about a certain narrative at a given time. And then we also stream live on Twitch now. And we've grown to become, I think, the largest Canadian political stream on Twitch, which I know a lot of people, as soon as they hear the word Canadian in front of anything, they don't think of it as impressive. But I mean, we're humbled by that. I definitely don't think that it's by virtue of what Mr. Peterson might call picking ourselves up by our bootstraps or that there's a meritocratic system that's at play here. And it's been by virtue in large part of a lot of people helping us along the way. And again, once their channel was taken down, having so many people come to our defense, people we didn't even know, like the majority Report or, you know, HBOMberguy, stuff like that really, really did help Streisand affect us and increase our messaging.
- [19:08]
A
Tell me, do you think or to what extent is there a growing audience? In other words, it's one thing for you to have gone and found the people that would be responsive to what you do. It's a bit of a slightly different question. Is that audience growing? Is there something that you can tell us not just about Canada, which would be more than enough, but about North America more generally and maybe even much of the world? Is there a shift away from right wing ways of expressing your alienation to more left wing? Is something like that going on in terms of what you're sensing and you're feeling about your audience?
- [19:51]
B
So there's a massive shift in the world of YouTube from that rhetoric. For a long time, the right wing dominated the platform for a handful of reasons. One they were very successful at, again, tapping into a couple movements that were becoming popular. One was the atheist movement, of which I'm a little bit ashamed to say that I was a part of. But I was more interested in reading the works of like Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens at the time, who I thought in their academia had really, really interesting things to talk about, like, you know, the evolution of memes and a lot of Hitchens work as well. But that evolved into a bit of a culture war thing online. And a lot of the online atheist community members wouldn't just talk about why they felt superior because they had found some kind of untapped knowledge that no one else knew about. They were also very critical of black crime rates and stuff like that. That's where it kind of evolved into a culture war that combined with a thing known as Gamergate, which I'm not sure if your audience is familiar with, but that was basically a large swath of the online Internet community being both critical of online game reviews, but also the elements of misogyny that were playing into that. All of this fed into the algorithm of YouTube, which rewards viewers. Basically the way YouTube works is they want to keep you watching their content for as long as is humanly possible. In order to do that, the algorithms start to learn about your patterns. If you've got a large amount of people online who are looking for, let's say, information they wouldn't find anywhere else, such as this right wing rhetoric, people talking about not enjoying the anti social justice warriors, third wave feminism, stuff like that, and they would talk for hours. I mean, someone like Sargon of Akkad could just turn on a camera and for two hours rant about how he doesn't like the modern feminist movement that would reward them in the algorithm. So you would see that grow very, very rapidly in every suggested video. If you watched one video by Jordan Peterson for the next, I guess forever, every single one of your suggested videos would say, jordan Peterson owns college liberal, Jordan Peterson destroys college liberals. Stuff like that. That grew so rapidly and they dominated the platform for so long that it took a long time, I think four, the left to catch up. And the left didn't really have cohesive messaging. And so you started to see figures like contrapoints, philosophy tube are some of the bigger ones who started to rise and combat that. But it's grown to such a point now, and I think this is a lot of overlap with your own work, where the Bernie Sanders movement itself really tapped into a consciousness that I think a lot of both Canadians and Americans didn't even know they were aware of. That helps propagate a lot of these ideas. And it's now gone to the point where there is a very decided rise of the left on a lot of these social media platforms.
- [22:25]
A
All right, this is, what can I say, very good news. And at least south of the border, we are badly in need of good news as everything here seems to be falling apart. Let me ask, and I know this is an absurd thing in a way, what have you learned about the attitudes in your audience? How do they understand, for example, the difference between how Canada and the United States has responded to or was prepared for the COVID virus? How has all of this played out? Give us an insight through your lens as to how Canadians feel about this.
- [23:08]
B
I think the term socialism, it may be a double edged sword because on one end it's not bad word, it's not the red scare anymore. So we've kind of evolved past that. And again, I would thank in large part Bernie Sanders for that. But also it's become a bit nebulous in that I don't think people understand the differences between social democracy or democratic socialism or libertarian socialism, for example. And that might muddy the waters a little bit. But in relation to how exactly say Canadians view the difference, the difference is striking both in the numbers of both Canada and a lot of the rest of the developed world in America, but also in the treatment in Canada. What we had is we had something called the cerb and this was a federal government program that would give $2,000 a month to every single Canadian who needed it. So without any questions, you could just go on the Canadian website, they would ask you, are you unemployed? Are you unable to find work at this time? You would say, yes. And then boom, $2,000 would be wired immediately into your bank account every month. And it's been that way since it started. Now, I also live in British Columbia, which is the only SOCDAM government in North America. They gave an additional $1,000 to workers provincially under the same provisions. So it was very, very easy for me to be able to explain to my audience something is deeply wrong because there are examples both in my country and worldwide of governments doing what is necessary in order to help workers through this difficult time.
- [24:33]
A
So it came in Your province to 3,000 per month per citizen?
- [24:38]
B
Well, the provincial one was a one time thing, but still there was one month. Yes. Where, if applicable, you could apply for $3,000, no questions asked, just delivered to your bank account.
- [24:48]
A
And the other months it would be 2000.
- [24:50]
B
Yes, 2000amonth. Typical things like a freezing of rent, which is quite typical in Canada as well.
- [24:59]
A
Do Canadians understand that nothing remotely like that was done in the United States? Is that understood?
- [25:05]
B
Yes, it was understood. I mean, it's one of those things that Canada is rife with problems. You know, my mother is indigenous. There's a huge amount of indigenous racism in this country. But it's very hard for me to posture in my show and talk about, well, things are a bit bad in Canada when I have to reflect every day upon American news and then really take it all in. That it seems like one of the cruelest forms of capitalism right now. Especially in the way that, I mean, There was a $1,000 check, wasn't there a $1,200 check one time and that was it, this is my understanding.
- [25:36]
A
Yeah, that's right. There was one of those. And for a while, until the end of July, there was an extra $600 on top of your state unemployment, but nothing remotely like what you have in Canada. Nor was there a generalized rent freeze or anything like that. The irony was here they suspended rents for a while in terms of your having to pay, but it accumulates as your debt and during the time it can be raised so that your debt at the end of five months will be more than it would have been had the rent been frozen. I mean, it's beyond words what is done here.
- [26:16]
B
So it's basically a ticking time bomb.
- [26:18]
A
Yes, it is a time bomb. And everybody here in this country, left, right and center, keeps wondering only when the fuse will finally burn and the thing blow up. I have to ask you because it's our election crazy time. So what's the view about Mr. Trump and the Republican government and all that it represents, both as a general question and in terms of what it means to Canadians?
- [26:45]
B
Well, I think Canada, like the rest of the world, is deeply invested in the elections of America because you do have the hegemonic control of the planet right now. So we are deeply invested in what is going to happen there. There is a deep dislike of Donald Trump across Canada. I think the recent polls were showing somewhere upwards of 83% of Canadians disapprove or dislike Donald Trump. The exemption, I think Alberta, which is our most conservative province, but even Alberta was ranking at 63% disapproval of Trump. So it is pretty universal amongst the country. For comparison. I'm actually in the middle of an election year myself, provincially one just got announced and the way elections work in our parliamentary system of Canada is that the election was announced a couple weeks ago and we are going to have our election on the 24th of October. And it can be 100% through mail in ballot, should you choose. So from start to inception to election to decision is going to be within the span of one month.
- [27:41]
A
It's very hard to spend the kind of money we spend in such a short time. You really have to stretch it out.
- [27:48]
B
All right, if I could just say one last thing.
- [27:50]
A
Sure. Please.
- [27:51]
B
The other unusual thing for me is to see that in America you have to spend an entire day, like, what is it, nine hours sometimes, in order to vote.
- [28:00]
A
All right, I wish we had more time, but look, let me say to my audience, while you're still here, please look up the serfs. This is an important new development for all of us in North America. We're trying to build this kind of commentary on the social media platforms. You're doing it in Canada. I want us to proceed together. I want my audience to know what you're doing and if we can work together, please know that we really want to.
- [28:30]
B
It's an absolute pleasure.
- [28:31]
A
And for all of you that have watched, I hope you've enjoyed this meeting of our sisters and brothers in Canada, and I look forward, as always, to speaking with you again next week.